James Henry - American memory in Henry James: void and value

AMERICAN MEMORY IN HENRY JAMES VOID AND VALUE

American Memory in Henry James

Void and Value

WILLIAM RIGHTER

Edited by Rosemary Righter

First published 2004 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Copyright William Righter 2004

Edited by Rosemary Righter

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Righter, William

American memory in Henry James: Void and Value 1. James, Henry, 18431916 Criticism and interpretation 2. History in literature 3. America in literature I. Title II. Righter, Rosemary 813.4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Righter, William,

American memory in Henry James: Void and Value / William Righter; edited by Rosemary Righter

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-7546-3674-7 (alk. paper)

1. James, Henry, 18431916 Knowledge History. 2. James, Henry, 18431916 Knowledge History United States. 3. National characteristics, American, in literature. 4. Literature and history United States. 5. United States in literature. 6. History in literature. 7. Memory in literature. I. Righter, Rosemary. II. Title

PS2127.H5R54 2003

813.4-dc21

2003045332

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3674-8 (hbk)

Contents

In my own country I haunt museums. It is not that the great museums of the Old World contain objects of less importance or allure. But in the New their meaning is transformed. Their relation to the surrounding culture acquires an urgency which is linked to detachment. So in New York, Chicago or Washington the great museums have a character quite different from the Louvre or the Uffizi, for rather than representing a continuous tradition through the masterpieces which embody it those works are an alien presence. The museums bring the fragments, icons, the surplus value of other worlds to a new form of creation, a strange mixture of quickening and withdrawal which that assembly offers to a place that is not its own. They oppose rather than underwrite, confront rather than confirm. The moments passed in them are committed to an unspoken discontinuity. And for me the great galleries of America become the compelling point of reference and refuge, above all in my own birthplace, in Kansas City, where the Nelson Gallery, marvellous in its absurd eclecticism, rises like a marble island from the sprawl.

Such islands have their magic, but it is ambiguous. The enterprise of implanting the beautiful and the edifying may intend a cultural transformation. But ones overwhelming impression is of something apart and hence an implication of conflict, a conflict surely not envisaged by those who conceive the movement of civilization as an unbroken progression, a steady advance of something like Arnolds sweetness and light. If a version of this latter gleams for Lambert Strether on the banks of the Seine, it is the vision of its transplantation, of creating a new world of culture in the vast spaces beyond the Hudson which hovers in the background of The Golden Bowl, spaces in which cultures mission mingles with the darkness of exile. That mixture of darkness and light, seldom in a controlled chiaroscuro, but in hidden implications, disturbing vistas, moments of discovery and of loss even of terror fills those late works of Henry James that attempt, however unevenly, a final assessment of an America which does not reflect the world of his youth but alien forces reaching to an unknown future. One discovers Europe to know America said F.O. Matthiessen, in a replay of a saying of Emerson. But what America? One perhaps whose opacity grows for the sequence of discoverers whose most reflective representative is Lambert Strether. It will of course include James himself, for it is above all The American Scene which gives the restless analyst his own voice.

If the relation of culture to the new America escapes both artistic and intellectual resolution, it remains the focus of Jamess final years, where his creative powers had both their greatest triumphs and their breaking point.

William Righter

When cancer was diagnosed, my husband William Righter was in one of the most creative phases of his life. He had completed the first, manuscript, draft of this book and revised one section, . He was also working on two further books a further exploration of Jamess sense of history, and Culture and Entropy, which would have been his riposte to Matthew Arnold and an anatomy of what constitutes culture at the dawn of the twenty-first century. It may have been the rigours of therapy that caused him to cease work on the present text, but I think it was more that, knowing better than he would admit how fast the hands on his lifes clock were now whirring towards midnight, he was determined to use what time remained on the other volumes. Before he died, only nine months later, I promised him that I would bring this book to completion. I am keenly aware how much he would have polished, as he always did at the revising stage. My own editing has been of the lightest; the greatest challenge was in interpreting the elegant but always almost indecipherable flow of his thick-nibbed fountain pen across the pages.

I have had unstintingly generous help in this labour of love. I owe a particular debt to Martin Warner, my husbands close colleague and friend at the philosophy department of Warwick University, who has kept steady watch over the project, solved puzzles that had eluded me and given invaluable guidance on structure. In Cambridge, Robert Lord gave early typescript versions the most meticulous and learned reading, and sat down with me to work out a reordering of some chapters and sections. From Princeton, Michael Wood gave enthusiastic encouragement and advice. To them, as indeed also to my colleagues at The Times who helped to sustain me in the abyss of loss, I am supremely grateful. The result is perhaps inevitably a half-hewn representation of the workings of a mind that bridged the Atlantic as few have, and that was too subtly imprvisible for an attempt to smooth out any rough edges to be other than an intellectual impertinence. But the insights in this text are, I think and hope, sufficiently rewarding for the reader to accept and to excuse any unavoidable element of the provisional.

Rosemary Righter

1. The Jamesian Perspective

2. The Composite Light

3. America and the Pathos of Desire

Jamess concept of history was shaped by European culture; but the shaping took a number of stages. These move from the construction of Europe, to the recollection of America; then to the reconstruction of Europe in terms of America, and thus finally to the reconstruction of America, in terms of a Europe seen by way of America.