What Henry James Went Through

THE. LEGEND OF THE MASTER (176 pp.) --Compiled by Simon Nowell-Smifh--Scribner ($3).

Henry James.was the Winston Spencer Churchill of fiction. Portly and bald, and one of the greatest talkers in literature, half-English by choice, as Churchill is half-American by birth, colorful, eloquent, holding fast to his opinions in the face of staggering reverses, he was to novelists what Churchill was to Britons in World War II--their battered but undefeated champion. He was the great embodiment of the idea that fiction is an art, and that it is art that makes life, that gives it interest and meaning.

Few events in literary history have been as remarkable as the revival of Henry James in the last ten years. In the growing list of books about him, The Legend of the Master is essential to an understanding of his life.

Chinese Nests. James was often the butt of smart young London intellectuals in the years before World War I. Everything about Henry James made him an easy target for their wit--particularly his resolute love of England in the face of the English stories that were told about him and the jokes that were played on him.

His habit of stopping in the midst of traffic while he groped painfully for the right word; his conversation, with its "Chinese nests of parentheses" and its sentences that "dropped to the floor and bounced about like tiny rubber balls"; his way of coming into a room, carrying his silk hat, stick and gloves; his reputation as both a wit and a bore ("Nobody bored him," said Violet Hunt, "he took care of that. . ."); his reputation for incomprehensibility ("Poor old James," said George Meredith, "he sets down on paper these mysterious rumblings in his bowels --but who could be expected to understand them?"); his reputation for social snobbery, and his reputation for knowing women only by observation and fancy--such were the handicaps he struggled against.

Many of these anecdotes have been told in affectionate recollections. But by some irony which James would have appreciated, even the most admiring of them, like Edmund Gosse's, make him seem a more comic figure than his enemies could.

Literary Legends. The friends of James who published their reminiscences of him after his death--especially Ford Madox Hueffer--romanticized, to say the least. Nowell-Smith has taken incidents and opinions and anecdotes from a hundred-odd sources--H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, Mrs. Joseph Conrad, J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett --and assembled them in the form of a dossier. The result is as absorbing as a good mystery story.

Something was left out of the account, however. It is easy to imagine the Henry James so pictured as a mildly comic figure in London drawing rooms, but it is impossible to imagine such an individual writing The Beast in the Jungle or The Altar of the Dead. Author Nowell-Smith has traced through their mutations several of the famous inane or incredibly affected remarks attributed to James, by various writers, pointing to an unmistakable conclusion: they were apocryphal. James was a character. Anecdotes were attributed to him, the way jokes about monosyllabic New Englanders were attributed to Calvin Coolidge.

James Barrie said of James's smile: "It brought one down like Leatherstocking's Killdeer ... it was a part of him chuckling at the other parts of him." But James was always getting into trouble with his cumbersome shyness. Once in Europe at a table d'hote, he ordered a bottle of wine in order to get up nerve enough to talk to the lady beside him, then spilled it on her. She forgave him, and he ordered another bottle--and spilled that one on her also.

Mishaps & Misgivings. The most obscure part of The Legend of the Master is the celebrated booing from the stage at the opening night of James's play, Guy Domville. It seems to have been a fairly good play; in 1930 (35 years later), the London Times called it "that beautiful, harshly treated play . . ." The producer of Guy Domville was sanguine, though James, with his usual misgivings stayed away opening night. Instead, he went to the Haymarket and saw Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, which had just opened. James considered Wilde's play crude, bad, clumsy, feeble, vulgar--but it appeared to be a complete success--"and that gave me the most fearful apprehension."

Meanwhile, at St. James's Theater, Guy Domville had opened brilliantly, but during the second act the audience began to laugh at an elderly actress whose hoop skirt and high plumed hat struck them as ridiculous. Then the producer (and star) made an awkward last-act exit, and the uproar became a thunderstorm.

As the curtain fell, James entered the theater by the stage door. He was told that all had gone well. The star, "with incredible cruelty," led him to the middle of the stage. "For a moment or so James faced the storm, his round face white, his mouth opening and shutting." Then the star dragged him back into the wings. A contemporary account suggested that there had been a cabal against the play, and that the hissing began according to a prearranged signal. Says Author Nowell-Smith: "The problem is perhaps now insoluble."

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