“‘Where are our moral foundations?’" Emily Dickinson and Henry James

 

On Thursday 4^th December, the Andrew Hook Centre was delighted to welcome Prof. Philip Horne (University College London) for the sixth seminar in the 2014-15 series. Horne is the world’s authority on Henry James, the author of Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (1990), the editor of Henry James: A Life in Letters (1999), and the founding General Editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of The Complete Fiction of Henry James, which is to extend over thirty volumes. In his talk today, Horne discussed the exciting evidence he has uncovered that Emily Dickinson and Henry James – two great titans of American literature – might have known, and appreciated, the works of one another.

Horne explained that the field of Dickinson-and-James scholarship was a slender one. Though several critics have contrasted their works, there have been no studies of the relationship between them as writers: there is no entry for Henry James in the Dickinson-encyclopaedia, and the only critic to publish book-length studies of both authors, Sharon Cameron, makes no connection between them. Horne’s own research on the topic has been some ten or more years in the making and beset by unpredicted setbacks, such as the “frustratingly good” 2011 essay by Kathryn Wichelns titled “Emily Dickinson’s Henry James.” Luckily for today’s audience, Horne decided that his own research was unique enough to warrant continued attention, and we thus had the privilege of hearing him finally bring all the pieces of the puzzle together.

Horne began by explaining the backgrounds of both writers, noting their many similarities. Both writers developed highly idiosyncratic, easily recognisable styles which are marked by their obscurity, their ambiguity, and the demands they make of their readers. James himself has been described as a “poet’s novelist,” garnering attention from Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and many others for his texts which have the density normally associated with poetry rather than prose. Biographically, both James and Dickinson were the children of eminent patriarchs, and struggled to negotiate their place in American society. Where Dickinson found exile in her own home, writing that she “[didn’t] like this country at all, and I shant stay here any longer!”, James spent most of his writing career in Europe and wrote about America from afar. Neither married, and both shared an ironic attitude towards the stiffness of the previous generation. 

The scholarly record of any direct connection between the two writers is scant, but – in typical Dickinson-fashion – a small mouthful leaves a lot to chew over. In an 1879 letter from Dickinson to her mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson, she thanks him for a copy of his book Short Studies of American Authors (1879), commenting on five out of six of the authors in the collection, of which Henry James was one: 

Of Poe, I know too little to think – Hawthorne appals, entices – / Mrs Jackson soars to your estimate lawfully as a Bird, but of Howells and James, one hesitates – Your relentless Music dooms as it redeems.

Dickinson’s reference to James brims with possible readings. Horne considered the various cases put forward by critics, all of whom have confidently proclaimed either that Dickinson “did not care for the […] prolixity of James,” or that she hesitates because she disagrees with her mentor’s position. Remarkably, however, Horne explained that none of these critics looked at Higginson’s essay itself to support their positions. The predominantly negative essay (says Higginson: “It cannot be said that Mr. James has yet succeeded in producing a satisfactory novel”) throws Dickinson’s letter into new light, and suggests that she perhaps admired James more than other critics have allowed. That James himself wrote in an 1880 letter that he was well aware of the “Higginsonian fangs” begins to suggest that Dickinson and James were linked by various degrees, and coming up against the edges of each other’s reading.

The other piece of explicit evidence that Dickinson had read James was in a letter she wrote to Elizabeth Chapin Holland in 1879: “for how little I know of you recently – An awkward loneliness smites me – I fear I must ask with Mr. Wentworth, ‘Where are our moral foundations?’” The Mr. Wentworth to whom Dickinson refers is a character in James’s The Europeans (1878), a novel about a well-ordered New England family, overseen by the patriarch Mr. Wentworth, who had an altogether too stiffly serious attitude towards his life. Mr. Wentworth is hesitant to allow his daughter to marry a man not of his choosing: 

‘Where are our moral grounds?’ demanded Mr. Wentworth, who had always thought Mr. Brand would be just the thing for a younger daughter with a peculiar temperament.

Dickinson’s quotation is slightly different (she writes moral “foundations,” rather than “grounds”) which only adds more to the puzzle, but Horne suggests that she was making it her own, altering it to better fit the rhythms of her sentence and to further inflate the grandiosity of Mr. Wentworth’s phrase. Horne speculated that Dickinson was drawn to James’s line because the ruling patriarch and the constraints on Wentworth’s daughter may well have resonated with Dickinson’s own life. With typical playfulness and irony she adopts the phrase in her letter, and thus records an explicit connection between these two writers. 

The question that all this evidence begs, of course, is to what extent James knew of Dickinson? By looking at issues of the Atlantic Monthly from 1891, in which there were printed both a Dickinson poem and a James serial, Horne is able to speculate that there is a good chance their writing crossed one another’s eyes. This can only be an educated guess, of course, but there was one last piece of evidence, and one last story to tell. In the Atlantic Monthly of January 1892, there was printed a very scathing review of Dickinson’s poetry by Thomas Bailey Aldrich. We can’t know if Henry James read this review, but we know that at least one James did. In her diary, two months before her death, Henry James’s sister Alice writes: “It is reassuring to hear the English pronouncement that Emily Dickinson is fifth-rate, they have such a capacity for missing quality.” Alice goes on to quote four lines from Dickinson, writing: “what tome of philosophy […] expresses the highest point of view of the aspiring soul more completely” than these. In a letter to his brother William after Alice’s death, James writes admiringly of her diaries. He writes with words which could apply just as perfectly to the work of Dickinson which was contained, in some small part, within: “I have been immensely impressed […] It is heroic in its individuality, its independence – its face-to-face with the universe for-&-by herself.” Though James may not have read much Dickinson, we know that at the very least he read the four lines quoted by his sister.

By reconstructing a picture of both Dickinson’s and James’s reading, Horne brings the pieces together to confirm, finally, that these two central figures of American literature were ever at the edges of one another’s words. As we read and appreciate them both now, it is exciting to think that at least in some small way they shared our experience.

By Jamie Redgate

PGR at the University of Glasgow

The Centre’s seminar series continues in the new year with Dr. Michael Collins (University of Kent): “Beautiful, Radiant Things: Emma Goldman and American Anarchist Autobiography.” It will be held on Wednesday 14^th January 2015 in Room 208, 2 University Gardens, at 5.15pm. All very welcome!

The Turn of the Page: Henry James in the 1890s

On the 27^th March, Dr. Hazel Hutchison (University of Aberdeen) presented the penultimate contribution to the Centre for American Studies’ 2013-2014 lecture series, entitled The Turn of the Page: Henry James in the 1890s.  In her examination of Henry James’ relationship with the precarious publishing market of the 1890s, Dr. Hutchison demonstrated the changing relations between the reader and the writer, the relationship between James and his publisher William Heinemann, and James’ struggles to amalgamate both commercial and refined tastes within his literature of this period.

She began by contextualising James’ work in the 1890s against the Elementary Education Act of 1870, where the first state-educated class of Victorians brought with them a mass market of readers.  Dr. Hutchison made the point that in the burgeoning literary market of the 1890s, the commercial power of the novel was beginning to fade compared to the critical success of short stories.  At the same time English Literature was becoming increasingly recognised as an academic discipline.  Both of these developments had ramifications for the major writers of the late-Victorian period, and Dr. Hutchison’s analysis of James explores his struggles to accommodate both popular and intellectual markets within his work.  His relationship with William Heinemann of Heinemann provided a significant period of surcease within the turbulence of the publishing market at the time, with Dr. Hutchison commenting that it was arguably the most stable professional relationship James had in the 1890s.  It was a period that additionally stood as the most productive period of James’ career.  With reference to a number of letters between James and Heinemann which Dr. Hutchison acquired within the Random House Archives, she argued that this writing period was heavily marked by commercial pressures.  She made the point that James’ recognized that his writings in this period were primarily for financial and not artistic gain.  His continued attempts to produce theatrical works were in part due to the vast financial opportunities the theatre held compared to the more saturated literary markets of the period.  As Dr. Hutchison noted, Heinemann’s publication of Hall Caine’s The Bondsman (1890), which found critical acclaim within theatre adaptations, would have spurred James on even more.  Her analysis of James’ letters demonstrated his growing interest in understanding the publishing and literary markets of the time.  This was reinforced in James’ employment of a literary agent, making him one of the first writers to do so.  His wish to tap into the popular and high-art markets of the time became exemplified in his publication of The Turn of the Screw.

James’ The Turn of the Screw first appeared in England in weekly editions of Heinemann’s Collier’s Weekly in 1898, and quickly become acclaimed by both the public and academics alike.  In James’ hotly-disputed horror story of a governess and her protection of the two children in her care, its critical acclaim exemplified his successful moulding of high-art and literary aesthetics with the more accessible, commercial demands of the popular literary market.  In a candid acknowledgement found in a letter from James to Heinemann, Dr. Hutchison’s argument was reinforced by his acknowledgement that the text was calculated to please popular interests whilst ensuring a generous amount of money in the process.  However, Dr. Hutchison argued that James’ publication was certainly not one that adhered completely to popular tastes.  She made the point that in fact it was James’ intention to inject a degree of high-art literary aesthetic into The Turn of the Screw, whilst courting popular tastes by publishing it within a magazine that could reach a wide spectrum of readers and ensuring that it possessed the accessibility and inexpensiveness of popular Victorian periodicals.  As the author remarked shortly after the text’s release, it was designed to catch those not easily caught, a remark that causes us to revise our understandings of the text’s inclusion within both popular and artistic markets and tastes.  James’ success with The Turn of the Screw was as Dr. Hutchison argued his mastering of the entertaining and the artful.  

The demand for shorter, more accessible fiction led publishers like Heinemann to insist to clients such as Hall Caines and his text The Bondsman (1890) that it be published in one volume rather than several.  Very soon after this the one-volume novel became the norm, which Dr. Hutchison argued exemplified the fragility of the publishing market at the time in adapting to the tastes of the popular market.  In addition, it illustrated the tensions between publishers and writers, in this case the tension between James and Heinemann.  Their relationship came under pressure when James employed James B. Pinker as his literary agent, a publishing middle-man that Heinemann absolutely despised and declined to have anything to do with.  In a particularly humorous segment of Dr. Hutchison’s lecture, she illustrated the difficulties of this tense relationship, with the example that after James corresponded with Pinker, and he in turn subsequently wrote to Heinemann, Heinemann refused to respond back, and would send his correspondence directly to James.  Although Heinemann resented the literary agent as a greedy and inessential intermediary between the author and the publisher, Dr. Hutchison reminded the audience that Heinemann was certainly not above playing games with his clients.  Having given James a mere £50 for The Turn of the Screw, she reminded us that Pinker’s own offers were significantly greater than Heinemann’s, a disparity that likely incensed the publisher furthermore.  Although James would later end Pinker’s services due to the infighting between himself and Heinemann, he subsequently would become disillusioned with the publishing company.  After numerous protests that Heinemann was not promoting his books as well as he could, James became all too aware of the contrast between his popularity back in the United States and in Britain.  

In Dr. Hutchison’s final remarks, she argued that James’ disillusionment with the British publishing market led him to concede that perhaps too much emphasis was put on the marketing of the contemporary text.  He extended Heinemann’s own criticism of the literary agent as a “middle man” to that of publishers as well, arguing that rather than having swathes of publishers, literary agents and other bodies of the market deliberate over what should be published, it is the public who should decide what is worth reading.  Dr. Hutchison’s lecture proved to be an engaging and illuminating discussion of Henry James’ 1890s literature, and one that skilfully demonstrated the numerous commercial, artistic and public pressures that faced authors at the time within a turbulent publishing market.

-          James Nixon

PGR at the University of Glasgow

The Centre for American Studies 2013-14 seminar series at the University of Glasgow concludes with the Fourteenth Annual Gordon Lecture in American Studies on Wednesday 7^th May.  In the final contribution to a fantastic seminar series, Professor David Blight of Yale University and Professor Richard Blackett of Vanderbilt University will participate in a forum on the 150^th anniversary of the American Civil War on Wednesday 7^th May.  We hope to see you there!