Henry James in–and out of– - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Henry James in–and out of–
the Classroom

Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Henry James did not write for the classroom. His personal experience of the institu-
tion was erratic at best, and most of his work was published at a time when the nov-
el had yet to be formally recognized as a subject of academic study. But he believed
strongly that “art lives upon discussion,” and the undergraduate classroom can be
an invigorating space in which to keep that discussion going. Drawing both on my
own experience of teaching James’s novels over the years and on an informal survey
of Yale undergraduates who have studied the novelist with me in recent decades, este
essay addresses some of the ways in which his work continues to resonate both in and
out of the classroom.

I have been teaching and writing about Henry James for half a century, pero

was only the other day that I realized how closely I associate him with the
aula. I was a bookish child who spent much of her adolescence con-
suming nineteenth-century novels indiscriminately with twentieth-century best-
sellers, but while I have vivid memories of weeping over Tess of the d’Urbervilles
and impressing adults with my capacity to read all of War and Peace, I do not recall
encountering James until my sophomore year in college, when a course on the En-
glish novel introduced me to both The Portrait of a Lady (1880–1881) and The Am-
bassadors (1903). I must have been drawn to the late James even then, since I also
recall writing a paper on the latter novel, though what I chiefly remember about
that exercise is a gentle suggestion from the instructor that I was not as clear as I
might have been about what exactly its innocent protagonist, Lambert Strether,
discovers in the climactic episode. The document in question is no longer avail-
capaz, but I strongly suspect that I was hedging my bets: between James’s obliquity
and my own innocence at the time, I am not sure I was ready to say explicitly that
the “virtuous attachment” in which Strether so wished to believe proves an adul-
terous relation after all, a discovery whose sublime comedy is now among my fa-
vorite moments in the novels. Like many of James’s protagonists, en otras palabras, I
was good at not quite knowing what I actually knew, though it was not until I read
The Golden Bowl for the first time in graduate school that I succumbed completely
to the excitement of following his characters as they negotiate between their de-

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sire for knowledge and their terror of it. I had arrived at Yale vaguely imagining
that I might write a dissertation on the poetry of W. h. Auden; I left having writ-
ten on the style of James’s major late novels. Eso, Sucesivamente, became both the sub-
ject of my first book and the endpoint of a series of courses I have been teaching
desde entonces.

Not that James himself ever wrote for the classroom. His own experience of the
institution was, to say the least, erratic: the offspring of a restless father, who be-
lieved in a liberal education but was perpetually dissatisfied with the usual means
of providing it, the young Henry endured “small vague spasms of school,” as he
charmingly put it in his autobiography, punctuated by a sequence of tutors and
extended periods of travel back and forth across the Atlantic.1 Though his older
brother William would dip in and out of German universities before eventually
earning a medical degree from Harvard and settling down to teach there for over
thirty years, Henry’s sole attempt at a university education was an abortive year
at Harvard Law School: “proceeding to Cambridge,” in his words, “on the very
vaguest grounds that probably ever determined a residence there,” only to spend
most of his time in an effort “to woo the muse . . . of prose fiction.”2

Unlike James Joyce, who famously quipped to his French translator that Ulysses
would “keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, y
that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality,” James never seems to have
imagined that literary success might be determined by becoming the province of
academics.3 Doubtless the difference was partly generational: though English lit-
erature had begun to be accepted as a university subject by the mid-nineteenth
siglo, modern works, including novels, took far longer to enter the curriculum;
and James, who was born almost forty years before Joyce, had been publishing
fiction for more than two decades before American professors controversially be-
gan to offer university courses on the subject in the early 1890s.4 James’s efforts to
elevate the status of the novel may have contributed to a split between elite and
popular fiction that sometimes appears to have culminated, among other things,
in works deliberately aimed at the college syllabus, but James himself never aban-
doned the hope of appealing to a wide audience.5 Even while composing the Pref-
aces to the so-called New York Edition of his works (1907–1909), whose medita-
tions on point of view and narrative form would later help inaugurate the austere-
ly named discipline of narratology, he retained the wishful expectation of “their
perhaps helping the Edition to sell two or three copies more!”6

But if there is no reason to think that James wrote for the classroom, hay
abundant reason to think that vigorous discussion was for him the very lifeblood
of the novel. “Discussion, suggestion, formulation, these things are fertilising
when they are frank and sincere,” he proclaimed in his influential essay “The Art
of Fiction” (1884); and one of the principal complaints he lodged in that essay
against the tradition he had inherited was that, until very recently, “the English

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150 (1) Winter 2021Ruth Bernard Yeazell

novel was not what the French call discutable.”7 James’s brief bilingualism is a use-
ful reminder that the Anglo-American association of literary theory with France
has a long history, though he was probably thinking more immediately of his own
experience as a young writer nearly a decade earlier, when he had spent a forma-
tive year in Paris socializing with a group of prominent novelists and other intel-
lectuals who gathered in Gustave Flaubert’s apartment. “They are all charming
talkers,” James had written to William Dean Howells of his new company: a group
that included Ivan Turgenev, Edmond de Goncourt, Émile Zola, Guy de Maupas-
sant, and Alphonse Daudet, así como, por supuesto, Flaubert himself.8 James, OMS
was thirty-two at the time, had already published two novels and was working on
un tercio, but by comparison with the members of Flaubert’s circle, he was some-
thing of a naïf, to adopt another word he used in “The Art of Fiction”: both eager
to soak in their worldly wisdom and repelled by what often seemed to him their
coarseness and vulgarity.9 As the literary scholar Peter Brooks has shown, it took
James several decades to assimilate his Parisian education: a not uncommon reac-
ción, tal vez, even for those whose schooling takes less heady forms than hang-
ing out in Flaubert’s apartment.10 By the winter of 1876, the experiment had run
its course, and the year concluded with a permanent move to London.

Yet James’s belief that “art lives upon discussion” long outlasted his decision
to quit his informal seminar in French fiction, as even a casual reader of his let-
ters–let alone his criticism and Prefaces–would recognize.11 Throughout his ca-
reer, he engaged in a conversation with fellow novelists and the public alike about
the potential of his chosen form, a conversation less systematic but perhaps more
lively than his subsequent reputation would sometimes suggest. When I am teach-
ing The American (1876–1877), Por ejemplo, I cannot resist introducing students
to his extended back-and-forth with Howells over the novel’s ending: a debate
obviously shaped by Howells’s position as editor of The Atlantic, where the work
was then being serialized, but also by the latter’s own reactions to the unfolding
narrative. Though we lack Howells’s side of the correspondence, it is clear that
he both wanted and expected the novel to conclude with a marriage between its
wealthy American hero and its aristocratic French heroine, and that James’s de-
termination to resist that prospect had finally more to do with his feeling for “the
tragedies in life”–the phrase is James’s–than with the arguments with which he
tried to placate his friend. To Howells, sin embargo, he chose to defend his plot on the
grounds of verisimilitude. “They would have been an impossible couple, con un
impossible problem before them,” he protested, half-facetiously:

For instance–to speak very materially–where could they have lived? It was all very
well for Newman to talk of giving her the whole world to choose from: but Asia &
Africa being counted out, what would Europe & America have offered? Mme de Cintré
couldn’t have lived in New York; depend upon it; & Hombre nuevo, after his marriage (o

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesHenry James in–and out of–the Classroom

rather she, after it) couldn’t have dwelt in France. There would have been nothing left
but a farm out West.12

Yet whether he was exchanging literary ideas with friends like Howells, revisar-
ing his contemporaries, both famous and otherwise–the list ranges from Flaubert
and George Eliot to the long forgotten Henry Kingsley–or composing memorials
to such distinguished predecessors as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Honoré de Balzac,
James was also engaged in a lifelong dialogue with himself; and by the time he came
to revise The American for the New York Edition thirty years later, what he saw in the
ending was not a testament to realism but a peculiar form of wish-fulfillment. Rath-
er than reject Newman as too vulgar, his creator now concluded, a family of impe-
cunious French aristocrats would have jumped at the opportunity to acquire the
American’s wealth. The youthful novelist had been so determined that his hero “be
ill-used,” he belatedly realized, that he had managed to overlook the more plausible
outcome and ended by “plotting arch-romance without knowing it.”13

For the older James, that discovery in turn precipitated one of his best-known
theoretical formulas, a distinction between “the real” and “the romantic” that he
elaborated in the novel’s Preface and that continues to influence many accounts
of nineteenth-century fiction, my own included.14 For my students, James’s dis-
tinction also continues to serve as a touchstone for conversation, as we work our
way through a selection of his novels over the course of a semester. A contempo-
rary classroom can hardly hope to replicate a writer’s lifelong exchanges with self
y otros, but I like to think it can go a little way to keeping them going. In what
follows, I want to give a brief account of such talk as I have experienced it over the
años, focusing especially on an undergraduate seminar that I have taught with
some frequency in the new millennium. That class has been among the highlights
of my intellectual life, and it is a tribute to the students as much as to James him-
self that I have found it so exhilarating.

F irst, sin embargo, some crucial disclaimers are in order. I have chosen to focus

on the undergraduate rather than graduate classroom both because under-
graduates have less professional stake in their reading and because courses
on a single writer have become comparatively uncommon in the graduate curric-
ulum. There are a number of reasons for this, ranging from the skepticism about
individual authorship promulgated by some literary theorists in the 1980s and
1990s to the opening up of the canon that has made an entire semester–or critical
book–devoted to one figure seem excessively narrow. Por supuesto, the classes still
existir, as do the books: en efecto, the conventional wisdom that publishers no longer
want such works is somewhat belied by the roughly ninety critical or biographi-
cal studies of James alone, by my count, that have appeared in multiple languages
since the turn of the present century, and that is without including new editions

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150 (1) Winter 2021Ruth Bernard Yeazell

and collections of his works, both fictional and nonfictional, or the thirteen vol-
umes thus far available of over forty projected in an ongoing edition of his com-
plete surviving letters. I myself last taught a (pequeño) graduate seminar on James
and narrative theory a half-dozen years ago, though I am more likely to include
him among several writers in graduate courses on broader themes or theoretical
preguntas: The Portrait of a Lady and some of his art criticism in a seminar on visu-
al portraiture and literary character, por ejemplo, or What Maisie Knew (1897) y
The Golden Bowl (1904) in a class devoted to the representation of consciousness
in third-person narrative from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf. After more than a
century of critical writing on Henry James, it can seem very hard–if not impossi-
ble–to say anything new; and for doctoral students anxious to make their distinc-
tive marks on the intellectual world, let alone to find employment in an extremely
straitened market, the opportunity to live for an extended time with the mind of a
single author increasingly looks like an unaffordable luxury.

Happily, undergraduates do not suffer from the same constraints, and that re-
mains true even if they later decide to pursue advanced work in their turn. Mucho
as I would like to think otherwise, sin embargo, I cannot pretend that those who end
up in the James class therefore speak for the common reader, assuming that myth-
ical creature can even be said to exist. Yale is a highly selective institution, con un
tradition of attracting students particularly drawn to the humanities, and the ma-
jority of those who enroll in the seminar are English majors, who arrive in the class
with at least some expectation that reading James will be worth the effort. Esto es
not to say that they always know what they are getting into: though they have of-
ten encountered a short work or two–The Turn of the Screw (1898) is a particular
favorite–and some have already read The Portrait of a Lady, whether for school or
for pleasure, prior experience with the late fiction is understandably rare; y eso
is not uncommon for students to take the course simply because they have heard,
by one means or another, that they should read some James before they graduate.
Yale is also unusual, as far as I know, in the emphasis it continues to place on the
study of poetry, and among the most responsive readers of James I have encoun-
tered over the years have been students with little formal training in the novel but
considerable experience analyzing–and writing–poems. I vividly recall one such
student who told me that the only thing he knew about James before signing up
for the course was that poets he admired, like T. S. Eliot and Marianne Moore, en
turn admired the novelist. It is probably also relevant that a growing number of
our students are would-be writers enrolled in a program premised on the belief
that the craft to which they aspire is primarily learned through extensive reading.
Eso, por supuesto, is how James himself became a novelist, and while the fact that
our writing concentrators, as we call them, are also expected to complete the reg-
ular requirements of the English major may help to account for their presence in
the class, the resulting mix feels especially appropriate for a writer who comment-

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesHenry James in–and out of–the Classroom

ed so abundantly on his own practice. That he often did so by addressing both or-
dinary readers and fellow novelists means that he speaks to such students with a
particular resonance.

Conscious of the challenge that James’s late style can pose even for sophisticat-
ed readers, I always begin the first meeting by urging everyone to try a page or two
of his Preface (1909) to The Golden Bowl before finally signing up for the course.
(“Among many matters thrown into relief by a refreshed acquaintance with ‘The
Golden Bowl,’” the opening sentence reads, “what perhaps most stands out for
me is the still marked inveteracy of a certain indirect and oblique view of my pre-
sented action; unless indeed I make up my mind to call this mode of treatment,
on the contrary, any superficial appearance notwithstanding, the very straight-
est and closest possible.”)15 Though I love the late work, I tell the students, ellos
are not required to follow suit: en efecto, it is perfectly acceptable to view the mid-
career Portrait of a Lady as the summit of James’s achievement and to regard his
later novels as appealing to a more specialized taste. But what I do ask is that they
be willing to tackle the difficulties and at least try to imagine why people like me
find the exercise so exhilarating. I do not know how many potential students this
warning discourages–though I can recall a few who confessed to backing out as a
consequence–but I think its principal effect is to make those who stay feel proud
of themselves for doing so and more committed to the collective project. Cuando
we finally arrive at The Golden Bowl, I urge them to play Colonel Bob as much as
they like, an invitation to which they usually respond with nervous laughter, desde
it means modeling themselves on that novel’s chief skeptic, Bob Assingham, OMS
characteristically cuts through his wife’s tortured syntax by asking bluntly what it
all amounts to. (“But what the deuce did they do?” he inquires at one point, después
she offers a particularly evasive account of the future adulterers’ previous roman-
tic history.)16 Behind my advice lies the hope that the group will likewise imitate
Colonel Bob in eventually learning to appreciate the value, both moral and aes-
thetic, of Jamesian obliquity; but for readers just beginning the novel, clarifying
what’s at stake clearly takes precedence. I also make a point of telling the class that
there are sentences in The Golden Bowl–and in the late James more generally–of
whose meaning I still remain uncertain, despite having edited the text for Penguin
about a decade ago. This is the simple truth, but knowing they are not alone also
encourages students to seek help when they find themselves baffled. James is mys-
terious enough without mystifying him further.

H e was also prolific enough to overwhelm the best efforts of a syllabus-

maker, even one willing to assign a lot of reading. In addition to twenty
novels and more than a dozen plays, there are over one hundred short sto-
ries, multiple volumes of literary essays, art criticism, and travel writing, incluir-
ing the book-length account of his late return to his native land, The American Scene

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150 (1) Winter 2021Ruth Bernard Yeazell

(1907), a commissioned biography of the American sculptor, William Wetmore Story
(1903), and two haunting works of autobiography: A Small Boy and Others (1913)
and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914). And that is not to mention two novels and
a third volume of autobiography left unfinished at the time of his death, or the
vast amount of writing he never intended for public eyes, like his letters and note-
books. (The last of these, first published in 1947, is a book I always recommend to
the aspiring writers in the class, as well as to anyone curious as to how James ar-
rived at his plots or decided, Por ejemplo, what names to bestow on his large cast
of characters.) As I usually observe on the first day, choosing among these possi-
bilities for a single course bears some resemblance to the activity in which James
himself engaged when deciding what to include in his New York Edition: a pro-
cess that was governed in his case not merely by retrospective judgments of quality
–in one baffling decision, he dismissed Washington Square (1880) on the grounds
that he could not bear to reread it–but by practical considerations like the costs
of negotiating copyright with different publishers or the question of how many
stories would fit in a single volume.17 Which novels to teach is also a question of
length and availability, as well as the history one is hoping to tell. I have never felt
tempted by Watch and Ward (1871), a rather queasy-making novel about a man who
ends up marrying the orphan he adopted when she was a girl, but it was not until
1983 that a reliable text was even in print. James’s disowning of this early effort
was so complete that he not only excluded it from the New York Edition but in-
troduced that opus by characterizing Roderick Hudson (1875), published four years
más tarde, as “my first attempt at a novel.”18

My courses on James usually follow his lead, beginning with Roderick Hudson
and concluding with The Golden Bowl, a trajectory that helps students see how
James reworks certain patterns again and again, even as it also traces a particular
story about his development as a novelist. Roderick Hudson opens with a wealthy
Americano, Rowland Mallett, who idly plans to help some native city establish an
art museum by going on a collecting tour of Europe and who impulsively decides
to bankroll a promising young sculptor’s aesthetic education in Italy instead; El
Golden Bowl begins with a penniless Italian prince on the brink of marriage to an
American heiress whose fabulously wealthy father has been collecting art for just
such a museum as Rowland contemplates in a place baldly dubbed “American
City.”19 With the partial exceptions of The Princess Casamassima (1886) and What
Maisie Knew, both primarily set in England but with protagonists who take cru-
cial journeys to the Continent, the other novels on this syllabus are likewise vari-
ations on what’s become known as James’s international theme: The American,
The Portrait of a Lady, and The Ambassadors. More important, tal vez, is how this
sequence enables students to follow James as he continually rewrites his earlier
trabajar, whether by reviving the charismatic Christina Light of Roderick Hudson in
the eponymous heroine of The Princess Casamassima, or by returning to particular

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesHenry James in–and out of–the Classroom

character types and situations and radically transforming them, as when the out-
worn affair between Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady
becomes the sympathetically imagined and erotically charged–if morally prob-
lematic–adultery of The Golden Bowl.

Before settling on this syllabus, I briefly experimented with another format,
a course on James and the movies that focused less on his reworking of certain
themes than on the potential and limits of his medium. The idea was to ask what
novels could do that films could not–and vice versa–and the choice of texts for
the course was necessarily constrained by the prior choices of the filmmakers.
When I last taught the class in 2004, the list included Washington Square, The Por-
trait of a Lady, The Bostonians (1886), The Turn of the Screw, and The Wings of the Dove
(1902), each of which had inspired one or more cinematic versions in the second
half of the twentieth century. Perhaps the most interesting case from a film buff’s
point of view was François Truffaut’s The Green Room (1978), a very loose riff on
several James tales, The Altar of the Dead (1895) most prominently among them,
updated to France in the aftermath of World War I. I had initially designed the
course in the hope of attracting students who might not otherwise be drawn to
James, but the results of the experiment were rather mixed, perhaps because it was
hard to make the materials cohere or because my own ambivalence about some of
the films was catching. As is often the case in my experience, the best films were
either those that had comparatively simple material with which to work–like The
Innocents (1961), Jack Clayton’s adaptation of James’s “shameless pot-boiler” The
Turn of the Screw 20–or those that took the greatest liberties with their source texts,
like the Truffaut.

James is an intensely visual writer, but he is also of course an elaborately ver-
bal one, and films struggle to get the balance right. Despite a script that adheres
quite closely to the original, Por ejemplo, Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady (1996)
repeatedly feels off to me, not least when John Malkovich’s over-the-top perfor-
mance as Gilbert Osmond turns psychological abuse into overt physical violence,
a possibility the novel explicitly rules out. The clumsy dialogue in Iain Softley’s
adaptation of The Wings of the Dove (1997), por el contrario, owes virtually nothing to
James, y, like Campion, Softley literalizes the action: in his case by dramatizing
a sex scene that the novel leaves implicit. But somewhat to my surprise, I often
found myself admiring the film’s visual effects, especially the skill with which the
actors and cinematographers translated the novel’s triangular erotic relations into
a subtle language of glance and gesture.21 It is not clear that I persuaded others on
this point, sin embargo; and after the second iteration of the course, a few students
complained that we were wasting our time with inferior examples of cinematic
arte. Though I have often suspected that stringent verdict emanated from a handful
of film studies majors in the group–their remarks were anonymous–the solution
seemed obvious. Henceforth, the novels would have to stand on their own.

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150 (1) Winter 2021Ruth Bernard Yeazell

I mmediate responses to a class are one thing, subsequent memories, anoth-

es. In preparation for this essay, I tried something I had never done before:
writing to former students to ask what afterthoughts they might be willing
to share about their semester with James. Did they ever think about the novels
they read? Continue to read or reread him? Did encountering him have any effect
on their subsequent literary or artistic tastes? Their careers or lives more gener-
ally? While I anticipated that some would have gone on to academic or literary
trabajar, I also expressed my eagerness to hear from those whose current lives had
less obvious Jamesian reverberations. Nor did I only ask for affirmative responses:
it is possible, I suggested, that his fiction feels dated now in a way it did not then,
or that they had always harbored reservations about the novelist that had only
grown over the years. Between the two versions of the course, I had taught almost
one hundred students since the beginning of the present century, but I could only
find email addresses for sixty-five, twenty-nine of whom chose to write back. Como
anticipated, a number of these remain in the classroom, though at least some for-
mer students are now teaching students of their own at every level from elemen-
tary school to university, and a number are writers in one genre or another, en-
cluding several journalists, a prize-winning poet, and three editors at major lit-
erary publications. A few are following more directly in the novelist’s footsteps,
including one woman who sent on a story about a pair of elderly Californians in
which the couple’s divided perspectives on their marriage are rendered through a
split narrative avowedly indebted to The Golden Bowl. Others work in the theater,
law, medicine, philanthropy or NGOs, and museums: a strikingly Jamesian list, en
the whole, and one that recalls the two generations of the novelist’s own family
who were “never in a single case,” as he put it, “guilty of a stroke of business.”22
The results of this small survey, en otras palabras, hardly count as scientific. Still,
a response rate of over 40 percent is not bad, and says something, I hope, acerca de
James’s continuing future as a novelist. “The writer makes the reader very much
as he makes his characters,” James memorably wrote in an early review of George
eliot; and “when he makes him well, eso es, makes him interested, then the read-
er does quite half the labor.”23 Not everyone from whom I heard remains a party
to this contract, though a number report continuing to read or reread him–The
Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl receive particular men-
tion–and two describe working their way through the entire canon. (Having fin-
ished the novels, one is now “ambling . . . through the short stories” in chronolog-
ical order: he is currently somewhere around 1893.) Those who still turn to James
do not always do so professionally: en efecto, the only member of the group who
has thus far begun a career as a professor of literature confesses to having read
no James since college, though his recollections also include struggling through
The Wings of the Dove on his own one summer “during bumpy matatu rides in rural
Uganda.” The same writer apparently talked his way into the course while still a

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesHenry James in–and out of–the Classroom

sophomore because he was on the rebound from an unsuccessful encounter with
vector calculus and James was “the hardest English class” he could find. “I wanted
difficulty above all,” he recalls, and “part of what drew me in was the intense ab-
straction of the prose, the sense that I was as close as one could get, within a novel,
to the blank formal mechanisms of mathematical proof. It reassured me to think
that English prose could be inscrutable too.”

These thoughts of math are less idiosyncratic than they may appear, desde
James’s characters often engage in abstruse forms of proof, as when Fanny Ass-
ingham in The Golden Bowl attempts to convince herself that no prior affair took
place between Charlotte Stant and the Prince, an effort James explicitly compares
to a new kind of “arithmetic.” 24 But while only this respondent explicitly affirmed
such a preference for the inscrutable, he was hardly alone in recording a fascina-
ción, however ambivalent, with the challenges of Jamesian prose.

It was not until the class ended and she began reading “novels not by James,” a
recent student testified, that she realized how much she had “not only gotten used
to but also started to enjoy–and to crave–reading [those] impossibly winding,
opaque sentences.” Whether this made her “a book snob,” or “just a better reader
–and hungrier for harder books,” she was not yet prepared to say. Another writer,
at a longer remove from the course, nicely described how his partial bafflement at
the time had eventually yielded to fuller understanding by invoking the temporal
delay that so often structures James’s late style itself. “I knew I was too young, en
twenty, for a novel like The Ambassadors,” he wrote,

but part of the reason I loved it so much was it gave me (valorized, aesthetic, pre-
redeemed) structures of feeling I could live toward until I developed my own. Y yo
think the intense reverence I had toward that Jamesian tensing of experience toward
a future recall, call it the future subjunctive perfect, helped me to redeem a lot of the
waste inherent to one’s twenties, even as it held me back in other ways.

What he has in mind, I believe, is a temporal trick that recurs throughout the
late James, but especially in The Ambassadors, as the narrative shifts from Strether’s
present experience to his future understanding or recollection of that experience.
We are told, por ejemplo, that “he was to know afterwards, in the watches of the
night” how the sudden appearance of Chad Newsome at the opera has affected
him, or that “he was to remember again repeatedly the medal-like Italian face” of
Gloriani when he encounters that dazzling sculptor for the first and last time in
his Parisian garden.25 In The Ambassadors, as I have recently argued, such temporal
shifts not only enact the delayed comprehension that is at the heart of Jamesian
narrative generally but anticipate the memories that will prove the only recom-
pense for the fifty-five-year-old protagonist’s belated expedition to Paris.26 I find
it oddly moving, entonces, to learn of a twenty-year-old anticipating such “future re-
call” of his own encounters with the novelist.

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150 (1) Winter 2021Ruth Bernard Yeazell

Por supuesto, most of James’s Americans abroad are considerably younger than
Strether, and a few students headed off to Europe after graduation keenly aware
that their stories might already have been scripted for them. One woman, now
resident for over a decade in England, describes measuring all her early experi-
ences against the standard set by Isabel Archer. “Whenever ‘Isabel’ appears in one
of my emails home,” she writes, “it’s a sign that I’m about to complain that my
expat life is cruder or grubbier than I’d hoped it would be.” Even as she deter-
mined not to be the kind of “loud . . . self-important” American about which her
new acquaintances complained, she “hadn’t moved to England to become En-
glish” but to prove “James’s version of the ‘American girl’: a heroine down to her
fingertips.” A male student who also headed to England before traveling on the
Continent likewise describes adopting James as a “prism” through which to view
his new experiences, though his alternative was not the Ugly American but the
distinctively English world of Evelyn Waugh. While his fellow students at Cam-
bridge “all aspired, more or less openly, to find their parts in a reenactment of
Brideshead Revisited (the early chapters only, por supuesto),” he preferred to imagine
himself “a vaguely perplexed American, attracted by class systems he didn’t fully
understand, spending the money of industrial America”–not the self-made for-
tunes of Christopher Newman or Adam Verver in his case, but a Mellon fellow-
ship–“in Gothic settings on both sides of the Channel.” James, he says, provided
him “with a sort of spiritual geography” by which to map his European travels,
whether he was carrying the Italian Hours (1909) on a first visit to Italy or simply
passing by the French seaside on a train or plane and recalling “a certain memo-
ry of alienation and of coming to knowledge” that he associates with What Maisie
Knew. He never made it to Boulogne itself, but he continues to identify its location
with the end of Maisie’s childhood.

Memory of novels appears to resemble other kinds of memory, attaching less
to events in chronological order than to psychological or emotional patterns, en
la una mano, and particular moments or images, en el otro. A woman who ad-
mitted to feeling “hazy on the details” of Maisie’s plot nonetheless testified to still
thinking about the young girl’s consciousness in relation to her own, while James’s
“description of Isabel Archer preferring to look inward at the garden within her
mente, as opposed to outward at the world,” continues to provide her with a mon-
itory image of egoism. Several correspondents recalled how James’s characters
awaken to knowledge and learn to grapple with other people–the discovery of
“the sheer, unbelievable depth of the human individual,” as a recent graduate put
él, and how that resonated with their own coming of age or professional develop-
mento. “I don’t know if I realized at the time how deeply I identified with Isabel,"
confessed a woman who had written her final essay on that heroine’s struggle to
fulfill her potential, “but I used to think about it a lot as I faced my own choices
about various paths to take”–choices, she hastened to add, “mostly about career,

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesHenry James in–and out of–the Classroom

not mate” that “fortunately” did not end with an Osmond. A woman now begin-
ning to publish fiction herself similarly recalled how she approached “the sudden
precipice of life after school” as if she were the protagonist of a novel, one whose
future might be grasped if she could understand herself as fully as James under-
stood his characters. “What would happen to me? And who was I?” she recalled
asking. “Thinking about the way those two questions were linked–and James cer-
tainly suggested that they were–fueled a lot of my early adulthood. Por supuesto,
I am sure I would have thought about that anyway, even without James” she ac-
knowledged, “but I felt less lonely doing so after reading him.”

A lawyer in Los Angeles likewise associated the reading of James with the pro-
cess of self-reflection, while also remarking the affinities between the novelist’s
interest in “why people know what they think they know” and the development
of evidence in the American legal system, a connection that might have amused
that law-school dropout. “I think that what most stuck with me from James (ser-
sides the prodigious length of his sentences),” wrote another man now settled in
Israel, “was the awareness that the journeys we make inside our own conscious-
ness are every bit as dramatic as those we undertake in the ‘real’ world. In a deep
way, tal vez, these are the most significant roads we travel.” A medical resident
in Boston, inspired by an encounter between a dying patient still in his forties and
the female cousin whose arrival had visibly reanimated him, chose to share with
them a passage from The Portrait of a Lady in which Isabel pays a similar visit to her
dying cousin, Ralph Touchett. “I don’t know if these lines gave any comfort,” the
doctor writes. “I know James had no intention of being used as a Hallmark card. . . .
But this patient, al menos, has not required any more opiates since I handed him
that passage.” The passage culminates in the memorable line, “nothing mattered
now but the only knowledge that was not pure anguish–the knowledge that they
were looking at the truth together.”27

L ooking over these responses, I am struck by how often what continues to

reverberate in readers’ minds is the wording of such individual lines or
even phrases. “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost”; “Live
all you can . . . it’s a mistake not to”; “I want a happiness without a hole in it”;
“the shriek of a soul in pain”; “the balloon of experience”: these fragments came
echoing back in my students’ memories, as apparently happened to James himself
when his own words from “The Art of Fiction” resurfaced to describe the protago-
nist of The Princess Casamassima as “a youth on whom nothing was lost.”28 James’s
style may be notoriously elaborate, but the capacity of his language to compress
experience and emotion in this way is one reason, tal vez, that some of his best
readers are otherwise drawn to poetry. En efecto, a poet among my correspondents
recalled how her own style began to morph after reading him: a shift to “long lines
with grammatically reticulated sentences” that felt like “a revelation” to some-

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150 (1) Winter 2021Ruth Bernard Yeazell

one still in search of her voice. Another described writing poems “infused with
imagery and associations” suggested by his work. But you do not need to mimic
James’s style in order to appreciate its effects, as many of these respondents tes-
tified. One of those who recalled his advice to be someone “on whom nothing is
lost” confessed to having struggled painfully with the novelist’s prose as a stu-
mella, even while taking courage as an aspiring fiction writer from James’s sugges-
tion that good work need not be limited to the author’s immediate experience. A
reporter interning at a national newspaper understandably observed that his edi-
tors would “kill” him if he wrote like James. Still, he too invoked the phrase from
“The Art of Fiction” as a model for his own kind of work: a journalism ideally alert
to how the smallest cues may signify.

All of which is not to say that James emerges unquestioned from these remi-
niscences. An online journalist observes regretfully that he no longer reads such
“intricate prose” as James’s, lest its reverberations interfere with the crisp style
his profession demands. “This is part of the sadness of adulthood,” he writes: “we
nurture the parts of us that are useful to the world and shear off the rest. Eso
sadness is much of what James means to me now; he is part of that sheared mass
that cannot be reconciled with the requirements of the world.” An elementary
school teacher admits that he never quite took to the novels, in part because he
thought their social interactions dated, though he did enjoy writing a paper on
the Jamesian uncanny: an experience he now uses as an object lesson when his
students balk at some required reading, by suggesting that they too can find some-
thing of interest even in an author they dislike. A correspondent who recalls the
“quiet dazzlement” with which he initially responded to James now finds himself
questioning the language in which the novelist formulates aesthetic judgments,
wondering, Por ejemplo, whether terms like “fine,” on the one hand, and “vul-
gar,” on the other, are not too nebulous to capture the specific effects of artistic
craftsmanship. Others describe resistant afterthoughts about the ethical values
that appear to govern the novels–protesting the “solipsism” that marks the close
of The Ambassadors, por ejemplo, with its determined sacrifice of Maria Gostrey to
an ideal of conduct seemingly endorsed by Strether and James alike, or wonder-
ing if a morality grounded in not imposing one’s will on other people is adequate
to a world whose well-being increasingly seems to require collective action. Para
yet another correspondent, the questions are not so much ethical as metaphysical.
“I keep wondering,” he writes, “why reality–a real encounter between two peo-
ple–is always something sinister in the Jamesian universe . . . why so much of life
seems to happen in the imagination, and whether that’s something to celebrate or
something to mourn.” In his case, al menos, such doubts have not precluded a deter-
mination that someday he will have read everything James wrote.

“The whole conduct of life consists of things done, which do other things in
their turn,” James declared, as he approached the end of his Prefaces for the New

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York Edition. The “doing” he had in mind, characteristically, was the act of writ-
En g, and in looking over these responses, I have been struck above all by the truth
of this claim.29 Sometimes the “other things” James’s work is doing here takes
the form of more writing; sometimes, of more reading, not just of James himself
but of novels and short stories by his contemporaries like George Eliot or Edith
Wharton or by more distant heirs like James Baldwin, whose intense admira-
tion for his predecessor one student excitedly discovered only after she too had
thought of James while reading the ending of “Sonny’s Blues.” But art also lives,
as James said, upon discussion, and there appears to be plenty of that too, both in
and out of the classroom. I heard from a beginning graduate student whose devo-
tion to James has already become the stuff of rumor among her cohort and an ad-
vanced student who has started to teach him, but also from a woman whose early
morning bus rides have been enlivened by chats with a software programmer who
happens to be an avid Jamesian, as well as from a recently graduated couple who
continue to debate just how “slightly” they prefer The Portrait of a Lady to The Am-
bassadors. A wife explains to her husband how the meaning of James’s sentences
comes through despite their difficulty; a daughter recommends The Portrait of a
Lady to her mother and helps decode some puzzling passages; another daughter
triggers “a bit of a James mania” in her household, which results in her parents’
listening to The American on tape, having mistaken it for The Ambassadors, and in
her own acquisition of a box of old James novels that had once belonged to her
grandfather, a Chinese mathematician. Estos, también, are among the things that the
novelist’s deeds make happen.

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Sobre el Autor

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, miembro de la Academia Americana desde 2009, is the Ster-
ling Professor of English at Yale University. She is the author most recently of Picture
Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names (2015) and Art of the
Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (2008), as well as editor of The Golden Bowl
(2009). Her first book, Language and Knowledge in the Late Novels of Henry James, ap-
peared in 1976.

notas finales

1 Henry James, A Small Boy and Others, in Autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son
and Brother, The Middle Years, Other Autobiographical Writings, ed. Philip Horne (Nueva York:
Library of America, 2016), 108.

2 Henry James, Notes of a Son and Brother, in Autobiographies, ed. Horne, 435, 463.

150 (1) Winter 2021Ruth Bernard Yeazell

3 Richard Ellman, James Joyce, rev. ed. (Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 1983), 521.

4 For competing claims as to priority in this regard–the rival claimants taught at Columbia
and Yale, respectively–see Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 124. On the first university courses in English
literature in Britain, see Alan Bacon, “English Literature Becomes a University Subject:
King’s College, London as Pioneer,” Victorian Studies 29 (4) (1986): 591–612.

5 See Mark McGurl, The Novel Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James (Princeton,

NUEVA JERSEY.: Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton, 2001).

6 Henry James to William Dean Howells, Agosto 17, 1908, in Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed.

Philip Horne (Londres: Pingüino, 1999), 463.

7 Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Henry James: Literary Criticism–Essays on Literature,
American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (Nueva York: Library of
America, 1984), 45, 44.

8 Henry James to William Dean Howells, Febrero 3, 1876, in Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed.

Horne, 66–67.

9 James, “The Art of Fiction," 44.
10 See Peter Brooks, Henry James Goes to Paris (Princeton, NUEVA JERSEY.: Prensa de la Universidad de Princeton,

2007).

11 James, “The Art of Fiction," 44.
12 Henry James to William Dean Howells, Marzo 30, 1877, in Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed.

Horne, 83.

13 Henry James, Preface to The American, ed. James W. Tuttleton (Nueva York: W.. W.. norton,

1978), 11, 4.
14 Ibídem., 9–11.
15 Henry James, Preface to The Golden Bowl, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Londres: Pingüino,

2009), 3.

16 James, The Golden Bowl, 76.
17 See Michael Anesko, “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship

(Oxford: prensa de la Universidad de Oxford, 1986), 141–162.

18 Henry James, Preface to Roderick Hudson, ed. Geoffrey Moore (Londres: Pingüino, 1986), 36.
19 James, The Golden Bowl, 34.
20 Henry James to Frederic William Henry Myers, December 19, 1898, in Henry James: A Life

in Letters, ed. Horne, 314.

21 For more on Softley’s film, see Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Sex, Lies, and Motion Pictures,"

Henry James Review 25 (1) (2004): 87–96.

22 James, A Small Boy and Others, 118.
23 Henry James, “The Novels of George Eliot,” in Henry James: Literary Criticism, ed. Edel and

wilson, 922.

24 “Yes, it was distinctly as if she had proved what was needing proof. . . . Old arithmetic had
perhaps been fallacious, but the new settled the question.” James, The Golden Bowl, 81.

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Dédalo, la Revista de la Academia Estadounidense de las Artes & SciencesHenry James in–and out of–the Classroom

25 Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. Adrian Poole (Londres: Pingüino, 2008), 119, 162.
26 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Remembrance of Things Present in The Ambassadors,” Henry James

Revisar 38 (3) (2017): 231–237.

27 Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, 2y ed., ed. Robert D. Bamberg (Nueva York: W.. W..

norton, 1995), 478.

28 James, “The Art of Fiction," 53; James, The Ambassadors, 176; James, The Golden Bowl, 483,
538; James, Preface to The American, 10; and Henry James, The Princess Casamassima, ed.
Derek Brewer (Londres: Pingüino, 1987), 164.

29 James, Preface to The Golden Bowl, 21.

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150 (1) Winter 2021Ruth Bernard Yeazell
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