Reading Henry James

Henry James Goes to Paris
by Peter Brooks
2008, 288 pages

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I’m a sucker for biographical works about Henry James, and, for that matter, the rest of the James family, especially William. I’ll read pretty much anything about Henry; the publishers description of Henry James Goes to Paris seemed interesting:

Henry James’s reputation as The Master is so familiar that it’s hard to imagine he was ever someone on whom some things really were lost. This is the story of the year – 1875 to 1876 – when the young novelist moved to Paris, drawn by his literary idols living at the center of the early modern movement in art. As Peter Brooks skillfully recounts, James largely failed to appreciate or even understand the new artistic developments teeming around him during his Paris sojourn. But living in England twenty years later, he would recall the aesthetic lessons of Paris, and his memories of the radical perspectives opened up by French novelists and painters would help transform James into the writer of his adventurous later fiction. A narrative that combines biography and criticism and uses James’s writings to tell the story from his point of view, Henry James Goes to Paris vividly brings to life the young American artist’s Paris year–and its momentous artistic and personal consequences.

Alas, I’ve stopped reading halfway through the book. After a first chapter that relates Henry’s year in Paris (beginning in late 1875), his meetings with famous authors, such as Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev, and others, and how he tried to fit into French society, the book takes an odd turn. In fact, it has very little to do with Henry James in Paris, but more to do with critical analyses of some of James’s novels.

This dense critical study attempts – in vain – to link James’s future novels to that year he spent in Paris, and to repeated visits he made over the year. Its thesis is flimsy and hard to pin down: that James didn’t really like what he saw in Paris in 1875-1876, but he stored away all that he saw for his future works. This is flimsy because James’s repeated visits to Paris, and his links to the country through his reading, helped him appreciate what he didn’t appreciate during that first year. But it wasn’t so much an unconscious storing away of Parisian sensibilities that informed his work, but rather the constant reinterpretation of French literature that Henry James would make throughout the years, as he became closer to what the French were doing in 1875.

I may dip back into this book in the future, but don’t expect a story about Henry James in Paris, as the title suggests. It’s a shame that this book is presented more as a biographical sketch than a critical study – especially through its title – while it is essentially a dissertation on the fiction. I may come back to this book during my reading of Henry’s works, to see what Brooks has to say about them, but for now, having read half of it, I find his insights relatively uninteresting.