Vol. 4 No. 3 1938 - page 6

6
PARTISAN REVIEW
often old-maidish than his sense of reality is feeble; and the whole
development of American society during his absence is implied in
these later books.
Now when he returns-late in the day though it is for him-he
reacts strongly and describes vividly what he finds.
The returning New Yorker of
The Jolly Corner
encounters the
apparition of himself as he would have been if he had stayed in
America: "Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his
own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his
power to dismay." At first the apparition covers its face with its hands;
then it advances upon the returned native "as for aggression, and he
knew himself give ground. Then harder pressed still, sick with the
force of his shock, and falling back as under the hot breath and the
sensed passion of a life larger t1).an his own, a rage of personality
before which his own collapsed, he felt the whole vision turn to dark-
ness," and he fainted.
But at contact with the harsh new America, the old Balzac in
James revives. I do not know why more has not been made by James's
critics-especially by the critics of the left, who are so certain that
there is nothing in him-of his unfinished novel,
The I vory Tower.
The work of his all but final period has been "poetic" rather than
"realistic"; but now he passes into still a further phase, in which the
poetic treatment is applied to what is for James a new kind of realism.
The fiction of his latest period is preoccupied in a curious way with
the ugly, the poor and the old, even with-what
is unprecedented for
James-the grotesque. It is perhaps the reflection of his own old age,
his own lack of worldly success, the strange creature that he himself
has become. This new vein begins, I think, with
The Papers,
with its
fantastically amusing picture of the sordid lives of journalists in Lon-
don.
Fordham Castle,
in which he said he had attempted to do some
justice to the parents of the Daisy Millers, whose children had left
them behind, is an excursion into the America of Sinclair Lewis.
The Bench of Desolation--one
of the most beautifully written and
wonderfully developed pieces in the whole range of Henry James's
work, and, I believe, the last piece of fiction he published-is a sort
of poem of loneliness and poverty among the nondescript small shop-
keepers and former governesses of an English seaside resort.
And now the revelation of Newport, as it presented itself in the
nineteen hundreds-so different from the Newport which he had de-
scribed years ago in
An International Episode-stimulates
him to
something quite new: a kind of nightmare of the American new rich.
Here his gusto for the varied forms of life, his interest in social phe-
nomena for their own sake, seems suddenly to wake up from its
I,1,2,3,4,5 7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,...66
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