80
PARTISAN REVIEW
heavy-handed discussion of him.
Boon
asserts that "James has never
discovered that a novel isn't a picture.... That life isn't a studio."
He goes on to take exception to James' insistence upon composition
and comes to the conclusion that
his
people are all "eviscerated," that
his books are of an "elaborate, copious emptiness." "The only living
human motives left in the novels of Henry James are a certain avidity
and an entirely superficial curiosity.... His people nose out suspicions,
hint by hint, link by link. Have you ever known living human beings
do that? The thing his novel is
about
is
always there. It is like a
church lit but without a congregation to distract you, with every light
and fuie focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently
I
placed, intensely there, is a dead kitten, an egg-shell, a bit of string."
James wrote at once, in profound bewilderment since, having
enjoyed Wells so "enormously from far back," he had grown into
"the habit of taking some common meeting-ground ... for granted,
and the falling away of this is like the collapse of a bridge which
made communication possible." "But"-he went on "I am by nature
more in dread of any fool's paradise, or at least of any bad misguided–
ness, than in love with the idea of a security proved, and the fact that
a mind as brilliant as yours
can
resolve me into such an unmitigated
mistake, can't enjoy me in anything like the degree in which I like to
think I may be enjoyed, makes me greatly want to
fix
myself, for as
long as my nerves will stand it, with such a pair of eyes." The defense
that rose from such scrutiny rested its case squarely on
((my
measure
of fullness-fullness of life and of the projection of it, which seems
to you such an emptiness of both." Every sentence of
this
defense
should be read in its slow dignified context, but since the issues were
sharpened by Wells' reply, we had better turn to it.
He pointed up their fundamental divergence in attitude by say–
ing, "To you literature like painting is an end, to me literature like
architecture is a means, it has a use. Your view was, I felt, altogether
too prominent in the world of criticism and I assailed it in lines of
harsh antagonism. And writing that stuff about you was the first
escape I had from the obsession of this war.
Boon
is
just a waste-paper
basket . . . I had rather be called a journalist than an artist, that
is
the essence of it, and there was no other antagonist possible than your–
self. But since it was printed I have regretted a hundred times that I
did not express our profound and incurable contrast with a better
grace."
