MUCH OUTCRY; LITTLE OUTCOME
cliches has not been as typical of fiction as of the other arts. Capote
shows us that in literature, too, you can reach the equivalent of those
sophisticated painters who seem miraculously to have been born with
precisely the same imagination as Paul Klee. In that sense,
Other Voices,
Other R ooms
already has a quaint historical significance.
Elizabeth Hardwick
THE PASSION AND THE TASK
THE NOTEBOOKS OF HENRY JAMES. Edited by F. 0. M11tthiessen end
Kenneth B. Murdock. Oxford University Press.
$6.00.
By this time anyone who has not actually read these note–
books will have become acquainted with their general content, scope,
and importance. All that can now be done is to add one's own support
to the widely expressed conviction that there is nothing quite like them
in the whole range of our literature. There are in existence plenty of
journals, memoirs, and notebooks by eminent artists in all fields-–
Leonardo, Delacroix, H awthorne, the GQncourts, and Gide among
many others. But for the most part these are made up of impressions,
observations on experience, or opinions on large subjects. Dostoevsky,
writing in his journal, will tell us of seeing one Sunday afternoon
a forlorn-looking workingman taking a stroll with a small child, and of
how the sight stirs him to reconstruct the whole background of the
man's life. But only Keats in his letters and Hopkins in his notebooks
provide the excitement that comes from an account of the "divine
process" itself, the eternal romance which the dedicated artist carries
on with his muse.
Romance is neither too far-fetched or sentimental a word to describe
what J ames himself called, in a letter to Wells, this "interminable gar–
rulous letter addressed to my own fancy." In this rare and unprece–
dented colloquy his fancy becomes something personified--even apo–
theosized, that is to say,
outside
himself. Like Rimbaud, he seems to
say,
u]E est un autre";
and the limited, fallible, tormented creature who
is the artist is someone through whom a great unspeakable force is
striving to get itself realized. We are, of course, reminded of Plato and
the daemonic possession, of the even more ancient and primitive concept
of the poet as the vehicle or mouthpiece of superior powers.
It
is the
furthest application of the ideal of aesthetic detachment which James
inherited from the Flaubert tradition. But all this is perhaps to em-
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