JAMES'S AIR OF EVIL
lator, Auguste Monod (July 17, 1907).
If
James's intention had been
as devious as the hoaxists and the nonapparitionists (if I may term
them thus) would have us believe, surely he would have hinted as
much to his translator; instead, he unambiguously refers to the book
as a
((fantaisie absolue dans le genre de recherche du frisson."
There is some evidence that James's opinion of the merits of
The Turn of the Screw
altered between the date of its first publica–
tion in 1898 and its appearance ten years later in the definitive edi–
tion: thus, in the above-mentioned letter to
F.W.H.
Myers, he refers
to it as "a very mechanical matter, I honestly think-an inferior, a
merely
pictorial
subject and rather a shameless pot-boiler," but in
the preface, as Philip Rahv has commented, he gives it serious and
lengthy treatment. It is possible, of course, that James was merely
being overmodest in the Myers letter (the tone of many of his let–
ters is self-deprecatory in this way, betraying their author's concern
for "good taste"), but again it is possible that he did not imme–
diately realize how consummately successful he had been in his at–
tempt to communicate to the reader a sense of "most infernal ima–
ginable evil and danger"-the poet, as he himself so well put it, be–
ing
always grateful to the justifying commentator. Neither expla–
nation supports the Kenton-'Wilson view: as we have seen, there is
no evil or danger without the apparitions; and if James had intended
to conceal the point of the narrative as carefully as they claim-if,
in
other words, it was to be the subtlest of his stories in this sense–
he would scarcely have referred to it as a potboiler.
The changes which James made for the definitive edition were
of a purely verbal character and do not affect the plot in any way.
However, the preface which he composed for the new edition is in–
valuable for the light which it throws on
his
intentions. Miss Kenton
has not ignored this preface; she has done
wh~t
is far worse: she
has lifted one of its sentences out of its context, interpreted it in a
very special kind of way, and then, claiming it as "evidence," has
proceeded to construct upon it her very largest argument. In the
case of a writer such as James, where context is ,almost all-important,
this is
particularly reprehensible. The sentence in question reads as
follows: "I need scarcely add after this that it
[The Turn of the
Screw]
is a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic cal–
culation, an
amttseite
to catch those not easily caught (the fun of
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