BOOKS
HENRY JAMES AS LATTER-DAY SAINT
THE AMERICAN HENRY JAMES.
By
Quentin Anderson. Rutgers
University Press. $6.50.
The admirers of Henry James are not likely to feel luke–
warm about this book. Mr. Anderson's revolutionary approach to James,
which transforms the novelist into a moral allegorist using the Sweden–
borgian symbols and assumptions of his father Henry Sr., was first of–
fered in
Kenyon Review
ten years ago; and since then his work has
won the praise of such accomplished critics as Francis Fergusson, Lionel
Trilling and (with major qualifications) F.
R.
Leavis. This is not a
company to be contradicted unless one has good reasons, so I had
better say at once that to my mind the reasons are not only good but
urgent. Mr. Anderson's book is the product of enormous labor, skill,
earnestness and ingenuity; but it is a bad book. Turgid in style, per–
verse and willful in approach, it rests upon assumptions that must
prove destructive to literary values and critical discriminations.
What strikes one upon first reading this book-it constitutes a
radical criticism-is that even while staking out the largest claims for
his thesis Mr. Anderson never states precisely what it is. We are to be
persuaded that an important relationship exists between some of James's
novels and the moral philosophy of his father; we are told that without
grasping this relationship it is virtually impossible to make out the mean–
ing of these novels; but we are not told, with sufficient rigor and
exactness, what that relationship is supposed to have been. Mr. Ander–
son simply fails to confront the question: Was James consciously and
systematically charting an allegorical equivalent of his father's system,
which in effect would transform his late novels into cabalistic texts,
or did the values of that system so infiltrate James's consciousness that,
quite regardless of his will, they also dominate his novels? Nor is this
a secondary question; for even, I think, those critics most rigid in dis–
missing the "intentional fallacy" would have to grant that as regards
allegory the description of the genre
is
inseparable from the claim for
intention.
