284
PARTISAN REVIEW
es the Conspiracy Theory of Criticism, which gives us writers practicing
a life-long mystification: Kafka secreting Freudian formulas in
his
work, Melville conducting a secret quarrel with God throughout
his
novels. It is an approach to literature which makes it very hard to dis–
tinguish between a novel and the Zohar.1
In any case, if it is Mr. Anderson's intention to say that James's
use
of his father's emblems is the central discovery of his book, then one
would expect that some evidence might
be
offered to indicate that
James alse knew what Mr. Anderson knows he was doing. But not a
line! Mr. Anderson feels obliged to quote from James's letters and
autobiographies several statements gently disavowing interest in
his
father's system, as for example this one:
It comes over me as I read ... how intensely original and personal
[his father's] whole system was, and how indispensable it is that those
who go in for religion [But doesn't that phrase give away the whole
show?-I.H.] should take some heed of it. I can't enter into it (much)
myself-I can't
be
so theological nor grant his extraordinary premises,
nor throw myself into conceptions of heavens and hells, nor be sure that
the keynote of nature is humanity....
This was written by the mature James in
1885,
and for those who
are familiar with the elaborate kindliness of his letters, as well as the
depths of his filial piety, the passage must surely seem
all
the more
decisive as an intellectual dissociation. Mr. Anderson wrestles with it
manfully, and declares that' it shows the younger James to be "plainly
uninformed" about his father's system-though why this is supposed
to support his case that Henry Jr.
"used
the elder James's beliefs"
escapes me.
Nor is there anything in the Notebooks concerning symbolic or
allegorical intentions of a systematic kind, despite the fact that James
discussed in them so many of his themes, methods and literary prob–
lems. (Swedenborg is not listed at all in the index to the Matthiessen–
Murdock edition, while James Sr. makes his few appearances in a
1 Not hard for everyone. Mr. Anderson's approach is essentially fanatical,
but he is careful to avoid the manner of fanaticism. Only once, to my knowledge,
does he slip into the amusing sort of self-congratulation, the claim to unique
revelation, which is the rationale for writing criticism to prove that an
author has been engaged in some form of secret speech: "He (James the
novelist
1
was of course shrewd enough to know that what was so carefully
concealed would be perceived only by an able reader, but he was clearly unaware
that his sense of humanity was emotionally so private and historically
10
special that this scheme would not
be
apprehensible unless the reader used
his father as a guide."
And since of course no one before Mr. Anderson has systematically used
the father as a guide. . . •
