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of the unaware."s (Here, as elsewhere, Mr. Anderson seems to be talking
about James as a novelist rather than as a person.) And finally,
James was not trying "to cope with a threatening cultural situation in
which, as a matter of fact, he was not involved."
A:part from that "unblinking pressure of the unaware," which
sounds fine but tends to resist paraphrase, all of these statements can
be examined and shown to be inaccurate or serious exaggerations.
If
James held "a vision of the moral life founded on personal freedom,"
then a "threatening cultural situation" would necessarily involve him,
since it would be working in opposition to his "vision of the moral life";
and as James in his unsystematic way knew only too well, that is pre–
cisely what did happen. It is true of course that "a vision of the moral
life founded on personal freedom" does inform his novels, but what
Mr. Anderson refuses to recognize-in the interest of his thesis, but at
great cost to the moral tension within the novels-is that there is also
present in them a profound and often extremely painful sense of "the
tyranny of conditions." What else endows them with their high drama?
What else could?
For without this awareness of the power of all that is
external to the self, it may be doubted that James or anyone else could
write novels at all.
But it is when one turns back to the novels themselves, while re–
membering Mr. Anderson's words, that one rubs one's eyes. Hyacinth
Robinson, caught between Paris and the Sun and Moon caf6--is he in
a dramatic situation prior to fated conditions? Isabel Archer, discover–
ing that her very quest for unconditioned freedom leads her into a
terrible subjection-is she exempt from the tyranny of conditions?
Maggie Verver, desperately maneuvering to save her marriage-is she
free from external compulsions?
Reading
The American Henry James
one would hardly suppose
that novels, among other things but surely not as the least of them, are
performances;
that a writer like James could yield himself to a moment
of spontaneity, could soften into his gift for play, even in his most
freighted and solemn works; that he could put something into a novel
because it seemed noteworthy as an instance of human conduct, quite
without reference to its place in a symbolic scheme to
be
announced
fifty or sixty years later; that, like every other novelist who ever wrote,
3 Yet we read, concerning this novelist fortunate (and unique) enough to
be "exempted . . . from the tyranny of conditions," that "as a thinker, Henry
J
ames is an exquisitely ordered version of the most general manifestations of
the culture of his origins." One might suppose that any writer who can be
described as a "version" of the manifestations of his culture is not entirely
free from the tyranny of conditions.
