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both father and son make dramatic
situations prior to external conditions,
biological, social or what not. His
question may be put: if the novelist
isn't coping with a Society Out There,
what is he doing ? He writes of the
novels: "What else endows them with
their high drama?
What else could?
For without this awareness of the pow–
er of all that is external to the self,
it may be doubted that James or any–
one else could write novels at all."
Howe is here looking into the Ameri–
can abyss, but he steps back. (Appar–
ently he wants to define the novel
as dependent on naive philosophic
realism-a game in which Society
tosses its terrible presentment to the
novelist who attempts to toss it back
again.) But Mr. Howe clearly never
stopped for a moment to ask him–
self
what
I was calling American in
Henry James, for whom (as for
Emerson, Whitman, Melville) society
was
not
imaginatively compelling.
Their characteristic attempts at self–
definition have the desperate meta–
physical finality of Ahab's quest. You
need not be happy about the fact–
I am not-but if you find that it
dictates the structure of James's last
three novels you report it. James, like
other
nineteenth-century American
authors, does sound like a Professor
of Moral Philosophy; and where has
Mr. Howe been for the last fifteen
years-wandering about Portland Place
investigating the social complement of
The Golden Bowl?
Or explaining to
his students how poor Isabel Archer
was financially and spiritually fleeced
by those wicked expatriates-as
if
The
Portrait of a Lady
was really about
a confidence game?
It is time those students gave him
a reading list on the great American
quarrel with matter; the attempt to
make selves without the aid of Marx,
the mediator, or manners.
QUENTIN ANDERSON
New
York City
SIRS:
Though Mr. Anderson charges that
I have mishandled his text, he fails
to provide any concrete examples. Had
