The last gasp of the master

Philip Hensher

THE OUTCRY by Henry James Penguin, £8.99, pp. 240, ISBN 0141186941 Henn: James's last period has been very little explored, and, for most readers, his career ends with The Golden Bowl of 1904. After that there are a few superb short stories — notably The Jolly Corner' — but the books he wrote between 1904 and his death in 1916 are very little known. Italian Hours, The Finer Grain and the two volumes of autobiography are unfamiliar even to quite enthusiastic Jamesians, and I freely admit that I had never even heard of this book, and was rather astonished to discover that it, and not The Golden Bowl, is James's last completed novel. There is much more James than one thinks — who, recently, has read The Reverberator or even (one of his best things) The Sacred Fount? But the idea that James's last novel is now being published for the first time since 1911 is frankly incredible.

The single reason one generally thinks of The Golden Bowl as, effectively, the end of James's career is quite simply its quality; I think it is his greatest novel, and the expertise of a lifetime went into its mastery. It would be nice to think of him signing off with such a summation, so unanswerable a vindication of the realist project. But he did not stop there, and in his subsequent work there are repeated indications that he was finding his way towards something new, Neither of the unfinished novels are quite satisfactory; The Sense of the Past is the ne plus ultra of James's involved style, and more interested in frustrating the reader with syntax than saying anything. The best of the late stories, similarly, continue the increasing abstract, psychological refinements of the late novel, with, in 'The Bench of Desolation' and 'The Jolly Corner', triumphant results. On the other hand, I think what we have of The Ivory Tower is tantalisingly good; it is hypnotically devoted to excess, and the obscene riches it dwells on and the obesity of its heroine are demonstrably building towards something very powerful. Its world is one inch from F. Scott Fitzgerald's, its manner highperiod James.

The Henry James revealed in the two volumes of autobiography seems to me quite a new figure; he was not a naturally confessional writer, and had always been wary of the first-person plural. But they are a delight; teasing, funny, nostalgic. James did not read Proust until Edith Wharton sent him Du Cote de Chez Swann in 1914, by which time his second volume was done, but they have something of the same character. Here, in looking back into the distant past, James seems to mould the future; there are many pages in his memoirs which resemble nothing so much as Nabokov's

autobiography of half a century later. James was always striking out into new territory and his most experimental books were often his most fascinating; The Princess Casamassima, a conscious attempt to turn himself into Dickens, The Awkward

Age's restriction to nothing but dialogue, or What Maisie Knew. that cruel exploitation of the single point of view. The sense of unexplored possibilities did not stop after The Golden Bowl. and James's very last period is filled with tantalising new directions, not least that book he was scrawling on his deathbed sheets when, in his delirium, he had come to believe that he was the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. All the same, I think very few people would have suspected that he had a book like The Outcry in him. It is a real oddity.

The novel originated in quite a different form. James had often been inspired by society gossip — The Aspem Papers, for one, started from a dinner-table anecdote and this was sparked off by a national news story. Holbein's portrait of Christina of Denmark (the woman who Henry VIII passed over as a prospective queen in favour of Anne of Cleves, lucky woman) was owned by the Duke of Norfolk and lent to the National Gallery. The Duke let it be known that he was in receipt of substantial offers for the painting, and interested in selling it. In the end, it was saved for the nation by a large donation from an anonymous lady. The story fascinated James — if it hardly seems much of a story, that is because it is so tantalisingly incomplete — and in 1909 he set to work.

Surprisingly, he did not immediately think of writing a novel on the subject, and what it spurred him to was to write a play on a similar subject. Very rum; his previous forays into the theatre had not been marked with much success, and the last of them, Guy Domville, had provided the most public humiliation of James's life. The Outcry, as a drama, is a perfectly well-made drawing-room comedy, and might have done reasonably well. On the death of Edward VII in May 1910, however, all the theatres were shut for a period of mourning, and James's last play was one of the unnoticed casualties of the national grief.

It is worth saying, before turning to the novel which resulted, that if James's previous encounters with the stage had left him bruised, by 1909 he must have come to feel that the discipline of writing dramas had enriched and deepened what really mattered, his novels. Guy Domville had proved an unworkable mess, but the requirement to portray minds through speech alone had resulted in the incomparable triumph of The Awkward Age; the discipline of thinking in terms of scenes, of entrances and exits, had enhanced every moment of The Golden Bowl. There was no reason, in short, why this lost opportunity might not prove the basis of a similar creative leap,

and James briskly set about turning the play into a novel.

The novel, when published in 1911, was surprisingly successful — James was never popular, but the sales were more than respectable. After his death, however, it fell into total obscurity, and nobody seems to have thought of republishing it until now.

Whether it is worth it, however, I don't know. In a spirit of completeness, one is pleased to have it for the shelves, but it doesn't really enlarge our sense of James. It is much lighter than one might expect, but it is not really good enough to serve as a gentle introduction to grander achievements. It is one of James's country-house fictions, like The Sacred Fount, but not on that level of density; it is refined, decorous, sly chat from beginning to end on the subject of a painting which may or may not be more important than anyone previously thought.

The problem with it is really that James, in 1911, was temporarily exhausted and made little effort to turn his stage play into a real novel, rethinking as he went. Every page betrays the book's origins; it hardly strays beyond dialogue, and the few authorial comments verge on the perfunctory. The novelist rarely troubles to venture into description, and when he speaks, it is usually in the form of fairly casual stage directions:

This again in turn visibly affected Lord John; marking the moment from which he, in spite of his cultivated levity, allowed an intenser and more sustained look to keep straying towards their host.

As I say, one is pleased to have it, and everything James wrote is of some interest. No one but James could have written the play, which might work perfectly well on stage. Any hack, however, could have undertaken the labour of turning the play into a novel; it is disappointingly similar to those modern cashing-in tomes called things like Star Wars: The Novel.

I won't complain that Penguin have republished this, as I hadn't read it and didn't know about it, and it goes against the grain to carp at any publisher who bravely issues a completely obscure novel by Henry James. But it would be nice to think that they won't stop here. The highlights of James's late period are difficult to get hold of in decent editions, and absolutely fascinating; it is bold to dig up a rarity like this, but what would really change our image of James's last decade would be a good, popular edition of The Ivory Tower or the two volumes of autobiography. Given the adventurous, delving spirit which has invigorated Penguin Classics over the last couple of years, we might see that very thing.