Common Knowledge

After Foucault, it has become a truism of literary criticism that the “author” is a socially constructed institution that should not be confused with the biographical person of the writer. In this eminently entertaining history of Henry James’s reception, Michael Anesko shows in meticulously researched detail that the truism is right. No innocent about the battles for power that invariably attend the production and transmission of cultural artifacts, the author of “The Death [End Page 563] of the Lion” and “The Aspern Papers” would not, of course, have found this conclusion surprising. In a tale told with considerable narrative verve, Anesko demonstrates that disputes contesting the construction of this writer’s reputation began even before his death and passed through several stages as sometimes fierce battles were waged to control the public perception of his life and works.

Anesko transforms the otherwise dry stuff of reception history into gripping drama—even at times melodrama—because his account revels in the seamier aspects of the personal rivalries, intrigues, and ambitions that marked the many conflicts over James’s literary remains. He is particularly hard on the provincial pruderies of the James family, especially those of brother William’s wife, Alice, and son Harry, who tried to erase any and all evidence of homoerotic longing in those remains by insisting on various omissions, revisions, and selections in the publication of his letters and, worse, by burning what they could not sanitize. Their suppressions could not completely succeed, however, because the evidence of James’s effusive affections was too overwhelming and too widely dispersed among his many correspondents—and because certain parties, like his young friend the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, refused to surrender the compromising correspondence they held. Credit is due as well to sister Alice’s longtime companion Katharine Loring, who preserved her dear friend’s witty, irreverent diary despite the family’s desire to prevent its indiscretions from seeing the light of day. Anesko also has little sympathy for Leon Edel’s efforts to keep poachers out of the James archive during the protracted period until he completed his magisterial five-volume biography and four-volume collection of letters. The repeated instances of small-mindedness make one wish the humanities were indeed the generous enterprise they are sometimes naively thought to be.

Although this book is full of juicy bits of gossip and intrigue, it also offers a long view of how an author is constructed and reconstructed through his (or her) reception. Anesko studiously follows James’s reception through all of its many phases over the course of nearly a century, from the neglect his works suffered in the years right after his death, to the fevered patriotic attacks in the 1920s and 1930s against his alleged desertion of his native land, to the revival of his artistic reputation in the hands of the New Critics—a “James boom” that continues even up to the present day (although now promoted by critics, like Anesko, who do not share the high modernists’ “art for art’s sake” credo). Anesko provides an excellent introduction to the century-long history of James criticism and to the conflicts that have contributed to making him interesting, and yet again interesting, so that his works remain in print and readers endlessly argue about what they mean. No one has a monopoly on Henry James, and nothing shows this better than the battles of the would-be monopolists. [End Page 564]