Henry James, John Singer Sargent, and the “masterpiece of painting” that survived a meat cleaver attack

An old friend of The Library of America is in New York City for the summer, receiving visitors by the hundreds every day and looking remarkably sharp despite having survived a brush with vandalism and, more recently, commemorated a hundredth birthday.

The “friend” in this case is the celebrated 1913 portrait of Henry James by John Singer Sargent—one of many arresting works featured in the exhibition Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If the painting looks familiar to Library of America readers, that’s because it graces the dust jacket of the LOA volume Henry James: Complete Stories 1898–1910.

John Singer Sargent, Henry James (1913)
Oil on canvas, 33–1/2 × 26–1/2 in. (85.1 × 67.3 cm)
National Portrait Gallery, London
Photo: © National Portrait Gallery, London

The Met’s exhibition is an opportunity to appreciate both Sargent’s artistic gifts and the remarkably rarefied nature of his social circle. His portraits encompass other painters, actors, singers, dancers, and of course writers, with Robert Louis Stevenson and W.B. Yeats both being caught especially vividly.

Sargent and James became friends after James published an extensive appreciation of the artist’s work in Harper’s magazine in 1887, where he wrote: “In an altogether exceptional degree does he give us the sense that an intention and the art of carrying it out are for him one and the same thing.” Their common experience as American expatriates and members of the cultural elite created a bond between the two men, but today it’s virtually a critical commonplace to find deeper affinities between them—to link the psychological depth conveyed in Sargent’s portraits, for instance, with James’s almost obsessive attention to his characters’ inner lives. (This might also help account for why Sargent reproductions regularly appear on the covers of James paperbacks.)

The 1913 portrait was a commission by James’s friends and admirers for his seventieth birthday. According to the exhibition catalogue, the author was happy with the result, calling it “Sargent at his very best and poor old HJ not at his worst; in short a living breathing likeness and a masterpiece of painting.”

But the “living breathing likeness” almost breathed its last before most people had a chance to see it for themselves. When the painting went on view at London’s Royal Academy in May 1914, a suffragette named Mary Wood attacked it with a meat cleaver, managing to slash the canvas three times before being apprehended. While it is tempting to speculate that Wood was venting her disapproval of the way James had portrayed the women’s movement in his novel The Bostonians nearly 30 years earlier, she was in fact engaged in a more general protest at the lack of political representation for women. In the years just prior to World War I, several English suffragettes drew attention to their cause by vandalizing pieces of art, and one theory about the Mary Wood incident suggests that at the time of its unveiling Sargent’s portrait would have symbolized an artistic elite that consisted entirely of men. (The Royal Academy itself was widely understood to be a “bastion of conservatism.”)

James relayed his feelings about the incident in a letter to his friend Jessie Allen:

Yes, it was a nasty one, or rather a nasty three—for she got at me thrice over before the tomahawk was stayed. I naturally feel very scalped and disfigured, but you will be glad to know that I seem to be pronounced curable—to all probability, that is, when the experts have well looked into me. The damage, in other words, isn’t past praying for, or rather past mending, given the magic of the modern mender’s art.

James’s optimism was well-founded. Sargent was quickly able to repair the painting with the help of a team of restorers, and The Library of America can attest that today “old HJ” looks none the worse for his ordeal.

Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through October 4, 2015. Visit metmuseum.org for complete exhibition information.

Related posts:

• Tom Sawyer’s Mississippi comes to panoramic full-color life in new Metropolitan Museum exhibition
• Harlem Renaissance literature plays strong supporting role in MoMA’s Jacob Lawrence exhibition

Lightness v. pungency: Michael Gorra on Henry James’s two versions of The Portrait of a Lady—25 years apart

Guest blog post by Michael Gorra, Mary Augusta Jordan Professor of English Language and Literature at Smith College and author of the recently published Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece

One October day many years ago I sat in a college classroom and wondered why the book on my desk wasn’t the same as the one the professor held in his hand. They were each called The Portrait of a Lady, and yet I couldn’t make the words he read aloud match up with the ones on the page before me. Henry James’s heroine was named Isabel Archer, and I could follow nicely when my teacher read that “she had had everything that a girl could have.” But it seemed that James then went on to specify. “Everything” included “the latest publications, the music of Gounod, the poetry of Browning, the prose of George Eliot.” The girl in my book didn’t have all that, she got only “a glimpse of contemporary aesthetics,” and I cursed myself for having gotten a cheap used copy instead of the new Penguin in the college bookstore. Mine was clearly abridged—and yet why didn’t it say so?

I’d like to report that I promptly put up my hand and asked what was going on, but I was shy and instead just bumbled along for the rest of the class and even on into the next week. The novel ends with a famous kiss, and my book told me that it was “like a flash of lightning.” My teacher’s said something more. On his pages that “kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed,” and so on for another fifty words. Well, the book had hit me like that, and even in what I thought was my own defective copy. It was time to get a good one.

The truth is that The Portrait of a Lady exists in two versions. You can read the text James published in 1881, or you can get the one that he revised twenty-five years later for what he called the New York Edition of his works. James had always tinkered with his own published works, marking them up and trying to make them better, even if the changes were for his eyes only. Then in 1905 he started to plan a definitive edition of his novels and tales, an edition “selective as well as collective; I want quietly to disown a few things.” As part of that, the early books that had made his name—stories like “Daisy Miller,” novels like the Portrait itself—would have their surfaces rubbed over, their style nudged or even kicked into line with that of his later work. Or as he himself put it, he would close the gap between “the march of my present attention…[and] the march of my original expression.”

My teacher had ordered the text of the New York Edition, which had become the classroom standard. I was reading the 1881 version, which some publishers had continued to use and which remained a staple of used bookstores and libraries. And over the years I’ve seen my own early puzzlement duplicated on the faces of one student after another; though I’m happy to say that they’re not at all reluctant to ask about those discrepancies. Put simply, the difference lies in the metaphoric weight and physical pungency of the older writer’s language. In 1881 Isabel waits to see her sick cousin Ralph, and grows “impatient at last; she grew nervous and even frightened.” In the later text, which James revised in 1906 and published in 1908, she grows “nervous and scared—as scared as if the objects about her had begun to show for conscious things, watching her trouble with grotesque grimaces.” The style in that later version is without question richer and more complicated.

Whether it’s an improvement is another question. James’s early texts have a lightness of touch that better suits his youthful comedy, and some readers have always preferred the relatively straightforward prose of those first editions. But his language had already begun to grow full by the time he wrote the Portrait, and the book can sustain the black brocade of his later manner.

Still, the changes are extensive. There’s something new in almost every paragraph, and the pages on which James made his revisions—you can see them at Harvard’s Houghton Library—seem an almost illegible confusion of word-balloons, of lines and arrows and scribbled interjections. His revisions are so great, in fact, that some critics believe we really have two Isabels, and maybe even two different novels.

The literary historian Nina Baym, for example, has argued that the 1881 Portrait is concerned with the social questions of its moment, and especially with the position of women in a world where their fate still depends upon marriage. The New York Edition, in contrast, offers us an interior drama, a modernist account of its heroine’s mental processes. One version concentrates on her “independence”; the other on her “awareness.” James’ revisions certainly do focus our attention on Isabel’s inner life, and even on what his brother, the philosopher William James, had called “the stream of consciousness.” Yet the later chapters of the novel’s first edition were already moving in that direction. James’s revisions don’t change it so much as they make its opening movements fit the book that it had by its last pages become.

The Library of America has, however, chosen to use the first version in its volume of James’s Novels, 1881–1886, and for their purposes that seems to me the only defensible choice. James left some major works out of the New York Edition, such as The Bostonians, and saw no need to revise his later novels in the same way as he had the Portrait. Both consistency and chronology demand that the Library make the decision it has in fact made: to print an early book version of each work.

And me? For my classes I have always ordered James’s revised edition, and expect I’ll go on doing so; I can’t do without that kiss in all its fullness. In writing about Isabel’s story, however, I’ve chosen to use the 1881 edition as my primary text. My new book, Portrait of a Novel, is a critical biography that looks at James’s life and work through the lens of his first great novel. It’s a study of development, of James in the act of becoming; a writer who wasn’t yet a monument, not yet the figure whose disciples would call him The Master. Instead of looking back to the novel’s early version as something discarded, I look forward to its later one as a form of culmination. The paradox is that in doing so I’ve become oddly happy that I began, so many years ago, by buying the wrong book.

Also of interest:

• Read the 1906 version of Isabel and Goodwood’s kiss
• In The New Yorker Anthony Lane appreciates both The Portrait of a Lady and Portrait of a Novel
• On Publishers Weekly Michael Gorra ranks the “Top 10 Henry James Novels”
• “Henry James as a fictional character,” a previous Reader’s Almanac post

Related LOA works: Henry James: Complete Novels (6 books)

Ross Posnock on Henry James’s fascination with the “terrible town” of New York

Ross Posnock speaks at the New York
Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony
Ryan Brenizer Photography

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Ross Posnock’s tribute to Henry James. Posnock is Professor of English at Columbia University. He is the author of The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity and the editor of Henry James: Novels 1903–1911, the sixth and final volume in the Library of America edition of Henry James’s novels.

“I like to think of my relation to New York as . . . almost inexpressibly intimate,” Henry James confessed in The American Scene, his memoir of his 1904 repatriation after a near twenty-year absence, a book that devotes fully a third of its remarkable near 500 pages to the city of his birth. “You care for the terrible town,” James remarked to himself; despite its “shameless” “swaggering and shouting,” its rude indifference to history, he loved New York, and to be on its streets was always, he said, an “adventure, an adventure I admit, as with some strident, battered, questionable beauty, truly some bad bold charmer.” The bad bold charmer never stopped arousing his imagination; he was fatally responsive to her seductive wiles.

Sometimes the seduction was closer to trauma: He tells us of his visit to Ellis Island where he found the immigrant in the act of “knocking at our official door” to be a “drama poignant and unforgettable” but also shocking because only now does James (addressing himself in the third person) “sense the degree that it was his American fate to share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivable alien.” Wandering among the immigrants in Central Park, unnerved by their ease yet impressed by the fastidious appearances of many of the children and their parents, commending especially their “gleaming” teeth and “varnished” shoes: he finds “thrilling” “the sweet ingratiation of the Park” and declares it “New York at its best.” His response is more uneasy after descending into the “whirlpool” of the “dense Yiddish quarter” of Rutgers Street on the Lower East Side, where he feels fascinated—“for once agreeably baffled”—by “swarming” “aliens”: “the scene here bristled , at every step, with the signs and sounds, immitigable, unmistakable, of a Jewry that had burst all bounds . . . the scene hummed with the human presence beyond any I had ever faced . . . producing part of the impression, moreover, no doubt, as a direct consequence of the intensity of the Jewish aspect.”

Henry James’s The Bostonians, published 125 years ago today, sparks a scandal

The Bostonians proved one of the most troubling of Henry James’s publishing efforts. It first appeared in thirteen installments in The Century magazine (February 1885–February 1886), but by the time of the last installment James’s American publisher, James R. Osgood and Company, had gone bankrupt. Scrambling to recover his losses, James had his English publisher, Macmillan & Co., bring out the first edition in London on February 15, 1886. The American edition appeared a month later.

In his novels of the late 1880s—The Bostonians, The Tragic Muse, and The Princess Casamassima—James turned to political topics for the first time and soon discovered that his readers did not follow. Richard Watson Gilder, publisher of The Century, was reportedly alarmed to find his subscribers falling away. Many found James’s portrait of his two main characters, a Boston feminist and her young protégé, scandalously close to the well-known “Boston marriage” of Annie Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett (although James’s biographers claim he drew more from observing his sister Alice’s relationship with Katharine Loring). Even his brother William chided Henry for creating a “portrait from life” in basing the character of Miss Birdseye on the veteran abolitionist Elizabeth Peabody, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister-in-law.

Henry found these attacks “harsh and unfair” and protested (perhaps too much) that he had “not seen Miss Peabody in 20 years” and had created Miss Birdseye “from my moral consciousness, like every person I have ever drawn.” Yet he was dismayed at the book’s reception, as he later wrote to William in October 1885:

I fear The Bostonians will be, as a finished work, a fiasco, as not a word, echo or comment on the serial (save your remarks) have come to me (since the row about the first number) from any quarter whatever. The deathly silence seems to indicate that it has fallen flat. I hoped much of it, and shall be disappointed—having got no money for it, I hoped for a little glory.

William reassured his brother of the novel’s success after he was able to read it as a book. His assessment echoed that of many contemporary reviewers:

Never again shall I attack one of your novels in the magazine. . . . The truth [is] that it is superlatively well done, provided one admits that method of doing such a thing at all. Really the datum seems to me to belong rather of the region of fancy, but the treatment to that of the most elaborate realism. One can easily imagine the story cut out and made into a bright, short, sparkling thing of a hundred pages, which would have been an absolute success. But you have worked it up by dint of descriptions and psychologic commentaries into near 500—charmingly done for those who have the leisure and the peculiar mood to enjoy that amount of miniature work—but perilously near to turning away the great majority of readers who crave more matter and less art.

Mark Twain famously declared that “I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read [The Bostonians].” Later critics developed a keener appreciation. In his essay “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” Edmund Wilson wrote:

The first hundred pages of The Bostonians, with the arrival of the young Southerner in Boston and his first contacts with the Boston reformers, is, in its way, one of the most masterly things that Henry James ever did.

Previous Reader’s Almanac posts of interest:

• Sarah Orne Jewett, “unsurpassed chronicler and interpreter of women’s lives”
• Moved by a story, Henry James writes to Edith Wharton for the first time
• Henry James as a fictional character
• The Art of the Interview: Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Henry James

Related LOA works: Henry James: Complete Novels; Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1930s and 40s (includes “The Ambiguity of Henry James”)

Celebrate Wallace Stevens Week

Yesterday, the literary blog Big Other launched “Wallace Stevens Week.” In coming days, the blog will feature commentary by a number of critics and poets, including an interview with Eleanor Cook (author of the Reader’s Guide to Wallace Stevens) and a post on the “maddening, funny and bizarre” titles of Stevens’s poems.

The interview with James Longenbach, a poet in his own right and the author of Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, mentions that Stevens offered the following quote from Henry James as advice to young writers:

To live in the world of creation—to get into it and stay in it—to frequent it and haunt it—to think intensely and fruitfully—to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation—this is the only thing.

In the video below, the inimitable Harold Bloom recites one of his favorite poems, Stevens’s “Tea at the Palace of Hoon.”



Related LOA volumes: Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose

Moved by a story, Henry James writes to Edith Wharton for the first time

It’s hard to imagine that the young Edith Wharton was shy. Yet that is her explanation for why she failed to meet Henry James the first two times their paths crossed. She wore her newest Doucet dress, “a tea-rose pink, embroidered with iridescent beads,” to a dinner party in Paris in 1887 when she was just twenty-five. He never noticed her and she didn’t speak up (“those were the principles in which I had been brought up”).

Later, in the 1890s, when they were both part of the entourage of the painter Daniel Curtis and his wife in Venice Wharton donned what she believed to be a particularly fetching hat. Another failed effect.

James did begin hearing about Wharton through their many mutual friends. As she wrote more, their pieces began appearing in the same magazines. In 1899 she sent him her first book of tales, The Greater Inclination. James wrote a caustic note to a friend: he had read “the fruits of her literary toils.” What was best in them was “her amiable self.” What was “not best was quite another person.”

Then in October 1900 Lippincott’s Magazine published “The Line of Least Resistance,” a story set in Newport about an unfaithful wife and a weak-willed rich husband. Readers in Wharton’s high society circle in Lenox, Massachusetts were appalled: they thought the millionaire bore a scandalous resemblance to Emily Vanderbilt’s brother-in-law. James loved it. Reading it prompted him to write this historic first letter from England on October 26, 1900 (110 years ago today):

Dear Mrs. Wharton,

I brave your interdiction & thank you both for your letter & for the brilliant little tale in the Philadelphia repository [Lippincott’s]. The latter has an admirable sharpness & neatness, & infinite wit & point – it only suffers a little, I think, from one’s not having a direct glimpse of the husband’s provoking causes – literally provoking ones. . . The subject is really a big one for the canvas – that was really your difficulty. But the thing is done. And I applaud, I mean I value, I egg you on in, your study of the American life that surrounds you. Let yourself go in it & at it – it’s an untouched field, really: the folk who try, over there, don’t come within miles of any civilized, however superficially, any “evolved” life. And use to the full your ironic and satiric gifts; they form a most valuable (I hold) & beneficent engine. Only, the Lippincott tale is a little hard, a little purely derisive. But that’s because you’re so young, &, with it, so clever. Youth is hard--& your needle-point, later on, will muffle itself in a little blur of silk. It is a needle-point! Do send me what you write, when you can kindly find time, & do, some day, better still, come to see yours, dear Mrs. Wharton, most truly,

Henry James

After many more letters they finally met in December 1903; for the remaining thirteen years of James’s life they would become close friends and traveling companions, despite a nineteen-year age difference.

Of related interest:

• Great Books, Half Read recounts Edith Wharton’s hilarious tale of motoring with Henry James (and why he should never ask for directions)
• The Mount, the Lenox estate Edith Wharton designed, hosts numerous Halloween-themed events this week, including readings of Wharton’s ghost stories

Related LOA works: Edith Wharton: Novels, Novellas, Stories, & Other Writings; Henry James: Complete Stories

Henry James as a fictional character

Updated below (9/24)

This month’s publication of What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James & Jack the Ripper, by Paula Marantz Cohen, renews our wonder at the enduring appeal of Henry James as a fictional character. James of course would not approve. In 1914 he admonished his nephew:

My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the postmortem exploiter.... I have long thought of launching, by provision in my will, a curse not less explicit than Shakespeare's own on any such as try to move my bones.

Nor would contemporary accounts of how he spoke seem to recommend him. Here is 25-year-old Virginia Woolf describing in a letter her meeting with the 64-year-old James in 1907:

Henry James fixed me with his staring blank eye, it is like a child’s marble, and said, “My dear Virginia, they tell me—they tell me—they tell me—that you—as indeed being your father’s daughter nay your father’s grandchild—the descendant I may say of a century—of a century—of quill pens and ink—ink—ink-pots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me—ahm m m—that you, that you, that you write in short.”

Yet, as Cynthia Ozick wrote in 1986: “Mysteriously, with the passing of each new decade, James becomes more and more our contemporary—it is as if our own sensibilities are only just catching up with his.” One of James’s fictionalizers, David Lodge, thinks this new subgenre could be seen either “as a sign of decadence and exhaustion in contemporary writing, or as a positive and ingenious way of coping with the ‘anxiety of influence’.” J. Russell Perkin concurs and believes that “Henry James is an exemplary hero as man of letters: he combines an oeuvre of Victorian amplitude with a modernist sense of artist vocation.”

Whatever the reason, we count no fewer than seven other novels since 2002 featuring James himself or a James-inspired character:

• Felony: The Private History of “The Aspern Papers” (2002), by Emma Tennant, examines how James’s long and mysterious relationship with the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson affected his writing and considers the possibility that James was responsible for Woolson’s suicide.
• The Master (2004), by Colm Tóibín, opens with the failure of James's play Guy Domville in 1895 and ends with his move to a new home in Rye, England in 1899.
• Author, Author (2004), by David Lodge, imagines Henry James in his deathbed in 1915, reviewing and reliving scenes from his life.
• The first of the three stories in The Pagoda in the Garden (2005), by Wendy Lesser, features Charlotte, a successful novelist similar to Edith Wharton, who visits her revered mentor, the James-like Roderick, at his country estate near Cambridge in 1901.
• The Typewriter’s Tale (2005), by Michael Heyns, recreates the social circle around James and Wharton, through the eyes of his typist Frieda Wroth. (Heyns wrote an article for Prospect Magazine about his difficulties finding a publisher because of the “spate of novels about Henry James.”)
• In Lions at Lamb House (2007), by Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., William James, concerned about his younger brother’s eccentricities, asks Sigmund Freud to visit him in Rye in 1908.
• The whimsical mash-up The James Boys: A Novel Account of Four Desperate Brothers (2008), by Richard Liebmann-Smith, conjures Henry and Williams James aboard a train stopped in Missouri by robbers Frank and Jesse James, who turn out to be their long-lost brothers Rob and Wilky.

And this list omits The Line of Beauty (2004) by Alan Hollinghurst and A Jealous Ghost (2005) by A. N. Wilson, novels in which the main characters are obsessed with Henry James.

Update (9/24): Two readers reminded us of two other works of fiction that feature Henry James as a character (and we belatedly remembered a third, or should we say eleventh?):

• Nicholas Birns (New School professor; The Tropes of Tenth Street): In Henry James’ Midnight Song (1993), by Carol de Chellis Hill, Edith Wharton and Henry James become entangled in a series of murders, one of them at the home of Sigmund Freud, in fin de siècle Vienna.
• Larry Dark (director, The Story Prize): In the title story of Dictation: A Quartet (2004), by Cynthia Ozick, the two secretaries who take dictation from Henry James and Joseph Conrad in London conspire to fool the world with a literary joke.
• Henry James turns in cameo appearances in the opening and closing scenes of Hotel de Dream (2007), by Edmund White, which recreates the last days of writer Stephen Crane in 1900.

Related LOA works: Henry James: Complete Stories; Henry James: Essays on Literature, American Writers & English Writers (includes his essay on Constance Fenimore Woolson)

Sarah Orne Jewett, “unsurpassed chronicler and interpreter of women’s lives”

Sarah Orne Jewett (1849–1909) turns 161 today. She was just 19 when she published her first story in the Atlantic Monthly (accepted by then assistant editor William Dean Howells). Over the next thirty-five years she would build a devoted readership through her twenty novels and story collections, each filled with carefully wrought portraits of the farmers, fishermen, and tradespeople she lived among along the coast of southern Maine. Writing about her first novel, Deephaven (1877), Howells discerned “an uncommon feeling for talk—I hear your people.”

For a more than a century, critics have acclaimed the interlaced stories of The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) as her masterpiece. Here she populates the fictional town of Dunnett Landing, a composite of coastal towns around Boothbay Harbor, with a memorable cast of colorful characters: a fiercely independent herbalist landlady, a garrulous retired sailor, a jilted, lovelorn young woman, among many others. Rudyard Kipling wrote her: “It’s immense—It’s the very life. So many of the people of less sympathy have missed the lovely New England landscape, and the genuine New England nature. I don’t believe even you know how good the work is.”

Willa Cather counted The Country of the Pointed Firs as one of three books destined for literary immortality, alongside The Scarlet Letter and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. “No other [books] confront time and change so serenely.” “The 'Pointed Fir' sketches are living things caught in the open, with light and freedom and air-spaces about them,” Cather wrote in her introduction to a two-volume collection of Jewett's work in 1925. “They melt into the land and the life of the land until they are not stories at all, but life itself.”

Sarah Orne Jewett came into Willa Cather’s life at a critical moment. As Hermione Lee notes in her biography Willa Cather: Double Lives:

Though some of her few close friends, such as Dorothy Canfield Fisher or Zoë Akins, were writers, [Cather] did not meet, or admit much interest in, the other great writers of her time, Edith Wharton or Ellen Glasgow or Gertrude Stein, and was dismissive of the only other well-known Nebraskan woman writer, Mari Sandoz. The one exception to this isolation was her brief friendship, of great formative importance for Cather’s life and writing, with the New England writer Sarah Orne Jewett, which came when Jewett was in her late fifties and Cather had not yet begun to write novels.

Jewett gave Cather crucial advice about the concentration and single-mindedness needed to become a good writer. But it was her example, as well as her advice, which was important for Cather ... she warmed to Jewett’s unselfconscious, matter-of-fact love stories between women, in the sad and beautiful story “Martha’s Lady” or in the novel Deephaven.... That innocent, idealized intimacy between women, which enabled Jewett to tell Cather that she did not need to use a male narrator to describe feelings of love for a woman, was not open to the more self-conscious and self-concealing Cather. But the example Jewett gave her, at the time she most needed it, was of a woman’s writing that was strong, truthful, and authentic, and could not be dismissed as “merely” feminine.

Cather had met Jewett in 1908 at what Henry James described as the “waterside museum” at 148 Charles Street in Boston. This was the home where Annie Fields, widow of Atlantic Monthly editor James T. Fields, and Jewett had been keeping their “Boston marriage” for some twenty-five years. In fact, some readers chided James because they found his portrayal of Olive Chancellor and her young ward Verena Tarrant in The Bostonians objectionably close to Fields and Jewett. Cather captured the old-world charm of the house in her brief sketch “148 Charles Street,” and in “Miss Jewett” she set down her appreciation of Jewett’s work as well as a portrait of her in person:

“The distinguished outward stamp”—it was that one felt immediately upon meeting Miss Jewett: a lady, in the old high sense. It was in her face and figure, her carriage, her smile, her voice, her way of greeting one. There was an ease, a graciousness, a light touch in conversation, a delicate unobtrusive wit. You quickly recognized that her gift with the pen was one of many charming personal attributes.

In Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Work Paula Blanchard records how critical attitudes to Jewett have changed:

In recent years Jewett has become recognized by feminist scholars as an unsurpassed chronicler and interpreter of women’s lives.... Jewett’s women are not the self-effacing and compliant helpmates portrayed in the typical Victorian novel, but vigorous, independent country-women, mostly widows and spinsters, who support themselves and their children by farming, nursing, or whatever comes to hand. Warm, humorous, and practical, they are the mainstays of their families and communities, keeping alive not only the gardens that symbolize their vitality but also the ties of sympathy that hold any human society together.

You can read Jewett's story, “Going to Shrewsbury,” available free at LOA's Story of the Week site.

Related LOA works: Sarah Orne Jewett: Novels and Stories; Willa Cather: Stories, Poems, and Other Writings (includes "148 Charles Street" and "Miss Jewett")

The Art of the Interview: Joan Didion, Philip Roth, Henry James

In a recent blog post for The American Scholar Bob Thompson shares the rules he developed—and the insights they unlocked—over his four years of writing about writers for The Washington Post. The most important rule he discovered when he interviewed Joan Didion in 2005:

Didion had just published The Year of Magical Thinking, her memoir of the sudden death of her husband and the simultaneous, life-threatening illness of their only child. I had read the book in galleys and found it remarkable. “Are you going to talk to her?” an editor asked, and I quickly said yes. But I had not thought the assignment through. The real question, I soon realized, was what we were going to talk about. Here was a writer, after all, who had just put everything she knew about death and grief into print.

He formulated a plan to stick to questions about writing. “Talking about writing, we both managed to keep our composure for an hour and a half.” This became his Didion Rule: “When in doubt, ask writers about writing.” Thompson goes on to describe what applying this rule revealed in his discussions with Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, Michael Cunningham, Junot Diaz, Dave Eggers, Marilynne Robinson, Art Spiegelman, and, in the category of “toughest interviews,” Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth.

Roth started things off by imposing the Didion Rule preemptively: he said he would discuss only his writing and would answer no questions about his personal life. Fine. Yet in Roth’s case, this created a major hurdle, because, as his readers know, he is an exceptionally brazen alchemist of the personal into the fictional.

Thompson dramatized the hurdles Roth threw in his path in his account of the interview—and it worked. When he called Roth months later to interview him about winning the PEN/Faulkner award, Roth surprised him by saying, “I liked what you wrote.”

But the Didion Rule may sometimes yield more than an interviewer bargained for. Henry James notoriously gave only three interviews during his lifetime. The New York Times headlined his third and last interview in 1915, “Henry James’s First Interview,” perhaps because it was the only interview over which James exerted complete control. Having recently been made honorary chairman of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps, James, at 71, had been busily writing impassioned letters, articles, and essays on behalf of the war effort. As part of this campaign he agreed to be interviewed in February by Preston Lockwood, a young Times correspondent. But he wasn’t happy with the result. As James’s secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, wrote in her Diary Notes:

H. J., finding that it wouldn’t do at all from his point of view, has spent the last four days re-dictating the interview to the young man, who is fortunately a good typist. . . . I think the idea of H.J. interviewing himself for four whole days is quite delightful. [from Literature, Technology and Magical Thinking, 1880–1920, by Pamela Thurschwell]

Knowing how closely James managed the account of the interview makes the following passage all the more remarkable:

Mr. James has a mobile mouth, a straight nose, a forehead which has thrust back the hair from the top of his commanding head, although it is thick at the sides over the ears, and repeats in its soft gray the color of his kindly eyes. Before taking in these physical facts one receives an impression of benignity and amenity not often conveyed, even by the most distinguished. And, taking advantage of this amiability, I asked if certain words just used should be followed by a dash, and even boldly added: “Are you not famous, Mr. James, for the use of dashes?”

“Dash my fame!” he impatiently replied. “And remember, please, that dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to produce. Dashes, it seems almost platitudinous to say, have their particular representative virtue, their quickening force, and, to put it roughly, strike both the familiar and the emphatic note, when those are the notes required, with a felicity beyond either the comma or the semicolon; though indeed a fine sense for the semicolon, like any sort of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood, on which the whole perspective in a sentence may depend, seems anything but common. Does nobody ever notice the calculated use by French writers of a short series of suggestive points in the current of their prose? I confess to a certain shame for my not employing frankly that shade of indication, a finer shade still than the dash. * * * But what on earth are we talking about?”

To be fair, James agreed to the interview, which was conducted almost exactly a year before he died, because of his deep feelings about the important service the ambulance corps was providing in France as the German front moved closer to England. He anticipated the impact the war would have:

“. . . such things may any day begin to occur at the front as will make what we have up to now been able to do mere child’s play, though some of our help has been rendered when casualties were occurring at the rate, say, of 5,000 in twenty minutes, which ought, on the whole, to satisfy us. In face of such enormous facts of destruction—”

Here Mr. James broke off as if these facts were, in their horror, too many and too much for him. But after another moment he explained his pause.

“One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one’s words as to endure one’s thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened, they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms, or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to walk.”

For the past four years The Library of America has been conducting its own exclusive interviews with the editors and authors of each new LOA collection. You can find interviews with John Ashbery on his Collected Poems 1956–1987, Jonathan Lethem on Philip K. Dick (one for each volume), Pete Hamill on A. J. Liebling (one for each volume), J. D. McClatchy on Thornton Wilder, Joyce Carol Oates on Shirley Jackson, and many more in our interviews archive.

Related LOA works: Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology (includes four pieces by Joan Didion); Philip Roth: Collected Works 1959–1995 (six volumes); Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers & English Writers