What Henry knew

In October 1875 Henry James moved to Paris to advance his nascent career as a man of letters, specifically as a novelist. This was not his first visit: his enlightened family encouraged travel, but the desire to take up residence was intimately connected with his ambitions: Paris, after all, was the epi- centre of forward looking artistic endeavour. He was funded by his father and also by the reviews and articles he wrote for various American magazines, notably Tribune and the Atlantic Monthly. He was 32 years old, and therefore not so very young, but his impressionability and a certain innocence that was to mark him for life caused him to marvel at everything he saw and heard, even when an inner resistance turned every reaction into a matter for further study, as if it could be understood only after a long period of maturation. It is this element that gives his novels their weight and scrutiny, as if too brutal an interpretation might falsify the subject addressed and as if only long study, and a certain blamelessness, were the foundations of character and a true reflection of the author’s integrity.

It is interesting to note that at this stage of his career James had a sense of the limitations of art, although he was to become associated with the oceanic nature of his own style, and thus a modernist with whom time has not altogether kept up. In Paris in 1875 and 1876 he was uneasy in the company of Flaubert, found Zola’s novels ‘dirty’, resented the French custom of mutual admiration and preferred the straightforwardness of Balzac and George Eliot. He thought it a poor thing to baffle and torment the reader, and believed that art should be verifiable above all else. This was a view to which he adhered all his life, even when under the cover of what he called the madness of art.