‘New York, where aberrations were so possible in the intellectual sphere’

                        – Henry James, The Wings of the Dove

            My mother said of the later James, that people thought his language was a total invention, but then they discovered it was how he talked. She said it as disparagement. But, like so much criticism, it reflected on the critic rather than her object. My mother read bestsellers, and she had a prodigious memory for plot. So my father thought she was literary. But the truth is, the higher reaches of literature – which is simply to say literature itself – were beyond her. Joyce and James were impenetrable. So rather than acknowledge the possibility, she resorted to cheap, stock criticism. But, of course, with that low critical ceiling, and my own naïve, if ambivalent deference, one can understand the difficulty of my own path in the art.
            Apart from the fact that I could not be who I was in my family, generally – that, whoever I was, it was somehow threatening or otherwise unacceptable, for reasons I have not fathomed to this day – it was also clearly not possible that I could be a writer. My mother’s father had failed on Broadway. After being the sole student to ever get all A’s in George Lyman Kittredge’s Shakespeare courses at Harvard and a successful student in Baker’s ‘47’, the famous playwriting workshop, the play he brought to New York was a failure. But he lived high on journeywork. My father’s brother, who had become his father figure after the death of theirs, came home from the war, where he served as a damage control officer on an aircraft carrier, wrote a novel, outlined another, and then decided to go into college administration. According to my father, in spite of having an editor at a name New York publisher, he had decided that his writing was not good enough.
            So the fact that I couldn’t be a writer went well beyond the peculiar dysfunctions of my family. Or perhaps, rather, that particular negative was the ultimate expression of the dysfunction.

            As I say, my mother resorted to cheap criticism of James. But also – an equally common feature of such criticism – it points to a virtue, rather than a weakness. When I started reading James, my reaction was just the reverse. I felt that he must be presenting an actual language that had been used, in reaches of society and a moment in time that were historically real, but alien to me. To be honest, I felt a strong nostalgia for a time and place when people could speak like that. That is, the language itself held a peculiar verisimilitude for me. Somehow it seemed almost more than real. At the same time, the seduction for me at that point was the apparent neoclassical formality, the peculiarly structured rhythms, not just sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, but according to some larger and more profound harmonics. This was why I perceived it in terms of masses and quasi-monoliths of sound and movement – organ music, perhaps, with a structured and sustained bass, not simply under the light melodic play, not just moving in a slow climb or measured fall, but actually striving and conversing with the lighter passages, in the way that the profoundest classical organ music does. And it was these undernotes that fascinated me on first reading, something I had never encountered in literature before.

            What I missed in all this – what I was not yet prepared to understand – is that this is precisely Henry James’ voice. Not just the whole harmonic pattern, which, in its complex formality and equal spontaneity is nevertheless just that, a relatively neoclassical construct. What makes it work and points up the wholly intuitive, spontaneous nature of the performance – its legitimate creativity – is precisely the fact that every element in the narrative, from immediate tone to the profoundest harmonics, are explicit dimensions of James’ speech.
            Only a Henry Miller, who finds the key to explode all literary convention, has a larger voice. But, as a consequence, Miller is not capable of the sustained and condensed harmonics that are the key to James’ originality, an originality that produces the final generation of truly creative novelists, a generation including Proust and Mann, who obviously read their James carefully. If Miller got James, he apparently got him from Knut Hamsun – who was clearly directly or indirectly influenced by the Jamesian tradition – since Miller found James himself distasteful.
            But Miller is instructive. Some cavil that The Tropic of Cancer actually involved editing, since Miller makes such an apparent fetish of spontaneity in the writing. But this is to miss the point of this Tropic. Here is the moment when Miller realizes that he is finally a writer, finally a ‘novelist’ in some sense But Miller is not a novelist. As he says, what he writes is true; and if what he has written is not true, it is nevertheless more true than what actually happened. I suppose, if we want to get into labels, The Tropic of Cancer is the first legitimate anti-novel. It is Tristram Shandy rewritten without distance. Even with the subsequent editing, it is instant truth. The artifice is the reality. Reality dovetails, particularly at such a moment as this. Nearly thirty years of vocational sensations, rigorous irruptions of purpose in a life of haphazard divagations suddenly come to focus in the mind of a man with a typewriter and a knapsack, a man in a foreign city with no more security than a handful of friends – of equally disoriented expatriates and strangers. The crazy quilt is exact and the whole truth, the whole story.
            In Capricorn, he looks back and tries to assess the change. But there will never be another Cancer.

            What does this have to do with Henry James? James and Miller are the two sides of the coin. Proust and Mann show us where we can go with James. A hundred pages describing a cookie and the specific memory it evokes. A hundred pages of meals and strolls on a mountain. But, in a sense, James is the end of the novel, something Miller recognizes, although he doesn’t assign it to James.