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The James Gang
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16763 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
2,378 Words |
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Audrey Foote
Audrey Foote is a writer and reviewer who lives in Washington,
D.C. |
A RING OF CONSPIRATORS
Henry James and his Literary Circle
Miranda Seymour
Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1989
$19.95
In 1898 H.G. Wells and his wife Jane settled at Sandgate in Sussex, and they soon became aware that they had tumbled into a nest of fellow novelists. Oddly, with the very obvious exception of Rudyard Kipling in nearby Burwash, not one of these writers in that little corner of England was a true-blue Briton. Henry James and Stephen Crane, the oldest and the youngest but both renowned authors, were Americans. Ford Madox Ford (ne Hueffer and still using that Teutonic last name) was half-German, and Joseph Conrad was Polish-born; they were at the start of their careers. Wells, already acclaimed for The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, quickly met them all. He was sufficiently impressed to remark, with jolly mock chauvinism but also with a sharp eye on the competition, that they seemed to form a "ring of foreign conspirators plotting against British letters in the neighborhood of Rye."
Not in any real sense did these novelists compose a "conspiracy" or even a self-conscious literary movement with shared credos and tastes, like the poets and dramatists of the Irish renaissance or the Bloomsbury aesthetes. They were more like the Lost Generation expatriates in Paris or contemporary cliques on Long Island. Never even acquiring a collective title, they remained a handful of talented and opinionated individuals of different background, ages, and aims, with clashing temperaments and usually incompatible wives or mistresses. Except for Conrad and Ford, who briefly collaborated, they often seemed drawn together less by literary concerns than by coincidence, the mild climate, and croquet.
Yet in spite of the lack of enthusiastic cohesion, these writers did share enough besides propinquity for one to think of them as some kind of loose confederation. Several had the same agent, whom they tended to treat as a rich patron, the long-suffering J.B. Pinker. All, at least during this period, had money troubles, but none as desperately as Stephen Crane. Each in his own way believed in the importance of fiction and worked furiously at it, though for Wells its mission was more political than artistic. And everyone, naturally including himself, regarded Henry James as a genius. The others also considered James the doyen of their society, and he in turn felt a certain squeamish responsibility for their prose. Though
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