by Larry Witham
He was the first american to put painterly themes in fiction
IN 1875, THE
AMERICAN novelist Henry James arrived in Paris. At that moment, his first novel
was also being published in Boston. Titled Roderick
Hudson, it was about a lovelorn sculptor and his tragic end in an Alpine
snowstorm.
The Paris arrival and the first
novel set the stage for James—an expatriate New Englander who would live most
of his life in London—to be the first American novelist to seriously include
artists in major works of fiction.
Up to this point, Nathaniel
Hawthorne was still the “great American novelist,” a mantel that both Herman
Melville and James aspired to inherit.
Hints of the visual arts began to
appear in Hawthorne. Well before Oscar Wilde’s novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890), for example, Hawthorne wrote his short
story “The Prophetic Pictures” (1837), in which portrait paintings reveal the
fates of their subjects. Melville was a friend of Hawthorne, and much more than his
older compatriot, Melville used artistic references, especially in two of his
major-period novels, Redburn
and Moby-Dick. And naturally so: Melville was a print
collector, lecturer on ancient art, and was everywhere exposed to the painters
and art books of his day in New York City.
Nevertheless, James finally outdoes
Melville by making artists and art lovers the actual characters in the stories.
Having seen art in Europe during his
upbringing, James further honed his tastes at the family home in Newport, Rhode
Island. There, his brother James—later, a famous psychologist—studied under
Boston’s leading painter, William Morris Hunt. In those circles, Henry also met
John La Farge, the American Impressionist. La Farge helped Henry see
that, as a writer, he could be a painter of sorts “even with canvas and brush
whisked out of my grasp.”
James’s first story about an artist
was set in New England, orbiting around a seasoned painter’s life. This was “A
Landscape Painter” (which appeared in 1866 in the Atlantic Monthly), his second published story. In his 1884 essay, “The
Art of Fiction,” James boldly equated the painter and the novelist. “The novel is
of all pictures the most comprehensive and the most elastic,” he writes.
James’s European return began with
the 1875 arrival in Paris. He was thirty-two and a correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. In no time he was
in the company of three venerable writers: Turgenev, Zola, and Flaubert.
He was also in the company of the
great revolution in painting, early Impressionism. James had arrived a year
after the first Impressionist exhibition. It was organized by a so-called Société,
a dissenting group led by Monet, Renior, Degas, and Pissarro. Eight more
exhibits followed over the next twelve years.
In all, some Jamesian scholars sees
these painters and their paintings as a primary influence on James’s future
style. The evidence is threefold: Under the influence of French painters, James
developed an “impressionist” literary style. Second, his largest category of
metaphors and similes draws upon art. “Painting,” for example, accounts for
four hundred of his sixteen thousand figures of speech—the largest single
grouping. “Portrait” is also a favorite, of course.
And third (as we’ll see in James,
Part II and Part III), he ended up writing four short stories about painters
(see the James III post), one novel about a sculptor, and three novels related
to painters and paintings.
Each of James’s novels speaks for
itself, but literary critics keep us in suspense: Using painting categories as
a measure, was Henry James an Impressionist or a “mannerist” in his writing
style? Are his novels like a Monet, Pissaro, and Sissley? Or are they more like
a Parmigianino, Tintoretto, Bronzino, and late Michelangelo?
At the start, James was not
impressed by the Impressionists. He called them “partisans of unadorned
reality,” and “absolute foes to arrangement, embellishment [and] selection.” In
dismissing James McNeill Whistler, he said, “His manner is very much that of
the French Impressionists.”
And yet to
many commentators, painterly Impressionism began to influence James’s “major
period,” making his prose Impressionist: looking at the ordinary, dwelling on
the moment, eliciting subjective experience, and leaving matters open ended
(such as having an ambiguous conclusion to a novel). In painting, Impressionism was the recording of fleeting impressions.
It sought open-air observation and detachment. It contrasted pure colors and liked
a visually nebulous atmosphere (rather than visual clarity).
The same could be said of the new
modern novel, of which James was the leading American pioneer. In
character, James himself was cosmopolitan, individualistic, apolitical, and inclined to
a life dedicated only art. All of this was very much like the leading French Impressionists.
To the
contrary, however, others have said James used traditional literary forms, but
then added on a quality of exaggeration. He exaggerated characters,
viewpoints, and dialogue. Far from being Impressionist, this would make James
an echo of the so-called mannerist paintings between the High Renaissance and
the baroque period. Mannerist paintings (a term art historians now dislike) offered
odd angles of vision and perspective. They stretched bodies and used abnormal
lighting. It has been noted that James’s favorite painter was the Italian Tintoretto,
the emblematic mannerist.
As one
scholar said, mannerism in painting emphasizes “intricate asymmetrical patterns
leading to no final solution.” And so it is with James novels. On this aspect
of James, the two sides have tacitly agreed. He was forebear of the modern
novel, which by definition, tends to avoid a clear resolution to the plots.
(Next: The James novel plots.)
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