`Memory and Credence'

Except for Walt Whitman, I can think of no American writer who has inspired so many poets or been the subject of so many first-rate poems as Henry James. The good and great include works by Auden, Donald Justice, Anthony Hecht, Geoffrey Hill, Thom Gunn, James Merrill, Richard Howard and Herbert Morris, among many others. (One by Erica Jong is not worth mentioning.) Auden’s “At the Grave of Henry James” is well known. Here’s the final stanza:

“All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers, living or dead:
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling, making intercession
For the treason of all clerks.”

Justice wrote “American Scenes (1904-1905).” In the last of its four sections, James is staying in the Hotel del Coronado near San Diego, as he actually did during his first visit to the United States in 20 years. Here’s the fourth section, titled “Epilogue: Coronado Beach, California”:

“In a hotel by the sea, the Master
Sits brooding on the continent he has crossed.
Not that he foresees immediate disaster,
Only a sort of freshness being lost –
Or should he go on calling it Innocence?
The sad-faced monsters of the plains are gone;
Wall Street controls the wilderness. There’s an immense
Novel in all this waiting to be done,
But not, not – sadly enough – by him. His talents,
Such as they may be, want an older theme,
One rather more civilized than this, on balance,
For him now always the consoling dream
Is just the mild dear light of Lamb House falling
Beautifully down the pages of his calling.”

Herbert Morris reanimates James in “House of Words,” a 657-line dramatic monologue set in 1906, in which the Master chronicles a nightmare of regret. James has just examined proofs of his portrait taken by Alvin Langdon Coburn, the American photographer whose ghostly, atmospheric pictures illustrate the New York Edition. The poem, which suffers from excerpting, can be found in Morris’ collection What Was Lost. James’ mood is sadly resigned, autumnal, teetering on the edge of self-pity, but he continues to write. In a dream, James returns to the 1880s, the early years of his residence in London, where he boards a carriage he thinks is bound for a dinner party in Mayfair. Instead, he enters a hellish London, the “City of Regret,” that recalls T.S. Eliot’s Unreal City in “The Wasteland,” with Morris echoing James’ halting, obsessively qualified syntax. Gazing at the swarming crowds, the dream-James muses:

“…there are lives, one’s own not least among them,
which seem, which come to seem, utterly wasted,
lived by the wrongs means for the wrong ends, lived
at the edge, at some safe edge, at those edges
far from the center where most lives are lived,
where one’s store of passion lodges, resides,
heat essential heat, core of what is human.”

Many of these poems share with James’ own work a sad, elegiac, autumnal tone, but never an indulgence in self-pity. As Christopher Ricks writes, “In James’ hands, the imagination is a continual victory over negation. He turns to positive advantage things which loom negatively.”

Richard Howard, a wonderful poet and very Jamesian prose writer, argues that one of James’s “continual victories” has been his pervasive but largely unacknowledged influence on poets. In a 1988 essay, “The Resonance of Henry James in American Poetry” (collected in Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1955-2003), Howard convincingly quotes passages from Auden (Caliban’s speech to the audience in The Sea and the Mirror), Elizabeth Bishop, Hecht, Howard Moss and John Hollander. None of Howard’s exhibits is a poem about James; rather they are, in his words, “…Jamesian, insofar as the Jamesian tone, the muster of language under the ravaging wing of memory and credence, will afford an access to the physical world which prosody has flunked.”