'That Queer Monster, the Artist'

“I still find my consciousness interesting – under cultivation of the interest.”

There’s no mistaking the author of that mot. I remember reading The Ambassadors (1903) again when preparing my senior thesis and noticing that consciousness appears at least once in each of its twelve chapters. James owns that word or co-owns it with his brother William. The sentence is drawn from a wonderful letter James wrote his old friend Henry Adams on March 21, 1914. James is a month from turning seventy-one; Adams, already seventy-six. James will be dead in less than two years, Adams in four. War looms. James is replying to a characteristically gloomy letter from Adams, now lost. We can guess at its bleakness from a letter Adams wrote the following day to Elizabeth Cameron:

“I’ve read Henry James' last bundle of memories [Notes of a Son and Brother] which have reduced me to a pulp. Why did we live? Was that all? Why was I not born in Central Africa and died young. Poor Henry James thinks it all real, I believe, and actually still lives in that dreary, stuffy Newport and Cambridge, with papa James and Charles Norton – and me!”

In his reply to Adams’ lost letter, James assumes the role of morale officer – in his own Jamesian way. He wants to buoy up his friend, lift his melancholy spirit. One senses affection mingled with head-shaking exasperation. James refers to the “unmitigated blackness” expressed by Adams and writes:

“Of course we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss — if the abyss has any bottom; of course, too, there’s no use talking unless one particularly wants to. But the purpose, almost, of my printed divagations was to show you that one can, strange to say, still want to — or at least can behave as if one did. Behold me therefore so behaving— and apparently capable of continuing to do so.”

One hears a distant echo of Lambert Strether’s pep talk to Little Bilham. James endorses the persistence of memory and the impulse – the necessity – to make art. Next comes the sentence quoted at the top, followed by this:

“Cultivate it with me, dear Henry — that’s what I hoped to make you do — to cultivate yours for all that it has in common with mine. Why mine yields an interest I don’t know that I can tell you, but I don’t challenge or quarrel with it — I encourage it with a ghastly grin. You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you deny to be such,) have reactions — as many as possible — and the book I sent you is a proof of them. It’s, I suppose, because I am that queer monster, the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility.”