'Incapable of the Shut Door in Any Direction'

By pandemic standards, Kaboom Books was crowded Saturday afternoon. The owner, John Dillman, caps occupancy at fifteen to preserve social-distancing. Much choreography in the narrow aisles with masked readers two-stepping to avoid others. John greets customers with a sanitizer-loaded squirt gun. If you pick up a book and choose not to buy it, put it in one of the plastic bins. A good haul: 

A 1970 hardcover reprint from Hogarth Press of Henry Green’s second novel, Living (1929). I now have copies of all his books, which I reread in fairly regular rotation.

 

Finally, a nice hardcover copy of The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (ed. Patricia C. Willis, 1986). I’m a sucker for Moore’s prose. As in her poems, she quotes heavily, weaving her words and those of writers she loves. Here’s how she closes her 1934 essay “Henry James as a Characteristic American”:   

 

“Love is the thing more written about than anything else, and in the mistaken sense of greed.  Henry James seems to have been haunted by awareness that rapacity destroys what it is successful in acquiring. He feels a need ‘to see the other side as well as his own, to feel what his adversary feels’; to be an American is not for him ‘just to glow belligerently with one’s country.’ Some complain of his transferred citizenship as a loss; but when we consider the trend of his fiction and his uncomplacent denouements, we have no scruple about insisting that he was American: not if the American is, as he thought ‘intrinsically and actively ample, . . . reaching westward, southward, anywhere, everywhere,’ with a mind ‘incapable of the shut door in any direction.’”

 

Speaking of James, I found a hardcover edition of his English Hours (1905), his fifth travel book, published by Orion Press in 1960. The book is edited by Alma Louise Lowe who, she notes in the acknowledgements, derives her introduction from the doctoral dissertation she wrote in 1955 at Rice University, my employer. The manuscript was read by Henry James’ literary executor, William James, his nephew. In 1962, Lowe became dean of women at Rice.

 

The book is inscribed to Mary Anderson – perhaps a student? Lowe’s note says: “I hope you’ll enjoy taking an armchair journey around England with Henry James and that you’ll enjoy a ‘wee bit’ my synthesis of it all.” She dates it February 1961. Like Marianne Moore, Lowe is fond of quoting. Here is her final sentence in a “Note on the Text”:

 

“Delightful and informative, English Hours is perhaps best characterized by James’s remarks about London: ‘Out of its richness and its inexhaustible good humour it belies the next hour any generalisation you may have been so simple as to make about it.’”