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 characteristically expressed with much tact and periphrasis, his tutelage sometimes became less an agent of bonding than of irritation.
Naturally, this was true for Wells, whose style and intentions were so unlike those of James; he finally retaliated with Boon, a devastating parody. In it he compared James and his compulsive search, both in speech and writing, for the exact word to a "magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost . . . upon picking up a pea which has got into a corner of its den."
Long before those snide words were written, the clever, fashionable Violet Hunt, already a novelist and later to be Ford Madox Ford's mistress, had also envisaged James as a kind of solemn behemoth. She had attended the disastrous opening of his play Guy Domville and at the end saw James hooted offstage
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