The method adopted for full-length novels was very different. With a
clear run of 100,000 words or more before him, Henry James always
cherished the delusive expectation of being able to fit his theme quite
easily between the covers of a volume. It was not until he was more than
half way through that the problem of space began to be embarrassing. At
the beginning he had no questions of compression to attend to, and he
"broke ground," as he said, by talking to himself day by day about the
characters and construction until the persons and their actions were
vividly present to his inward eye. This soliloquy was of course recorded
on the typewriter. He had from far back tended to dramatize all the
material that life gave him, and he more and more prefigured his novels
as staged performances, arranged in acts and scenes, with the characters
making their observed entrances and exits. These scenes he worked out
until he felt himself so thoroughly possessed of the action that he
could begin on the dictation of the book itself--a process which has
been incorrectly described by one critic as re-dictation from a rough
draft. It was nothing of the kind. Owners of the volumes containing _The
Ivory Tower_ or _The Sense of the Past_ have only to turn to the Notes
printed at the end to see that the scenario dictated in advance contains
practically none of the phrases used in the final work. The two sets of
Notes are a different and a much more interesting literary record than a
mere draft. They are the framework set up for imagination to clothe with
the spun web of life. But they are not bare framework. They are
elaborate and abundant. They are the kind of exercise described in _The
Death of the Lion_ as "a great gossiping eloquent letter--the overflow
into talk of an artist's amorous design." But the design was thus mapped
out with the clear understanding that at a later stage and at closer
quarters the subject might grow away from the plan. "In the intimacy of
composition pre-noted proportions and arrangements do most uncommonly
insist on making themselves different by shifts and variations, always
improving, which impose themselves as one goes and keep the door open
always to something more right and _more_ related. It is subject to that
constant possibility, all the while, that one does pre-note and
tentatively sketch."[1]
The preliminary sketch was seldom consulted after the novel began to
take permanent shape, but the same method of "talking out" was resorted
to at difficult points of the narrative as it progressed, always for the
sake of testing in advance the values of the persons involved in a given
situation, so that their creator should ensure their right action both
for the development of the drama and the truth of their relations to
each other. The knowledge of all the conscious motives and concealments
of his creatures, gained by unwearied observation of their attitudes
behind the scenes, enabled Henry James to exhibit them with a final
confidence that dispensed with explanations. Among certain stumbling
blocks in the path of the perfect comprehension of his readers is their
uneasy doubt of the sincerity of the conversational encounters recorded.
Most novelists provide some clue to help their readers to distinguish
truth from falsehood, and in the theatre, although husbands and wives
may be deceived by lies, the audience is usually privy to the plot. But
a study of the Notes to _The Ivory Tower_ will make it clear that
between the people created by Henry James lying is as frequent as among
mortals and not any easier to detect.
For the volumes of memories, _A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and
Brother_, and the uncompleted _Middle Years_, no preliminary work was
needed. A straight dive into the past brought to the surface treasure
after treasure, a wealth of material which became embarrassing. The
earlier book was begun in 1911, after Henry James had returned from a
year in the United States, where he had been called by his brother's
fatal illness. He had come back, after many seasons of country solitude,
to his former love of the friendly London winter, and for the first few
months after his return from America he lodged near the Reform Club and
came to the old house in Chelsea where I was living and where he had
taken a room for his work. It was a quiet room, long and narrow and
rather dark--he used to speak of it as "my Chelsea cellar." There he
settled down to write what, as he outlined it to me, was to be a set of
notes to his brother William's early letters, prefaced by a brief
account of the family into which they were both born. But an entire
volume of memories was finished before bringing William to an age for
writing letters, and _A Small Boy_ came to a rather abrupt end as a
result of the writer's sudden decision that a break must be made at once
if the flood of remembrance was not to drown his pious intention.
It was extraordinarily easy for him to recover the past; he had always
been sensitive to impressions and his mind was stored with records of
exposure. All he had to do was to render his sense of those records as
adequately as he could. Each morning, after reading over the pages
written the day before, he would settle down in a chair for an hour or
so of conscious effort. Then, lifted on a rising tide of inspiration, he
would get up and pace up and down the room, sounding out the periods in
tones of resonant assurance. At such times he was beyond reach of
irrelevant sounds or sights. Hosts of cats--a tribe he usually routed
with shouts of execration--might wail outside the window, phalanxes of
motor-cars bearing dreaded visitors might hoot at the door. He heard
nothing of them. The only thing that could arrest his progress was the
escape of the word he wanted to use. When that had vanished he broke off
the rhythmic pacing and made his way to a chimney-piece or book-case
tall enough to support his elbows while he rested his head in his hands
and audibly pursued the fugitive.
[Footnote 1: _The Ivory Tower_ (Collini, 1917), p. 341.]