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Show which he was obliged to do with a pen. Plays, if they were to he kept within the limits of possible performance, and short stories, if they were to remain within the bounds of publication in a monthly magazine, must be written by hand. He was well aware that the manual labour of writing was his best aid to a desired brevity. The plays-such a play as The Outcry, for instancewere copied straight from his manuscript, since he was too much afraid of "the murderous limits of the Engli sh theatre" to risk the temptation of dictation and embroidery. With the short stories he allowed himself a little more freedom, dictating them from his written draft and expanding them as he went to an extent which inevitably defeated his original purpose. It is almost literally true to say of the sheaf of tales collected in The Finer Grain that they were all written in response to a s1ngle request for a short story for Harper's Monthly Magazine. The length was to be about s,ooo words and each promising idea was cultivated in the optimistic behef that 1t would produce a flower too frail and small to demand any exhaustive treatment. But even under pressure of being written by hand, with dictated interpolations rigidly restricted, each in turn pushed out to lengths that no chopping could reduce to the word limit. The tale eventually printed was Grapy Cornelia, but, although it was the shortest of the batch, it was thought too long to be published in one number and appeared in two sections, to the gre11t annoyance of the author. III The method adopted for full-lenoth novels was very different. With a clear run of roo ooo words or morebefore him~ Henry James always cherished the deh.1s1ve expectat1on of being able to fit his theme quite easdy between the covers of a volume. It was not until 8 he was more than half way through that the problem of space began to be embarrassing. At the beginning he had no questions of com pre3sion to attend to, and he "broke ground", as he said, by talk1ng to h1mself day by day about the char~ct er s and construct:on until the persons and their acttons were vtvtdly present to hts inward eye. This soliloquy was of course recorded on the typewriter. He had from f:tr back tended to dramatise 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 moking their observed en;ran r:es and ex1ts. These scenes he worked out until he felt himself so thoroughly possessed of the actiotl that he could begin on the dictatiot> of the hook itself-a process which has been in correctly described by one critic as re-dict:ttion from a rough draft. lt was nothing of the kind. Owners of the volumes containing The Ivory Tower or T!u Sense of the 'Past have only to turn to the Notes printed at the end to see that the scenario dictated in advance con tams practtcally none of the phrases used in the final work. The two sets of Notes are a di.fferent and a much more mteresttng ltteray 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 1ns1st on making themselves different by shifts anJ variations, always improving, which impose themselves as one goes and keep the door open always to something more right 9 |
