James and Wilde - the most beautiful odd couple of the gay nineties

A rather silly review from The Scotsman - or at least it seems to me to sillify itself, by getting the emphasis wrong. There is a new book out. It is published by Edinburgh University Press, and I badly want it, and it costs only £65.* Its very title reads to me like a sweet shop in words: Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture. See it here.

Now, one of my most treasured books - currently on loan with a trusted friend, ahem - is the correspondence of Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson.They were firm friends, by letter mostly, due to the vagaries of Stevenson's travels. As the introduction to that book puts it, although you might expect a person to love Stevenson's adventure stories, and you might also expect a person to love James' intricate psychological tales of moral downfall, you might not expect one person to love both. BUT, as the intro points out, James and Stevenson were two of the great sylists of their period, and they had the greatest admiration for one another. Their letters are both interesting and touching, and when word reached London at the end of 1894 that Stevenson had died, Henry James was so desolated he could barely speak.

As it happens, the end of 1894 was also the beginning of 1895, a year that would change Henry James' life. Or, rather, fail to change it. In January that year his one play, Guy Domville, opened on the stage. James was desperate to gain the kind of popularity that other writers had, and make more money, and generally be more of a 'success'. He wrote a play, partly because, as he saw it, if Oscar Wilde could do it, so could he. He was a great craftsman, and the play was beautiful, and the night it opened he was famously booed off the stage.

As a 1948 review of another book I now want, called The Legend of the Master (ed. Simon Nowell-Smith)* tells it:

"It seems to have been a fairly good play; in 1930 (35 years later), the London Times called it 'that beautiful, harshly treated play . . .' The producer of Guy Domville was sanguine, though James, with his usual misgivings stayed away opening night. Instead, he went to the Haymarket and saw Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband, which had just opened. James considered Wilde's play crude, bad, clumsy, feeble, vulgar—but it appeared to be a complete success—'and that gave me the most fearful apprehension.'"

The story of the booing and hissing is famous, and still mysterious. James was traumatised, and never wrote another play. But on January 23rd he wrote this wonderful passage in his notebook:

"I take up my own old pen again - the pen of all my old unforgettable efforts and sacred struggles. To myself - today - I need say no more. Large and full and high the future still opens. It is now indeed that I may do the work of my life. And I will."

(That passage, by the way, is the basis of one of my very favourite ever poems by myself, called 'The Master and the Future', written in the voice of Henry James. My own mother tried, and failed, to parse the main sentence of the final stanza, so well did I get his style.)**

The Scotsman piece is all about Oscar Wilde being a plagiarist, as if that were interesting, and maybe he was; he was certainly a butterfly, and I gather they are collectors. But it even finishes with a heartsinking list of famous quotes from Wilde called 'Talk on the Wilde Side', and I can't help thinking the silly reviewer is missing the point.

More fruitfully, there are mentions that the two men men were fascinated, or even obsessed, by one another,*** jealous of each other's gifts - nemeses - and that is very interesting. It is as it should be. They were two of the premier fops in a great age of fops. And I love fops. And they were both terribly, terribly serious: one in a shallow way which is also deep, and one in a deep way which comes perilously close to shallowness in the wrong light. I knew James loved to hate Wilde, but I had no idea it went the other way too. I want this book!

Here is its table of contents for your delectation:

CHAPTER 1
'I have asked Henry James not to bring his friend Oscar Wilde': Washington Square and the politics of Transatlantic Aestheticism

CHAPTER 2
The Gentle Art of Making Enemies: Plagiarism, Appropriation, and the Reinvention of Aestheticism

CHAPTER 3
The school of the future as well as the present: Wilde's impressions of James in 'Intentions' and 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'.

CHAPTER 4
"Wild thoughts and desire! Things I can’t tell you - words I can’t speak!": the Drama of Identity in "The Importance of Being Earnest" and "Guy Domville"

CHAPTER 5
Despoiling Poynton: James, the Wilde trials, and Interior Decoration

CHAPTER 6
"A nest of almost infant blackmailers!": the End of Innocence in "The Turn of the Screw" and De Profundis

* It's been suggested to me that they might be knocking them out at £5.99 in Tesco. If anybody sees one, be a darling and pick me one up, will you?

** Originally published at a much more promising £3, but I think that's by the bye, now, don't you?

*** n.b. It is fully parsable.

**** in the same manner as TS Eliot and Groucho Marx, actually. I love these stories.