Henry James and the Suspense of Masculinity. Leland S. Person

      Introduction: Henry James and the Plural Terms of Masculinity

      Here I sit: impatient to work: only wanting to concentrate myself, to keep at it: full of ideas, full of ambition, full of capacity—as I believe. Sometimes the discouragements, however, seem greater than anything else—the delays, the interruptions, the éparpillement, etc. But courage, courage, and forward, forward. If one must generalize, that is the only generalization. There is an immensity to be done, and, without vain presumption—I shall at the worst do a part of it. But all one’s manhood must be at one’s side.

      —James, Complete Notebooks 44

      In the unfinished story “Hugh Merrow,” Henry James recounts a conversation between the eponymous artist and a young couple, the Archdeans, who want him to paint the portrait of a child. A surrogate rather than a replica, the portrait would serve as the child the husband and wife have been unable to conceive. Although in his first note for the story James had imagined the couple requesting that the child be a girl (Complete Notebooks 192), in the version James eventually wrote they ask the artist to make the decision himself, because they disagree about whether they want a boy or a girl. James did not finish the story, but it nevertheless reaches a logical conclusion, ending at the moment when Merrow agrees to paint the portrait. What remains open—in a state of suspense—is the question of the child’s gender.

      As a story that ends with the creative process about to begin and the artist suspended, as it were, between genders, “Hugh Merrow” offers an appropriate point of entry for a study of James’s representation of masculinity and male subjectivity. As Leon Edel notes, James was working on the story, which he called “The Beautiful Child,” during the summer of 1902, at virtually the same time that The Ambassadors was moving toward publication and he was writing a series of essays on French novelists (Edel, Master 128–29). Connections among these various works, especially as they foreground questions about masculinity, can be illuminated in the context of James’s concerns at the turn of the century, but they can also highlight the vexed question of masculinity that he pursued from the beginning to the end of his career. In reviewing his responses to French novelists, James was trying not only to create and promote a public authorial self but also to research his private self. Through the intimate process of his reading, he recognized, these writers had inscribed themselves in him. As he writes at the beginning of his 1902 essay on Balzac,

      these particular agents exist for us, with the lapse of time, as the substance itself of knowledge: they have been intellectually so swallowed, digested and assimilated that we take their general use and suggestion for granted, cease to be aware of them because they have passed out of sight. But they have passed out of sight simply by having passed into our lives. They have become a part of our personal history, a part of ourselves, very often, so far as we may have succeeded in best expressing ourselves. (90)

      In his essays on the French novelists James repeatedly measured his own “best” writing against the standard offered by such male writers as Flaubert, Zola, and especially Balzac, whom he considered the “father of us all” (“Lesson of Balzac” 120). George Sand, however, forced him to test himself against a much more enigmatic model of gender. Reading and writing about Sand compelled James to reexamine gender questions he had swallowed, digested and assimilated—to bring to the surface of his discourse a complicated gender identity, as well as complex questions about sexual desires, that had passed “out of sight” and into his own life.

      In James’s late work, Leo Bersani argues, there is an insistence that “fictional invention” actually “constitutes the self.” Although James’s primary subject is freedom, the novels

      dramatize the difficulties of living by improvisation: the incompatibilities among different ways of composing life, the absence of determined values by which to discriminate morally among various compositions, the need to develop persuasive strategies capable of imposing personal ingenuities on the life of a community, and finally, the nostalgia for an enslaving truth which would rescue us from the strenuous responsibilities of inventive freedom. (132)

      Coincidentally, the quality that most captivated James in Sand’s writing was her power of improvisation—the “force of her ability to act herself out” (Review of George Sand 783). She was an “improvisaterice, raised to a very high power,” he maintained (“Letter from Paris” 705)—indeed, “the great improvisatrice of literature” (“George Sand,” Galaxy 712). What Bersani calls the strenuous responsibilities of inventive