The Novels of Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thomas Recchio
and its co-options. The problem is rather the persistent gendering as feminine of that which is devalued. (53)
And, I would add, the devalued is also the desired since what is devalued is, not so paradoxically, money, the marker of value (and the enabler/mediator of material comfort).
The documented material that chronicles Burnett’s relationship with Henry James contains small but powerful details that function as symptoms if not comprehensive evidence of the tensions laid out so abstractly above. Burnett and James were well acquainted with each other if not exactly friends. When Burnett’s elder son, Lionel, died of tuberculosis at age 16 in 1890 in Paris, James paid a visit of condolence to Burnett in London, an act of “kindness,” according to Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, that Burnett recalled years later with gratitude and fondness.14 Burnett and James were neighbors in England in the late 1890s, where James was a frequent casual correspondent but an infrequent visitor. Burnett tried to cultivate a friendship, offering, for instance, to support him by attending the debut of his ill-fated play Guy Domville, an offer that James fortunately declined, sparing himself the humiliation and Burnett the embarrassment of her witnessing the audience hoot and jeer at the author during the curtain call. Their relationship was restricted to letters in which, according to Gerzina, James was “always the epitome of thoughtfulness.” His courtesy on paper, which we will see as unsettlingly overstated at times, and his reticence in person can perhaps be accounted for by the fact that Burnett sold many books and he sold few. “He admitted to his brother [William],” Gerzina notes, of “being somewhat disheartened by the fact that her books sold far more copies than his and, unbeknown to her, had years before written an anonymous and not particularly flattering review of her play Esmeralda in the Pall Mall Gazette” (208). While it is impossible to know the proportions, it would not stretch the truth to suggest that the aesthetic principles that grounded James’s criticism of Burnett’s play were leavened by a dose of financial jealousy.
That latter possibility is strengthened when we examine in more detail James’s letters to Burnett during the years when they were neighbors in Kent, he at Lamb House in Rye and she at Maytham Hall in Rolvenden. As Ann Thwaite tells it, before leaving London for Maytham, Burnett bought “a set of James’ books” and sent them to him “to be autographed.” He signed the books and attached the following note when he returned them:
Dear Mrs Burnett
And yet I lingered—I never leave your presence and precinct on wings or by leaps—was leaden-footed and most reluctant. And now I’m glad of anything—even anything so dreary as my own books—that may renew our communion.
I am divided between joy at the thought of so many copies sold—my publishers’ statement is usually one on alternate years—and anguish for your having added that thumping, pecuniary excrescence to the treasure you are lavishing at Maytham.
But I will charge you nothing for the signs-manual. There, don’t take them to Maytham (unless you are really otherwise homeless); they will require an extra van. However, if you do, I will speed over and scatter broadcast that I am.
Yours most respectfully,
Henry James (Quoted in Thwaite 184)
While the extravagance of style is certainly very much Henry James, there are three noteworthy things to notice in that note. The self-deprecating reference to the paucity of sales of James’s works (one book every other year) is contained within an elaborate allusion to the “treasure” Burnett was “lavishing at Maytham”; the value of James’s books marks a damning contrast to Burnett’s financial success/excess. The lurking notion here is that his books are expensive and aesthetically demanding, which accounts for their limited sale, but Burnett’s wealth, which was based on the sales of her less demanding books, reduces James’s books to objects whose value is not aesthetic but monetary, a bit of extra and incidental treasure. The corollary lurking notion here is that for Burnett, that is all his books could possibly be. His compliment masks an insult. And his promise to “speed over” is not kept. As Thwaite puts it, “But when they were both in Kent […] James did not do much speeding over” (184).
The faintly discernible, simmering resentment in the letter quoted above screams for recognition in an undated letter from that same period. Burnett had sent fruit from her orchard at Maytham to James at Lamb House. Here is the first part of his “Thank You” note:
Noblest of Neighbors and Most Heavenly of Women!—
Your gorgeous, glorious gift shook Lamb House to its foundations an hour or two ago—but that agitated structure, with the light of purpose rapidly kindling in its eye, recuperates even as I write, with a sense of futility, under the circumstances of a mere, economical swoon. We may swoon again—it is more than likely (if you can swoon from excess of—everything!)—but we avail ourselves of this lucid interval absolutely to fawn upon you with the force of our gratitude.
It’s too magnificent—we don’t deserve the quarter (another peach, please—yet it is the 7th—and one more fig—it is I can’t deny it—the 19th!) Well, I envy you the power to make a poor, decent body so happy—and, still more, so proud. The decent body has a pair of other decent bodies coming to him for the week’s end, from town, and—my eye! won’t he swagger over his intimate friend, the Princess of Maytham, for whom these trophies and treasures are mere lumps of sugar or grains of salt. (Quoted in Thwaite 184–85)
Such a note, which contains two more paragraphs after the ones quoted, could be written off as hyperbolic humor in a style one might expect from Henry James, but the content is nonetheless odd. After the elaborate cliché of the greeting, James conflates Lamb House with himself, the house recuperating after its swoon “even as I write, with a sense of futility.” Is the house’s recuperation futile or is the writing futile, James’s effort to suggest to Burnett that her gift smacks of economic one-upmanship pointless? As “the light of purpose [rekindles] in its [the house’s] eye,” one can imagine James’s own eyes sharpen with satiric intent, claiming a brief interval of consciousness before being overwhelmed again with some manifestation of excess from Maytham, that is, Burnett. Perhaps if he were to “fawn” upon Burnett “with the force of [his] gratitude,” the torrent of gifts, which in their excess smack of condescension, would stop. That implication emerges more explicitly in the next paragraph. After the comic images of consumption (7 peaches and 19 figs!), James deftly contrasts his poverty and decency to Burnett’s indecent display of wealth, an indecency reinforced by the final comparison between the particularity and quantity of the gifts as they appear in Lamb House and the undifferentiated mass from which they were extracted, the peaches and figs in Lamb House being equivalent to “lumps of sugar or grains of salt” in Maytham. The mask of jest in the note barely conceals an animosity born of pain that energizes the prose. The selective use of italics (in the handwritten letter markers of emphasis rendered as italics in print) emphasizes the general hyperbolic tone more pointedly. As Thwaite mildly observes, “James rather resented a munificence which cast him in the role of comparatively unsuccessful writer” (185).
The undercurrent of palpable pain one can feel in James’s note is more visible in a letter he wrote to his brother in 1899 when he was negotiating the purchase of Lamb House.
My whole being cries out aloud for something that I can call my own—and when I look round me at the splendor of so many of the “literary” fry, my confreres (M. Crawford’s, P. Bourget’s, Humphrey Ward’s, Hodgson Burnett’s, W.D. Howellses, etc.) and I feel that I may strike the world as still, at fifty-six with my long labour and my genius, reckless, presumptuous and unwarranted in curling up (for more assured peaceful production) in a poor little $10,000 shelter—once for all and for all time—then I do feel the bitterness of humiliation, the iron enters into my soul, and (I blush to confess it,) I weep! But enough, enough, enough! (Quoted in Thwaite 185)
James’s anguish about the gap between the “genius” of his aesthetically first-rate literary productions and the second-rate financial return on the material production of those works is a mixture of honest self-assessment