Friction with the Market: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship

Godfather Mario Puzo, reviewing a new volume of the Paris Review Writers at Work series, complains about the series' ivory-tower approach to writing and failure to account for the meat and potatoes of contracts and earnings. Michael Anesko arrives on Henry James's revered doorstep, like a Harvard Business School grad armed with ledgers and spreadsheets, to rescue James from the ivory tower of pure art in which criticism places him. And what a wonderful homage Anesko tears from time's clutches, driving out every last penny James earns. Despite legends of the James family wealth, Henry James earns his own living by his literary labors until over fifty. His part of the family inheritance, assigned to his sister Alice, does not revert to him until her death, with James well into his middle years. He tries tirelessly to crack the American and British markets, even going so far as to write plays, hoping for a salable fame in the theater--but his theater adventures turn into blood-humbling disasters, with James himself booed by the audience. Somewhat better off after Alice's death, James gives birth to his most knotted and unsalable grand manner. His inheritance frees him at last truly to lock himself up in the ivory tower. But this view misleads the matter, since he strives for "that benefit of friction with the market which is so true a one for solitary artists too much steeped in their mere personal dreams." James's very last literary art, aside from his unfinished novel The Ivory Tower: to spend two years shaping, revising and adding prefaces to Scribner's 24-volume New York Edition of his fiction. This defining but incomplete edition, holding all the fiction he cared to save, and his heroic effort to re-see ten of his greatest novels, as well as volumes of tales and short stories, along with his confiding prefaces about the art of writing, turns quixotic, his labors built on hope of at last finding a market for his wares amid the larger book-buying public. Will he haul in the readers? Yes! And during that two-year period he writes nothing new and earns less. Then the titanic New York Edition comes out! And sinks like steel tonnage into Atlantic darkness. The horrible beauty of Anesko's picture of James groping on the seabottom to meet his New Years bills because of the zero balance on Scribner's royalty statement, breaks the heart. A towering slap at the Writers at Work series.