Dean Flower at the Hudson Review:
We may still wonder why Balzac occupied so much space in James’s writing career and particularly in The Prefaces. In temperament and method the two were poles apart. But Balzac had come to represent for James something primal, fundamentally generative—more a natural phenomenon than an individual. The sculptor Gloriani, who appears in James’s first novel, Roderick Hudson, reappears in The Ambassadors, at the center of his garden in Paris, a man in touch with “the great world,” Strether thinks, a figure who has “something covertly tigerish” about him, compelling a stab of envy and admiration for “the glossy male tiger, magnificently marked.” This is the moment when Strether realizes, and tells little Bilham, “Live now! Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to . . . Live!” It’s difficult here to ignore Balzac as Gloriani’s progenitor, the figure that kept telling James to embrace life with more vital courage—and greater response to its magnificence. Gloriani appears again in “The Velvet Glove,” a short story of 1909, but he’s also present in metaphors like the beast in “The Beast in the Jungle,” in which John Marcher waits passively for Life’s big revelation to seize him—that was Strether’s mistake, too. Think of Balzac again when you read about James visiting Edith Wharton at The Mount in 1904 and reading aloud together Walt Whitman’s celebrations of “The Body Electric” with unselfconscious joy.
more here.
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