James

protagonist, Barney Fugelman, whose West Country idyll is disturbed by his fantasies about Thomas *Hardy and his conviction that his wife is betraying him. Redback (1987) was set in Australia (the title refers to a venomous Australian spider). He has also published a travel book, also about Australia, In the Land of Oz (1987). A more recent novel, The Very Model of a Man (1992), considered the Jewish experience in the light of the story of its most famous familyAdam and Eve and their sons, Cain and Abel. Jacob's Room, an early novel by V. *Woolf, published in 1922, and written as an elegy for her brother Thoby, who died young in 1906. The novel tries to extend the fluid narrative method of her early short stories, using interconnected images (butterflies, a sheep's skull) carefully patterned. It is strongly influenced by her reading of Greek literature. The factual 'biography' of Jacob moves from his childhood on holiday in Cornwall with his widowed mother Betty Flanders and his two younger brothers. Jacob grows up in Scarborough, learns Latin from Mr Floyd (who also proposes to his mother), collects butterflies, and goes to Cambridge in October 1906, aged 19, where he meets Richard Bonamy and Tim Durrant, whose sister Clara he is attracted to. After Cambridge he lives in elegant eighteenth-century rooms in London, has affairs, goes to parties and operas, writes essays, visits Europe, and is killed in the warwhich proves to be the novel's hidden subjectat the age of 26. But these facts are presented indirectly through impressions and conversations. Jacob is an elusive, absent shadow or ghost. Conventional biographical techniques cannot 'catch' him. His own youthful, Wordsworthian resistance to the hard realities of modern life resemble Woolf's own attempt to change the conventions of fiction. JAMES, Clive (Vivian Leopold) (1939- ), Australian writer and broadcaster, born in Kogarah, New South Wales, Australia, educated at Sydney University and Pembroke College, Cambridge. Collections of his early work as a literary journalist with the Times Literary Supplement and other leading periodicals include The Metropolitan Critic (1974)- Visions Before Midnight (1977) collects samples of his work as television critic for the Observer from 1972 to 1982. During the 19805 he emerged as a well-known television personality and cultural commentator. Other Passports: Poems 1958-1985 (1986) displays his accomplishment in traditional verse forms and contains numerous memorable parodies. His other works include the mock-heroic poem Charles Charming's Challenges on the Pathway to the Throne (1981) and the novels Brilliant Creatures (1983), The Remake (1987), and Brrm Bmn! (1991). His three volumes of autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs (1980), Falling towards England (1985), and May Week Was in June (1990), have enjoyed considerable success. Fame in the Twentieth Century (1993) is a tie-in for a TV series. JAMES, C(yril) L(ionel) R(obert) (1901-89), Trinidadian historian, political theorist, and novelist, born in Tunapuna, near Port of Spain, Trinidad, educated at Queen's Royal College. In the early 19305 he was involved in the publication of two influential literary and political magazines, *Trinidad and *The Beacon. In 1932 he moved to Britain where he became cricket correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, and later the Glasgow Herald. In this period he published his only novel, *Minty Alley (1936), which had a great influence on modern Caribbean fiction, and The Black Jacobins: Toussaint VOverture and. the San Domingo Revolt (1938). A prolific writer, and a political activist and publicist, James was much involved in the struggles for independence in the West Indies, and in Africa, initially from a Trotskyist, but later from an independent, and always anti-Stalinist perspective: he translated Boris Souvarine's critical biography of Stalin (1939)- He stayed in the USA after a lecture tour in 1938, but was interned in Ellis Island in 1952, and expelled in 1953 for his Marxist political activities. His other major works included a study of Herman Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1953); Notes on Dialectics (1980); Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977); and his delightfully autobiographical book on cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963). Most of his essays have been collected in The Future in the Present (1971), Spheres ofEsdstence (1980), and At the Rendezvous of Victory (1984). See Paul Buhle, C. L. R.James: The Artist as Revolutionary (1988). JAMES, Henry (1843-1916), American novelist and author of short stories, critical essays, and plays, born in New York, son of the Swedenborgian philosopher Henry James, Sr, brother of William *James. He spent many of his formative years in Europe, residing in Geneva, London, Paris, and Boulogne in 1855-8 and 1859-60, until returning to live in Newport, Rhode Island in 1860. He entered Harvard Law School in 1862. With encouragement from William Dean "Howells, with whom he developed a lifelong friendship, he devoted himself to writing. He contributed short stories and book reviews to the Nation and Galaxy in 1865, his first short story appearing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1868. In 1869 James returned to Europe and spent some time travelling in England, France, and Italy; this provided him with his observations of Americans adrift in Europe and the 'international' theme of the collision and collusion between Europe (especially Britain) and the USA that was to preoccupy his fiction in future years. Back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, his first novel Watch and Ward was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly in 1871, and appeared in book form in 1878. His first significant short story, 'The Passionate Pilgrim', also appeared in 1871, later published in A Passionate Pilgrim and Other Tales (1875). These early tales reflect the influence of the realism of Dickens, Balzac, Hawthorne, and George Eliot. After living in Boston writing reviews, short stories, and art criticism, he returned to Europe in 1872 and spent the next two years in Italy working on his first long work, Roderick Hudson (1875), a novel whose description of the disintegration of the life of a
335

James
young American sculptor in Rome, hopelessly in love with an Italian girl, appears to suggest that love and passion are detrimental to the aesthetic vocation. After returning to America in 1874, he spent a year in Paris during 1875-6, where his friendship with Ivan Turgenev introduced him to a literary circle which included Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Bmile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and de Goncourt; he settled in London in 1876, where he lived for twenty years. He completed The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), Daisy Miller (1879), a short story about an American girl's experiences of the inflexibility of European social politeness and behaviour, and the two novelettes An International Episode (1879) and Confidence (1880), all of which continued his investigation of the cultural, social, and historical relationships between Europe and the USA. A collection of short stories also appeared at this time, The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales (1879). This period also brought James's first major works of criticism, French Poets and Novelists (1878) and Hawthorne (1879); these were followed in 1888 by Partial Portraits which included the classic essay The Art of Fiction', which laid down many of the aesthetic precepts for much of his work. The i88os saw several important achievements: Washington Square (1881), a novel about the isolated and hemmed-in social and cultural aspirations of the young American woman Catherine Sloper; TheBostonians (1886), which deals with the emerging feminist movement and different social and gender reactions to its demands; and The Princess Casamassima (1886), a tale about London revolutionaries, which brings back the Italian girl from Roderick Hudson. His abiding theme of analysing the American character with a group of Europeans occurred again in the book acknowledged as his first masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Its detailed and extended analysis of the characters involved in the story makes the book a triumph of understated psychological realism. During this period there were also several attempts at playwriting, with a dramatization of Daisy Miller (1883), but his later unsuccessful Guy DomviUe (1895) was booed off the stage. Several novelettes were also written, including The Reverberator (1888) and The Aspem Papers (1888), the latter about a critic's attempt to acquire a famous poet's correspondence. There followed The Tragic Muse (1890), which was set in London and focused on the lives of an artistic circle; WhatMaisie Knew (1897), describing the break-up of a marriage through the eyes of a young girl; an unsuccessful melodrama, The Other House (1896); and The Spoils ofPoynton (1897), dramatizing the mean-mindedness of the occupants of a magnificent house, and a complex set of relationships based on acquisitiveness and a chain of personal pressures. As well as writing these successful full-length novels, throughout his career James also produced a steady stream of outstanding short stories and novellas, including the collections A London Life (1889), The Lesson of the Master (1892), The Private Life (1893), The Wheel of Time (1893), Terminations (1895), Embarrass336

ments (1896) which contains the tale 'The Figure in the Carpet', In The Cage (1898), The Two Magics (1898) which contains The Turn of the Screw', a ghost story of subtle horror, The Altar of the Dead (1909), and The Finer Grain (1910). In 1897 he purchased Lamb House in Rye, where he lived for the remainder of his life. The novel The Awkward Age appeared in 1899, about Nanda Brookhouse and her adolescent experiences in the materialistic and cut-throat New York salon society; and The *Sacred Fount in 1901, a novelette which satirizes the "detached observer' of James's novels, and ranges over the distinction between masks and 'reality', the ageing process, the invulnerability of art, the 'madness of art' which insists on seeing more than the immediate 'real', and the vulnerability of love. Although the majority of James's fiction was written in the nineteenth century, he reached the peak of his career in the early 19003 with three massive novels: The *Wings of the Dove (1902), a masterpiece of ironic character portrayal; The *Ambassadors (1903); and The *Golden Bowl (1904). In 1904 he returned to the USA, where he stayed with Henry *Adams, and his generally dyspeptic and pessimistic analysis of the country and culture was expressed in The American Scene (1907). For the two years after the publication of this volume, he worked on the enormous New York Edition of his works, which eventually appeared complete with the new prefaces on the art of fiction. Although criticized by some for the labyrinthine complexity of his style, James's prose is usually regarded as second to none for subtlety of phrase and perception, with a reputation for sophistication, and his attention to textual detail and nuance is clearly evident in the revisions occasioned by this publishing enterprise. Between 1910 and 1914 he completed two volumes of a projected five-volume autobiography: A Small Boy (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914). He also began two novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower (both published in 1917), and a volume of autobiography, The Middle Years (1917), all of which remained incomplete. His final years were scarred by his brother William's and sister Alice's deaths, and the outbreak of the First World War, which he described as 'the plunge of civilization into the abyss of blood and darkness'. In 1915 he acquired British citizenship and was awarded the Order of Merit. James also published several travel books, principally Transatlantic Sketches (1875), Portraits of Places (1883), A Little Tour in France (1900), and Italian Hours (1909). Other works of criticism were Picture and Text (1893), Notes on Novelists (1914), and Within the Rim and Other Essays (1918). F. O. *Matthiessen editedjames's Notebooks (1947), and four volumes of his Letters (1974-84) were edited by Leon *Edel. Edel has also written an authoritative fivevolume biography, TheLifeofHenryJames (1953-72), all of which confirm James's place as one of the most selfreflective artists to have ever lived. JAMES, M(ontague) R(hodes) (1862-1936), British writer and scholar, born at Goodnestone, Kent, edu-