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The James Gang
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16763 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1989 |
2,378 Words |
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Audrey Foote
Audrey Foote is a writer and reviewer who lives in Washington,
D.C. |
A RING OF CONSPIRATORS
Henry James and his Literary Circle
Miranda Seymour
Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1989
$19.95
In 1898 H.G. Wells and his wife Jane settled at Sandgate in Sussex, and they soon became aware that they had tumbled into a nest of fellow novelists. Oddly, with the very obvious exception of Rudyard Kipling in nearby Burwash, not one of these writers in that little corner of England was a true-blue Briton. Henry James and Stephen Crane, the oldest and the youngest but both renowned authors, were Americans. Ford Madox Ford (ne Hueffer and still using that Teutonic last name) was half-German, and Joseph Conrad was Polish-born; they were at the start of their careers. Wells, already acclaimed for The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, quickly met them all. He was sufficiently impressed to remark, with jolly mock chauvinism but also with a sharp eye on the competition, that they seemed to form a "ring of foreign conspirators plotting against British letters in the neighborhood of Rye."
Not in any real sense did these novelists compose a "conspiracy" or even a self-conscious literary movement with shared credos and tastes, like the poets and dramatists of the Irish renaissance or the Bloomsbury aesthetes. They were more like the Lost Generation expatriates in Paris or contemporary cliques on Long Island. Never even acquiring a collective title, they remained a handful of talented and opinionated individuals of different background, ages, and aims, with clashing temperaments and usually incompatible wives or mistresses. Except for
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