Starting from loneliness

Abstract

Thus far, the emphasis has been on the professional rationale for James’s role as melodramatist. Before the text proper is examined, it would be appropriate to say a word about the author’s personal affinity for that role. More than any writer of the past hundred years, James represents the Great Solitary, the high priest of art whose devotion is a curious mixture of self-indulgence and sacrifice. James chose deliberately to have no wife, no lovers, no children, no career. Like all writers, he wrote out of himself, but since he had comparatively little life outside of his art, and since his fiction is hardly self-reflexive (with the exception ofa handful ofshort stories such as ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ [1896] and ‘The Lesson of the Master’ [1888]), he must have been writing out ofsomething deeper than either life or art. In one sense, one may say that loneliness is the well out of which James’s fiction flowed. The novelist Desmond McCarthy recorded an anecdote (quoted by Gordon Pirie) that speaks volumes on this subject.