Deux lettres autographes signées fondamentales sur l'art du roman d'Henry James adressées à Paul Bourget

Two fundamental signed autograph letters on the art of the novel by Henry James, written to Paul Bourget.
London (De Vere Gardens - Kensington) 1 January and 23 February 1888, 11.5 x 18 cm, 16 pages on 4 double leaves for each letter.
Two long and handsome autograph letters signed by Henry James to his friend the writer Paul Bourget, written in black ink in a bold hand.
Fundamental letters by Henry James on the art of the novel. The writer takes a stand on a very Parisian debate about the latest literary trends, Symbolism, Decadence and Naturalism. Mensonges, the novel by Paul Bourget published in late 1887 is here strongly criticized but through the examination of this book, representative of a style and an age, a whole new conception of the novel emerges, and indeed of writing itself.
Three years after the publication of Poètes maudits by Paul Verlaine, the theme of the conflict between the artist and the external world had become fashionable; James treated it two years later in The Tragic Muse. It was in this context that Bourget, who boasted about dissecting psychology, in his own phrase, tried writing the story of a young poet taking his first steps into adultery. But his friend Henry James found nothing in it to his liking: "...to tell you the brutal truth, I absolutely do not like this work." He found "the point of view vain and erroneous, as well as the tone, the basis and the form," and takes umbrage above all at the futility with which his correspondent uses an "excessive eroticism...All in all, all this is so far from life the way I know it, or think I know it, see it or experience it, and so far from the people I know, recognize, come from, and who make up for me the stuff of life and contact with human beings, that the action of your novel was for me like being locked in some awful cage in a zoo..." As James' biographer notes, citing extracts from these letters, "such frankness was only possible between friends!"
But the outstanding interest of these letters lies in the literary arguments brought up against the book. In focusing on the negative examples of Bourget's book and knocking it down, James' own view emerge. The refusal of the private detail, that small field he considers poor and without interest, is insinuated by the desire for tact and good taste, as well as a deeper one, that of an open-ended, unbounded analysis. The desire to separate action from reflection, to distance oneself from that bad joke of fake subjectivity dressed up as psychological insight goes hand in hand with the desire for subtle exposition. The finesse in James' writing is to be found just as much in the goals he sets himself as the means he uses to achieve them. There is no hypocritical prudery there, as James assures us; and beyond Bourget's excessiveness, it is his moralizing goal that is here refuted. This almost utilitarian conception of the novel is the very opposite of that attempt to understand things for which James uses it. Proof, if proof were required, is to be found in his introductory essay to Maupassant, published in the same year in which he continues this thought, finding with the latter, though in a different form, the same subtle ambition of understanding the world. In 2007, at a conference on "Paris Life", an American student from Yale, Peter Brooks, spent some considerable time dealing with this incident as part of the broader theme of the French Novel According to Henry James, deeming it crucial and typical of the latter's exchanges with Bourget. Commenting on the second of these letters (the only one to which he actually had access), Brooks concluded notably: "I am far from certain of the manner in which this letter should be interpreted, a private letter of course, but which seems to contain a fragment of literary criticism at its core. It is perhaps the only text where James refers to the sexual act per se, claiming, it seems, personal experience thereof. What he seems to reproach Bourget with is above all the idea that one can talk about it openly, that it is legitimate to "wade about in it" intellectually. Is this simply Anglo-Saxon prudery? Partly yes, no doubt, but I believe that his whole conception of the novel comes into play here..." That says it all on the fundamental importance of these two classic letters.

We thank Monsieur Pierre E. Richard for his kind assistance in cataloguing these items.