Word: geismar
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Unfortunately, they will find little more. Geismar's book is knowledgeable and occasionally witty--but it is also badly written, ill-tempered, and blased out of all proportion. His point, reiterated throughout the book, is simple enough: he doesn't think Henry James is a great writer and he questions the judgment of any one who does. Consequently, the book is unrelieved polemic against James and his critics...
...first chapter, in which he announces these prejudices, makes good reading. Here Geismar says some bitingly accurate things about James--things which most of us, at one time or another, have wanted to hear. He begins his literary ambush with the declaration that this "writer was not a major writer at all--.. he is a major entertainer..." He notes that Jame's vision of sex was essentially voyeuristic..., in this esoteric Jamesian universe--a literary world that was comprised of one-half of the upper one per cent of the human race at best; and one-quarter of their emotions...
...Geismar fails to prove his points. He simply repeats his initial insights-like the contrast between entertainment and profundity -- to the end of the book, without exploring or developing them. At best, any expansion of those insights, is obscured by lack of organization. Geismar might learn from those academicians he so despises ("James is the perfect academic novelist") that literary criticism and literary history demand more than just chronological order. Even a reader intimately familiar with James's work will be confused by Geismar's haphazard approach to analysis and by his assumption that everybody already knows the psychological history...
...Geismar's problem, I think, is that he identifies James's personality with James's writing. That is, in attempting to ridicule James's critics for making him into a "major writer" Geismar ends by simply ridiculing James. It is interesting, I suppose, that James was sexually inhibited, neurotically fastidious, and incurably romantic. But it isn't literary criticism. A bald assertion like "Perhaps Henry James might better be described as the greatest feminine novelist of any age. If anything, such sniping gets in derstand the man, his writing, or his age. If anything such sniping gets...
This is doubly unfortunate because Geismar has an opportunity to make legitimate critical re-evaluations. James has been misunderstood in the past, to a degree; parts of his work have been overrated though not, as Geismar claims, by F.O. Matthiessen or Edmund Wilson). The American Scene is a good example of such misunderstanding and exaggeration. But Geismar only writes, this was James's most vicious book at its core, as the 'rootless returner' shall we say?--the orphan-exile from early childhood, the journalist-news paperman-artist, now kicked out, in his own fantasles, from the European castle of culture...