Chapter 36 - Work

Summary

As a proud professional writer, Henry James disliked being told how to do his job. He particularly resented advice regarding what he should, or should not, write about. When, in 1884, Walter Besant published an essay of general guidance to prospective authors, James was quick to resist such axioms as that ‘a young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life’ or that ‘a writer whose friends and personal experiences belong to the lower middle-class should carefully avoid introducing his characters into society’ (LC-1, 51). His celebrated response, ‘The Art of Fiction’, is notable, amongst other things, for its lack of professional dogma. While he is willing to agree, for instance, that the novelist ‘must write from his experience’, James insists that experience itself is such a slippery, indefinable quantity, ‘never limited’ and ‘never complete’ (52), that it would be difficult to know when one is not writing from it. The smallest hint of experience would enable ‘a damsel upon whom nothing is lost’ (52) to have plenty to say about soldiers’ lives. ‘The province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision’ (59), James famously concludes, refuting Besant’s ‘rather chilling’ (51) implication that writers should know, and stick to, their place. Yet, while he claimed ‘all life’ as matter for his art, this does not seem to have prevented James from feeling some hesitation about tackling subjects of which his own immediate experience was limited. One of these is the broad topic of this chapter: work.