The Year of Henry James

by David Lodge

  In the same letter George Eliot emphasised that she was not taking up a partisan stance on the religious issue: ‘The collision in the drama is not at all between “bigoted churchmanship” and evangelicalism, but between irreligion and religion. Religion in this case happens to be represented by evangelicalism.’31 And religion, one might add, is deeply coloured by George Eliot’s own ‘doctrine of sympathy’. Tryan understands that ‘the first thing Janet needed was to be assured of sympathy . . . The tale of the Divine Pity was never yet to be believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity.’ Without going as far as Feuerbach, who advocated translating the entire language of Christianity into secular, humanist terms, George Eliot manages to suggest that Mr Tryan’s Evangelical doctrine is accidental to the real value and efficacy of his ministry, showing us that he is admired by characters like Mrs Raynor and Old Mr Jerome, whose Christianity is simple, tolerant and pragmatic. Nevertheless ‘Janet’s Repentance’ is closer in spirit to Evangelical Christianity than anything George Eliot had written since the trauma of her loss of faith, and in it she finally made peace with the religion of her childhood and youth. She even compromised with her disbelief in personal immortality to the extent of allowing her hero and heroine a ‘sacred kiss of promise’ on his deathbed.

  George Eliot’s contemporaries immediately recognised the distinction and originality of Scenes of Clerical Life. Blackwood knew he was on to a good thing, and sent back to his new author encouraging reports of reader reactions. ‘I could not explain the exact symptoms of popularity,’ he wrote to her about the reception of ‘Amos Barton’, ‘but to me they are literally unmistakeable.’ Thackeray was reported to be impressed, Mrs Gaskell was flattered to be suspected of being the author, and Dickens, to whom George Eliot sent a copy of Scenes when it was published as a book in 1858, wrote to her:

  I have been so strongly affected by the first two tales in the book you have had the kindness to send me through Messrs Blackwood that I hope you will excuse my writing to you to express my admiration of their extraordinary merit. The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humour and the pathos of these stories, I have never seen the like of; and they have impressed me in a manner that I should find very difficult to describe to you, if I had the impertinence to try.32

  No writer of the period could have asked for a more encouraging response to her first book.

  There was inevitably keen speculation in the literary world as to the identity of ‘George Eliot’. Dickens shrewdly guessed that the writer was a woman, though Jane Carlyle supposed that George Eliot must have ‘a wife from whom he has got those beautiful feminine touches in his book’.33 Lewes and Marian revealed to John Blackwood the truth which he had long suspected in February 1858, shortly after Scenes was published as a book, and gave him the first thirteen chapters of her next work of fiction, Adam Bede. He scanned the first page of the manuscript, said with a smile, ‘This will do,’ and read as much as he could on the train back to Edinburgh, reporting that he felt ‘very savage when the waning light stopped me as we neared the Scottish border’.34 He was anxious, for the same reasons as before, that George Eliot’s identity should not become public knowledge and jeopardise the reception of Adam Bede, but soon after that novel was published in February 1859 events compelled her to admit her authorship.

  Not surprisingly, speculation about the author of Scenes of Clerical Life had been particularly intense in and around Nuneaton, since the tales were so closely based on real persons and places. As a beginner in the art of fiction, Marian Evans did not perhaps appreciate the advisability of disguising her source material, or perhaps she thought the fact that she was writing about events twenty-five years or more in the past made it unnecessary to do so – in which case she reckoned without the retentiveness of local memory. The story of ‘Janet’s Repentance’ in particular was read as a roman-à-clef, though not intended as such, and ‘keys’ to the story began to circulate in Nuneaton shortly after it was serialised. It was obvious that the author must be of local origin, and in May 1858, a candidate was named publicly: a down-at-heel Nuneaton resident called Joseph Liggins, a baker’s son who had been educated at Cambridge University and was subsequently disappointed in his hopes of a career in the Church. It is not clear whether Liggins instigated this rumour, or merely failed to deny it for his own advantage. At first the report gave more amusement than concern to George Eliot and her publisher, who saw it as a useful distraction of public attention from the truth. But a year later, when ‘George Eliot’ had become famous as the author of the hugely successful Adam Bede, the Liggins affair took a more serious turn. In April 1859 a group of Warwickshire gentlemen set up a subscription for Liggins, maintaining that he had been defrauded of his rightful earnings. George Eliot wrote an indignant letter to The Times under her pen name denouncing Liggins as an imposter, but the campaign, or hoax, persisted. In May work by George Eliot written out in Liggins’s hand was circulating in Warwickshire, and soon a London gossip columnist, who obviously knew who the novelist was, accused her of encouraging the Liggins story for her own purposes. In July she agreed with Blackwood that she would no longer conceal the identity of George Eliot. But she retained the pen name for the rest of her career: it pleased her to preserve a distinction between her public persona as a novelist and her private life.

  It was Adam Bede, originally conceived as another ‘Scene’, which made George Eliot’s fame and fortune, selling well over ten thousand copies in the first year of publication, compared to the thousand copies sold of its predecessor, and being translated into many languages. In the opinion of her biographer, Gordon Haight, ‘No book had made such an impression since Uncle Tom’s Cabin swept the world’, and he quotes the magisterial judgement of the reviewer in The Times: ‘It is a first-rate novel, and its author takes rank at once among the masters of the art.’35 But that author could not have achieved such a triumph without the apprenticeship of writing Scenes of Clerical Life, and George Eliot herself always had a special fondness for her first attempt at fiction. In 1860, with the enormous success of Adam Bede behind her, and The Mill on the Floss approaching completion, she wrote to Blackwood, urging that Scenes should be kept in print and

  have every chance of impressing the public with its existence, first because I think it of importance to the estimate of me as a writer that ‘Adam Bede’ should not be counted as my only book; and secondly, because there are ideas presented in these stories about which I care a good deal, and I am not sure that I can ever embody again.36

  Notes

  1 Dublin Review, 21 (1846), p. 261.

  2 ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr Cumming’, Westminster Review, 64 (1855), p. 464. Goshen was the area of Egypt allocated to the exiled Israelites by the Pharaoh, as recorded in Genesis.

  3 Virginia Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, in The Common Reader (1925).

  4 The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight (1954–6), Vol. II, p. 407.

  5 Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (1998), p. 44.

  6 Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (1968), pp. 285–6; Hughes, George Eliot, pp. 252–3.

  7 The George Eliot Letters, ed. Haight, Vol. I, p. 22.

  8 Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies (1949), Chapter 8.

  9 Hughes, George Eliot, p. 75.

  10 Quoted by Haight, George Eliot, pp. 183–4.

  11 Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (1968), pp. 170–1.

  12 Thomas A. Noble, George Eliot’s ‘Scenes of Clerical Life’ (1965), pp. 55ff.

  13 Essays of George Eliot, ed. Pinney, pp. 373–4.

  14 Letters, ed. Haight, Vol. II, pp. 230–1.

  15 Quoted by Derek and Sybil Oldfield in Critical Essays on George Eliot, ed. Barbara Hardy (1970), p. 3.

  16 Letters, ed. Haight, Vol. II, p. 269.

  17 Essays, ed. Pinney, p. 311.

  18 Ibid., p. 318.

  19 The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot (1988), p. 227.

  20 Let
ters, Vol. II, p. 277.

  21 Barbara Hardy, The Novels of George Eliot (1964), p. 190.

  22 Haight, George Eliot, p. 205.

  23 Hughes, George Eliot, p. 257.

  24 Ibid., p. 262.

  25 Letters, Vol. II, pp. 297–9.

  26 Ibid., pp. 308–9.

  27 Ibid., p. 378.

  28 Ibid., pp. 348 and 362.

  29 U. C. Knoepflmacher, George Eliot’s Early Novels: The Limits of Realism (1968), p. 24ff.

  30 Letters, Vol. II, p. 347.

  31 Ibid.

  32 Ibid., p. 423.

  33 Hughes, George Eliot, p. 267.

  34 Ibid., p. 273.

  35 Haight, George Eliot, p. 279.

  36 Letters, Vol. II, p. 240.

  * * *

  GRAHAM GREENE

  AND THE

  ANXIETY OF

  INFLUENCE

  * * *

  It is of course impossible to write anything without being influenced. Nobody ever wrote a novel or a poem or an essay without having read at least one and more probably hundreds of such works by others. Most creative writers were voracious readers in their childhood and youth, and most began themselves by imitating and emulating, consciously or unconsciously, the writers they admired. Literary influence is therefore inevitable. But attitudes to this phenomenon changed significantly over the last two or three centuries. In earlier times writers felt no hesitation or uneasiness about borrowing stories and rhetorical devices from their predecessors. Classical and medieval literature endlessly recycled well-known myths and legends. In neo-classical literature the explicit ‘imitation’ of precursors, adapting an ancient model to contemporary themes, was seen as not merely an apprentice exercise but as a prestigious and genuinely creative kind of writing. But in the modern era there is a new emphasis on ‘originality’ as an absolute value in literature. The privileging of individual consciousness in post-Renaissance culture, which can already be seen in the soliloquies of Shakespeare’s plays and was further developed in the rise of the novel in the eighteenth century, combined with the Romantic view of writing as essentially self-expression, caused literary influence to be seen as something potentially threatening as well as inspiring – something you must struggle against when it threatens your claim to originality. The American critic Harold Bloom coined the phrase ‘the anxiety of influence’, in a book of that title published in 1973, to signify this ambivalent attitude of the modern writer towards his precursors. He observes that the use of the word ‘influence’ as a literary critical term actually begins in the nineteenth century.1 Influence was so taken for granted as a component of writing in previous ages that they didn’t need a word for it.

  Harold Bloom is a brilliant but somewhat idiosyncratic critic, who employs an esoteric jargon of his own, and makes few concessions to his readers by way of explanation. I am not going to discuss his theory in detail, but rather to take from it some hints and ideas which seem to throw light on Graham Greene’s development as a writer, and his use of precursor writers. Bloom is almost exclusively concerned with poets and poetry, especially with what he calls ‘strong’ poets – in other words, major poets who make, or aspire to make, a fundamentally original contribution to the poetic tradition. There are relatively few such poets at any one time; they tend to know who they are themselves, and to be recognised fairly quickly by their peers. Bloom sees poetry in the modern period being carried forward by the struggle of such poets to absorb and assimilate the achievement of their great predecessors, while themselves producing something that is different but equally great, and according to Bloom this involves a misreading of their strong precursors. Here is a crucial passage in his book:

  Poetic influence – when it involves two strong, authentic poets – always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influence, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse, wilful revisionism, without which modern poetry as such could not exist.2

  Another closely related Bloomian jargon term is ‘misprision’. He doesn’t explain what he means by it, but the dictionary offers two definitions: (1) contempt (archaic) and (2) failure to appreciate the value of something. In other words, creative misreading often involves depreciation of the precursor. An example of such poetic revisionism – though Bloom doesn’t I think mention it in his book, which has no index – would be T. S. Eliot’s reading of Milton and post-Miltonic English poetry as flawed by ‘a dissociation of sensibility’ which it was the mission of modern poets like himself to repair.3 Poetic revisionism doesn’t always find such explicit articulation – indeed, it is more often a private inner struggle of the poet, manifested publicly only in his work – but when the writer is also a critic it is easier to trace the anxiety of influence. Graham Greene wrote criticism, if more occasionally and less systematically than Eliot, and he left some valuable clues to his literary influences, and the way he assimilated them, in his essays, especially those first collected under the title The Lost Childhood (1951).

  The modern novelist is in a way even more vulnerable to the anxiety of influence than the modern poet. Most modern poetry is lyric, the expression of the poet’s own thoughts and experiences; and since every individual is unique, with a unique personal history, the poet can be confident of achieving a measure of originality through self-expression. But the novelist works in narrative; he undertakes to tell a story involving more than one person, and a story that is new every time. The novelist character Helen Reed in my novel Thinks . . . reflects on the effort this entails:

  Before the rise of the novel there wasn’t the same obligation on the storyteller – you could relate the old familiar tales over and over, the matter of Troy, the matter of Rome, the matter of Britain . . . giving them a new spin as times and manners changed. But for the last three centuries writers have been required to make up a new story every time. Not absolutely new, of course – it’s been pointed out often enough that at a certain level there are only a finite number of plots – but the plot must be fleshed out each time with a new set of characters, and worked out in a new set of circumstances.4

  Furthermore the novel was a totally new kind of writing in the history of literature – an anti-generic genre. Unlike the classical genres of epic, tragedy, comedy, pastoral, etc., the novel has no rules except those that it chooses to borrow eclectically from those traditional forms. The novel evolved and continues to evolve by perpetually breaking its own rules and deviating from its own conventions – Tristram Shandy, written very early in the novel’s history, is in that sense an exemplary text. Popular fiction, of course, is shamelessly formulaic and imitative, but for novelists of any literary ambition the pressure to be original in form and content is intense – hence their anxiety of, or about, influence.

  But not all influences arouse anxiety. A writer will acknowledge some kinds of influence quite happily when no real competition with the precursor is involved – for example, the effect of books encountered in childhood and adolescence. Graham Greene was particularly interested in this kind of influence, which he believed was important for everybody, not just for future writers. He says in A Sort of Life: ‘The influence of early books is profound. So much of the future lies on the shelves: early reading has more influence on conduct than any religious teaching.’5 The title essay of The Lost Childhood, which he wrote in 1947, is all about his own early reading of adventure fiction: authors like Rider Haggard, Percy Westerman, Stanley Weyman, Anthony Hope. Elsewhere he recalls the time when he devoured the imperialistic and historical yarns of Henty, of which there was a whole shelf-full in the nursery at home. He was also drawn to the tales of his distinguished cousin, Robert Louis Stevenson. As a schoolboy he was a great fan of John Buchan, and as an undergraduate at Oxford rather cheekily invited the famous writer to contribute to Oxford Outlook when he beca
me editor of that magazine. The relevance to Greene’s mature work of all this saturation in adventure fiction at an impressionable age is obvious. What he did in his novels was to combine the structures and conventions of adventure fiction – for example, the story of a pursuit or quest, often in an exotic setting, involving situations of constant jeopardy for the protagonist – with a focus on adult moral and spiritual conflicts and dilemmas not usually associated with such fiction. He also inverted the stereotypical hero of the adventure novels – the chivalrous, courageous, resourceful, clean-cut, upper-class Englishman, like Haggard’s Allan Quatermain and Henry Curtis in King Solomon’s Mines, or Hope’s Rudolf Rassendyll in The Prisoner of Zenda – putting at the centre of his stories characters who were weak, sinful, guilt-ridden, and self-loathing: the hit-man Raven in A Gun For Sale, Pinkie in Brighton Rock, the whisky priest in The Power and the Glory, Scobie in The Heart of the Matter.

  In his essay ‘The Lost Childhood’ Greene attributes his first realisation that he wanted to become a writer to the experience of reading, when he was about fourteen, Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan (1906), a novel set in the late medieval period in Italy. It appealed to him because Bowen turned the conventions of the historical adventure story in the direction of a much darker and more pessimistic vision of life than usual, one that answered to his own unhappiness and despair at the time, a schoolboy who was persecuted and distrusted by his peers as the headmaster’s son:

  It was no good in that real world to dream that one would ever be a Sir Henry Curtis, but della Scala who at last turned from an honesty that never paid and betrayed his friends and died dishonoured and a failure even at treachery – it was easier for a child to escape behind his mask. As for Visconti, with his beauty, his patience, and his genius for evil, I had watched him pass by many a time in his black Sunday suit smelling of mothballs. His name was Carter . . . Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white but black and grey. I read all that in The Viper of Milan and I saw that it was so.