Relations will stop at nothing

Philip Horne

• The Whole Family: A Novel by 12 Authors by Henry James and William Dean Howells, edited by Elizabeth Jordan, by Alfred Bendixen
  Ungar (USA), 392 pp, $9.95, June 1986, ISBN 0 8044 6036 1
• ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship by Michael Anesko
  Oxford, 272 pp, £21.50, January 1987, ISBN 0 19 504034 1

Henry James was a perfectionist, though not a humourless one, about his public appearance and appearances: hence the pleasure taken by certain anecdotalists in showing him out of control – of situations, conversations, himself, others. That he danced a cake-walk in 1899 and was photographed with a mouthful of doughnut intrigues us, as a treasurable departure from the magisterial dignity we mainly like to impute to him. Cakewalk and doughnut were taken at a party at the Cranes’, a private affair. The Whole Family, which became a book at the end of 1908 after 12 months in Harper’s Bazar, is a public party game for Harper’s authors, an improvised collaboration (or sequence, rather, of solo turns). What, one asks, is the author of The Golden Bowl doing dans cette galère?