Buffalo Book

James wrote this book, about a wealthy American art collector visiting one of the great treasure houses of Britain hoping to buy a Sir Joshua Reynolds portrait, as a play, scheduled to premiere in the same season as works by J.M. Barrie, G.B. Shaw, Somerset Maugham, and John Galsworthy. When Edward VII died, London's theaters were closed for the season, cancelling James's premiere. He then retooled it as a novel. But just barely. It reads very, very much like a play. It's 99% dialogue, with faintly disguised stage directions ("he cast a stare about"; "Mr. Bender carnivorously smiled") and few set changes. And way, way too many adverbs.

I haven't read enough late James to know when his writing took a turn toward the incomprehensible. This book is written in a strange dialect, upper class, rigid and uptight yet slangy, and not only completely remote from the way anyone speaks today, but remote from any dialect I've read in any novel from any era. At one point I realized that in order to understand what the characters were saying, I would need an annotated edition, or else have to translate into modern English on a separate piece of paper. As William James wrote to his brother after The Wings of the Dove was published, "You've reversed every traditional canon of story-telling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, which you carefully avoid)." [This line is quoted in Jean Strouse's introduction. Yet Strouse contrasts The Outcry as a plot-driven novel, and it was much more successful in its first few weeks than James's previous works.]

I also realized that the play had been written with the expectation of many hard-of-hearing elderly in the audience, for whom lines would need to be repeated.

"And so awfully long after - wasn't it?" Lady Grace asked.
"Awfully long after -"

"Oh of course we don't see every one!" she heroically kept it up.
"You don't see every one," Hugh bravely laughed.

"His yielding on the picture?"
"His yielding on the picture."
"Your proposal wasn't good enough?"
"It wasn't good enough."
"You found you were too sorry for me?"
"I found I was too sorry for you -"