Pulitzer Prize Archive - Supplements Chronicle of the Pulitzer Prizes for Biography Book

Reading Selections:

Henry James on Compassion
To the young, the early dead, the baffled, the defeated, I don’t think we can be tender enough.

Henry James Observation of Death
Yet I confess I used the only word (extinction) that expresses my own sense of what the great silence means -- and of the impenetrable mystery. That I should have used it of such a spirit as your mother’s, only proves, I fear, how inveterate in me is the habit of that particular vision. But I cherish the knowledge that in others -- any others -- abides the other vision. But its all mere wrath and yearning in the darkness! I saw your mother go -- saw it with the tenderest and most leavetaking eyes: and the reconstruction of the soul is to me the most difficult of all imaginations. Yet -- I must add -- she is a part of the universe to me at this hour! So much, at any rate, in simple explanation of my rather chance expression. I wanted only to express the intensity -- to our eyes -- of cessation.

Henry James on the Transformation of Experience Into Art
Only live and think of living, from hour to hour and day to day: it is perfect wisdom and take us through troubles that no other way can take us through…Art makes life, makes interest.

James’s Sense of His Own Development: What Maisie Knew
..he created What Maisie Knew a brilliant tour de force, one of his most lucid and at he same time aesthetically and morally complicated novels. A sexual maelstrom of coupling and competitiveness swirls around little Maisie. For Mrs. Wix, her governess, the representative of middle class conventionality, the crucial concern is does Maisie have, or will she develop, a moral sense? Throughout the novel, Maisie’s consciousness is the center of experience and perception, aided by the Jamesian narrator’s dexterity in using the indirect narrative to mediate between the young girl’s mind and the external world. The central drama in the story is the gradual growth of Maisie’s consciousness as she struggles against the rejections and the confusions of the adult world. In the end, like the serpent in the garden, Mrs. Wix becomes the instrument of Maisie’s self-awareness. At last poor Maisie develops a moral sense. Heretofore she had consulted only her needs, and created adaptive strategies to get people to love her. Her basic acts of self-preservation had been instinctive, amoral. What did Maisie know? She knew a great deal. Little by little she knew everything about the sexual relationships and activities swirling around her. But she did not know that they were immoral. She knew them and judged them only insofar as they affected her primary needs. Finally she returns to England with Mrs. Wix, having done the best, and about to do the best, she can with freedom, a freedom based on knowledge. She has grown up, into a world of moral complexity, self-consciousness, limitation, and restraint but also a world of choice, and possibly of sufficient freedom from fear to act on impulses of love and on changing self-definitions. The novel is a telling fictional embodiment of James’s own sense of his own development. Like Maisie, he knew, gradually, everything in his depiction, though Maisie of the stages and the mysteries of growing up and the pain of the final conflict between deep, intuitive needs and the challenge of socialization. James dramatized his own lifelong problems of growth, choice, and personal freedom.

The Beast In The Jungle
James wrote his most powerful short story on the subject of sexual and marital inaction, confused by sexual identity, and evasive personal deception -- “The Beast In The Jungle.”…Whatever James understood about his own desires, he expressed them indirectly with dramatic power in the story of “a man haunted…by the fear, more and more, throughout his life, that something will happen to him.” The sense of special destiny that determines much of John Marcher’s life turns out in the end to be his emotional inability to love, which suggests sexual impotence. Deeply repressed feelings lie in wait to take revenge against him, to spring out as a hallucinatory embodiment of his inner emptiness, dismissive unfeeling egotism, and his lifelong repression of his sown sexuality. It springs out into consciousness and takes its revenge when he knows that it is he has done, what he has missed, what he has been incapable of…For Marcher there is not second chance , no renewal -- an embodiment of James’s nightmare vision of never having lived, of having missed the depths and the passions of life, of having denied love and sexuality.

Henry James on the Future of English
He strained to hear the “accent of the future.” The language of America “may be destined to become the most beautiful on the globe and the very music of humanity ..but whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for English -- in any sense for which there is an existing literary measure.” What he most feared was that his new society would have no place for him. He had spent a lifetime creating works of literary art in a language that might be as irrelevant, impenetrable, and foreign in the American future as he felt himself to be on the Lower East Side.

Henry James on Journalism and Art
What he did imply, though, is that what he most feared, as he had all his life, was the victory of journalism over art, of Wells (H. G. Wells) over James. For “it is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance… and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”