Table Of ContentHenry
James
The
of
Spoils
POYNTON
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation
https://archive.org/details/spoilsofpoyntonpOOhen
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE SPOILS OF POYNTON
Henry James was bom in 1843 in Washington Place, New York, of
Scottish and Irish ancestry. His father was a prominent theologian and
philosopher, and his elder brother, William, is also famous as a philoso-
pher. He attended schools in New York and later in London, Paris and
Geneva, entering the Law School at Harvard in 1862. In 1865 he began
to contribute reviews and short stories to American journals. In 1875,
after two prior visits to Europe, he settled for a year in Paris, where he
met Flaubert, Turgenev and other literary figures. However, the next
year he moved to London, where he became such an inveterate diner-
out that in the winter of 1878—9 he confessed to accepting 107 invita-
tions. In 1898 he left London and went to live at Lamb House, Rye,
Sussex. Henry James became naturalized in 1915, was awarded the
O.M., and died in 1916.
In addition to many short stories, plays, books of criticism, autobiog-
raphy and travel he wrote some twenty novels, the first published being
Roderick Hudson (1875). They include The Europeans, Washington Square,
The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The
Tragic Muse, The Spoils ofPoynton, The Awkward Age The Wings ofthe
,
Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.
David Lodge is Honorary Professor of Modern English Literature at
the University of Birmingham, where he taught from i960 to 1987. In
1964—5 he held a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship to the United
States and in 1969 he was Visiting Associate Professor at the University
of California. His novels include How Far Can You Go?, which won the
1980 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, Small World, the sequel to
Changing Places, which was shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize, Nice
Work, which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award in 1988
and was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and Paradise News (1991).
He has also written several books ofliterary criticism, including Language
of Fiction (1966), The Modes of Modern Writing (1977), After Bakhtin:
Essays on Fiction and Criticism (1990) and The Art of Fiction (Penguin
On
1992), and a collection of occasional essays, Write (1986).
Patricia Crick, one-time Scholar of Girton College, Cambridge, is a
modem
teacher of languages.
-
HENRY
JAMES
m
THE
POYNTON
SPOILS OF
EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION
BY DAVID LODGE
AND NOTES BY PATRICIA CRICK
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published 1897
New York Edition published 1908
Published in Penguin Books 1963
Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1987
5 7 9 10 8 6
©
Introduction copyright David Lodge, 1987
©
Notes copyright Patricia Crick, 1987
Extracts from The Notebooks ofHenry James copyright 1947 by Oxford University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in England by Clays Ltd, St Ives pic
Filmset in Linotron 202 Bembo
Except in the United States ofAmerica, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way oftrade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form ofbinding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
CONTENTS
m
Introduction
i
A Note on the Text 19
THE SPOILS OF POYNTON 21
New
Henry James’s Preface to the York Edition 23
Appendix: Extracts from Henry James’s Notebooks
concerning The Spoils ofPoytiton 214
Notes 237
*
I
4*
INTRODUCTION
m
The Spoils ofPoynton, first published in 1897, occupies a uniquely
interesting place in the long history of Henry James’s literary
career. It was the first substantial piece of fiction that he wrote
after the collapse of his ambitions to find fame and fortune as a
playwright, and the first to be written in what has come to be
known as his ‘later’ manner. These two facts are connected.
In 1890 James was commissioned to adapt his early novel The
American (1877) for the stage. It had a qualified success, and the
experience encouraged him to try writing original plays. His
career as a novelist was in the doldrums. The reception ofhis last
two major works. The Princess Casamassima (1886) and The Tragic
Muse (1^90), had been disappointing, both critically and commer-
cially. He was worried and piqued by the small financial reward
he derived from his books. He saw in the theatre the chance to
make a lot of money in a short space of time, enough to ensure
‘real freedom for one’s general artistic life’.1 He accordingly wrote
three comedies in the next few years, none ofwhich managed to
find a producer. All his hopes now hung upon the success ofGuy
Domville a costume drama set in eighteenth-century England
,
about a young Catholic gentleman who is torn between his
vocation to become a priest and a felt obligation, on the sudden
death ofhis elder brother, to marry and ensure the continuation of
A
the family. popular actor-manager, George Alexander, accepted
the play for production at the StJames’s theatre in London early
in 1895.
The story of the first,night of Guy Domville superbly narrated
,
by Leon Edel in his Life ofHenryfames,* is itselfas full ofsuspense,
pathos, comedy and irony as any novel. Among the newspaper
critics present, at that time unknown to each other and toJames,
were three men shortly destined to become the most celebrated
writers of the age - George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett and
H. G. Wells. They appreciatedJames’s intelligent dialogue, as did
most of the stalls, well packed with James’s friends and admirers
ofhis fiction. The gallery, however, was impatient with the play’s
clumsy stagecraft and began to barrack the production in its later
stages. James himself, unable to bear the strain ofsitting through
the performance, had spent the evening watching Oscar Wilde’s
highly successful An Ideal Husband. With the applause for this play
still ringing in his ears, James walked the short distance to the St
James’s theatre, arriving in the wingsjust as Alexander was taking
his bow. The actor-manager, either foolishly or mischievously,
led James onto the stage, where this most sensitive and dignified
of writers was roundly booed by the gallery.
Guy Domville was a flop and had to be hurriedly replaced (ironi-
cally enough by Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest), but it
was the personal humiliation of the first night that determined
James to abandon his theatrical ambitions. It was one ofthe darkest
episodes of his literary life. Yet he was able to turn this apparent
failure to positive account. He returned to writing fiction with a
confirmed sense that this was his true metier but he began to
,
develop a new kind of narrative method that owed much to his
experiments with drama — first in short novels such as The Spoils
of Poynton and What Maisie Knew (1897), and eventually in the
three great masterpieces ofhis mature years, The Wings ofthe Dove
(1902), The Ambassadors (1903) and The Golden Bowl (1904).
On
superficial inspection the later novels of HenryJames seem
anything but theatrical. They are much concerned with conscious-
ness, with representing mental acts ofperception, speculation and
inference; and usually the story is conveyed to us through the
consciousness of a single character whose understanding of the
actions and motives of the others is necessarily limited and often
unreliable. These are effects that are very difficult to achieve in the
theatre, except by the comparatively clumsy conventions of the
soliloquy and the aside.
What Henry James’s later work owes ,to drama is essentially
structural, what he himselfreferred to as ’the scenic method*. The
story is unfolded in a series of scenes or dramatic encounters
between the main characters, in which the issues of the plot are
discussed or alluded to in dialogue. The import of what is said is
often obscure or problematical, and the effort ofinterpreting it is
depicted in the consciousness ofthe central or focalizing character,
2
