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Bernard Richards, Henry James’s Pony, Essays in Criticism, Volume 75, Issue 1, January 2025, Pages 87–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgaf005
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A notice in the Louisville Courier-Journal (11 January 1908), ‘Henry James Will Elucidate’, argued that the Prefaces to the New York Edition were a gloss or guide for ‘the unintelligent reader’, ‘telling “what the idea was” in each book’: ‘Not to know James is to be benighted, and an opportunity to read him with a pony, as Caesar, Virgil and Livy are read by undergraduates, will be appreciated by the mere reader of tales who loses his interest when he loses his way in the labyrinth’.
Oliver Herford’s edition of the Prefaces is terrifyingly impressive, but it could have been even more like the north face of the Eiger had manuscripts existed for them. In fact, one has survived, for The Portrait of a Lady, and the variants are provided. Daniel Karlin said how relieved he was, when he produced his edition of The Bostonians for Cambridge University Press, that there was no manuscript to add to his labours. What we have in Herford’s edition is not only a presentation of the Prefaces but a dense account of James’s creative mind during the early years of the twentieth century, with constant interplay between the different projects, including the revision of his fiction and the writing of William Wetmore Story and of The American Scene, and revising English Hours and Italian Hours. The 937 footnotes chart the back and forth, and for future James scholars this edition work will provide a convenient and invaluable insight into his writing life. Time and time again I learned things I did not know. One is in good hands with Herford, in the light of his Henry James’s Style of Retrospect: Late Personal Writings 1890-1915 (Oxford University Press, 2016). The 113-page introduction covers the writing and publication of the Prefaces and their complicated process of publication, which one needs cold towels wrapped round one’s head to follow, and also the contemporary and subsequent critical reception. Herford gives an excellent account of the precedents for the revision of fiction and of Prefaces. Balzac is the dominant figure, as he is in the notes. James never mastered the typewriter; unlike Lawrence he established no Blutbrüderschaft with the machine. But he was helped by the highly competent Theodora Bosanquet.
