One reads on, even if internally apprehensive at the prospect
of a multiple increase in reading matter, and numb after
completing "The American." "Not that efficiency has always been
dictation's prime selling point," Powers writes. "In dictating
his own last few baggy monsters, Henry James perfected such fluid
elocution that, according to Edith Wharton, he couldn't even ask
directions without releasing a torrent of 'explanatory
ramifications.'"
Henry James! In his travel books James demonstrates his
extraordinary powers of discrimination. Geneva suffers from "the
want of humor in the local atmosphere, and the absence, as well,
of that aesthetic character which is begotten of a generous view
of life." OK. But what about the Swiss in general? They have,
James found, "an insensibility to comeliness or purity of form --
a partiality to the clumsy, coarse, and prosaic, which one might
almost interpret as a calculated offset to their great treasure
of natural beauty, or at least as an instinctive protest of the
national genius for frugality."
One or two mechanical points should be made here. One of them
is that James' "The American," lionized in American literary
history, was written in 1877 -- which was before he took to
dictating his work. A second mechanical point is that
transcribers didn't have the skill, in the 19th century, to
record as fast as people could speak. Another, non-mechanical
point: It is the responsibility of men and women who seek an
audience for their writing beyond the family to instruct or
entertain, or to die trying. The ratio is not definitively
established, between skills disposed of and weight of literary
production.
The grand meaning of this lesson being that eminent people can
write eminently awful books and get away with it, and that
medical science falls short of shielding us from bad books.