Picture This

Henry James loved pictures, but not when they threatened to supplement his words. For James, “responsible prose” should be “pictorial enough, above all in itself”—the phrase comes from his preface to The Golden Bowl (1909)—and anything that offered to relieve it of that responsibility risked short-circuiting the process by which good writers should stimulate the imaginative capacity of their readers. “As regards illustrations you will of course please yourself,” he observed resignedly to the editor of The Century Magazine, Robert Underwood Johnson, in 1887. “I frankly confess that I hate them when attached to my own prose—& like them only as an incident of that of others.”James lost that particular battle when The Century published the travel essay in question, “London,” with thirteen illustrations by the American artist Joseph Pennell the following year. But with the partial exception of the frontispieces that Scribner’s commissioned from the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn for the so-called New York Edition of 1907–1909, James mostly succeeded in keeping his novels and tales free of illustration. Writing about visual art was one thing—the narrator of a story also submitted ...