‘Some years ago my friend H. G. Wells wrote to the papers to say that for many years he was conscious of a ring of foreign conspirators plotting against British letters at no great distance from his residence, Spade House, Sandgate’. (Ford Madox Ford: Return to Yesterday.) These words lie at the heart of Mr Delbanco's book, [Group Portrait,] though, curiously, he doesn't quote them. Three of the foreign conspirators were Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Stephen Crane. Ford tried to pretend that a fourth was W. H. Hudson, but it's more likely that Wells had Ford himself in mind—it was in his Hueffer days before his change of surname disguised his German antecedents.

And of course Wells was quite right, up to a point. James, Conrad and Ford (as it seems more convenient to call him) were indeed engaged, if not exactly on a conspiracy, at least in an attack, that gave the impression of being in some way concerted, on that ‘loose baggy monster, the English novel’. The phrase was James's own, and the baggy monster was the target he had set himself to shoot down. Like almost all such consciously-selected oppositions, there was something a bit disingenuous in what James was doing. The English novel wasn't quite—had never been quite—the unstructured and rambling thing he identified. There had after all been Jane Austen; there was still Meredith, and Stevenson was only a few years dead in 1900, the year in which Mr Delbanco chooses to pitch his story. Nevertheless there was enough truth in James's strictures, and enough substance in his achievement, and in Conrad's and Ford's for us to be able to date the modern English novel from the work they did. They brought to the writing of fiction the sense of dedication and responsibility which had formerly been left to poets or to the French.

Mr Delbanco's subject is the degree of collaboration between them. Ford and Conrad worked closely together—that is well-known—and the chapter dealing with them is very properly placed at the centre of this cunningly-wrought book. Mr Delbanco is (rightly, I think) in no doubt that the collaboration was beneficial to both writers. It encouraged them to think more closely about what they were aiming at, and how it could be done. Between them, in hours of conversation, they worked out the theory of literary impressionism:

We agreed that the general effect of a novel must be the general effect life makes on mankind. A novel must therefore not be a narration, a report … We saw that Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains. We in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render impressions … We agreed that the whole of Art consists in selection …

(Ford: Joseph Conrad, a Personal Reminiscence.)

The works they produced together were not frightfully good; it was when they resumed their separate careers that the fruits appeared. All the same they played nicely off each other. Mr Delbanco sets fascinatingly side by side passages from Heart of Darkness and Ford's The Cinque Ports; which echoes which? And of course Ford learned enough to write a good Conrad chapter. Mr Delbanco cites the example from Nostromo. I wish he had taken a look at the part Ford may have played in the writing of The Secret Agent.

The chapter or Crane is the least satisfactory, just as Crane is the most faded of the writers under review. All the same, all the others regarded him as outstandingly gifted. Conrad proposed collaboration with him before he fixed on Ford. James and Crane are said to have discussed ‘style’. Crane claimed that James had sent him manuscripts. The young American struck a chord in his senior: ‘during the first months of the new year’, wrote Leon Edel, ‘when Crane was ill most of the time, Henry James wrote The Sacred Fount. It may have derived some of its poignancy from the vision the novelist had of the way in which Crane was visibly dying while Cora thrived, seemingly unaware of the tragedy being lived out under her roof’. If nothing else then, Crane provided material for Jamesian art. The relation of art to life—that is an argument central to this book.

It was central to the famous quarrel between James and Wells. Here, Mr Delbanco has an advantage over most of us: he has actually read Boon, the novel in which Wells savaged and mocked the aged James. But, before then, there was a long record of friendship, of admiration that stopped short of understanding on either side. (Mr Delbanco also neatly points out that Wells's first sight of James was as the wretched author being catcalled on the first night of Guy Domville.) Mr Delbanco's sympathies lie clearly with James. He takes some satisfaction in pointing out that though ‘What Maisie Knew sold fewer copies in its first year of publication than The Time Machine in an average month; 80 years later, the figures are no doubt reversed.’ That might not have worried Wells; he always insisted he was a journalist, that his novels were written for the here and now. What he objected to in James was in fact put more forcibly and effectively by Rebecca West: in The Sacred Fount ‘a week-end visitor spends more intellectual force than Kant can have used on The Critique of Pure Reason in an unsuccessful attempt to discover whether there exists between certain of his fellow-guests a relationship not more interesting among these vacuous people than it is among sparrows.’ Of course, James comes well out of the quarrel. His personal dignity is impressive, while Wells's hippety-hoppiting impertinence reminds us of a sparrow. Nevertheless, H. G.'s own claims for the novel were hardly humble: ‘it is to be the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the instrument of self-examination, the parade of morals and exchange of manners, the factory of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of social dogmas and ideas’.

But, the trouble from the James-Ford-Conrad point of view was that H. G.'s loudly-trumpeted indifference to the how of the matter vitiated the whole enterprise. Perhaps he sensed this himself: ‘the Novel proved like a blanket too small for the bed and when I tried to pull it over to cover my tossing conflict of ideas, I found I had to abandon questions of individuation. I never got “all life within the scope of the novel”. What a phrase. Who could?’ No one perhaps; but by ‘abandoning questions of individuation’, any felt life was likely to be excluded. All the same Wells's insistence on the importance of the what against the how should not be forgotten either. Mr Delbanco includes an admirable letter from Wells to Joyce, then engaged on Finnegan's Wake, to show how the argument was carried on to the next generation.

This is a book full of interest and intelligent perception. It occasionally irritates. Mr Delbanco frequently uses words meaninglessly. He has a ponderous way with the examination of metaphor. He is rather given to pretentious pronouncements which claim to discern significance where common sense sees none. But he has read everything on the subject, generously.