Edith Wharton is known, among other things, as the teller of the most devastating of the anecdotes displaying Henry James's incapacity to communicate efficiently. The story told in her 1933 autobiography, A Backward Glance, has James, late one evening, attempt to ask a doddering Windsor pedestrian how their car can find its way to the address they want. After a page of repetitious parenthetical irrelevancies from James, which leave the old man 'dazed', she loses patience and insists James 'ask him where the King's Road is'. This, a little less elaborately, he does, and the old man says: 'Ye're in it.'

LRB 30 August 1990 | PDF Download