How German Is It By Walter Abish New Directions, 252 pp., $5.95 In the preface to the New York edition of The Portrait of a Lady there is a passage that many consider the cornerstone of Henry James’s theory of the art of writing:
The house of fiction has not one window, but a million every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.At each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes which forms,for observation, a unique instrument, ensuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from any other. He and his neighbors are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small
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