摘要：Well into his writing career, at the age of fifty-three, Henry James began to write differently. In the spring of 1897, rheumatism in his right wrist worsened and writing became painful, so James hired a secretary to take dictation. From then on, his routine was to dictate fiction in the morning hours to an amanuensis and make revisions in his own hand to the typescripts in the afternoons. James admitted that adopting dictation to compose novels affected his writing. “I know,” he once told Theodora Bosanquet, the secretary of his final years, “that I’m too diffuse when I’m dictating” (Bosanquet 247). “It all seems,” he explained, “to be so much more effectively and unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in writing” (248). Not only did James come to write more readily by the sound of his own voice, but eventually he required the accompaniment of the typewriter’s taps as well (his habit became so specific that the machine he used had to be a Remington—other makes, such as the Oliver which was too quiet for his taste, didn’t “work”). The scene of writing had become a place of sound.
