SELECTED TALES

INTRODUCTION

EVER SO MANY THINGS

‘It is like starting a zoo in a closet: the giraffe alone takes up more space than one has for the collection.’1 So the distinguished poet and critic Randall Jarrell lamented the task of selecting an anthology of short stories. The Jamesian zoo which we are sampling here is indeed vast, running to some 112 fine specimens – with a profusion of giraffes and elephants, and some extraordinary supernatural beasts. If Jamesian tales are not always tall, they are often very large for, despite the pressures of publishers and magazine editors, Henry James was never to be persuaded of the ‘blank misery’² that stories ought, always or even usually, to be short. The works I have been selecting from here vary between 5,000 and 45,000 words. They encompass brief stories, which James referred to as anecdotes, and longer works, which he called nouvelles, and they are all most usefully subsumed under the general title which their author himself favoured – tales. Remarkably numerous, highly various both in subject matter and in style, often very long: mundane facts like these about Jamesian tales put further constraints even on a volume as large as this in its attempt to be adequate to his diversity and variety. Such an attempt, the least that readers have a right to expect from any selection of any author, is an altogether greater requirement in the case of Henry James, where diversity and variety are the very heart of the matter, the message as well as the medium.

Moreover, this great abundance of tales is itself only part of the story of Jamesian art. James cherished, and unquestionably realized, his dream of becoming one of the world’s greatest novelists – although by the time of the ‘late phase’ ( James’s twentieth-century writing), his art had travelled far from the realism of those nineteenth-century novelists, such as Balzac and George Eliot, whom he had come to Europe to admire and to emulate. James cherished, and by his own account humiliatingly failed in, an ambition to be a successful dramatist. James produced essays, criticism, travel writing, autobiography and a vast, incessant flow of letters. Yet throughout his artistic career, from his first creative publication of ‘A Tragedy of Error’ in 1864 to his continuing revision of tales even in the final months of his life, James was writing and revising tales – anecdotes and nouvelles – with a regularity and profusion which might allow us to map out his artistic life as a life of tales. When his roles of novelist or of dramatist came under pressure, or his novels and dramas failed the public or the public failed them, then his commitment to tales, and the thinking behind such a commitment, were formulated with particular force. At such times, James apparently felt that he could be more imaginatively adequate to the world’s rich and varying possibilities by way of a seemingly endless accumulation of comparative smallnesses rather than by containing that rich variousness in a single large work, however magisterial. In his Notebooks – the great gathering place of the sources for so many of his writings – in 1889 and 1891, at a time when he was struggling both with large novelistic attempts at social realism and with ambitions for a career as playwright in the London theatre, he was drawn repeatedly and in recompense to the multiplicity and freedom of opportunities which the tale afforded him:

reviving, refreshing, confirming, consecrating, as it were, the wish and dream that have lately grown stronger than ever in me – the desire that the literary heritage, such as it is, poor thing, that I may leave, shall consist of a large number of perfect short things, nouvelles and tales, illustrative of ever so many things in life – in the life I see and know and feel – and of all the deep and the delicate – and of London, and of art, and of everything: and that they shall be fine, rare, strong, wise – eventually perhaps even recognized.

… by doing short things I can do so many, touch so many subjects, break out in so many places, handle so many of the threads of life.3

The plurality of James’s stories, together with the selectivity and compression necessary within each one of them, declare implicitly that there are other ways to tell each tale, and other tales to be told: taken together, his many tales approach the Jamesian dream of ‘everything’, a vast magnanimous inclusiveness of seeing and knowing and feeling, a great grasping of ‘the threads of life’.

In this selection, doubtless, individual inclusions and exclusions will disappoint individual readers. However, this volume, if it is not to fail, must give some sense of the imaginative, liberating largesse of this prolific and generous writer. The present introduction, too, will have gone wrong if it attempts what James himself does altogether better: here, then, in place of any attempt to summarize or ‘tell’ the stories which follow (although some plot details will be revealed), are some observations and contexts which readers may test against their experiences of the tales in this selection.

CREATING THE RECORD

Henry James embraced what some other writers in the nineteenth century feared: what Matthew Arnold had described as a growing awareness of the ‘world’s multitudinousness’.⁴ For James was uniquely placed to recognize, from the start, that the world was not reducible to a single understanding, however complex and capacious. Born in New York in 1843, as a child Henry James travelled with his family in Europe, receiving an idiosyncratic education. He crossed the Atlantic again, as a young adult travelling alone in England, France and Italy, before settling in England in 1876. But his toings and froings to the Continent and across the Atlantic, his literal and his imaginative voyagings, his comparings and contrastings, were never really over: even on his deathbed by the Thames in Chelsea, James continued to travel far and wide in his imagination, rearranging the entire world in his tenacious but now fragmenting mind. His elder brother, the philosopher William James, was led to conclude that Henry was ‘really… a native of the James family, and has no other country’,⁵ but even this may be too fraternally appropriative: Henry James was unique, an internationalist at a time when this signified, not today’s bland homogeneity and erosion of difference, but comedies and tragedies of distinctiveness and divergence. The tales, particularly the earlier works such as ‘Four Meetings’, ‘Daisy Miller’ and ‘The Pension Beaurepas’ here, are the lasting record of James’s appreciation of the international. Other tales here realize the fuller implications, beyond any literal contrast of European and American perspectives, of this international vision, and of the challenge which such a vision represents for the writer.

How is a writer to depict worlds so various? In 1884, in his great, ever hesitating, ever qualifying essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Henry James spoke up for fiction as history, for fiction as what we rather glibly call ‘realism’. He declared that the writer of fiction must ‘possess the sense of reality’. But which reality? James himself immediately expands into a wondering, complicating celebration of the mind’s relation with its worlds:

Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms… Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility, a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of consciousness, and catching every air-borne particle in its tissue. It is the very atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative – much more when it happens to be that of a man of genius – it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it converts the very pulses of the air into revelations… The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it – this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience… If experience consists of impressions, it may be said that impressions are experience, just as (have we not seen it?) they are the very air we breathe…6

‘Experience’ flows into ‘sensibility’, into ‘consciousness’; ‘experience’ is related to, and then equated with, ‘impressions’. From here James goes on, all gently and benignly, to proffer to the intending writer a piece of advice which perhaps only a Henry James could fulfil, a piece of advice baffling, exhausting, well-nigh impossible: ‘Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!’⁷

The terms for the great Jamesian drama – the encounter between the mind and the world, the romantic and the realistic, vision and fact, art and life – are already declaring themselves here; and he is already varying his emphasis and his priority, just as each of his tales varies in its particular configuration of that drama. Near the end of James’s life, H. G. Wells’s mocked ‘the elaborate copious emptiness’ of Jamesian style and described, with cruel comedy, James’s narrative as ‘a magnificent but painful hippopotamus resolved at any cost, even at the cost of its dignity, upon picking up a pea’.⁸ In reply and rebuke, Henry James declared: ‘It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of its process.’⁹ However, it was a few years earlier, in the Preface to the volume in the important New York Edition of those tales centred particularly on ‘the literary life’ (represented in this selection by ‘The Lesson of the Master’, ‘The Death of the Lion’ and ‘The Figure in the Carpet’), that James was to elaborate more publicly and more fully the argument for art in opposition to, and in rebuke of, actuality; he argued for imaginative possibilities above reality’s probabilities. Faced with the accusation that such tales focused on ‘supersubtle fry’ who were without precedent in real life, James defended an art which ‘implies and projects the possible other case, the case rich and edifying where actuality is pretentious and vain’. If art and life were not in accord, then ‘so much the worse for that life’. And James warmed to his audacious argument with his disbelieving reader:

What does your contention of non-existent conscious exposures, in the midst of all the stupidity and vulgarity and hypocrisy, imply but that we have been, nationally, so to speak, graced with no instance of recorded sensibility fine enough to react against these things? – an admission too distressing. What one would accordingly fain do is to baffle any such calamity, to create the record, in default of any other enjoyment of it; to imagine, in a word, the honourable, the producible case. What better example than this of the high and helpful public and, as it were, civic use of the imagination?… How can one consent to make a picture of the preponderant futilities and vulgarities and miseries of life without the impulse to exhibit as well from time to time, in its place, some fine example of the reaction, the opposition or the escape?¹⁰

However, in the stories here, we can also often find James taking a sharp look at ‘all the stupidity and vulgarity and hypocrisy… the preponderant futilities and vulgarities and miseries of life’, including those realities of the world of work and of ordinary people with which his writing is not usually associated. James himself worried that his talent did not stretch ‘downtown’, to the world of business, but was confined ‘uptown’, in New York and elsewhere, with the ladies. Nevertheless, the figure of Mr Ruck is the most sympathetic portrait in ‘The Pension Beaurepas’, an informed observation of a New York businessman, on unhappy holiday, failing in health and failing financially, as his wife and daughter continue only too well in their roles, spending his wealth in the ‘stores’ of Europe. The ugly horror of American business emerges again, in ghostly form, in ‘The Jolly Corner’. On the other side of the Atlantic, ‘The Birthplace’ begins with a wonderfully economical and sharp-eyed depiction of genteel poverty in Blackport-on-Dwindle. But the great work in this respect is ‘In the Cage’, combining an extraordinary particularity in its realization of the ordinary woman at work with – in a nouvelle notorious for its cryptic difficulties – an astonishingly direct diagnosis and denunciation of the late nineteenth-century aristocracy. The telegraphist hates them: ‘They’re too real! They’re selfish brutes.’

What could still remain fresh in her daily grind was the immense disparity, the difference and contrast, from class to class, of every instant and every motion… What twisted the knife in her vitals was the way the profligate rich scattered about them, in extravagant chatter over their extravagant pleasures and sins, an amount of money that would have held the stricken household of her frightened childhood, her poor pinched mother and tormented father and lost brother and starved sister, together for a lifetime.

This is not to suggest that the revelation of ‘stupidity and vulgarity and hypocrisy’ is limited to matters of class; when James turns to the life of the family, his attention appears similarly unremitting. The vileness of the Moreen parents in ‘The Pupil’ is hard to match; the children of ‘Greville Fane’ are pitilessly selfish, in fact murderous.

But James was never content merely to depict and to diagnose vain actuality. His tales also celebrate creative reaction. ‘Daisy Miller’ has been attacked for failing on both accounts, attacked both for its unpatriotic satirizing of the American girl and for its idealizing of her. Within the tale, Daisy Miller is the victim, among the expatriate American community in Europe, of too dogmatic, too confident, too single-minded readings: in this respect, the tale itself was to suffer from readings analogous to those inflicted on its eponymous heroine. In his Preface to this story James recalls how ‘in Italy again… in Venice… on the Grand Canal’, he was the recipient of such criticism. There two friends – again American expatriates – voice opposing views about the tale: one identifies in two young American girls they are watching on the terrace of a Venetian hotel ‘a couple of attesting Daisy Millers’. The other friend, however, protests that, in his portrayal of Daisy Miller, James ‘quite falsified… the thing you had had, to satiety, the chance of “observing”’. On this account, James has failed to produce a realistic and satiric diagnosis of the Daisy Miller type; he has misled critical judgement and indeed rendered a judgemental attitude impossible; he has been led astray by his ‘incurable prejudice in favour of grace’. The culmination of the attack and James’s reply reveal that, by the time he writes this Preface in the first decade of the twentieth century, he has become relaxed and explicit about an art which is not content merely to serve realism:

‘… Is it that you’ve after all too much imagination? Those awful young women capering at the hotel-door, they are the real little Daisy Millers that were; whereas yours in the tale is such a one, more’s the pity, as – for pitch of the ingenuous, for quality of the artless – couldn’t have been at all.’ My answer to all which bristled of course with more professions than I can or need report here; the chief of them inevitably to the effect that my supposedly typical little figure was of course pure poetry, and had never been anything else; since this is what helpful imagination, in however slight a dose, ever directly makes for.11

Both Morris Gedge in ‘The Birthplace’ and the telegraphist of ‘In the Cage’ might be said to exhibit ‘all too much imagination’. At the end of the latter nouvelle, the telegraphist finally sees ‘in the whole business… the vivid reflexion of her own dreams and delusions and her own return to reality’, and it falls, not to our telegraphist whose imaginings we have followed throughout this long tale, but to the butler Mr Drake to reveal the truth about the shabby amatory intriguings of the tale’s various telegram-sending aristocrats. In ‘The Birthplace’ Morris Gedge almost loses his job as guide and caretaker because of his initial inability to play along with the tourists’ need for stories about Shakespeare’s birthplace, and then, abandoning his critical sense for the creative, triumphantly does his job only too well in vastly embellishing the Shakespearean legend. We might read these two tales as satire, indeed as punitive revelations of illusion. Thus ‘In the Cage’ might take its place in the tradition of prose fiction – of which Jane Austen and George Eliot are famous exponents – which judges the delusions of young women led astray by reading cheap, romantic fiction. ‘The Birthplace’ is a trenchant and prescient critique of the ways in which culture has come to serve cynical commercial tourism: James predicted with extraordinary accuracy the dismal ‘Show’ of present-day Stratford, even down to the catering franchises, the ‘buffet farmed out to a great firm’. But this story, as it initially occurred to James and is recorded in his Notebooks,¹² ends with the protagonist denying Shakespeare, refusing to play to the needs of the tourists and being dismissed: wouldn’t that be enough to secure James’s satirical point – without need of the tale’s glorious, imaginative coda? And, in the case of ‘In the Cage’, would we as readers really prefer what the butler saw – the shoddy aristocratic connivings told to us by Mr Drake? There is an imaginative excess in both these tales, an excess centred on their protagonists, which compels our admiration. Both Morris Gedge – described as ‘really a genius’ – and the telegraphist are artists, and if their imaginings exhibit something of what James in ‘The Middle Years’ calls ‘the madness of art’, they are nonetheless artists of a kind remarkably close to James himself. In particular, the action of ‘In the Cage’ is, according to James, ‘simply the girl’s “subjective” adventure – that of her quite definitely winged intelligence’; and, like the reader, he too wonders that such a seemingly unpromising adventure should have ‘whirled us so far’.13 The telegraphist creates a huge adventure from mere scraps – the truncated staccato words and numbers of telegram messages. This ability to make so much out of so little proves to be an especially close parallel to Henry James’s own typical practice as a writer. It was often the case that others – at the dinner table and in other sociable circumstances – would give him ideas or ‘germs’ for stories and he himself wanted to hear them, but not too much of them – there was a limit to what he wanted to hear or to know since ‘anything more than the minimum… spoils the [creative] operation’.¹⁴

The tales here are a full and varied record of the worlds of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but they also resist those worlds to pursue ‘the reaction, the opposition or the escape’ and to cultivate an artistic consciousness in despite of and in rebuke of reality. They are of an inclusiveness which accommodates both the real and the imaginary, the actual and the creative.

A DRAMA OF SIGNS AND LANGUAGES

In ‘Four Meetings’, prior to what amounts, especially in pre-aircraft days, to her comically, pathetically brief day-trip – a mere thirteen hours – in Europe, the American heroine, Caroline Spencer, asks of our narrator: ‘Do you know the foreign languages?’ It is a question, variously posed and variously answered, which will structure the tale. The diverse replies received in the course of the story are revealingly equivocal: ‘After a fashion’; ‘Some kinds’; ‘I do, madam – tant bien que mal.’ James’s early stories play over what is literally a diverse array of European languages, but all his stories are dramas of translation. Realist novels often invite readers to enter their imaginatively realized worlds and, as it were, to leave words behind: language is offered merely as a transparent window on the world. By contrast, James’s novels and tales are always linguistically self-conscious. Writing on ‘The Question of Our Speech’, he explained the primacy of language:

All life therefore comes back to the question of our speech, the medium through which we communicate with each other; for all life comes back to the question of our relations with each other. These relations are made possible, are registered, are verily constituted, by our speech, and are successful… in proportion as our speech is worthy of its great human and social function; is developed, delicate, flexible, rich – an adequate accomplished fact. The more it suggests and expresses the more we live by it – the more it promotes and enhances life. Its quality, its authenticity, its security, are hence supremely important for the general multifold opportunity, for the dignity and integrity, of our existence.¹⁵

James tells stories through words but he also tells stories about words. They are the very stuff of his tales; quotation marks, italics and repetitions isolate words and phrases as objects in themselves to be held inquiringly up to the light, as it were, wondered at and puzzled over. Characters are forever picking up on each other’s words, repeating them and questioning them (‘The Pension Beaurepas’ offers such dialogue in particularly pure form). Such linguistic self-consciousness makes for a habit of voice in James’s tales which, even in the smallest details, calls the reader’s attention to different ways of thinking and to the different cultures represented by different languages, signs, idioms and conventions. A lot may be lost in translation. People may be lost in translation. Opportunities and constraints cannot always be translated. Signs may all too easily be misread or mistranslated. Above all, too dogmatic and single-minded a reading of people’s words and actions, of the people who speak and act – and, by extension, of stories about such people, can be deadening and destructive: that is the one message, the ‘figure in the carpet’, which these open and exploratory tales consistently offer their readers.

Is a ‘jeune fille’ the same thing as an ‘American girl’? And what is to become of Aurora Church (‘The Pension Beaurepas’) who is in the particular – and perhaps false – position of being neither? Aurora speaks four languages, but is she entirely sure that she knows (American) English? How does a ‘flirt’ differ from a ‘coquette’? How is Winterbourne to interpret Daisy Miller’s various sayings and doings? And how, in turn, are we to understand Winterbourne? Winterbourne will never be more wrong than when he believes that Daisy Miller was ‘easy to read’. Henry St George, the Master of ‘The Lesson of the Master’, is a ‘text… a style considerably involved, a language not easy to translate at sight’. His is a text which neither we nor the narrator shall ever satisfactorily resolve. Morgan Moreen, ‘The Pupil’, is ‘as puzzling as a page in an unknown language… Indeed the whole mystic volume in which the boy had been amateurishly bound demanded some practice in translation.’ Morgan’s baffling family speak ‘Ultramoreen’, ‘an ingenious dialect of their own, an elastic spoken cipher’. The greatest interpretative challenge among these tales is perhaps the compressed words and numbers of the telegrams which make for the drama of ‘In the Cage’. The greatest joke is ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, where as readers we are invited to worry over the interpretation of writings which are entirely withheld from us.

At the centre of this concern with reading and with languages is an obsession with names and naming.16 James’s Notebooks are often nothing more and nothing less than long lists of names, often gathered from real life – from the pages of that day’s Times for example – to be put to fictional use. Perhaps the peculiarities of his own name contributed to his fascination. Born into the burden of a famous family name, Henry James nevertheless had in one sense no name of his own but, until he was nearly forty years of age, was merely his father’s second son and namesake, Henry (or Harry) James Junior: the later title of ‘Master’ or ‘cher Maître’ which younger writers accorded him was clearly a welcome compensation.

Are Jamesian names telltale? Are names in direct accord with the realities they offer to describe? Or is the relation instead an ironic and inverted one? Or is there no such relation at all? James does not use names to fix character but, in keeping with his imaginative generosity, deploys names interrogatively and teasingly as part of the comic play of a story’s interpretative possibilities. Daisy Miller seems doubly ordinary – a common but pretty flower; a worthy but mundane occupation – and is mocked as such in Mrs Costello’s deliberate misrememberings of Daisy’s name as Miss Baker or Miss Chandler. But, in the course of the tale and at great cost, does not Daisy prove herself extraordinary under the cold eyes of Winterbourne? There is, moreover, another ironic naming in the same tale in the figure of Mrs Walker who does not in fact walk but travels by carriage and who, in one of the narrative’s great moments of confrontation, wishes that Daisy would do likewise. In ‘In the Cage’ names multiply riotously – the camply priapic Everard who is also the Captain, Philip, Phil, the Count, William, ‘the Pink ’Un’ and – an especial confusion – Mudge; Lady Bradeen at Twindle and Doctor Buzzard at Brickwood; Lady Ventnor, Mrs Bubb and Lord Rye; Fritz and Gussy and Mary and Cissy; Miss Dolman for whom it is always Cooper’s and never Burfield’s; the Mr Mudge who is not Captain Everard; Mr Buckton, Mr Drake, Mr Cocker and ‘Mr Cocker’s young men’. Yet the story’s heroine remains without a name just as she remains largely unnoticed and without an identity for her many customers throughout the tale. The only role which awaits her proves to be that of Mrs Mudge, a muddy smudge of a name. Yet her patient fiancé is greater – both more generous and more heroic – than his name. Like the telegraphist, Shakespeare goes unnamed in ‘The Birthplace’ – but for quite other reasons. The eponymous, much engaged heroine of ‘Julia Bride’ is destined, it seems, never to fulfil her name, beset as she is by the damaging attentions of the likes of Mrs George Maule in a very proper New York ‘not in sympathy with the old American freedom’. The ‘waning April days’ will see the failure of any relationship between John Marcher and May Bartram in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’.

James seems to take particular delight in the naming of artists, and in their soubriquets and pseudonyms. He relishes, for example, the suggestions of the vain and the feigning in the work of the novelist Greville Fane, who ‘wrote only from the elbow down’ and whose ‘real’ name – Mrs Stormer – is no less expressive. In ‘The Death of the Lion’, the lion in question, Neil Paraday, hovers between parody and paragon, while James has great fun with the aggressive futurity of the gossip columnist, Mr Morrow, and the cross-gendered novelists, Guy Walsingham, ‘a pretty little girl’, and Dora Forbes, the male, red-moustached author of The Other Way Round. Even the tales’ titles may involve naming jokes. This is the case with the misnomer of ‘Fordham Castle’, as we shall see below. It is true too of ‘The Pension Beaurepas’ where the plot, such as it is, turns on the eating of an ice-cream.

THE LIFE OF THE ARTIST

James’s writing gathers its energy from increasing uncertainty – at times empowering, at times frightening – about what life is, and what life should be, and about how that life should be represented in art. It is unsurprising in such circumstances that his art should become self-conscious and that so many of the tales here centre on the life of the artist. As the nineteenth century progressed, the artist’s claim to representation, and in particular to realistic representation, was being challenged by new media and by new technology: newspapers, advertising, photography. The written word, which assumed an intimacy between the individual writer and the individual reader, was challenged by the telegraph, which compressed eloquence into staccato phrases, numbers, and indeed mere clicks of sound and electrical impulses, and sent them over great distances, across oceans, rendering them at once more public, more anonymous and more cryptic. The telephone soon followed. In the tales here, in addition to the profusion of telegrams in ‘In the Cage’, one telegram precipitates ‘Greville Fane’ and another effects a major turn in the plot of ‘The Pupil’. Journalism, advertising and photography press in on and harry the various artists in, for example, ‘The Real Thing’, ‘The Death of the Lion’, ‘The Lesson of the Master’ and ‘Broken Wings’. The real thing became doubly problematic: the artist was unsure of the reality of his subject, and unsure of the adequacy of his medium in representing that subject. Print proliferated, yet the elegy for a written and verbal culture had begun.

‘The Real Thing’, with a double focus on the dilemma of the painter and on that of the socially displaced, is a humane and wittily paradoxical exposition of such matters. The artist narrator discovers that, as a source of inspiration for his art, he prefers his professional models to the ‘immensely’ photographed Monarchs, the ‘real thing’. When he works from the Monarchs, his art suffers. Yet Major Monarch and his wife, ‘the Beautiful Statue’, reduced to seeking paid work as artists’ models, are no more what they appear to be, no more the ‘real thing’, than are the professional models. The impoverished Monarchs are now hard pressed to keep up appearances and, as Major Monarch well knows, the couple are merely two among the many ‘thousands as good as yourself already on the ground’ and in straitened circumstances. The ironically named Monarchs go on to prove inadequate models, and serve momentarily as servants before being finally bought off and dismissed from the narrator’s sight. The social instability of which they are a symptom compounds the challenge of representation which the artist faces, and the story delights in the paradoxes and contradictions which such a challenge throws up. So the distinguished appearance of Major Monarch ‘would have struck me as a celebrity if celebrities often were striking’. The narrator learns that ‘a figure with a good deal of frontage was, as one might say, almost never a public institution’. The tale begins in a comic confusion over who – artist or models – is going to pay whom. The narrator declares a Wildean ‘preference for the represented subject over the real one: the defect of the real one was so apt to be a lack of representation’. Artistic drawings of Mrs Monarch turn out, topsy turvy, to look like nothing more than ‘a copy of a photograph’. And the narrative puns zanily on figures physical, artistic and financial, on what fits and is fitting, on copies and copiousness. In the course of the tale, the ‘real thing’ proves itself to be ‘the wrong thing’: reality and aesthetic rightness are no longer in any easy relation.

If life and art are in difficulties, then what of life and the artist? At the close of ‘The Middle Years’ the dying novelist Dencombe announces oddly but movingly: ‘We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’ Few of James’s artists have an easy time of it. It is remarkable how many tales here involve the death of the artist: ‘Greville Fane’, ‘The Middle Years’, ‘The Death of the Lion’, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, ‘The Real Right Thing’ and – stretching the term ‘artist’ to include men of letters – ‘The Abasement of the Northmores’. While death comes all too often and all too soon, life, in the form of reciprocated and realized love, seems to elude the artist. Or perhaps the artist deliberately evades love, or he is tricked by others into such evasion – as might be the case in ‘The Lesson of the Master’. Is such evasion motivated by a concern to preserve the fineness of high art? Is it perhaps a reflection of a fear of life, and a fear of sexuality in particular? The artist tales here are a set of variations on such questions, James repeatedly configuring and reconfiguring the problems, the pressures and the pleasures of the artistic life.

ON NOT BEING THE NOVEL

One way of thinking of these tales is as jokes at the novel’s expense, the tales enjoying a freedom and a fleetingness which the nineteenth-century novel in its vast interrelatedness is always denied. That joke is there in the very title of ‘Fordham Castle’: the narrative promises us a place and then never gets there. As a novelist James often enmeshed his writing in the vast complicating history which the great family house carries – one thinks pre-eminently of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, but also of The Spoils of Poynton and The Golden Bowl. He thus enmeshed himself in a novelistic tradition which goes back through George Eliot, the Brontës, Austen (as, for example, the very title Mansfield Park declares) to Henry Fielding and the eighteenth century and which goes forward to D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster. But the tale ‘Fordham Castle’ is a comic misnomer, avoiding the English castle and instead putting itself out ‘at board’ in an anonymous Swiss pension. The tale ends with one of its protagonists finally setting off for a minor part in the novelistic Fordham Castle; the other promises to follow – but only ‘as the ghost’. The encumbrances of marriage and paternity (or, more accurately, maternity) – the very stuff of the novel – are in this tale radically and abruptly dissolved. For example, Abel Taker’s identity flickers in the dark in the ‘little momentary flame’ of a struck match. Identities in such tales have a freedom and an elusiveness more modern, more frightening and more free than the novel traditionally can accommodate: names quickly change and multiply; gender seems fluid; even the distinction between being alive or dead is put in question; and pages crowd with alter egos, alibis, doubles and ghosts.

‘Broken Wings’ too is a joke at the novel’s expense: it is the story, not of a failed relationship, but of something which fails to be a relationship – and the curious final reparation in the coming together of Stuart Straith and Mrs Harvey in a mutuality of failure at the tale’s close. In the wonderfully elaborated joke of the tale’s opening, the protagonists hover uncertainly at the periphery of the novelistic events of a country-house weekend, but the meetings characteristic of novels do not get underway, since throughout luncheon and dinner ‘no sound and no sign from the other had been picked up by either’. Indeed Straith is left wondering at ‘the special oddity – for it was nothing else – of his being there at all’. ‘Broken Wings’ is, moreover, a vengeful snub to another great art form: our two characters go to the theatre, attending the opening night of a play set to run for three years and more, and manage to take in precisely nothing of the drama playing before them. These tales suggest versions and histories alternative to those which the novel and the theatre provide. ‘Greville Fane’ and ‘The Death of the Lion’ are stories told after the public story has been despatched by their respective narrators to newspapers and magazines. Victims in the publicly accredited world of the novel are allowed, in these stories, their private sorrows – and their private victories. Furthermore, such victories are not without an element of revenge, as in the case of ‘The Abasement of the Northmores’ where the widowed Mrs Hope spares Lady Northmore further public humiliation, but nonetheless cherishes her privately printed volume of intimate letters and – either selflessly or else perversely – wishes for her own death. It is precisely the element of vengefulness, the admission of negative feelings, which gives so many of these tales, predominantly of generosity and self-abnegation, their edge.

Typically these tales – even the early ‘Four Meetings’ – afford not the novelistic continuities of day-to-day living, but brief meetings, casual or formal, by arrangement or by chance, leaping over wide gaps of time and spanning vast distances among diverse locations. The tales put the eventfulnesses and significances of the nineteenth-century novel in question. ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ here, the story of a man in whose life precisely nothing is to happen, is the pre-eminent case. Even when they attempt what James once called ‘the large in a small dose’,17 his tales are without the solidity and continuity of specification which we associate with the novel. They speak instead of a more modern world – a various, uncertain and often uncanny world, one of potential and opportunity, but also of terror and waste.

AGAINST INTERPRETATION

In the light of such diversity and uncertainty, perhaps we should not be too quick in fixing these tales’ meanings. Particular tales here are salutary for the interpreter. Even to speak of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ – the story of the monomaniacal pursuit of Hugh Vereker’s literary meaning – is to become embroiled in its joke: we can become as sophisticated as we like – and critics have proved themselves extraordinarily sophisticated and ingenious – but, whatever we say, we are inevitably positing some figure in the carpet. It may be a secret, an absence, a misapprehension, even, as I would have it, a caution against over-zealous interpretation, but it still is a figure.¹⁸ The interpreters within the tale are nightmarish reflections of ourselves as readers: they turn the world upside down in their obsessive pursuit of literary meaning. Marriages, engagements, illnesses of brothers, deaths of mothers, husbands and best friends are subordinate, merely a means to interpretative fulfilment. Sexuality is displaced into hermeneutics. In this crazy world the narrator sees the revelation of the literary secret as the wedding night’s consummation – ‘For what else but that ceremony had the nuptials taken place?’ – and looks for signs of (intellectual) pregnancy in husbands:

Never, for a marriage in literary circles – so the newspapers described the alliance – had a lady been so bravely dowered. I began with due promptness to look for the fruit of the affair – that fruit, I mean, of which the premonitory symptoms would be peculiarly visible in the husband.

Both life and literature suffer as the narrator reveals that his obsession with Vereker’s meaning ‘damaged my liking’, destroying the pleasures of the texts: ‘Instead of being a pleasure the more they became a resource the less.’

In another cautionary tale for readers, ‘The Death of the Lion’, Neil Paraday, the literary lion in question, endures a fate perhaps worse than the ultimate one which awaits him at the tale’s close. He is made ‘a contemporary’: ‘the poor man was to be squeezed into his horrible age’. Such ostensible popularity involves remaking the artist to serve society’s image. It involves not reading him, and indeed literally losing the one copy of Paraday’s latest and last manuscript somewhere between Lady Augusta’s maid and Lord Dorimont’s man. It is perhaps inevitable that to appropriate an author, to render him our contemporary, is also, in some sense, to lose him. At present, academic criticism of James is focused on matters of gender, and James’s writings are daring to speak their homosexuality. Of May Bartram’s relationship with John Marcher in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, the narrative records: ‘The rest of the world of course thought him queer, but she, she only, knew how, and above all why, queer; which was precisely what enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the right folds.’¹⁹ Among the tales here, the veil is currently being professionally lifted in the cases of ‘The Pupil’, ‘The Middle Years’, ‘In the Cage’, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ and ‘The Jolly Corner’; and while these are strong and plausible readings they are also somewhat disappointing. They insist on the possible fact of a homosexual interpretation; they are less persuasive that the tales are saying anything distinctive and particular about homosexuality. While politically radical they are in method critically old-fashioned and somewhat oppressive: what is proffered initially as a possible meaning of a tale very quickly becomes the meaning. For all the political liberation they appear to offer, they narrow the possibilities of interpretation, and the pleasures of James’s texts are somehow lost amidst our contemporary political zeal.²⁰

In 1964 the American critic and thinker Susan Sontag published a wonderful polemical essay ‘Against Interpretation’.²¹ Her argument is particularly apposite to the short story and to Henry James’s tales, where the comparative brevity of these writings, and their diverse plurality, ask that we respect their reticence and their refusal to have the final authoritative say. We can bring various contexts – biographical, historical and critical – to bear on James’s tales; we can, for example, read them as marginal and illuminating commentary on the fulsome major novels; but we damage these tales, for ourselves and for future readers, if we fix their meanings, squeeze them into our own age and our own intellectual and political agendas. In place of interpretation Sontag argued for an ‘erotics of art’ – a phrase we might presently misunderstand because of our current emphasis on the sexualities of writing and on the politics of desire. But her emphasis was intended to return us to the experiential nature of art, to the ‘sensory experience’ as it unfolds in time. What we experience as we read Henry James – from individual sentences to the whole works which these sentences go to make up – is a delicate play of multiplying, ever transforming interpretative possibilities, an entangling, puzzling, pleasurable play of meaning.

James himself knew the value of the experience of reading; he repeatedly advised readers to take him slowly; and in his last tale, ‘A Round of Visits’, he wrote of ‘a momentary watcher – which is indeed what I can but invite the reader to become’.22 It is now time for the reader to take up that invitation and, given that it comes from a tale not reprinted here, eventually perhaps to extend the acquaintance with James’s tales even beyond those in this substantial volume.

NOTES

1. Randall Jarrell, ‘Stories’ (first published 1962), in The New Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1994), p. 8.

2. Henry James, Preface to ‘The Lesson of the Master’ (1908), in Literary Criticism: French Writers; Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1227.

3. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 54, 57.

4. The Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Foster Lowry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 97.

5. F. O. Matthiessen, The James Family: A Group Biography (1947; New York: Vintage Books, 1980), p. 303.

6. Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 52–3.

7. Ibid., p. 53.

8. Henry James and H. G. Wells: A Record of their Friendship, their Debate on the Art of Fiction, and their Quarrel, ed. Leon Edel and Gordon N. Ray (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), pp. 248, 249.

9. Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Allen Lane, 1999), p. 555.

10. Henry James, Preface to ‘The Lesson of the Master’, in Literary Criticism: French Writers, pp. 1229–30.

11. Henry James, Preface to ‘Daisy Miller’ (1909), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, pp. 1270–71.

12. Complete Notebooks, ed. Edel and Powers, p. 195.

13. Henry James, Preface to What Maisie Knew (1908), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, pp. 1170–71.

14. Henry James, Preface to The Spoils of Poynton (1908), in Literary Criticism: French Writers, p. 1138.

15. Henry James, The Question of Our Speech; The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), p. 10.

16. On the comedy of names generally, see Anne Barton, The Names of Comedy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); on James’s playful naming – and in particular on the implications for sexuality and gender of such play, see Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

17. Henry James, ‘The Story-Teller at Large: Mr Henry Harland’ (1898), in Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, p. 285.

18. For the important and influential argument that James’s narratives are dependent on a secret or an absent cause, see Tzvetan Todorov, ‘The Secret of Narrative’, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), pp. 143–78.

19. In Twentieth Century Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 166, John Ayto dates ‘queer’ meaning ‘homosexual’ to 1922 and states that the usage did not become widespread until the 1930s. This is, of course, long after James. However, evidence of word usage is never conclusive – not least in the case of language naming controversial or taboo subjects.

20. See, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic’, Epistemology of the Closet (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), pp. 182–212. Philip Horne has taken the pains to point out the inadequacies of such readings in his ‘The Master and the “Queer Affair” of “The Pupil”’, in Henry James: The Shorter Fiction – Reassessments (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 114–37.

21. Susan Sontag, ‘Against Interpretation’ (1964), in A Susan Sontag Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), pp. 95–104.

22. Henry James, ‘A Round of Visits’ (1910), in The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, Vol. 12, 1903–1910 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964), p. 449.

SELECTED TALES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

FURTHER READING

A HENRY JAMES CHRONOLOGY

A NOTE ON THE TEXTS