Reading Henry James
The long and short of his art of fiction.
Henry James seems ripe for parody: the meandering sentences, with their intricate choreography of subordinate clauses; the insistent emphasis on the ineffability of what the characters are trying to express; the minute-by- minute attention to the minutiae of social exchange and evasion; the rarefied experience of Americans abroad, as their awkward energies collide with the elegance and etiquette of European sophistication; the endless patience with which the author pursues nuances of sensation, like a naturalist stalking elusive butterflies — it can all be a little maddening. And yet: what Henry knew, and what he translated into the art of fiction, was just how much of life is in fact felt rather than acted out. He was keenly aware of how much more of our time is spent in worry, or regret, or anticipation, than in sureness or endeavor, and of how much more closely we live to our feelings than to our ideas (unless, of course, we’re fooling ourselves, and maybe others, with the kind of unknowing self-deception often on display in James’s pages). Which is to say that what James explored in his ruminating prose, with a scrutiny no previous novelist had applied, was the character of our interior life: the privacy in which so much of our existence is passed and in which, ultimately, we find, or lose, our way. James intuited that our weightiest moments are internal and often unresolved, and it’s his arresting skill in measuring those moments that gives his work its special aura. His calibrations of consciousness were captured in fictions long and short, each offering his readers distinctive pleasures, both embodying the seductive charms of a storytelling suffused with an eloquent sympathy.
The Portrait of a Lady
A Woman of Independent Means
James’s novels grew in sophistication and expressive sensitivity throughout his long career, culminating in a trio of late-period revelations: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). Yet his masterpiece in the form remains The Portrait of a Lady, published in 1881. We can even witness his fictional artistry mature in one of that book’s key scenes, in which his protagonist, Isabel Archer, sits alone in her drawing room through a quiet night, meditating on the ruins of her marriage to the supercilious aesthete Gilbert Osmond. For page upon page, no action unfolds other than the gradual dawning of both the morning and her self-awareness. She ponders how she — who once seemed so original a young woman in possessing “intentions of her own” rather than expecting a man to furnish her with a destiny — has come to the grim reality of her present unhappiness, shaped with perverse connoisseurship by her husband: “She had effaced herself when he first knew her; she had made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was.”
In the seclusion of that room, Isabel remembers how capacious her character is, and might be again. On the surface, The Portrait of a Lady is about an American ingenue who charts a singular path into the wider world only to find her singularity no match for that world’s designs and duplicities; at its depth, it’s about how intrepid solitude must become to help an individual maintain her identity under the onslaught of society’s charms and expectations. The novel hurtles toward a close in which Isabel is surprised by a predictable death in the family, an unforeseen passion, and the impulsive purpose of both duty and identity. Her departure from England for Italy on the book’s final page has left generations of readers disappointed in her seeming acquiescence to an unhappy fate: is she headed back to Osmond? But James makes no declaration about her motives or intent. All we know is that she has started toward Rome and some undetermined future.
The irresolution of this massive novel is the author’s deference to the vitality of his protagonist, and to the diffidence she must turn to action if she is to take to heart the admonition of an undaunted suitor before her departure: “You must save what you can of your life.” In not imagining Isabel’s fate to completion, James grants her a reality few fictional characters ever earn, giving her story a secrecy so profound, a privacy so telling, that it may help readers save what they can of their own.
The Aspern Papers
A Tale of Venice and Obsession
It’s no surprise that the name Henry James will conjure, for many readers, visions of enormous novels complicated by intricate sentences. But James was prolific in shorter form, too, writing more than a hundred tales, a good number of which are longer than conventional short stories. In these works, the parenthetical probing that characterizes his novels’ narration — embodied so often in the clausal hesitations and qualifications that can make the sense of his sentences hard to hold fast — gives way to more direct dramatization of James’s explorations of heart and mind. Although the brilliant and chilling Turn of the Screw (1898) and the alluring Daisy Miller (1879) are more famous among James’s smaller gems, The Aspern Papers — with its Venetian setting, literary preoccupations, psychological tension, and moody suspense — may be the most perfect distillation of the author’s storytelling gifts. All of James’s tales are ghost stories of a sort, the characters haunted by some absent person, unattainable ideal, or elusive memory that exerts an uncanny influence on their conduct, evoking a sense of menace that is distinctively his.
In The Aspern Papers the ghost is the famous (and invented) poet Jeffrey Aspern, and the ghost-hunter is the tale’s unnamed narrator, the devoted co-editor of Aspern’s work who has never had occasion to speak to a person who actually knew the poet. When he discovers that an old lover of the poet lives on, sequestered in a decrepit Venetian palace with her spinster niece, he suspects she has some of Aspern’s papers — and there’s nothing he won’t do to get them: “Hypocrisy, duplicity are my only chance. I’m sorry for it, but there’s no baseness I wouldn’t commit for Jeffrey Aspern’s sake.” Presenting himself on the doorstep of the Misses Bordereau as a would-be lodger, he worms his way closer to his literary treasure, and, heartlessly, into the niece’s heart.
Felicities of style abound; describing the Bordereaus’ abode, James writes, “It was not particularly old, only two or three centuries; and it had an air not so much of decay as of quiet discouragement, as if it had rather missed its career.” And the evocations of Venice are as good as any lovers of that city will ever come across:
. . . with its little winding ways where people crowd together, where voices sound as in the corridors of a house, where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles of furniture and shoes never wear out, the place has the character of an immense collective apartment, in which Piazza San Marco is the most ornamented corner and palaces and churches, for the rest, play the part of great divans of repose, tables of entertainment, expanses of decoration.
It’s a perfect setting indeed for a tale of obsession, heartbreak, and civilized horror.
