Reading Henry James

Published: 1865
Length: 16,300 words, 44 pages
Genre: life and love during wartime
Library of America volume: Complete Stories, 1864-1874
Etexts: The Henry James Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites, Project Gutenberg edition of the March, 1865, Atlantic Monthly

Henry begins The Story of a Year with this simple introduction:

My story begins as a great many stories have begun within the last three years, and indeed as a great many have ended; for, when the hero is despatched, does not the romance come to a stop?

This is then followed by a space, clearly setting the introduction off from the remainder of the story. Again, as in A Tragedy of Error, Henry puts himself forward, using first-person narration in this story, but, again, as in his first story, the narrator is not a character.

The “last three years” refers to the Civil War, which was to end a month after this story was published. Henry and his brother William did not fight in this war, but his other brothers Bob (Robertson) and Wilky (Wilkinson), did go off to fight. The smart brothers stayed home while the other two went to spill blood. Wilky was, in fact, seriously wounded during the war, while serving with the famous Massachusetts 54th, one of the first black infantry regiments in the war. This story may be Henry’s way of coming to terms with Wilky’s wounds and suffering. But it was also a way of writing a story that would resonate with the American world around him, after his first story which was set in France. And, perhaps, ever the market-savvy writer, it could be that Henry was writing about the zeitgeist in order to create a story that had a good chance of selling.

This story seems to be influenced by Hawthorne’s fables, at least in the beginning, with a tone that is much more florid than that of Henry’s first story, A Tragedy of Error. Here’s a long excerpt from the beginning of the story, that gives a good idea as to how Henry’s language is different:

They made their way up a long swelling mound, whose top commanded the sunset. The dim landscape which had been brightening all day to the green of spring was now darkening to the gray of evening. The lesser hills, the farms, the brooks, the fields, orchards, and woods, made a dusky gulf before the great splendor of the west. As Ford looked at the clouds, it seemed to him that their imagery was all of war, their great uneven masses were marshalled into the semblance of a battle. There were columns charging and columns flying and standards floating,—tatters of the reflected purple; and great captains on colossal horses, and a rolling canopy of cannon-smoke and fire and blood. The background of the clouds, indeed, was like a land on fire, or a battle-ground illumined by another sunset, a country of blackened villages and crimsoned pastures. The tumult of the clouds increased; it was hard to believe them inanimate. You might have fancied them an army of gigantic souls playing at football with the sun. They seemed to sway in confused splendor; the opposing squadrons bore each other down; and then suddenly they scattered, bowling with equal velocity towards north and south, and gradually fading into the pale evening sky. The purple pennons sailed away and sank out of sight, caught, doubtless, upon the brambles of the intervening plain. Day contracted itself into a fiery ball and vanished.

While there are hints of Henry’s future style, the prose here is overly Romantic; it’s overdone, full of adjectives, and, frankly, a bit mushy.

In this first part of the story, John Ford and Elizabeth Crowe are traipsing around the pastoral countryside, declaring their love to each other, and, in this badinage, they decide to become engaged. However, knowing he is due to go away to war soon, Ford asks Lizzie to say nothing. Ford is decked out in his Union uniform, and is awaiting orders to go to the front. When they return home (it is not explained why, but Ford’s mother is Lizzie’s guardian), Ford finds his orders awaiting him; he is to leave the next morning. Lizzie goes up to her room, and Ford tells his mother of their engagement, asking her to say nothing about it. Ford’s mother disapproves, but that doesn’t bother Ford one bit.

Henry seems, here, to be full of love himself, with an especially lyrical passage about Lizzie’s reaction to her engagement:

Elizabeth went up stairs buoyant with her young love. It had dawned upon her like a new life,—a life positively worth the living. Hereby she would subsist and cost nobody anything. In it she was boundlessly rich. She would make it the hidden spring of a hundred praiseworthy deeds. She would begin the career of duty: she would enjoy boundless equanimity: she would raise her whole being to the level of her sublime passion. She would practise charity, humility, piety, — in fine, all the virtues: together with certain morceaux of Beethoven and Chopin. She would walk the earth like one glorified. She would do homage to the best of men by inviolate secrecy. Here, by I know not what gentle transition, as she lay in the quiet darkness, Elizabeth covered her pillow with a flood of tears.

It seems as if Henry was already attuned to the feelings of young love, even though there is no evidence that he himself experienced these feelings. (He would experience them a bit later, with his cousin Minnie Temple.)

One interesting note in this story is the presence of Lizzie in Ford’s own home, meaning that, while technically not incestuous, this is psychologically an incestuous relationship. Leon Edel also suggests that the many Scottish names in the story recall Henry’s mother, who descended from a Scottish family, and the character of the mother, particularly later in the story, has some similarities with Henry’s own mother.

The second part of this story is pure narrative. (The story contains five numbered sections.) Henry begins by saying:

I have no intention of following Lieutenant Ford to the seat of war. The exploits of his campaign are recorded in the public journals of the day, where the curious may still peruse them. My own taste has always been for unwritten history, and my present business is with the reverse of the picture.

Indeed, the story is not about the war, but the home front, how, “when the columns of battle-smoke leave the field, they journey through the heavy air to a thousand quiet homes, and play about the crackling blaze of as many firesides.” This masterfully written section describes – tells, rather than shows – how Lizzie’s love slowly fades away. While Ford’s letters came often, containing, “long details of movements, plans of campaigns, military opinions and conjectures, expressed with the emphasis habitual to young sub-lieutenants,” “Lizzie answered in her own fashion. It must be owned that hers was a dull pen.”

As time passed, Lizzie grew weary:

John Ford became a veteran down by the Potomac. And, to tell the truth, Lizzie became a veteran at home. That is, her love and hope grew to be an old story. She gave way, as the strongest must, as the wisest will, to time.

In part three of the story, as Ford goes into winter quarters, “Miss Crowe received an invitation to pass the second fortnight in February at the great manufacturing town of Leatherborough.” Mrs. Ford is quite amenable to this idea, hoping that the girl will forget her son, and helps Lizzie prepare her wardrobe.

At a party, Lizzie meets Robert Bruce, and is immediately smitten by him. When it’s time to return home, while he is seeing her off on the train, he discusses the latest news from the front. There was a “scrimmage on the Rappahannock,” says Bruce. “Two of our regiments engaged, — the Fifteenth and the Twenty-Eighth. Didn’t you tell me you had a cousin or something in the Fifteenth?” They find a boy selling a New York newspaper which lists the casualties: John Ford, second lieutenant was listed as severely wounded.

Bruce finally left as the train started its journey. But Lizzie was left to ponder the news she had just received. Henry presents this with an overflowing of melodrama:

She had enough to do to think, or rather to feel. It is fortunate that the utmost shock of evil tidings often comes first. After that everything is for the better. Jack’s name stood printed in that fatal column like a stern signal for despair. Lizzie felt conscious of a crisis which almost arrested her breath. Night had fallen at midday: what was the hour? A tragedy had stepped into her life: was she spectator or actor? She found herself face to face with death: was it not her own soul masquerading in a shroud? She sat in a half-stupor. She had been aroused from a dream into a waking nightmare. It was like hearing a murder-shriek while you turn the page of your novel. But I cannot describe these things. In time the crushing sense of calamity loosened its grasp. Feeling lashed her pinions. Thought struggled to rise. Passion was still, stunned, floored. She had recoiled like a receding wave for a stronger onset. A hundred ghastly fears and fancies strutted a moment, pecking at the young girl’s naked heart, like sandpipers on the weltering beach. Then, as with a great murmurous rush, came the meaning of her grief. The flood-gates of emotion were opened.

When Lizzie returned home, Mrs. Ford was waiting, having received a telegram with the news. She would leave within the hour to go and be by his side and nurse him.

In part four of the story, Lizzie is alone and reflects on her love for the wounded Ford. Here Henry stabs a knife in this nascent love: “Young girls are prone to fancy that when once they have a lover, they have everything they need: a conclusion inconsistent with the belief entertained by many persons, that life begins with love.” Lizzie is despondent, and doesn’t know what to do. A Miss Cooper asks if she wants to come and stay with her and her brother, Doctor Cooper. Lizzie accepts. Soon after, Robert Bruce comes to town looking for her, and this cheers Lizzie up a great deal. He returns home, happy to have seen her.

Now the final part of the story begins. Lizzie receives a letter saying that Ford is dying, and shortly after, Bruce comes again to visit, and asks her to marry him. She accepts, hesitantly, perhaps because she thinks that Ford will not survive.

Four days later comes news that Ford is doing better, and will be coming home. Lizzie makes sure the house is clean, and, a few days later, “at twilight, John Ford was borne up to the door on his stretcher, with his mother stalking beside him in rigid grief, and kind, silent friends pressing about with helping hands.” This is the same way that Wilky was returned to his home from battle, where he would lay for some time. As Sheldon M. Novick says in his biography of Henry James:

They arrived at night. Wilky was on a stretcher, and at first there was a question whether he was not dead. He was pitifully haggard and seemed pitifully young. He had been wounded in the side and the leg, and the wounds were deeply infected. He lay on his stretcher in the entry hall of the new house in Spring Street, too weak after his journey even to be carried upstairs into a bedroom.

Ford does not live; his wounds are too serious. (Unlike Wilky who does survive his wounds.) Before dying, he tells Lizzie, “Your heart has found its true keeper; so we shall all three be happy. Tell him I bless him and honor him.” When she sees Bruce after Ford’s death, she makes it clear that she will no longer marry him. “I mean justice to my old — old love.” But Bruce doesn’t want to accept this. He wants to follow her into her house to confront her, and she says, “I forbid you to follow me!” And the story ends with the uncertain line, “But for all that, he went in.”

While this story is melodramatic, and the prose is at times excessively ornate, Henry, in his first signed story, manages to weave a complex tale of love, loss, betrayal and redemption. Robert Gale says this story is “crudely written,” but I disagree. While Henry had not yet refined his prose style, the themes treated in this story, and the overall structure, are quite mature. In a way, the five-part story recalls the traditional pattern of Shakespeare’s plays, and this story does have its Shakespearean aspects. (There is even a moment in the story where Henry says that Lizzie had never read Romeo and Juliet.)

This early story has its weaknesses, but it is far from a sophomoric work of prose. Henry’s style is refined, though lacking in the subtlety that will be his trademark later in his career. The theme of this story, which recalls the travails of his brother Wilky, is one that he seems to take very personally. Finally, the lack of a firm ending, as in A Tragedy of Error, is something that Henry will come back to often in the future.