Reading Henry James

Published: 1866
Length: 14,300 words, 36 pages
Genre: artists, love and money
Library of America volume: Complete Stories, 1864-1874
Etext: Project Gutenberg edition of the February, 1866, Atlantic Monthly

This is the first of Henry’s stories featuring artists, a type of character he will explore often in his fiction, though in this story, the art itself is secondary. An unnamed narrator is telling the story of love and marriage between a rich young painter, Locksley (his first name is not given), and Esther Blunt. The story begins as follows:

Do you remember how, a dozen years ago, a number of our friends were startled by the report of the rupture of young Locksley’s engagement with Miss Leary?

Henry begins by telling us of an event that is not part of this story, but may have led to it. Locksley was jilted, apparently, by this Josephine Leary, causing him to go off into nature to find himself, and to see things differently. In order to tell this story, Henry creates a narrator who inherited a number of personal effects of the painter, including his diary.

He left a mass of papers on all subjects, few of which are adapted to be generally interesting. A portion of them, however, I highly prize, — that which constitutes his private diary. It extends from his twenty-fifth to his thirtieth year, at which period it breaks off suddenly.

The narrator’s presentation is two long chapters, after which the remainder of the story is excerpts from the diary itself. So following a brief introduction by a narrator, we then have a story written in the first person by one of the protagonists.

Locksley’s diary begins with an entry in a town called Cragthorpe. He has set out to see the scenery of an area on the sea, and is enchanted by it. Staying at a tavern, he decides he wants to find a house in which to board, but the innkeeper was of no help. Setting out in a small rented boat, Locksley finds a quite little cove, “So bright, so still, so warm, so remote from the town, which lay off in the distance, white and semicircular!” He anchors his boat and wanders for a while. After the tide has gone out, he cannot use his boat to return to his lodgings, and he hails a man in a sailboat who picks him up. The sailor, Richard Blunt, “though most people [...] call me Captain, for short,” inquires as to Locksley’s “titles and pretensions.” Locksley replies, and tells the reader what his is about:

I told him no lies, but I told him only half the truth; and if he chooses to indulge mentally in any romantic understatements, why, he is welcome, and bless his simple heart! The fact is, that I have broken with the past. I have decided, coolly and calmly, as I believe, that it is necessary to my success, or, at any rate, to my happiness, to abjure for a while my conventional self, and to assume a simple, natural character. How can a man be simple and natural who is known to have a hundred thousand a year? That is the supreme curse. It’s bad enough to have it: to be known to have it, to be known only because you have it, is most damnable. I suppose I am too proud to be successfully rich. Let me see how poverty will serve my turn. I have taken a fresh start. I have determined to stand upon my own merits. If they fail me, I shall fall back upon my millions; but with God’s help I will test them, and see what kind of stuff I am made of. To be young, to be strong, to be poor,—such, in this blessed nineteenth century, is the great basis of solid success. I have resolved to take at least one brief draught from the pure founts of inspiration of my time.

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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.

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Published: 1864
Length: 8,000 words, 21 pages
Genre: mistaken identity and death
Library of America volume: Complete Stories, 1864-1874

Henry James’ first short story, A Tragedy of Error, was published in the long-defunct Continental Monthly in February, 1864. Published anonymously, Henry James never admitted that this story was his, and it was Leon Edel who “discovered” it. This story, with its love triangle, mistaken identity, and death, was inspired by Léone Léoni, by George Sand, one of James’ favorite authors. It harkens forward to the stories of Guy de Maupassant, which often contain paradoxes of identity and confusion, and whose denouements appear often in the final sentence of the stories.

Louis Auchincloss, in Reading Henry James, says that of the early stories (that is, those up to Daisy Miller), except for three of them, A Passionate Pilgrim, The Madonna of the Future and Madame de Mauves, “none of them would be apt to be included in any discriminating anthology of American short stories.” While this may be true, and these early stories are not among the best written in America, we’ll see that some of them are very good, and many of them are fine examples of the type of work Henry would do later.

Henry introduces himself as the narrator in the very first paragraph:

A low English phaeton was drawn up before the door of the post office of a French seaport town. In it was seated a lady, with her veil down and her parasol held closely over her face. My story begins with a gentleman coming out of the office and handing her a letter.

It is interesting that in the first paragraph of Henry’s first story he puts himself in the spotlight, presenting himself as the storyteller. (Not by name, of course, but as a first-person narrator who is not a character.) While this may be seen as a gauche procedure by a novice author, it has significance for the importance Henry holds, throughout his career, of the “narrator.”

The story itself is simple. An adulteress, Hortense Bernier, and her lover, Vicomte Louis de Meyrau, are in a French seaport town, and the woman receives a letter from her crippled husband, saying he is returning after two years’ absence. She hires a boatman to fetch the husband from his ship and kill him, but the “tragedy of error” is that the boatman kills Louis instead of the husband.

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Published: 1896
Length: 15,400 words, 37 pages
Genre: artists and their arts
Library of America volume: Complete Stories, 1892-1898
Penguin edition: The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories
Etext: Gutenberg

Published in 1896, this story belongs to the end of Henry James’s “middle period”; more specifically, it was written shortly after Henry’s singular failure in the theater, during which he was booed during curtain calls for Guy Domville, one of his plays. I have chosen to start by looking at this story, before embarking on my chronological reading of Henry’s fiction, because of the subject, which, I think, has particular relevance to my reading project.

Henry wrote about this story in his notebook, in a long entry on October 24, 1895:

“I seem to see a little subject in this idea, that of the author of certain books who is known to hold–and to declare as much, au besoin, to the few with whom he communicates–that his writings contain a very beautiful and valuable, very interesting and remunerative secret, or latent intention, for those who read them with a right intelligence–who see into them, as it were—bring to the perusal of them a certain perceptive sense.

[...]

“His great amusement in life is really to see if anyone will ever see it…”

That, then, is what Henry would call the “germ” of the story. His notebook entry goes on to sketch out the plot that will examine this “figure in the carpet.”

In the story, an unnamed narrator, a minor critic, writes about the latest novel by Hugh Vereker for a publication called The Middle. He finds this author “clever,” and, shortly after the review is published, meets Vereker at a weekend party. A person there has a copy of the publication, and gives it to Vereker to read. He dismisses it as “the usual twaddle,” and says that the author “doesn’t see anything.” As the narrator is heading off to his bedroom, he crosses Vereker who apologizes for his comments, saying that he only just found out that the narrator was the author of the “little notice.” But the two sit down to discuss this, and Vereker’s work in general.
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