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The Next Time

March 29, 2012 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Next Time (1895) comes from volume nine of the Complete Tales of Henry James featuring stories he composed between 1892 and 1898. The twelve volume set was issued in the UK as a very handsome edition by Rupert Hart-Davis between 1962 and 1964, edited and with introductions by Leon Edel. But for reasons I have never been able to discover, volumes nine and ten of this edition are now rare collector’s items.

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

My reading of this story was from the print-on-demand paperback reprint from Digireads.com. These editions are clearly produced by optical character recognition (OCR) scans of some original text, and are flawed by occasional mistakes in spelling and punctuation. A much more reliable source is the Library of America edition, the four volumes of which are fully edited to scholarly standards.

The other late and great stories in this volume include the so-called ‘ghost story’ Owen Wingrave (1892), his satires of literay life The Coxon Fund (1894) and The Death of the Lion (1894), and his puzzle of literary interpretation The Figure in the Carpet (1896).

The Next Time – critical commentary

The main theme

There are two issues at play in the story that James treated extensively in his shorter works around this period at the end of the century. One is the reputation and standing of the creative artist – in this instance of being under-appreciated except to a discerning few. The second is the commercial imperatives of the literary marketplace which always seem to be in conflict with the very artistic integrity from which they draw their kudos. One of his next stories John Delavoy (1898) returned to the same issues three years later.

Ray Limbert fails as a journalist and an editor because his artistic tastes are too refined for The Blackport Beacon and despite his own wishes to court popularity and commercial success, he cannot help himself producing work which is high quality.

We are given to believe that whilst his prosperity gradually declines (he is forced to leave London and live in the country) his artistic achievements continue to soar, even if they are only appreciated by the narrator. In other words he is commercially unsuccessful, but he continues to write masterpieces.

The structure

The story is told in five numbered sections which follow a straightforward chronological sequence – from the narrator’s securing a position for Limbert on the Beacon up to the point of the novelist’s death. But these sections are preceded rather curiously by an un-numbered introduction that deals with events that take place eighteen years later. Jane Highmore asks the narrator to write a critique of her work which will put her on a par with Limbert, whose work has been a highly revered flop. “She yearned to be, like Limbert, but of course only once, an exquisite failure”. The irony here is that she is in fact a commercially successful novelist, but she is seeking the distinction of being amongst the neglected and unsucceful elite.

This passage is curious in the sense that it is not, nor indeed cannot be referred to again – because it happens beyond the time frame of the main narrative. But it is connected thematically with the issue of the role of the narrator. Jane Highmore selects the narrator to write an article about her because he has established a reputation as a critic with a talent for spoiling the chances of those he writes about.

She meant that of old it had always appeared to be the fine blade, as some one had hyperbolically called it, of my particular opinion that snapped the silken thread by which Limbert’s chance in the market was wont to hang. She meant that my favour was compromising, that my praise was fatal.

The un-named narrator

As in many of the stories he wrote around this time, James used the device of an un-named narrator to deliver the events. In some instances this allowed him to bring into play the literary device of the unreliable narrator – the person telling the tale whose word we cannot necessarily trust, who gives what is obviously a distorted account of events, or who interprets them in a manner which is at variance with what is obvious to the reader.

James’s skill lies in providing the reader with sufficient evidence – almost behind his narrator’s back, as it were – to make an alternative judgement on what is happening. The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers are well-known cases in point.

But here there is no real ironic distance between the narrator and the reader. We are invited to take the narrator’s account at face value, and therefore we must take it on trust that Ray Limbert’s novels are as accomplished as we are told.

This is one of the reasons why the story is less satisfying than it otherwise might be – because the narrator gives us no concrete examples of Limbert’s talent. He describes the achievement of The Middle Key and The Hidden Heart entirely in extended metaphors of approval:

It happens not to be given to Limbert to fail. He belongs to the heights—he breathes there. he lives there, and it’s accordingly to the heights I must ascend.

And yet in fact Limbert loses both his job on the Beacon and as magazine editor because of his association with the narrator, and he even seems to be aware of his negative influence when he implores him not to write an article praising his work. “My dear fellow, I think I’ve done it this time, if you’ll only keep quiet.”

Is the narrator therefore more unreliable than is at first apparent? Certainly there is every conscious intention in the Notebooks that James intended this.

I just, after all, dish him …and on my head is the responsibility. I am the blighting critic.

It’s interesting to note, a propos the un-named narrator, that James identifies completely with him in the notes, writing in the first person “I am a critic who doesn’t sell, ie, whose writing is too good—attracts no attention whatever.” he makes no distinction at all between himself and his narrator.

Certainly the narrator’s actions result in Limbert being unappreciated and his fortunes going into decline. And yet there is nothing else in the text of the story or the Notebooks entries to suggest that James intended us to see the narrator as a malevolent force. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t open to us to do so.

A secondary theme

In addition to the main theme of literary reputations, the story also deals with the issue of tensions between Art and domestic life which were a recurrent problem for James. The question was – to marry or to stay single?

Ray Limbert cannot afford to marry Maude without an income to provide for her. But the Beacon journalism pays enough for him to finish his novel The Major Key, against which he secures an advance. This gives him the wherewithal to get married, after which Maude produces three children and becomes an invalid.

The picture of Limbert’s domestic life is clearly one conjured up in the imagination of any bachelor hovering between marriage and independence, and looking for reasons to justify selecting the latter

Limbert’s study was behind the dining-room, with folding doors not impervious to the clatter of the children’s tea … It was Upstairs that the thunder gathered … that Mrs Limbert had her babies and her headaches, that bells forever jangled at the maids, that everything imperative in short took place—everything that he had somehow, pen in hand, to meet and dispose of in the little room on the garden-level.

His lack of commercial success leads to that picture growing even worse. He lives beyond his means and is forced to leave London to live “mainly in a village on the edge of a goose green” where he is burdened with yet another two children.

This is clearly what Cyril Connolly called ‘the pram in the hallway’ – that is, family life as a distracting and burdensome brake on artistic freedom and creativity. Limbert does in fact keep writing at his unfinished and ironically entitles novel Derogation [‘lessening of authority, position, and dignity’] but it is this which brings his life to an end.

It’s as if James were conjuring up scenarios for himself, to try out or justify his own decision to remain a bachelor. This was something he managed very successfully, continuing to produce great fiction almost to the end of his life. Some critics observe that he seemed to do this at the expense of engagement in emotional life – but that is a private rather than an artistic matter.

The Next Time – study resources

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Complete Tales (Vol 9) – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

Selected Tales – Penguin Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Next Time – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Next Time – plot summary

Preface. A literary critic and narrator of the story is asked by a successful popular novelist June Highmore to write an article about her that will make her famous, even if she is regarded as an artistic failure.

Part I. The narrator goes back in time to give an account of how at June Highmore’s request he secured a journalist’s job for her brother-in-law Ray Limbert, writing for a northern newspaper the Blackport Beacon. Limbert is an aspiring novelist who needs the income from journalism in order to get married. The narrator publishes a collection of literary impressions, and Limbert puffs it in the Beacon, from which he is sacked for not being chatty enough.

Part II. Limbert subsequently finds employment in occasional journalism whilst completing his next novel, The Major Key. The narrator vouches for its quality to a publisher, who releases it as a magazine serial. When it is published, the novel is a commercial flop, and Limbert becomes burdened with domestic responsibilities, three children, and an ailing wife.

Part III. Limbert is suddenly offered an editorial job on a literary magazine for a one year trial period. He has secretly run up debts by living beyond his means. He decides to become a successful writer – by which he means to make money. The narrator fears that he will think less of him if he succeeds, but supports him in his hidden plan to lower the standards of the magazine. Limbert publishes a new novel, which the narrator thinks is very good quality work.

Part IV. However, Limbert is sacked form the magazine because he has not cultivated the public, but has published his friend the narrator on a regular basis. He is replaced on the magazine by ‘a lady humorist’.

Part V. He is forced to move out of London and live in the country on reduced means. The narrator gradually realises that he is incapable of being commercially successful. Limbert continues to produce worthwhile work, but eventually dies in obscurity.

Principal characters

I	the un-named narrator, a writer and literary critic
Mrs Jane Highmore	a successful popular lady novelist
Cecil Highmore	her strict and practical husband
Ray Limbert	a journalist and novelist
Maud Stannace	Limbert’s wife
*The Blackport Beacon*	a northern newspaper with London correspondents
Mr Bousefield	the editor of a monthly literary magazine
Minnie Meadows	a lady humorist

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

Washington Square (1880) is a superb early short novel, It’s the tale of a young girl whose future happiness is being controlled by her strict authoritarian (but rather witty) father. She is rather reserved, but has a handsome young suitor. However, her father disapproves of him, seeing him as an opportunist and a fortune hunter. There is a battle of wills – all conducted within the confines of their elegant New York town house. Who wins out in the end? You will probably be surprised by the outcome. This is a masterpiece of social commentary, offering a sensitive picture of a young woman’s life.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The Aspern Papers (1888) is a psychological drama set in Venice which centres on the tussle for control of a great writer’s correspondence. An elderly lady, ex-lover of the writer, seeks a husband for her daughter. But the potential purchaser of the papers is a dedicated bachelor. Money is also at stake – but of course not discussed overtly. There is a refined battle of wills between them. Who will win in the end? As usual, James keeps the reader guessing. The novella is a masterpiece of subtle narration, with an ironic twist in its outcome. This collection of stories also includes three of his accomplished long short stories – The Private Life, The Middle Years, and The Death of the Lion.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

The Spoils of Poynton (1896) is a short novel which centres on the contents of a country house, and the question of who is the most desirable person to inherit it via marriage. The owner Mrs Gereth is being forced to leave her home to make way for her son and his greedy and uncultured fiancee. Mrs Gereth develops a subtle plan to take as many of the house’s priceless furnishings with her as possible. But things do not go quite according to plan. There are some very witty social ironies, and a contest of wills which matches nouveau-riche greed against high principles. There’s also a spectacular finale in which nobody wins out.
Buy the book from Amazon UK
Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

More tales by James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Other House

May 6, 2011 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Other House (1896) was first conceived as a stage play called The Promise. It was converted into a novel and first appeared in the London Illustrated News, then later as a single-volume novel published by Heinemann in 1896. Almost ten years later it was re-converted into a play. But neither the earlier nor the latest dramatised version ever reached the stage.

The decade of the 1890s was a period in which James suffered from the disappointment of his calamitous experiments with the theatre. But he was nothing if not an efficient housekeeper of the materials he had generated. Dramatic plots he had first created for the stage were turned into prose fiction – even though their origins show through in the volume of dialogue which dominates the text.

The Other House is also unusual in James’s oeuvre in that it is a murder mystery. Many of his other works flirt closely with illegal acts and certainly contain many forms of death – but this novel embeds beneath its welter of conversation the deliberate murder of a child. It’s also a murder which goes unpunished.

The Other House – critical commentary

Literary critics have passed generally unfavourable comment on The Other House on the grounds that the muder of a child is inconsistent with the rest of Henry James’s work, and that the psychological motivation of the characters is rather improbable.

This view has two weaknesses, the first of which is that the governess in The Turn of the Screw (written around the same time) frightens to death the child Miles because of her neurotic obssessions. The second is that the person guilty of the crime in The Other House, Rose Armiger, is quite obviously a ruthless and ‘bad heroine’. She comes from a lower class of society than the other characters (with an income of only £200 per annum) and must remove the one obstacle that stands in the way of her snaring Tony.

She and the ‘good heroine’ Jean Martle are not only in love with the same man but deeply antagonistic to each other. She has every reason for wishing to blame the murder onto her rival, and thus eliminate two impediments at the same time.

The only problem, given such a tightly choreographed series of events, is why she should announce her engagement to Dennis Vidal only a few moments before commiting the murder which she hopes will clear her way to securing Tony.

Presumably, one might argue, that rather like many other unscrupulous villains, she wishes to keep all her options open. One might also argue that in declaring her engagement (which she does before Dennis has actually proposed) she thereby deflects suspicion from herself. She would also certainly have had no compunction in ditching Dennis a second time if her plan had been successful.

Certainly the motivation and behaviour of the other characters is consistent and credible. Dennis is fatally ‘smitten’ with Rose. Jean is heroically devoted to Tony and his child. Paul is a naive young man casting around in an adult milieu, propelled by a controlling mother. Dr Ramage acts entirely unethically in covering up the crime, but he does so in order that the good name of an upper-class family (who are also his employers) should not be sullied.

James is no stranger to ambiguous conclusions in his work. Everyone in this story gets off scott free – except that it is assumed that Rose will have to live out her emigrant existance in China with a heavily burdened conscience.

It only remains to observe that given the circumstances obtaining at the conclusion, Jean is actually free to get her man after all.

Dramatic unity

In 1890 Henry James began his ill-fated attempt to succeed in the theatre. The story is now well known. He wrote several plays which successive producers turned down, and when finally his Guy Domeville was staged in 1895 it was greeted on its first night with a 15 minute curtain call of booing and jeering. James gave up the stage, put his dramatic ambitions behind him, and returned to the novel.

But what is not so well known (or observed) is that he retained the plots of these failures, and some of the novels he produced in the wake of this decision are heavily influenced by theatrical conventions and the mechanics of the theatre. The Awkward Age (1898) for instance is a story almost entirely composed of conversations between characters as they visit each others’ drawing rooms.

The Other House (1896) uses the same technique but focuses dramatic interest even more intensely into three ‘acts’ set in only two adjacent and very similar locations. The characters walk on and off ‘stage’ in carefully choreographed sequences, exchanging the information which constitutes the narrative.

Indeed the whole of the first part of the novel (one hundred pages) follows the Aristotelian ideal of unity of time, place, and action. It takes place in one short period of time in one location. It’s a story made for the theatre, and the strategies for getting the players on and off stage are as creakingly evident as the flapping scenery of a painted backdrop.

It is in fact a three act murder mystery, and was first conceived as the scenario for a stage play in 1883 called The Promise, but was turned down by theatrical producers. James certainly made the best of his opportunities for re-cycling the carefully planned dramatic material with which he filled his notebooks.

The Other House – study resources

The Other House – New York Review Books – Amazon UK

The Other House – New York Review Books – Amazon US

The Other House – Everyman Classics – Amazon UK

The Other House – Everyman Classics – Amazon US

The Other House – Kindle eBook edition

The Other House – (unabridged) audio download edition

The Other House – notes on the text

The Other House – eBook edition

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Other House – plot summary

Book First. A bank is controlled by two families, the Beevers and the Breams who live in two adjacent contry houses separated by a river with a connecting bridge. In Part I of the novel the characters assemble at Bounds, the Bream house. Tony Bream’s wife Julia is ill following the birth of their daughter Effie. She makes her husband promise that in the event of her death he will not re-marry whilst their daughter is still alive. At the same time, Rose Armiage, an impecunious friend of the Breams is due to marry Dennis Vidal, a clerk in the ‘Eastern office’ with prospects, but they quarrel over her attachment to the Breams and break off their engagement. Vidal goes back to China.

Book Second. Events take place four years later at Eastmead, the Beever house, following the death of Julia Bream. Effie’s birthday is being celebrated. Interest is focussed on Paul Beever, a young man who has inherited a half share in the bank and whose mother wishes to see him married – possibly to Jean Martle, Mrs Beever’s cousin. This match is encouraged by both Tony Bream and Rose Armiger in what they claim is Paul’s best interest.

But Jean refuses the offer, saying that she will never be marry anyone. Dennis Vidal on the same day has arrived back from China, much richer, to enquire after Rose, who announces publicly that she will now accept his offer of marriage. During the social flurry of these events the child Effie goes missing, and is discovered dead in the river by Dr Rammage. Her father Tony confesses that he has killed her.

Book Third. Events take place in the same location, immediately following this announcement. A series of characters interview each other, during the course of which it emerges (very obscurely) that Rose has killed the child and tried to put the blame onto Jean, her rival in love for Tony Bream (and as a way of circumventing the promise made to his former wife).

Dr Ramage arranges to cover up the crime, claiming there has been an accident. Dennis takes Rose away to return to China, and Tony is spared any of the scandal for which he was honourably trying to take the blame.