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The Author of Beltraffio

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Author of Beltraffio first appeared in magazine form in two issues of The English Illustrated Journal, for June—July 1884. It was then reprinted in book form the following year by Macmillan in England and Osgood in Boston (USA).

The Knight Errant 18790

The Knight Errant – John Everett Millais

The Author of Beltraffio – critical commentary

Structure

The chronological structure and dramatic unity of the story are very strong, because the events of the tale take place in one location within the period of a two day weekend visit to the Ambient home. There is therefore a powerful continuity and sense of dramatic compression to commend the tale.

But this shaping is undermined by what seems like a shifting point of attention on James’s part. Because the story is essentially in three parts, and the problem is that they are essentially different subjects which do not fit well together. The three parts are as follows:

  1. the establishment of the narrator’s character
  2. the conflicts between Mr and Mrs Ambient
  3. the death of their son

1. The first part of the story is quite a witty social comedy in which a naive and over-enthusiastic narrator goes in search of his literary hero. He finds him, and regards everybody in the Ambient household through glasses tinted by Pre-Raphaelite Renaissance romanticism. He wants to regard Ambient as a superhuman being, and does everything to convince himself that he is one.

But in fact Ambient behaves towards him just like an ordinary person. He is polite, welcoming, hospitable, but keep a certain distance. There is every reason to believe that the family are going to find the narrator’s enthusiasm and his presence something of a bore. He is being set up by James as the over-intrusive fan.

2. But then the second strand of the tale begins to change the tone of the narrative. Mrs Ambient is unsympathetic to her husband’s writing; she doesn’t even read what he writes; and she has ideological views about the function of art which are at odds with those of her husband. The naive narrator becomes a spectator at this point – so the focus of attention switches away from him and centres upon the domestic conflict between husband and wife.

3. Then in the latter part of the story, attention is focused entirely on Mrs Ambient’s erratic behaviour towards her son, the doctor’s visits, and eventually the child’s death. This is a long way from the light comedy of the story’s opening, and in no way connected with it.

Literature that corrupts?

We are led to believe that Mrs Ambient disapproves of her husband’s writing because it might even lead to corruption. And of course it is the combination of her reading Ambient’s latest work, shutting out the doctor, and failing to give her son his medicine that leads to the boy’s death.

If only by implication, we are being asked to accept some sort of connection between these elements here. A little information on the background to the story might help throw light on what was being implied.

James wrote in his notebooks that the germ of the story came to him through his friendship with James Addington Symonds and his wife. Symonds was an English art historian, and a poet who was part of the ‘art for art’s sake’ movement at the end of the nineteenth century. This movement, which included writers such as Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, advocated that true Art should be free of all didactic purpose. That is, it should not seek to teach people moral lessons.

Such is the first level of Mrs Ambient’s differences with her husband – because she believes that art should have a moral purpose – and the clear implication from the little we know about Ambient’s writings is that they singularly lack this feature. But there is more to it than that.

The art for art’s sake philosophy was also a very bohemian movement, propounded by and associated with artists who led what were regarded as somewhat dissolute lives compared with the strict and rather puritanical norms advanced in Victorian England. These people read and associated with what were called ‘decadent’ poets and writers. They travelled to places such as France and Italy – which at that time was regarded as what we would now call ‘sexual tourism’. That is the second strand of Mrs Ambient’s differences with her husband and his works. But there is a third strand.

John Addington Symonds was also one of the first English authors to openly defend and even proselytise on behalf of male homosexuality. He was married, with a family, but had been educated at public (that is, private) school and Oxford University, which were the traditional all-male breeding grounds for homosexuality. He wrote in coded form in defence of ‘Greek ethics’ and ‘soldier love’. It is not altogether surprising that his wife took a slightly less-than-enthusiastic view of these matters.

James obviously could not make these issues explicit at the time he was writing, but he was certainly aware of them. So – Mrs Ambient does have some grounds for thinking that her husband’s writing might even corrupt his son – and it is all the more surprising that at the end of the story she has begun to read her husband’s work – even the infamous Beltraffio.

The Author of Beltraffio – study resources

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

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

The Author of Beltraffio Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Author of Beltraffio Complete Stories 1884—1891 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Author of Beltraffio The Author of Beltraffio – Kindle edition

The Author of Beltraffio The Author of Beltraffio – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

The Author of Beltraffio The Author of Beltraffio – eBook versions at Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Author of Beltraffio

The Author of Beltraffio – plot summary

Part I. A young American fan of the writer Mark Ambient visits him at his country house in Surrey. He interprets everything he sees there in terms of artistic romanticism. He praises the author to Ambient’s own wife, who he sees as a figure from a painting by Reynols or Lawrence. She responds to him with a distinct lack of enthusiasm, saying that she is not at all artistic and doesn’t even read what her husband writes.

Part II. The narrator interprets Ambient’s sister negatively as a Renaissance figure from a painting by Rossetti, and attributes all sorts of unproven opinions and attributes to the two women. At dinner he encourages Ambient to ‘talk’, which he thinks of as the height of Art. Afterwards, the child is reported to be ill.

Gwendolen Ambient tells the narrator that her sister-in-law disapproves of Ambient’s ideas as an influence on the child. When he talks further with Ambient, he takes the author’s silences as ‘an advance on intimacy’. Mrs Ambient confirms to him that she finds her husband’s writing ‘objectionable’.

Part III. Next day Gwendolen tells the narrator that Mrs Ambient thinks that books should have a moral purpose, and that she and her husband disagree over possible bad influences on the child. The narrator and Ambient walk in the countryside and discuss Ambient’s work as an artist (largely in metaphors). Ambient reveals that differences between him and his wife are of an ideological (religious) nature. Over lunch the narrator cannot understand why Ambient is so tolerant of his wife. Gwendolen reveals that the young boy continues to be ill. Ambient gives the narrator pages from his latest book to read..

Part IV. Whilst Ambient goes to fetch a doctor, the narrator asks Mrs Ambient to read the pages from her husband’s latest book – which she does later. It turns out that the boy has diphtheria. Mrs Ambient has been sitting up with him during the night, meanwhile reading Ambient’s latest pages. She then dismisses the doctor and locks herself in the room with her son. Gwendolen thinks Mrs Ambient is deliberately bringing about the boy’s death, but asks the narrator not to say anything. The child dies; Gwendolen retreats into a convent; then Mr and Mrs Ambient die too – though she has started to read her husband’s work shortly before her death.

Principal characters
I the outer narrator, a young American enthusiast and fan of Ambient’s work
Mark Ambient an English author
Mrs Beatrice Ambient his wife, who has different views
Dolcino their beautiful young son
Gwendolen Ambient Ambient’s sister

The Author of Beltraffio - Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Red button Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Red button Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Red button Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The BostoniansThe Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

The Author of Beltraffio Buy the book at Amazon UK
The Author of Beltraffio Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James What Masie KnewWhat Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon UK
Henry James What Masie Knew Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James The AmbassadorsThe Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon UK
Longstaff's Marriage Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2013

More tales by James
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The Awakening and Other Stories

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short stories from a ‘new woman’ of the 1890s

Kate Chopin was an American writer who is now best known for her novel The Awakening (1899) which was ‘re-discovered’ in the 1960s. But in fact she was a professional and quite successful author in her own lifetime who earned part of her living by placing her short stories with magazines. Her stories embrace the modern tradition, created in the late nineteenth century, of describing situations or dramatic episodes, then leaving them to speak for themselves.

The Awakening and Other Stories Without doubt she was what many people would call ‘ahead of her time’. It is no surprise that with the reassertion of women’s rightful place in cultural history which occurred in the 1960s, she was seen as an unjustly neglected figure. And reading her stories today, it’s amazing how fresh and modern they seem, My guess is that she will now retain her place in the literary canon.

She comes from the aristocratic landowning south of the United States with the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean as its neighbours, and this cultural miscegenation is reflected in her writing – both in the linguistically rich mixture of English, French, and Spanish vocabulary and in the mores of her characters.

She tackles many of the subjects favoured by ‘new women’ of the period – the critique of patriarchy, the yearning for self-expression amongst females, the social perspective on daily life which sees the personal as political.

Her default manner is a mild Jane Austen-like irony which reveals the vanities and foolishness of everyday life. In tone and literary style, she is very much a precursor to Jean Rhys – another female Caribbean writer who explored similar themes.

The major text in this collection is her short novel or novella – The Awakening. It’s this work by which she is now best known, but in fact this should not detract from her accomplishments as a writer of short stories.

The Awakening is a slow, beautifully paced work set in New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century. Edna Pontellier is a married woman on summer holiday on the Gulf in the process of waking up to a new sense of responsiveness to the world. She does this via ecstatic responses to social mood, to romantic music, and to swimming at night.

A feeling of exultation overtook her, as if some power of significant import had been given her to control the working of her body and hr soul. She grew daring and reckless, overestimating her strength. She wanted to swim far out, where no woman had swum before.

The narrative is composed of short scenes, pregnant with significance, which follow each other like the acts of a play. She captures perfectly the elegant cadences of the aristocratic landowning south of which she was part.

When the holiday is over she progressively distances herself from her husband and even her children. She is also surprised to discover that she misses a young would-be lover when he leaves abruptly to seek his fortune in Mexico. Nevertheless, when her husband goes away on business she begins a flirtation with another man.

With husband conveniently out of the way, when the first lover returns unexpectedly, she declares herself to him, but almost immediately realises that one man succeeding another in her life is not the answer to the process of self-realisation which her summer experiences have brought about.

This has quite rightly become a central text for anyone even mildly sympathetic to the feminist movement – the story of a conventionally successful woman who chooses to reject the central values of her society in favour of pursuing a goal of self-realisation. Ultimately, she opts to pay the ultimate price for doing so – but the consummate skill with which her narrative is articulated makes it a milestone of the twentieth century, on whose eve it was published.

© Roy Johnson 2009

The Awakening   Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Awakening   Buy the book at Amazon US

Kate Chopin, The Awakening and Other Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp.410, ISBN: 0192823000

More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
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The Awkward Age

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tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Awkward Age first appeared as a serial in Harper’s Weekly in 1898-1899 and then as a book later in 1899. It was written during the same period as What Maisie Knew (1896) and The Turn of the Screw (1898) in which the innocence of the young is threatened by the behaviour of the adults amongst whom they live. The novel was written in the late phase of James’s career, just after the period of his disastrous experiments in the theatre, and it seems to bear the traces of a theatrical conception. The narrative is progressed largely through conversation between the characters, and each ‘book’ of the novel’s structure is based in a single location. There is very little action in the conventional sense of that term: people simply visit each other’s sitting rooms and talk over tea.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – by John Singer Sargeant

The Awkward Age – critical commentary

James’s purported main issue is the vulnerability of Nanda, surrounded as she is by a variety of dubious adult influences. But she is not the dramatic centre of the narrative. James focuses his attention on the inconsequential issues of how much one adult character knows about another, or what fleeting liaison from the past might resurface to cause embarrassment.

At the start of the novel we are led to believe that Nanda is in need of protection, since she is surrounded by such bad influences in her parents and their friends – but by the end of the novel she has become as scheming and duplicitous as they are.

James tries his best to be funny in his introductions of characters, but they are not properly or fully realised and not dramatised, despite the presentation of the story via conversations – as on a stage.

He goes to endless lengths in spinning a web of subtleties regarding social relationships – but the characters are so vacuous and insignificant that there is little incentive for the reader to keep track of it all. Page after page is filled with vapid posturing, insincere flattery, snobbish one-upmanship, desperately contrived bon mots, and strained metaphors.

Lots of energy is expended by the characters making very oblique references to other people, usually via the use of ambiguous pronouns. It is not clear who they are talking about – both to readers and their interlocutors. Their references are mis-interpreted as part of the conversation and have to be spelled out and explained. The novel would be at least one third shorter if the characters made the subjects of their statements clear.

They also converse using the sorts of extended metaphors which James normally employs as a third person omniscient narrator in his other novels. Their conversations are extremely mannered and quite improbably unrealistic.

Social anxiety

The principal concerns of the characters are class anxiety, money, and the marriage market. There is also the concern for social status, property, and income common to the literature (and society) of this period. Characters take endless trouble to determine how much capital and annual income other people might have, as a clear indicator of their social worth and their potential for forming more profitable alliances.

Social indicators of the changing nature of society at the end of the nineteenth century include women smoking and using slang, and members of the upper class having to rent out their country houses to generate income. There is also repeated concern for what people are permitted to call each other – that is the use and prohibitions of using forenames only, nicknames, or formal titles. These seem very much a signal of social strain as the Victorian period came to an end.

What is slightly unusual in The Awkward Age is the fact that two important characters are sufficiently close to the bottom of their social class that they need paid employment (albeit in the form of sinecures). Vanderbank is a civil servant, and so is Edward Brookenham – his position having been bought with his wife’s influence.

A biographical reading

The relationship between the elder Mr Longdon and the much younger Vanderbank is shot through with homo-erotic undertones. Both of them are bachelors. Longdon has failed to marry, despite his previous relationships with women – one of whom is Vanderbank’s mother. The elder man ‘takes a fancy’ to the younger, and in a sense tries to ‘procure’ Nanda for him by offering to supply her dowry. The revelation scene where Longdon makes his financial proposal regarding Nanda is full of sexual innuendo and double entendres. It takes place late at night, just as they are about to go to bed, with the younger man lighting the elder’s candle for him.

It is difficult to escape the sense that in this novel (and others of the late period) that James was wrestling subconsciously with his own latent homo-eroticism, which we know was a sub-text to his later years. He seems to put in play the alternative prospects of heterosexual marriage and bachelorhood in order to find good reasons for retaining the default setting of remaining single.

The Awkward Age – study resources

The Awkward Age The Awkward Age – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Awkward Age The Awkward Age – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Awkward Age The Awkward Age – Everyman Classics – Amazon UK

The Awkward Age The Awkward Age – Everyman Classics – Amazon US

The Awkward Age The Awkward Age – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Awkward Age The Awkward Age – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Awkward Age The Awkward Age – Kindle eBook edition

The Awkward Age The Awkward Age – (unabridged) Audio book

The Awkward Age The Awkward Age – eBook editions at Gutenberg

The Awkward Age The Awkward Age – HTML version (with notes)

The Awkward Age The Awkward Age – Full text + James’s Preface

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Awkward Age

The Awkward Age – plot summary

Mrs Brookenham and her husband Edward are the centre of a social group of upper-class people in London. Their daughter Fernanda has become of marriageable age, but has not yet been introduced into society. Nevertheless, she has young married women as friends, and this is considered by some as rather dangerous in terms of her limited knowledge of the world.

The Awkward AgeWhen Mr Longdon is introduced to their social circle, he is amazed at how closely ‘Nanda’ resembles her grandmother, with whom he was once in love. Mrs Brookenham decides to introduce Nanda into adult society, with the hope that she will secure a rich husband, preferably Mitchy, who is only the son of a shoemaker, but very wealthy. The first half of the novel is spent in exploring exactly what the characters know of each other’s intentions. It also establishes Mrs Brookenham as a vivacious and manipulative woman who wishes to influence the lives of those around her for her own advantage – including her own daughter.

The plot (as such) starts mid way through the novel when Mr Longdon, moved by the similarity between Nanda and her grandmother, decides to bestow a substantial amount of money on her as a form of dowry. He reveals this in confidence to Vanderbank, hoping that he will offer to marry her. Instead, Van reveals the offer to Mrs Brookenham and to Mitchy.

Mitchy is porevailed upon to marry Aggie, which he does in order to please Nanda, with whom he is in love. When his marriage turns out to be disappointing, he solicits Nanda, who keeps him at bay by palming him off onto her mother.

We are led to believe (by the conventions of the realist novel) that Nanda is in love with ‘Van’, but when asked she denies the fact, and although Van flirts with her, he never declares a serious interest. Nanda is therefore left with only a dubious and ill-defined relationship with Mr Longdon, and at the end of the novel she is planning to go on a protracted holiday with him.

Principal characters
Gustavus Vanderbank a civil servant (34), the Deputy Chairman of the General Audit
Mr Longdon wealthy older man (70+) who once had a relationship with both Van’s and Mrs Brookenham’s mothers
Edward Brookenham a civil servant in charge of ‘Rivers and Lakes’ (a position bought with his wife’s influence)
Mrs Brookenham his wife (41) who is in love with Van
Harold Brookenham their feckless son
Fernanda (Nanda) Brookenham their attractive daughter (18)
Lady Julia Mrs Brookenham’s mother
Duchess Jane Edward Brookenham’s cousin, protectoress to Aggie
Agnesina (Little Aggie) niece of the duchess
Mrs Tisley Grendon friend of Nanda’s
Mr Mitchett (Mitchy) a chinless wonder, son of a shoemaker, with £40K p.a.
Lord Petherton ‘kept’ by Mitchy
Carrie Donner friend of Nanda’s
Mrs Beach Donner Carrie’s mother
Lady Fanny Cashmore sister of Mrs Grendon
Mr Cashmore brother-in-law to Petherton – lends money to Harold Brookenham

Henry James's Study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Red button Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Red button Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Red button Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Henry James Washington SquareWashington 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.
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Henry James web links 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.

© Roy Johnson 2011

More on Henry James
More on literature
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Beast in the Jungle

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Beast in the Jungle (1903) is widely regarded as the greatest of James’s short stories – if not one of the greatest stories of all time. It is certainly one of his most frequently reprinted and anthologised works. And as if to mark the begining of modernism in the twentieth century, it is a story in which almost nothing happens. In fact that is one of the key features of the story.

It is worth noting that although Henry James made a number of technical innovations to both the story and the novel as literary genres, he gave his shorter works the collective name of tales. These works are rarely as short, condensed, and understated as we now think of narratives categorised as short stories: they are often quite long; many deal in a number of inter-related themes; and some become novellas and even short novels.

The Beast in the Jungle

The Beast in the Jungle – critical commentary

This story has been the subject of enormous amounts of critical commentary – partly because it is such a powerful narrative, and partly because its eventless and abstract subject lends itself to a number of possible interpretations. These are variations of three basic types – existential, biographical, and psychological.

Existential

It’s quite possible to see the story as an expression of existential angst some years before such philosophic notions became popular. After all, Kafka would be writing about lonely figures trapped inside vague fears and presentiments only a few years after James wrote The Beast in the Jungle.

Marcher is after all a civil servant, and although we have no account of his working life, it is quite clear that it is regimented and unexciting. He goes to the opera with May, and they even play piano transcriptions together, but his life is dominated by his idée fixe. He lives in London and his situation is that of an isolated city-dweller.

He feels a presentiment, and is not even sure if what awaits him in life will be of a positive or negative nature. That is part of the existential threat – not knowing what it will be and when it will come. He fears that it will be ‘tremendous’, but does not know in what way. That is its existential nature: it is a sort of metaphysical threat – something abstract and intagible, but felt as very real.

Biographical

Even the most cursory acquaintance with James’s own life cannot but suggest that he was reflecting on his own predicament in many of his late stories, and in particular The Beast in the Jungle. Throughout his life he had enjoyed relationships with a number of women – but only as friends. And he also worried terribly about the idea that he ought to be married. It was the normal, acceptable thing to do, but he could not face the prospect of commitment.

But many of his stories reflect a deep-seated fear of women as potential or actual sources of problems. And of course many post-Freudian commentators have observed the ssubmerged homo-erotic elements in his work.

Marcher rationalises his fear of marriage by claiming that it would be unfair to marry someone when he does not know what the outcome of his ‘destiny’ will be. He cannot marry May because it would be unfair to subject her to such uncertainty. That is his rationale – but in fact he continues to harrass her with discussions of his fear right up to the point of her death.

Psychological

Marcher is a man imprisoned in a solipsistic world. He has conceived this notion that something sets him aside from his fellow creatures. He believes he is destined for a special destiny. It might not be positive, it might even be tragic – but it will be something outstanding or momentous – which will confirm his superiority over other lesser beings.

He has no evidence to support the validity of this supposition. He merely feels it and asserts it. and his behaviour is guided entirely with reference to the belief.

May Bartram’s own personal tragedy is that she devotes her life to supporting him in this unfounded notion. We are led to believe from the inferences in the text that she hopes he will one day realise that she is the thing that is to happen to him. But of course he doesn’t realise this – because he is so wrapped up in himself.

Marcher’s sudden awareness of his wasted life at the end of the story is certainly a dramatic resolution – but in fact the story reaches its heart-stopping structural climax three-quarters way through when May comes as close as she ever does to offering herself directly to Marcher. She is ill; she can hardly get out of her chair; and Marcher is quizzing her relentlessly about the ‘thing’ that is to happen to him – yet she gets up and presents herself to him:

“I’m with you – don’t you see – still”. And as if to make it more vivid to him she rose from her chair – a movement she seldom made in these days – and showed herself, all draped and all soft, in her fairness and slimness. “I haven’t forsaken you.”

This is a very heart-rending, and a beautifully understated pivotal moment in the development of this apparently eventless story. Marcher of course fails to recognise or respond to what her words and movement signify. He is so blinded by his own egotism that May’s gesture is completely ignored. Marcher merely worries that she’s going to die before he finds the answer, and he even asks her (whilst she actually is dying), if he is going to suffer.

The Beast in the Jungle – study resources

The Beast in the Jungle The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Beast in the Jungle The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Beast in the Jungle Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Beast in the Jungle Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Beast in the Jungle The Beast in the Jungle – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon UK

The Beast in the Jungle The Beast in the Jungle – Penguin Modern Classics – Amazon US

The Beast in the Jungle The Beast in the Jungle – Dover Thrift edition

The Beast in the Jungle The Beast in the Jungle – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Beast in the Jungle The Beast in the Jungle – read the story on line

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Beast in the Jungle

The Beast in the Jungle – plot summary

John Marcher is a minor civil servant with a library and a garden in the country. Visiting a stately home he encounters May Bartram who he met ten years previously in Italy. She reveals that he confided to her his abiding notion that something lay ahead for him in life which would have far-reaching consequences. He confesses that the fear still haunts him and invites her to join him in waiting and watching to see what it will be.

She inherits enough to buy a house in London, and they continue to meet regularly, comparing their thoughts and observations on the issue which continues to preoccupy him. As the years go by they discuss the problem ad nauseam. He realises that she is the only other person who knows about his fear, he is very dependent on her, and wonders what he would do if anything should happen to her.

He also begins to wonder if their relationship is causing her to be ‘talked about’, but she reassures him that she is doing as she wishes. He suspects that she secretly knows what the thing or the event will be, but isn’t telling him because it might be so horrible.

They grow old together, and she finally becomes ill. He is alarmed that she might die before revealing to him what it will be, and he makes a final plea for reassurance or relief. She tells him that the ‘thing’ has already happened and that he is not conscious of it.

She dies shortly afterwards and he is left wondering what it could be. He travels abroad, but finds no respite. Finally, whilst visiting her grave one day, he sees a man similar to himself who is obviously grieving a lost loved one in a passionate and deep manner. Marcher realises that he has lived his entire life without any deep feelings or passion of any kind. Moreover he realises that the thing for which he has been waiting was May Bartram and her offer of herself to him, and that he has missed his chance because of his egoism and selfishness.

Principal characters
John Marcher a minor civil servant
May Bartram a young English woman
Weatherhead an ‘almost famous’ house where they meet

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Red button Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Red button Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Red button Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Henry James Washington SquareWashington 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.
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Bedside Companion to Virginia Woolf

by

This is a really curious book, both in appearance and content. The text is presented in double columns like a Victorian newspaper, and its subject is just about everything you could think of regarding Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury – but offered in quick snatches and potted summaries. It’s not a continuous narrative but a series of overlapping sketches and thematic surveys.

The Bedside Companion to Virginia Woolf The chapters switch from biography to social history, then on to Woolf’s major fictional writing, and back again to the geography of Bloomsbury, the houses they all lived in, and their relationships with feminism, the two world wars, and even animals. This renders the treatment rather superficial, but I imagine it will make the book more interesting to the people it is aimed at – because new characters, incidents, and themes are coming up on almost every page.

Sandwiched amongst the main text there are panels featuring such topics as the other artistic movements of the period, the geography of Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia, synopses of Woolf’s major novels, and issues such as pacifism and even films based on Bloomsbury. There are biographical sketches of most of the principal characters, from Virginia Woolf’s family and outwards, covering minor figures such as Saxon Sydney-Turner and Dora Carrington. Each of these sections has suggestions for further reading which are commendably up to date.

It’s also worth saying that the book is generously illustrated with some refreshingly original photographs – but also with some amateurish sketches which would have been better left out.

Sarah Hall is very good at keeping track of the many complex relationships which were established in Bloomsbury and its outer reaches. Speaking of the artist Duncan Grant she notes:

Through a friendship with the art critic Bernard Berenson’s step-daughters, Ray and Karin Costelloe (Ray became Bunny Garnet’s first wife, Karin married Adrian Stephen), he stayed at the Berenson’s villa in Florence, I Tatti, and learned at first hand the politics of art dealing.

She takes a sympathetic view of Bloomsbury – sometimes to the point of almost naive enthusiasm. She thinks that Virginia and Leonard Woolf were ‘faithful’ to each other during their marriage, and that Bloomsbury’s homosexual men were ‘not promiscuous’ – which would have been news to most of them.

If a good test of critical writing is that it makes a reader wish to re-visit the work, then one of the most successful chapters is on Virginia Woolf’s short stories which offers a sympathetic and insightful account of those profoundly experimental studies. Other highlights include chapters on the Hogarth Press, Lytton Strachey, and the Memoir Club.

It would not matter which aspect of Virginia Woolf or Bloomsbury you wished to pursue – be it Woolf’s feminism or mental illness, the lives of her relatives, the writing and art works of her friends, or even the popular walking tours which retrace her steps through London and the Home Counties – this would be an excellent point of departure.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Buy the book at Amazon UK

Buy the book at Amazon US

Sarah M. Hall, The Beside, Bathroom, and Armchair Companion to Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, London: Continuum, 2007, pp.206, ISBN 0826486754

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

The Beldonald Holbein

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Beldonald Holbein first appeared in Harper’s Magazine for October 1901. It was later collected with other tales in The Better Sort published in London by Methuen and in New York by Scribner in 1903.

The Beldonald Holbein

Holbein – Catherine Howard (1540)

The Beldonald Holbein – critical commentary

This is one of a number of stories Henry James wrote about artists – usually portrait painters. As a young man James had studied art, and the interest stayed with him throughout his long career as a novelist. In fact it is the relationship between visual and literary art which lies at the centre of this tale – and creates its central problem.

James enthusiastically records in his notebooks the original idea for this story – what he often calls the donné of the tale:

… little old ugly, or plain (unappreciated) woman, after dull, small life, in ‘aesthetic’ perceptive ‘European’ ‘air’. Element in it of situation of some other American woman (who has had lots of ‘Europe’ always) —thought so pretty (and so envied by my heroine) when younger&mdsh;and now so ‘gone’.

All these elements are present in the finished tale. Mrs Brash comes from her obscure American life and is specifically employed as an ugly old woman by the vain Lady Beldonald to act as a contrast to her own good looks. But the narrator and his friend Outereau see in Mrs Brash an unappreciated beauty of a kind they liken to a portrait by Holbein.

More than that, Lady Beldonald eventually realises that Mrs Brash is failing to fulfil the role for which she has been employed, and we are led to believe that Mrs Brash is despatched back to America where she sinks once again into plain obscurity.

This presents readers with a problem. How can Mrs Brash be ‘ugly’ when she first appears in the narrative, then miraculously becomes ‘attractive’ in the eyes of the narrator, Outereau, and Mrs Munden? It is obvious that they appreciate something in Mrs Brash’s appearance which has been neglected by her fellow Americans. But we have no way of knowing if these critical assessments are valid or not: all the information at our disposal is mediated via the un-named narrator.

The Beldonald Holbein – study resources

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

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

The Beldonald Holbein Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Beldonald Holbein Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Beldonald Holbein The Beldonald Holbein – Paperback – Amazon UK

The Beldonald Holbein The Beldonald Holbein – Paperback – Amazon US

The Beldonald Holbein The Beldonald Holbein – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

The Beldonald Holbein Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

The Beldonald Holbein Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Beldonald Holbein

The Beldonald Holbein – story synopsis

Part I   Mrs Munden proposes to the un-named narrator, an artist, that he paint a picture of her sister-in-law, the elderly but beautiful Lady Nina Beldonald. The commission is agreed but delayed because of the death of Nina’s black servant Miss Dadd, who has been hired to throw Nina’s beauty into sharp contrast.

Part II   Miss Dadd is replaced by an American relative Mrs Louisa Brash, who Nina employs because she is old and plain. But the narrator and his friend Paul Outreau feel that she is in fact a specially attractive ‘type’ – like a figure in a Holbein painting. The narrator asks Nina if he can paint Mrs Brash’s portrait, but she finds his suggestion offensive.

Part III   Nina cancels the commission for her own portrait. The narrator reconstructs Mrs Brash as an attractive figure who has not appreciated her own advantages. Having been ‘plain’ all her life, he wonders if she will be able to cope with being seen as attractive.

Part IV   The narrator and Mrs Munden feel responsible for Mrs Brash, who they fear may be turned away if she fails to perform the function for which she has been hired – which is to present a contrast to Lady Beldonald. However, they also feel they owe it to her to celebrate her attractiveness.

Part V   Mrs Brash eventually declines to sit for her portrait. Lady Beldonald then realises that she is an attractive woman, and sends her back to America, where she reverts to her former state of being – an elderly and plain woman. Lady Beldonald hires a new young and pretty servant, and offers to sit for her portrait after all – whereupon the narrator agrees.

The Beldonald Holbein – principal characters
— the un-named narrator, an artist
Paul Outereau the narrator’s friend, a French painter
Mrs Munden an American friend of the narrator
Lady Nina Beldonald an American ageing beauty
Miss Dadd a small black servant (who does not appear)
Mrs Louisa Brash Nina’s cousin, an ugly older woman

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button F.W. Dupee, Henry James: Autobiography, Princeton University Press, 1983.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, HarperCollins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Elizabeth Allen, A Woman’s Place in the Novels of Henry James London: Macmillan Press, 1983.

Red button Ian F.A. Bell, Henry James and the Past, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993.

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button J. Donald Crowley and Richard A. Hocks (eds), The Wings of the Dove, New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Virginia C. Fowler, Henry James’s American Girl: The Embroidery on the Canvas, Madison (Wis): University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve: Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976

Red button Roger Gard (ed), Henry James: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 1968.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Barbara Hardy, Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work), Northcote House Publishers, 1996.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Merle A. Williams, Henry James and the Philosophical Novel, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Red button Judith Woolf, Henry James: The Major Novels, Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

 

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton 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.

© Roy Johnson 2014

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

The Bellarosa Connection

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Bellarosa Connection (1989) is a novella in which Saul Bellow examines three aspects of what he calls ‘Jewish history’ – and to which might be added the epithet ‘Jewish immigrant history’. It’s also the first major piece of his fiction in which he addresses the issue of the Holocaust. As he said of this topic in an interview, commenting on the absence of these topics in his earlier work:

Somehow I managed to miss the significance of some very great events. I didn’t take hold of them as I now see I might have done. Not until The Bellarosa Connection. So I have lived long enough to satisfy a few neglected demands.

The Bellarosa Connection

In this novel (or novella) he looks at the plight of the Jews in Europe who in the twentieth century have been persecuted first by the Russians (and others) and then by the Germans. Many of them emigrated to America, where he examines two generations. The first was glad to escape persecution and worked hard to establish a new life. The second generation grew up as naturalised Americans, but they had a family background, a cultural tradition, and a ‘history’. They could either ignore this and become ‘Americanised’ or take on the burden of their social inheritance.

The Bellarosa Connection – critical comment

Literature and history

Whilst the characters in the novel are fictional constructs, Billy Rose was a real-life historical person. He was a famous theatrical impresario and a showman who amassed a huge personal fortune and founded a sculpture garden in Jerusalem. He also wrote the lyrics to popular songs such as Me and My Shadow and It’s Only a Paper Moon. However, suspicions exist that he paid ghost writers to do most of the work – a rumour that Bellow incorporates into the novella.

The rescue operation bearing his name is a fictional transposition of the fact that Billy Rose did become involved in organising fund-raising events in America for the aid of European Jews. Thus Saul Bellow is mingling fact and fiction here – in a way which became quite fashionable in post second world war American fiction.

The reader is being asked to ‘suspend disbelief’ – that is, to simultaneously accept information from a historical and an invented source. Questions arise such as “Did this really happen?” and “Is this really true?” and such doubts must be dealt with as a matter of aesthetic judgement by the reader. We ask ourselves – Are these events plausible? Do they make sense? Is the author pushing invention too far here?

We are being invited to accept the simultaneous existence of Billy Rose, a real-life historical figure whose biographical details can be looked up in Wikipedia, and the Fonsteins who are fictional constructs (even if they were based on people who Bellow knew personally).

The narrator

The reader’s dilemma in making these judgements is perhaps made easier by the sheer drive and panache of Bellow’s first person narrator. In most of his novels from Augie March onward he employs narrators who are clear substitutes for Bellow himself as a sophisticated intellectual with an enormous grasp of cultural history. He develops narrators who are witty, well-informed, and very entertaining. The result is that as readers we tend to believe what they are saying, even though we know they are fictional constructs.

He also employs a style of narration which is a fascinating admixture of street language, colloquial expressions, slang, and the vocabulary of intellectual and even philosophic discourse.

I was at the bar of parental judgement again, charged with American puerility. When would I shape up, at last! At the age of thirty-two, I still behaved like a twelve-year-old, hanging out in Greenwich Village, immature, drifting, a layabout, shacking up with Bennington girls, a foolish intellectual gossip, nothing in his head but froth—the founder, said my father with comic bewilderment, of the Mnemosyne Institute, about as profitable as it was pronounceable

What’s more, this narrative voice was consciously developed, and is a reflection of Bellow’s desire to fuse Eurocentric culture absorbed via his higher education with the American demotic in which he had been raised as the son of first-generation immigrants:

What I found was the relief of turning away from mandarin English and putting my own accents into the language My earlier books had been straight and respectable. As if I had to satisfy the demands of H. W. Fowler. But in Augie March I wanted to invent a new sort of American sentence. Something like a fusion of colloquialism and elegance … Street language combined with a high style.

Americanisation

Bellow sees the question of Jewish history in three phases. First is the flight of parents from anti-Semitism and poverty in Europe. Second is immigration and establishing an economic foothold in America. The third phase for their children is a choice between their Jewish heritage or assimilating as Americans. As his narrator makes quite clear:

“But if you want my basic view, here it is: The Jews could survive everything that Europe threw at them. I mean the lucky remnant. But now comes the next test—America. Can they hold their ground, or will the U.S.A. be too much for them?”

Immigration and race

In connection with the issue of race and American society,
as has been argued in a similar analysis of his late novel Ravelstein, it is slightly surprising that at no time does Bellow consider the subject of African-Americans who were also ‘immigrants’. They however were imported against their will into a protestant God-fearing society which then exploited and persecuted them.

Bellow is not obliged to cover every racial issue in the flux of American life, but the close parallels between European Jewish immigrants (fleeing from persecution) and Africans (imprisoned in a slave culture) did not seem to occur to him as a fruitful point of comparison. Bellow is very conscious of modern history, but the fact is that the Africans were made forcible ‘immigrants’ to American society from the sixteenth century onwards, whereas the Jewish diaspora affected America largely from the late nineteenth century.

The Bellarosa Connection – study resources

The Bellarosa Connection The Bellarosa Connection – Penguin – Amazon UK

The Bellarosa Connection The Bellarosa Connection – Penguin – Amazon US

The Bellarosa Connection The Bellarosa Connection – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Bellarosa Connection The Bellarosa Connection – Library of America – Amazon US

The Bellarosa Connection Saul Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Bellarosa Connection Saul; Bellow – Collected Stories – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Bellarosa Connection Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz UK

The Bellarosa Connection Saul Bellow (Modern Critical Views) – essays and studies – Amz US

Cambridge Companion to Saul Bellow – Amazon UK

The Bellarosa Connection

The Bellarosa Connection – plot summary

A successful and un-named academic specialises in memory studies. He wishes to record a history of emotions and states of being, conscious of his poor Jewish immigrant background. He recalls the story of his relative Harry Fonstein who escapes Hitler and flees to Italy where he works as a waiter in Rome.

Fonstein is arrested at a fascist reception and jailed, but then his escape is arranged by a clandestine operation organised by Billy Rose (‘Bellarosa’). Rose is a flamboyant theatrical impresario and newspaper gossip columnist who collects fine art and has made a fortune from show business. He keeps his rescue operation secret and will not even meet the people he saves. The narrator assumes that the Mafia are also involved in his operations.

Fonstein escapes to America where he is detained on Ellis Island. From there he is exported to Cuba, and forbidden to mention Billy Rose. In Cuba he works as an assistant and educates himself through part-time study.

A marriage is arranged with an overweight woman from America, which gives him naturalisation papers. He moves to New Jersey where he becomes successful running a plumbing supplies business. When he tries to thank Billy Rose for saving his life, all his overtures are rejected..

The narrator discusses ‘Jewish history’ with Fonstein’s obese wife Sorella, but finds the Nazi horrors ‘burdensome’. He then meets the Fonsteins on holiday in Israel, where Billy Rose is staying at the same hotel. Sorella reveals that Rose’s assistant kept a secret journal and papers documenting all Rose’s personal foibles and shady business deals. The narrator declines the offer of seeing the documents.

Sorella arranges a meeting with Billy Rose and uses the documents as blackmail in an attempt to persuade Rose to give her husband a brief audience. Rose vigorously defends his reputation and refuses her request. She throws the documents at him – but they go out of the window..

Some years later the narrator is asked for Fonstein’s contact details by a Rabbi who is seeking help for an insane man who claims to be a relative of Fonstein. The narrator makes phone calls to people who might know – and gets short shift from them.

When he finally locates the address, a young man is house-sitting. He reveals that the Fonsteins were killed in a motor accident six months earlier. They were on their way to their mathematically gifted son who had taken up gambling and was in trouble.

© Roy Johnson 2017

More on Saul Bellow
More on the novella
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Twentieth century literature

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The Bench of Desolation

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Bench of Desolation (1909) comes from the late period of James’s career as a writer of short stories, and with such a title readers might understandably assume it was similar to his late dark masterpieces such as The Beast in the Jungle and The Altar of the Dead. Indeed, the first two thirds of the story are marked by a mood of gloom which intensifies as the misery of the protagonist’s life becomes more protracted. But this atmosphere is completely dispelled by a resolution to the story which is as unexpected as it is improbable and unexplained.

The Bench of Desolation

a boring seafront

The Bench of Desolation – critical commentary

Is this story a lavish piece of wish-fulfilment on James’s part? It starts with the subject of one of his recurrent themes – the fearful prospect of marriage and its responsibilities. In fact it encompasses the fear of both the prospect and the consequences of marriage reflected in legal confrontation, public exposure, and financial punishment, followed by social death.

This clearly characterises the first part of the story, as Herbert Dodd is projected into his downward spiral of doom. But this scenario is completely dispelled in the latter part of the story. There is no credible justification provided for Herbert Dodd’s good fortune, and one can only think that it’s a form of wish-fulfilment on James’s part to come up with a resolution to this story which involves an old flame emerging from the past to offer both undiminished adoration and a large pot of money.

In fact the story suffers credibility weaknesses on two counts. First of all, no convincing motivation is provided for Kate Cookham’s ten year vigil. She has ruined Herbert financially by the original out-of-court settlement. He has subsequently married, become a widower, and sunk even lower in the social scale with no intervening contact between them to sustain either love or good will. But we are expected to believe that she has loved him and wished for his best interests throughout the decade. She even claims to have ‘hated’ what she was doing to him for ten years. We are given no explanation for her behaviour – only her statement of intent.

The second weakness is that not only has she worked and saved for a decade to repay him, but she is repaying his original two hundred and seventy pounds with interest. This original sum has accumulated simple interest of one hundred pounds a year to produce a total of twelve hundred and sixty pounds. That is a rate of return of thirty-seven per cent which even in the most prosperous years of the industrial revolution and the high point of British imperialism would have been impossible. Interest rates historically hover between three and ten percent. We can’t expect novelists to be professional economists or financial analysts, but we can object to their providing fairy tale pots of gold to furnish plot resolutions.

The story also has a rather uneven tone. At the beginning of the narrative Herbert Dodd is an almost comic figure – a vain, somewhat self-regarding character with a disdainful attitude to his low station in life. He could be seen as the Mr Pooter of the south coast. But as the misery of his blighted life begins to bite deeper, his seat on ‘the bench of desolation’ is a much more sombre affair. His state of tired resignation to a completely uneventful existence is something we are invited to take seriously. Having established this deeper mood, one would expect James to lead it towards a more logical and tragic conclusion, but instead of turning the screw tighter, he releases it to return to a mood of almost drawing room comedy.

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

The Bench of Desolation – study resources

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

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

The Bench of Desolation Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Bench of Desolation Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Bench of Desolation The Collected Stories – Everyman’s Library Classics – Amazon UK

The Bench of Desolation The Bench of Desolation – read the story on line

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button The Prefaces of Henry James – Introductions to his works – Amazon UK

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Bench of Desolation

The Bench of Desolation – plot summary

Herbert Dodd has inherited a shop selling old books and prints in a ‘fourth-rate’ seaside town on the south coast of England. He becomes engaged to Kate Cookham, one of his customers, but when he changes his mind she threatens to sue him for breach of promise. He settles out of court for four hundred pounds compensation, mortgages his business, and in fact only pays her two hundred and seventy pounds.

He confides his plight to an old flame Nan Drury, and ends up marrying her. They have two children who die, as does she. The solicitors handling his mortgage go into liquidation because one of its partners embezzles from the firm, and his business is seized by creditors. He gets a job working as a petty clerk for the local gas works and begins to wonder in his misery at what might have happened if he had challenged Kate Cookham over the four hundred pound settlement.

Ten years pass, and his life is reduced to a meaningless void, when suddenly a much-improved Kate Cookham returns from London, seeks him out on his lonely seafront bench, and invites him to tea at her hotel. She reveals that she has taken his money, invested it, and wants to pay him back – with interest, because she loved him all the time. He is shocked by the news of her offer, but a week later he accepts the money – and her.

Principal characters
Herbert Dodd a somewhat effete dealer in old books and prints
Kate Cookham a plain private teacher and governess
Nan Drury an old flame of Henry’s who he marries
Bill Frankel a man known to Kate of whom Henry feels jealous

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life, Harper Collins, 1985.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button F.O. Matthieson (ed), The Notebooks of Henry James, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Critical commentary

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Modern Critical Views: Henry James, Chelsea House Publishers, 1991.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button Victoria Coulson, Henry James, Women and Realism, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Tessa Hadley, Henry James and the Imagination of Pleasure, Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Red button Donatella Izzo, Portraying the Lady: Technologies of Gender in the Short Stories of Henry James, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Red button Richard Poirer, The Comic Sense of Henry James, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Red button Ruth Yeazell (ed), Henry James: A Collection of Critical Essays, Longmans, 1994.

Other works by Henry James

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James Daisy MillerDaisy Miller (1879) is a key story from James’s early phase in which a spirited young American woman travels to Europe with her wealthy but commonplace mother. Daisy’s innocence and her audacity challenge social conventions, and she seems to be compromising her reputation by her independent behaviour. But when she later dies in Rome the reader is invited to see the outcome as a powerful sense of a great lost potential. This novella is a great study in understatement and symbolic power.
Daisy Miller Buy the book from Amazon UK
Daisy Miller Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

More tales by James
More on literature
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More on short stories

The Birthplace

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Birthplace was first published in the collection The Better Sort in 1903. It is collected in Volume XI of The Complete Tales of Henry James (Rupert Hart-Davis) 1964.

Shakespeare's Birthplace

Shakespeare’s birthplace

The Birthplace – critical commentary

On the surface this appears to be a mildly amusing satirical dig at what we now call the ‘heritage industry’. Tourists and particularly foreigners flock to see the birthplace of a famous person in the hope that having seen some object or been in the same room as that person, they will thereby have some sort of transcendental experience that will provide them with a deep understanding of art, writing, philosophy, or other cultural value.

Maurice Gedge is appalled that the previous wardens (represented by Miss Putchin) and the visiting ‘pilgrims’ are interested in the place but not in the Work. They wish to see the birthplace, but are not interested in what the person born there created. And in Shakespeare’s case, even the authenticity of the birthplace is in doubt, since so little is known about him.

Rather cleverly, without ever naming him, James uses Shakespeare as a hook on which to hang his general argument. Very little is known about Shakespeare’s life, but the trustees wish to squeeze every ounce of cultural capital out of the smallest possible association.

It is this that Maurice Gedge rebels against, and then in an ideological volt-face to save his and his wife’s jobs, gives way to. He gives the pilgrims what they have come for – a cultural warm shower of half truths, romantic myths, and cultural platitudes.

But the story also contains within it a quite serious element of literary theory. It’s known as ‘the death of the author’ and was first made famous in 1967 by the French literary critic Roland Barthes. The theory, put in a very over-simplified form, is that there is no possible way to prove any causal link between authors’ lives and the works they produce. Therefore we should concentrate our critical attention onto the works themselves, not their authors. The novelist D.H. Lawrence put it another way when he said “Trust the tale, not the teller”.

That is the theory discussed between Maurice Gedge and Mr B.D. Hayes on the occasion of his first visit. Hayes quotes from Hamlet: “‘The play’s the thing’. Let the author alone.” Then he pushes the point further: “There should really, to clear the matter up, be no such Person”. And Maurice Gedge agrees: “There is no such Person.”

So – sixty-plus years before such ideas became formalised into what is now called ‘critical theory’, James was exploring the relationship between the Author and the Work. It has to be said that he was very resistant to any intrusions into his own private life, even though he had (until almost the end) very little to conceal. So it was a subject very dear to his heart.

The Birthplace – study resources

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

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

The Birthplace Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Birthplace Complete Stories 1898—1910 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Birthplace The Birthplace – Digireads reprint edition – Amazon UK

The Birthplace The Birthplace – eBook at Project Gutenberg

The Birthplace The Birthplace – read the story on line

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Red button The Prefaces of Henry James – Introductions to his tales and novels

Red button Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Red button Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, biography, study resources

The Birthplace

The Birthplace – plot summary

Part I. Maurice Gedge, a librarian and failed schoolmaster, is given the opportunity by a sponsor to become warden of Shakespeare’s birthplace (though Shakespeare is never actually named). Gedge and his wife start reading the Works and are determined to uphold the honour of His name.

Part II. Gedge is inducted into his custodial duties by one of the previous wardens, Miss Putchin. It becomes apparent that she (and the visitors) are more interested in the place as something like a holy shrine, rather than the famous person who lived there, or what he actually wrote.

Part III. Gedge takes to wandering round the house late at night to imbibe its spirit – but he realises that very few of its contents have any true connection or relationship with the Great Man. They are simply associated memorabilia, and the traces of previous visitors (or ‘pilgrims’ as they are called) in objects and signatures they have left behind.

Part IV. He begins to feel oppressed by the role he is required to play – trotting out ‘facts’ in which he does not believe in response to the demands of tourists. And he worries that the trustees might ‘inspect’ him and find him fraudulent. He tries to persuade his wife that they ought to admit the truth – that there are very few hard facts and very little evidence for all the claims being made about the place. She disagrees and argues that they ought to enhance the myths.

Part V. One day a young American couple arrive and Gedge finds that the husband agrees with him – that attention should be focused on the work of the great poet, and certainly not on such dubious items as the room where it was claimed (on no evidence) where he was born.

Part VI. Gedge feels his critical sense bolstered by this encounter, but he allows his scepticism to show through to the public. His original patron arrives as a representative of the trustees to give him a severe warning about ‘spoiling the show’. Gedge agrees to his wife that he will change his approach in order to protect their jobs.

Part VII. Over a year later, the young American couple visit again. Gedge is apprehensive, but he realises that they must have come to see him, since they know his views. He puts on a bravura performance as a tourist guide, full of clichés and gushing trivia. It turns out that his fame for delivering this sort of thing has spread across the Atlantic. Now he worries that he might be overdoing things in performing this deceit, but his sponsor arrives and doubles his salary in recognition of the increased income from receipts at the Birthplace.

Principal characters
Mr Grant-Jackson a banker, chair of the Birthplace committee
Maurice Gedge failed schoolmaster, librarian
Isabel Gedge his wife
Miss Putchin previous warden at the Birthplace
Mr and Mrs B.D. Hayes American couple from New York City

Henry James portrait

Henry James – portrait by John Singer Sargeant

Further reading

Biographical

Red button Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Red button Philip Horne (ed), Henry James: A Life in Letters, Viking/Allen Lane, 1999.

Red button Henry James, The Letters of Henry James, Adamant Media Corporation, 2001.

Red button Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999

Critical commentary

Red button Millicent Bell, Meaning in Henry James, Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 1993.

Red button Kirstin Boudreau, Henry James’s Narrative Technique, Macmillan, 2010.

Red button Daniel Mark Fogel, A Companion to Henry James Studies, Greenwood Press, 1993.

Red button Jonathan Freedman, The Cambridge Companion to Henry James, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Red button Richard A. Hocks, Henry James: A study of the short fiction, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

Red button Colin Meissner, Henry James and the Language of Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2009

Red button John Pearson (ed), The Prefaces of Henry James, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993.

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

Other works by Henry James

Henry James Washington SquareWashington 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.
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James Washington Square Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Aspern PapersThe 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.
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Aspern Papers Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James The Spoils of PoyntonThe 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.
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon UK
Henry James The Spoils of Poynton Buy the book from Amazon US

Henry James – web links

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

Henry James 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.

Henry James web links 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.

Red button 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Roy Johnson 2012

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

The Black Mate

by

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Black Mate was written, according to Conrad’s own reckoning, in 1886. This would make it his earliest tale or short story (though it is not so short). But it was not published until 1908, and was then republished posthumously as part of the collection Tales of Hearsay in 1925. The other stories in the collection were The Warrior’s Soul, Prince Roman, and The Tale.

The Black Mate

The Black Mate – critical commentary

Narrative

The tale starts in first person narrative mode. The un-named narrator is a friend of the mate of the Sapphire Winston Bunter, and he is present in the restaurant conversation where the story begins. In fact Conrad rather coyly signals his presence in his own account of events.

There was also a very young shipmaster, with a little fair moustache and serious eyes, who said nothing, and only smiled faintly from time to time.

But on Bunter’s voyage aboard the Sapphire to Calcutta and back, events are presented in third person omniscient narrative mode, with the thoughts and feelings of the secondary and tertiary characters fully expressed.

Then when Bunter nears home and his wife inherits the money, the narrator suddenly reappears to present the conclusion to the story as a first person narrative again.

Conrad offers no explanation of how the information in the central part of the story reaches us, nor any persuasive logical reason why there should be two narrative modes at work in the one tale.

None of this would be terribly important were it not for the fact that Conrad has become celebrated for his inventive use of narrators and the complex structure of his tales and novels. But the fact is that he often makes mistakes in the logic and the narrative paths by which information reaches the reader – and this is an early example of that weakness, which is worth noting.

He also sometimes plays fast and lose with the conventions of tale-telling – as he does here. The narrator knows perfectly well at the outset of the tale why Bunter’s hair is so black, yet he conceals the fact from the reader with teasing hints that Bunter has a secret (without revealing what it is). In fact it is the narrator who advises Bunter to dye his hair in the first place. This device reduces the story to not much more than an elaborate and delayed joke.

The Black Mate – study resources

The Black Mate The Black Mate – CreateSpace editions – Amazon UK

The Black Mate The Black Mate – CreateSpace editions – Amazon US

The Black Mate The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad – Kindle eBook

The Black Mate The Black Mate – eBook versions at Project Gutenberg

The Black Mate Joseph Conrad: A Biography – Amazon UK

Red button The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Routledge Guide to Joseph Conrad – Amazon UK

Red button Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad – Amazon UK

The Black Mate Notes on Life and Letters – Amazon UK

The Black Mate Joseph Conrad – biographical notes

The Black Mate

The Black Mate – plot summary

A number of sea captains meet at a restaurant in the Port of London. They tease Captain Johns, who thinks that only young seamen should be on ships. Then they discuss ghosts and comment on Bunter, the mate of the Sapphire who once lost a ship in the Indian Ocean and who has strikingly black hair.

Bunter complains to the narrator that Captain Johns has been treating him suspiciously, and has been trying to persuade him to share his belief in ghosts and spiritualism. He has also been oppressed by a berthing master who recognises him from somewhere. It seems that Bunter has some sort of secret, as well as the bad luck that has dogged him ever since the loss of his ship. He has been a captain, but is now forced to accept the position of mate.

The Sapphire sets off bound for Calcutta, and encounters rough seas in the Southern Ocean, which results in breakages of some of Bunter’s personal belongings. Captain Johns continues to harass Bunter with his belief in spiritualism and he regards any signs of scepticism as a personal insult. Then one night Bunter suddenly falls down a ladder and injures his head. There is a general mystery regarding the reason for this accident. When he recovers he tells Captain Johns that he was startled by an apparition and fell backwards in terror.

Bunter continues to be ill, and he is converted to a belief in spiritualism. Then he reveals that the fright has turned his hair white.

Meanwhile, back in London Mrs Bunter inherits money from a distant relative but cannot pass the good news on to her husband because the Sapphire is en route back from Calcutta. She goes to meet the ship at Dunkirk, along with the narrator.

In Dunkirk, Bunter reveals to the narrator that he merely slipped on some brass plates at the top of the ladder, and his hair turned white because he ran out of the hair dye he had been using to make himself look younger. The ghostly apparition was an invention to placate Captain Johns. Bunter leaves the Sapphire and goes off with his wife.

Joseph Conrad – video biography

The Black Mate – principal characters
I the un-named narrator, a friend of Bunter
Winston Bunter a former captain, now a mate
Mrs Bunter his wife
Captain Johns commander of the Sapphire
The Black Mate

The Black Mate

first edition 1925 Fisher Unwin

The Cambridge Companion to Joseph ConradThe Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad offers a series of essays by leading Conrad scholars aimed at both students and the general reader. There’s a chronology and overview of Conrad’s life, then chapters that explore significant issues in his major writings, and deal in depth with individual works. These are followed by discussions of the special nature of Conrad’s narrative techniques, his complex relationships with late-Victorian imperialism and with literary Modernism, and his influence on other writers and artists. Each essay provides guidance to further reading, and a concluding chapter surveys the body of Conrad criticism.
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Joseph Conrad - writing table

Joseph Conrad’s writing table

Further reading

Red button Amar Acheraiou Joseph Conrad and the Reader, London: Macmillan, 2009.

Red button Jacques Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Red button Muriel Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941

Red button Harold Bloom (ed), Joseph Conrad (Bloom’s Modern Critical Views, New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 2010

Red button Hillel M. Daleski , Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession, London: Faber, 1977

Red button Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Red button Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985

Red button John Dozier Gordon, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1940

Red button Albert J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1958

Red button Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness, London: Edward Arnold, 1979

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, London: Edward Arnold, 1990

Red button Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, London: Continuum, 2007.

Red button Owen Knowles, The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Conrad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990

Red button Jakob Lothe, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008

Red button Gustav Morf, The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad, New York: Astra, 1976

Red button Ross Murfin, Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, Tuscaloosa, Ala: University of Alabama Press, 1985

Red button Jeffery Myers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, Cooper Square Publishers, 2001.

Red button Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, Camden House, 2007.

Red button George A. Panichas, Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, Mercer University Press, 2005.

Red button John G. Peters, The Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Red button James Phelan, Joseph Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, Ohio State University Press, 2008.

Red button Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press, 1966

Red button Allan H. Simmons, Joseph Conrad: (Critical Issues), London: Macmillan, 2006.

Red button J.H. Stape, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996

Red button John Stape, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, Arrow Books, 2008.

Red button Peter Villiers, Joseph Conrad: Master Mariner, Seafarer Books, 2006.

Red button Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, London: Chatto and Windus, 1980

Red button Cedric Watts, Joseph Conrad: (Writers and their Work), London: Northcote House, 1994.

Other writing by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad Lord JimLord Jim (1900) is the earliest of Conrad’s big and serious novels, and it explores one of his favourite subjects – cowardice and moral redemption. Jim is a ship’s captain who in youthful ignorance commits the worst offence – abandoning his ship. He spends the remainder of his adult life in shameful obscurity in the South Seas, trying to re-build his confidence and his character. What makes the novel fascinating is not only the tragic but redemptive outcome, but the manner in which it is told. The narrator Marlowe recounts the events in a time scheme which shifts between past and present in an amazingly complex manner. This is one of the features which makes Conrad (born in the nineteenth century) considered one of the fathers of twentieth century modernism.
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Joseph Conrad Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness (1902) is a tightly controlled novella which has assumed classic status as an account of the process of Imperialism. It documents the search for a mysterious Kurtz, who has ‘gone too far’ in his exploitation of Africans in the ivory trade. The reader is plunged deeper and deeper into the ‘horrors’ of what happened when Europeans invaded the continent. This might well go down in literary history as Conrad’s finest and most insightful achievement, and it is based on his own experiences as a sea captain. This volume also contains ‘An Outpost of Progress’ – the magnificent study in shabby cowardice which prefigures ‘Heart of Darkness’.
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© Roy Johnson 2013

Joseph Conrad web links

Joseph Conrad at Mantex
Biography, tutorials, book reviews, study guides, videos, web links.

Joseph Conrad – his greatest novels and novellas
Brief notes introducing his major works in recommended editions.

Joseph Conrad at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of formats.

Joseph Conrad at Wikipedia
Biography, major works, literary career, style, politics, and further reading.

Joseph Conrad at the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production notes, box office, trivia, and quizzes.

Works by Joseph Conrad
Large online database of free HTML texts, digital scans, and eText versions of novels, stories, and occasional writings.

The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
Conradian journal, reviews. and scholarly resources.

The Joseph Conrad Society of America
American-based – recent publications, journal, awards, conferences.

Hyper-Concordance of Conrad’s works
Locate a word or phrase – in the context of the novel or story.

More on Joseph Conrad
Twentieth century literature
Joseph Conrad complete tales

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