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The Altar of the Dead

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The Altar of the Dead (1895) holds a very high distinction amongst the stories of Henry James – for it is the one from the hundred or more that he wrote with which he said he was ‘least dissatisfied’. And it is generally held in positive regard amongst literary critics, along with similar stories such as The Beast in the Jungle which he wrote a few years later. One amazing feature of this story is that it was turned down by several magazine editors, and only first published in the collection Terminations in 1895.

His great achievement in this story is to compress what seems like the entire adult lives of his characters into the space of a few pages. It is intensely focused in terms of location, characters, and tone. And whilst reading it, one actually feels that half a lifetime has passed.

The Altar of the Dead

The altar of the dead

The Altar of the Dead – critical commentary

Interpretation

Some critics have seen the story as a fable which shows that love and forgiveness can conquer deep seated hostilities and cure old wounds. The woman has forgiven Acton Hague, and in the end Stransom too is prepared to add Hague to his list of the Remembered – though it is not clear if the ‘one final candle’ he intends for his altar is for Hague or for Stransom himself. This reading would see the last-minute change of heart on both their parts as a rather sad conclusion to a tale with a morally uplifting message.

A more critical reading however would see the story as a ghastly picture of two people who have rationalised their emotional emptiness as self-sacrifice. For like The Beast in the Jungle this is a story of lost opportunities, of missed chances, fear of ‘life’, and the choice of a spiritual ‘death in life’. Both the principal characters have devoted their lives to the memory of someone dead – Stransom to Mary Antrim and his other friends, the woman to Acton Hague.

Even whilst we might admire their loyalty and firmness of purpose, their emotional investment is in something negative and life-denying. And they cling morbidly to these associations whilst all the time the chance of establishing a a healthy human relationship with each other is staring them in the face.

They appear to have so much in common – their devotion to lost friends and the steadfastness of their beliefs. Everything in the story appears to point to them having a mutual interest in forming a supportive emotional bond. But in fact both of them are very secretive with each other. Stransom deliberately withholds information about himself:

it was natural enough that of his previous life she should have ascertained only what he judged good to communicate. There were passages it was quite conceivable that even in the moments of tenderest expansion he should have withheld.

In other words he is emotionally costive, secretive, and withdrawn. She in her turn refuses to let him into her home until her aunt has died, because she fears what the aunt might reveal about her. It takes him ‘years and years’ to even learn her address.

It is then no wonder that the relationship between them is doomed to be unfulfilled. And yet there is a beautifully symbolic and delicately orchestrated scene of potential intimacy that takes place when Stransom visits her for the first time in her own home.

First of all she gives him an open invitation to return: ‘You can always come now, you know’. Then she invites him into her own private room, which they reach via a ‘narrow hall’. Once inside she sits beside him on a sofa and takes his hand in hers whilst she tells him she has forgiven Acton Hague.

The scene is very lightly suggestive of what could exist between them, and it is echoed in the final scene when she comforts him in the church as he is dying, but by then it is then Too Late.

Like The Beast in the Jungle there is a wonderful evocation of years and years slipping by as they both become older and nearer to death. At the start of the story Stransom is ‘an elderly man’ of fifty-five and by the repetition of small phrases such as ‘months passed … years later … they were growing old together in their piety’ – a whole lifetime seems to drift by, and at the end of only twenty pages he is expiring in the church from a weak heart. The woman when he first meets her at the music recital is ‘pretty’, yet in no time ‘her faded beauty was like a summer twilight’

James certainly saw Stransom’s devotion in quite a positive light in the plans he made for the story in his Notebooks:

He cherishes for the silent, for the patient, the unreproaching dead, a tenderness in which all his private need of something, not of this world, to cherish, to be pious to, to make the object of a donation, finds a sacred, and almost a secret, expression.

However, it should be borne in mind that James’s notebooks entries recorded his original ideas for stories. The details and emphases might change during the process of composition. And conversely, his famous Prefaces which form the introductions to the New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James (1907-1909) were written a long time after the stories had been written and published. There is therefore considerable scope for post-rationalisation on James’s part. And of course we do not need to take as authoritative writers’ estimates of their own works. We should ‘trust the tale, not the teller’.

The Altar of the Dead – study resources

The Altar of the Dead The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Altar of the Dead The Complete Works of Henry James – Kindle edition – Amazon US

The Altar of the Dead Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon UK

The Altar of the Dead Complete Stories 1892—1898 – Library of America – Amazon US

The Altar of the Dead The Altar of the Dead – Classic Reprints edition – Amazon UK

The Altar of the Dead The Altar of the Dead – Kindle eBook edition

The Altar of the Dead The Altar of the Dead – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Altar of the Dead The Altar of the Dead – audio book at LibriVox

The Altar of the Dead The Complete Tales (Vol 9) – Paperback edition – Amazon UK

Red button La Chambre Verte (The Vanishing Fiancée) – Film version – Amazon UK

The Altar of the Dead The Altar of the Dead – Henry 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 Altar of the Dead

The Altar of the Dead – plot summary

Distressed by the death of his fiancée, George Stransom devotes his adult life to keeping the memory of her alive. As he grows older, further names of friends are added to his personal roll call of the Dead.

In a cemetery he discovers an old church, inside which there is an empty altar that he decides to consecrate for his own personal use. He lights candles to the memory of all his dead friends – except one, Acton Hague, with whom he quarrelled.

In the course of his regular visits he meets a fellow mourner, a woman with whom he shares his altar. They know nothing personal about each other, except the fact that she is mourning one particular person, whilst he mourns several.

Following the death of her aunt, with whom she lives, the woman invites him to her home, where he realises that her mourning is for Acton Hague his former friend. Hague has done the woman some terrible wrong, but she has forgiven him. Feeling that he is getting older, Stransom wants her to devote herself to his shrine in the event of his own death. She wants him to add a candle for Acton Hague, but he refuses.

This difference splits them apart, and Stransom is left to realise that when he himself dies, the whole of his sacred memories will die with him. In failing health he returns to the church where he has a powerful vision of his former fiancée, and feels he ought to forgive Acton Hague.

His un-named woman friend has also returned to the church, having felt that their difference over Acton Hague is no longer significant. He offers to add another one candle on the altar, but she dismisses the idea. She has come to take up the memory of his collective – and she does so just as he dies beside her.

Principal characters
George Stransom an ‘elderly man’ of fifty-five
Mary Antrim his former fiancée who died
Sir Acton Hague KCB his old university friend, with whom he quarrelled
Paul Creston his younger friend
Kate Creston Creston’s former wife, who died
Mrs Creston his new (vulgar) wife
— an un-named woman who Stransom befriends

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.

Henry James's study

Henry James’s study

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 from the South 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 Altar of the Dead Buy the book at Amazon UK
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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
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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 2012

More tales by James
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The Angel at the Grave

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

The Angel at the Grave first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine in February 1901 and was collected in Edith Wharton’s compilation of short stories Crucial Instances published later the same year. Scribner’s was a New York company which went on to present the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe. Many of its authors have been Pulitzer Prizewinners – including Edith Wharton herself.

The Angel at the Grave

cover design by Parish Maxfield

The Angel at the Grave – critical commentary

This is a story which is poised very delicately between a tragedy of wasted spirit and a redemptive tale of long-suffering patience finally rewarded. Paulina Anson is a figure of female self-sacrifice. She rejects the early offer of love from Hewlett Winsloe, and chooses to remain at home rather than go to New York. The house which symbolises the life and work of her grandfather starts out as a place of comfort for her, but gradually becomes a living tomb. Even her creative efforts in writing her grandfather’s biography come to nothing, and eventually she feels that her life has been wasted.

The success of the redemptive ending depends a great deal on its credibility. Corby intends to write an article commenting on Anson’s pamphlet on the amphioxus, which demonstrates missing evolutionary links between the invertebrate and the vertebrate world. We are expected to believe that this will restore interest in Anson’s work, possibly make Corby famous, and will validate Paulina’s long-unrewarded dedication to her grandfather. This is rather a lot to ask, and any idea that there might be some romantic link between the two believers (‘she looked as though youth had touched her on the lips’) should be tempered by the observation that Paulina is by this stage of the tale a middle-aged woman and Corby a ‘fresh-eyed sanguine youth’.

The Angel at the Grave – study resources

The Angel at the Grave Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

The Angel at the Grave Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

The Angel at the Grave - eBook edition The Angel at the Grave – eBook format at Project Gutenberg

The Angel at the Grave - eBook edition The Angel at the Grave – eBook format

Edith Wharton - biography The Angel at the Grave – hardback edition

Red button A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Angel at the Grave

The Angel at the Grave – plot summary

Part I   Paulina Anson has grown up in the New England house of her grandfather, a celebrated Transcendentalist philosopher. She is the only member of the family who can read and understand his works. When a young New York scholar visits the house and marriage seems a possibility, she turns him down because she refuses to go to New York.

Part II   She devotes herself to the house and to the memory and work of her grandfather. By the age of forty she has written his definitive biography, but when she takes the manuscript to his publisher they tell her there is no longer any public interest in his work. She then tries to understand how and why her grandfather’s reputation has faded when those of his contemporaries (Emerson and Hawthorne) remain alive. She concludes in despair that both she and her grandfather have wasted their lives.

Part III   Subsequently, she is visited by a young scholar George Corby who wants to write an article on one of Anson’s early anatomical discoveries. When Paulina produces the long-forgotten pamphlet from the archives, Corby is ecstatic. She warns him that she has ruined her life guarding her grandfather’s legacy – but he argues that by staying in the house she has saved from oblivion a work which will now bring his reputation back to life.

The Angel at the Grave – main characters
Orestes Anson a New England transcendentalist philosopher
Paulina Anson his grand-daughter
George Corby a young researcher
Hewlett Winsloe a young man and suitor to Paulina

Edith Wharton's writing

Edith Wharton’s writing

Further reading

Louis Auchincloss, Edith Wharton: A Woman of her Time, New York: Viking, 1971,

Elizabeth Ammons, Edith Wharton’s Argument with America, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1982, pp.222. ISBN: 0820305138

Janet Beer, Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), New York: Northcote House, 2001, pp.99, ISBN: 0746308981

Millicent Bell (ed), The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp.232, ISBN: 0521485134

Alfred Bendixen and Annette Zilversmit (eds), Edith Wharton: New Critical Essays, New York: Garland, 1992, pp.329, ISBN: 0824078489

Eleanor Dwight, Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary Life, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994, ISBN: 0810927950

Gloria C. Erlich, The Sexual Education of Edith Wharton, California: University of California Press, 1992, pp.223, ISBN: 0520075838

Susan Goodman, Edith Wharton’s Women: Friends and Rivals, UPNE, 1990, pp.220, ISBN: 0874515246

Irving Howe, (ed), Edith Wharton: A collection of Critical Essays, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986,

Jennie A. Kassanoff, Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp.240, ISBN: 0521830893

Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton, London: Vintage, new edition 2008, pp.864, ISBN: 0099763516

R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography, New York: Harper and Rowe, 1975, pp.592, ISBN: 0880640200

James W. Tuttleton (ed), Edith Wharton: The Contemporary Reviews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp.586, ISBN: 0521383196

Candace Waid, Edith Wharton’s Letters from the Underworld, London: University of North Carolina Press, 1991,

Sarah Bird Wright, Edith Wharton A to Z: The Essential Reference to Her Life and Work, Fact on File, 1998, pp.352, ISBN: 0816034818

Cynthia Griffin Wolff, A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton, New York: Perseus Books, second edition 1994, pp.512, ISBN: 0201409186

Video documentary

Other works by Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton - The Custom of the CountryThe Custom of the Country (1913) is Edith Wharton’s satiric anatomy of American society in the first decade of the twentieth century. It follows the career of Undine Spragg, recently arrived in New York from the midwest and determined to conquer high society. Glamorous, selfish, mercenary and manipulative, her principal assets are her striking beauty, her tenacity, and her father’s money. With her sights set on an advantageous marriage, Undine pursues her schemes in a world of shifting values, where triumph is swiftly followed by disillusion. This is a study of modern ambition and materialism written a hundred years before its time.
Edith Wharton - The Custom of the Country Buy the book from Amazon UK
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Edith Wharton - The House of MirthThe House of Mirth (1905) is the story of Lily Bart, who is beautiful, poor, and still unmarried at twenty-nine. In her search for a husband with money and position she betrays her own heart and sows the seeds of the tragedy that finally overwhelms her. The book is a disturbing analysis of the stifling limitations imposed upon women of Wharton’s generation. In telling the story of Lily Bart, who must marry to survive, Wharton recasts the age-old themes of family, marriage, and money in ways that transform the traditional novel of manners into an arresting modern document of cultural anthropology.
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The ReefThe Reef deals with three topics with which Edith Wharton herself was intimately acquainted at the period of its composition – unhappy marriage, divorce, and the discovery of sensual pleasures. The setting is a country chateau in France where diplomat George Darrow has arrived from America, hoping to marry the beautiful widow Anna Leith. But a young woman employed as governess to Anna’s daughter proves to be someone he met briefly in the past and has fallen in love with him. She also becomes engaged to Anna’s stepson. The result is a quadrangle of tensions and suspicions about who knows what about whom. And the outcome is not what you might imagine.
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Edith Wharton – web links

Edith Wharton at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, tutorials on the shorter fiction, bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Short Stories of Edith Wharton
This is an old-fashioned but excellently detailed site listing the publication details of all Edith Wharton’s eighty-six short stories – with links to digital versions available free on line.

Edith Wharton at Gutenberg
Free eTexts of the major novels and collections of stories in a variety of digital formats – also includes travel writing and interior design.

Edith Wharton at Wikipedia
Full details of novels, stories, and travel writing, adaptations for television and the cinema, plus web links to related sites.

The Edith Wharton Society
Old but comprehensive collection of free eTexts of the major novels, stories, and travel writing, linking archives at University of Virginia and Washington State University.

The Mount: Edith Wharton’s Home
Aggressively commercial site devoted to exploiting The Mount – the house and estate designed by Edith Wharton. Plan your wedding reception here.

Edith Wharton at Fantastic Fiction
A compilation which purports to be a complete bibliography, arranged as novels, collections, non-fiction, anthologies, short stories, letters, and commentaries – but is largely links to book-selling sites, which however contain some hidden gems.

Edith Wharton’s manuscripts
Archive of Wharton holdings at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library

© Roy Johnson 2014

Edith Wharton – short stories
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The Aspern Papers and Other Stories

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stories of writers, readers, and literary reputations

The Aspern Papers (18888) was composed at a critical period in Henry James’s life. It might seem odd one hundred and thirty years later, but his reputation took something of a minor dive in mid career. He was disappointed by the reception of both The Bostonians (1885) and The Princess Cassamassima (1887) and he retreated for a while into the pleasures of the shorter forms of the novella and the short story – both of which he described as ‘tales’. This collection brings together four pieces of work which have a common subject matter – the relationship between authors, readers, and the texts which join them. James was well aware of the rich fictional potential in the writer as a public figure.

The Aspern Papers and Other StoriesThe most famous here is his celebrated novella The Aspern Papers, which like many other of his works has been a fertile source for film, theatre, and opera adaptations. An unnamed writer goes to Venice in search of letters written by Jeffrey Aspern, a famous nineteenth century poet. They were written to and in the possession of Juliana Bordereau, an elderly American woman who was his lover many years ago. She wishes to guard her privacy; the writer wishes to get hold of the letters as material for a biography he is working on. A battle of wills ensues, in which Miss Bordereau dangles before him the prospect of marriage to her niece, Tina Bordereau, a plain middle-aged woman.

It’s a very typical James work, in that there is very little movement or external drama. The three characters are living in the same palazzo in a very charged psychological atmosphere, keeping a very close eye on each other. The denouement is precipitated by Juliana catching the Narrator snooping in her room late at night. The papers have indeed been hidden in a most significant place – but in the end nobody triumphs. In fact, they all fail to get what they want.

James knew full well that many accomplished writers and artists were unremarkable in their private lives, and that conversely there were exuberant talkers and entertainers over the dinner table who had no creative talent. The Private Life is a curious exercise in exploring this difference between an artist’s public manifestation and his personal life. Clare Vawdrey is perfectly at ease in a social group, but when asked to present his latest literary creation, he is unable to face his admirers. He needs privacy and seclusion in order to reveal his imaginative life. This case is wittily contrasted with an example of an accomplished public figure whose personality disappears completely once there is nobody present with whom he can interact.

The Middle Years is a much anthologised tale in which a dying novelist meets a young doctor who is also an enthusiastic reader of his work. Feeling re-charged with creative force by the quality of the younger man’s appreciation, he conceives of a ‘second chance’, an extension to his creative life, in which to say all that he feels he still has within him. But it is too late: he finally realises that life has presented him with his one and only ‘chance’ – and dies.

The Death of the Lion is a variation on the same theme. A journalist feels he must guard and nurture the reputation of Neil Paraday, an ailing novelist he admires. He befriends Paraday, who shows him the manuscript of a novel he has written but not yet published. Paraday becomes celebrated, and he is drawn into fashionable society that basks in his fame but does not actually read his work. The journalist is horrified to learn that the manuscript is being passed around and is eventually lost. Paraday is distracted from his work, becomes ill, and he too dies. But in this version, the journalist marries a fellow Paraday admirer, and they settle to search for the lost manuscript.

There are plenty more stories in the James oeuvre which deal with writers and artists (though none about musicians): he wrote more than a hundred stories in all. But this is an excellent selection – and worth it for the inclusion of the magnificent Aspern Papers alone.

The Aspern Papers and Other Stories Buy the book at Amazon UK

The Aspern Papers and Other Stories Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2011

Henry James, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories, London: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp.212, ISBN: 0199538557

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

The Beast in the Jungle

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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 Beldonald Holbein

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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 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
More on the novella
More on literary studies
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

The Bolted Door

by

tutorial, study guide, commentary, further reading

The Bolted Door first appeared in Scribner’s Magazine for March 1908 and was later included in the collection Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910). Edith Wharton was a commercially successful writer of short stories at this period, even though she felt she didn’t reach true maturity as an artist until the production of her novella Ethan Frome written in 1911.

The Bolted Door

The Bolted Door – commentary

This is a story that suffers from several serious weaknesses, but has one redeeming and unusual feature. The weaknesses are that it is based on a rather unconvincing idea; it is annoyingly repetitive; the first part of the story has little to do with the second; and the issue in question is technically unresolved.

The idea that someone has committed a murder but is unable to persuade others of his guilt is mildly amusing, but it is never seriously examined or brought to closure. Hubert Granice tells his story to a lawyer, then to a newspaper editor, and finally to someone who purports to be a detective. His tale becomes more complex and fanciful at each telling. In this way, the reader is led to believe that the murder is a product of his imagination. But he never reports to the police, and his account of events is never held up for comparison with any details of the original crime.

The first sections of the story deal with Granice’s failure as a playwright. He has invested time and money in his ambition to become a successful writer for the stage. Despite exploring various dramatic modes – ‘comedy, tragedy, prose and verse’ – he has failed in all of them. We can be forgiven for thinking that his urge to commit suicide is associated with this failure.

But the narrative then changes to focus on his attempts to confess to the murder of his cousin Joseph Lenman – all of which efforts are thwarted. After this point any mention of his theatrical ambition is forgotten – so there is no persuasive or thematic connection between these two elements of the plot.

Instead, the narrative is taken up with a very repetitive and long-winded series of ‘explanations’ which fail to convince a succession of people of his guilt. These are spun out in exhaustive detail, until he is finally persuaded to enter what we take to be a lunatic asylum as someone who is clearly deluded.

At this point his final confessor, the detective McCarren, reveals that he has solved the mystery of the original crime. He claims that Granice really did murder his cousin Joseph Lenman. However, McCarren produces no evidence in support of this assertion. There is no explanation of how he has uncovered the truth, nor is there any confirmation of Granice’s own account of the murder.

The story therefore concludes with producing a sense of irresolution. It becomes a ‘reversal of expectation’ narrative for which there is no justification.

Existentialism

However, there is a very interesting passage in the story which occurrs when Granice’s frustration is at its most intense. He is unable to persuade other people of his account of the murder, and as a consequence he feels trapped within his own anguished consciousness.

Edith Wharton expresses this state of mind in terms very similar to those used by Jean-Paul Sartre in his writing on existentialism which came forty years later – particularly in Nausea (1938). The protagonist of Sartre’s novel, Antoine Roquentin, experiences his own state of being with a feeling of repulsion. Granice’s anguish is expressed in very similar terms:

He was chained to life—a ‘prisoner of consciousness’ … he was visited by a sense of his fixed identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable selfness, keener, more insidious, more unescapable, than any other sensation he had ever known … Often he woke from his brief snatches of sleep with the feeling that something material was clinging to him, was on his hands and face, and in his throat—and as his brain cleared he understood that it was the sense of his own loathed personality that stuck to him like some thick viscous substance.

In 1908 modern forms of existentialism were still some way off, so this counts as writing which was prescient, if not prophetic.

The Bolted Door – study resources

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon UK

The New York Stories – NYRB – Amazon US

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon UK

Edith Wharton Stories 1891-1910 – Norton Critical – Amazon US

A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Introduction to Edith Wharton – Amazon UK

The Bolted Door

The Bolted Door – plot summary

I   Hubert Granice is a failed playwright who entertains the idea of suicide because of his lack of success. He summons his friend the lawyer Ascham to whom he reveals that he committed a murder ten years previously.

II   He reveals to Ascham the story of his rich elderly cousin Joseph Lenman whose hobby was growing melons. Granice poisoned Lenman by injecting cyanide into a melon, but Ascham does not believe his story.

III   Granice repeats his story to Denver, the editor of a newspaper, with further details about how he arranged and carried out the murder. Denver challenges some of the details, and ultimately refuses to print the confession in his newspaper.

IV   Granice takes his tale to Allonby the district attorney, who does nothing, but sends detective Hewson from his office to go over some of the details.

V   Granice employs a reporter McCarren who checks on the car he claims to have used in the murder and a lock-up garage where it has been kept. However, all the evidence has disappeared in the ten years since the crime took place.

VI   Granice discovers that detective Hewson is really a psychiatrist, who advises him to rest and give up smoking. In despair at his lack of progress, Granice decides to confide to a stranger, and on pestering a young girl in Washington Square, he is arrested by the police.

VII   Granice is placed in what appears to be a mental asylum. He enjoys the peace and quiet, and begins writing long accounts of his ‘case’. When visited by McCarren and a friend, it is revealed that McCarren has discovered that Granice was telling the truth all along.

© Roy Johnson 2018

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