THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
First included in Everyman’s Library, 1999
Selection © 1999 by Everyman’s Library
Introduction, Bibliography and Chronology Copyright © 1999 by
Everyman’s Library
Typography by Peter B. Willberg
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York. Published in the United Kingdom by Everyman’s Library, Northburgh House, 10 Northburgh Street, London EC1V 0AT, and distributed by Random House (UK) Ltd.
US website: www.randomhouse.com/everymans
ISBN: 0-375-40935-1 (US)
1-85715-785-0 (UK)
eBook ISBN 978-0-375-71284-5
A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the
British Library
v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Select Bibliography
Chronology
A Landscape-Painter (1866)
A Light Man (1869)
A Passionate Pilgrim (1871)
The Madonna of the Future (1873)
Madame de Mauves (1874)
Benvolio (1875)
Daisy Miller: A Study (1878)
An International Episode (1878)
The Pension Beaurepas (1879)
The Point of View (1882)
The Siege of London (1883)
Lady Barberina (1884)
The Author of ‘Beltraffio’ (1884)
Louisa Pallant (1888)
The Aspern Papers (1888)
The Liar (1888)
The Lesson of the Master (1888)
The Patagonia (1888)
The Pupil (1888)
The Marriages (1891)
The Chaperon (1891)
Sir Edmund Orme (1891)
About the Introducer
INTRODUCTION
In his stories James reveals himself more deeply and comprehensively than he does anywhere in his novels. That is necessarily a bold generalization, but I believe it to be true. By way of example and of contrast let us select two of the earliest stories in this volume, one of them, ‘A Landscape-Painter’, only the third that the young author wrote. Both are little masterpieces, as good in their own way as anything by the mature master. The editor of the Atlantic Monthly must have been pleased to receive stories of this quality. And yet both these tales carry all the signs of an apprentice – a highly skilful and promising apprentice – who is still feeling his way. That is precisely the reason for their freshness and their charm. James is still too uncertain of himself and his craft not to be direct – almost touchingly direct. He cannot help but give away both himself and his method. And that imparts to these two very contrasting tales their timbre, as James himself would have put it, and their vividness.
Of the two – ‘A Landscape-Painter’ and ‘A Light Man’ – I myself prefer the former. The plot is almost comically artificial, but James was always to like the diary form and the story makes a perfect companion to his sense of place, already so well developed – his sense here of the sea, the islands, the little New England fishing town, the heroine herself as a figure in the landscape. All are seen just as a painter might see them, and remind us that James himself, when young, had the idea of becoming a painter, and studied for a while at Newport on the Atlantic coast. Newport was a much more fashionable place than Chowderville, a point James makes a joke of in the story, but the choice of setting indicates the engaging fact that the stories in bulk can be seen to form a kind of biography of James’s own changing moods and his intentions, his likes and dislikes, his boredom and his enthusiasms – his enthusiasms above all. They cover the whole span of his creative life; and some of the last that he wrote, when he revisited New York in the twentieth century and found it horribly changed, remind us by contrast of his wonderful early and, as it were, innocent sense of the pristine beauty of the American scene, as revealed in ‘A Landscape-Painter’.
This is the same enthusiasm which James exaggerates almost to the point of parody when describing the charms of English scenery in ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’, or when, in a later story, he gives us what must be one of the most passionately vivid accounts ever written of the splendours of the Venetian Duomo where ‘I wandered beneath these reverted cups of scintillating darkness, stumbling on the great stony swells of the pavement … where a thousand once-bright fragments glimmer through the long attrition of idle feet and devoted knees.’ (Those two adjectives confer with each other brilliantly, and surely Venetian mosaic has never been better described.)
To return briefly to that pioneer tale, ‘A Landscape-Painter’. It is an idyll with a dark ending, a formula in which James’s stories may be said to specialize, but one never done more subtly, or in a sense more disquietingly. Locksley’s innocence, a kind of innocence in which harmless vanity plays a decided part, is disillusioned for the second time. No girl can love so rich a man, even so quietly and obscurely rich a man, for himself alone, and as she apparently expects him to love her. ‘If you really love me,’ says Miriam after she has secretly read his diary and discovered how rich he is – ‘and I think you do – you will not let this make any difference.’ She has never said she loved him: she said she would be his wife, and ‘I am incapable of more than one deception.’
This has the appearance of a happy ending, but it is also an ending from which the real life of the story has significantly departed, just as vitality has departed from Locksley’s own life with the realization that he will never write any more in his diary, and perhaps never paint any more either. This apparently unmotivated decision takes us deep into James’s own heart and mind. Locksley has made the irrevocable decision: he has found himself committed to ‘normal’ life, instead of to the life of imagination and creation represented by his diary and his painting. His painting has earned respect from the anonymous narrator of the tale, into whose hands the diary has passed. Locksley, we learn from this ‘narrator’, is dead. Life as a married man – even as a man married to the once bewitching Miriam – offers no more for him it seems, and so he dies. The story ends on an appropriate note of solution, and yet nothing but emptiness and failure appear to lie ahead.
Miriam too has changed, although the shift in tone abruptly fixed up by the young author in his concluding paragraphs must seem an artificial one. From the beautifully observed and naturalistically recorded rustic maiden with whom Locksley gradually falls in love, she has suddenly become like the word-perfect heroine at the close of a play – a Restoration comedy, or the type of neat Comédie française production with which the young James was already familiar. But artificial as it is, this change exactly suits what has occurred. Miriam is now a rich married woman. She has changed just as her new husband has changed, and neither can ever be the same again. Young as he was, James already had the obscure horror of marriage and domesticity which in time became, so to speak, natural to him. He can never bear the young men in his stories to get married, and indeed Locksley is almost the only one who does. It is a far far better thing to forbear, to renounce, to remain celibate, and James sees to it that this is the fate to befall most of his heroes, and very often his heroines too. He arranges the matter by means of a plot, and yet the stories get their characteristic resonance and meaning from his own much deeper and more personal instincts.
There is something engaging, touching too, in the oblique way the young James reveals himself in such tales. He was extremely aware of youthful female charm, possibly susceptible to it as well: he may well have bee
n half in love with his cousin Minny Temple, who was to die young, in the fashion in which Locksley fell in love with his picture of Miriam in her seaside setting. But James no doubt knew too, at an early age, that to see and admire and record the picture, to love it even, was one thing: to marry the picture and settle down with it into domesticity was quite another, and not for him.
All these matters are compressed in a sense into one remarkable story, a story with all the lyric tone and freshness of enthusiasm so attractive in the best of James’s early tales. ‘A Light Man’ is equally remarkable in a very different way. It is the first story which hints at the theme of homosexuality, as today we can hardly avoid seeing and recognizing; and it is significant that the author expressed in later life a special affection for the work, and for the way he had composed it – ‘done’ it, in his own later phrase. A diary is again used, and used with an equal amount of subtlety. As James’s biographer Leon Edel remarks, it is the kind of tale in which ‘the hero provides one picture of himself while the reader forms another’. James developed a great fondness for this technique, which he was to use superbly in one of the most famous of all his tales and nouvelles, ‘The Aspern Papers’.
Like every cultured late Victorian James was steeped in the works of Browning, whose skill as a narrator influenced him deeply. He takes as epigraph to ‘A Light Man’ a verse from Browning’s poem ‘A Light Woman’, whose narrator tells how he stole his friend’s mistress just to see how easy the feat would be. The friend accuses him of disloyalty, a charge he does not accept given the woman in question. What will she herself come to think of him? – how will the story end?
Well anyhow here the story stays,
So far at least as I understand:
And Robert Browning, you writer of plays,
Here’s a subject made to your hand!
The final verse is not the one James quotes, but it may have determined something important to his own narrative technique. ‘Here the story stays’ – not ends: James will become adept at suggesting the possibilities in this, for, as he was later to put it, ‘relations … stop nowhere, and the eternal problem of the artist is but to draw the circle in which they will happily appear to do so’. In early days he could be comparatively clumsy at this, but the fascination of the earlier tales for the reader consists partly in perceiving how the author is creating his own way of doing it.
Brilliant as it is, the tone of ‘A Light Man’ is appropriately worldly and cynical: his diary makes the greatest possible contrast with that of the landscape-painter. But in the short space of the tale the characters of Theodore and old Mr Sloane come abundantly alive, as alive as that of the ‘light man’ himself. The three are locked in a contest in which sex and personality are as ambiguous as money, and as important. It is a theme made not only for James but for writers like Somerset Maugham and Christopher Isherwood, and for a film like Joseph Losey’s ‘The Servant’. Like ‘A Landscape-Painter’, James’s tale changes its note at the end, and gives us an example of his preference, not perhaps quite satisfactorily managed here, for leaving the future unresolved and the characters’ purpose unrequited – a type of ending that achieves maximum effectiveness in ‘The Aspern Papers’.
I have dwelt at some length on the first two stories in our selection because they illustrate so well and with such comparative clarity the ways in which James approaches and will ultimately perfect his instincts for story form and narrative method. And so it seems more helpful to concentrate on this in the case of a few revealing examples than to pass the whole collection rapidly in review. What these stories demonstrate above all is James’s power of suggestibility: how he brings all manner of considerations, those from his own inner life very much included, into the overall presentation of what might at first appear quite a simple and straightforward narrative.
He soon begins to bring the same sort of technique to bear on social and national as well as on personal issues. In terms of popularity and financial reward ‘Daisy Miller’ was the most successful story he ever wrote, although it is difficult to think of it today as one of his best, or one that deeply engaged his truest talent and his own most characteristic kinds of awareness. But we should always remember that James, though he might give the impression of leading a secluded aesthetic life, out of the world, was in fact deeply interested in everything worldly from money-making and high society to the national character and the state of the poor. Not for nothing did he learn what he described as ‘the lesson of Balzac’; not for nothing had he been an assiduous reader of Carlyle and Dickens. Dickens’s London and Balzac’s Paris of the great Comédie humaine novels were the twin centres of civilization which, together with his American heritage, helped to make him the most comprehensive of late nineteenth-century novelists and story-tellers.
As his art developed, a main subject was turning out to be those many contrasts between burgeoning young America, and ancient, decaying but still infinitely seductive Europe, of which he was to have so varied and so rich an experience. After his first ‘passionate pilgrimage’ to Europe as a young man he paid a more businesslike extended visit from 1872 to 1874, making the discovery as he travelled that he could practise his art more cheaply and profitably in Europe than in America. It was during this period that he obtained the material for stories like ‘The Madonna of the Future’, ‘Madame de Mauves’, ‘Benvolio’ and ‘The Last of the Valerii’, stories which verge on allegory and the tradition of American Gothic. Edgar Allen Poe is in the background, as is the Hawthorne who wrote The House of the Seven Gables and The Marble Faun. Remarkable as these stories are – ‘Benvolio’ and the more worldly ‘Madame de Mauves’ in particular – the reader may come to feel that even the most sophisticated and urbane type of allegory is not a genre that really suits James. As ‘A Landscape-Painter’ demonstrated, he best approaches meaning in a tale by more subtle paths: there is something by James’s standards a trifle crude and schematic in the contrast in ‘Benvolio’ between the Countess, who breathes so seductively the decadent breath of Europe, and the pure-souled, high-minded Scholastica, who is Benvolio’s ultimate choice. We may feel, again by James’s standards, that neither Benvolio himself nor the two women are really – as he would later have put it – ‘there’.
But Daisy Miller emphatically is – that is her great strength. James caught the reading public’s fancy with this tale of an All-American girl whose instincts were as pure and wholesome as those of Scholastica herself, but who was wholly oblivious of the conventions which governed a nice young girl’s conduct in Europe. Europe loved the story in consequence: for a time there were even ‘Daisy Miller’ hats to be bought there, and ‘Daisy Miller’ dresses. There is something ironical about success coming to James by such means, and through the invention of such a character, but such success was always important to him, financially dependent as he was on his writing. The many stories and articles he turned out at every period of his long creative life were always much more profitable than his novels.
There followed a period which can be conveniently labelled by the title of one of James’s most lively tales, ‘The Siege of London’. And not London only, although James was soon to decide that neither Paris nor Rome suited him so well, either as literary headquarters or source of inspiration. In ‘Daisy Miller’ he had been an interested spectator, as he now was in London society: the time had passed for those franker symbolic examinations of his own provenance and destiny which we found in ‘Benvolio’. He had made his decisions, which were very unlike those of Benvolio, and committed himself to the lonely vocation of the dedicated artist. But that did not mean any loss of vivacity and humour, in which all his tales in their different ways abound. James could be as worldly in pursuit of his goals as his hero in ‘The Aspern Papers’; and there is something irresistibly comic, as the author is well aware, in the predicament of that hero, condemned to choose, as he gradually comes to realize, between marrying poor Tita in order to obtain the papers, or giving up his whole mission as
a bad job. In fact he fatally dithers, and the loss that ensues will always be ‘intolerable’ to him.
This is not black humour: it is genuine comedy, but it is mixed in the tale with the true flavour of pathos, even of tragedy. Like so many things in James’s stories the germ of ‘The Aspern Papers’ was close, even uncomfortably close, to his own experience. Venice was the city he loved most in Italy, and it was there that he had dedicated himself to the monkish life of a hard-working and solitary author. The very stones of Venice, her churches and statues and incomparable pictures, seemed to inspire and confirm his own resolve. In one of the most haunting scenes in any of his tales his hero gazes up at the great equestrian statue of the warrior Colleoni, feeling through that contemplation, the all-importance of a ruthless will, a will to seize without scruple on what it desires and aspires to.
James saw in the soldier his own very different but equal determination, and his will was, in a bizarre sense, put to the test when an American maiden lady who had become a close friend began to show signs of yearning for a more intimate relation, perhaps even for marriage. James took fright: but he showed his usual determination. He detached himself, as cordially and as coldly as he could manage, and poor Constance Fenimore, who had presumed too far on the pleasure he had undoubtedly experienced in her company, retired chastened to an apartment in Venice where she died, possibly by suicide. The news appalled James, who hastened to Venice to possess himself of any compromising correspondence. He was filled with remorse, perhaps more so even than the occasion required; he could not help feeling that he had behaved heartlessly and like a cad, just as the hero of ‘The Aspern Papers’ was to do. The story was in a sense a kind of penance, as well as a way of exorcizing what had been for its author a deeply painful experience.
There is no doubt a further element of James’s own hidden experience in another and briefer nouvelle of this period, ‘The Pupil’. (James never knew what length of tale the donnée of an idea would yield him, and what had started as a short story sometimes swelled, as he pondered its implications, into a whole novel, as the idea of The Ambassadors was to do.) ‘The Pupil’ has a love theme, of a sort that James understood well, and the touching pathos of pupil and tutor, with their hopeless but mutually needful relationship, is set against the hard grotesque of Morgan’s parents, who want to do an affectionate best for their son, but only if it costs them nothing. It seems likely that James has taken a hint here from the case of Dickens’s parents – there is something decidedly Dickensian and Micawberish in the setting of the tale – but with his usual refinement of intelligence he has added and explored the idea by perceiving that the parents might genuinely dote on the boy (‘Morgan was dear to his mother’) without the will, or the love, to abate their selfish pursuits in his interest.