Selected Tales
SELECTED TALES
HENRY JAMES was born in 1843 in New York City, of Scottish and Irish ancestry. His father was a prominent theologian and philosopher, and his elder brother, William, is also famous as a philosopher. He attended schools in New York and later in London, Paris and Geneva, entering the Law School at Harvard in 1862. In 1865 he began to contribute reviews and short stories to American journals. In 1875, after two prior visits to Europe, he settled for a year in Paris, where he met Flaubert, Turgenev and other literary figures. However, the next year he moved to London, where he became so popular in society that in the winter of 1878–9 he confessed to accepting 107 invitations. In 1898 he left London and went to live at Lamb House, Rye, Sussex. Henry James became a British citizen in 1915, was awarded the Order of Merit, and died in 1916.
Henry James wrote some twenty novels, the first published being Roderick Hudson (1875). Other titles include The Europeans, Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians, The Princess Casamassima, The Tragic Muse, The Spoils of Poynton, The Awkward Age, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.
JOHN LYON is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol and Gillespie Visiting Professor at the College of Wooster, Ohio. He is a Founding Fellow of the English Association. He is the author of a book-length study of The Merchant of Venice, and publishes on the novel and on contemporary poetry. He has also edited Rudyard Kipling’s The Light That Failed, Joseph Conrad’s Youth/Heart of Darkness/The End of the Tether and Henry James’s The Sacred Fount for Penguin.
HENRY JAMES
SELECTED TALES
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
JOHN LYON
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This collection published in Penguin Classics 2001
1
Editorial material copyright © John Lyon, 2001
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EISBN: 9781101490655
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
FURTHER READING
A HENRY JAMES CHRONOLOGY
A NOTE ON THE TEXTS
Four Meetings
Daisy Miller
The Pension Beaurepas
The Lesson of the Master
The Pupil
The Real Thing
Greville Fane
The Middle Years
The Death of the Lion
The Figure in the Carpet
In the Cage
The Real Right Thing
Broken Wings
The Abasement of the Northmores
The Beast in the Jungle
The Birthplace
Fordham Castle
Julia Bride
The Jolly Corner
Notes
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This edition would not have been possible without the help of my friends – George and Mary Donaldson, Penny Fielding, Tim Kendall and Fiona Mathews, John Lee, Peter McDonald and Karen O’Brien, Carol Meale, and Helen Small. At Penguin, Hilary Laurie has proved an exemplary editor, not least in her patience and kindness; and the text is all the better for Lindeth Vasey’s characteristic and scrupulous copy editing.
INTRODUCTION
EVER SO MANY THINGS
‘It is like starting a zoo in a closet: the giraffe alone takes up more space than one has for the collection.’1 So the distinguished poet and critic Randall Jarrell lamented the task of selecting an anthology of short stories. The Jamesian zoo which we are sampling here is indeed vast, running to some 112 fine specimens – with a profusion of giraffes and elephants, and some extraordinary supernatural beasts. If Jamesian tales are not always tall, they are often very large for, despite the pressures of publishers and magazine editors, Henry James was never to be persuaded of the ‘blank misery’2 that stories ought, always or even usually, to be short. The works I have been selecting from here vary between 5,000 and 45,000 words. They encompass brief stories, which James referred to as anecdotes, and longer works, which he called nouvelles, and they are all most usefully subsumed under the general title which their author himself favoured – tales. Remarkably numerous, highly various both in subject matter and in style, often very long: mundane facts like these about Jamesian tales put further constraints even on a volume as large as this in its attempt to be adequate to his diversity and variety. Such an attempt, the least that readers have a right to expect from any selection of any author, is an altogether greater requirement in the case of Henry James, where diversity and variety are the very heart of the matter, the message as well as the medium.
Moreover, this great abundance of tales is itself only part of the story of Jamesian art. James cherished, and unquestionably realized, his dream of becoming one of the world’s greatest novelists – although by the time of the ‘late phase’ ( James’s twentieth-century writing), his art had travelled far from the realism of those nineteenth-century novelists, such as Balzac and George Eliot, whom he had come to Europe to admire and to emulate. James cherished, and by his own account humiliatingly failed in, an ambition to be a successful dramatist. James produced essays, criticism, travel writing, autobiography and a vast, incessant flow of letters. Yet throughout his artistic career, from his first creative publication of ‘A Tragedy of Error’ in 1864 to his continuing revision of tales even in the final months of his life, James was writing and revising tales – anecdotes and nouvelles – with a regularity and profusion which might allow us to map out his artistic life as a life of tales. When his roles of novelist or of dramatist came under pressure, or his novels and dramas failed the public or the public failed them, then his commitment to tales, and the thinking behind such a commitment, were formulated with particular force. At such times, James apparently felt that he could be more imaginatively adequate to the world’s rich and varying possibilities by way of a seemingly endless accumulation of comparative smallnesses rather than by containing that rich variousness in a single large work, however magisterial. In his Notebooks – the great gathering place of the sources for so many of his writings – in 1889 and 1891, at a time when he was struggling both with large novelistic attempts at social realism and with ambitions for a career as playwright in the London theatre, he was drawn repeatedly and in recompense to the multiplicity and freedom of opportunities which the tale afforded him:
reviving, refreshing, confirming, consecrating, as it were, the wish and dream that have lately grown stronger than ever in me – the desire that the literary heritage, such as it is, poor thing, that I may leave, shall consist of a large number of perfect short things, nouvelles and tales, illustrative of ever so many things in life – in the life I see and know and feel – and of all the deep and the delicate – and of London, and of art, and of everything: and that they shall be fine, rare, strong, wise – eventually perhaps even recognized.
… by doing short things I can do so many, touch so many subjects, break out in so many places, handle so many of the threads of life.3
The plurality of James’s stories, together with the selectivity and compression necessary within each one of them, declare implicitly that there are other ways to tell each tale, and other tales to be told: taken together, his many tales approach the Jamesian dream of ‘everything’, a vast magnanimous inclusiveness of seeing and knowing and feeling, a great grasping of ‘the threads of life’.
In this selection, doubtless, individual inclusions and exclusions will disappoint individual readers. However, this volume, if it is not to fail, must give some sense of the imaginative, liberating largesse of this prolific and generous writer. The present introduction, too, will have gone wrong if it attempts what James himself does altogether better: here, then, in place of any attempt to summarize or ‘tell’ the stories which follow (although some plot details will be revealed), are some observations and contexts which readers may test against their experiences of the tales in this selection.
CREATING THE RECORD
Henry James embraced what some other writers in the nineteenth century feared: what Matthew Arnold had described as a growing awareness of the ‘world’s multitudinousness’.4 For James was uniquely placed to recognize, from the start, that the world was not reducible to a single understanding, however complex and capacious. Born in New York in 1843, as a child Henry James travelled with his family in Europe, receiving an idiosyncratic education. He crossed the Atlantic again, as a young adult travelling alone in England, France and Italy, before settling in England in 1876.
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