The greatest interpretative challenge among these tales is perhaps the compressed words and numbers of the telegrams which make for the drama of ‘In the Cage’. The greatest joke is ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, where as readers we are invited to worry over the interpretation of writings which are entirely withheld from us.

At the centre of this concern with reading and with languages is an obsession with names and naming.16 James’s Notebooks are often nothing more and nothing less than long lists of names, often gathered from real life – from the pages of that day’s Times for example – to be put to fictional use. Perhaps the peculiarities of his own name contributed to his fascination. Born into the burden of a famous family name, Henry James nevertheless had in one sense no name of his own but, until he was nearly forty years of age, was merely his father’s second son and namesake, Henry (or Harry) James Junior: the later title of ‘Master’ or ‘cher Maître’ which younger writers accorded him was clearly a welcome compensation.

Are Jamesian names telltale? Are names in direct accord with the realities they offer to describe? Or is the relation instead an ironic and inverted one? Or is there no such relation at all? James does not use names to fix character but, in keeping with his imaginative generosity, deploys names interrogatively and teasingly as part of the comic play of a story’s interpretative possibilities. Daisy Miller seems doubly ordinary – a common but pretty flower; a worthy but mundane occupation – and is mocked as such in Mrs Costello’s deliberate misrememberings of Daisy’s name as Miss Baker or Miss Chandler. But, in the course of the tale and at great cost, does not Daisy prove herself extraordinary under the cold eyes of Winterbourne? There is, moreover, another ironic naming in the same tale in the figure of Mrs Walker who does not in fact walk but travels by carriage and who, in one of the narrative’s great moments of confrontation, wishes that Daisy would do likewise. In ‘In the Cage’ names multiply riotously – the camply priapic Everard who is also the Captain, Philip, Phil, the Count, William, ‘the Pink ’Un’ and – an especial confusion – Mudge; Lady Bradeen at Twindle and Doctor Buzzard at Brickwood; Lady Ventnor, Mrs Bubb and Lord Rye; Fritz and Gussy and Mary and Cissy; Miss Dolman for whom it is always Cooper’s and never Burfield’s; the Mr Mudge who is not Captain Everard; Mr Buckton, Mr Drake, Mr Cocker and ‘Mr Cocker’s young men’. Yet the story’s heroine remains without a name just as she remains largely unnoticed and without an identity for her many customers throughout the tale. The only role which awaits her proves to be that of Mrs Mudge, a muddy smudge of a name. Yet her patient fiancé is greater – both more generous and more heroic – than his name. Like the telegraphist, Shakespeare goes unnamed in ‘The Birthplace’ – but for quite other reasons. The eponymous, much engaged heroine of ‘Julia Bride’ is destined, it seems, never to fulfil her name, beset as she is by the damaging attentions of the likes of Mrs George Maule in a very proper New York ‘not in sympathy with the old American freedom’. The ‘waning April days’ will see the failure of any relationship between John Marcher and May Bartram in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’.

James seems to take particular delight in the naming of artists, and in their soubriquets and pseudonyms. He relishes, for example, the suggestions of the vain and the feigning in the work of the novelist Greville Fane, who ‘wrote only from the elbow down’ and whose ‘real’ name – Mrs Stormer – is no less expressive. In ‘The Death of the Lion’, the lion in question, Neil Paraday, hovers between parody and paragon, while James has great fun with the aggressive futurity of the gossip columnist, Mr Morrow, and the cross-gendered novelists, Guy Walsingham, ‘a pretty little girl’, and Dora Forbes, the male, red-moustached author of The Other Way Round. Even the tales’ titles may involve naming jokes. This is the case with the misnomer of ‘Fordham Castle’, as we shall see below. It is true too of ‘The Pension Beaurepas’ where the plot, such as it is, turns on the eating of an ice-cream.

THE LIFE OF THE ARTIST

James’s writing gathers its energy from increasing uncertainty – at times empowering, at times frightening – about what life is, and what life should be, and about how that life should be represented in art. It is unsurprising in such circumstances that his art should become self-conscious and that so many of the tales here centre on the life of the artist. As the nineteenth century progressed, the artist’s claim to representation, and in particular to realistic representation, was being challenged by new media and by new technology: newspapers, advertising, photography. The written word, which assumed an intimacy between the individual writer and the individual reader, was challenged by the telegraph, which compressed eloquence into staccato phrases, numbers, and indeed mere clicks of sound and electrical impulses, and sent them over great distances, across oceans, rendering them at once more public, more anonymous and more cryptic. The telephone soon followed. In the tales here, in addition to the profusion of telegrams in ‘In the Cage’, one telegram precipitates ‘Greville Fane’ and another effects a major turn in the plot of ‘The Pupil’. Journalism, advertising and photography press in on and harry the various artists in, for example, ‘The Real Thing’, ‘The Death of the Lion’, ‘The Lesson of the Master’ and ‘Broken Wings’. The real thing became doubly problematic: the artist was unsure of the reality of his subject, and unsure of the adequacy of his medium in representing that subject. Print proliferated, yet the elegy for a written and verbal culture had begun.

‘The Real Thing’, with a double focus on the dilemma of the painter and on that of the socially displaced, is a humane and wittily paradoxical exposition of such matters. The artist narrator discovers that, as a source of inspiration for his art, he prefers his professional models to the ‘immensely’ photographed Monarchs, the ‘real thing’. When he works from the Monarchs, his art suffers. Yet Major Monarch and his wife, ‘the Beautiful Statue’, reduced to seeking paid work as artists’ models, are no more what they appear to be, no more the ‘real thing’, than are the professional models. The impoverished Monarchs are now hard pressed to keep up appearances and, as Major Monarch well knows, the couple are merely two among the many ‘thousands as good as yourself already on the ground’ and in straitened circumstances.