These tales suggest versions and histories alternative to those which the novel and the theatre provide. ‘Greville Fane’ and ‘The Death of the Lion’ are stories told after the public story has been despatched by their respective narrators to newspapers and magazines. Victims in the publicly accredited world of the novel are allowed, in these stories, their private sorrows – and their private victories. Furthermore, such victories are not without an element of revenge, as in the case of ‘The Abasement of the Northmores’ where the widowed Mrs Hope spares Lady Northmore further public humiliation, but nonetheless cherishes her privately printed volume of intimate letters and – either selflessly or else perversely – wishes for her own death. It is precisely the element of vengefulness, the admission of negative feelings, which gives so many of these tales, predominantly of generosity and self-abnegation, their edge.

Typically these tales – even the early ‘Four Meetings’ – afford not the novelistic continuities of day-to-day living, but brief meetings, casual or formal, by arrangement or by chance, leaping over wide gaps of time and spanning vast distances among diverse locations. The tales put the eventfulnesses and significances of the nineteenth-century novel in question. ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ here, the story of a man in whose life precisely nothing is to happen, is the pre-eminent case. Even when they attempt what James once called ‘the large in a small dose’,17 his tales are without the solidity and continuity of specification which we associate with the novel. They speak instead of a more modern world – a various, uncertain and often uncanny world, one of potential and opportunity, but also of terror and waste.

AGAINST INTERPRETATION

In the light of such diversity and uncertainty, perhaps we should not be too quick in fixing these tales’ meanings. Particular tales here are salutary for the interpreter. Even to speak of ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ – the story of the monomaniacal pursuit of Hugh Vereker’s literary meaning – is to become embroiled in its joke: we can become as sophisticated as we like – and critics have proved themselves extraordinarily sophisticated and ingenious – but, whatever we say, we are inevitably positing some figure in the carpet. It may be a secret, an absence, a misapprehension, even, as I would have it, a caution against over-zealous interpretation, but it still is a figure.18 The interpreters within the tale are nightmarish reflections of ourselves as readers: they turn the world upside down in their obsessive pursuit of literary meaning. Marriages, engagements, illnesses of brothers, deaths of mothers, husbands and best friends are subordinate, merely a means to interpretative fulfilment. Sexuality is displaced into hermeneutics. In this crazy world the narrator sees the revelation of the literary secret as the wedding night’s consummation – ‘For what else but that ceremony had the nuptials taken place?’ – and looks for signs of (intellectual) pregnancy in husbands:

Never, for a marriage in literary circles – so the newspapers described the alliance – had a lady been so bravely dowered. I began with due promptness to look for the fruit of the affair – that fruit, I mean, of which the premonitory symptoms would be peculiarly visible in the husband.

Both life and literature suffer as the narrator reveals that his obsession with Vereker’s meaning ‘damaged my liking’, destroying the pleasures of the texts: ‘Instead of being a pleasure the more they became a resource the less.’

In another cautionary tale for readers, ‘The Death of the Lion’, Neil Paraday, the literary lion in question, endures a fate perhaps worse than the ultimate one which awaits him at the tale’s close. He is made ‘a contemporary’: ‘the poor man was to be squeezed into his horrible age’. Such ostensible popularity involves remaking the artist to serve society’s image. It involves not reading him, and indeed literally losing the one copy of Paraday’s latest and last manuscript somewhere between Lady Augusta’s maid and Lord Dorimont’s man. It is perhaps inevitable that to appropriate an author, to render him our contemporary, is also, in some sense, to lose him. At present, academic criticism of James is focused on matters of gender, and James’s writings are daring to speak their homosexuality. Of May Bartram’s relationship with John Marcher in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, the narrative records: ‘The rest of the world of course thought him queer, but she, she only, knew how, and above all why, queer; which was precisely what enabled her to dispose the concealing veil in the right folds.’19 Among the tales here, the veil is currently being professionally lifted in the cases of ‘The Pupil’, ‘The Middle Years’, ‘In the Cage’, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ and ‘The Jolly Corner’; and while these are strong and plausible readings they are also somewhat disappointing. They insist on the possible fact of a homosexual interpretation; they are less persuasive that the tales are saying anything distinctive and particular about homosexuality. While politically radical they are in method critically old-fashioned and somewhat oppressive: what is proffered initially as a possible meaning of a tale very quickly becomes the meaning. For all the political liberation they appear to offer, they narrow the possibilities of interpretation, and the pleasures of James’s texts are somehow lost amidst our contemporary political zeal.20

In 1964 the American critic and thinker Susan Sontag published a wonderful polemical essay ‘Against Interpretation’.21 Her argument is particularly apposite to the short story and to Henry James’s tales, where the comparative brevity of these writings, and their diverse plurality, ask that we respect their reticence and their refusal to have the final authoritative say. We can bring various contexts – biographical, historical and critical – to bear on James’s tales; we can, for example, read them as marginal and illuminating commentary on the fulsome major novels; but we damage these tales, for ourselves and for future readers, if we fix their meanings, squeeze them into our own age and our own intellectual and political agendas. In place of interpretation Sontag argued for an ‘erotics of art’ – a phrase we might presently misunderstand because of our current emphasis on the sexualities of writing and on the politics of desire. But her emphasis was intended to return us to the experiential nature of art, to the ‘sensory experience’ as it unfolds in time. What we experience as we read Henry James – from individual sentences to the whole works which these sentences go to make up – is a delicate play of multiplying, ever transforming interpretative possibilities, an entangling, puzzling, pleasurable play of meaning.

James himself knew the value of the experience of reading; he repeatedly advised readers to take him slowly; and in his last tale, ‘A Round of Visits’, he wrote of ‘a momentary watcher – which is indeed what I can but invite the reader to become’.22 It is now time for the reader to take up that invitation and, given that it comes from a tale not reprinted here, eventually perhaps to extend the acquaintance with James’s tales even beyond those in this substantial volume.

NOTES

1. Randall Jarrell, ‘Stories’ (first published 1962), in The New Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E.