The New York Stories of Henry James (New York Review Books Classics)

HENRY JAMES (1843–1916), the younger brother of the psychologist William James and one of the greatest of American writers, was born in New York but lived for most of his life in England. Among the best known of his many stories and novels are The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, and The Wings of the Dove. In addition to The New York Stories of Henry James, New York Review Classics has published several long-unavailable James novels: The Other House, The Outcry, and The Ivory Tower.

COLM TÓIBÍN is the author of five novels, including The Story of the Night, The Blackwater Lightship, and The Heather Blazing. The Master, a novel based on the life of Henry James, was published in 2004 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Among his nonfiction works are Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border, Homage to Barcelona, The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe, and, most recently, Love in a Dark Time. In 2004, his first play, Beauty in a Broken Place, was produced in Dublin, where Tóibín currently lives.

THE NEW YORK STORIES

OF HENRY JAMES

Selected and with an introduction by

COLM TÓIBÍN

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

CONTENTS

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Introduction

THE NEW YORK STORIES OF HENRY JAMES

The Story of a Masterpiece

A Most Extraordinary Case

Crawford’s Consistency

An International Episode

Washington Square

The Impressions of a Cousin

The Jolly Corner

Crapy Cornelia

A Round of Visits

NOTE ON THE TEXT

Copyright and More Information

INTRODUCTION: Henry James’s New York

VERY EARLY in his career as a writer Henry James made his position clear. He would not be a public novelist or a social commentator but would instead deal with the reverse of the picture; the intricacies and vagaries of feeling in the relations between people, and mainly between men and women, would be his subject. Duplicity and greed, disappointment and renunciation, which became his most pressing themes, occurred for James the novelist in the private realm. It was his genius to make this realm seem more dramatic and ample than any space inhabited by government or business.

James himself was a figure of complexity and ambiguity and secrecy; a number of matters in his life seemed greatly unresolved. His personality, like his later prose style, was one in which things could not be easily named, in which nuance was more substantial than fact and the flickering of consciousness more interesting than knowledge. James was, above all, guarded. He was the supreme artist concerned with the architecture and tone of fiction; he specialized in the deliberate, the considered, and the exertion of control; he did not seek to bare his soul for the reader.

Nonetheless, it is possible to read between the lines of James’s work, searching for clues, seeking moments in which the author came close to unmasking himself. Many of his stories, written quickly and for money, give more away perhaps than he intended. Here, more than in the novels, he comes closer to opening a chink, for example, in the grand amour of his own sexuality, allowing us to catch a brief glimpse of his deepest and darkest concerns. These stories include “The Pupil,” “The Master of Beltraffio,” and “The Beast in the Jungle.” The stories are careful and restrained, but it is clear from them that the subject of illicit love or misguided loyalty interested him deeply, as did the subject of sexual coldness.

Thus it is possible to trace James’s sometimes unwitting, unconscious, and often quite deliberate efforts to mask and explore matters which concerned him deeply and uneasily. It would be possible to trace, for example, in his copious writings, all references to Ireland or England, or to his brother William, or to the novelist George Eliot, and find areas of ambiguity and uncertainty as well as strange contradictions, underlining the fact that these things mattered very deeply to James, so deeply indeed that they appear in many layers and guises.

Perhaps of all the provinces in his realm whose contours remain shadowy and whose topography is unresolved, the city of New York is a prime example. James’s writings about New York disclose, more than anything, an anger, quite unlike any other anger in James, at what has been lost to him, what has been done, in the name of commerce and material progress, to a place he once knew. It is not an ordinary anger at the destruction of beauty and familiarity; it is much stranger and complex than that, and it deserves a great deal of attention.

There is a peculiar intensity in the tone of Henry James’s memoir of his first fourteen years, A Small Boy and Others, written in 1911, when James was sixty-eight, one year after the death of his brother William. Much of the memory evoked and most of the scenes conjured up in the book took place in New York between 1848, when the Jameses moved to the city, and 1855, when they left for Europe. Since he had no notes or letters or diaries to work from, it is astonishing how fresh and detailed his memory is, how many names he can remember, including those of teachers and actors, how sharply he can evoke places and their atmospheres, precise smells and sights and locations, including many shows and plays in the New York theaters of the time. “I have lost nothing of what I saw,” he wrote, “and that though I can’t now quite divide the total into separate occasions the various items surprisingly swarm for me.”

It was as though old New York, as he saw it between the ages of five and twelve, had remained still and frozen and perfect in his memory. He had not watched it change, or participated in its growth. It was the ground which formed him; he was never to have a place again which would belong to him so fundamentally. He would not possess another territory until 1897 when he signed the lease on Lamb House in Rye in England. The fact that his New York had been taken from him and not replaced, save by hotel rooms and temporary abodes, may explain the sheer driven enthusiasm with which he pursued Lamb House and his sense of relief when he had made it his. Indeed, the year before he purchased the lease he wrote his novel The Spoils of Poynton, a drama about owning and losing a treasured house. Having signed the lease, he wrote “The Turn of the Screw,” about a lone figure attempting to make a home in a house already possessed.

New York after 1855 was lost to him, not merely, he realized as the years went on, by his father’s removing the family from there, but by changes in the city which would be absolute and overwhelming. A new world was being built on the site of his dreams. This site’s most hallowed quarter was 58 West Fourteenth Street, first seen during “an afternoon call with my father at a house there situated, one of an already fairly mature row on the south side and quite near Sixth Avenue. It was ‘our’ house, just acquired by us...the place was to become to me for ever so long afterwards a sort of anchorage of the spirit.”

Henry James’s New York, the city of his childhood, “the small warm dusky homogeneous New York world of the mid-century,” was situated between Fifth and Sixth Avenues down to Washington Square, where his maternal grandmother lived, and up eastwards to Union Square, which was, in his day, surrounded by a high railing.