As in “An International Episode,” written thirty years earlier, the weather is impossible, this time “a blinding New York blizzard,” a “great white savage storm.” As in “Crapy Cornelia,” the hero goes to visit a number of old friends, deploring once more the interiors of their houses with their “rather glaringly false accents.” What is notable about these two stories is the deeply unsympathetic way in which the New York women are presented. Leon Edel has commented: “The women particularly in these tales are devoid of all sympathy, fat and fatuous, ugly, rich, cruel, they seem to have lost the meaning of kindness.” It is perhaps not surprising that the last moment of James’s last New York story involves a New Yorker blowing his brains out with a revolver.

“The Jolly Corner” was the single American tale that James allowed into his twenty-three-volume New York Edition, from which he excluded The Europeans, “Washington Square,” and The Bostonians. He worked on the edition in the years between writing The American Scene and writing his autobiography. In case there was any doubt that he meant business in his battle to make his personal New York stand up to the Goliath daily rising on the island of Manhattan, he wrote to his publishers, Scribners, on July 30, 1905: “If a name be wanted for the edition, for convenience and distinction, I should particularly like to call it the New York Edition if that may pass for a general title of sufficient dignity and distinctness. My feeling about the matter is that it refers the whole enterprise explicitly to my native city—to which I have had no great opportunity of rendering that sort of homage.” James’s work would show to a world, much hardened against the idea, that the reverse of the picture, the soft side as he would call it, could endure and matter, could have a fame beyond money. The great house of fiction would stand as tall as any skyscraper, its rooms would remain well lit even as the world outside darkened.

—Colm Tóibín

THE NEW YORK STORIES OF HENRY JAMES

THE STORY OF A MASTERPIECE

I

NO LONGER ago than last summer, during a six weeks’ stay at Newport, John Lennox became engaged to Miss Marian Everett of New York. Mr. Lennox was a widower, of large estate, and without children. He was thirty-five years old, of a sufficiently distinguished appearance, of excellent manners, of an unusual share of sound information, of irreproachable habits and of a temper which was understood to have suffered a trying and salutary probation during the short term of his wedded life. Miss Everett was, therefore, all things considered, believed to be making a very good match and to be having by no means the worst of the bargain.

And yet Miss Everett, too, was a very marriageable young lady—the pretty Miss Everett, as she was called, to distinguish her from certain plain cousins, with whom, owing to her having no mother and no sisters, she was constrained, for decency’s sake, to spend a great deal of her time—rather to her own satisfaction, it may be conjectured, than to that of these excellent young women.

Marian Everett was penniless, indeed; but she was richly endowed with all the gifts which make a woman charming. She was, without dispute, the most charming girl in the circle in which she lived and moved. Even certain of her elders, women of a larger experience, of a heavier calibre, as it were, and, thanks to their being married ladies, of greater freedom of action, were practically not so charming as she. And yet, in her emulation of the social graces of these, her more fully licensed sisters, Miss Everett was quite guiltless of any aberration from the strict line of maidenly dignity. She professed an almost religious devotion to good taste, and she looked with horror upon the boisterous graces of many of her companions. Beside being the most entertaining girl in New York, she was, therefore, also the most irreproachable. Her beauty was, perhaps, contestable, but it was certainly uncontested. She was the least bit below middle height, and her person was marked by a great fulness and roundness of outline; and yet, in spite of this comely ponderosity, her movements were perfectly light and elastic. In complexion, she was a genuine blonde—a warm blonde; with a midsummer bloom upon her cheek, and the light of a midsummer sun wrought into her auburn hair. Her features were not cast upon a classical model, but their expression was in the highest degree pleasing. Her forehead was low and broad, her nose small, and her mouth—well, by the envious her mouth was called enormous. It is certain that it had an immense capacity for smiles, and that when she opened it to sing (which she did with infinite sweetness) it emitted a copious flood of sound. Her face was, perhaps, a trifle too circular, and her shoulders a trifle too high; but, as I say, the general effect left nothing to be desired. I might point out a dozen discords in the character of her face and figure, and yet utterly fail to invalidate the impression they produced. There is something essentially uncivil, and, indeed, unphilosophical, in the attempt to verify or to disprove a woman’s beauty in detail, and a man gets no more than he deserves when he finds that, in strictness, the aggregation of the different features fails to make up the total. Stand off, gentlemen, and let her make the addition. Beside her beauty, Miss Everett shone by her good nature and her lively perceptions. She neither made harsh speeches nor resented them; and, on the other hand, she keenly enjoyed intellectual cleverness, and even cultivated it. Her great merit was that she made no claims or pretensions. Just as there was nothing artificial in her beauty, so there was nothing pedantic in her acuteness and nothing sentimental in her amiability. The one was all freshness and the others all bonhomie.

John Lennox saw her, then loved her and offered her his hand. In accepting it Miss Everett acquired, in the world’s eye, the one advantage which she lacked—a complete stability and regularity of position.