In Marcher’s case, his preoccupation with some undefined essence-that-is-to-be blinds him to the actuality of a significant fact at hand: May Bartram, his sympathetic and compassionate lifelong friend, loves and desires him. Forces of avoidance within him—partly narcissistic self-involvement, partly his repressed sexuality, which has left him both sexless and without emotional force—make him unable to see that. In the end, what he has missed is that all meaningful experiences take place as a process, not as ends. What he cannot see and what she does is that the failure of their intimacy results from his repressed homosexuality. When she remarks that people have been talking about their relationship and that ‘‘It’s my intimacy with you that’s in question,’’ his un-self-comprehending response is James’s way of signaling the complexities of Marcher’s psychosexual repression:‘‘You help me to pass for a man like another,’’ he unwittingly says. Finally, at May’s graveside, his revelatory awareness that she had offered him an escape from his arid, passionless life, and would have offered all and endured anything for love of him, provides an explosive moment of pain and panic. The beast that had lurked for so long came out of the jungle in the form of self-awareness, knowledge of what he had been offered and what he missed and why: ‘‘This horror of waking— this was knowledge, knowledge under the breath of which the very tears in his eyes seemed to freeze.’’ The man who all his life, for reasons he could not fathom or control, had been a member of the walking dead, now, still attempting to avoid direct engagement with ‘‘the lurking beast,’’ flings himself ‘‘on his face, on the tomb.’’

A final word about reading James: His fiction invites analysis, partly because of its linguistic richness, but also because of its thick levels of psychological and social layering; and it also invites biographical interpretations, because James has provided in his letters, notebooks, and autobiographical writings a very full self-portraiture that, like his fiction, reveals by concealing. But for the reader new to James, it is often intellectually counterproductive to generalize very much about such matters; the more one immerses oneself in literary works in a culture that engages with them less and less, the more important seems engagement itself, the challenge of attentive and committed reading. James requires engagement more than formal analysis, though analysis can be useful. He requires this engagement of himself and he requires it of us. As a writer, that is what he asks for, that is what he values in literature and in life. Such engagement cannot countenance halfhearted approaches. It requires testing and stretching one’s intellect and imagination and sometimes even one’s patience. After ‘‘An International Episode’’ and ‘‘Daisy Miller,’’ James doesn’t come to us with the pretense or the appearance of an easy read, and for the twenty-first-century reader, who is conditioned by the simplifications of electronic media and by the decrease in emphasis on literary reading, this volume can be especially useful as an introduction to Henry James. It provides an imaginative exercise in attentive reading. It is an accessible James, one who can take us from a modest commitment to a serious engagement. Once that engagement begins, the reader can gradually become the reader that James desires and that most of us desire to be.


—Fred Kaplan

AN INTERNATIONAL EPISODE

PART I

Four years ago—in 1874—two young Englishmen had occasion to go to the United States. They crossed the ocean at midsummer, and, arriving in New York on the first day of August, were much struck with the fervid temperature of that city. Disembarking upon the wharf, they climbed into one of those huge high-hung coaches which convey passengers to the hotels, and with a great deal of bouncing and bumping, took their course through Broadway. The midsummer aspect of New York is not, perhaps, the most favorable one; still, it is not without its picturesque and even brilliant side. Nothing could well resemble less a typical English street than the interminable avenue, rich in incongruities, through which our two travelers advanced—looking out on each side of them at the comfortable animation of the sidewalks, the high-colored, heterogeneous architecture, the huge white marble façades glittering in the strong, crude light, and bedizened with gilded lettering, the multifarious awnings, banners, and streamers, the extraordinary number of omnibuses, horsecars, and other democratic vehicles, the vendors of cooling fluids, the white trousers and big straw hats of the policemen, the tripping gait of the modish young persons on the pavement, the general brightness, newness, juvenility, both of people and things. The young men had exchanged few observations; but in crossing Union Square, in front of the monument to Washington—in the very shadow, indeed, projected by the image of the pater patriae—one of them remarked to the other, ‘‘It seems a rum-looking place.’’

‘‘Ah, very odd, very odd,’’ said the other, who was the clever man of the two.

‘‘Pity it’s so beastly hot,’’ resumed the first speaker after a pause.

‘‘You know we are in a low latitude,’’ said his friend.

‘‘I daresay,’’ remarked the other.

‘‘I wonder,’’ said the second speaker presently, ‘‘if they can give one a bath?’’

‘‘I daresay not,’’ rejoined the other.

‘‘Oh, I say!’’ cried his comrade.

This animated discussion was checked by their arrival at the hotel, which had been recommended to them by an American gentleman whose acquaintance they made—with whom, indeed, they became very intimate— on the steamer, and who had proposed to accompany them to the inn and introduce them, in a friendly way, to the proprietor. This plan, however, had been defeated by their friend’s finding that his ‘‘partner’’ was awaiting him on the wharf and that his commercial associate desired him instantly to come and give his attention to certain telegrams received from St. Louis. But the two Englishmen, with nothing but their national prestige and personal graces to recommend them, were very well received at the hotel, which had an air of capacious hospitality. They found that a bath was not unattainable, and were indeed struck with the facilities for prolonged and reiterated immersion with which their apartment was supplied. After bathing a good deal—more, indeed, than they had ever done before on a single occasion—they made their way into the dining room of the hotel, which was a spacious restaurant, with a fountain in the middle, a great many tall plants in ornamental tubs, and an array of French waiters. The first dinner on land, after a sea voyage, is, under any circumstances, a delightful occasion, and there was something particularly agreeable in the circumstances in which our young Englishmen found themselves. They were extremely good natured young men; they were more observant than they appeared; in a sort of inarticulate, accidentally dissimulative fashion, they were highly appreciative. This was, perhaps, especially the case with the elder, who was also, as I have said, the man of talent.