Master Class

About a year ago, having nothing new to read, I picked up Henry James’ “Portrait of a Lady,” which I hadn’t read in 20 years, and began rereading it. It was an astonishing experience. The book was much better than I had remembered it; more to the point, I was a much better reader of it. Isabel was infinitely more appealing to me than she had been when I was her age: I felt I understood, finally, what she thought she was doing with her life. She was attempting to shape it through conscious choice, waiting to respond alertly to the signal that would tell her what she should be, and do, to best fulfill her fate. Having finally acquired some sort of fate myself, I was belatedly interested in the question of how I had gotten there. So instead of rushing impatiently through the pages, wanting to get to the point when she would finally make the right choice (why didn’t she just marry the lord and get it over with, my youthful self had complained), I took each page at the leisurely, thoughtful pace James had intended, savoring Isabel’s deliberations. The decision, not the arrival, mattered.

The great thing about Henry James is that he is always there to go back to, and when you do go back to him, he is better even than you remembered. Now, thanks to the Library of America, there is even more of him, in a more accessible form, to go back to. Stories like “The Death of the Lion”--which you previously had to search out in a crackly old copy of the Yellow Book magazine and read under a librarian’s eagle-eyed supervision--are readily available in the reasonably priced, comfortable to hold, elegantly black-jacketed, beribboned format of the Library of America series of “Complete Stories.”

The series editors are working backward, so they began by giving us the last two volumes, extending from 1892 to 1898 and from 1898 to 1910. And though there is nothing in the current volumes to compare with James’ late, great masterpieces in the short form (“The Real Thing,” “The Private Life,” “The Beast in the Jungle”), there are several among these 36 stories that come very close, and there is more here that is likely to be new to even the most devoted James reader. I suspect that the still-to-be-issued volume, which will cover James’ earliest years as a writer, will be of mainly historical interest. (I have read, for instance, “A Landscape Painter,” and it is the kind of incompetently written story that makes you feel even you could turn out to be Henry James.) So we already have in hand the four volumes that will turn out to have lasting literary value.

Of the two that have just been issued, the earlier one is still a bit transitional. In a story like “Professor Fargo,” the first in the 1874-1884 volume, one can hear the creakiness of the prose as James decides whether he is going to turn into Mark Twain, William Dean Howells or himself. “After venting my disappointment in a variety of profitless expletives, I decided that the only course worthy of the elastic philosophy of a commercial traveller was to take a room at the local tavern and await his return. . . . I lounged awhile in the tavern porch, but my presence seemed only to deepen the spell of silence on that customary group of jaundiced ruminants who were tilting their chairs hard by.” This kind of thing heavy-handedly aims at humor but fails to get there. It is not for another 240 pages or so--until we reach “Daisy Miller,” James’ first really Jamesian story--that we encounter the mature wit. As in the “Professor Fargo” example, the source of the humor is the meeting between civilized manners and their opposite. But here it is done much more lightly, as the story’s central figure, the Europeanized American Winterbourne, meets Daisy Miller’s irrepressible younger brother:

“ ‘My father’s name is Ezra B. Miller,’ he announced. ‘My father ain’t in Europe; my father’s in a better place than Europe.’

“Winterbourne imagined for a moment that this was the manner in which the child had been taught to intimate that Mr. Miller had been removed to the sphere of celestial rewards. But Randolph immediately added, ‘My father’s in Schenectady.’ ”

This sort of wit (of which there are increasingly telling examples later on) strikes me as being at the root of James’ virtues. It is not that he is always, or even often, laugh-out-loud funny; and certainly the best of his stories, like the best of his novels, hinge on somewhat tragic or at any rate unresolved outcomes. But the kind of humorous insight that he is capable of practicing--the kind of rich condensation that one also finds in the poetry of Alexander Pope and the song lyrics of Cole Porter--also lies at the root of the most striking passages in James. His wit explains not only his power of social observation but his acuteness about the inner life. Both at once, for instance, can be seen in a perfect metaphor from “The Siege of London”: “If he was a little man in a big place, he never strutted nor talked loud: He merely felt it as a kind of luxury that he had a large social circumference. It was like sleeping in a big bed; one didn’t toss about the more, but one felt a greater freshness.”

These are the gems for which I, in my late, slow phase, now read James. But you can also go after him for the plots and the characters, as I did when I was younger. What seems amazing about James, when you compare him to his contemporaries in the English-speaking world, is how incredibly sexy his concerns were. Sometimes the stories are outright about the lures of sex (older women seducing younger men, smart girls falling for stupid but handsome brutes, unhappy wives bringing shame on their relatives through illicit dalliances, et cetera). At other times they are more about the reasons that lie behind the choice to marry, which may include but not be limited to sex. Above all, James is the great writer about women, and in the 19th century the question for women was almost always one of marriage. The train of thought I discerned in “Portrait of a Lady”--that one must choose marriage carefully because through it one is choosing a fate--is there quite strongly even in this early volume of stories, composed when James was younger than 40.

Even the stories that lack literary merit, in the 1874-1884 volume, have interest for the way they foreshadow the fuller treatment of the same themes in James’ novels. “Professor Fargo,” for instance, is the first treatment of themes that later appear, marvelously transmuted, in “The Bostonians.” “Eugene Pickering” prefigures “The Ambassadors.” “Longstaff’s Marriage” gives us an early version of “The Wings of the Dove.” “An International Episode,” with its American girl who turns down a lord, is the forerunner of “Portrait of a Lady.” And so on.

In the later of these two volumes, extending from 1884 to 1891, we need make no such allowances. Every work in here is a stunner, and every one bears reading and rereading. “The Lesson of the Master,” for instance, turns out not at all to be the O. Henryish thing I thought it was when I read it at 19 for a sophomore English class. It is too easy to view this tale either as a strict moral lesson (one must remain celibate for one’s art) or as quite the opposite, a story of a young artist duped by an older one into renouncing the woman they both love. But what you discover, when you reread the story in mid-life, is that it very delicately and carefully hangs in the balance: The competing claims of earthly love and unearthly artistic achievement are held up, measured against each other, placed in relationship to each other, made to seem both intertwined and mutually exclusive. It is a triumph of ambiguity and can be reread each time in a different way.

The same is true of “The Aspern Papers,” one of the best things (if not the best) ever written about the trials and crimes of literary biography. Whenever I remember this story, I picture a scene at the end in which the unscrupulous biographer fools the dowdy middle-aged protector of the literary letters into giving him the goods in exchange for the promise of love. But this is precisely what doesn’t happen. Even Mr. Unscrupulous turns out to have scruples, and when Miss Dowdy declares herself to him--essentially asks for his hand in marriage in exchange for the gift of the Aspern papers--he flees the house in embarrassment, leaving her to burn her valuable cache. It is not that we come to like this man so much as that we are made to feel even his viewpoint in the story.

But James’ literary intelligence goes beyond that. Though the biographer in “The Aspern Papers” is a first-person narrator, the story has a deeper intelligence than his. Even as he is reporting to us about the stupidity of women, we think back on the frequent stupidity of Jamesian men. So when he complains of one of his female allies, “She had put the idea into my head and now (so little are women to be counted on) she appeared to take a despondent view of it,” there is a vertiginous moment when we imagine that parenthetical remark to have been composed by a woman writer portraying a male mind: Henry James in his Jane Austen mode.

But such comparisons are invidious. James needn’t substitute for Austen when he can, so beautifully, be himself. The 1884-1891 volume coincides with the years when he produced “The Princess Casamassima,” “The Tragic Muse,” “The Bostonians”--each a novel that would have been the pinnacle of anyone else’s achievement. That he could, at the same time, have been turning out priceless gems like these stories is nothing short of remarkable, and the only suitable response to having them all under one cover is intense gratitude.