Source of book: I own this.
I decided for my annual Henry James selection, I would read The Aspern Papers. As it is a short novella, I figured I would find another one to add, so that I read more than just a bit. A London Life is of similar length - just over 100 pages - and the two of them pair nicely as a contrast.
Both novellas are from James’ middle period, so they are not as dense as later stories. They both share some common features - Americans living abroad in Europe, morally ambiguous situations, flawed and difficult characters, and endings that are all about the frustration of the protagonists in their desires and goals.
I might even go so far as to wonder if in the first, the protagonist is the villain. In the second, it is difficult to find any major character who is not deeply in the wrong. All of which is typical James, and are the reasons I find his writing so fascinating. Well, that and his incredible use of the English language.
***
The Aspern Papers
As he commonly did, James borrowed from real life for inspiration for this story. Claire Clairmont was the stepsister of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein and The Last Man), and was part of the circle that included Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. She may or may not have slept with Percy, but it is undisputed that she had Byron’s child - Allegra - who sadly died in childhood.
Clairmont outlived the others, and ended up with a huge collection of Percy’s letters to her, which she kept until her death. As an old woman, she tried to hide her connection to Percy, retreating into secrecy and hiding herself from the public. Her niece Clara married after a courtship of only a few days - something Claire disapproved of. I mention this, because James repurposes this part of the story as well.
In James’ hand, the story goes roughly as follows: The nameless narrator is a literary editor in search of the “Aspern Papers” - the correspondence between the fictional author “Jeffrey Aspern” and his one-time lover, Miss Juliana, who is now an old woman living in semi-secrecy in Venice with her niece, Miss Tita.
The narrator poses as a renter, seeking to sublet a few rooms at the “palace” the women are living at.
He eventually takes Miss Tita into his confidence, but she is torn between her loyalty to her aunt, her attraction to the narrator, and her desire to escape the life she seems trapped in.
Will he get the papers? What will it take to get them? And, most importantly, how do the various characters wrestle with the moral issues involved?
The narrator is definitely in a morally problematic position. On the one hand, the potentially lurid details of the affair may well be important to understanding the poet and of interest to both scholars and the public. It would also be a career coup for the narrator. On the other hand, he is very much seeking to violate the privacy of an old woman.
For Miss Juliana, there are other questions. She is still obsessed with Aspern: she takes out the letters and reads them regularly, and also lets Miss Tita know that they are part of who she is. She never does destroy the papers, and it is unclear if she entirely wants them destroyed. But she also is unwilling for them to be made public, even after her death. Her behavior toward the narrator is also greedy and ruthless - she tries to take him for as much money as she can, ostensibly for her niece’s future support.
I already mentioned the dilemma of Miss Tita, who is initially the most sympathetic of the characters, but whose gambit at the end is pretty shocking.
Even at his most verbose, James writes tight plots, and never lets the meanderings of his words become superfluous. Every new perspective on the psychology adds something, until it all comes together at the end. (The Wings of the Dove does this for over 500 pages, and is a masterwork of the technique of the exploration of the motivations of the characters that circles the truth, never stating it outright, but letting the reader slowly draw conclusions from the web of evidence.)
In The Aspern Papers, James manages to hold off the final twist in the plot until literally halfway through the last page. It is definitely an “Oh damn!” moment too.
For those who have never read any Henry James, this is not a bad story to start with. It doesn’t require the commitment of his longer novels, but is thoroughly rewarding and characteristic of his art.
As always with Henry James, the language is a good percentage of the fun. I noted a few particularly juicy quotes.
I could see she was amused by my infatuation, the way my interest in the papers had become a fixed idea. ‘One would think you expected to find in them the answer to the riddle of the universe,’ she said; and I denied the impeachment only by replying that if I had to choose between that precious solution and a bundle of Jeffrey Aspern’s letters I knew indeed which would appear to me the greater boon. She pretended to make light of his genius and I took no pains to defend him. One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
I love everything about that passage. The ambiguous answer, the understanding that a god that one truly worships needs no defense offered.
And this one, after the first solo encounter with Miss Tita.
It was as if she never peeped out of her aunt’s apartment. I used to wonder what she did there week after week and year after year. I had never encountered such a violent parti pris of seclusion; it was more than keeping quiet - it was like hunted creatures feigning death. The two ladies appeared to have no visitors whatever and no sort of contact with the world.
Finally, there is this bit of repartee - combat really - between the narrator and Miss Juliana.
‘Do you think it’s right to rake up the past?’
‘I don’t know that I know what you mean by raking it up; but how can we get at it unless we dig a little? The present has such a rough way of treading it down.’
‘Oh, I like the past, but I don’t like critics,’ the old woman declared, with her fine tranquillity.
‘Neither do I, but I like their discoveries.’
‘Aren’t they mostly lies?’
‘The lies are what they sometimes discover,’ I said, smiling at the quiet impertinence of this. ‘They often lay bare the truth.’
‘The truth is God’s, it isn’t man’s; we had better leave it alone. Who can judge of it - who can say?’
This is perhaps the crux of the moral question presented by The Aspern Papers. To be clear here, we are not dealing with an attempt to expose abusive behavior by someone in power - I think even a man as private as Henry James would agree that evil of that sort needs to be exposed. Rather, we are talking about intimate secrets of two lovers. And indeed one might ask where the truth lies.
This is an excellent shorter work by James, and well worth reading.
***
A London Life
“Like one who grabs a stray dog by the ears is someone who rushes into a quarrel not their own.” Proverbs 26:17
The second novella I read has a plot that my lawyer heart enjoyed. It centers around a failed marriage coming apart in a public and catastrophic manner.
The narrator in this case is Laura Wing, a penniless American young woman who has come to live in London with her sister, Selina Berrington and her husband, Lionel, a wealthy Brit.
All is not well in the Berrington household. Lionel is a drunk and a boor who seems highly unpleasant to live with. Selina, meanwhile, is having an affair with Charlie Crispin, a military man.
As this reality becomes clear to Laura, she does her best to morally lecture the parties in an attempt to force them to be better people, at least for the sake of their two children.
This is about as effective as you would expect. It doesn’t help that Laura’s self-righteousness and officious meddling is driven more by her moral outrage than by any sense of compassion for those involved. Plus, she often seems more concerned that her own reputation will be blighted by association.
The only sensible person in this story is Lady Davenant, an old woman who tries to get Laura to just stay out of the quarrel, and not take it personally.
In the meantime, another American has come to call, Mr. Wendover, who seems like a basically nice guy, if bland and boring. His relationship with Laura is complicated. He is initially more interested in her than she with him, but this flips when it becomes clear that Selina has run off with Crispin, leaving Laura literally stranded at the opera with Wendover. Laura handles the situation extremely poorly (although the scene is really hilarious for the reader), and they both take their separate ways home, convinced the other hates them.
Lady Davenant’s attempts to put them back together are not successful, both because of Wendover’s wounded pride and because Laura is hell-bent on “saving” her sister.
In the end, everything fails, and Laura and Wendover return to America. We are left wondering if they will eventually get together. But one thing is clear: the Berrington divorce case will be tried in the courts and in public opinion, and it will be ugly as hell.
In this book, while James handles things with his usual craft, he is shockingly frank about the situation, at least by the standards of the time. It caused a bit of a scandal when it was published, and sharply divided the critics. The strong reactions to the story are pretty good proof that James accomplished his goal, and that the story touched on some significant emotions.
I am on the side of the critics who praised it - I think it is an excellent tale, and I thought that Laura is one of James’ better female protagonists. (And he actually writes women well, although his women are, if anything, more irritating than his men.) She has the assertiveness that many of his young women lack, but has all of the naivety that bring his American young women to grief in so many of his books.
She aspires to the “sophistication” of Europe, but fails to understand that a crucial part of that is a willingness to ignore unpleasantness by reducing it to gossip and talk rather than moral outrage. On the subject of sex, James is of course correct. We Americans love our moral panics even as we worship the most sexually predatory men among us. (See: Trump, Donald) More than anything, Laura needs to learn to just stay out of quarrels that are not hers. We cannot “save” others from themselves.
If anything, this story has even more quotable lines. Selina is a great beauty, particularly in contrast to the pleasant, but unremarkable Laura. Perhaps part of Laura’s problem is in expecting the beautiful to be moral - a common enough mistake we humans make. But for me, the description of Lady Davenant is the best one.
Lady Davenant always had a head-dress of a peculiar style, original and appropriate - a sort of white veil or cape which came in a point to the place on her forehead where her smooth hair began to show and then covered her shoulders. It was always exquisitely fresh and was partly the reason why she struck the girl rather as a fine portrait than as a living person. And yet she was full of life, old as she was, and had been made finer, sharper, more delicate, by nearly eighty years of it. It was the hand of a master that Laura could see in her face, the witty expression of which shone like a lamp through the ground-glass of her good breeding; nature was always an artist, but not so much of an artist as that.
And then, there is one of my favorite lines from Henry James of all time:
It was not Lady Davenant’s leading characteristic that she was comforting, and Laura had not aspired to be coaxed or coddled into forgetfulness: she wanted rather to be taught a certain fortitude - how to live and hold up one’s head even while knowing that things were very bad. A brazen indifference - it was not exactly that that she wished to acquire; but were there not some sorts of indifference that were philosophic and noble?
Such a Jamesian way of putting it: he states an idea, “brazen indifference,” then says that isn’t what he means….but. So many of his later books use the syllogism, “it wasn’t quite this, but it also wasn’t quite that” - a round-about way of nibbling near the truth.
I’ll also mention a hilarious conversation between Lady Davenant and Laura, where Laura expresses her contempt for Lionel. Lady Davenant doesn’t exactly defend him - she acknowledges that he is “idiotic as a comic song,” but notes that Laura has enough brains for two. Laura parrys with “I shall never marry a man I can’t respect.” Good advice, that. And one wonders at the end if she respects Wendover or not.
There is another fascinating passage, where Laura meets Miss Steet, the governess. Whatever Laura thinks of her (and it isn’t flattering), she at least admits that Miss Steet’s sisters are enviable for one reason.
Neither of them seemed destined to go into the English divorce-court, and such a circumstance on the part of one’s near relations struck Laura as in itself almost sufficient to constitute happiness.
There is also a pretty sick burn about the British upper class. She contemplates her nephews, who seem pretty ordinary kids, but with a bit of the snobbery already developing.
[S]he marveled at the waste involved in some human institutions (the English country gentry for instance) when she perceived that it had taken so much to produce so little.
There is another perceptive passage about Laura that I found interesting.
She was of a serious turn by nature and unlike many serious people she made no particular study of the art of being gay. Had her circumstances been different she might have done so, but she lived in a merry house (heaven save the mark! as she used to say) and therefore was not driven to amuse herself for conscience sake.
And then there is the scene in the house after Selina runs off the Belgium with her lover.
Nothing had been said yet in the house, of course, as Laura knew, about Selina’s disappearance, in the way of treating it as irregular; but the servants pretended so hard not to be aware of anything in particular that they were like pickpockets looking with unnatural interest the other way after they have cribbed a fellow’s watch.
One final thing I noted was James’ reference to “cutting new books.” We don’t see that today, but back when, the edges of the printed pages weren’t cut, but folded and then glued. To read the book, you had to cut the folded edges.
Both of these novellas were fascinating to me - James writes well in both the epically long works and in the shorter formats. Both books contain tight plots along with a psychological depth that I love in fiction. I’m openly a Henry James fanboy, of course, so take that how you like it. But maybe give James (and his equally talented brother and sister) a chance.
No comments:
Post a Comment