“The Friends of the Friends” by Henry James
From The Virtual Anthology
The fiction of Henry James must be an “acquired” taste, because I have friends, good readers, whose eyelids droop and heads shake to indicate ‘No’ at the mere mention of his name. So for all of you who can’t bear his elliptical prose in which the only thing more scarce than action is metaphor, I apologize, but I insist that Henry have his place in The Virtual Anthology. Besides, as another famous writer named Henry (Miller) said, “All great art must be a trifle boring.”
A book of his stories fell into my hands somehow the summer I was eighteen. I had just flunked out of my first year of college and was working at a metal shop, feeding a Burroughs power press that banged oddly shaped slugs from a ten foot long, flat bar of steel I fed to it from off my left shoulder. The first story in the book I chose was actually a novella, “Washington Square,” which I read on my lunch breaks, when I wasn’t getting high down by the railroad tracks with Paco, Raphael and a guy from Virginia who spoke directly to God, and while walking home in the late afternoon beneath the shade of a long avenue of elm trees. When I finished reading it, I was astonished, for never before had I read a story that so entranced me by merely fulfilling those expectations it had set up in the first three pages. I don’t recall many of the details, but I know it was about a woman, in “danger” of becoming an old maid, who was in love with a man she hoped would ask her to marry him. The question at hand: “Was this fellow a bounder, just stringing her along, or did he really love her?” It was pretty clear that he didn’t love her from the start, but as the story developed, I was subject to all of the vicissitudes of hope and despair that the woman experienced in relation to this suitor.
After I finished that collection, I began to look for more James. His writing style was at times complex to the point of being complicated, and his lines, like the paths in a maze, twisted and turned, doubling back on themselves. He was a master of the parenthetical phrase. The excitement in reading him was not due to a melodramatic climax of action. Everything was subtle as hell. Even in “The Turn of the Screw,” which had some truly frightening moments, the effect came more from the calm and quiet nature of the action, the sense of loneliness, a concentration upon what would in any other story seem insignificant. Many of his stories ended in ambiguity and those that didn’t drew their final affect more from what was inferred by the narrator than what was actually told. There was a grace and precision to the whole enterprise that I wanted to get to the bottom of.
I’ve never read any of James’ big novels like Portrait of a Lady or The Golden Bowl. At one time or another I started and abandoned pretty much all of them. Too much. My feeling is that James is better in the shorter form. There are some novels, little more than novellas really, that are just excellent—The Aspern Papers, What Maisie Knew, The Spoils of Poynton. As for the stories (or Tales as James referred to them), there are too many great ones to mention. Some of my favorites are “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Pension Beaurepas,” “The Marriages.” Each is a masterpiece of psychological fiction, for want of a better term. The drama is 9/10ths in the heads of the characters. They are tales of jealousy, envy, insecurity, hubris, vanity.
An aspect of his fictions that puts some people off, and, to an extent, rightly so, is that they are always also about a certain class. It’s really hard to figure out in a James story what anybody’s job is. Everyone seems to be on a perpetual tour of Europe or they are a famous writer or on vacation. This is some kind of Jamesian leisure class, convenient for the author in that a character doesn’t have to have a daily schedule mucking up the works. Rarely does James turn his attention to a character who is not fairly well off or at least was at one point. James’ stories are not, though, about the trappings of the upper class as Balzac’s often are, they are about the interior of people’s heads. Granted, some of the issues in the reality of the characters that set off their internal dilemmas would be scoffed at by the working class or the poor, but the mental and emotional process of dealing with them gets at the essential elements of the universal human drama. To be fair, many of the stories illustrate the foolishness and destructiveness of the attitudes of the wealthy.
And then there are the ghost stories, or, as Leon Edel (scholar and editor of The Complete Tales of Henry James) referred to them, stories of the supernatural. James wrote quite a number of them. It was a tradition with many 19th century and early 20th century magazines that their Christmas issues carried ghost stories. Many of the well known writers of the time had tried their hand at the genre. James’ close confidant, Edith Wharton, was another writer who did wonders with this form (and if The Virtual Anthology lasts long enough, she will have her place here too). There is a new paperback on the shelves at bookstores these days, the Wordsworth Classics edition of Ghost Stories of Henry James, which includes “The Turn of the Screw” and nine other tales. I bought it because in all of the editions of James’ stories I own, none of them contained “The Real Right Thing,” or “The Private Life.” It’s a nice collection, with notes by James about nearly all of the pieces. Edel’s earlier editon, from 1949, Rutgers University Press, The Ghostly Tales of Henry James, carries eighteen tales. I’d like to get my hands on a copy of that one.
