All fiction of Henry James set in New York collected here - in addition to the famous novella Washington Square, eight lesser known tales: The Story of a Masterpiece, A Most Extraordinary Case, Crawford's Consistency, An International Episode, The Impressions of a Cousin, The Jolly Corner, Crapy Cornelia and A Round of Visits. Also included in this New York Review Books edition is Colm Tóibín's extensive Introduction providing context and critical commentary on each story as well as Henry James' connection with the city of New York. Since so much has been written about Washington Square, I will focus on three of the seven other tales:

THE STORY OF A MASTERPIECE
Henry James had a lifelong interest in the power of art and its impact on men and women, portrait painting a prime example. Think of Nick Dorner’s portrait of actress Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse or The Madonna of the Future with Mr. Theobald’s painting of Madonna and Child. Well, with this early Henry James published when the great author was age twenty-five, we’re provided a foretaste, a tale where a portrait of young, beautiful, bride-to-be Marian Everett takes center stage.

John Lennox, wealthy, thirty-five-year-old New Yorker, a man steeped in all things cultural and a patron of the arts, admits to the painter himself, Stephen Baxter, that the portrait of his future wife Marion is excellent on all counts but he still has serious objections: “I approve you; I can’t too much admire the broad and firm methods you’ve taken for reaching this same reality. But you can be real without being brutal – without attempting, as one might say, to be actual.”

But is John Lennox really in any position to judge the work of art? After all, as the lover and future husband of the portrait’s subject, he obviously lacks what philosophers term objective disinterest or aesthetic distance. Also, through Baxter's painterly genius, Henry James highlights how, in many critical and important ways, the portrait is more alive, more “real” than the flesh-and-blood person. And it’s this underlying reality of Marion and how the painter has captured her “horrible blankness and deadness” John Lennox particularly objects to - how, as the portrait makes abundantly clear, his future wife lacks any true depth and heart, or, in our modern parlance, Marian’s beauty is all surface, she's nothing more than a glamor girl.

The drama of the tale escalates, raising additional, equally pressing questions pertaining to art and aesthetics. Vintage Henry James to be savored sentence by glorious sentence.


The Painter at His Easel - Honore Daumier

THE JOLLY CORNER
A ghost story. Actually, after The Turn of the Screw, many consider this the very best Henry James ghost story. I concur – the tale gathers serious momentum and an eerie psychic power with every turn of the page (no pun intended). We have a beginning innocent enough: after an absence of thirty-three years, Spencer Brydon returns to New York, the city of his youth, adolescence and early manhood. The city surprises him, including how when visiting an apartment property he owns under construction, he learns he might just be a building foreman at heart and quite possibly could have become a New York real estate tycoon if he chose to remain rather than flee the city. A close lady friend of his tells him much of the same; matter of fact, she confesses that she twice had a dream where Spencer is a New York billionaire.

All this “What if I remained in New York?” prompts Spencer to project a second self, one who, in fact, has always lived in the home of his childhood, the house he calls with a measure of affection “the Jolly Corner.” Spencer is staying at a nearby hotel but has been in the habit of spending hours every evening, midnight to 2 a.m., investigating the many empty rooms, hallways and stairways of his boyhood mansion. After awhile, feeling especially bold, Spencer places the candle down and explores the rooms of his house in the dark – and the more accustomed his eyes become to the lack of light, the more courage fills his breast. We read: “It made him feel, this acquired faculty, like some monstrous stealthy cat; he wondered if he would have glared at these moments with large shining yellow eyes, and what it mightn’t verily be, for the poor hard-pressed alter ego, to be confronted with such a type.”

Now all those many hours of the night in isolation, pursuing mystical, otherworldly dimensions, calling up past memories as if they are a swarm of ghosts, dealing with a father’s curse in not making this house your home, opening doors and peering into blackish rooms as if they are subconscious and unconscious spaces in your own mind or part of some mysterious Egyptian tomb, well, such practices can have unexpected and even undesired consequences. Read all about it in this Henry James dusky jewel.


from the portfolio of Henry James's The Jolly Corner - etching by Peter Milton

A ROUND OF VISITS
In addition to being thirty pages long (in this sense, similar to The Story of a Masterpiece and The Jolly Corner), A Round of Visits has a well-crafted seven part structure, a story published in 1910 about Mark Monteith making his return trip to New York after a ten year absence abroad only to find good buddy Phil Bloodgood has amscrayed with his life savings. Sound familiar, as in New York during the 1980s, when Wall Street scandals and financial swindles were all the rage? Henry James was not a happy camper when he himself returned to New York and could see the city of his youth had become one unending nasty, noisy, stinking, foul, money-grubbing urban sewer.

Am I being too harsh here? Hardly. Commenting on A Round of Visits and another New York tale penned by the author, Colm Tóibín cites James biographer, Leon Edel, who writes: “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.” Welcome to the Big Apple. As they say, a nice place to visit but you wouldn’t want to life there. And to top off, when Mark Monteith steps into the New York streets, he steps into a blinding blizzard and comes down with the flu. Oh, my, can things get any worse? Actually, they can. Especially when your round of visits takes you to another old friend who reeks of money and success. But how legal, really, is all his moneymaking? You’re given something of an answer when the police pay him an unexpected visit.

Of course, A Round of Visits, similar to the other Henry James New York tales, is told in James’s exquisite language. I’ll let the author have the last words – here’s the first two sentences from Part II: “Everything, as he passed through the place, went on – all the offices of life, the whole bustle of the market, and withal, surprisingly, scarce less that of the nursery and the playground; the whole sprawl in especial of the great gregarious fireside: it was a complete social scene in itself, on which types might figure and passions rage and plots thicken and dramas develop, without reference to any other sphere, or perhaps even to anything at all outside. The signs of this met him at every turn as he threaded the labyrinth, passing from one extraordinary masquerade of expensive objects, one portentous “period” of decoration, one violent phase of publicity, to another: the heavy heat, the luxuriance, the extravagance, the quantity, the colour, gave the impression of some wondrous tropical forest, where vociferous, bright-eyed, and feathered creatures, of every variety of size and hue, where half smothered between undergrowths of velvet and tapestry and ramifications of marble and bronze.”


Henry James - portrait by John Singer Sargent ( )

In which I discover, notwithstanding my love of The American, that I really do prefer later James. The early stories are good, too, although not indispensable. 'Impressions of a Cousin' is interesting for James-followers, since it's written as a diary, hardly his usual form; and the main characters are fascinating. For all that, it's a bit long for the material. 'An International Episode' is great, of course; I'd read it before and it held up the second time around. I think it's the best written of the earlier stories here, the most thoughtful and the most charming. I have no idea why people like 'Washington Square' at all. The prose is dull and dry, the story, such as it is, is tiresome and depressing. I say this as someone who loves, loves depressing books; something about WS, though, was too grim altogether. I didn't like 'The Bostonians,' don't like WS... I'm concerned that when I get round to re-reading A Portrait I won't like that either. Fingers crossed I'm wrong.
That leaves the three later stories, The Jolly Corner, Crapy Cornelia, and A Round of Visits. They're all about the past in some way, and the general impression they leave is that nostalgia is often justified, usually pleasant and always harmful. The prose is difficult and abstract, but far more interesting and stimulating than the earlier stories. Fascinating stuff. ( )