The Secret in Henry James’ Late Stories

“The theme of his tale of ‘A Round of Visits’ and of [the unfinished novel] The Ivory Tower is of Americans who inherit great wealth, only to have it stolen by other Americans,” writes the Henry James biographer Leon Edel.¹ But that theme was not in James’ mind when he first thought about his story. As early as 1894, he set down the idea for the story he would not write until fifteen years had passed: “There came to me a night or two ago the notion of a young man (young, presumably), who has something—some secret sorrow, trouble, fault—to tell and can’t find the recipient.”² Four years later, he reminds himself that he is yet to write the story of “The young man who can’t get rid of his secret—his oppressive knowledge—with solution of his taking one—HAVING to, from some one else—to keep it company.”³ The next year he returns to his still unwritten “story,” this time in more detail:

Don’t lose, after this, the tail of the little concetto of the poor young man with the burden of his personal sorrow or secret on his mind that he longs to work off on some one, roams restlessly, nervously, in depression, about London, trying for a recipient, and finding in the great heartless preoccupied city and society, every one taken up with quite other matters than the occasion for listening to him. I had thought, for the point of this, of his being suddenly approached by some one who demands his attention for some dreadful complication or trouble—a trouble so much greater than his own, a distress so extreme, that he sees the moral: the balm for his woe residing not in the sympathy of some one else, but in the coercion of giving it—the sympathy—to some one else. I see this, however, somehow, as obvious and banal, n’est-ce pas?—“goody” and calculable beforehand. There glimmers out some better alternative, in the form of his making some one tide over some awful crisis by listening to him. He learns afterwards what it has been—I mean the crisis, the other preoccupation, danger, anguish. [The thing needs working out—maturing.]⁴

It was not until 1910, in the New Review, that he finally published his story about the man who itches to tell his secret but cannot find anyone to tell it to. And now, for the first time (the germ of “A Round of Visits” dates from 1894, it will be recalled), James reveals the secret his young man, Mark Monteith, is so eager to tell: he, an American living abroad, has been swindled by his friend in America. What he wishes to say is:

Oh, he’s [Phil Bloodgood] what’s the matter with me—that, looking after some of my poor dividends, as he for the ten years of my absence had served me by doing, he has simply jockeyed me out of the whole little collection, such as it was, and taken the opportunity of my return, inevitably at last bewildered and uneasy, to “sail,” ten days ago, for parts unknown and as yet unguessable. It isn’t the beastly values themselves, however; that’s only awkward and I can still live, though I don’t quite know how I shall turn around; it’s the horror of his having done it, and done it to me—without a mitigation or, so to speak, a warning or an excuse.⁵

How had James come upon the idea of having an American-based American “swindling” of a London-based American as the “secret” that motivates a “round of visits”? It is not coincidental, I think, that the long-germinating story was not actually written until three or four years after James had returned from his lengthy visit to his native land in 1904–05. “One does not need the resolution” of “A Round of Visits,” explains Edel, “to recognize its inner statement. Henry James had been robbed and betrayed; his patrimony was gone; he had lived in a...