Henry James: The Shorter Fiction: Reassessments (review)

N. H. Reeve, ed. Henry James, The Shorter Fiction: Reassessments. London: Macmillan, 1997; New York: St. Martin's, 1997. 249 pp. $49.95.

"Reassess" is not exactly what the eleven helpful and entertaining essays in this collection mainly do. The value of the shorter fiction is not in question nor, really, weighed; the consensus seems to be, frankly, that they are works of "genius," a word that appears with some frequency herein, perhaps given new license by Fred Kaplan's 1992 biography of James, The Imagination of Genius. In his Preface, N. H. Reeve points out that James's "shorter fictions, the tales and nouvelles, 112 in all, the 'multitude of pictures of my time' which he was so proud to have produced, tend for the most part to be summoned as incidental witnesses in the interrogation of larger works, rather than explored at length for their own sakes." Ranging chronologically (although they are not thus arranged) from "The Story of a Year" (1865) to James's last completed story, "Mora Montravers" (1909), the essays do, with perhaps one exception, explore these works "for their own sakes," if with at least half an eye always on the larger prizes.

What the essays more strikingly do, quite as if the authors had been asked to take up this particular issue, is concern themselves with the problem of emotional engagement, mostly of James's characters with themselves and under- or over-appreciated others, but also of James with his art and of critics with James. It is as if the authors of the essays in this volume read James and find him to be saying, "Only disconnect." I do not know whether this is yet more evidence of the frightening coherence of James's oeuvre or whether it (also) has to do with the current concerns of critics, but either way, as somebody once said, there we are. In his essay on "The Aspern Papers" (1888), Rod Mengham describes the narrator's inability to "occupy any middle ground of mutual concessions, adjustments of given and take"; "the encounters depicted in the book are distinguished by either an alienating remoteness or a violating closeness" (47). N. H. Reeve describes Sidney and Jane Traffle, the middle-aged couple at the center of "Mora Montravers," as like other couples at other moments in James's late stories who "appear to have joined briefly in league together to defend themselves against the impact of real feeling" (152). In a yummy essay on "Glasses" (1896), Adrian Poole illuminates the narrator's ambivalent voyeuristic attraction to "Flora's two faces, the one tragically disfigured by spectacles, the other triumphantly presented as spectacle" (4).

Flora represents the "figure of the woman withdrawn or withdrawing from the world of the living into a mysterious realm of self-communion and self-gratification" (Poole 11), an image not unlike that of James himself as some of our authors describe him, particularly William Veeder in his essay, "James and the Limitations of Self-Therapy," on the purposes and benefits of James's flight to the great good places of fiction. In his comical piece on "The Birthplace" (1903), Tony Tanner suggests the extent to which "the critical sense" alienates the central character from his own life, with obvious implications for James. Geoff Ward analogously analyzes "the strength of applied irony" (James's phrase) brought to bear upon Stransom in "The Altar of the Dead" (1894), who demonstrates the "dwindling psychic capital of a subjectivity that severs all investments in the world" (67). Millicent Bell shows that James offers a strikingly opposite strategy of verbal disengagement in Catherine Sloper's "style of silence" (107), which she compares to Fleda Vetch's own purposive disconnection from what and whom she loves.

Philip Horne's essay, "The Master and the 'Queer Affair' of 'The Pupil'" directly confronts certain critics' own unwillingness to take a cue from James and critically "disconnect" their passions from their readings. Horne "indicate...