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  • Introduction
  • Susan M. Griffin

“Short James” is, for many people, an oxymoron—at least when applied to the Master’s own prose. Yet, anyone who has looked at James’s Notebooks will be familiar with lists of names, pithy examples of slang, polyglot passages where James finds that only Italian or French can succinctly provide le mot juste. Readers debate the semantics of James’s recurring “Basta!” and pore over the clipped entries in his Pocket Diaries. Then, too, there are the sketches, journalism, and reviews with which James supported himself early on. And surely one can speak of truncated relations in James’s narratives, a topic that Isobel Waters takes up in this issue. We also know that James was a voracious reader of short fiction, a fact that informs Paul Grimstad’s surprising coupling of James and Poe.

Central, though, to the topic of brevity and James is his belief that, as all faithful readers of the prefaces know, “really, universally, relations stop nowhere” (Preface to Roderick Hudson). In the Notebooks and prefaces, James describes again and again the often unsuccessful struggle to confine his prose within the limits of publisher and genre demands. This problem is nowhere more emphasized than in his discussions of short stories and novellas. Late in life, in that same preface to Roderick Hudson, James describes writing his early fiction as “bumping about, to acquire skill, in the shallow waters and sandy coves of the ‘short story’ and master as yet of no vessel constructed to carry a sail.” The larger craft of Roderick Hudson, James claims, at last allowed him to put out to sea.

The teleological arc James gives to this narrative of his artistic progress—his kunstleroman—is, however, deceptive. For Roderick Hudson was not James’s first novel, nor can he be said to have left behind the short story form, in which he wrote throughout his life. Wrote, read, and studied. In 1888, for example, James, whose sense of national markets was always keen, astutely analyzed the various international audiences for stories:

The little story is but scantily relished in England, where readers take their fiction rather by the volume than by the page, and the novelist’s idea is apt to resemble one of those old-fashioned carriages which require a wide court to turn round. In America, where it is associated pre-eminently with Hawthorne’s name, with Edgar Poe’s, and with that of Mr. Bret Harte, the [End Page 219] short tale has had a better fortune. France, however, has been the land of its great prosperity.

(“Guy de Maupassant”)

Like James, Matthew Rubery, Paul Grimstad, and Andrea Zemgulys concern themselves with histories of national reading and writing patterns.

Further undermining the notion that James progressed from the short story to the novel is his excitement in 1889, fourteen years after the publication of Roderick Hudson, about a conversation with Hippolyte Taine in which Taine praised Turgenev lavishly. Such attention to one famous for his short fictions “has done me a world of good,” James exclaims, “reviving, refreshing, confirming, consecrating, as it were, the wish and dream that have lately grown stronger than ever in me—the desire that the literary heritage, such as it is, poor thing, that I may leave, shall consist of a large number of perfect short things, nouvelles and tales, illustrative of ever so many things in life” (Notebooks).

Part of the lure of short fiction lay in the very difficulties that it posed for James. In the preface to “The Aspern Papers,” he asserts that “Great for me from far back had been the interest of the whole ‘question of the short story,’ roundabout which our age has, for lamentable reasons, heard so vain a babble; but I foresee occasions yet to come when it will abundantly waylay me. Then it will insist on presenting itself but in too many lights.”

Despite his (vexed) dedication to shorter forms of fiction, many of Henry James’s stories (with a few notable exceptions like “Daisy Miller,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and “The Beast in the Jungle”) remain largely absent—from both our criticism and our classrooms. Recent articles, including...

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