Henry James: Collected Stories Volume 2 (Everyman's Library) [Hardcover]

Henry James (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 2000

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1120 pages
• Publisher: Everyman's Library (March 7, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037540936X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375409363
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 1.9 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,273,319 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Henry James (1843-1916), the son of the religious philosopher Henry James Sr. and brother of the psychologist and philosopher William James, published many important novels including Daisy Miller, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors.

Customer Reviews

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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Short Stories of Henry Jame: Worth the Effort, August 15, 2006

By 

Martin Asiner (jersey city, nj United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Henry James: Collected Stories Volume 2 (Everyman's Library) (Hardcover)

The short stories of Henry James are a microcosm of his novels: bafflingly complex, syntactically convoluted, and thematically multi-layered. He wrote more than 100 between 1864 and 1910, of which perhaps a few dozen are much read today. Complicating any discussion of his short prose is to define "short." Many of his short stories are long enough to qualify as novellas but regardless of the length, any fiction of Henry James promises to take the reader into the world of the microverse, a highly stylized and internalized arena where action counts less than thought and "how" far more than "what." For those who come to his short fiction after having read, say THE GOLDEN BOWL or THE AMBASSADORS, such readers have learned patience, secure in the knowledge that the inner workings of the mind are surely more interesting than the slam-bang world of reality.

There are a few themes that James uses often both in his short and long fiction. He likes to place cultured and intelligent protagonists in an alien environment just to watch them squirm on a foreign alter, or what is more sinister, to maintain them in a familiar ground, only to change the laws of physics or rationality--and then watch them squirm. He employs the doppelganger, or double of the protagonist, one who might be his present or future version, or again more sinister, one who might be a spectral reincarnation. Many of James' heroes fear marriage and must battle an encrusted society that demands it. James was also fascinated with innocence, especially in children and child-like adults. In such stories, the world exists only to corrupt such innocence. Finally, James rarely used one theme in isolation. He much preferred to onion his stories with overlapping themes, all of which are centered on James' rich and allusive prose style, allowing him to meld the complexity of content with the complexity of style. I have chosen a few of his short prose fiction as examples of the quintessential Henry James.

In "The Aspern Papers," James writes of a narrator who must balance the need to obtain art (the papers of the deceased American poet Aspern) while maintaining his ethics while so doing. The narrator travels to Venice for these papers only to discover that their current owners are quite unwilling to give them up. He promises to marry one of them in return for their delivery to him, thinking all the while they are too naïve to see through his scheme. In the end, he tries to steal them, only to learn that they have burned them, one page at a time. James' narrator is one of a long series of such who speak of integrity more than show it.

In "The Jolly Corner," James uses the "double" of the protagonist to point out how one man's life could have been had things been different. Spencer Brydon, an American expatriate returns to America, only to meet his ghostly alter ego, one who Brydon might have become had he stayed at home. Perhaps James had in mind Lambert Strether of THE AMBASSADORS, who is also the model of what the alter ego might have been: a money-grubbing capitalist with no one to tell him "Live!"

James uses "The Pupil" to depict the loss of childhood innocence. The caddish and grifting transplanted American Moreen family hires fellow American Pemberton to tutor their son. They refuse to pay him agreed on wages, all the while exhorting him with the nobility of his task. They offer him custody of their son, which he understandably refuses, but the boy is crushed since he favors Pemberton over his parents.

Art versus life come into conflict in "The Real Thing." The narrator is hired by a couple, punningly named the Monarchs, to paint them as exemplars of the "real thing" of nobility. It is his realization that the reality of their claim does not allow him to create the illusion of a second-rate knock off. He is unwilling to further society's need to measure a life by glorifying its phony aspect.

In these stories and in Henry James' others, he presents the reader with a subjective examination of the inner workings of the mind. For those readers who wish to enter such a microverse, they will find that James' admittedly baffling style will be seen as more as a part of that journey than an impediment.