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Henry James: Complete Stories, 1892-1898 (Library of America)

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Henry James (1843-1916) was nicknamed The Master by admiring fellow-authors towards the end of his life. He is truly a noble, gifted, psychological author depicting a by-gone era but including timeless insights about human beings and their general and mental situations in his writings. He is a master of lengthy prose (too lengthy for some!) These Library of America editions of James's writings are wonderful, high-quality, unabridged books with expert editing (notes) at the back of the volume. They have a knack for selecting the best editions of the author's writings where more than one version was published in the author's lifetime. The short stories of this volume are from the mature period but before James' final developed style of fictional writing. There are a large number of stories including many wonderful gems such as "Owen Wingrave," "The Coxon Fund" and "In the Cage." To be fair, most of the stories were written quickly for magazines, and a few ("Glasses" comes to mind) just aren't good stories at all, in my opinion. However, most of the stories do succeed quite well. "Owen Wingrave" (criticized by Bernard Shaw as being too deterministic and neglecting free will) is actually a penetrating tale about military culture, military values, and the role of the military in the nineteenth-century world. "The Coxon Fund" is about a brilliant lecturer supported by the fund but whose life and the lives of his supporters are full of pitfalls outside of the Fund's influence. The story shows how the successes and failures of the Fund (and the Lecturer) have subtle and not-so-subtle ramifications for each of the characters. With "In the Cage", the author steps outside of his accustomed higher-class and higher-educated mix of characters to present the plight of a penetrating lower-class telegram processor and her insights on life and her suitor. I found it a nice rendition of late-nineteenth century London. I encourage readers to explore this and other Library of America editions of James' writings.

Despite the objections that readers may raise as to style (difficult, convoluted) and his sometimes limited subject matter, Henry James remains one of the Great American writers, and also one of the most prolific. The mountain of fiction James created is truly impressive and almost consistently interesting. Library of America has dedicated multiple volumes to James, excluding only (as far as I am aware) his "dramatic" efforts, which were by and large a failure, if not a disaster. Consistent with its approach, LoA has published all of James's short stories in 5 volumes, organized by date of composition/publication. The present volume covers 1892-98, a fertile period for James's short fiction, encompassing the final years of his theatrical efforts and somewhat before his most difficult final period (i.e, The Golden Bowl, and others). This volume includes a number of stories that should be in ANY compilation of James's stories, including The Turn of the Screw, The Real Thing, The Figure in the Carpet, In the Cage, and others. It also is interesting to note that, at this point in his career, James's stories increasingly were concerned with loss, mortality, and ruminations on the "legacy" of an artist, for example "Greville Fane," "The Middle Years," "The Death of the Lion," "The Alter of the Dead," and " The Figure in the Carpet." The volume is done with LoA's usual quality and is certainly a worthy publication. My only reservations are these. First, if you are looking for a volume that includes the "best" of James's stories, you don't specifically care about this "period," and you do not intend to collect or read all 5 LoA volumes of stories amounting to something like 4000 pages, you are probably better off with an anthology that covers all of James's writing career. Second, LoA has consistently followed a philosophy of letting the works speak for themselves, with little (if any) critical commentary or guidance, except for very good chronologies of the authors' lives. I certainly respect and understand this approach, and an interested reader can relatively easily acquire useful criticism or commentary from other sources. However, with James, perhaps more than some other LoA authors, some critical input would be quite valuable. For example, taking only The Turn of the Screw, the various interpretations are diverse and fascinating in their own right: is it a simple (relatively speaking) ghost story? Is the governess mentally unstable and the victim of repressed sexuality? It would go beyond the bounds of the LoA format fully to address these issues, but it might be useful if the volume at least gave the reader a "heads up" about the various interpretations and their sources.
With those small reservations, this is a very good volume and a good place to start if you are deeply interested in James's shorter fiction. If anyone happened to pick up this volume, or read this comment, looking for a thesis or paper topic, for what it is worth, you could do worse than to think about James's short fiction on the artist, mortality and the artist's legacy and take special note of the stories cited above.

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.

Why is Amazon listing this book, Henry James: Complete Stories 1892-98 as available new? I ordered it in February and never received it. Amazon notified me frequently of continuing delays and, then, a few weeks ago cancelled the order, the book being unavailable. This is one of two volumes of James's stories which Amazon lists but has been unable to provide. I've written the same review for the other one.

I have since ordered a used copy and received it without delay!

The stories, of course, all five volumes are perfection, delight, wondrous! The edition is beautiful: print is very small and on thin paper but still easy to read. The hardback bindings hold the pages together securely yet allow the reader to hold the book open without a lot of effort. The little ribbon marker is a nice touch.