‘The Story of a Masterpiece’ by Henry James

Henry James is my favourite author, I think. He’s certainly the one I’ve spent the most time with, apart from perhaps Stephen King (they would not have got on). My favourite novel is, unquestionably, The Portrait of a Lady, which I re-read every few years and still find dark depths in, because it is such a dark novel. So perhaps King and James would have got on. I certainly find James to be a much, much darker writer than he is often painted.

Talking of painting – I’ve picked one of James’s earliest published short stories, from before he wrote his first novel (Watch and Ward, best avoided, in truth), when he was still oscillating between Europe and Massachusetts and trying to find his true voice.

Which is strange, because the true voice is undoubtedly here, in this strange tale of a man who commissions an artist to paint his fiancée, only to be horribly disturbed by what the painting says – or might say – about his future wife. James’s obsessions with trust, surfaces, art and even the nature of evil itself are all present in here, and it’s a cracking story to boot. It would make an exceptional play – but then James thought that about a lot of his work, and the belief served him poorly.

First published in Galaxy, January-February 1868. Collected in The Complete Tales of Henry James, Volume 1: 1864-1868. Available to read online here

‘The Figure in the Carpet’ by Henry James

“‘I see–it’s some idea ABOUT life, some sort of philosophy. Unless it be,’ I added with the eagerness of a thought perhaps still happier, ‘some kind of game you’re up to with your style, something you’re after in the language. Perhaps it’s a preference for the letter P!’ I ventured profanely to break out. ‘Papa, potatoes, prunes–that sort of thing?’ He was suitably indulgent: he only said I hadn’t got the right letter.”

‘The Figure in the Carpet’ forces you to accept ambiguity, waking up your thoughts and giving them insomnia. This was one of the stories I couldn’t have omitted without ingratitude – I read it early and it’s become part of the furniture of my brain. It’s about a young critic who dedicates his life to learning the hidden meaning of an author’s work. Like Paul Auster’s City of Glass or any number of Borges’ stories, it captures something ineffable in concrete, only to sink it just out of view so that we really feel its absence.

I am often very sure that I know things – about myself, other people, the meaning of books and films and tv shows – right up until the moment that I try to articulate them to myself or others. Then I have that moment of terrifying undoing when I realise that nothing exists outside the how of my saying it, and if I don’t have that how, the knowledge recedes, and I’m left with nothing but a feeling of personal insufficiency. I think that’s what’s compelling about ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, more than it being a theorisation of ‘criticism’ or ‘authorship’ or whatever – it’s a story about the frustration of feeling like you ought to be able to know.

First published in Cosmopolis, 1896. Collected in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1986; also available as a Little Black Classic, Penguin, 2015. Read online at Project Gutenberg here

‘The Figure in the Carpet’ by Henry James

“It’s the finest, fullest intention of the lot, and the application of it has been, I think, a triumph of patience, of ingenuity. I ought to leave that to somebody else to say; but that nobody does say it is precisely what we’re talking about. It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it.”

In The Pound Era, Hugh Kenner depicts a scene in which Ezra Pound meets Henry James. Of Pound, Kenner writes: “He liked James, he wondered at James, as at a narwhal disporting.” I too like James and wonder at him—narwhals disporting and all that—and, in a way, that’s what ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ is about. Like other sublime stories about obsessive literary critics, including ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ by Oscar Wilde and ‘Shakespeare’s Memory’ by Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’ interrogates how artists entrance us with their woven tapestries, how we long to understand their genius in the hopes of better understanding ourselves, but also how in our obsessive attempts at interpretation we often miss the forest for the trees. Or might it be missing the vast ocean for the disporting narwhals?

First published in the January/February 1896 issue of Cosmopolis, collected in some James story collections, printed individually as a novella, including as a Penguin Little Black Classic, and available online at Project Gutenberg

‘The Beast in the Jungle’ by Henry James

I was told of this short story (which I think is actually a novella) by Amanda Holmes Duffy, a writer and friend who now lives in Washington and works for the Politics and Prose Bookshop there. We became friends twenty years ago when we both lived in Brussels. She always recommends wonderful books. When she told me about this story, I was fascinated, and my interest only increased once I had read it. In this story, I think James manages to dramatize a problem which afflicts us all. Always there is that great, threatening, lurking fear. But what if our fear is only the fear of fear itself?

First published in the collection The Better Sort, Methuen & Co., 1903. Currently available in the Everyman Collected Stories Vol 2, 2000. Published as a Penguin Mini Modern Classic in 2011

‘The Private Life’ by Henry James

NO ONE DOES A SPECTRAL PRESENCE LIKE HENRY JAMES! There are such a posse of good ones to choose from, but this story fascinates me. A group of creative friends are holidaying in Switzerland together: “We talked of London, face to face with a great bristling, primeval glacier”. The social life of the party is dominated by Clarence “Clare” Vawdrey, an excellent raconteur. However, does he find the time to actually write anything, the group wonders? (It’s like the ultimate short story for anyone who thinks their favourite writer spends too much time on social media.) Then, our narrator has a chance encounter in a corridor, which makes him suspect that Vawdrey’s ‘true’ self may have unsuspected hidden skills. Funny, slightly spooky, and enlightening about the weird ambivalence of the creative life. Henry James emoji. There is one right?

First published in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1892. Collected in the Everyman Collected Stories Vol 2. Available online here