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 There is a considerable body of modern literature dealing with the ambiguity of the artist in his social and moral character, and in a sense this is the implicit theme of "The Aspern Papers." The position of the lodger – "the publishing scoundrel"– is a position at only one remove from that of the artist-type.
by Victor Verney
I. Neither by temperament not inclination, wrote Dean Flower, was Henry James a writer of short stories, which is probably why he only wrote 112 of them in his lifetime. The short tale, "concise anecdote," or conte, as he variously called it, seemed to him "a form that would give little," and he usually used it because it would sell easily. James's preference was for the "beautiful and blest nouvelle," a long story having the idea "happily developed." He liked to use the nouvelle for the summing up of his deepest convictions; he used it to present his definitive statements on such prevailing subjects as innocence, experience, evil, and isolation. At the center of each there stands a figure of supreme loneliness, pitted against society, betrayed by relatives and friends, yet equally derided or destroyed by an enemy within.
In his discussion of three James tales, Leon Edel points out that ten years of storytelling – in various lengths – preceded James's first significant novel. With the slender tale "Daisy Miller" he made his enduring reputation in the 1870s, and there was at least one masterpiece of the form for each subsequent decade. "The Aspern Papers" was of the 1880s; "The Turn of the Screw" the 1890s; and "The Beast of the Jungle" the first decade of the past century.
As an expatriate, James was fascinated with the differences between the European/English scene and the American, and between his compatriots and their trans-Atlantic neighbors. Again and again throughout his career he turned, in his novels and stories, to one or another aspect of what he called the "Americano-European Legend." Some of his best tales are less concerned with international themes than with the portrayal of visitors from the United States who were affected, in one way or another, by life in Europe and revealed essential characteristics less apparently manifested in their native environment. This helplessness of the innocent abroad against ancient evil is what Lewis calls a dominant mis-en-scene in James's earlier work.
This social or documentary impulse decreases in the later tales until it is refined nearly out of existence. "The Aspern Papers" begins not with a social portrait, but with a man obsessed by an unnatural passion for the relics of a dead poet. Only at the end, notes Flower, does the narrator withdraw from his "battles and stratagems" to discover Venetian life and its charm. The sight of the magnificent statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni astride a huge bronze horse throws into perspective his own petty fanaticism.
Any serious reader of James knows that a reference to a specific painting or sculpture in his fiction is always purposeful, never mere travelogue background. "The Master" was himself, of course, a failed painter, and exquisitely erudite in the aesthetics and history of art. Some research in art history books yielded (in addition to a nice photograph) the intelligence that the sculptor Andrea del Verrochio, was Leonardo da Vinci's teacher. Here, the master/acolyte relationship reflects that between Aspern and the publishing scoundrel. William Goetz uses "The Aspern Papers" as an example of what he terms James's "parables of art," which portray the standard relationship between the young narrator and the established master, but also postulate a doppelganger in order to illustrate a typical thematic tension between the demands of life and art. The dead, submits Goetz, before whom the hero stands in a posture of reverence are, in some cases, mysterious projected versions of their own selves, in other cases former friends and lovers, and in this case a revered author. But in all cases they become a "sovereign presence" domineering the hero's consciousness.
"The Aspern Papers" (1888) is considered one of James's best short works. Critics have waxed rapturous over this nouvelle; Stephen Spender has said that it is here we find a "rare, inaccessible and pure poetry … that resembles nothing so much as the musical art of a composer." Philip Rahv feels that the nouvelle was so adaptable to the Master's gifts because within its range, James could satisfy his need for psychological exploration, even while practicing that "exquisite economy in composition that he was said to value above all else.
In an altogether representative waspish diatribe – what might be termed a "Reader's Digest" critical slam against James – compiled by Morton Dauwen Zabel, such worthies as H. G. Wells, Burton Rascoe, Somerset Maugham, J. Middleton Murray, Van Wyck Brooks and Andre Gide are seen as having "... preferred to charge him with most of the sins of the literary and American calendars – with repudiating his birthright, with being a snob, with falling indecisively between two cultures and finding himself at home in neither, with evading a full commitment to life, with accepting only the values of privilege and aristocracy, with excluding a great share of human misery and injustice from serious consideration. He was accused of being the "culmination of the superficial type": a man who "doesn't find things out" and so produces "tales of nothingness"--of being a "fat, wistful remittance man with a passion for elegance," of creating "the impassioned formalism of an art without content," of "magnificent pretensions, petty performances! – the fruits of an irresponsible imagination, of a deranged sense of values, of a mind working in the void, uncorrected by any clear consciousness of human cause and effect," even, finally, of being "simply not interesting; he is only intelligent, he has no mystery in him, no secret, no figure in the carpet."
All this notwithstanding, the evolving consensus among critics of resolute astuteness and radically different standards would appear to be that James was a masterful giant of the world of letters. "He is a great artist, in spite of everything," wrote T. S. Eliot, "his work is incomplete as his experience was, but it is in no respect second-rate, and he can be judged only in the company of the greatest." Edmund Wilson, Yvor Winters, and Cyril Connolly nominate him as among the half-dozen greatest writers in English, and F. R. Leavis flatly asks: "What achievement in the art of fiction– fiction as a completely serious art addressed to the adult mind– can we point to in English as surpassing his?"
In "The Aspern Papers," the scene is Venice, but the principal characters are American. In the original anecdote, on which James based his nouvelle, only one was American. Under James's treatment, this American remains substantially as he was, but is given a bit more literary sensitivity and made somewhat less ridiculous than in the original anecdote. But the two Misses Clairmont are transformed from Englishwomen into Americans; Florence into Venice; and Byron and Shelley into Jeffrey Aspern, an imaginary American poet of the same period and stature. Most of James's narratives owe their first impulse to some small fact or circumstance of real life. The particle of fact in "TAP" was heard by James in Florence, where he was told one day in 1879 of the presence in that city of the still-surviving Jane Claremont, the half-sister of Shelley's wife and the mother of Byron's daughter Allegra. To the legend was added the rich detail of an American traveler – "an ardent Shelleyite" – who contrived to enter the forgotten Claremont household in the guise of a lodger in order to get hold of "literary remains." When the aged Jane Claremont died, her niece offered him the papers, but at a price – the same suggested by Miss Tita – which drove him to hasty and undignified flight. This was quite enough to provide James with the "germ" he wanted; since he believed that the "minimum of suggestion serves the man of imagination better than the maximum," he literally shrank from any further investigation of the facts. The episode as it was told to James was comic and, he felt, "a trifle coarse." He saw potentialities in it, however, and the story was promptly developed and published in "The Atlantic Monthly" in Boston, in the spring of 1888 and in book form in London in the same year.
Scholars of art history, like James, know that the very existence of Colleoni's statue in Venice, rather than Florence, was highly significant. By 1450, a great Florentine civic campaign of art patronage had tapered out, while military and economic power was shifting to Venice, which had gained ascendancy in its running battle with the Turks over control of Crete and Cyprus. Colleoni, who had commanded the Venetian army, requested such a statue in his will, and, by way of encouragement, left a sizable fortune to the Republic of Venice. As Florentine artists became dependent upon private commissions, they essentially co-opted the cultural roots of their art, as the sheer wealth of Venice was irresistible. Here, perhaps, an extremely subtle reference by the author to his own running leitmotif of the trauma inflicted upon personal and national self-identity by international or cosmopolitan social contexts. Further, it mirrors the avaricious exploitation of Clara Claremont by the narrator for self-aggrandizing, narrowly egoistic purposes. Like Byron, who died fighting in a Greek revolution, Colleoni turns his combative vision toward the Aegean. Finally, the statue's association with the uprooted artist comprises a sly metadramatic fingerprint, left for the benefit of those "upon whom nothing is lost." This statue is, then, a wonderfully representative example of the complex internal and external artistic allusions which James is able to manipulate through his rarified technical and referential expertise.
The idea of what James termed "the rich dim Shelley drama played out in the very theater of our 'modernity'" delighted him. For James, Europe was like a stage, dexterously arranged and lighted, which revealed with special vividness the American who played their role upon it. He loved a "palpable imaginable visitable past," and the Byronic Age met his tests. Characteristically, he wondered if some reflection of it could be found in the United States. Hence Jeffrey Aspern is made to be an American poet, and Miss Boredereau his countrywoman. If such an American Byron and such a mistress had lived in what James termed the "lean prime Western period" of the United States, what, the story implies, might they have been and what romantic memories might their existence have left?
This transmutation of national identity is important. The old palace in which the action takes place is alien territory to all three American, and it accents the nostalgic isolation of the ladies. Its dilapidation strengthens the effect of their having outlived their time and having lost forever the glories of the past. At the same time, its age and beauty symbolically suggest the older woman's memories of those glories, and contrast ironically with the shabbier side of the American collector, who calculatingly "works" the garden and tries to charm the ladies, not for the love of it or them, but in order to accomplish his romantically inspired, but essentially selfish, ends. It is partly with the intention of covering his tracks, some feel, that James transposed the scene from Florence to Venice. The addition of an experimental American element promised to heighten the charm. James asked, but scarcely answered, the question of what the Byronic Age had come to on the banks of the Hudson, and textually the American reference remained a mere conceit. Rahv's remark, that Venice "furnished a background of moldy rococo for his little drama," understates a great deal, and omits much.
R. W. B. Lewis, in The American Adam, writes that James, who had used the Italian setting very effectively in Roderick Hudson early in his career, was closely anteceded in this particular by Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose final novel, The Marble Faun, reflecting a growing loss of artistic faith, explored the Americanist conceit of Italy as a merciless crucible of character. Hawthorne, presaging James, wrote of a young American who is transplanted to Italy, only to be crushed by the artifice and materialistic cynicism of international society. This theme was also mirrored by European authors, most notably Thomas Mann in Death in Venice. The American was thus heir to a Northern European legacy prevalent since the Elizabethans, which painted Venice as the Sodom and Gomorrah of Europe. What Lewis calls the irony, complexity, and ambiguity of post-lapsarian experience is what the Anglo-Saxon (and by extension, the American) Innocent, searching Venice for cultivation and enlightenment, in fact finds.
In 1637, five years before Cromwell and the Parliamentarians closed the English theaters, Venice opened seven opera houses, which quickly became the rage with the aristocracy but also with the middle classes and, it is said, the gondoliers. In general, Venice, home of the most notable colorists in the paintings of the time, also pioneered, in music, what we today term "colorful": mass effects, solo and choral combinations, etc. Indeed, it was this exuberant embrace of the arts, as well as florid Venetian refinement of religious music to include stereophonic effects of two choirs or more, as well as a strikingly modern sense of harmonic sophistication, that for the Puritans was emblematic of a decadent Christianity.
The English conceit of Venice as a morally corrosive den of iniquity was well entrenched by Shakespeare’s time. The following quote from "As You Like It" [IV.i.33-8] finds Rosalind ridiculing Jacques and adumbrating a central Jamesian notion: "Farewell, Monsieur traveler: look you lisp and wear strange suits, disable the benefits of your own country, be out of love with your nativity and almost chide God for making you that countenance you are, or I will scarce think that you have been in a gondola” [i.e. been in Venice]. In "Much Ado About Nothing," [I.i.273-5], Don Pedro tells Benedick, the confirmed bachelor, "Nay, if Cupid have not spent all his quiver in Venice, thou wilt quake for this shortly." Harin Craig's footnote to this passage simply remarks that Venice was "noted for licentiousness."
It is not purely by accident that Shakespeare's two most explicit treatments of the theme of "otherness," "Othello" and "The Merchant of Venice," were situated in this city. Considered the most "oriental" of European cities, Venice was literally on the cusp between East and West, and even its military focus faced squarely toward Asia, in distinct contrast to the wide-spread internecine squabbles common to the other principalities of northern Italy. This cosmopolitan character was given strong economic underpinning by the trading position of the city, which was predicated by the first institutionalized mercantile system of exchange; money from all of Europe and the Mediterranean held currency in the Venetian marketplace. It was, in the literary world, a city where a black man might command European soldiery and marry European womanhood, while retaining a grand innocence amidst Machiavellian politics; it was a city where a Jewish man might become a prosperous financial services professional, a city where a woman of acumen might fashion herself into a lawyer and speak with her own voice before the law. Shakespeare's Portia literally keeps her own counsel in Venice.
II.
Morton Dauwen Zabel tells us that the James home was a breeding ground of curiosity, ideas and bookish pleasures. Emerson was a familiar guest – "the divinely pompous rose of the philosophic garden," the elder Henry James called him – and the air was a stir of enthusiasms. Idealism, Transcendentalism, and a democratic emancipation bred a new faith in humanity whose guides were Emerson and Fourier, and a creative freedom in religion whose prophets were Sandeman and Swedenborg. What F. Scott Fitzgerald (echoing Emerson) has ascribed to the American character a "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" was the native emotion of the James household. Man was to be redeemed by society; society was to be redeemed by a rebirth of moral confidence and a faith in "possibilities." Such ideas implanted in both William and Henry James a religious conviction which, persisting beyond rationality or agnosticism was to fix its stamp on their ultimate conceptions of science and art.
The paternal grandfather of the James brothers had made a fortune at Albany, enabling his heirs to cast aside all neat practicalities in favor of the cultivation of individuality and the arts of life. In two generations they were never known "to be guilty of a stroke of business." However, there was (then as now) a distinct downside to being an independently wealthy religious eccentric in a culture dominated by the Protestant work ethic. As difficult as it may be for most to be overly sympathetic on this score, it could be difficult to adjust a life of moneyed leisure to the demands of a society in which as yet "business alone was respectable." The James children often came home in a state of acute embarrassment because of their inability to appease their inquiring schoolmates with a "presentable account" of their father. Their constant appeal to him was: "What shall we tell them you are?" – an appeal to which he patiently replied: "Say I'm a philosopher, say I'm a seeker of truth, say I'm a lover of my kind, say I'm an author of books if you like; or, best of all, say I'm a student." There was, in addition, the sad and mystifying example of a whole set of uncles and male cousins who appeared to find no other use for inherited ease than to go to the bad with it.
M. Corona Sharp, in The Confidante in Henry James: Evolution & Moral Value of a Fictive Character, touches briefly upon Mrs. Prest as an example of a specific Jamesian archetype: the woman who serves as a platonic accomplice/informant. Sharp (a Catholic nun, incidentally) paints a James family portrait from a somewhat different perspective than Zabel's, creating a stereographically denser view: "... in his own family [Henry James, Junior] was used to a matriarchal system. "Father and his ideas" were a constant source of amusement, whereas the mother was the heart of family unity. ... The power-seeking mothers of James's fiction are the unconscious re-creations of his mother's concealed force: for consciously James could only idealize her." Post-Freudian critics might find that Sharp's book suffers from a certain overfastidiousness, which busys itself with technical catalogues and seems vulnerable to charges of dilettantism, inasmuch as it stops well short of the gamier implications of the phenomenon that might be termed "Henry James and the Older Woman." The word Oedipus never appears, to say nothing of more clinical terms. (To be altogether frank, eleven years in Catholic schools have engendered a somewhat chary view of literary criticism by nuns on the part of the present writer!).
Like Henry Senior, who lost a leg at the age of thirteen, Henry Junior had a deep and abiding sense of his physical inadequacy. An infamous "obscure hurt" (probably a severe hernia) incurred while serving as a volunteer fireman exempted him from military service during Civil War, in which two other brothers served, one sustaining significant injuries. It is speculated that James, who probably died a virgin, may have avoided marriage because of this condition. Henry the Younger was precluded from acquitting his patriotism and his manhood to himself, and biographers feel that this explains much about James's later life, particularly his suicidal volunteerism during World War I and his change of citizenship.
Edel submits that a great part of the "natural history" of the American Woman is inscribed into the tales, particularly those of James's "middle period." James studied her with a mixture of affection, awe, and profound mistrust. Whether he is describing the flattened-out mother of "Daisy Miller," the irrelevant parents of the self-made Pandora Day, or the powerful "managerial" woman, he is concerned with the American Male's tendency to idealize womanhood, glorify children, and then abdicate all human and social responsibility to the wives. Edel quotes James: "'An American woman who respects herself,' said Mrs. Westgate, turning to Beaumont with her bright expository air, 'must buy something every day of her life. If she cannot do it for herself, she must send out some member of the family for the purpose.'" In this simple economy, feels Edel, the husband, whose job in American life is simply to provide the dollars, is made aware that his dollars are put to constant use.
James understood the power-driven matron – American or British – to the very tips of her manicured fingers. Most James critics refer to this domineeringly recurrent figure simply as "La Mere." Edel adduces another, seldom reprinted story about a widow, Mrs. Temperly, who exudes such effortless control of her family, servants, and Paris salon that James's protagonist explains it to himself by remarking that "she was a man as well as a woman--the masculine element was included in her nature. He was sure she bought her horses without being cheated, and very few men could do that." In a separate critical essay (focusing upon James's novel The American), Edel writes of a family atmosphere of maternal coldness and paternal softness that seemed almost indifference; eventually Edel constellates a Jamesian archetype of the "crippled/absent father," supplemented by the mother who remains the unassailable arbiter and dispenser of the love-object, be it a woman, social status, savoir-faire, or in the present case, literary artifacts.
There is a considerable body of modern literature dealing with the ambiguity of the artist in his social and moral character, and in a sense this is the implicit theme of "The Aspern Papers." The position of the lodger – "the publishing scoundrel"– is a position at only one remove from that of the artist-type. The lodger has all of the artist's presumption and ruthless curiosity; like the artist, he cannot conceivably justify his behavior except on the somewhat ambiguous ground of the artist's "right" to make public that which is intrinsically private. Thus, the intrigue of "TAP" might be seen as symbolic of the perpetual danger and intrigue of art, whose practitioners have always risked moral annihilation in "publishing" those secrets which, because of fear, pride, delicacy, or shame, most individuals are resolved to keep to themselves.
About the reviewer: Victor Verney grew up in Buffalo, NY, where he developed an early and abiding love for music, literature and baseball. After spending a four-year hitch in the U.S. Navy indulging his inner Herman Melville, he went on to a stint as a semi-pro jazz pianist indulging his inner Chick Corea. Eventually, he earned graduate degree in American literature at the State University of NY-Buffalo; his doctoral dissertation was directed by the late Leslie Fiedler, renowned literary critic and author of the widely acclaimed "Love and Death in the American Novel." Formerly a college literature professor, Victor has also been a journalist, serving as an editor for weekly and daily newspapers in Iowa. Now a full-time freelance writer living in the Des Moines area, his primary hobbies continue to be jazz and baseball (along with mowing the lawn). More background and writing samples from a variety of contexts may be found at his Web site: http://verney.us/
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