July 23, 2021

Best European Novels (5): France (Part 1)

France is the largest country in the EU by area (552,000 square kilometers) and the second largest by population (67 million). France enjoys a centuries-long status as a global center of art, science, and philosophy.

Some other facts:
- France is the world’s most popular tourist destination and the Louvre is the most visited museum in the world
-  It hosts the world's fifth-largest number of UNESCO World Heritage Sites
- Europe’s highest mountain is Mont Blanc in the French Alps
- Paris Gare du Nord is Europe’s busiest railway station
- The French rail network is the second largest in Europe, and the ninth biggest in the world

And about our subject: France has more Nobel Prize winners in Literature than any other country. With 15 French individuals winning the prestigious award since 1901, it’s fair to say that France has produced some of the world’s most influential writers and thinkers. France stands consistently at the summit of world literature. Novelists like Balzac and Zola have written large series of novels which mirror society in a particular period; Flaubert has single-handedly molded the modern novel; Voltaire, Diderot, Proust, Camus and Sartre have blended their art with philosophy; and Breton, Queneau, Robbe-Grillet and Perec have been at the forefront of Modernism.

Their historical achievements leave the French convinced that their mission is to civilize Europe and the world. The French feel sadness at the decline of French compared to English - French was once the internationally accepted language of diplomacy and was spoken widely on four continents (until 1362, even the English aristocracy spoke it!). American-English seems anti-intellectual to the French.

France is EU-oriented, but also wishes to keep considerable independence. It is anxious to retain its place on the world-stage. There is a strong defense of French and European culture. Like the Japanese, the French believe they are unique.


Here are the best French novels until WWI:

1. François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532-1564)
Like in the case of Kafka, there is a word coined after the name of Rabelais: "Rabelaisian," which means as much as "marked by gross robust humor, extravagance of caricature, or bold naturalism." France is the country of exquisite dinners and high-flown love, but Rabelais turns these on their head. The two giants, father and son, of his novel cram and fornicate their way through the world. The novels stinks an hour in the wind, filled as it is with crudity, scatological humor, and vulgar insults. It is a celebration of what Bakhtin has called "the carnival of the grotesque." For example, as soon as the giant Gargantua is born from his mother's left ear, he calls for beer; later, 17,913 cows are required for the provision of his daily milk. His first garment includes a codpiece "the length of a yard," to the delight of his three nurses. When he is sent to Paris for his education, he is so annoyed by the crowds that he drowns thousands of them in a flood of piss (the survivors laugh so much, the city is renamed "Par Ris"). Also the language is extravagant, making it one of the most difficult books written in French literature: wordplay and risqué humor abound, and Rabelais invents hundreds of new words. That calls for a good modern translation - the older versions available for free at Gutenberg etc. simply will not do. I recommend the Penguin Classics translation by M.A. Screech. [For readers of Dutch: there is an excellent Dutch translation available for free at the DBNL (Digital Library of Dutch Letters)].

2. The Princess of Cleves, by Madame de Lafayette (1678)
This enigmatic novel, set in the court society of the Ancien Regime, is a warning against love. We follow a young woman from her entry into court - she has received a strict moral education from her mother and finds the gossipy and jealous court society difficult to fathom. At a very young age she is forced to accept a husband she doesn't love. Soon after that, she falls in love with another man, Nemours. When she confesses this to her husband, he dies of the shock. But although she is free now, she refuses to marry Nemours. Love, on both sides, has an obsessive quality, and this cannot be allowed by the princes as it will destroy them both. In the end she makes the controversial decision to reject both lover and society and enter a convent. The behavior of the princess is difficult to explain and has given rise to a long list of disagreements among readers. For example, is Madame de Cleves virtuous, frigid, or egotistical? Is her confession of love for another man to her husband an act of sincere courage, or a desire to wound? Is her husband an unfortunate innocent or a paranoid egoist? Is Nemours a devoted lover trying to win a coy mistress or a cynical playboy? Try to find out for yourself by reading this ambiguous novel.
[Translated by Robin Buss (Penguin Classics) and Terence Cave (Oxford's World Classics)]

3. Manon Lescaut, by Abbé Prévost (1731)
Manon Lescaut is a tale of absolutely uncontrollable passion for a bewitchingly beautiful young woman who is 100% immoral. She is an empty-headed minx, who doesn’t love anyone and who will do anything to avoid poverty. When he is gripped by Manon's sensual charms, after spotting her as a voluptuous siren chained in a gang of female inmates, Des Grieux is only seventeen, a mere boy, Manon is even younger than that, but she has already had a good measure of sexual experience as we are told. Des Grieux is an aristocrat, but despite his breeding and good taste he is unable to resist his sexual passion. The love affair is an unmitigated disaster for the family of Des Grieux: he elopes with the girl, abandoning his family, his career and his principles. Manon develops into a demanding sybarite and liar, and pulls him down into a life of crime and deceit, even taking a rich older lover to pay the bills of the young couple. The events which follow lead eventually to imprisonment, murder, and the flight of the couple to the New World. Des Grieux’s passion for Manon never falters, as a fatal addiction, a sign of his nobility of character. Manon, from her side, can neither resist him nor return his love. She remains an elusive figure, addicted to pleasure, satisfied at her conquest of a man of rank, but just as easily leaving him again and again when circumstances make that necessary. The taut story is a prime example of fast moving narration, pulling the reader from calamity to escape to new calamity, and then on to the final tragedy. The novel ends with a melodramatic burial scene: Des Grieux breaks his sword and digs Manon's grave in the sand; he takes off his clothes to enshroud her body and then lies sprawling naked on the grave in abject torment.
[Translated by Leonard Tancock (Penguin Classics) and Angela Scholar (Oxford's World Classics)]

4. Candide, by Voltaire (1759)
A picaresque novella written to refute the tenets of the German philosopher Leibniz, who claimed that mankind lives in "the best of all possible worlds (created by God)." Voltaire was an agnostic who loathed the abuse of power and hypocrisy of the Church and he didn't agree at all that "everything was (already) for the best." So in his story he piles misfortune on misfortune and disaster on disaster to show how terrible the world really can be. Candide is a young man like a blank leaf, very naive, in love with Cunegonde - when they are separated, he travels around the world searching for her. During his perambulations, he gradually learns about life and becomes more mature. The point of view of Leibniz is represented by Candide's teacher, the philosopher Pangloss ("easy tongue"), who comes to grief, first by catching syphilis, later by being hanged. Voltaire graphically shows us the cruelty and savagery of humans who steal, rape, murder, torture, enslave, and cheat. He also includes historical happenings such as the Seven Years' War and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake (and tsunami). Candide moves at neck-breaking speed, condensing whole novels into its chapters. It is full of sharp wit and provides an insightful portrayal of the human condition. In the end, Candide marries Cunegonde and they live on a farm. There they "cultivate their garden," which is the best we can do, as it leaves no time for idle speculation and as it serves the practical purpose of really making things gradually somewhat better.
[Translated by Theo Cuffe (Penguin Classics) and Roger Pearson (Oxford's World Classics)]

5. Dangerous Liaisons, by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1782)
Another novel about amoral characters, a story about sex, deceit and manipulation in the upper ranks of society. Les Liaisons Dangereuses was written only seven years before the Revolution of 1789, when high heads would start rolling. The bawdy excesses of the leisure class were infamous (this was also the age of the Marquis de Sade), and Les Liaisons Dangereuses only added oil to the fire. The main characters are the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, former lovers and now partners in crime. Valmont is a notorious rake, a man who seduces women for sport. The Marquise is a wealthy aristocratic widow who has maintained an air of social respectability. But she is all the more dangerous. In their jaded existence, both derive no pleasure from sex anymore, but instead need the headier kick of destroying the lives of other people. Valmont is set on seducing the young, virtuous and married Madame de Tourvel, a difficult feat he sees as the ultimate triumph. Meanwhile, the Marquise wants revenge on a man who left her, M. de Gercourt, so she pushes Valmont to seduce a young woman, the fifteen year old Cecile, who is to marry De Gercourt in a few month's time – her enemy will be covered in shame when after the marriage it is made public that he has been preemptively cuckolded. Valmont’s reward will be the rekindling of his former love affair with the Marquise. Valmont and the Marquise de Merteuil are absolutely ruthless, they lie effortlessly in letters to their victims, then gleefully relate their successes in epistles to each other. But things do not entirely go as planned... Valmont and the Marquise will finally stand as enemies opposite each other. This scandalous web of intrigue, infidelity, corruption and lust for power is expertly told in the form of letters between the various characters, letters which are just as full of lies and tricks as the characters themselves.
[Read the translation by Helen Constatine in Penguin Classics or by Douglas Parmee in Oxford World Classics. See my post on films based on classical novels for a discussion of film adaptations.]

6. Jacques the Fatalist and his Master, by Denis Diderot (written 1765-80, published 1795)
Diderot was the driving force behind the Enlightenment and the huge Encyclopedie, but he also wrote several works of fiction - often these could only be published posthumously due to censorship. Although educated as a Jesuit, he later became a deist and finally atheist. In this novel, Diderot explores the problems of destiny and free will. The "fatalism" of the title should not mislead. It has nothing to do with fate or Destiny, or with the Wheel of Fortune or Providence. Diderot rather points at biological and psychological fatalism, that is, how much we are conditioned by our mental make-up and by our DNA, to say it in modern terms - and how should a rational man live with the consequences. The other aspect of the novel is that it is strongly self-referential, in the way of Tristam Shandy and Don Quixote (from which it also borrows the "master and servant on a trip" convention). Jacques has to tell his master about his love life, but due to constant interruptions, he doesn't get anywhere. The novel is more a disjointed conversation between two thinly drawn protagonists, into which Diderot inserts chance meetings with other characters who only appear one time, never to return. It is very modern in an experimental way. In his essay The Art of the Novel Milan Kundera argues that Jacques le Fataliste is one of the masterpieces of the form, and I fully agree. This novel deserves to be better known.
[Translated by Martin Hall (Penguin Classics) and David Coward (Oxford's World Classics)]

7. Adolphe, by Benjamin Constant (1816)
Adolphe by tells the story of an introverted young man, harboring a melancholy outlook on life. At 22, he has just completed his studies in Gottingen and now is hanging around in D** before returning to sterner duties at home. Inspired by a friend, he relieves his boredom by courting an older woman, Ellénore, the beautiful Polish mistress of the Comte de P**. First she refuses him, then she acquiesces and after that her ardor grows larger than his. She leaves the Comte and her two children for the much younger Adolphe. But now Adolphe becomes worried: he realizes he is sacrificing his future. Ellénore, however, loves him more than ever. Their all-consuming relationship drives a wedge between them and society. Will he be able to break loose from her? This novella does away with all descriptions and focuses solely on detailed accounts of states of mind. Adolphe and Ellénore are all the time analyzing and rationalizing their thoughts and feelings, something which seems very French to me, in an interesting way. By doing so, Adolphe has become the first psychological novel ever written.
[Translated by Leonard Tancock (Penguin Classics) and Margaret Mauldon (Oxford's World Classics)]

8. Le rouge et le noir, by Stendhal (1830)
The Bildungsroman of Julien Sorel, an intelligent and ambitious young man, inspired by Napoleon's example, who comes from a poor family and fails to understand much about the ways of the world he sets out to conquer. As he harbors many romantic illusions, he inevitable becomes a pawn in the machinations of the ruthless and influential people around him. His adventures are a satire of early 19th-century French society, a monarchic society of fixed social classes, accusing the aristocracy and Catholic clergy as hypocritical and materialist. Part One of the novel describes how this carpenter's son, who gets a good education from the local priest, becomes the tutor of the children of Monsieur de Rênal, the mayor of his village. He starts a love affair with Monsieur de Rênal’s wife, which ends when it is revealed to the village by her chambermaid, Elisa, who is also in love with Julien. He is ordered to enter a seminary in Besançon, which he finds intellectually stifling and pervaded with social cliques. In Part Two, at the recommendation of the head of the seminary, Julien becomes private secretary to the diplomat Marquis de la Mole, a Catholic legitimist. He now gets romantically involved with the Marquis’s bored daughter, Mathilde, who is torn between her attraction to Julien, for his admirable personal and intellectual qualities, and her social repugnance at becoming sexually intimate with a lower-class man. When after many ups and downs, the romantic liaison is on the verge of success, Madame de Rênal breaks it up by accusing Julien of being a social climber who only uses women. Out of revenge, Julien shoots her (although not fatally), but he is imprisoned and sentenced to death. In prison, Madame de Rênal visits him and their love is rekindled, but it is too late...
[There is a good free translation available at ebooks@Adelaide by Scott-Moncrieff (who is also famous for his Proust translations)]

9. Pere Goriot, by Honore de Balzac (1835)
Le Père Goriot ("Old Goriot" or "Father Goriot") is a fierce criticism of the money-and-greed dominated society that France had become in the 19th century. The hero is a social climber, the student Rastignac. The novel is set in the Paris of 1819, in the Maison Vauquer, a poor boarding house in Paris' rue Neuve-Sainte-Geneviève. Eugène de Rastignac lives there together with several other characters, of whom the most important are the elderly Goriot, a retired businessman who dotes on his two daughters who have married status and money and don't want to see him anymore; and Vautrin, a mysterious criminal in hiding. The novel is filled with descriptions of corruption and greed. Balzac quotes the price for everything, from the room rents on different floors of the boarding house to the cost of a meal or a horse-drawn carriage. Money rules the world after the success of capitalism through the Industrial Revolution, and has also infiltrated aristocratic society. Rather than studying his law books, Rastignac tries a shortcut to wealth by having himself introduced into high society by his cousin, Madame de Beauséant. There he meets Goriot's daughters, Anastasie (married to rank, a count) and Delphine (married to money, a banker) and falls in love with the second one. Vautrin, at the same time, pushes him to court a young woman in the boarding house, Victorine, whose family fortune is blocked only by her brother - of course, he offers to clear the way for Rastignac. The student balks at the idea of murder, but listens attentively to the lessons about the harsh realities of modern society that Vautrin teaches him. Le Père Goriot is a "bildungsroman:" the initially naive Rastignac is tutored by Vautrin, Madame de Beauséant and others in the truth of society and the ruthless strategies required for success. First repulsed by these unpleasant realities, Rastignac eventually embraces them.
[A.J. Krailsheimer, Oxford World's Classics]

10. Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1856)
Madame Bovary probably is the most beautifully written novel ever. Gustave Flaubert weighed his words on a gold scale, as if writing poetry and not prose. He sought the best words for each situation, wanting them to be unchangeable, and made so many revisions that he only advanced one or two pages a week. That style is the opposite of romantic - it is clinically realistic. Flaubert offers a painstaking description of bourgeois life in mid-19th c. France and along the way he transforms his sordid materials about adultery and suicide into something poetic. The story is simple. Charles Bovary is a plodding, dull country doctor, practicing medicine in the environs of Rouen in Normandy. He marries a farmer's daughter, the beautiful and very young Emma, who has been brought up in a convent and has received all her knowledge of the world from romantic tales. But Charles is no prince on a white horse but a simple and practical man and after the birth of a little daughter, out of necessity Emma settles down to a life of boredom. Flaubert makes us acutely feel the meaninglessness and emptiness of her existence. Madame Bovary is in fact the greatest study in alienation and boredom in world literature. It is often thought of as an immoral novel about adultery like Lady Chatterley's Lover, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The bourgeois types that surround Emma Bovary in the village are all selfish and self-serving. Flaubert demonstrates how hypocritical moral standards are, concocted to support the status quo. The merchant and moneylender Lheureux purposefully lends Emma so much money and allows her to buy so many luxury goods on credit, that in the end he can claim Dr. Bovary's assets. This is what drives Emma to suicide, not the end of her affair with Leon. Finally, she has nobody she can rely on, everyone only tries to take advantage of her. She dies a terrible, lonely death, described in clinical detail by Flaubert who was the son of a medical doctor. Emma is not an immoral woman - what her case demonstrates is that the culture around her itself has no values.
[Translated by Lydia Davis, Penguin Random House (there is another Penguin translation, which I did not like, so be sure to get the right one); another translation I liked is the free one at Gutenberg by Eleanor Marx-Aveling (the daughter of Karl Marx)]

11. Bel Ami, by Guy de Maupassant (1885)
Although he is more commonly known as a writer of short stories, Maupassant’s satire about the life of a Parisian journalist in late-nineteenth century France is a fun novel about cold-blooded social climbing, with a generous admixture of sex and seduction as ladders to success. "Bel Ami" ("Beautiful Boy") is the nickname of Georges Duroy, a penniless soldier just returned from French Algeria who comes to Paris to make his fortune in journalism. He soon learns an important lesson, that the most important part of the Parisian population are the women, not the men. Georges starts on the lowest sport of the ladder, but quickly climbs up the social scale via the various women who fall for his charms, finally ending with the daughter of the super-rich owner of the newspaper he works for as journalist. As the husband of millionaire's daughter Suzanne the world of politics will lie open for him, perhaps he will even become a minister... Georges has cunningly built his success on the hypocrisy, decadence and corruption of society, but his rise to power has above all been made possible by the powerful and wealthy women around him. Readers who would like to see Georges punished for his unscrupulousness might be dissatisfied, but Maupassant is too much of a realist to fall into such a trap. The world is cruel, and that is what he wanted to show us - wealth and glory are often for the unworthy.
[Margaret Mauldon, Oxford World's Classics; keep away from the free translations on Gutenberg etc, as these are unreliable (shortened and inaccurate)]

12. À rebours (Against Nature aka Against the Grain) by Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884)
The acknowledged masterpiece of the international decadent movement, a trend anticipated in the work of Baudelaire, Verlaine and Flaubert's Salammbo, after which the greatest decadent writers Huysmans, Wilde and d'Annunzio appeared. À rebours broke free from Naturalism and already contains many themes that became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. The decadent period in European literature coincided with the Belle Epoque (1880-1914), ironically the period of the greatest flowering of bourgeois culture. There is little story in the novel. We get a catalog of the tastes and inner life of Jean des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero who loathes 19th-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. The text describes in detail the luxurious decor in which he sequesters himself, and lists all his aesthetic enthusiasms. But Des Esseintes also suffers from a personality disorder, he is torn between intense yearnings for relatedness and for withdrawal - he is ultimately a sick hero. He has a misogynistic view of women (considering them all as a sort of "Salomes") and as an act of defiance against his parents and family he refuses to have children. His "intimate shelter" is in fact an act of regression - but that is in itself also a form of decadence. À rebours is the ultimate example of "decadent" literature.
[Margaret Mauldon, Oxford World's Classics]

13. L'œuvre (The Masterwork aka His Masterpiece; lit. "The Work") by Émile Zola (1886)
L'œuvre is the fourteenth novel in the Rougon-Macquart series by Émile Zola. It is the story of a contemporary painter, Claude Lantier, and his struggle to paint a great work that will reflect his talent and genius. It is also an accurate portrayal of the Parisian art world in the mid-nineteenth century, between 1855 and 1870. Claude Lantier is a revolutionary artist whose work is misunderstood by an art-going public hidebound by traditional subjects, techniques and representations. But the biggest problem is in himself: he is unable to finish his great painting, he just keeps changing it and adding to it, often incongruous elements, and then completely repainting it. In the end, he becomes so anguished and frustrated that he is driven to suicide. So it is the story of a groundbreaking artist unable to live up to his potential, a theme that fits in the Rougon-Macquart series, which shows how heredity works on a family, and how several members of that family show obsessive compulsive behavior and a predisposition to self-destruction. Many critics have seen in Claude Lantier a portrait of the Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne, who was a friend of Zola (until he read the present novel), but that is a mistake. Zola used some youthful memories from Aix-en-Provence he shared with Cézanne, but the character of Lantier is most of all a compound based on Claude Monet and Édouard Manet (plus lots of imagination). For example, Claude Lantier's first painting in the book is based on Manet's Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, and we also get a long and interesting description of the Salon des Refusés from 1863. Zola doesn't call Lantier's style "Impressionism," but "Open Air school" as Monet advocated painting not in the studio, but indeed in the open air, etc. What makes this novel so interesting is not only the fictional struggle of one artist, but above all the depiction of the bohemian art world of 19th-century Paris. Besides painting, Zola also looks at contemporary sculpture, literature (Zola gives us something like a self-portrait in the character of the novelist Pierre Sandoz), architecture, music and journalism, as well as the commodification of art in the unscrupulous behavior of art dealers. In short, a vast panorama of the French art world, that in my view is superior to more popular novels by Zola such as Germinal and L'assommoir, not to speak of Thérèse Raquin.
[Thomas Walton, Oxford World's Classics; as 19th c. translations of Zola were heavily censored, pick a modern translation and not one of the free ones on Gutenberg etc.]

14. The Great Meaulnes, by Alain-Fournier (1913)
Le Grand Meaulnes, of which the title literally means "The Great Meaulnes", is the only work written by the French author Alain-Fournier (Henri Alban Fournier) before he was killed at age 27 in one of the early battles of WWI. It is a true masterpiece of nostalgia. The novel is narrated by François Seurel, son of a schoolmaster in a village in the Sologne, a region of pools and marshes in north-central France. François (age 15) is captivated by the charismatic new schoolboy Augustin Meaulnes (17 years old), who is known as “the great Meaulnes" not only for his large stature, but also the daring feats he pulls off. On a solitary excursion through the countryside, Meaulnes looses his way and stumbles upon a mysterious country estate where a strange wedding celebration is underway. There Meaulnes also chances to meet a young woman of otherworldly beauty, Yvonne de Galais, for whom he conceives a transcendent love. But abruptly, the party breaks up and Meaulnes has to return to the village, where he takes François in his confidence. To his dismay, Meaulnes discovers that he cannot retrace the route to the country estate, which has become "lost," an unobtainable romantic ideal, and a symbol of perfect happiness on the borderline of childhood and adulthood. He keeps hopelessly trying with the help of François, and it is the narrator who a few years later succeeds in locating the castle after Meaulnes has already left the village. Meaulnes is called back, he revisits the estate and later even marries Yvonne - but the perfect happiness he believed to find has evaporated due to the experiences he himself has had in the meantime. The novel is therefore permeated by a feeling of irrevocable loss: the loss of the pure dreams of charmed youth to cruel experience, the loss of idealized love to the sordid reality of the flesh, and the realization of the evanescence of the world around us - and even our memories of that world.
[Robin Buss, Penguin Classics]



July 22, 2021

Hyakunin Isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each): Poem 48 (Minamoto no Shigeyuki)

Hyakunin Isshu, Poem 48

Translation and comments by Ad Blankestijn
(version September 2022)


waves dashed on the rocks
by the fierce wind -
I alone am the one
who breaks
when longing for her!

kaze o itami
iwa utsu nami no
onore nomi
kudakete mono o
omou koro kana

風をいたみ
岩うつ波の
おのれのみ
くだけて物を
おもふ頃かな

Minamoto no Shigeyuki 源重之 (d. 1001)


 


The poem compares a heartless woman to a rock that remains unmoved when the wind dashes a wave (the poet) against it. The first two lines of the poem are a preface (jokotoba) containing a scene from nature which is set-off against the poet's feelings.

According to a note, this poem was part of a "100 poem sequence" (hyakushu) "written during the time when Emperor Reizei was still crown prince" (that was from 950 to 967). Shigeyuki's "100 poem sequence" is one of the earliest examples of a genre that became very popular in the late Heian period (12th c.). 

Notes

  • kaze wo itami: literally "because the wind is fierce" (...wo...mi = ...ga...na node)
  • iwa: the poet's lover is compared to an unfeeling rock
  • kudakete: both a pivot word and a pun, for the waves crashing on the rocks and the poet's shattered feelings.
  • kana: indicates an exclamation



[Shigeyuki by Kano Yasunobu]


The poet

About Minamoto no Shigeyuki we only know that year of his death, 1001. He worked in the provincial bureaucracy. A great-grandson of Emperor Seiwa, he was an associate of Kanemori (Poem 40) and Sanekata (Poem 51). His personal poetry collection survives and he has 67 poems in imperial anthologies.


References: Pictures of the Heart, The Hyakunin Isshu in Word and Image by Joshua S. Mostow (University of Hawai'i Press, 1996); One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each, by Peter MacMIllan (Penguin Classics); Traditional Japanese Poetry, An Anthology, by Steven D. Carter (Stanford University Press, 1991); Hyakunin Isshu by Inoue Muneo, etc. (Shinchosha, 1990); Genshoku Hyakunin Isshu by Suzuki Hideo, etc. (Buneido, 1997); Chishiki Zero kara no Hyakunin Isshu, by Ariyoshi Tamotsu (Gentosha); Hyakunin Isshu Kaibo Zukan, by Tani Tomoko (X-Knowledge);  Ogura Hyakunin Isshu at Japanese Text Initiative (University of Virginia Library Etext Center); Hyakunin Isshu wo aruku by Shimaoka Shin (Kofusha Shuppan); Hyakunin Isshu, Ocho waka kara chusei waka e by Inoue Muneo (Chikuma Shoin, 2004); Basho's Haiku (2 vols) by Toshiharu Oseko (Maruzen, 1990); The Ise Stories by Joshua S. Mostow and Royall Tyler (University of Hawai'i Press, 2010); Kokin Wakashu, The First Imperial Anthology of Japanese Poetry by Helen Craig McCullough (Stanford University Press, 1985); Kokinshu, A Collection of Poems Ancient and Modern by Laurel Rasplica Rodd and Mary Catherine Henkenius (University of Tokyo Press, 1984); Kokin Wakashu (Shogakkan, 1994); Shinkokin Wakashu (Shogakkan, 1995); Taketori Monogatari-Ise Monogatari-Yamato Monogatari-Heichu Monogatari (Shogakkan, 1994).


Photo of waves and rocks my own work (taken at Enoshima); the portrait of Kano Yasunobu is from Wikimedia Commons.


Hyakunin Isshu Index

July 21, 2021

The Best Stories of Anton Chekhov (5): The Late Stories (1896-1904)

Chekhov's last years stand in the shadow of his health problems. In March 1897, he suffered a major hemorrhage of the lungs after which tuberculosis was diagnosed.

To live at least part of the time in a healthier climate, in 1898 Chekhov bought a plot of land on the outskirts of Yalta and built a villa ("The White Dacha"), into which he moved with his mother and sister the following year.

In this period Chekhov was busy writing his great plays. In 1898, "The Seagull" was produced successfully by the Moscow Art Theater, and in 1899 "Uncle Vanya" would follow.

In 1900 Anton Chekhov became the first writer elected to membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In 1901 Chekhov's play "Three Sisters" was produced to poor reviews. But thanks to his affiliation with the theater, in 1898, Chekhov ("Russia's most elusive literary bachelor") had met the actress Olga Knipper. They married quietly in 1901 (Chekhov hated big weddings), but Olga Knipper acted in Moscow during the season while Chekhov stayed in Yalta to improve his health. The literary legacy of this long-distance marriage is a correspondence that preserves important theater history, such as Chekhov's advice to Olga about performing in his plays.

In the last years of his life, Chekhov wrote some of his best short stories, such as the trilogy "The Man in the Case," "Gooseberries" and "About Love." Others are "The Schoolmistress," "The Darling," "The New Bishop" and "In the Hollow." Yalta also gave him the special inspiration to write "The Lady With the Dog," which depicts a casual liaison between a cynical married man and an unhappy married woman who meet while holidaying in Yalta, a fling which then grows into a passionate love affair, against the expectation of both participants.

1904, "The Cherry Orchard," Chekhov's last play, was produced.

Chekhov's tuberculosis worsened in 1904, and on his way to warmer climes, he died in a hotel in Badenweiler (a spa town in the Black Forest in Germany). Olga was with him when he died. His body was returned to Moscow for the funeral.





"An Artist’s Story"
[The House with the Mezzanine] [1896] (The Darling and other stories)
Chekhov compares two different young people: an indolent landscape painter and an idealistic woman who has dedicated her life to educating the peasantry. The painter is staying with his friend Belokurov, a landowner. The two men visit the Volchaninovs, a mother who has been widowed and two daughters, the beautiful and cold Lydia, and the young and sensitive Genia. Lydia is a teacher and social activist. The narrator likes the family atmosphere and starts making daily visits, although he doesn't hit it off with Lydia, with whom he has frequent collisions about her political and social views. Lydia wants to open a school and dispense medicine to the peasants, she wants to improve their lot by positive action. The narrator believes this will only enslave them more. The painter falls in love with the 17-year old Genia, and one evening he kisses her at the gate when leaving. The next day when he comes back, both Genia and her mother have disappeared. Lydia has sent them away after hearing about the furtive kiss. She looks down upon the painter for his idleness and wrong views and doesn't want her sister (whom she also may think too young) to have a serious relation with him. The two never meet again.

"My Life"
[1896] (The Chorus Girl and other stories)
The narrator Misail Poloznev lives in a provincial town (Chekhov's own hometown of Taganrog, a port town in southern Russia on the Sea of Azov) with his father, an architect, and his sister, Cleopatra. He has no liking for the standard office-type employment for the middle or upper classes, but instead wants to earn his bread with manual labor – his own class is morally corrupt, he thinks. His father and others in his environment think that manual labor is demeaning, so when Misail starts working for a house painter, his father disowns him. The local governor also warns him about his immoral behavior. Through his friend, Dr Blagovo, who thinks that Russia is still a savage country (he talks a lot about improving the peasant's lot, but in fact never acts), he meets Masha Dolzhikov, the daughter of an engineer, whose ideal it is to work on the land and help the peasants. She thinks that Misail embodies her ideals and they marry, moving to the countryside and trying to farm. But the peasants cheat them and Masha's project of setting up a school is also sabotaged. Finally she tires of the hard life and gives up, asking Misail for a divorce. In the meantime, the sister, Cleopatra, has become close to Dr Blagovo and even is pregnant with his child. But Dr Blagovo refuses to marry her and leaves the town. The outcast brother and sister now start living together, until Cleopatra dies of tuberculosis after having the baby. Misail takes on the care of the child and continues his career as a workman. His commitment to a simple life is authentic.

"Peasants"
[1897] (The Witch and other stories)
Nikolay Tchikildyeev, formerly a valet in Moscow, falls incurably ill and returns with wife Olga and daughter Sasha to his ancestral village, as life in the city is too expensive for a sick man without a job. They start living in the hut of his parents, where they also find brother Kirill and wife Maria (and many, many children). Kirill is a drunkard who regularly beats his wife – she accepts this mistreatment passively. Life in the countryside is terrible: dirty, unhealthy, poor, full of degradation, one constant quarrel with others. There is no morality and no religion. When the hut of a neighbor burns, none of the other farmers helps to put out the fire. After the death of her husband, Olga therefore returns to the city with her daughter, leaving poor Maria behind for more beatings. A most unpleasant story, true to its naturalistic origin.

"The Petchenyeg"
["The Savage") [1897]
(The Horse-stealers and other stories)
Evokes the Cossacks in all the barbarity for which they were notorious. Ivan Zhmuhin, a retired Cossack officer, returns by train from the city to his farmhouse. In the train, he meets a lawyer whom he offers a lodging for the night. Both men arrive at his farmhouse in the middle of the endless steppe: without trees or water and two kids running wild. After a frugal dinner, Ivan's wife asks advice from the lawyer about her two sons (the eldest is 19), who are neither able to read nor write. Their father has kept them in ignorance and as nobody ever visits, she doesn't know whom to ask. Ivan chases her away, interrupting the conversation, and starts speaking himself about the time he was a Cossack, complaining about the stupidity of his wife, of his sons, and of vegetarians (the lawyer happens to be a vegetarian: if people don't eat pigs anymore, pigs will destroy everything, is the silly counter-argument). The lawyer can't stand it anymore and leaves early at dawn.

"At Home"
[1897] (The Duel and other stories)
Twenty-three-year-old Vera Kardin returns to the home of her childhood that she left ten years ago. Her parents are deceased. Only her grandfather and aunt live on the estate which is now hers. After the first happy moments of the family reunion, she worries about her future in this god-forsaken place. Her aunt wants her to marry Doctor Neshtchapov, but Vera finds no charm in him. But she lets herself be won over by resignation and idleness, and finally agrees to marry the doctor to make herself useful. A month later, she is a housewife at the doctor's office.

"The Schoolmistress"
[In the Cart] [1897] (The Schoolmistress and other stories)
Marya Vassilyevna returns from town in old Semyon's cart. She had gone to get her teacher's salary and do some shopping. She has been making the same trip for thirteen years, and is thinking about her boring life: the death of her parents in Moscow, her difficulties with the administrative authority of the school, her loneliness (she is not married). She is overtaken by the carriage of Hanov, a rich widower, in his forties. She likes him, although he is an alcoholic. At one point, while crossing the river, the cart all but overturns, and she gets knee-deep in icy water. At another she stops for tea in a local tavern full of drunken lout, some of them outright abusive. At a railway barrier, watching the train passing by, she sees in it a woman who looks very much like her late mother. She then has a vision of Hanov again driving up and inviting her to his cart in a dismissive way. Then she wakes up and she is again alone.

"The Man in the Case"
[The Man in the Shell] [1898] (The Wife and other stories)
In 1898, Chekhov wrote a trilogy of stories each of which is told by a narrator to characters who figure as narrators in the other two stories. All three stories (in fact "stories in stories") focus on the failure to grasp the essential joys of life by not taking advantage of opportunities that come only once in  a lifetime, for fear of making a mistake. In the first story, "The Man in the Case," the schoolteacher Burkin describes a fellow teacher who shuts himself off from life. Byelikov, a teacher of classical Greek, was like “a man in a case,” always keeping himself and his things wrapped up so as not to come into contact with the outside world. He was also a strict disciplinarian, intent on always doing things the proper way. At one point, Byelikov fell in love with Varinka, the sister of Kovalenko, a new teacher at the school. But when he saw Varinka and her brother bicycling in the park, he complained about this scandalous behavior (at that time, cycling was considered as immodest for women). Kovalenko pushed him down the steps, after which Byelikov became so depressed that he died – and so truly became a man in a case (his coffin).

"Gooseberries"
[1898] (The House with the Mezzanine and other stories)
The vet Ivan Ivanovitch tells the story of his brother Nikolay who worked as a government functionary and always dreamed of saving enough money to buy his own country house with a garden and gooseberry bushes. He skimped and saved and finally, after his wife's death, bought an estate. When his brother visits many years later, he has become a fat landowner and tucks into a bowl of hard, unripe, practically inedible gooseberries from the bushes he has planted, convinced they are utterly delicious. A story of dreams and self-delusion. Ivan Ivanovitch realizes that he, too, is one of the self-deluded persons, content with his lot and not helping to reduce suffering and injustice.

"Concerning Love"
[About Love] [1898] (The Wife and other stories)
About Love describes a love that was professed too late. When he was young, Alehin worked closely with Luganovitch, the vice-president of the circuit court, and became close friends with Luganovitch and his beautiful wife Anna Alexyevna. They spend a lot of time together and Alehin falls passionately in love with Anna - although he feels his love is reciprocated, he never acts on his passion. Only when Luganovitch is transferred to a distant province and they say goodbye at the station, Alehin takes Anna in his arms - but it is too late and they separate forever. One could say the theme is this story is "carpe diem."

"A Doctor's Visit"
[A Case History] [1898] (The Lady with the Dog and other stories)
The medical intern Korolyov is sent by his professor to the Lyalikov factory just outside Moscow. Lisa, the daughter, has been ill for a long time and now has "heart palpitations." Korolyov examines her, but finds nothing wrong. He decides it must be her nerves and wants to leave immediately, but Mrs. Lyalikov insists on keeping him that night. At night, unable to sleep, he walks around the factory, pondering the condition of the workers, the bad cotton produced here and the fact that everybody seems unhappy. He decides it must be the oppression of the dreary town that is responsible for Liza's condition. Later, he talks to Liza - she knows she is not sick, but she suffers from loneliness - and she realizes her father's wealth is won over the backs of the workers. The intern listens to her with empathy and it seems Liza feels much better the next morning, when she puts on her beautiful clothes when the intern is leaving.

"Ionitch" [Doctor Startsev]
[1898] (The Lady with the Dog and other stories)
A new doctor, Dmitri Ionitch Startsev, settles in a provincial town and soon meets the Turkins, considered as the most distinguished family. He falls in love with the daughter, Yekaterina, who teases him by inviting him on a date in the cemetery at night and then not showing up. She soon moves to Moscow to study music and become an artist. Startsev builds a big practice, but also get corpulent and wealthy, and looses all interest in romance. When Yekaterina returns to the town (her dream of becoming an artist has not been realized as she lacks real talent), he is not interested in her anymore. But he is not a good doctor, either: he only works for financial reward and shouts at his patients. 

"The Darling"
[1898] (The Darling and other stories)
A negative commentary on the sort of woman who has no intellectual life of her own. but who simply serves as a mirror of the interests and opinions of her husband. Olga is a lovely, plump, and friendly girl - a true "darling." But she has no identity of her own, each time she marries she takes on the identity of her husband, whether it be the manager of an amusement park, a timber merchant or an army veterinary surgeon who is separated from his wife... While Chekhov believed that women should be more than "darlings," and have their own opinions, here we again find a large difference with Tolstoy, who was a terrible anti-feminist - Tolstoy believed that women could only find happiness by reflecting "the light of their husbands." He criticized the present story and re-interpreted Chekhov’s tale of a woman without a self as a paean to truly selfless women...

"The New Villa"
[1899] (The Witch and other stories)
A well-meaning engineer and his wife settle in a rural spot after the engineer has built a bridge there. They attempt to befriend their peasant neighbors, only to find themselves opposed by malice and incomprehension at every turn. How irrational their treatment is, becomes clear after they flee and sell their villa to a pompous government clerk who disdains the peasants: the clerk is treated with paradoxical civility by the locals. Chekhov demonstrates here how mistaken his fellow intellectuals were who romanticized the Russian peasant as the epitome of virtue and purity (as Tolstoy did). On the contrary, the peasants are ignorant and live in a tribal world - as is also shown in another story, "The Peasants." They feel the engineer is friendly and therefore weak and only bow to the power of the official class. The "noble" peasants in reality prove to be nasty, brutish, and mean.

"On Official Duty"
[1899] (The Schoolmistress and other stories)
Judge Lyzhin and doctor Startchenko travel to the village of Syrnya to question witnesses and perform an autopsy after the suspicious death of insurance agent Lesnitsky, believed to be suicide. They arrive after dark because of a snowstorm. The witnesses have already left, so they have to wait until the next day. Startchenko refuses to spend the night in such a grim place and goes to an acquaintance, Von Taunitz. Lyzhin decides to sleep where he is, and has a long conversation with the old rural policeman, Loshadin. Later that night, Lyzhin is woken up by Startchenko to take him to his friend Von Taunitz's place where singing and dancing is going on. The next day, the snowstorm prevents them from leaving the estate. Two days later, at dawn Loshadin comes to fetch them - there is still work to be done...

"The Lady with the Dog"
[1899] (The Lady with the Dog and other stories)
Chekhov's most famous story, a tale of insuppressible love and infatuation, written at a time Chekhov had also found a new love, Olga Knipper, the actress whom he would marry in 1901. Gurov, a 40 year old family man, is holidaying alone in Yalta and sees a lovely young woman, Anna, with a Pomeranian dog on the beach. Although she is also married, they become passionate lovers. When the time comes she has to return to her husband in a provincial town, she implores Gurov to forget her. But although he has had regular extramarital affairs, this time he cannot control his passion and he follows her to her hometown. They fall into one another's arms again, Anna forgiving him that he has followed her. Now she starts visiting Moscow for secret trysts with Gurov. Their love grows into tenderness, and they decide to remain together, realizing that "the most complicated and difficult part of their road is just beginning." A story written with great sensitivity to the subtleties of human relationships and deep respect for the characters. There is no cheap romanticizing in the story and it is clear there is no easy solution - there is suffering ahead and both lives could well be destroyed. Like "About Love" this story is an oblique commentary on the cheap morality preached by Tolstoy in Anna Karenina.

"At Christmas Time"
[1900] (The Witch and other stories)
A story written at the request at a newspaper for the Christmas season. It is much less highbrow than Chekhov's usual work and also more straightforward. Vassilissa, an old peasant woman, goes to see a vague acquaintance to have her write a letter to her daughter, Yefimia. The latter left her parents after her marriage four years ago, but she never writes. After wishes for good health and the hope to see her soon, the public letter writer fills the letter with excerpts from the Army Regulations! The next day, Vassilissa will take the letter to the station twelve versts away. In Moscow, Andrey Hrisanfitch, Yefimia's husband, hands the mother's letter to his wife. Yefimia bursts into tears upon hearing news from her parent and her village. Andrey now remembers that in the past he has often lost the letters his wife gave him for her mother. It doesn't matter, he concludes by himself.

"In the Hollow"
[In the Ravine] [1900] (The Witch and other stories)
A depressive and even cruel tale about Russian village life. The village, lying in a ravine, is ruled dictatorially by an oligarchy of a few wealthy families and is a "gray wasp nest of deception and injustice." One of well-to-do is Grigori Tsybukin, who runs the local grocery store by cheating on all his customers and supplementing his income by dealing in anything he can get his hands on, including home brewed vodka. A widower, he has two sons. The first, Anisim, still single, almost illiterate, is a police officer in the nearby town; Stepan, the youngest is deaf and a bit strange in the head. He is married to Axinia, a dynamic woman with lots of business acumen. She seems  pleasant and effective, but is in fact a true devil. She swindles the customers of the store and deceives her husband with one the mill owners in the village.
Tsybukin decides to remarry himself and finds Varvara, who is pleasant enough and creates a clean and bright home, but who is in reality a hollow shell of superficial kindness with nothing underneath. In fact, the whole family is a masquerade of deceit (including Anisim, with whom there is something wrong which is only hinted at initially).
A wife is now found for Anisim: Lipa, a child-wife of only fifteen from a poor family, soft, delicate and frail, and completely innocent. The wedding is celebrated. On the occasion of the wedding, Anisim offers new money to his parents and to the guests, before returning to the city. A few months later, we learn that Anisim has been arrested for making and selling counterfeit money. His 'secret' has come out and he is sentenced to 6 years in Siberia.
The young Lipa seems almost relieved by the disappearance of her husband: she has a new sun in her life, her baby Nikifor. But she now dreads her sister-in-law Axinia whose ambition begins to come out in the open, especially after it is rumored that Grigori has made a new will leaving a large piece of land to his new grandson. In the kitchen, Axinia gets angry with Lipa who is doing the laundry, while the baby is playing by her side. Axinia grabs a scoop and pours scalding hot water over the baby. Nikifor is taken to hospital in the nearby town, but dies the same evening in excruciating pain. Lipa returns alone, with the corpse of her son, and after the funeral Axinia drives her out of the house. Axinia has triumphed and become the true head of the family. Old Grigori Tsybukin has become a weak and silent King Lear, and often goes days on end without food.

"The Bishop"
[1902] (The Bishop and other stories)
This story depicts the last days of an elderly bishop, who though tired and ill, still tries to keep his busy schedule, living for others rather than for himself. He has risen from humble origins - at the beginning of the story his old mother, a peasant woman, visits him to see her famous son. But although the bishop is famous and powerful, in the end what matters to him are the simple things - his commitment to duty and his family relationships. And despite his fame, after his death he is soon forgotten - except by his old mother. The story reads like an anthem on Chekhov's own death from tuberculosis and his effort to continue working till the last.

"The Betrothed"
[The Fiancée] [1903] (The Schoolmaster and other stories)
The antithesis of "The Darling," this is a story about a strong woman with a desire for independence. Nadya lives with her mother and grandmother in the dreary countryside, and out of sheer boredom has acquiesced to a marriage with Andrey, the son of a local priest, who is a colorless and vacuous man. Her mother is a religious freak who even at her advanced age is financially wholly dependent on the dictatorial grandmother. Sasha, an impoverished student who is supported by the family, and who stays with them during the summer, implores Nadya to follow her heart - and go to Petersburg and attend university. She does so by eloping a few days before her marriage with his help. Although Nadya returns once home after two years to see her family, she realizes that things will never be the same and the news of Sasha's death from tuberculosis steels her resolve to leave the estate forever, and lead an independent life. This was the last story Chekhov completed - he was killed by the same illness as the character Sasha in the story, who died after taking a course of koumiss therapy at a tuberculosis sanitarium.


Chekhov Stories in Five Parts:


Chekhov (Stories 1): Earliest Comical Stories (1882-1885)

Chekhov (Stories 2): The Years of High Production (1886-87)

Chekhov (Stories 3): Period of Maturity A (1888-1891)

Chekhov (Stories 4): Period of Maturity B (1892-1895)

Chekhov (Stories 5): The Late Stories (1896-1904)


July 17, 2021

Short Stories and Novellas of Edith Wharton: (1) Beginnings 1891-1903

Edith Wharton (born Edith Newbold Jones; 1862–1937) is born into a distinguished New York family. Her parents, George Frederic and Lucretia Jones, are descendants of English and Dutch colonists who had made their fortune in shipping, banking, and real estate. The family belongs to the small, interrelated, fashionable society of New York which lived on inherited wealth. From 1866 to 1872, the Jones family lives and travels for six years in Europe.

After their return to the United States in June 1872, the family lives near Fifth Avenue in New York City and spends the summers in Newport, Rhode Island (like many other wealthy New York families). Edith studies French and German among other subjects - as was normal for well-to-do girls, she is tutored at home. She is a studious girl and reads the classics as she is forbidden to read novels.

In 1876-77 Edith writes "Fast and Loose," a novella of 30,000 words (unpublished).

In 1878 a collection of her poetry is privately printed (paid for by her mother).

In 1879, Edith makes her debut in society according to the customs of her time.

In 1880, five of her poems appear in the Atlantic Monthly, and two in the New York World. Worried that such an intellectual daughter will not be able to marry, her parents discourage further literary efforts.

From 1881-82 Wharton again stays with her parents in southern France. In March 1882, her father dies in Cannes at the age of 61.

Edith spends the summer of 1883 in Bar Harbor, Maine (another summer resort for wealthy New Yorkers). She meets Walter Berry, who will become a close friend, and her future husband, Edward ("Teddy") Wharton, a wealthy banker from Boston. He is attractive and kindly, a man of leisure from a similar social background as Edith and a good sportsman. But he lacks Edith's artistic or intellectual interests.

Edith Wharton grew up at a time when women were discouraged from achieving anything beyond a good marriage and follows this recipe by in April 1885 marrying Edward Wharton. They move to a cottage on Edith's mother's estate in Newport where they live from 1885 to 1889; in that period, they spend every winter and spring in Europe (Italy) - travel seems to have been the only thing that bound them together in what was mostly an unhappy marriage.

Edith meets Egerton Winthrop, who becomes her literary advisor. He recommends her to read more systematically. He also introduces her to Darwin, Huxley, Spencer and other evolutionary theorists. She reads voraciously in literature, art and philosophy. This all helped Wharton apply an almost scientific detachment to her study of the world.

In 1888. the Whartons travel to the Aegean on a four-month cruise. In 1889 the couple buys a townhouse on Fourth Avenue and 78th Street in New York.

Although Edith Wharton had a book of her poems privately printed when she was 16, it is not until after several years of married life that she begins to write in earnest. Her major literary model is Henry James, and her work reveals James’s concern for artistic form and ethical issues.

In 1890, Wharton writes her first story, "Mrs. Manstey's View." In 1892, she writes "Bunner Sisters," a long story that is not published until 1916 (in Xingu).

In 1893, the Whartons purchase Land's End, a house in Newport, and hire Ogden Codman as the interior designer. Edith works closely with him on the design for remodeling the house.

In 1893-94 she writes three more stories. In 1894, while traveling in Italy, she meets the English author Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), an engaged feminist and writer on aesthetics.

In 1897 Wharton begins work on her book The Decoration of Houses with architect Ogden Codman, later that year published by Scribner's. The two writers denounce Victorian decorating practices, and instead propose simple, classical design principles, based on symmetry, proportion, and balance. The Decoration of Houses was an immediate success, and encouraged the emergence of professional decorators in the new style.

In 1898, Edith Wharton writes several short stories, as "The Muse's Tragedy," "Souls Belated," and "A Coward."

In 1899 the Whartons stay 4 months in Washington DC where Walter Berry acts as Edith's literary advisor and supportive friend. Her first story collection, The Greater Inclination, is published. Later that year, the Whartons travel with French novelist and critic Paul Bourget and his wife in northern Italy and Switzerland. In the fall, they visit Lenox in western Massachusetts.

In 1900, Edith Wharton publishes the novella The Touchstone. Edith and Teddy Wharton travel to England and Paris, as well as northern Italy, where Edith  gathers material for her historical novel, The Valley of Decision, which she continues to write after returning to Lenox.

After receiving both criticism and praise from Henry James for "The Line of Least Resistance," she withdraws the story from her second volume of short stories, Crucial Instances.

In 1901, the Whartons acquire a large piece of land in Lenox, Massachusetts, where Edith designs a country house in the style of famous British architect Christopher Wren ("The Mount"). In June, Edith's mother dies in Paris. From various inheritances, Edith has an income of about $22,000 per year, but this will soon be dwarfed by the income from her books.

In 1902 The Valley of Decision, Wharton's first novel, set in Italy, is published. When she thinks about writing a sequel, her mentor Henry James advises her "to do more New York."

In 1903 Sanctuary is published. In Italy, Wharton does research for a series of articles that later will appear in book form as Italian Villas and Their Gardens. In Rome, she rides for the first time in an automobile.

***

The wonder is that Wharton broke through her social strictures to become one of America’s greatest writers. All in all, she would wrote over 40 books in 40 years, including authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel. She would become the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and a full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

As a writer, Wharton drew upon her insider's knowledge of the upper class New York "aristocracy" to realistically portray the lives and morals of the Gilded Age. She wrote realistic, psychological stories and novels. But her fiction was not limited to the upper classes: in Ethan Frome, Summer and other works she wrote Naturalistic stories about people in straitened circumstances. A third type of tale she wrote has strong supernatural elements (a masterful story as "Afterwards"); a fourth type is proto-Modernist in its focus on the powers of texts, as well as the lives of writers and artists, through which Edith Wharton made the fictionality involved in producing stories manifest. And finally she was an American living in Europe, so in almost all her work we find a cultural comparison or conflict.

Edith Wharton's stories are modern because of the way in which they are told: she doesn't tell everything from A to Z as a 19th c. author would do, but cuts out scenes and important information, and lets the reader infer these. This demands a careful and intelligent way of reading.


[Edith Wharton]


A. Uncollected Tales (1891-98)

Mrs. Manstey's View (1891)
[Scribner's 10 (July 1891): 117-22 ]
A rather melancholy tale about an old lady who lives alone, and whose only real pleasure in life is to sit at her boarding-house window and watch the world go by. As a younger woman, she always wanted to live in the country, but that ambition was never fulfilled and her only real contact with nature now is by observing the plants in her neighbors' gardens. When her view becomes threatened, Mrs Manstey is distraught and goes to great lengths to protect it. It was not until Wharton was 29 that this first short story was published. "Mrs. Manstey's View" had very little success, and it took her more than a year to publish another story.

Bunner Sisters (1892, published in 1916)
A long story that was considered as too grim by Scribner's and therefore refused. It was finally published with Xingu in 1916. As it was never published in separate form, this subdued, realist masterpiece of thwarted lives never gained the status it deserved. The story tells about two sisters making ends meet with their shabby-genteel shop in a run-down corner of New York. The older one is self-abnegating and anxious, the younger one spoiled and dissatisfied. A creepy sensualist courts both of them and finally marries the younger one, but he turns out to be a drug addict and abandons her...

The Fullness of Life (1893)
[Scribner's 14 (December 1893): 699-704 ]
A nameless dead woman confides in the "Spirit of Life" she meets in the next world about her earthly marriage. She had been fond of her (rather dull) husband, but had never known with him the “fullness of life.” The pleasures she knew - flowers, literature, nature - all came from outside of her marriage. Though the Spirit offers the woman the opportunity to spend eternity with a “kindred soul,” her sense of duty to her husband and the habits of a lifetime prevent her from accepting the chance for joy. Clearly Wharton was examining her own unfulfilling marriage with Teddy Wharton, to whom she had been married for eight years when she began to publish fiction.
Wharton uses one of her best-known images to depict her character’s sexual and emotional relationship with her husband: "I have sometimes thought that a woman's nature is like a great house full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting-room, where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors perhaps are never turned; no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a footstep that never comes."

That Good May Come (1894) **
[Scribner's 15 (May 1894): 629-42. ]
Maurice wants to become a writer, but in the meantime his mother and sister are almost starving as he has given up his daytime job. His sister needs a white dress for confirmation at her church. To help her, he sells the only poem he has written that can be sold: a low satire on the sexual escapade of a certain woman. Will good come from evil?

The Lamp of Psyche (1895)
[Scribner's 18 (October 1895): 418-28 ]
Delia has married for the second time, after the demise of her first husband whose behavior made her very unhappy. She has never been more content in her life than she is now and adores her second husband's fastidious taste and his European manners. But then - from her stern Boston aunt - she finds out a detail in her husband’s past (that he evaded participation in the Civil War), which, for her, is not acceptable and changes her love of him forever.

The Valley of Childish Things, and Other Emblems (1896)
[Century 52 (July 1894): 629-42 ]
Ten short entries in a sort of fairy-tale style. A group of ironical fables about American infantilism and wastefulness.


B. The Greater Inclination (1899) - 7 stories (and a play)
Wharton's first collection of short stories. Although she had published several stories in magazines by this time, most of the stories for this book were new as she wanted to give her best. Each of the stories is a study in motives.

The Muse's Tragedy ***
[Scribner's 25 (January 1899): 77-84. ]
The story of Danyers, an aspiring scholar, and Mary Anerton, who used to be the muse of the famous poet Vincent Rendle (now deceased), whose work Danyers admires very much. He is thrilled when he meets Mary Anerton by chance in Italy, and falls in love with her. They agree to meet again in Venice, but that part of the story has been elided; instead, the tale finishes abruptly with a letter from Mrs Anerton in which she explains to Danyers why she can't marry him: far from having had a secret affair with Rendle, and despite having worshiped him for 15 years as friend and patron, her love was never returned - she has in fact only been "used", because Rendle took his inspiration from her, but offered nothing in return. She is heartily sick of Rendle and his poems (that is why she never wants to discuss his work with Danyers). She loves Danyers who has for the first time in her life made her feel what it means to be loved for her own sake - but finally renounces him, because deep-down, she is afraid that he is only interested in her because he wants to write Rendle's biography, and that she will be used again. Such is the "muse's tragedy."
 
A Journey ***
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
A very dark and suspenseful psychological story, one of Wharton's best. A woman has accompanied her husband to Colorado for his failing health, but he has not improved, and the two are now returning home to New York City, where he probably will soon die. But then she finds her husband dead in their sleeping car... She has once seen that a woman whose husband had died during a train journey, was unceremoniously kicked off the train in the middle of nowhere - with the dead body - and, afraid that the same will happen to her, she tries to keep her husband's death a secret.  She pretends to the other travelers that her husband is very sick (but still alive) and endeavors to keep the curtains of their compartment tightly closed. But as the train nears its final destination, she becomes increasingly nervous and confused...   
 
The Pelican ***
[Scribner's 24 (November 1898): 620-29.]
Another winning - and this time humorous - story. After being widowed, Mrs. Amyot makes a living by lecturing to groups of ladies so that she can pay for the expense of raising her son and putting him through school. Her lectures are rather superficial and more about what she wants to say than offering any interesting content. The narrator encounters her several times over the years, and now and then helps her, for example to find new audiences. As the years go by, Mrs Amyot continues lecturing for the education of her son, long after he has grown up, as if she can't do anything else anymore. At the end of the story, the narrator meets an interesting person at one of her lectures, someone with a long beard...

Souls Belated **
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
Two lovers attempt to escape the consequences of their adultery - the story emphasizes how those who flout the conventions of upper-class society are forced to move outside it. Lydia has left her wealthy but boring Fifth Avenue husband for Gannett with whom she is now traveling in Italy, when the letter of divorce reaches her from New York. Under these circumstances, Lydia doesn't want to be asked in marriage by Gannett - it would look too much as if he were just doing his duty. But when they stay in a hotel where also many English people are residing (among them a rather vulgar couple in similar circumstances), they realize they can not go on living a lie. Should they go to Paris and get married? Or is it better to end their relationship?

A Coward
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
Vibart visits the Carstyles (mother, father, daughter) because he first likes the daughter, Irene, until he sees how much she is like her terrible mother. Instead, he learns to appreciate the father, whose honorable decision to pay back a group of people who were defrauded by his brother, is responsible for the difficult circumstances in which the family lives. But then Mr Carstyle tells Vibart the story of the event in his past which made him decide to be heroic...
 
The Twilight of the God
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
This is not a short story, but a brief play, a Wildean, 1890s drawing room comedy of disillusion.
 
 A Cup of Cold Water ***
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
Woburn has made large debts and after that stolen money from the bank where he works - this all to be able to marry Miss Talcott who belongs to the upper crust of New York society. The morning that his theft will be discovered by an audit, he plans to escape by steamship. But the night before, he has two experiences. He visits a ball where he now sees Miss Talcott with other eyes, and he realizes the falseness and superficiality of his life. Later that night he stays in a cheap hotel and hears a woman crying in the room next to his. She seems on the verge of committing suicide (he hears the click of a revolver) and he breaks down the door to save her. He also helps her in her predicament by giving her the money for a train ticket to return to the husband she has left but whom she still loves. This good deed ultimately helps him to decide how he should solve his own crisis.
 
The Portrait
[First published in The Greater Inclination, 1899]
A group is discussing the pictures of Lillo (who always managed to bring out the - even ugly - truth of those whose portraits he paints, and his failure with his portrait of the monstrous politician Vard. Later Lillo himself explains the circumstances to the narrator: as the daughter who idolized her father was always at the sittings, Lillo could not bring out the true ugliness of Vard.


C. Early Uncollected Stories (1900) - 3 stories

April Showers
[Youth's Companion 74 (18 January 1900): 25-26 ]
An aspiring 17-year old writer has just finished her first novel (of high quality, she believes, not just a popular tale) and send it in to a magazine. She has neglected her family's household work to get it finished. After weeks she gets a positive answer by letter and is in the 7th heaven. But when the magazine comes out, it features another novel by a settled author. It was all a mistake... When Theodora returns from the magazine's offices in Boston, where she has gone to make her claim, she is happy to find her father waiting for her at the station. Wharton criticizes both the publishing business and America’s love of sentimental writers. At the same time, she stresses the importance of family relationships.

Friends
[The Youth's Companion: Vol. 74, Number 33 (August 23, 1900), 405-06 and Vol. 74, Number 34 (August 30, 1900), 417-180. ]
Penelope Bent has given up her teaching job in an industrial New England town because she thinks she is going to be married - but, abandoned by her lover, she returns to find her post has been given to an even needier - and much less intelligent - friend. What follows is a struggle between resentment and generosity.

The Line of Least Resistance
**
[Lippincott's 66 (October 1900): 559-70. ]
An excellent story. The wealthy Mr. Mindon is a comic and absurd character who pays for the excesses of his wife without any complaint. That their marriage is almost non-existent is proven by the love letter from her to another man he happens to find in her boudoir one day. He suddenly decides to divorce his frivolous, expensive and adulterous wife but his decisiveness is condemned from the start to be short-lived. It is a pretense, and his return to the family (after being lectured by friends, family and church elders) will be the beginning of another and added level of pretense when his three comforters bring him back to his sham marriage.


D. Novella: The Touchstone (1900) ***
Edith Wharton was a great friend of Henry James, who initially acted as her mentor - and as she was more successful with the public, towards the end of his life she could give him some (secret) financial assistance. The Touchstone is built on one of James' eternal themes, for example in The Aspern Papers: all that counts is a writer's work, not his / her life - we should not pry into his / her biography. Stephen Glennard, the novella's protagonist, is suddenly impoverished and unable to marry Alexa Trent, the woman he loves. He therefore sells the private letters Margaret Aubyn, a former admirer, had written to him, before she had become a famous author (Margaret seems a character based on Wharton herself). He fully realizes he is betraying her and the one-sided relation they had in the past. His monetary motive is also dubious, and the fact that he conceals the matter from his fiancé (and later wife). He is later overcome by guilt for betraying one who had loved him, and by living very frugally he and his wife pay back the money he has received for the letters. In all respects a perfect novella, a worthy companion to The Aspern Papers - it is regrettable that Edith Wharton is not better known today.


E. 
Crucial Instances (1901) - 7 stories
Wharton's second short story collection, even better than the first one. Many of the stories try to look behind the masks that the characters wear.

[Illustration from "The Duchess at Prayer"]


The Duchess at Prayer ***
[Scribner's 28 (August 1900): 153-69.]
A dark and violent legend with a gothic feel set in Italy, told by the old caretaker of an estate, who has heard it from his grandmother. As the Duke is frequently away, the young Duchess often seeks refuge in her private chapel (a crypt), which leads to various suspicions. One day, under the pretext of being in Rome, the jealous Duke pays a sudden visit to the Duchess. He brings along a marble sculpture of the Duchess as a praying Madonna, chiseled by a famous sculptor, which he has immediately placed over the entrance to the chapel, neglecting the protests of the Duchess. Reading between the lines, we understand the Duchess has been together with her lover, the Duke's cousin, who is now buried alive in the crypt. The high-strung Duchess soon dies of this psychological torture. And the marble statue, in supernatural sympathy with its living counterpart, changes its face into "one of frozen horror." The story invokes Browning's "My Last Duchess."

The Angel at the Grave ***
[Scribner's 29 (February 1901): 158-66.]
Paulina's grandfather was famous as one of the American Transcendentalists, like Emerson and Thoreau. She acts as a caretaker of his house and papers and as a guide to visitors. She also writes his biography, but when she takes it to a publisher she receives a shock: the publisher refuses it because her grandfather's fame has faded. The depiction of Paulina slowly realizing that her grandfather is no longer the famous man he once was is beautifully done. She feels that her life has been wasted... but then a young man visits her and shows interest in her grandfather’s papers for an entirely different reason (a scientific discovery the grandfather made in his younger years) - but it remains an open matter whether they will be able to restore his fame.

The Recovery ***
[Harper's 102 (February 1901): 468-77. ]
Kensington is a celebrated American painter, with a small circle of ardent admirers. Then he has a chance to travel to Paris and have his paintings shown in Europe. As soon as he is in Paris, he spends all his time in The Louvre to study the old masters - the high level of their complex art comes as a shock to him. At the same time, the small exhibition of his own paintings fails to attract viewers. Kensington realizes he has to rethink his ideas about art, and start again from zero - but happily he is still young enough to make a "recovery."

Copy: A Dialogue
[Scribner's 27 (June 1900): 657-63.]
A dialogue between two writers who were once lovers and now meet again. Each has kept the letters received from the other, and both have done so for a similar reason. 

The Rembrandt ***
[Hearst's International Cosmopolitan 29 (August 1900): 429-37. ]
A wonderful story. The narrator is in charge of acquiring art for a New York museum. He is introduced by his cousin Eleanor to a Mrs. Fontage, a distressed gentlewoman, who owns an unsigned Rembrandt. He realizes immediately that it is not worth a dime, but wanting to ease her difficulties, tells her that it is worth $1,000. He ends up buying the piece for the museum, but worries what the committee will say about it - will it help that in the same period he has been able to buy another, genuinely valuable painting as well?

The Moving Finger ***
[Harper's 102 (March 1901): 627-32. ]
Ralph Grancy marries a woman whom he loves very deeply and he asks a friend, Claydon, to paint her picture. The result is more wonderful than the actual looks of his wife, but that is how he sees her. When Mrs. Grancy dies, Mr. Grancy goes abroad for several years, but when he returns he has Claydon alter the picture to bring his wife closer to what she would look like if she were still alive - by making her look older. In that way, he says, he can still communicate with her in his mind. When Grancy himself dies, the painting is according to his last will given to Claydon, who again restores it to the original image, for a very specific reason....

The Confessional

[First published in Crucial Instances]
The longest story in the book, mainly set in Italy, and told by an Italian priest, Don Egidio. The first two thirds of the story show how political battles between Lombardy and the ruling Austrians determine the family life of Count Roberto, a nationalist, and his young wife the Countess Faustina, who supposedly takes an Austrian lover. The political background is sketched in great detail - the political feud seems to play out as a family feud. The Count persuades Don Egidio, his wife’s confessor, to let him take his place and listen to his wife’s confession. Having done so, he publicly exonerates her, even though she must have confessed to the affair. The Count goes off to fight for Lombardy and Italy. The priest is sent to the United States as punishment for betraying his spiritual duty. Later he is joined by the count who spends his life lecturing and raising money to support the Italian cause. One of the least interesting stories of Wharton, although the idea behind the "confessional" is interesting.


F. Novella: Sanctuary (1903) ***
Kate Orme is about to be married to a wealthy, charming man, but discovers that his morality is weak and flawed (he is indirectly is responsible for the suicide of two people). However, she goes through with the marriage because she believes that knowing what she knows she is the only one who can properly bring up the children of her husband (in the event, they have only one child, a son). She apparently believes in nurture over nature. She does everything in her power to instill in their son the highest moral principles to save him from the same moral degeneration as his father. Yet, when 25 years later the son is faced with his own moral dilemma, she has to face her possessiveness and neurotic inability to let go of her son's life. She is her son's "sanctuary," but this is title is meant darkly ironic...


Webpages about Edith Wharton

An Edith Wharton Chronology

Short Stories, Publication Information


 
 
Biography: Edith Wharton, by Hermione Lee.

Study: The Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton, edited by Millicent Bell.

July 13, 2021

The Stories of Henry James (5): The Master 1899-1910

Between 1899 and 1904 Henry James produced an immense amount of work: his great late novels, The Wing of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl, plus 22 tales. The renewed attention for the short story may have been caused by need for money, as the acquisition of Lamb House in Rye had made a large dent in James' finances.

In 1904, James visited the United States again - his first visit since a long absence and he was unpleasantly surprised at how the country had been changed by a fierce form of capitalism. He paid his way by giving lectures and traveled extensively through the whole country, also visiting California. Of course this all resulted in a book: The American Scene (1907). While this American travelogue is rather on the complaining side, James also collected memories about his beloved Italy in the charming Italian Hours.

James had always been obsessed with his literary legacy, and this resulted in a revised edition, with long and detailed prefaces, of his Collected Works - the works that he himself wanted to preserve for posterity. He even rewrote parts of his early novels for this republishing event.

This 24 volume collection was published by Scribner in New York, and is therefore known as "The New York Edition." As highbrow literature of the highest level, James' books had never sold very well (although not worse than those by other literary authors), although they had generally been praised by the critics. In that sense, this new edition resulted also in a new disappointment: sales were extremely slow and one could say that it cost James money instead of improving his financial situation.

Editing this huge collection took up much of James' time; he finished no new novels in the last twelve years of his life (he worked on The Ivory Tower, but left it unfinished) and only wrote 7 short stories.

As James was making up the balance of his life, he now turned to autobiography, finishing two volumes (A Small Boy and Others from 1913 and Notes of a Son and Brother from 1914); a third volume, The Middle Years, was left unfinished. In these years James also received honorary degrees from Harvard and Oxford.

James was shocked by the outbreak of the Great War. He was also angry that the U.S. refused to come to the aid of England and in 1915, as a sort of declaration of loyalty (but also for practical reasons), he became a British citizen. At the end of that year James became seriously ill after suffering a series of strokes and he died in early 1916. His ashes were interred at Cambridge, Massachusetts.


What are the themes of James' late tales?
- The obsession with ‘literary remains’ and posthumous reputation ("The Real Right Thing")
- The stupidity of letting life slip by without having a life ("Europe," "The Beast in the Jungle")
- "fear of marriage" ("Flickerbridge")
- James' negative reaction to the changes he saw in New York (a harsh money society) after an absence of some two decades.


"Europe" [1899]
First published in Scribner's Magazine, June 1899. First book edition in The Soft Side, London / New York, 1900. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
A black comedy about a Puritanical Boston family, mother and three daughters. The mother has been able to visit Europe when she was young, and has implanted the notion of 'Europe' in the minds of her daughters as a sort of cultural ideal. The daughters want to visit Europe but miss their chance - they have to stay in Boston to care for their old and infirm mother - and grow old themselves in the process. Only the youngest daughter manages to slip away to the Old Continent, and she never comes back. A story about the folly of letting life slip by without having a life.
Wikisource - State University of New York, New Paltz

"The Great Condition" [1899]
First publication in The Anglo-Saxon Review, June 1899. First book edition in The Soft Side, London / New York, 1900. 
On the transatlantic boat back home, two Englishmen fall in love with an unattached American lady, a widow. They don't know anything about her past and therefore suspect she has one - showing the strict morals imposed unilaterally on woman at that time. It also shows the difference between Europe and the U.S.: the upper class in Europe formed a tight social group in which a person’s circumstances would be known to members of the group. Marriage was very much a financial arrangement. The American widow agrees to marry the man who promises not to ask her about her past for the first six months of the marriage. One of them (the wealthy one) thinks he will be unable to do that, so he compulsively travels around the world trying to unearth something about her (finding nothing). The other man (in more modest circumstances) marries her and never asks her about her past - and of course in the end it becomes clear that she has no past (but no fortune either).
Wikisource

"The Real Right Thing" [1899]
First published in Collier's Weekly, December 1899. First book edition in The Soft Side, London / New York, 1900. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
The spirit of a deceased writer, haunting his wife and her chosen biographer, ensures that they give up the idea of publishing a ‘Life,’ by telling them that in his writings he has left enough of himself for the world to know. A strong statement of James' opinion that all that counts is the surviving work of the artist and that it is no use - even "not done," almost as if it were a kind of desecration - to delve into personal and intimate circumstances. As in The Turn of the Screw, it remains ambiguous whether there really was a ghost. This is one of shortest of the tales James wrote, and one of the weaker as James didn't develop all its possibilities.
Wikisource

"Paste" [1899]
First published in Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly, December 1899. First book edition in The Soft Side, London / New York, 1900. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
James conceived this story as a clever reversal of Guy de Maupassant's "The Necklace" ("La Parure"). Henry James was a personal friend of De Maupassant and wrote a critical essay about his work. An inherited string of pearls, thought to be just paste, turns out to be real and thereby reflects uncomfortably on the morals of the woman who left them behind (she must have received them from a gentleman in return for certain unmentionable favors).
Wikisource; State University of New York, New Paltz

"The Great Good Place" [1900]
First published in Scribner's Magazine, January 1900. First book edition in The Soft Side, London / New York, 1900. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
The story portrays George Dane, a successful writer harried by visitors and an overload of duties. In this social whirlwind, he has no time left for introspection. A young man who is another of his visitors hypnotically wafts him to the Great Good Place - a sort of resort for tired intellectuals where they can recharge themselves while talking with "Brothers." Dane finds his inner balance again and awakes refreshed at the end of the day, to notice that the young man has even brought order to his study. A strange piece of fancy, with homoerotic overtones: for James heaven is clearly a place filled with beautiful young men.
Wikisource - State University of New York, New Paltz

"Maud-Evelyn" [1900]
First published in The Atlantic Monthly, April 1900. First book edition in The Soft Side, London / New York, 1900. 
Marmaduke has just seen his marriage proposal refused and therefore makes a trip on the continent. There he meets an English couple who have lost their daughter, Maud-Evelyn, when she was only fifteen. They have a fantasy that Maud-Evelyn is still alive and construct fanciful memories about her, with the help of Marmaduke, who - without ever having known her - becomes the "phantom" fiancé and then "husband" of the deceased daughter. He then wears mourning for her and devotes the rest of his life to her memory.
Wikisource

"Miss Gunton of Poughkeepsie" [1900]
First published in Cornhill Magazine, May-June 1900. First book edition in The Soft Side, London / New York, 1900. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
A short and lighthearted story. A young American woman, Lily Gunton of Poughkeepsie (of all places), is engaged to an Italian Prince. She is waiting for an invitation from his mother to come and visit, but the Prince, on the contrary, asks her to write first to his mother (the right thing to do in status-conscious 19th c. Europe) - which the democratic lady refuses. When the wait lasts too long, she returns to America and breaks off the engagement. A story of cultural differences.
Wikisource

"The Tree of Knowledge" [1900]
First published in The Soft Side, London / New York, 1900. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
A sharp story about a sculptor who believes himself to be a great artist, and his friend, who knows better but keeps silent as he loves the wife of the sculptor and doesn't want to make her unhappy. But when the son later studies art in Paris, he realizes that his father was not a real artist but a fraud and tells his mother. She, of course, knew so all the time, but kept quiet out of love for her husband.
Project Gutenberg (Victorian Short Stories); Wikisource

"The Abasement of the Northmores" [1900]
First published in The Soft Side, London / New York, 1900. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
The pompous Lord Northmore has always overshadowed his friend Mr Hope, although Hope possessed the greater talent. After both men are dead, the widow of Lord Northmore publishes her husbands' correspondence, showing inadvertently what a nobody he really was. Mrs Hope then decides to posthumously publish the old correspondence between herself and her husband to show posterity where true greatness was present. A rather hurriedly written story in which nothing is dramatized.
Wikisource

"The Third Person" [1900]
First published in The Soft Side, London / New York, 1900. 
Two old ladies, who are related, one a spinster, the other a widow, together inherit a cottage in a quaint English town (very much like James' Rye) and decide to go and live there. They discover one of their common ancestors was a smuggler who was hanged for his offenses - and then the ghost of the man appears to defend himself from these accusations. An amusingly satirical ghost story.
Wikisource

"The Special Type" [1900]
First published in Collier's Weekly, June 1900. First book publication in The Better Sort, London / New York 1903.
Alice Dundene is a "special type" of woman, who is rather misused by her environment. One Brivet uses his supposed affair with her to give his wife cause for divorce, so that he can marry the woman he really loves, a Mrs. Cavenham. All is well: the wife marries someone else, the husband marries Mrs. Cavenham. But all poor Alice gets is the portrait of Brivet... their relations have always been wholly innocent.
Wikisource

"The Tone of Time" [1900]
First published in Scribner's Magazine, November 1900. First book publication in The Better Sort, London / New York 1903. 
The story turns on the coincidence that two women who were once rivals for the same man recognize each other via the effect his portrait has upon them. Mary Tredick is commissioned by a woman she has never seen to paint a portrait of her deceased husband. Mary paints with art and hatred the image of a man she has once loved and whom another woman has taken from her. When the commissioner  sees the portrait she wants it so badly that she agrees (through the narrator) to double the price. But the painter discovers that her patron is "the other woman" and will not part with her work to her rival. After both are dead, the narrator gets it in his possession, ironically never learning the name of the man who has been painted here.
Wikisource

"Broken Wings" [1900]
First published in Century Magazine, December 1900. First book publication in The Better Sort, London / New York 1903. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
This story presents a man and a woman, one a painter and the other a writer, each of whom discovers that the other is no longer successful, whereas it was in the old days each other's success that kept them apart. Hesitantly but inevitably
they now come together, with the words "And now to work!"
Wikisource

"The Two Faces" [1900]
First published in Harper's Bazar, December 1900. First book publication in The Better Sort, London / New York 1903. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
Mrs Grantham has been jilted by Lord Gwyther. While her new admirer, Mr Sutton, is with her, Lord Gwyther makes the faux pas of visiting her to ask her to introduce his young, foreign wife (so in fact, Mrs Grantham's successor and rival) into London society. Mrs. Grantham makes her young rival ridiculous by overloading her with clothes - a gaffe from which the young woman will never recover.
Wikisource

"Mrs. Medwin" [1901]
First published in Punch, August-September 1901. First book publication in The Better Sort, London / New York 1903. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
Mrs, Medwin (1903) is to be engineered into society by Mamie Cutter, social secretary, through the special favor of Lady Wantridge. But Scott Cutter, her big American brother, turns up and the sister is afraid the crude boy will upset things. However, he is just the man that Lady Wantridge likes, and through him Mrs. Medwin gets invited into the charmed circle.
Project Gutenberg (Some Stories); Wikisource

"The Beldonald Holbein" [1901]
First published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Oct. 1901. First book publication in The Better Sort, London / New York 1903. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
A story about artists. An obscure American woman, Mrs Brash, who is supposedly very ugly, is employed by the vain Lady Beldonald to act as a contrast to her own good looks. But the painter-narrator and his friend see in Mrs Brash an unappreciated beauty of a kind they liken to a portrait by Holbein. The narrator wants to paint Mrs Brash's portrait but she refuses. All the same, this episode is enough for Lady Beldonald to ship Mrs Brash back to the United Sates.
Project Gutenberg; Wikisource

"The Story in It" [1902]
First published in Anglo-American Magazine, January 1902. First book publication in The Better Sort, London / New York 1903. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
Colonel Vogt says that romance implies a developed relation which cannot spell innocence. Mrs. Blessingbourne takes the view that romance may consist in a suppressed relation. She herself, we learn, has for the Colonel just such an innocent feeling. In this way, the story in a very modern way comments ingenuously on its own subject.
Project Gutenberg; Wikisource

"Flickerbridge" [1902]
First published in Scribner's Magazine, February 1902. First book publication in The Better Sort, London / New York 1903. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
Another "fear of marriage" story. Frank Granger, a painter living in Paris, is engaged to the successful journalist Addie, but has second thoughts. When he is painting a portrait in London he falls ill. Addie then sends him a letter of introduction to Miss Wenham, the caretaker of the beautiful old Flickerbridge estate in the countryside, so that he can go there to recuperate. Frank enjoys himself and regains his health, but suddenly receives news that Addie is also planning to come to Flickerbridge from Paris. He immediately leaves for Oxford, as a sign that he is breaking off the engagement.
Project Gutenberg; Wikisource

"The Birthplace" [1903]
First book publication in The Better Sort, London / New York 1903. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
A satirical dig at the "heritage industry." Morris Gedge and his wife are stationed at the birthplace of England's greatest poet, and expect to peddle exaggerations to the gullible visitor. At first Morris is understated and ironical, and is reprimanded by the Board; later he goes to the other extreme, and gets his salary raised. But the story also contains within it a quite serious element of literary theory: critical attention should be focused on the works themselves, not their authors or the author's biographical elements, as there is no way to prove a causal link between the life of an author and the works he produces.
Wikisource

"The Beast in the Jungle" [1903]
First book publication in The Better Sort, London / New York 1903. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
One of James' finest short narratives. John Marcher has once told May Bartram that he lives under a fear of some undefined calamity: he believes that his life is to be defined by some catastrophic or spectacular event, lying in wait for him like a "beast in the jungle." Ten years later, they meet again. May is romantically interested in him, but he believes that he is precluded from marrying so that he does not subject his wife to his "spectacular fate." They keep meeting now and then, for the theater or an occasional dinner, as May is curious what fate has in store for him. And so time passes, and Marcher allows the best years of his life to slip by, taking down May as well, until the denouement where he learns that the great misfortune of his life was to throw it away, and to ignore the love of a good woman, based upon his preposterous sense of foreboding! As James has said elsewhere: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?" This great story, in which almost nothing happens (and that is exactly the crux!), has been subjected to an enormous amount of critical commentary. Sometimes it is seen as an early expression of "existential angst," or it is interpreted psychologically, as the story of a man imprisoned in a solipsistic world. And finally, here, too, we find James "fear of marriage"...
Project Gutenberg; Wikisource.

"The Papers" [1903]
First book publication in The Better Sort, London / New York 1903. 
A story in which James deals with all the unsavory features now associated with contemporary media – cynical journalism, image manipulation, empty celebrity culture, and what we now call ‘spin doctoring’ – he shows how all elements are already alive and working smoothly at the start of the 20th century. Part of the story is rather bitter in tone, as if James had to get something off his chest.
Wikisource

"Fordham Castle" [1904]
First publication in Harper's Magazine, Dec. 1904. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
The middle-aged American Abel Taker has been exiled to Geneva by his wife while she conquers aristocratic England under an assumed name while staying at Fordham Castle. He finds comfort in the similar plight of Mrs Magaw, a lady who has been hidden to further her daughter’s desire to marry into British aristocracy (again under a more resounding name than that of her mother). But in Geneva both Mr Taker and Mrs Magaw also live under assumed names, and they speak about their previous identities as dead things. After Mrs Magaw's daughter has succeeded in getting engaged to Lord Dunderton, she asks her mother to come over. When Mrs Magaw is leaving, she asks if Mr Taker wants to come with her, but he refuses - he doubts he will get a similar invitation from his wife and continues in his situation of a "dead" person. 
Wikisource


"Julia Bride" [1908]
First publication in Harper's Magazine, March-April 1908. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
Julia Bride is a beautiful single young American girl with a chequered past (she has a score of six broken off engagements); on top of that, her mother has been twice divorced and is living apart from her third husband. Julia wants to marry the rich young son of a wealthy traditional family, Basil French, so she needs a clean slate. She appeals to Mr. Pitman, one of her stepfathers, to aid her, but he, wanting in turn to marry Mrs. Drack and her millions, prevails on her to help him from her side - both have to tell lies on behalf of the other. Julia also asks the help of Murray Brush, the most serious of her old suitors, who is now engaged to a perfect young lady. Murray is willing to talk to Mr French (lying to him that he and Julia were never engaged, but only friends), but it is clear to Julia he only wants to do that only to further the prospects of himself and his wife - it never hurts to know an important family. The story has an open ending, but it is clear that Julia Bride won't find success in the upper echelons of old-fashioned American society. She will always be a Bride but never get married. There are some echoes in this story from The House of Mirth by James' good friend Edith Wharton.
Project Gutenberg (Great English Short Story Writers)   


"The Jolly Corner" [1908]
First published in The English Review, December 1908. Later also included in The New York Edition (1907-09).
One of Henry James' most-anthologized stories, a combination of a classical ghost story with a psychological tale, and therefore open to a variety of different interpretations - we can see it as a story of guilt, of redemption, or of wish-fulfillment. Spencer Brydon returns to New York after thirty-three years in Europe. He visits the now-empty New York house where he grew up, on the corner of a block. There he encounters the ghost of himself (his double) as he would have been had he remained at home as a business man - he sees a figure who is rich, but also made horridly ugly by the egoistic life he has led. He passes out because of the shock and is found the next day by his old friend Alice Staverton, who has taken a sympathetic interest in his concerns.
Project Gutenberg; Wikisource.

"The Velvet Glove" [1909]
First published in The English Review, March 1909. First book edition in The Finer Grain, London / New York, 1910.
A story perhaps inspired by James' relation with Edith Wharton, who had asked him to write a preface to one of her lesser novels, something James refused, telling her she didn't need commercial success - in fact Wharton was much more successful than James and her The House of Mirth had become a big bestseller. She also earned more than James and once took him on a tour around France in her large automobile.
Project Gutenberg;

"Mora Montravers" [1909]
First published in The English Review, August-September 1909. First book edition in The Finer Grain, London / New York, 1910. 
On a subject which was very popular around that time – the new woman. Since the 1880s and 1890s women had been fighting for independence, voting rights, and reform of the divorce laws. Alongside these larger political matters, they had also been claiming the right to make their own life choices. James deals here with these issues in his characteristically ambiguous manner. Mora Montravers leaves the dull household of her relatives, the Traffles, and establishes herself in the studio of a young painter, Mr. Puddick. Mrs. Traffle offers to settle four hundred and fifty pounds a year on Mora if Puddick will marry her. He is embarrassed, but Mr. Traffle (whose drab life with Mrs. Traffle has been agreeably jarred by Mora) learns later that the two are now married. But Mora wishes to be free, gets the money settled on her husband and seeks a divorce so that she may marry Sir Bruce Bagley. Underneath it all lies the story of the tensions in the Traffle marriage, an emotional power struggle won by Mrs Traffle.
Public Library UK (PDF)

"Crapy Cornelia" [1909]
First published in Harper's Magazine, October 1909. First book edition in The Finer Grain, London / New York, 1910. 
A combination of two important themes for James: "fear of marriage" and "lost opportunity." A third theme are the unwelcome changes in American society.
The protagonist, White-Mason, contemplates asking the much younger Mrs. Worthingham's in marriage. In her drawing room, he meets his old friend Cornelia and thereafter frequents her house. Cornelia is of the same generation and has the same memories of New York, so they hit it off. White-Mason gives up marriage with the much younger woman, but he also refuses Cornelia - they both are old, he says, an he just wants to be her friend.
Project Gutenberg

"The Bench of Desolation" [1909]
First published in Putnam's Magazine, Oct. 1909-Jan. 1910. First book edition in The Finer Grain, London / New York, 1910. 
A story that starts in a gloomy mood but ends with a rather improbable, fairy-tale-like solution. Herbert Dodd, seller of prints and old books, and Kate Cookham become estranged; and to ward off a breach of promise suit, he agrees to pay her four hundred pounds. He then has a separate life in which he marries, but also looses his family again, and finally is bankrupted. That is the situation in which he day in day out sits on a bench overlooking the sea, and there Kate Cookham finds him. She has invested his money and more than quadrupled it; she has always loved him; their estrangement was based on a misunderstanding; they marry.
Project Gutenberg

"A Round of Visits" [1910]
First published in The English Review, April-May 1910. First book edition in The Finer Grain, London / New York, 1910. 
James' last short story, again about the impression he received of the United States after living in Europe for a long time. James had left the traditional (Puritanical and paternalistic) New York of the 1870s, and he was rather shocked by the ‘new’ America (harsh and materialistic) he found on revisiting 25 years later. The protagonist of the story has returned from Europe to New York after discovering that a friend in New York has embezzled his money. This is symbolic for James' own situation: he felt swindled out of his identity by the huge changes for the worse he saw in American society.
Project Gutenberg



The best stories among the above are in my view:
  • The Beast in the Jungle
  • The Jolly Corner
  • A Round of Visits
*****


If you prefer to read the stories in book form, the recommended edition is that of the Complete Stories of Henry James, in five volumes, in The Library of America. Collections of stories are also available, for example in two volumes in Everyman's Library, or in Penguin Classics.

The definitive biography on James has been written by Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James, in five volumes (1955-1972). There is also a shortened version: Henry James, A Life (1985) - which still runs to above 700 pages.

Information on James' stories at the internet:

The Ladder (Archived) 

James - Tales (at Mantex)

Henry James Scholar's Guide to Websites

 

*****

 
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