The Aspern Papers (1888)

With the middle period of Henry James full upon us here I found myself thinking less of Jane Austen—though she remains at the heart, to be sure, with all the complexities of Europeanized family relations and especially romance—and more of Vladimir Nabokov. There are clearly antecedents for Pale Fire in "The Aspern Papers" with its oversized lionized hero of a 19th-century poet, Jeffrey Aspern by name, and the literary critic (who narrates the long tale but never once reveals his name) who lusts for some of Aspern's letters, which are in the possession of a broken-down ancient mistress of Aspern's living her latter days in a Venice palazzo with her hapless niece. The various intrigues between the critic and the niece remind me of those between Humbert Humbert and Lolita's mother in that novel too. But the reverberations can be felt elsewhere as well, including one scene that could have inspired significant parts of Susanna Clarke's odd fat fantasy Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. James is in full control of his powers here, letting the long sentences and long paragraphs flow like warm water into a bath. One luxuriates in the comic punch carried by a sure-handed narrative momentum. It is funny and fascinating all at once, these ribald adventures of the literary critic, and towards the end there is a flash of the ghost story in a fierce memorable scene when all has unraveled and gone wrong. What I love about stories like this and Pale Fire is how they consciously set out to transform the dreary grinding life of the literary academic (as I imagine it), recasting it as brash and heroic. At the same time it never loses sight of what it is actually about and thus often proves to be very funny for all its sly sense of its own absurdity. What I know about James for myself is that I have a real preference for these middle-period works (e.g., Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady), which are straightforward enough, or anyway with his impulses to shade and dither held in check by his equal devotion to getting a story told. "The Aspern Papers" makes evident that it doesn't have to be a story of great moment at all—no swashbuckling adventures ever, and even the greatest romances puckered by a knowing irony, even cynicism. "The Aspern Papers" is fully engaging, often very funny, and with an ending that only unfolds to even greater depths of implication.

"interlocutor" count = 3/85 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)