The Diary of a Man of Fifty
international tales by the master
Henry James was a prolific writer of stories, in addition to his many great novels. There are over a hundred in the twelve volumes of the Collected Tales – many of them so long that they become ‘long short stories’ or even novellas, as in the case of The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers.
The three stories in this collection are fairly typical – long, quite complex, and not at all seeking brevity to make their point. In fact the tale which gives the volume its title is one of James’ least-known stories, and wasn’t even included in the Collected Tales. It’s also rather unusual, because it’s written in the form of a journal. James normally likes to keep the narrative and the point of view tightly under his own control in the form of a first person or omniscient third person narrator.
A man just turned fifty revisits Florence, where he had a romantic liaison twenty-seven years before. He ran away from the woman concerned, because he suspected her moral probity. Now he meets her equally charming daughter, who appears to be beguiling a young Englishman in a similar manner. The narrator warns the younger man, who he sees as a version of his younger self.
It’s a story about ‘dangerous’ women and the fear of marriage and emotional commitment – and you don’t need a brass plaque on your door to realise that the tale is also crying out for interpretation as a rationalisation of James’ own homo-eroticism. It also brings into play another of James’ regular themes – the tensions and contradictions between ‘new’ American and ‘old’ European cultures.
This volume also contains two other stories written in a form which James used very rarely – the exchange of letters. ‘A Bundle of Letters’ is Jane Austen (and even Smollett) revisited. The individual correspondents make self-satirising revelations of themselves – the gushingly enthusiastic aesthete; the slightly over-confident New Woman – many of which could be said to be aspects of James’ own character, exaggerated for effect. English and American tourists are staying with a family in Paris to learn the language, but where it seems they spend most of their time talking to each other.
‘The Point of View’ uses the same techniques, but the setting this time is America – presenting both its views of Europe and its views on America itself. One of the characters from the earlier story (Louis Levant, the over-developed art lover) crops up again, and seems to represent almost a satirical portrait of James himself – the American viewing his native land after many years living in Europe. But it is the sane and sober observations of the fifty year old Miss Sturdy which are probably a closer match to James’ own.
He even includes a satirical portrait of himself in the letter of a Frenchman reporting on the absence of American culture to a colleague back in Paris:
They have a novelist with pretensions to literature, who writes about the chase for the husband and the adventures of the rich Americans in our corrupt old Europe, where their primeval candour puts the Europeans to shame. C’est proprement écrit; but it’s terribly pale.
And if you wish to see Henry James as a social and political prophet, you need look no further than these lines, penned by a pro-Yankee character, tired of world travel, and glad to be back home:
Our salvation is here, if we have eyes to see it, and the salvation of Europe into the bargain; that is, if Europe is to be saved, which I rather doubt.
Once one feels, over here, that the great questions of the future are social questions, that a mighty tide is sweeping the world to democracy, and that this country is the biggest stage on which the drama can be enacted, the fashionable European topics seem petty and parochial.
In England they were talking about the Hares and Rabbits Bill, about the extension of the County Franchise, about the Dissenters’ Burials, about the Deceased Wife’s Sister, about the abolition of the House of Lords, about heaven knows what ridiculous measure for the propping-up of their ridiculous little country. And they call us provincial
Those words come from a story written one hundred and twenty seven years ago, but they might have been written last week.
© Roy Johnson 2008
Henry James, The Diary of a Man of Fifty, London: Hesperus Press, 2008, pp.113, ISBN 1843911787
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