This is a novella more than a novel. Written by Henry James (1843-1916), it was first published as a serial over three months in 1888 in The Atlantic Monthly.

I'll get to why I've returned to Henry James in a minute. But we go back a while, the two of us. Washington Square was one of my A-level texts, and while still in sixth form, I munched my way through a number of his other books (on the school bus, this would have been, the top-deck air thick with cigarette smoke, and mid-seventies hits blasting out on some kid's portable radio).

By the time we were contemplating the Great Clear-Out (when we were thinking of moving from Australia, that is), and I decided to console myself for the loss of so many books by memorializing them individually, it seems a number of Henry James titles had already fallen by the wayside. Apart from Washington Square, I'd kept The Europeans, and The Spoils of Poynton, and a couple of collections of short stories. They were all undated, but two of them cost GBP 0.30 and another GBP 0.40, so they must have gone back a while. I'm sure, in my bus days, that I read A Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller. Maybe I borrowed those...


See them?

I briefly returned to James during the early 1990s, when stories on tape and French radio were the only way to make two long daily car-commutes bearable. I listened to Washington Square, noting in my diary: "I'm certainly more aware of the pain of it now than I was at 18. I think then I secretly longed for a happy ending. Now I appreciate Catherine's growth, and her ultimate strength." I also listened to The Turn of the Screw, which my diary tells me I found pretty impenetrable...

So why Henry James again now? After a lapse of three decades...? Well, after reading The House of Doors, I came across this comment in an article by John Self: "[Tan Twan Eng's novel is] the latest in a curious sub-genre: that of the biographical novel about a gay (or gay-adjacent) writer, following Colm Toibin’s brilliant The Master (Henry James) and The Magician (Thomas Mann), Janette Jenkins’s wrongly overlooked Firefly (Noel Coward) and Damon Galgut’s rightly overlooked Arctic Summer (E.M. Forster)." After reading the various interpretations of Pierre Loti's Aziyade, I found this very fascinating. Thomas Mann, well, yes, understandable enough if you've read Death in Venice; E.M. Forster, again, yes, we have Maurice, which I remember finding very moving; as far as Noel Coward is concerned, I'm too unfamiliar with his life and work to have much idea.

But Henry James as "gay (or gay-adjacent)"? Well, apparently, it's complicated, as can readily be understood from the account Toibin sketches here, and Felice Picano's review of Toibin's book here.

These pieces raise many questions, and I'll come back to some of them later. Bottom line, though, Toibin's The Master sounds worth reading, but for it to make sense, I felt, I need to reacquaint myself with the work of James himself, preferably by way of books I've never read.

So this is the one I started with. It's a great story, very psychological and suspenseful.

The bones are these: An unnamed narrator cooks up a plan to insinuate himself into the household of the Misses Bordereau -- respectively Juliana and Tita, aunt and niece (ostensibly, though some suspect mother and daughter...), elderly and middle-aged -- who live in seclusion and poverty "in a dilapidated old palace on an out-of-the-way canal" in Venice.

And why this cuckooing? Well, our I-figure is obsessed with the life and work of Jeffrey Aspern, long deceased, but in life a noted American poet of the Romantic era. More specifically, Aspern had some kind of liaison with Juliana, who possesses -- or so our fanatic believes -- a stash of letters from the great man.


The photos are all from the Museum of Romanticism, Madrid, 2020

The narrator's mission cannot be undertaken straightforwardly, however. His sidekick, John Cumnor, has already approached Juliana by letter -- and been sent away with a flea in his ear. "I can arrive at the papers only by putting her off her guard," our inveigler explains to Mrs Prest, a friend in Venice, "and I can put her off her guard only by ingratiating diplomatic practices. Hypocrisy, duplicity are my only chance." So we know right away where we are with this narrator...

He initially meets Tita, but having stated his proposition -- that he rent rooms off them, and cultivate their apparently neglected garden -- he returns to meet the aunt. Thus he comes "face to face with the Juliana of some of Aspern's most exquisite and most renowned lyrics". Who turns out to be "very small and shrunken", but remarkably feisty for all that. She's routinely nasty to Tita, and distinctly avaricious: "You may have as many rooms as you like," she tells the narrator, "if you will pay a good deal of money." And she names an astronomic sum, which -- worshipper as he is is -- he agrees to fork out.

Tita is something of a sad case. Not beautiful, we imagine. The narrator initially joked with Mrs Prest about paying court to her, but receives the reply: "Ah, wait till you see her!" When we do first see her, she is described as "a long, lean, pale person, habited apparently in a dull-coloured dressing gown", and she comes across as somewhat helpless. But she recognizes that Juliana, fearing imminent death, has named the exorbitant sum of rent for her benefit. She's obviously bored and dissatisfied with her life: "We are terribly quiet. I don't know how the days pass. We have no life." And at one point, when the narrator refers to pleasure, she says, "Oh, pleasure, pleasure -- there's no pleasure in this house!"



Many weeks pass with no advance in the narrator's quest, but one evening he gets talking to Tita in the garden he has created (or, more accurately, has paid to have created, because I don't think he's actually out there doing the digging himself). Tita is obviously happy to have the chance to talk, and is guilelessly open towards her new lodger. She and her aunt used to lead a brilliant life in Venice, she says. Now their acquaintances only make annual visits. "There was something affecting in the good faith of this sketch of former social glories... The matter of her reminiscences struck one as an old world altogether. If she had not been so decent her references would have seemed to carry one back to the queer rococo Venice of Casanova."

When asked, she admits that her aunt knew Aspern personally: "She said he was a god." After a few more questions, Tita asks: "Do you write about HIM -- do you pry into his life?" Our narrator admits he does: "Yes, I have written about him and I am looking for more material. In heaven's name have you got any?" She is very shocked by this, and two more weeks go by without further conversation.

Then there's another meeting with Juliana. Although Tita says she has not reported the conversation in the garden, and the narrator believes her, he has no doubt that Juliana has winkled out his true purpose: "She had turned me over and over in the long, still hours, and she had guessed. The worst of it was that she looked terribly like an old woman who at a pinch would burn her papers."

We're now in a holding pattern. Juliana wants to keep the narrator around, so that she can continue to milk him. He, on the other hand, is not getting any closer to his purpose, although he does ask Tita to help if she can -- by, for example, preventing the destruction of the coveted papers.

At a subsequent meeting, Juliana overplays her hand somewhat by trying to sell her lodger a portrait of Aspern, painted by her father. She only wants 1,000 pounds for it... The answer is no.

When Juliana suffers a bout of illness, caused, the narrator fears, by her run-in with him, he asks her niece to try to locate the papers, which -- Tita says -- have been moved. Later that night, he toys with the idea of opening the bureau where he suspects the papers are now concealed. He even starts to wonder whether Tita has complicitly smoothed the way for him to do this. But he is surprised by Juliana, who now definitely sees him for what he is, and exclaims, memorably: "Ah, you publishing scoundrel!" Our narrator leaves Venice for a while. After all, "it had been devilish awkward, as the young men say, to be found by Miss Bordereau in the dead of night examining the attachment of her bureau".

When he returns, Juliana is dead.



We have never really respected our narrator. He is duplicitous, ruthless, and exploitative. But now his true colours really hit our eyes. He worries, first, that Juliana has destroyed the papers. In which case, he will depart, "for seriously (and as it struck me in the morning light) I could not linger there to act as guardian to a piece of middle-aged female helplessness. If she had not saved the papers wherein should I be indebted to her?"

But Tita tells him the papers still exist. Indeed, there are more than she had supposed. But she feels duty-bound not to show them to him. She stopped Juliana burning the papers, and made no formal promise to the old lady, but she is restrained by the knowledge that Juliana hated the idea of their being seen. It's at this point that she effectively offers herself in marriage: "If you were a relation it would be different... Anything that is mine -- would be yours, and you could do what you like... I would give you everything -- and she would understand, where she is -- she would forgive me!"

The narrator is horrified. He denies that he has courted her -- and this is true. But he is totally forgetting that his attentions might have been misconstrued by a guileless, lonely woman, even one who realizes that her guest has but one aim in life. And now the gloves are off: "I had been as kind as possible, because I really liked her; but since when had that become a crime where a woman of such an age and such an appearance was concerned?... At any rate, whether I had given cause or not it went without saying that I could not pay the price. I could not accept. I could not, for a bundle of tattered papers, marry a ridiculous, pathetic, provincial old woman."

Ah, the milk of human kindness...

Initially, he flees (leaving Tita, we presume, in no doubt of his loathing). But after a night's sleep, he reconsiders. Maybe he can think of some other scheme? Maybe -- maybe, because Tita somehow seems beautified this morning -- he could actually consider marrying her...

Too late, though, because she has burned the papers...

And having admitted this, she is transfigured "back to a plain, dingy, elderly person". She looks at him. There is "no resentment, nothing hard or vindictive", but he will long suffer from that look. He later sends her a generous sum of money for the portrait she has given him, but actually he kept it, and hung it over his desk. The book ends: "When I look at it my chagrin at the loss of the letters becomes almost intolerable." (Bauer points out, by the way, that James rephrased this final sentence for the 1908 New York edition of the novel, substituting: "When I look at it, I can scarcely bear my loss -- I mean of the precious papers." The dash seems to indicate a loss greater than that of the letters, and of course we're free to speculate on what that might be.)



The central questions that the story leaves lingering in the air are these: How much should be revealed about a person once that person is gone; if that person is a world literary figure, does that make a difference to the answer; and what restraints should biographers and collectors observe when gathering their materials?

Our narrator links his obsession with Aspern to a desire to shine a penetrating and irresistable light on his subject. He and Cumnor believe they have served Aspern's memory better than anyone else, "and we had done it by opening lights into his life. He had nothing to fear from us because he had nothing to fear from the truth." There have been rumours, he tells us, that Aspern didn't behave that well towards Juliana (or indeed towards other women), but "we had never failed to acquit him conscientiously of shabby behavior", despite the fact that "half the women of his time, to speak liberally, had flung themselves at his head". As readers, having seen the narrator in action, we reasonably wonder how fairly he would have dealt with Juliana's past, and sympathise strongly with her desire not to let herself be taken hostage in this way...

There's an illuminating conversation at one point between Juliana and the narrator. She starts:

"Do you think it's right to rake up the past?"
"I don't know that I know what you mean by raking it up; but how can we get at it unless we dig a little..."
"Oh, I like the past, but I don't like critics," the old woman declared with her fine tranquility.
"Neither do I, but I like their discoveries."
"Aren't they mostly lies?"
"The lies are what they sometimes discover..."
"The truth is God's, it isn't man's; we had better leave it alone. Who can judge of it -- who can say?"

And yes -- who can say? Have creators lost all right to their privacy once their works are out there in the world? Just because someone is a world figure of some sort, can the world simply DEMAND to know everything about him/her?

In this connection, there's a very prescient little comment, as the narrator wonders how Juliana has managed to stay under the radar in the way she has: "It was a revelation to us that it was possible to keep so quiet as that in the latter half of the nineteenth century -- the age of newspapers and telegrams and photographs and interviewers." You want to warn him: "Hey, you ain't seen not'in' yet..." Actually, that prescience recurs, and with it the temptation to make the same response, in a remark about travelling: "When Americans went abroad in 1820 there was something romantic, almost heroic in it, as compared with the perpetual ferryings of the present hour, when photography and other conveniences have annihilated surprise." But I digress...



The antecedents of The Aspern Papers are quite complex, and all have a bearing on this question of disclosure/non-disclosure.

According to Pridmore, when he wrote the novella, James was staying in Bellosguardo in a villa he was sharing (platonically) with a writer called Constance Fenimore Woolson. She would have liked a more intimate relationship, but James either didn't know, or didn't acknowledge, that this was the case. According to Leon Edel, his biographer, she might have spoken to him about her feelings, and "James's attitude towards the middle-aged Miss Woolson may have influenced The Aspern Papers in the narrator's rejection of the middle-aged Miss Tina." (James changed the name Tita to Tina in the later edition.) Would Constance, we wonder, have wanted to be immortalized in this rather humiliating way...? Six years after James wrote this story, Pridmore tells us, "Miss Woolson died in Venice, alone, just after Christmas, probably a suicide. She had been an important friend and James really did like her. He was devastated by her death, especially the manner of it, and helped her family generously for the rest of his life." Did he feel he could have handled things better perhaps?

Then there's the Claire Clairmont element. James tells us (in the preface to the 1908 edition) that the inspiration for The Aspern Papers was his discovery that Claire (1798-1879) had been living in Florence until comparatively recently. She was the stepsister of Mary Shelley, and became Lord Byron's mistress for a while, but there were also rumours of a relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley (husband of Mary), and -- according to Hoeveler -- of shenanigans involving all four of them. And Claire supposedly possessed some priceless Shelley letters... At about the same time he heard about her recent residence in Florence, he also spoke to Countess Gamba, a relative of Byron’s last mistress, Teresa Gamba Guiccioli. James's interlocutor confessed she had destroyed at least one "scandalous" letter that Byron and Teresa had exchanged. Was she right to do this? Did they deserve their privacy, all those years later? And "by blatantly aligning his portrait of Juliana Bordereau with Claire", was James deliberately blackening Juliana's name in the eyes of contemporary audiences?

But wait, there's more... According to Mambrol, in her old age, Claire took in an American lodger called Captain Silsbee, who was himself on the hunt for papers relating to Byron and Shelley...

Bysshe Stein brings out another Byronic connection, since Venice is where the poet wrote Don Juan: "It seems beyond question that Juliana is a surrogate of the beautiful Donna Julia in the first Canto who seduces the sixteen-year-old Don Juan. By association, the artist advises the reader that Juliana seduced Aspern, not the contrary, as the narrator thinks." I'm starting to feel much sorrier for Juliana than I did while reading the story. One scurrilous implication after another...

Aspern, meanwhile -- at least according to Scharnhorst -- is modelled on Nathaniel Hawthorne. "James," he argues, "had been disturbed by the invasions of Hawthorne's privacy -- the ethical problem at issue in the nouvelle -- some fifteen years BEFORE he heard the anecdote about Silsbee and Claire Clairmont." According to his widow, Hawthorne had always resisted the idea that anyone might write his biography, and "James believed that the posthumous issue of six volumes of Hawthorne's private notebooks violated the spirit, if not the letter, of the request". Seven years later, however, James began to change his tune, and wrote his own book on Hawthorne: "Although he protests in the first sentence... that he has written a 'critical essay,' not a biography, the distinction seems academic." James visited Julian Hawthorne, the celebrated author's son, with the intention of getting information for his work: "Like Juliana, Julian impeded the investigation of the erstwhile biographer... James would make Juliana, like Julian, a crabby expatriated American, not a genteel Englishwoman like Claire Clairmont." Julian then goes on to write his own biography of his father...

It's hardly surprising that James destroyed his own private papers in 1909 (and letters are frequently destroyed in his fiction). You really can't trust anyone...



Which brings us full circle to Toibin again, and the tight control James's family attempted to exert over his letters after his death. There were many motivations at play here, but one of them was certainly a concern over James's sexuality. When a volume of his letters appeared, edited by Percy Lubbock under close supervision by the family, there was still anxiety that too much had been given away. James's sister-in-law wrote to her son: "People are putting a vile interpretation on his silly letters to young men. Poor dear Uncle Henry."

So that's another angle to the puzzle. As a public figure, out there in the public domain, it's a question not only of whether your OWN views about your privacy should be respected after your death, but also of the extent to which the views of your family should be taken into account, and if so, for how long...

In James's case, suppressing all information on the author's complex sexuality -- even if possible -- would have smeared an important lens through which to view his work. Toibin refers us to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's 1990 book, which "proposed an entire new way of reading James as a gay writer whose efforts to remain in the closet gave him his style and may, in fact, have been his real subject, all the more present for being secret and submerged".

As an example of this lens, Bauer argues that the narrator in The Aspern Papers "increasingly eroticises the 'open secret' of the fetishised letters as a substitute for his unliveable homoerotic desire for the dead poet". I'm not really sure I buy that... But then I'm not accustomed to reading things against this particular grain, so maybe I'm just not seeing what is plain to others (including, for example, Lukacs and Hoeveler).

I've always been a voracious reader. I've always needed stories, and have not thrived during periods when they've been rationed because of lack of time. But I think it's only since retirement that I've become interested in the LIVES of authors. Almost always now, I check out an author's biography, and look for the context that produced his/her work. This is legitimate, I think. No work of art is produced in splendid isolation. Everything is part of a much, much bigger picture. But HOW MUCH we need to know -- when these people are still alive, and when they are dead -- is for me still a very open question.