More Tales by Henry James

Devotees of the classic short story (and it's more relaxed cousin, the 'tale') should head over pronto to our Henry James sub-site. We've just posted analyses of a number of his greatest stories. As it happens they're all to do with writers and their relationships with readers, the public, and posterity - things which were clearly on the mind of the Master as he approached the climax of his career. The Death of the Lion is a sad tale of a novelist who is swallowed up by his own fans. The Coxon Fund is almost its opposite: a writer and great talker manages to secure a grant from a rich patroness, but then produces nothing for the remainder of his life. The Middle Years is about an author who feels he is about to produce his best work, but needs 'another shot at life' in order to achieve it. And The Figure in the Carpet is a famous literary puzzle: an author claims that there's a hidden pattern in his work and sets critics on a quest to detect it. But he dies before revealing what it is. Every one of these stories is a first class work of art, from a great novelist. Henry James may not be the easiest of writers: his sentences tend to be long and his syntax complex. But he repays attention. Read these tales, and you'll want to read more.

Print on Demand

I bought one of those Print on Demand books from Amazon the other day - Volume 9 from the 12 volume set of the Complete Tales of Henry James which was missing from my collection. For some unknown reason volumes 9 and 10 from the wonderful Rupert Hart-Davis edition are now very rare. PoD offers a service of producing rare, classic, or out-of-print texts in a basic paperback format in small quantities - including single copies.

It served its purpose in delivering the text in a more-or-less readable form at a reasonable price (given the rarity of the volume). But it left a lot to be desired. I imagine it has been scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) and formatted using some automated process.

There are no details about the origin of the text; no critical apparatus or footnotes; no introduction, bibliography, or further reading; and no details of any editorial process. There are almost no page margins either. The text is crammed into the page space with no concessions to the reader's visual comfort.

Is the text accurate? Well, it's hard to tell without the definitive version to make a comparison, but I noticed lots of scrappy errors. Foreign expressions are not italicised; m-dashes have been converted to double hyphens; there are missing words, misspellings, and double full stops; and text which is conversation has been rendered as if it was part of the narrative. There are absolutely no concessions to bibliographic aesthetics. New stories begin half way down a page.

These digitised publishing solutions may perform a useful function: better a print-on-demand text than none at all. But eTexts may be close behind. The deficiencies in what's available demonstrate what added value we expect and get from a well-produced and properly edited edition.

Nonesuch Radio

Nonesuch Radio offers an excellent streaming service of tracks from its music publishing service. You can choose from jazz, musical theatre, film soundtracks, classical, world, pop, and alternative. But probably the best feature is a random mix, which will expose you to stuff you've probably not heard before. I'm just enjoying Bill Evans, which followed a Stephen Songheim track and Dawn Upshaw.

The Leveson Inquiry

The Leveson Inquiry, for all its limitations and weaknesses, might possibly have shed a far-reaching light into the murky regions of power and moral influence in the upper regions of British society.

Previously, the MPs expenses scandal revealed that elected parliamentary representatives and unelected peers of the realm were not averse to stealing from the people they were supposed to be representing. Some went to jail: many did not. But we realised that the first part of Lord Acton's maxim still remains true today: "All power corrupts".

When the inquiry into phone-hacking started we all knew that sleazy tabloid hacks would stop at nothing to get their stories - doorstepping, deception, bribery, diving into dustbins - but I don't think many people were prepared for the depths of cynicism touched on by the grotesque figure of Paul McMullan and his "Privacy is for paedos" bon mot.

But as the days have gone on it's got worse and worse. The so-called journalists all claimed they were under orders - and some of them even claimed to be acting in the public interest. For public interest, read "football players' sex lives" and circulation figures. The buck was passed upwards.

We already know that the newspaper owners were not aware of the criminal invasions of privacy and moral harrassment that were used to provide them with the scandals on which they made their profits. They didn't know - because they told us so. Har har.

Those giving the orders - the senior editors - said the same thing. "I wasn't responsible ... It wasn't my remit ... You'll have to ask somebody else." And then when those responsible for making legal decisions stepped into the box (professional, senior and all rather slimy lawyers) they retreated into Circumlocution Office mode and sidestepped responsibility, doing their best to create the impression that they were men of integrity and honour - when it was quite clear that all the people concerned were from a moral world inhabited by scumbags.

And en route we've had the corruption of the police force thrown in for good measure - a regular system of bribery and the selling of confidential information. Plus collusion between government officials, private investigators, and the Press.

These are people from the top tables, people on six and seven figure salaries, people with celebrity status. Some of them might not actually be guilty of course - but the inquiry is rather like lifing a slab of stone which has been lying for a number of years in the corner of a dirty farm yard. When you lift it up, you recoil with disgust at the mass of low forms of life squirming there.

The Book Strikes Back

There's been lots about the eBook revolution recently. Amazon are trying to persuade us that eBooks dominate Xmas 2011 sales - but that's largely because they want to promote their Kindle eBook reader. But if you keep your eye on bricks and mortar bookshops you'll see that print publishers are starting to fight back. What weapons are they using? Well, the old-fashioned production values of typographic style, eye-catching graphic design, and physical desirability. The book is becoming once again an object of desire. If you look at an example such as Alexandra Harris's recent Romantic Moderns you'll see that her publishers Thames and Hudson have commissioned good designers to create aesthetically pleasing jacket covers, they use patterns for the end papers inside the book, choose thick creamy paper for their pages, use a stylish font for the body text, add lots of wide margins and leading, plus full colour photographs and illustrations. The result is a book you haven't seen for ages - something that is pleasing to hold, feel, look at, and own.

Short Stories by Henry James

For devotees of the short story, we've just launched several explanatory guides to the work of Henry James. Actually, the stories are not short by modern standards, but they have the distinction of all being very good. The Best in the Jungle is quite well known. It's about a man who has a presentiment that something momentous lies ahead for him in life, but he doesn't know what it will be. Not so well known, but amazingly contemporary in its relevance is The Papers which concerns, would you believe, journalists making up stories for newspapers to generate publicity for would-be celebrities. Four Meetings is an almost tragic tale of a gullible American schoolteacher who has a dream of seeing Europe but is conned out of it by an unscrupulous relative. Two stories are about women in relation to ships. In Pandora a spirited young American woman tweaks the nose of a young German diplomat who she meets on a cross-Atlantic liner, whilst in The Patagonia a similar young woman throws herself overboard rather than meet the man to whom she is going to be married. The Bench of Desolation is not nearly so gloomy as its title suggests, Fordham Castle is a story of an advanced form of social climbing - by pretending to be somebody else - and Daisy Miller is another of his acknowledged masterpieces about Americans in Europe, with the eponymous Daisy breaking social taboos at a cost to herself. Every one a gem, and a tribute to an author known to other writers simply as 'The Master'.

Henry James in Andalucia

Just enjoying another reading 'week' here in Mijas, and I have to report that my production quotient has been higher than normal because of unusually bad weather. Some days it's been impossible to move out of the house. But with my trusty book bag alongside, I've managed to get to grips with Daisy Miller (so to speak) plus her fictional sisters in his stories Pandora and The Patagonia. There've also been excursions into boys-stuff Joseph Conrad, with The Secret Sharer and The Shadow-Line. More to come too from Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy - but that will depend on the weather.

Joseph Conrad and the novella

Joseph Conrad explored just about every genre of prose fiction. He wrote novels, long and short stories, travel books, memoirs, essays, and even experimented with collaborative writing. But the genre in which he seems to be most comfortable and in which he created some of his most carefully crafted works is the novella. This is a work which is longer than a story but shorter than a novel. But it's not just a matter of length. The novella usually has very few characters, the events of the narrative are concentrated on a single issue, and that issue itself is usually of universal rather than just local or temporary significance.

A short story may be based on no more than an anecdote, whereas a novella deals with large scale general themes. A novel can have a cast of dozens and feature multiple locations, whereas a novella can have just two or even one main character, and the setting is likely to remain focussed in one place.

We've just posted study guides to two of Conrad's best novellas, both of them based on his own experiences as a young sea captain. The Shadow-Line deals with the character-building drama of a ship which is becalmed with a sick crew, and The Secret Sharer explores notions of 'the double' and 'alternative selves' when a young captain allows a murderer to hide on board his ship.

More on the novella here

Marcel Proust and Manchester

I was pleased to note recently that Marcel Proust had an active connection with Manchester, my native city. He was very much influenced by the writing of John Ruskin, whose famous lectures on culture and society Sesame and Lilies were delivered there in 1864. And whilst translating Ruskin's work into French, Proust was assisted by English born Marie Nordlinger, who was cousin of the French composer Reynaldo Hahn, who in his turn was Proust's lover. Marie Nordlinger lived in Rusholme, the same suburb where Ruskin had made his presentations. It's an area all now swallowed up into the behemoth which is The University of Manchester. Frederick Engels also lived just round the corner, but as a cultural footnote to this posting, the postbox in which he dropped his letters to Marx (including cheques) still exists there on Oxford Road.

False Readings

Many years ago, in a search for direction with literary studies, I read a guide which recommended Madame Bovary as one of the greatest romantic love stories. I dashed out and bought a copy, and couldn't understand the disjunction between what I was looking for and what was being delivered. It was anything but romantic. I was reading the right novel - but with the wrong preconceptions. Flaubert wrote it as an anti-romantic novel. The same thing happened when I read Moby Dick, commended by the same guide as 'a gripping chase of the Great White Whale'. After six hundred pages, I was wondering when this chase would ever begin.

And now fifty years later, the same thing has just happened in reverse. I decided to re-read Joseph Conrad's famous novella The Secret Sharer, got my copy of a well-edited text from Amazon, and started making notes on 'the double', ambiguities of 'sharing', youthful maturing experiences, and so on. But I was puzzled by the amount of time it was taking the escaping swimmer Leggat to appear alongside. I was half way through the book, and the captain had only just boarded his new command. Then I realised I was reading not The Secret Sharer but The Shadow Line. Right approach - wrong book. Doh!