Tales of a Master’s Uncertainty

Abstract

Tales of a Master’s Uncertainty Joshua Parker Philip Horne, editor. Tales from a Master’s Notebook: Stories Henry James Never Wrote. Vintage, 2018. xiv + 255 pp. $17.19 (hardcover). Mary F. Burns. At Chalk Farm. San Francisco: Word by Word, 2019. 187 pp. $8.95 (paperback). Mary F. Burns. The Grace of Uncertainty. San Francisco: Word by Word, 2019. 102 pp. $5.95 (paperback). Michael Woods’s foreword to this short story collection speaks of ghosts: “Tales from a Master’s Notebook is full of ghosts,” the “undead” (xii). Unlike novels, by definition offering new, original narratives, the tale, etymologically related to “talk, or telling,” is “an account of things in their due order,” or, perhaps more interestingly, “things divulged that were given secretly, gossip.” Its German root word is linked with reckoning and numbers. Here, eleven tales differing in tone, theme, and setting have a common source as unfinished story sketches in James’s nine surviving notebooks covering the years 1878 to 1911 (recently available online with all of James’s “original hieroglyphics”), which Philip Horne has been re-editing. “Why these particular volumes survive and the rest were chucked into the flames at Lamb House is something of a puzzle,” Horne writes. [End Page E-1] Horne lays out an overview of precursors who have taken up James’s unfinished plot sketches, from David Lodge to Joyce Carol Oates to John Banville (leaving aside facetious parodists like Max Beerbohm and H. G. Wells). Horne asked ten authors to choose a plot sketch from entries in James’s notebooks (James’s “germs”) and to make “whatever loose arrangements they wished to make, quite privately, with the spirit of James” (12). “Germs,” Horne calls them, quickly clarifying: as in the sense of seeds (3). Much as Roland Barthes suggested, the “soul” of any narrative function is “its seedlike quality, which enables the function to inseminate the narrative with an element that will later come to materiality, on the same level, or elsewhere on another level” (Barthes 244). You might best begin with the volume’s appendix. Read the plot sketches from James’s notebooks, then choose which tale you’d like to see fleshed out by the authors Horne has selected. James left open patches in the plots sketched in his notebooks. Would a husband take back a straying wife? How long will love wait? Will X marry Y, or will Y abscond with Z? At times James’s notes seem to indicate he felt his tales might incarnate better at a later date, even decades later. In the hands of these authors, James’s plots are, if not quite infected with James’s style, haunting. James haunts us, but these authors haunt him. I started with Colm Tóibín’s take on 34 D[e].V[ere].G[ardens]. Jan. 23, 1894: “Silence.” James’s 1894 journal records a story told to James by Lady Gregory: a wife’s passion leads her to run away from her husband and children. Her lover having deserted her, she returns home, on the condition that she leave the family forever once her children are grown—on a fixed date and hour. The hour strikes. Mayhem ensues as she leaves the family in “bewilderment and distress,” appalled and with “the most terrible effect on them” (CN 84–86). Horne’s footnotes are wonderful.1 Tóibín’s tale works in flashbacks, from the perspective of the wife, now an aging dowager. The Dowager describes in detail a miserable love life with her late husband, a man twice her age. Stylistically, James is in there. But there’s also Djuna Barnes, Ian McEwan, Lorrie Moore, and one senses how much the intervening waves of modernism, postmodernism, neorealism, and minimalism can’t help but color the style of contemporary authors, even those most eager to follow the lessons of the master. Spirits of the living mingle with those of the dead. Tóibín’s fictional husband, a retired MP, and his wife go to Cairo, where a young poet and his wife are by chance staying at the same hotel. The two couples dine together each night. The dinner scenes, as...