‘The Aspern Papers’ by Henry James (1888)
Jan 3rd, 2008 by abi
“A story of ’spoils and stratagems’, The Aspern Papers is set in a crumbling Venetian palazzo, where an old woman treasures up some letters sent to her by the great American poet Aspern. When a zealous literary historian arrives and attempts to prise the letters from her, he finds his charm, ingenuity and morals stretched to breaking point.”
Wow, wow, and wow again. This is such a short story but there’s so much in it and I admit I was really sucked into its vivid world with all its complexities and contradictions.
The writing, of course, was magnificent, depicting Venice, the hot days, the garden, and the big empty house, perfectly. There were also some wonderful observations, each of which would set me off on my own train of thought. In particular I loved the moments he had when thinking about the very old lady and how she must have been young once, her hands must have touched Aspern’s, her eyes must have met his, and that she belonged to a long gone age that seemed so out of his grasp. I admit, too, that I was fully convinced by his obsession with Aspern and the single mindedness that resulted.
In this story James is extremely clever in that he manages simultaneously to make the reader understand and therefore sympathise with the narrator while at the same time making it clear that his actions are morally dubious and dangerous. There were occasions when I had every sympathy with him and was willing him to succeed and others where I was furious with him and horrified by his behaviour. Sometimes I even felt both these things at once.
***spoilers ahead ***
The author is not without some judgement here and even in the (unnamed, by the way) narrator’s telling of the tale we can see enough of the other characters to understand more about them than he himself does and we see into his mind enough to censure him. Hence at the end Miss Tina’s behaviour is far more comprehensible to the reader than it is to the narrator who has been too blinkered to see what we could see. The final outcome is more the narrator’s fault than anyone else’s and I admit I was very upset about the loss of the papers and felt like shouting aloud to them all not to be so stupid and destroy such a valuable resource simply because of their own whims and egos.
However, even as I felt this I couldn’t shake the feeling that James was somehow laughing at me for feeling so, as if he was saying to me ‘don’t think those papers are a true representation of the man, and what gives you the right to pry anyway?’. That said, the characters and themes are interwoven so masterfully that it’s impossible to see him as coming down firmly on one side or the other. For all I can decipher he may have been bewailing the loss of the papers as much as I was!
A thoroughly brilliant novel, I might even venture to say one of the best I’ve read (and the best of James’s that I’ve read so far), I will definitely keep a copy of this in my permanent collection to go back to.
