The Aspern Papers – Henry James, 1888 ★★

A Polite Form of Rape

Who has the right to decide how best to honor a historical figure’s legacy, the woman who loved him or a scholar who has transformed personal appreciation into a kind of portable altar?

That’s the nub of this Henry James novella, a story which takes a good idea and makes it into something people can enjoy arguing over at least as much as they do reading. More so arguing, I think; The Aspern Papers is frustratingly reticent about involving the reader in anything so banal as a forward-moving plot.

The unnamed narrator is an American scholar in search of the love letters of Jeffrey Aspern, a big deal in the early 1800s and still well regarded as the century reaches an end. He comes to Venice after learning that Aspern’s former lover Juliana Bordereau resides there, still alive and apparently unwilling to part with the letters Aspern wrote her.

The narrator is willing to do just about anything to get at them:

“I can arrive at the papers only by putting her off her guard, and I can put her off her guard only by ingratiating diplomatic practices. Hypocrisy, duplicity are my only chance. I am sorry for it, but for Jeffrey Aspern’s sake I would do worse still.”

He settles on a plan to offer himself as a boarder at her palatial, slightly dilapidated mansion, pay whatever price she demands, and work his wiles on Juliana’s middle-aged niece. Can he get the niece to help him get her aunt’s papers? Will crafty Juliana sniff him out?

Venice emerges as a central character in The Aspern Papers; more interesting in its beguiling beauty than anything we learn about Jeffrey Aspern. Image from https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00s2slh.

A possibility for tense gamesmanship hovers in the air, as well as an opportunity to present us with a figure in the fictional Aspern that touches on great themes of art and life. Yet Henry James, ever low-key, seems more interested in exploring the mindset of our unnamed narrator; how singularly motivated he is by his hunt, and how capable he is of justifying any tack he takes in the name of art.

The best quote I can apply to reviewing The Aspern Papers is not from the novella itself, but rather the book I read just before it, which also happens to deal with the power of the written word. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury has someone muse: “The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”

I can’t judge Aspern as a writer, since James presents no excerpts from his work. But it is clear from the start that our narrator falls into the last category. He’s not cruel or without a conscience, just very smooth at satisfying any qualms he might have about selfish ploys by thinking more of final ends, even if he is the main (only?) beneficiary.

Author Henry James. The Aspern Papers is a continuation of themes explored in earlier novels, like Americans living overseas. James lived in Italy while writing The Aspern Papers and settled in Europe soon after, eventually becoming a British citizen. Image from http://www.silksoundbooks.com/authors/henry-james/. 

The fact James doesn’t actually quote Aspern, or even give us a single title of his to consider, seems deliberate. He’s the hollow center of a sham perpetuated in his name. The narrator tells us all we need to know about his own mindset in the opening pages:

She pretended to make light of his genius and I took no pains to defend him. One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defence.

A bit unbalanced, no? What we have here is one of those unreliable narrators who frequently pop up in literature at the time. The more he talks and explains his actions, the more on guard we should be. Do we still root for him anyway? James manages to pull off this tension, to a degree, by making his bold quest so close at hand.

Ultimately, though, I found myself suffering from a problem I find occurs often in reading this author. I didn’t care about the characters enough to be invested in what they were doing, for good or for ill.

I ran into a similar problem with the last James book I read, his more heralded novella The Turn Of The Screw. In fact, the situations are similar. In both stories, our main characters are cooped up in an old house. There’s a ghostly figure at the center of things here, too, Jeffrey Aspern. And both ultimately revolve around a mystery which seems at its heart to be about nothing at all.

The Turn Of The Screw centers more overtly on horror and evil; The Aspern Papers is more subtle. There is an opportunity here for Gothic stagecraft; in fact a 1947 film adaptation called The Lost Moment starring Robert Cummings and Susan Hayward takes a Hitchcock approach to the material that almost, kind of, works. In doing so, it pulls against the quieter tone of the source novella. 

The Lost Moment adds a romantic element between the main characters which plays at an intriguing blend of Rebecca and Vertigo. Melodramatic, yes, but the sort of drama missed in the source material. Not bad, and I found it free on YouTube. http://videowatchdog.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-lost-moment-reviewed.html

Instead of scares, the novella peppers us with questions like one where Juliana, wry as always beneath a habitual veil, asks the narrator: “Do you think it’s right to rake up the past?” The answer, it seems, is no, however hungry we are for some kind of grand discovery. The past, we come to understand, belongs to Juliana, and is hers to do what she wants with it, burn it or sell it or hide it in her bedroom until death do they part.

The narrator settles for self-aggrandizement to justify what he’s up to:

My eccentric private errand became a part of the general romance and the general glory – I felt even a mystic companionship, a moral fraternity with all those who in the past had been in the service of art. They had worked for beauty, for a devotion; and what else was I doing?

If we had a better sense of Aspern as a poet or a person, this argument might tug at us more. Since he’s just a mute ghost here, it doesn’t.

James does get value from his setting. There is the immediate one of the house itself, described as “cold and cautious” and largely empty as Juliana and her niece reside in one small section of it, leaving the rest for the narrator to wander through. Then there is the larger setting of Venice itself, majestic and vibrant, centered around the glorious Piazza San Marco where the narrator ponders a statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni:

The statue of Bartolommeo Colleoni as seen in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. His profession was that of a condottieri, or mercenary, though he was reputedly less nasty than most. He makes a pregnant figure for the narrator to look up to in The Aspern Papers. https://discovervenice.wordpress.com/.

The statue is incomparable, the finest of all mounted figures, unless that of Marcus Aurelius, who rides benignant before the Roman Capitol, be finer; but I was not thinking of that; I only found myself staring at the triumphant captain as if he had an oracle on his lips. The western light shines into all his grimness at that hour and makes it wonderfully personal. But he continued to look far over my head, at the red immersion of another day – he had seen so many go down into the lagoon through the centuries – and if he were thinking of battles and stratagems they were of a different quality from any I had to tell him of.

I find James a masterful descriptive writer, as he is here and elsewhere in the story. But when it comes to plot, that lack of investment tells.

A focus does eventually settle in; The Aspern Papers’s conclusion revolves around the narrator’s relationship not with Juliana, maddening distant, but rather the niece, Miss Tita (renamed Miss Tina for later editions). Miss Tita is described as “the oddest mixture of the shrinking and the direct,” vulnerable in her isolation and clearly moved by the presence of this stranger in her life.

Thus she seems a possible ally for the narrator’s quest, but as she comes to lean on him for companionship in an otherwise lonely life, he sense a trap about to spring:

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.

The Aspern Papers has been dramatized several times, including a 1959 British stage production depicted here starring Michael Redgrave as the sneaky protagonist. In 2018, his daughter Vanessa Redgrave and granddaughter Joely Richardson played aunt and niece Bordereau in a film adaptation. Image from https://www.collectors.com.

The narrator will come to regret this mindset, but we do so much earlier on, as we don’t have enough of a sense about these characters to worry about their entanglements. We just want a look at those papers James keeps hyping and pulling away.

At risk of spoiling a story I regard as spoiler-proof, the matter of the papers themselves proves anticlimactic.

The ending is solid and not completely negative, with the narrator having an epiphany more comic than tragic. He spent a lot of money, and does get something to show for it, beyond wisdom. Some fans of the book point to Miss Tita as the hero of the piece; she’s not quite that, but she manages to hold our interest longer than anyone else.

The novella is reportedly based on the legend of the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who corresponded with a stepsister in Italy, Claire Clairmont. Living out her days in Florence, Clairmont died in 1879 and also was a muse for another famous poet, Lord Byron; sometimes he is referenced as the inspiration for Aspern.

A painting of Claire Clairmont by Irish artist Amelia Curran. Byron wrote of her in 1817: I never loved her nor pretended to love her—but a man is a man--& if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours of the night—there is but one way. Image from http://theesotericcuriosa.blogspot.com/2010/03/tainted-goddess-of-free-love-claire.html. 

I was reminded more of still another literary giant, the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wasn’t one for mistresses but did spend considerable time abroad and influenced James enormously. Like Hawthorne, Aspern, we are told, was an American, and his work was “essentially American” at a time when American literature was seen as “crude and provincial.”

I even caught echoes of one Hawthorne novel, The Blithedale Romance, in the way these characters operate, the employment of an unreliable narrator, a central mystery explored in service of the plot, and how our sympathies for the narrator are challenged as the plot unfolds.

But echoes were about all I got reading The Aspern Papers, an interesting example of good and not-so-good elements of its author. Not easy to dismiss given James’ subtlety at exploring the many facets of human engagement, but hard to recommend.