The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw

First library book I borrowed in over a decade. It was good. By my reading of the successful Turn of the Screw, I look forward to reading more of Henry James. He writes the way I think and speak. Pretty much long, non punctuated, sentences. But he is able to portray thoughts much better than I of course. Because of his writing style, I became totally engrossed when I read it and shut the world out and actually was startled a few times. The story was a great suspense classic with a twist at the end. I recommend it to anybody.

Henry James (1843-1916) is an acquired literary taste! James novels became increasingly esoteric as the master grew older. His style is densely colored with his observing eye as his long sentences are used to plumb into the depths of the human heart and mind. James demands your total concentration. In an electronic age this is hard to acquire but this author does warrant careful reading. The Aspern Papers of 1888 was inspired by a story heard by James. A woman who had been loved by Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley was reported to be lving in James' own day. James took this nugget and polished it into a gem of a tale. The narrator wheedles his way into a home in Venice owned by the aged lover of the fictionally famous author Jefrey Aspern. The narrator seeks to obtain the love letters so they might be published. He will then be the reaper of the rewards of such a literay sensation! However, the old lady refuses to give up the yellowing pages. She dies but not before her niece Miss Tina falls in love with the narrator. She gives him a choice: marry her though she is late middle age or lose the opportunity to possess the papers. How will the narrator choose? The Turn of the Screw is the most famous ghost story in the English language. It has been turned into an opera and been seen in many film and television version. The plot concerns a young woman who is hired to tutor young children Miles and Flora whose father remains out of the picture. He resides in London while the governess and children live on his vast estate in the countryside. She and the children see the ghosts of dead servants Peter Quince and the former governess Miss Jessel. The terror is palpable in the scary home. The novelette ends in a suspensful and surprising way. The story is open to psychological interpretations which have kept critics guessing for years as to the story's meaning. Is the tale a dream of the governess? Is it an honest report of ghosts? Is it a veiled descrption of puberty and budding sexuality? Read the novella making up your own mind. Henry James was a master of the short story and novella. These two offerings in the Penguin edition are well worthy of your time, attention and money.

This omnibus collects two of James's best and most well-known shorter works, The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw. Both allow the work of James to live up to its reputation of being very dense and operating on multiple levels at once. He had the ability, as did Hawthorne, to make very short works seem extremely long -- although, at least in this reviewer's humble opinion, James did it much better and more successfully. The Turn of the Screw, in particular, though very short for a novel, is almost startlingly complex -- practically begging for multiple close readings and a thorough overview of the subsequent literary criticism. I won't go into a detailed analysis or overview of that story itself here; for that, please refer to my review of the stand-alone book containing The Turn of the Screw.Specifics aside, both of these stories are also masterful exercises in suspense. The Aspern Papers manages to work up a general feeling of expectancy and apprehension, while The Turn of the Screw conjures up dark and sinister vision of intrigue. They manage to keep the reader reading -- and reading -- and re-reading. Both of them are filtered, of course, through James's characteristically ambiguous narrative. It has been well-said that James surrounds a narrative and illuminates parts of it with a flickering light, rather than pinning it down. The endings of both of these stories, at least one of which is positively shocking, leaves many elements unresolved. James forces the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. This aspect of his writing style, along with his generally unique style, makes for great reading material for the dedicated reader. Here are two of his best stories here for our enjoyment.

This is an early examination of a deterioration of the human psyche. It's a dark psychological thriller told by a woman who finds herself scattered by fleeting emotions and unseen torments. From the start, the protagonist's mind seems to flow in several different directions, showing the portrait of a very insecure woman. I think that the purpose of the lengthy language is to serve as her very personal outlook on the situation, on herself. Henry has put himself fully in her position to achieve the purpose of forcing the reader to do so as well.I tend to dislike films or books that depict mental illness as an organized or curable disorder. Something that can be easily fixed by medical advances or hope alone. The truth of the matter is much more dark. Insanity is not something to romanticize about, although there is certainly speculation of mental illness furthering artistic insight. (an example would be Virginia Wolff, or Vincent van Gogh) But Henry James does not view the woman's hallucinations with hope for her recovery.The author has always shown particular interest in insanity, not from the vantage point of an onlooker or professional...but from the direct and unaltered view of the person suffering the hallucinations. There actually are ghosts in this book, but the kind that are much more sinister and real in that they only exist to this one woman. She's alone in her hallucinations, completely unable to share the nightmare that has taken over her mind, left to bare it by herself. I think that's truly more frightening than the thin plot of any other 'ghost' story.I recommend this book for several reasons; it has an intriguing plot, is an exploration of psychological aspects, and ends with a suspenseful finale.

Well these are my two favorite works by Henry James. In both James displays his very neatly honed talents for creating fine fictional universes and architecturally perfect stories where all seems to be just right but of course it isn't. James is writing in the still young American tradition of letters but he has cleared away much of the romanticism that was so evident in Hawthorne and Melville. The romanticism still exists but it is not in the writers brain, it exists in the characters alone. James was the first to really write at a remove from his characters. He tells each tale with no authorial comment to sway your opinion of his characters one way or another, he lets the reader make his own observations and draw his own conclusions based on the characters behaviour and thoughts. That authorial distance allows him to simply relate the story, not explain it, and James stories are each as intricate as the psychologies that occupy them. In these two stories he creates very intriguing and complex situations. Both are mysteries and both perhaps have no easy solution or resolution because James lets the complex minds and psychologies of his characters subjectively grapple with a web that they have themselves woven and any resolution would mean an unraveling of their entire character. These are story long webs which can be baffling(Aspern Papers) or terrifying(Turn of the Screw), the psychological webs these characters weave can lead them to frightening extremes(Turn of the Screw) or can serve as a necessary support for the fragile psyche that created them(Aspern Papers). The real thrill of reading James is in how controlled a manner all is told. There are no obvious clues just psychological gradations and patterns which begin adding up to an overall impression. It can seem after finishing one of his stories that nothing much has happened at all, and yet a psychology has all the while been examined and quite thoroughly. Through his stories much is revealed about what lies just beneath the facade of life and what motivates our most basic perceptions, our identity, and our societal or world view. It has been said that James brought the insight of a psycholgist to his stories. But his insights are much more profound than a mere clinicians notes. In James we get a highly discerned character in a highly discerned context and the discerning reader will be entertained and enlightened and inspired to contemplate the workings of ones own intricate structure.

These are two of James's most haunting stories. It is amazing how he uses his mastery of narrative technique to unsettle the reader. It is never clear in the "Turn of the Screw" whether the ghosts actually exist or whether the narrator herself is deluded. Similarly, in "The Aspern Papers" the narrator seems to be eminently reasonable and civilized, but his actions are anything but. This story, in its quiet, "boring" fashion, throws a very disturbing light on literary biographers. In fact, this is one of James's trademarks, the ability to probe the dark side of refined, genteel people.