J

It is entirely typical of Henry James that he

should belong to nowhere in particular. An

abundant solitude haunts both his life history

and his fiction, and in this respect he appears

like a kind of belated avatar of the Romantic

exile or the doomed wanderer so familiar as a

cultural cliche´ in the early decades of the

nineteenth century. The fact that the wan-

derings and the exile were both self-imposed

and eminently comfortable is beside the

point: it is his role as the lonely, half-alien

observer which gives shape and vividness to

his creations, and the direction of much of his

early life seems to have tended towards the

successful achievement of such a stance. His

works continue to exhale an air of half-

intimated confidence which is central to our

appreciation of his unique viewpoint. ‘A

work of art that one has to explain,’ he told a

friend in reference to The Awkward Age

(1899), ‘fails in so far, I suppose, of its mis-

sion.’ Both the italicizing and the subjective

qualifier in this sentence are characteristic of

its author’s retreat into the kind of verbal

labyrinth which anticipates the monumental

inarticulateness of twentieth-century English,

with its host of qualifiers and its mass of

unfinished sentences. That there was some-

thing both intensely understood and supremely

inexpressible in fiction was an idea to which

James gave prominence in several stories,

including the archetypal ‘The Figure in the

Carpet’, in which the hidden meaning con-

veyed in the work of Hugh Vereker perishes

in obscurity. Interest in James’s writing has so

far recovered from a preoccupation with his

stylistic obliquity (all too easily parodied –

see, for example, H.G. Wells’s Boon and the

squibs of Max Beerbohm) as to accept this

aspect of his later novels as one of the most

consistently rewarding.