12 Jun 2013 02:44:09
In his preface to The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James describes looking out over the Venetian waterscape during the "fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase ... mightn't come into sight". His many spells in Venice were to provide him with more than a shapely phrase. This collection of his letters sent from the Palazzo Barbaro – his regular haunt on the southern end of the Grand Canal – abounds in detail later put to work in his fiction. Here, James first records the burning of Byron's letters by the niece of his final mistress, the story that later became The Aspern Papers. Writing with an impressionistic immediacy and familiarity of tone, he conveys the breadth of his experience with all of his powers of psychological shading, and none of his usual restraint.The collection is padded out with various commentaries intended to place the letters historically. Too often, they bring to bear a context from which James wilfully removed himself. Leon Edel, James's biographer, suggests in a foreword that the book is really about the palazzo itself (the anthology includes letters from its owners) and James is "at the centre" because he provides "vivid documentation" of the high society that graced its stuccoed salons. But James is at his most lyrical when he believes himself "blissfully lifted from that little simmering social pot", and at his most intimate in his flight from it: "I came abroad to escape 'em."
Like the many continental ambassadors of his fiction, he seems to have been driven by the desire to remain an outsider, "unknowing and unknown". In truth, he is at the centre because he has been pushed there by the clutter of introductions and postscripts extolling the importance of a society he sought to shun.
