WORDSWORTH CLASSICS

The Turn of the Screw
& The Aspern Papers HENRY JAMES
With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Claire Seymour, University of Kent at Canterbury

The Turn of the Screw is the classic ghost story for which Henry James is best remembered. Set in an English country house, it is a chilling tale of the supernatural told by a master of the genre.

The Aspern Papers is a tale of Americans in Europe, a theme in which Henry James is at his most assured and accomplished. The author cleverly evokes the drama of the comédie humaine against the majestic setting of a Venetian palace.

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ISBN 1-85326-069-X

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION	VII

	The Turn of the Screw	1
	The Aspern Papers	95

NOTES	191

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Wordsworth Classics are inexpensive editions designed to appeal to the general reader and students. We commissioned teachers and specialists to write wide-ranging, jargon-free introductions and to provide notes that would assist the understanding of our readers, rather than interpret the stories for them. In the same spirit, because the pleasures of reading are inseparable from the surprises, secrets and revelations that all narratives contain, we strongly advise you to enjoy this book before turning to the Introduction.

Editorial Adviser
KEITH CARABINE
Rutherford College
The University of Kent at Canterbury

INTRODUCTION

The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers are two of Henry James's best known and finest novellas. James himself described this literary form as "for length and breadth - our ideal, the beautiful and blest nouvelle". ¹ Although he advanced no further specific theories as to the structure, length and workings of the "shapely nouvelle", James appears to have delighted in its scale and focus, which released him from the limiting constraints of the short story without compelling him to fulfil the conventional requirements of the full-length novel.

Both novellas were originally published in serialised form, the former appearing in the journal Collier's Weekly from January to April 1898, and the latter monthly in Atlantic from March to May 1888. Each might be considered to be a supreme example of a specific genre of short story: The Aspern Papers, published in the year after Sherlock Holmes had made his first fictional appearance, is a sort of historical detective tale, concerned with the affairs of literary life and historiographical research, while The Turn of the Screw is a ghost story of the kind in which an inexplicable, supernatural apparition plays an important part, the structure of the tale incorporating a distancing frame.

However, closer examination reveals a number of similarities between the two novellas. In the period 1907 to 1909 James sought to organise his short fictions, which numbered more than one hundred, into a coherent form, grouping tales according to generic type. By establishing a contextual frame of reference which exposed common elements in the tales, James may have hoped to validate retrospectively his authorial, aesthetic conception. This plan came to fruition as the New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Significantly The Turn of the Screw was not included in the volume devoted to ghostly tales but was sandwiched between two other "psychological tales" which depict menacing, almost pathological, mania, The Aspern Papers and The Liar.

The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw relate accounts of obsessive quests for the possession of "knowledge" or "truth", a "truth" which takes the form of secret text, story or history which may ultimately reside only in the mind of the quester. The desire for possession is a substitute for normal human relationships. The narrators become involved in adversarial battles with ambiguous, mysterious protagonists who, it is implied, embody latent, unstable aspects of the narrators' own psyches, impulses which they would prefer to ignore or suppress. The narrators are potentially unreliable, sharing an impressability and susceptibility to outside influences which causes them, as their feelings intensify, to lose control of their narratives. Both tales are characterised by a pervasive atmosphere of emotional and sexual repression. The unrelenting pursuit of knowledge leads to an unwanted confrontation with "self-knowledge", releasing dangerous energies which threaten the psychological equilibrium of the confused, self-deluding and disingenuous narrators. Ultimately they can only be "saved" from the "truth" by the destruction of the very object which they have so compulsively desired.

The Turn of the Screw

There is a silence at the centre of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw which stubbornly refuses to be filled. Each twist of the plot drags the reader deeper into the narrative maze and moral quagmire. Each step and detail tantalises with the promise of explanation and resolution, yet each turn of the screw is not a movement towards "meaning" but a further evasion of definition. The reader reaches the end of the narrative frustrated and exhausted by the ethical battle within: the promised revelation is never supplied and the text retains its secrets.

James's silence may be the silence which is "everything", an infinite panorama of all possibilities. Alternatively it may represent the "unknowable". In a letter to H. G. Wells, 8 December 1898,² James implied that his silence was an emptiness, a "nothingness", and that his novella was "essentially a pot-boiler and a jeu d'esprit" in which he had delighted in manipulating the reader's literary and moral sensibilities. In the Preface he goes further, describing the work as "a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught ... (p. xxxii-xxxiii).³

If James intended The Turn of the Screw to be a "trap" it is one which generations of critics have fallen into. Since its publication this tale of the corruption of two "innocents" by unspecified forces of "evil" has generated an extraordinary amount of critical literature and given rise to a relentless, and continuing, acrimonious debate. The four main issues of contention are the reliability of the governess, the "reality" of the ghosts, the integrity of the children's innocence and the exact cause and nature of their corruption.

The opposing critical factions can broadly be described as the "literalists", who include Leon Edel, Allen Tate and Robert Heilman, and the "Freudians", led by Edmund Wilson. The "apparitionists", who support the governess, have three basic arguments: firstly, that her description of the man she sees on the tower is immediately identified by Mrs Grose as Peter Quint, a man the governess has never met, secondly, that in the Prologue, Douglas relates that her record of employment after the events at Bly was exemplary, and finally, that the sudden death of an otherwise healthy young boy can only be accounted for by the fact that he was truly "possessed".

It was Wilson's 1952 article "The Ambiguity in Henry James",⁴ in which he suggested that James's governess is a classic psycho-neurotic Freudian case study, which provoked such a fierce reaction from dissenting interpreters and initiated the on-going battle between "scientific" and "imaginative" readings of the narrative. Wilson and the "non-apparitionists" claim that the ghosts are not real ghosts at all but merely the governess's hallucinations, citing as evidence the Freudian sexual symbolism in the text - the male ghost appearing on the tower, the female ghost by the side of the lake, Flora fitting the mast of her wooden boat into its base. In Wilson's interpretation the sexually repressed governess, her passion awakened by her meetings with her handsome employer, imagines a morbid and paranoid history involving her predecessors

The in/stability of the governess has been one of the most controversial features of The Turn of the Screw. Although she remains nameless, the story is essentially her narrative, revealed to us by Douglas. She is both a character within the tale and the agent of its communication, thus the question of her reliability is crucial if she is to be credible in the eyes of the reader. James counsels in his Preface:

It was "déjà très-joli" ... the general proposition of our young woman's keeping crystalline her record of so many intense anomalies and obscurities - by which I don't of course mean her explanation of them, a different matter. We have surely as much of her own nature as we can swallow in watching it reflect her anxieties and inductions. she has "authority"; which is a good deal to have given her, and I couldn't have arrived at so much had I clumsily tried for more.

(p. xxxiii-xxxiv)

Similarly, James had written to H. G. Wells:

Of course I had, about my young woman, to take a very sharp line ... absolute lucidity and logic, a singleness of effect, were imperative. Therefore I had to rule out subjective complications of her own - play of tone etc., and keep her impersonal save for the most obvious and indispensable little note of neatness, firmness and courage - without which she wouldn't have had her data.5

However, her first-person narrative exposes the workings of her own mind and the inconsistencies and ambiguities of her account. She is not merely a passive observer and raconteur but a vivid participant in the events which she describes. From the start James indicates her naïvety and impetuous romanticism - "I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong"⁶ - which contrasts with Quint's worldliness - "Quint was so clever - he was so deep" (p. 30).

"Young", "untried", "nervous", it was the first time she had known "space and air and freedom, all the music of summer and all the mystery of nature" (p. 17). This exposure to new experiences outside her previously limited, restrictive world releases unfamiliar emotions and energies which she perceives as dangerous and threatening. At first she had trusted in the innate purity of the children, observing "[there] was something divine that I have never found to the same degree in any child - his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love" (p. 16). However, alarmed by the children's precocity, she worries that their knowledge outweighs her own and comes to fear that their apparent guilelessness and physical perfection, "their more than earthly beauty, their absolutely unnatural goodness", may in fact be a trap designed to deceive and ruin her. As the tale unfolds these doubts escalate and inhibit her vision and judgement. Consequently the reader begins to doubt the accuracy and veracity of her account of the paranormal events at Bly.

James's fascination with the supernatural was not surprising given his family's interest in spiritualism. His brother, William James, was an active psychical researcher and a member of the Society for Psychical Research, the reports of which appear to have provided James with the framework and some of the details of his story. However, this family obsession with the occult need not mean that James intended his phantoms to be objective presences, and Freudian interpreters can draw upon the evidence that William James was also an influential psychologist and that their sister, Alice, suffered from depression and neurosis of the kind they ascribe to James's governess.

James's comments in his Preface suggest that he was less concerned with the ghosts" "actuality" than with the extent and nature of the "evil" evoked by the potential presence. He writes:

	Recorded and attested "ghosts" are, in other words, as little expressive, as little dramatic, above all as little continuous and conscious and responsive, as is consistent with their taking the trouble... to appear at all... I had to decide... between having my apparitions correct and having my story "good" - that is, producing the impression of the dreadful, my designed horror... They would be agents in fact; there would be laid on them the dire duty of causing the situation to reek with the air of Evil.
	... The essence of the matter was the villainy of motive in the evoked predatory creatures... Portentous evil - how was I to save that, as an intention on the part of my demon-spirits, from the drop, the comparative vulgarity, inevitably attending, throughout the whole range of possible brief illustration, the offered example, the imputed vice, the cited act, the limited deplorable presentable instance?... If my bad things... should succumb to this danger, if they shouldn't seem sufficiently bad, there would be nothing for me but to hang my artistic head lower than I had ever known occasion to do.

(pp. xxxiv-xxxv)

What is this "portentous evil"? Who has corrupted whom? And what is the nature of that corruption?

James's pervasive evil emanates from an indeterminate source. At times he implies that it is the governess herself who terrifies the children. Flora cries:

	"I see nobody... I never have. I think you're cruel. I don't like you!... Take me away, take me away - oh, take me away from her!"
	"From me?" I panted.
	"From you - from you!" she cried.

(p. 77)

The novella contains many instances of cross-identification between the governess and the ghosts. For example, Mrs Grose describes her predecessor, "She was also young and pretty - almost as young and pretty, miss, even as you" (pp. 14). Likewise, after catching a glimpse of Quint through the mirror-like window, the governess remembers:

It was confusedly present to me that I ought to place myself where he had stood. I did so; I applied my face to the pane and looked, as he had looked, into the room... She [Mrs Grose] saw me as I had seen my own visitant... I gave her something of the shock that I had received.

(pp. 24)

Her identification with Miss Jessel intensifies as the novella progresses - "I remember sinking down at the foot of the staircase... recalling that it was exactly where, more than a month before, in the darkness of night and just so bowed with evil things, I had seen the spectre of the most horrible of women" (pp. 63) - and climaxes when she enters the schoolroom and sees the spirit of the former governess bent over her own desk, writing a letter to her lover.

The struggle between the governess and the ghosts takes the form of a fight for "possession" of the children, particularly Miles. The protagonists engage in a battle for the right to act as surrogate parent and teacher of the uninitiated and inexperienced children, who have been neglected by their legal guardian. At the preliminary interview James's governess is told "of course the young lady who should go down as governess would be in supreme authority", yet on arriving at Bly she learns from Mrs Grose that Quint has previously assumed this authority:

"The master believed in him and placed him here... So he had everything to say. Yes" - she let me have it - "even about them!."

(p. 30)

... for a period of several months Quint and the boy had been perpetually together... they had been about... as if Quint were his tutor - and a very grand one - and Miss Jessel only for the little lady.

(pp. 39)

The governess and Quint are both desperate to control the children's access to "knowledge", which as the novella proceeds is increasingly identified with sexuality and experience. Quint urges Miles to spurn the ignorance which is inexperience and to enter the world of knowledge and adventure, of instinct and natural desire. In contrast, the governess presumes that all knowledge not imparted by herself is untrustworthy and dangerous - even the school world is "horrid", "unclean" - and seeks to stifle his natural curiosity. From meagre evidence she construes a monstrous yet unspecified wickedness. Quint's crime is that he has been "much too free" and inculcated this passion for "freedom" in Miles, who declares, "I've been ever so far; all round about - miles and miles away. I've never been so free" (p. 88). The freedom which Quint represents is simultaneously literal and metaphoric, imaginative and physical, innocent and sexual. To the governess such freedom represents the portentous "unknown"; she attempts to force the young boy to speak out, to "tell the truth", to shatter Quint's silent world with a "confession" which will cleanse his soul of Quint's influence, and by so doing purge her own heart of her disturbing desires.

The governess convinces herself that ignorance and self-denial are the only possible routes to salvation, yet does not comprehend that these negative energies will suffocate and destroy life. Following Miles's "confession" and his climactic, ambivalent shriek, "Peter Quint - you devil!" (p. 93), he collapses, lifeless, into the governess's arms - "I caught him, yes, I held him - it may be imagined with what a passion" (p. 94). Her monomaniacal urge for "possession" has resulted in Miles's "dispossession" and death. In contrast, the ghosts' gift of knowledge might appear positively liberating, creative and life-giving.

The Aspern Papers

The unnamed narrator of The Aspern Papers is a publisher and literary researcher who has travelled to Venice in order to locate the "papers" of the deceased poet, Jeffrey Aspern, which he believes are in the possession of two elderly ladies, Juliana Bordereau and her niece, Tina. In this tale, "literary scholarship" is posited as the means by which "truth" may potentially be laid bare, although the futility of this method of questing is exposed by the events of the tale. The narrator engages in a struggle with his adversarial alter ego, Miss Juliana - a battle which recalls the confrontation between the governess and Quint - but his compulsive desire for "possession" (a word constantly reiterated in the text) ultimately leads merely to his loss of "self-possession". At the conclusion his ambitions are unfulfilled, and the silences and gaps in knowledge - which are represented by the narrator's frequent lapses of memory and by the literal "gaps" in literary history, as symbolised by the missing "papers" themselves - remain.

However, initially the narrator is confident that he will acquire the papers. Prepared to perform any duplicity or crime ("there's no baseness I wouldn't commit for Jeffrey Aspern's sake" - p. 102) in order to secure the evidence which he believes will vindicate and support his faith in the poet he worships as a "god", he engages in a struggle with the aging Juliana. He probes with his eyes - "I turned an eye on every article of furniture" (p. 151), "I turned my eyes once more all over the room, rummaging with them the closets, the chests of drawers, the tables" (p. 153) desperately striving to locate his "spoils". James emphasises the predatory nature of his quest: adopting a nom de guerre, when he first enters the palazzo, the narrator crosses the "threshold", declaring, "I felt my foot in the citadel" (p. 104). Similarly, after his disillusionment and the collapse of his hopes, he wanders about Venice, stopping to gaze at the statue of a past plunderer, Bartolomeo Colleoni, "the terrible condottiere who sits so sturdily astride of his huge bronze horse" (p. 172).

The narrator and Miss Juliana battle to control historical "truth": each wishes to assert the veracity and authority of their respective versions of the past. It is interesting that in the Preface to The Aspern Papers James gives an account of his own attempts to control "literary history", describing the genesis of his tale which had its origins in a real-life historical romance set in Florence involving Jane Clairmont, the half-sister of Mary Shelley and the mother of Lord Byron's daughter Allegra, who was believed by an American literary enthusiast to own personal papers belonging to Percy Shelley. James writes:

Legend here dropped to another key; it remained in a manner interesting, but became to my ear a trifle coarse, or at least rather vague and obscure. [It] had flickered enough to give me my "facts", bare facts of intimation, which, scant handful though they were, were more distinct and more numerous than I mostly like facts: like them, that is, as we say of an etcher's progressive subject, in a early "state". Nine-tenths of the artist's interest in them is that of what he shall add to them and how he shall turn them.

(pp. xxvi)

In the novella the narrator stresses the "artistry" of the literary and editorial skills by which he maintains his authority. He wonders "by what combination of arts I might become an acquaintance" (p. 97) of the Misses Bordereau. (Similarly, in The Turn of the Screw the governess had described "all the art" which she required in order to render the details of her tale distinct.) He experiences a sense of mystical fraternity with the spirit of Aspern, who he believes has "returned to earth to assure me he regarded the affair as his own no less than as mine" (p. 119), and declares:

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? That element was in everything that Jeffrey Aspern had written, and I was only bringing it to light.

(p. 119)

The researcher announces his intention to "work the garden" (p. 103) as a means to gain access to the secrets enclosed within the dilapidated Bordereau palazzo. The garden is thus a pretext for, and displacement of, his real motives. Its vitality and fecundity contrast with the sterility and lifelessness of the green "mystifying bandage" which conceals Miss Juliana's eyes and the green box in which he is certain the papers are concealed. The enclosed garden is the physical manifestation of the narrator's desire to control history, an imaginative space which he creates for himself where his authorial skill and creative powers can bloom like the flowers with which he bombards the two ladies. He coaxes Miss Juliana into the garden in order to re-engage her in his own passionate historical narrative, and the garden is also the scene of his own, unintentional, seduction of Miss Tina.

Throughout the novella the narrator struggles to reconcile the literal image of Miss Juliana with his imaginative vision of her as the passionate lover and muse of his idol, Jeffrey Aspern. His perceptive myopia is matched by her literal "blindness"; James describes the deathly effect of the "horrible green shade which served for her almost as a mask" which "created a presumption of some ghastly death's-head lurking behind it. The divine Juliana as grinning skull - the vision hung there until it passed" (p. 108-9). Miss Juliana "preserves" her magnificent eyes, effulgently eulogised by Jeffrey Aspern, obsessively scrutinising the publisher - "I want to watch you - I want to watch you!" (p. 150), while he is denied a comparable vision - "I look at you but don't see you" (p. 150). He appreciates the incisiveness of her gaze:

She listened to me in perfect stillness and I felt her look at me with great penetration, though I could see only the lower part of her bleached and shrivelled face... the old woman remained impenetrable and her attitude worried me by suggesting that she had a fuller vision of me than I had of her.

(p. 110)

The fight between the two protagonists reaches a climax when the narrator is apprehended by Miss Juliana as he rifles her desk where the papers are lodged:

... she had lifted the everlasting curtain that covered her face, and for the first, the last, the only time I beheld her extraordinary eyes. They glared at me, they were like the sudden drench, for a caught burglar, of a flood of gaslight; they made me horribly ashamed.

(p. 160-1)

It is the awful force of Juliana's eyes, the green eyeshade which has concealed them finally removed, which compels the narrator to open his own eyes and to acknowledge his own dubious motivations. Interrupting the narrator in his criminal act, Miss Juliana, cries, "Ah, you publishing scoundrel!" (p. 161), and her words act like a bolt of light, momentarily enabling his perceptive faculties which are illuminated by a flash of self-knowledge - she has experienced the very passions which he has so determinedly repressed in his pursuit of the papers.

The narrator's relentless pursuit of the Bordereau ladies is in some ways a sexual pursuit, since the papers which they possess encryptically encode his own latent sexual desire. As in The Turn of the Screw, the moral issues are complex, but we might deduce that the "horror" in both texts - represented by inexplicable, monstrous apparitions or visions - is related to the narrators' fear of their own sexuality and the exposure of their subconscious desires. Contact with the ghoulish old woman has revived within the narrator the living presence of both her and Aspern when they were united in youthful, romantic love, and has subconsciously awakened his own sexuality. Previously he had sought to ignore rumours that Aspern had "treated her badly" or that "he had "served"... several other ladies in the same masterful way" (pp. 99). Now the narrator is confronted with the inadequacies and disingenuousness of his own reading of the past and with the awareness of his previously repressed sexuality.

He is shortly to be faced with the consequences of his irresponsible and self-delusive "strategems". Although he jests to Mrs Prest that in order to gain his spoils he will "make love to the niece" (p. 103), he underestimates the effect that his presence and behaviour will have upon Miss Tina, whose romantic sensibilities are emancipated by his behaviour. Although she has been deprived of social interaction, the narrator senses that "a grateful susceptibility to human contact had not died out, and contact of a limited order there would be if I should come to live in the house" (p. 107). "Artless", without guile and incapable of deceit, Miss Tina has a "candid", "clear" gaze, but the narrator stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the evidence of his own eyes, even reverting to the impersonal pronoun in his efforts to avoid acknowledging his sexuality:

... this poor lady's dull face ceased to be dull, almost ceased to be plain, as she turned it gladly to her late aunt's lodger. That touched him extremely and he thought it simplified his situation until he found that it didn't.

(p. 163)

The actions of the unscrupulous publisher not only hasten the death of Miss Juliana, but also thwart his own ambitions, for Miss Tina's response when her affections are rebuffed is to burn the Aspern papers. This destructive act implies the failure of "reading" and "knowledge" in the absence of human and social love. The narrator is essentially asocial: he is unable to connect the public and private worlds and his yearning for the papers is abstract and intellectual. Thus he is wilfully blind to the very passion which has produced the letters in the first place. He is granted only a brief illuminating vision, as Miss Tina is transformed before his eyes:

She stood in the middle of the room... and her look of forgiveness, of absolution, made her angelic. It beautified her; she was younger; she was not a ridiculous old woman.

(p. 174)

However, this metamorphosis is merely transitory and she reverts to "a plain dingy elderly person". At the close of the tale he is forced to seek consolation in the portrait of his deceased hero; however, his final words, "When I look at it I can scarcely bear my loss - I mean of the precious papers" (p. 175), illustrate the extent of his disillusionment and frustration. His words echo the governess's at the close of The Turn of the Screw - "With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss... " (p. 94). Both have "lost" narrative authority and the potential for human love.

James's Prefaces

There is... no eligible absolute of the wrong, it remains relative to fifty other elements, a matter of appreciation, speculation, imagination - these things, moreover, quite exactly in the light of the spectator's, the critic's, the reader's experience. Only make the reader's general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself - and that already is a charming job and his own experience, his own imagination... will supply the rest.

Like the absent master in The Turn of the Screw, or the deceased poet, Jeffrey Aspern, in The Aspern Papers, James retains possession of narrative and historical authority while occasionally abdicating responsibility for the elucidation of "meaning" to the reader. The reader is cast in the same position as the nameless governess and publisher, overwhelmed by contradictory and confusing information, challenged to unravel and resolve the mysteries of the text for themselves. Just as the governess longs for renewed contact with the master in order to aid her understanding, so we inevitably go to James's Prefaces for solutions to the unanswered questions in James's fictions.

In these Prefaces, James describes in detail the historiographical origins of his tales and presents himself as the sole possessor of the knowledge required for a true understanding of the texts. He establishes himself as the ideal reader of his own fictions, but refrains from disclosing the secrets of his texts. For example, the reader of the Preface to The Turn of the Screw is told, "There is not only from beginning to end of the matter not an inch of expatiation, but my values are all positively blanks..." (p. xxxvi) In this way the Prefaces become examples of the kind of fiction James is attempting to introduce: as he repeats the quests of his tales, searching for "truth" in his papers and finding only ambiguity, the boundaries between fiction and criticism become blurred.

In much of James's writing, knowledge is assumed but unarticulated. In this way, James's Prefaces are comparable to the many unread, unsent, lost and diverted documents and letters which appear in his own texts. These letters stubbornly retain their secrets and withhold meaning and thus emphasise the subjective nature of the relationship between reading, or "seeing", and "knowing". Thus in The Turn of the Screw, which is itself an untitled "letter" whose story has remained undisclosed for twenty years, the headmaster's letter of expulsion does not reveal the nature of Miles's crime. Similarly, the governess confronts Miles about the theft of her letter to his guardian:

"You opened the letter?" "I opened it." ... "And you found nothing!"

(p. 91)

Finding "nothing" Miles, like Miss Tina, burns the letter. Likewise, in The Aspern Papers, John Cumnor's first letter to Miss Juliana is ignored and the second "had been answered very sharply, in six lines, by her niece" (p. 102), while the poet's own papers remain unread and are ultimately burned.

In his Preface to The Aspern Papers, James employs a pertinent metaphor to describe the inaccessibility or "unreadability" of the past:

I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past - in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table... With more moves back the element of the appreciable shrinks - just as the charm of looking over a garden-wall into another garden breaks down when successions of walls appear. The other gardens, those still beyond, may be there, but even by use of our longest ladder we are baffled and bewildered - the view is mainly a view of barriers.

(pp. xxvi-xxvii)

In the novella, when the narrator approaches the Bordereau palazzo, with its "impenetrable regions" and "motionless shutters", he remarks the:

... high blank wall which appeared to confine an expanse of ground on one side of the house. Blank I call it, but it was figured over with the patches that please a painter, repaired breaches, crumblings of plaster, extrusions of brick that had turned pink with time; while a few thin trees, with the poles of certain rickety trellises, were visible over the top. The place was a garden and apparently attached to the house. I suddenly felt that so attached it gave me my pretext

(p. 101)

However, although he may, like an artist, "work the garden" in the present, this will not give him access to the past.

In the Prologue to The Turn of the Screw, Douglas cautions his audience "the story won't tell... not in any literal, vulgar way" (p. 5). His words are a warning to the reader who attempts to fill the gaps in James's texts. The climactic denouements of the two tales - Miles's ambiguous cry, "Peter Quint - you devil" and Miss Juliana's accusatory challenge, "Ah you publishing scoundrel!" - are moments of illumination and explanation which, paradoxically, lead only to death and destruction. If the obsessive search for "truth" kills Miles and leads to the burning of the Aspern papers, then, by analogy, it might be suggested that the efforts of successive generations of literary critics and readers to "fill in" the silences and gaps in James's fictions might similarly "murder" James's texts, by destroying their essential ambiguity and their atmosphere of imaginative, enriching mystery. The dilemma for the reader is how to preserve James's ambiguity while also locating its "meaning".

DR CLAIRE SEYMOUR
University of Tokyo

---

1	Henry James, Preface to Volume XV in the New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James, reprinted in The Art of the Novel, Charles Scribner's Sons, New York 1934, pp. 217-31
2	Leon Edel (ed.), Henry James: Selected Letters, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1987, p. 314
3	Henry James, Preface to Volume XII in the New York Edition, reprinted in The An of the Novel, op. cit, pp. 159-79, and in the present edition, Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, Wordsworth Classics, 1993 and 2000, pp. xxiii-xxxvi
4	Edmund Wilson, "The Ambiguity in Henry James', in The Triple Thinkers, Oxford University Press, New York 1948, pp. 88-132
5	op. cit.
6	Henry James, The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, Wordsworth Classics, 1993, p. 9. All subsequent references are to this edition and are given in parentheses in the text.

PREFACE

I not only recover with ease, but I delight to recall, the first impulse given to the idea of The Aspern Papers. It is at the same time true that my present mention of it may perhaps too effectually dispose of any complacent claim to my having "found" the situation. Not that I quite know indeed what situations the seeking fabulist does "find"; he seeks them enough assuredly, but his discoveries are, like those of the navigator, the chemist, the biologist, scarce more than alert recognitions. He comes upon the interesting thing as Columbus came upon the isle of San Salvador, because he had moved in the right direction for it - also because he knew, with the encounter, what "making land" then and there represented. Nature had so placed it, to profit - if as profit we may measure the matter! - by his fine unrest, just as history, "literary history" we in this connection call it, had in an out-of-the-way corner of the great garden of life thrown off a curious flower that I was to feel worth gathering as soon as I saw it. I got wind of my positive fact, I followed the scent. It was in Florence years ago; which is precisely, of the whole matter, what I like most to remember. The air of the old- time Italy invests it, a mixture that on the faintest invitation I rejoice again to inhale and this in spite of the mere cold renewal, ever, of the infirm side of that felicity, the sense, in the whole elements of things too numerous, too deep, too obscure, too strange, or even simply too beautiful, for any ease of intellectual relation. One must pay oneself largely with words, I think, one must induce almost any "Italian subject" to make believe it gives up its secret, in order to keep at all on working - or call them perhaps rather playing - terms with the general impression. We entertain it thus, the impression, by the aid of a merciful convention which resembles the fashion of our intercourse with Iberians or Orientals whose form of courtesy places everything they have at our disposal. We thank them and call upon them, but without acting on their professions. The offer has been too large and our assurance is too small; we peep at most into two or three of the chambers of their hospitality, with the rest of the case stretching beyond our ken and escaping our penetration. The pious fiction suffices; we have entered, we have seen, we are charmed. So, right and left, in Italy - before the great historic complexity at least - penetration fails; we scratch at the extensive surface, we meet the perfunctory smile, we hang about in the golden air. But we exaggerate our gathered values only if we are eminently witless. It is fortunately the exhibition in all the world before which, as admirers, we can most remain superficial without feeling silly.

All of which I note, however, perhaps with too scant relevance to the inexhaustible charm of Roman and Florentine memories. Off the ground, at a distance, our fond indifference to being "silly" grows fonder still; the working convention, as I have called it - the convention of the real revelations and surrenders on one side and the real immersions and appreciations on the other - has not only nothing to keep it down, but every glimpse of contrast, every pang of exile and every nostalgic twinge to keep it up. These latter haunting presences in fact, let me note, almost reduce at first to a mere blurred, sad, scarcely consolable vision this present revisiting, reappropriating impulse. There are parts of one's past, evidently, that bask consentingly and serenely enough in the light of other days - which is but the intensity of thought; and there are other parts that take it as with agitation and pain, a troubled consciousness that heaves as with the disorder of drinking it deeply in. So it is at any rate, fairly in too thick and rich a retrospect, that I see my old Venice of The Aspern Papers, that I see the still earlier one of Jeffrey Aspern himself, and that I see even the comparatively recent Florence that was to drop into my ear the solicitation of these things. I would fain "lay it on" thick for the very love of them - that at least I may profess; and, with the ground of this desire frankly admitted, something that somehow makes, in the whole story, for a romantic harmony. I have had occasion in the course of these remarks to define my sense of the romantic, and am glad to encounter again here an instance of that virtue as I understand it. I shall presently say why this small case so ranges itself, but must first refer more exactly to the thrill of appreciation it was immediately to excite in me. I saw it somehow at the very first blush as romantic - for the use, of course I mean, I should certainly have had to make of it - that Jane Clairmont, the half-sister of Mary Godwin, Shelley's second wife, and for a while the intimate friend of Byron and the mother of his daughter Allegra, should have been living on in Florence, where she had long lived, up to our own day, and that in fact, had I happened to hear of her but a little sooner, I might have seen her in the flesh. The question of whether I should have wished to do so was another matter the - question of whether I shouldn't have preferred to keep her preciously unseen, to run no risk, in other words, by too rude a choice, of depreciating that romance-value which, as I say, it was instantly inevitable to attach (through association above all, with another signal circumstance) to her long survival.

I had luckily not had to deal with the difficult option; difficult in such a case by reason of that odd law which somehow always makes the minimum of valid suggestion serve the man of imagination better than the maximum. The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take. Nothing, fortunately, however, had, as the case stood, depended on my delicacy; I might have "looked up" Miss Clairmont in previous years had I been earlier informed - the silence about her seemed full of the "irony of fate"; but I felt myself more concerned with the mere strong fact of her having testified for the reality and the closeness of our relation to the past than with any question of the particular sort of person I might have flattered myself I "found". I had certainly at the very least been saved the undue simplicity of pretending to read meanings into things absolutely sealed and beyond test or proof - to tap a fount of waters that couldn't possibly not have run dry. The thrill of learning that she had "overlapped", and by so much, and the wonder of my having doubtless at several earlier seasons passed again and again, all unknowing, the door of her house, where she sat above, within call and in her habit as she lived, these things gave me all I wanted; I seem to remember in fact my more or less immediately recognising that I positively oughtn't - "for anything to come of it" - to have wanted more. I saw, quickly, how something might come of it thus; whereas a fine instinct told me that the effect of a nearer view of the case (the case of the overlapping) would probably have had to be quite differently calculable. It was really with another item of knowledge, however, that I measured the mistake I should have made in waking up sooner to the question of opportunity. That item consisted of the action taken on the premises by a person who had waked up in time, and the legend of whose consequent adventure, as a few spoken words put it before me, at once kindled a flame. This gentleman, an American of long ago, an ardent Shelleyite, a singularly marked figure and himself in the highest degree a subject for a free sketch - I had known him a little, but there is not a reflected glint of him in The Aspern Papers - was named to me as having made interest with Miss Clairmont to be accepted as a lodger on the calculation that she would have Shelley documents for which, in the possibly not remote event of her death, he would thus enjoy priority of chance to treat with her representatives. He had at any rate, according to the legend, become, on earnest Shelley grounds, her yearning, though also her highly diplomatic, pensionnaire - but without gathering, as was to befall, the fruit of his design.

Legend here dropped to another key, it remained in a manner interesting, but became to my ear a trifle coarse, or at least rather vague and obscure. It mentioned a younger female relative of the ancient woman as a person who, for a queer climax, had had to be dealt with; it flickered so for a moment and then, as a light, to my great relief, quite went out. It had flickered indeed but at the best - yet had flickered enough to give me my "facts", bare facts of intimation; which, scant handful though they were, were more distinct and more numerous than I mostly like facts: like them, that is, as we say of an etcher's progressive subject, in an early "state". Nine-tenths of the artist's interest in them is that of what he shall add to them and how he shall turn them. Mine, however, in the connection I speak of, had fortunately got away from me, and quite of their own movement, in time not to crush me. So it was, at all events, that my imagination preserved power to react under the mere essential charm - that, I mean, of a final scene of the rich dim Shelley drama played out in the very theatre of our own "modernity". This was the beauty that appealed to me; there had been, so to speak, a forward continuity, from the actual man, the divine poet, on; and the curious, the ingenious, the admirable thing would be to throw it backward again, to compress - squeezing it hard! - the connection that had drawn itself out, and convert so the stretched relation into a value of nearness on our own part. In short, I saw my chance as admirable, and one reason, when the direction is right, may serve as well as fifty; but if I "took over", as I say, everything that was of the essence, I stayed my hand for the rest. The Italian side of the legend closely clung; if only because the so possible terms of my Juliana's life in the Italy of other days could make conceivable for her the fortunate privacy, the long uninvaded and uninterviewed state on which I represent her situation as founded. Yes, a surviving unexploited unparagraphed Juliana was up to a quarter of a century since still supposable - as much so as any such buried treasure, any such grave unprofaned, would defy probability now. And then the case had the air of the past just in the degree in which that air, I confess, most appeals to me - when the region over which it hangs is far enough away without being too far.

I delight in a palpable imaginable visitable past - in the nearer distances and the clearer mysteries, the marks and signs of a world we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table. The table is the one, the common expanse, and where we lean, so stretching, we find it firm and continuous. That, to my imagination, is the past fragrant of all, or of almost all, the poetry of the thing outlived and lost and gone, and yet in which the precious element of closeness, telling so of connections but tasting so of differences, remains appreciable. With more moves back the element of the appreciable shrinks - just as the charm of looking over a garden-wall into another garden breaks down when successions of walls appear. The other gardens, those still beyond, may be there, but even by use of our longest ladder we are baffled and bewildered - the view is mainly a view of barriers. The one partition makes the place we have wondered about other, both richly and recognisably so; but who shall pretend to impute an effect of composition to the twenty? We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar; the difficulty is, for intensity, to catch it at the moment when the scales of the balance hang with the right evenness. I say for intensity, for we may profit by them in other aspects enough if we are content to measure or to feel loosely. It would take me too far, however, to tell why the particular afternoon light that I thus call intense rests clearer to my sense on the Byronic age, as I conveniently name it, than on periods more protected by the "dignity" of history. With the times beyond, intrinsically more "strange", the tender grace, for the backward vision, has faded, the afternoon darkened; for any time nearer to us the special effect hasn't begun. So there, to put the matter crudely, is the appeal I fondly recognise, an appeal residing doubtless more in the "special effect", in some deep associational force, than in a virtue more intrinsic. I am afraid I must add, since I allow myself so much to fantasticate, that the impulse had more than once taken me to project the Byronic age and the afternoon light across the great sea, to see in short whether association would carry so far and what the young century might pass for on that side of the modern world where it was not only itself so irremediably youngest, but was bound up with youth in everything else. There was a refinement of curiosity in this imputation of a golden strangeness to American social facts - though I cannot pretend, I fear, that there was any greater wisdom.

Since what it had come to then was, harmlessly enough, cultivating a sense of the past under that close protection, it was natural, it was fond and filial, to wonder if a few of the distilled drops mightn't be gathered from some vision of, say, "old" New York Would that human congeries, to aid obligingly in the production of a fable, be conceivable as "taking" the afternoon light with the right happy slant? - or could a recognisable reflexion of the Byronic age, in other words, be picked up on the banks of the Hudson? (Only just there, beyond the great sea, if anywhere: in no other connection would the question so much as raise its head. I admit that Jeffrey Aspern isn't even feebly localised, but I thought New York as I projected him.) It was "amusing", in any case, always, to try experiments; and the experiment for the right transposition of my Juliana would be to fit her out with an immortalising poet as transposed as herself. Delicacy had demanded, I felt, that my appropriation of the Florentine legend should purge it, first of all, of references too obvious; so that, to begin with, I shifted the scene of the adventure. Juliana, as I saw her, was thinkable only in Byronic and more or less immediately post-Byronic Italy; but there were conditions in which she was ideally arrangeable, as happened, especially in respect to the later time and the long undetected survival; there being absolutely no refinement of the mouldy rococo, in human or whatever other form, that you may not disembark at the dislocated water-steps of almost any decayed monument of Venetian greatness in auspicious quest of. It was a question, in fine, of covering one's tracks - though with no great elaboration I am bound to admit; and I felt I couldn't cover mine more than in postulating a comparative American Byron to match an American Miss Clairmont - she as absolute as she would. I scarce know whether best to say for this device today that it cost me little or that it cost me much; it was "cheap" or expensive according to the degree of verisimilitude artfully obtained. If that degree appears nil the "art", such as it was, is wasted, and my remembrance of the contention, on the part of a highly critical friend who at that time and later on often had my ear, that it had been simply foredoomed to be wasted, puts before me the passage in the private history of The Aspern Papers that I now find, I confess, most interesting. I comfort myself for the needful brevity of a present glance at it by the sense that the general question involved, under criticism, can't but come up for us again at higher pressure.

My friend's argument bore, then - at the time and afterward - on my vicious practice, as he maintained, of postulating for the purpose of my fable celebrities who not only hadn't existed in the conditions I imputed to them, but who for the most part (and in no case more markedly than in that of Jeffrey Aspern) couldn't possibly have done so. The stricture was to apply itself to a whole group of short fictions in which I had, with whatever ingenuity, assigned to several so-called eminent figures positions absolutely unthinkable in our actual encompassing air, an air definitely unfavourable to certain forms of eminence. It was vicious, my critic contended, to flourish forth on one's page "great people", public persons, who shouldn't more or less square with our quite definite and calculable array of such notabilities; and by this rule I was heavily incriminated. The rule demanded that the "public person" portrayed should be at least of the tradition, of the general complexion, of the face-value, exactly, of some past or present producible counterfoil. Mere private figures, under one's hand, might correspond with nobody, it being of their essence to be but narrowly known; the represented state of being conspicuous, on the other hand, involved before anything else a recognition - and none of my eminent folk were recognisable. It was all very well, for instance, to have put oneself at such pains for Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse; but there was misapplied zeal, there a case of pitiful waste, crying aloud to be denounced. Miriam is offered not as a young person passing unnoticed by her age - like the Biddy Dormers and Julia Dallows, say, of the same book, but as a high rarity, a time-figure of the scope inevitably attended by other commemorations. Where on earth would be, then, Miriam's inscribed "counterfoil", and in what conditions of the contemporary English theatre, in what conditions of criticism, of appreciation, under what conceivable Anglo-Saxon star, might we take an artistic value of this order either for produced or for recognised. We are, as a "public", chalk-marked by nothing, more unmistakably, than by the truth that we know nothing of such values - any more than, as my friend was to impress on me, we are susceptible of consciousness of such others (these in the sphere of literary eminence) as my Neil Paraday in The Death of the Lion, as my Hugh Vereker in The Figure in the Carpet, as my Ralph Limbert, above all, in The Next Time, as sundry unprecedented and unmatched heroes and martyrs of the artistic ideal, in short, elsewhere exemplified in my pages. We shall come to these objects of animadversion in another hour, when I shall have no difficulty in producing the defence I found for them - since, obviously, I hadn't cast them into the world all naked and ashamed; and I deal for the moment but with the stigma in general as Jeffrey Aspern carries it.

The charge being that I foist upon our early American annals a distinguished presence for which they yield me absolutely no warrant - "Where, within them, gracious heaven, were we to look for so much as an approach to the social elements of habitat and climate of birds of that note and plumage?" - I find his link with reality, then, just in the tone of the picture wrought round him. What was that tone but exactly, but exquisitely, calculated, the harmless hocus-pocus under cover of which we might suppose him to have existed? This tone is the tone, artistically speaking, of "amusement", the current floating that precious influence home quite as one of those high tides watched by the smugglers of old might, in case of their boat's being boarded, be trusted to wash far up the strand the cask of foreign liquor expertly committed to it. If through our lean prime Western period no dim and charming ghost of an adventurous lyric genius might by a stretch of fancy flit, if the time was really too hard to "take", in the light form proposed, the elegant reflexion, then so much the worse for the time - it was all one could say! The retort to that of course was that such a plea represented no "link" with reality - which was what was under discussion - but only a link, and flimsy enough too, with the deepest depths of the artificial: the restrictive truth exactly contended for, which may embody my critic's last word rather of course than my own. My own, so far as I shall pretend in that especial connection to report it, was that one's warrant, in such a case, hangs essentially on the question of whether or no the false element imputed would have borne that test of further development which so exposes the wrong and so consecrates the right. My last word was, heaven forgive me, that, occasion favouring, I could have perfectly "worked out" Jeffrey Aspern. The boast remains indeed to be verified when we shall arrive at the other challenged cases.

That particular challenge at least The Turn of the Screw doesn't incur; and this perfectly independent and irresponsible little fiction rejoices, beyond any rival on a like ground, in a conscious provision of prompt retort to the sharpest question that may be addressed to it. For it has the small strength - if I shouldn't say rather the unattackable ease - of a perfect homogeneity, of being, to the very last grain of its virtue, all of a kind; the very kind, as happens, least apt to be baited by earnest criticism, the only sort of criticism of which account need be taken. To have handled again this so full-blown flower of high fancy is to be led back by it to easy and happy recognitions. Let the first of these be that of the starting-point itself - the sense, all charming again, of the circle, one winter afternoon, round the hall-fire of a grave old country-house where (for all the world as if to resolve itself promptly and obligingly into convertible, into "literary" stuff) the talk turned, on I forget what homely pretext, to apparitions and night-fears, to the marked and sad drop in the general supply, and still more in the general quality, of such commodities. The good, the really effective and heart-shaking ghost- stories (roughly so to term them) appeared all to have been told, and neither new crop nor new type in any quarter awaited us. The new type indeed, the mere modern "psychical" case, washed clean of all queerness as by exposure to a flowing laboratory tap, and equipped with credentials vouching for this - the new type clearly promised little, for the more it was respectably certified the less it seemed of a nature to rouse the dear old sacred terror. Thus it was, I remember, that amid our lament for a beautiful lost form, our distinguished host expressed the wish that he might but have recovered for us one of the scantest of fragments of this form at its best. He had never forgotten the impression made on him as a young man by the withheld glimpse, as it were, of a dreadful matter that had been reported years before, and with as few particulars, to a lady with whom he had youthfully talked. The story would have been thrilling could she but have found herself in better possession of it, dealing as it did with a couple of small children in an out-of-the-way place, to whom the spirits of certain "bad" servants, dead in the employ of the house, were believed to have appeared with the design of "getting hold" of them. This was all, but there had been more, which my friend's old converser had lost the thread of: she could only assure him of the wonder of the allegations as she had anciently heard them made. He himself could give us but this shadow of a shadow - my own appreciation of which, I need scarcely say, was exactly wrapped up in that thinness. On the surface there wasn't much, but another grain, none the less, would have spoiled the precious pinch addressed to its end as neatly as some modicum extracted from an old silver snuff-box and held between finger and thumb. I was to remember the haunted children and the prowling servile spirits as a "value", of the disquieting sort, in all conscience sufficient; so that when, after an interval, I was asked for something seasonable by the promoters of a periodical dealing in the time- honoured Christmastide toy, I bethought myself at once of the vividest little note for sinister romance that I had ever jotted down.

Such was the private source of The Turn of the Screw, and I wondered, I confess, why so fine a germ, gleaming there in the wayside dust of life, had never been deftly picked up. The thing had for me the immense merit of allowing the imagination absolute freedom of hand, of inviting it to act on a perfectly clear field, with no "outside" control involved, no pattern of the usual or the true or the terrible "pleasant" (save always, of course, the high pleasantry of one's very form) to consort with. This makes, in fact, the charm of my second reference, that I find here a perfect example of an exercise of the imagination unassisted, unassociated - playing the game, making the score, in the phrase of our sporting day, off its own bat. To what degree the game was worth playing I needn't attempt to say: the exercise I have noted strikes me now, I confess, as the interesting thing, the imaginative faculty acting with the whole of the case on its hands. The exhibition involved is, in other words, a fairy-tale pure and simple - save indeed as to its springing not from an artless and measureless, but from a conscious and cultivated credulity. Yet the fairy-tale belongs mainly to either of two classes, the short and sharp and single, charged more or less with the compactness of anecdote (as to which let the familiars of our childhood, Cinderella and Blue-Beard and Hop o' my Thumb and Little Red Riding-Hood and many of the gems of the Brothers Grimm directly testify), or else the long and loose, the copious, the various, the endless, where, dramatically speaking, roundness is quite sacrificed - sacrificed to fullness, sacrificed to exuberance, if one will: witness at hazard almost any one of the Arabian Nights. The charm of all these things for the distracted modern mind is in the clear field of experience, as I call it, over which we are thus led to roam; an annexed but independent world in which nothing is right save as we rightly imagine it. We have to do that, and we do it happily for the short spurt and in the smaller piece, achieving so perhaps beauty and lucidity; we flounder, we lose breath, on the other hand - that is, we fail, not of continuity, but of an agreeable unity, of the "roundness" in which beauty and lucidity largely reside - when we go in, as they say, for great lengths and breadths. And this, oddly enough, not because "keeping it up" isn't abundantly within the compass of the imagination appealed to in certain conditions, but because the finer interest depends just on how it is kept up.

Nothing is so easy as improvisation, the running on and on of invention; it is sadly compromised, however, from the moment its stream breaks bounds and gets into flood. Then the waters may spread indeed, gathering houses and herds and crops and cities into their arms and wrenching off, for our amusement, the whole face of the land - only violating by the same stroke our sense of the course and the channel, which is our sense of the uses of a stream and the virtue of a story. Improvisation, as in the Arabian Nights, may keep on terms with encountered objects by sweeping them in and floating them on its breast; but the great effect it so loses - that of keeping on terms with itself. This is ever, I intimate, the hard thing for the fairy-tale; but by just so much as it struck me as hard did it in The Turn of the Screw affect me as irresistibly prescribed. To improvise with extreme freedom and yet at the same time without the possibility of ravage, without the hint of a flood; to keep the stream, in a word, on something like ideal terms with itself: that was here my definite business. The thing was to aim at absolute singleness, clearness and roundness, and yet to depend on an imagination working freely, working (call it) with extravagance; by which law it wouldn't be thinkable except as free and wouldn't be amusing except as controlled. The merit of the tale, as it stands, is accordingly, I judge, that it has struggled successfully with its dangers. It is an excursion into chaos while remaining, like Blue-Beard and Cinderella, but an anecdote - though an anecdote amplified and highly emphasised and returning upon itself; as, for that matter, Cinderella and Blue-Beard return. I need scarcely add after this that it is a piece of ingenuity pure and simple, of cold artistic calculation, an amusette to catch those not easily caught (the "fun" of the capture of the merely witless being ever but small), the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious. Otherwise expressed, the study is of a conceived "tone", the tone of suspected and felt trouble of an inordinate and incalculable sort - the tone of tragic, yet of exquisite, mystification. To knead the subject of my young friend's, the supposititious narrator's, mystification thick, and yet strain the expression of it so clear and fine that beauty would result: no side of the matter so revives for me as that endeavour. Indeed if the artistic value of such an experiment be measured by the intellectual echoes it may again, long after, set in motion, the case would make in favour of this little firm fantasy - which I seem to see draw behind it today a train of associations. I ought doubtless to blush for thus confessing them so numerous that I can but pick among them for reference. I recall for instance a reproach made me by a reader capable evidently, for the time, of some attention, but not quite capable of enough, who complained that I hadn't sufficiently "characterised" my young woman engaged in her labyrinth; hadn't endowed her with signs and marks, features and humours, hadn't in a word invited her to deal with her own mystery as well as with that of Peter Quint, Miss Jessel and the hapless children. I remember well, whatever the absurdity of its now coming back to me, my reply to that criticism - under which one's artistic, one's ironic heart shook for the instant almost to breaking.

You indulge in that stricture at your ease, and I don't mind confiding to you that - strange as it may appear! - one has to choose ever so delicately among one's difficulties, attaching oneself to the greatest, bearing hard on those and intelligently neglecting the others. If one attempts to tackle them all one is certain to deal completely with none; whereas the effectual dealing with a few casts a blest golden haze under cover of which, like wanton mocking goddesses in clouds, the others find prudent to retire. It was "déjà très-joli", in The Turn of the Screw, please believe, the general proposition of our young woman's keeping crystalline her record of so many intense anomalies and obscurities - by which I don't of course mean her explanation of them, a different matter; and I saw no way, I feebly grant (fighting, at the best too, periodically, for every grudged inch of my space) to exhibit her in relations other than those; one of which, precisely, would have been her relation to her own nature. We have surely as much of her own nature as we can swallow in watching it reflect her anxieties and inductions. It constitutes no little of a character indeed, in such conditions, for a young person, as she says, "privately bred", that she is able to make her particular credible statement of such strange matters She has "authority", which is a good deal to have given her, and I couldn't have arrived at so much had I clumsily tried for more.

For which truth I claim part of the charm latent on occasion in the extracted reasons of beautiful things - putting for the beautiful always, in a work of art, the close, the curious, the deep. Let me place above all, however, under the protection of that presence the side by which this fiction appeals most to consideration: its choice of its way of meeting its gravest difficulty. There were difficulties not so grave: I had for instance simply to renounce all attempt to keep the kind and degree of impression I wished to produce on terms with the today so copious psychical record of cases of apparitions. Different signs and circumstances, in the reports, mark these cases: different things are done - though on the whole very little appears to be - by the persons appearing; the point is, however, that some things are never done at all: this negative quantity is large - certain reserves and proprieties and immobilities consistently impose themselves. Recorded and attested "ghosts" are, in other words, as little expressive, as little dramatic, above all as little continuous and conscious and responsive, as is consistent with their taking the trouble - and an immense trouble they find it, we gather - to appear at all. Wonderful and interesting, therefore, at a given moment, they are inconceivable figures in an action - and The Turn of the Screw was an action, desperately, or it was nothing. I had to decide in fine between having my apparitions correct and having my story "good" - that is, producing my impression of the dreadful, my designed horror. Good ghosts, speaking by book, make poor subjects, and it was clear that from the first my hovering prowling blighting presences, my pair of abnormal agents, would have to depart altogether from the rules. They would be agents in fact; there would be laid on them the dire duty of causing the situation to reek with the air of Evil. Their desire and their ability to do so, visibly measuring meanwhile their effect, together with their observed and described success - this was exactly my central idea; so that, briefly, I cast my lot with pure romance, the appearances conforming to the true type being so little romantic.

This is to say, I recognise again, that Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not "ghosts" at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for witchcraft; if not, more pleasingly, fairies of the legendary order, wooing their victims forth to see them dance under the moon. Not indeed that I suggest their reducibility to any form of the pleasing pure and simple; they please at the best but through having helped me to express my subject all directly and intensely. Here it was - in the use made of them - that I felt a high degree of art really required; and here it is that, on reading the tale over, I find my precautions justified. The essence of the matter was the villainy of motive in the evoked predatory creatures; so that the result would be ignoble - by which I mean would be trivial - were this element of evil but feebly or inanely suggested. Thus arose on behalf of my idea the lively interest of a possible suggestion and process of adumbration; the question of how best to convey that sense of the depths of the sinister without which my fable would so woefully limp. Portentous evil - how was I to save that, as an intention on the part of my demon-spirits, from the drop, the comparative vulgarity, inevitably attending, throughout the whole range of possible brief illustration, the offered example, the imputed vice, the cited act, the limited deplorable presentable instance? To bring the bad dead back to life for a second round of badness is to warrant them as indeed prodigious, and to become hence as shy of specifications as of a waiting anti-climax. One had seen, in fiction, some grand form of wrong-doing, or better still of wrong-being, imputed, seen it promised and announced as by the hot breath of the Pit - and then, all lamentably, shrink to the compass of some particular brutality, some particular immorality, some particular infamy portrayed: with the result, alas, of the demonstration's falling sadly short. If my bad things, for The Turn of the Screw, I felt, should succumb to this danger, if they shouldn't seem sufficiently bad, there would be nothing for me but to hang my artistic head lower than I had ever known occasion to do.

The view of that discomfort and the fear of that dishonour, it accordingly must have been, that struck the proper light for my right, though by no means easy, short cut. What, in the last analysis, had I to give the sense of? Of their being, the haunting pair, capable, as the phrase is, of everything - that is of exerting, in respect to the children, the very worst action small victims so conditioned might be conceived as subject to. What would be then, on reflexion, this utmost conceivability? - a question to which the answer all admirably came. There is for such a case no eligible absolute of the wrong; it remains relative to fifty other elements, a matter of appreciation, speculation, imagination - these things, moreover, quite exactly in the light of the spectator's, the critic's, the reader's experience. Only make the reader's general vision of evil intense enough, I said to myself - and that already is a charming job - and his own experience, his own imagination, his own sympathy (with the children) and horror (of their false friends) will supply him quite sufficiently with all the particulars. Make him think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. This ingenuity I took pains - as indeed great pains were required - to apply; and with a success apparendy beyond my liveliest hope. Droll enough at the same time, I must add, some of the evidence - even when most convincing - of this success. How can I feel my calculation to have failed, my wrought suggestion not to have worked, that is, on my being assailed, as has befallen me, with the charge of a monstrous emphasis, me charge of all indecently expatiating? There is not only from beginning to end of the matter not an inch of expatiation, but my values are positively all blanks save so far as an excited horror, a promoted pity, a created expertness - on which punctual effects of strong causes no writer can ever fail to plume himself - proceed to read into them more or less fantastic figures. Of high interest to the author meanwhile - and by the same stroke a theme for the moralist - the artless resentful reaction of the entertained person who has bounded in the sense of the situation. He visits his abundance, morally, on the artist who has but clung to an ideal of faultlessness. Such indeed, for mis latter, are some of the observations by which the prolonged strain of that clinging may be enlivened!

HENRY JAMES*

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*

reprinted from the Preface to Volume XII in the New York Edition of The Novels and Tales of Henry James