The moment I saw this book in a second-hand shop I knew I had to have it. It's exactly the kind of thing I love: a monomaniac academic's life work, nestled neatly between two covers.
That's not to say that it doesn't come with impressive literary credentials. As the blurb on the back-cover puts it:
More than two decades of research, study, and literary detection lie behind this treasury of stories by one of the undisputed giants in the field of American fiction, as Professor Floyd Horowitz here offers a collection of tales that he himself has authenticated to be the work of the prodigiously gifted Henry James, ... justly remembered for his novellas and scores of short stories. And there may indeed be scores more [my emphasis], as this important volume shows. Published anonymously or under noms de plume in magazines like nineteenth-century New York's favourite The Knickerbocker, Frank Leslie's Lady's Magazine, The National Magazine, and The Continental, these previously uncollected pieces represent both apprentice work and early stories that already bear the mark of Jamesian artistry. Written in a period of more than ten years before James's first signed fiction appeared (in 1865) ... these uncovered stories add significantly to the James canon.Well, you can't say better than that! So precocious was this studious young man that he apparently wrote (and published) at least 24 stories between the ages of 9 (!) and 26 as a kind of side-hustle to his burgeoning official career as a professional author, which began with "The Story of a Year" in 1865, and eventually grew to include no fewer than 112 stories (as you'll see if you consult this list of his work in that genre).
My comments above may sound a little sceptical, but they're not meant to be. After all, most young writers fill page after page with more-or-less accomplished juvenilia before they eventually begin to publish - and many are subsequently anxious to suppress any evidence of early work which appeared in print before they were ready ...
And, in at least partial support of Horowitz's claims, the first item on the list of authenticated James short stories, "A Tragedy of Error" (1864) was indeed published anonymously, and only identified by his biographer Leon Edel through a chance reference in a letter.
For that matter, the first dozen or so of his canonical stories could probably be quietly shelved without any great loss to posterity. The Master himself only included a little over half of the 100-odd novellas and short stories he'd previously published in the multi-volume New York Edition (1907-09), which he definitely intended to stand as his last word on the matter.
So what are these new stories like? And, more to the point, are they really all by Henry James? Distinguished Jamesian Philip Horne, editor of the Life in Letters pictured above, is, unfortunately - according to the précis at the top of his review - "not convinced of the authorship of Floyd R Horowitz's 'newly discovered' Henry James stories." That, however, "does not mean that they are not worth reading."
His Guardian article is too long and closely argued to quote here in detail, but I thought I might tease out a few of the more telling points:
Horowitz's central notion is that young James had a secret life as "Leslie Walter", consistently using that pseudonym to get his stories into (mostly unremunerated) print: eight of those here, mostly later ones, seem to be attributable to that author.Horne, however, detects certain problems with this hypothesis:
I discovered, for example, that in January 1869, well after James had broken cover under his own name, "Lesley Walter" published a pretty awful sentimental poem called "Among the Lilies" in the Galaxy: Horowitz doesn't mention the supposed alter ego's unJamesian propensity for verse. And then Leslie Walter's rather monotonous subject matter, supposedly showing a closeness to James's father's Swedenborgian philosophy, seems just conventionally pious ... Indeed, these tales often amount to cases of what [Henry James] used to call with withering scorn "flagrant morality". Horowitz might have done better to claim they were parodies.But he goes on to concede:
This is not to say that one steeped in James, and reading for resemblance, doesn't occasionally come across something that seems strikingly close to the master's voice in these tales, or fleeting parallels of situation. Horowitz has built a certain plausible deniability into his case, moreover, in the sense that these stories are presented as apprentice works, written to the house style of the Knickerbocker or the Newport Mercury, from a period mostly before we have any authenticated James fiction.In other words, anything unlike James can be attributed to his desperation to break into print by aping each journal's house-style. Anything that is like him is clear proof of his authorship. Either way, Horowitz can claim to be vindicated. Horne, however, is not having any:
The greatest value and interest of this collection ... is ultimately not that it's by James, but that it isn't. Short stories reveal worlds even when they're affected or sentimental or badly written, and this book constitutes a vivid picture of the literary, cultural and social universe James entered. Apart from showing us just how original he actually was, it reeks of the dead past ...
"From time to time one catches a whiff of Pale Fire mania in the confident circularity of Horowitz's logic," Horne comments about the former's methodology - the magic wand which rendered this Computer Science professor capable of nosing out lost pieces of Jamesiana amongst all the reams of abandoned fiction he'd been assembling for the past thirty years.
Pale Fire, for those of you unfamiliar with this most teasing and, in some respects, most worrying of Nabokov's fictions, "is presented as a 999-line poem titled "Pale Fire", written by the fictional poet John Shade, with a foreword, lengthy commentary and index written by Shade's neighbor and academic colleague, Charles Kinbote."
Kinbote, who is (most readers would agree) a delusional monomaniac, "inherited" (i.e. stole) the manuscript of "Pale Fire" after John Shade's murder, and is now attempting to prove in his commentary-cum-autobiography that this poem, which never directly mentions the subject, is nevertheless is almost entirely about him and the (possibly imaginary) country of Zembla, whose lost king he may or may not be.
E. T. A. Hoffmann: Lebens-Ansichten des Katers Murr nebst fragmentarischer Biographiedes Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler in zufälligen Makulaturblättern (1855)
Clear? No? You're not alone in feeling a bit puzzled. Suffice it to say that the nutty, monocular professor is a commonplace of post-modern fiction - but actually the idea of writing a self-refuting, self-satirising commentary on what is alleged to be someone else's work goes way back beyond that: to E. T. A. Hoffmann's Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper (1819-21); or, even further, to Laurence Sterne's Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-67); or, for that matter, to the fons et origo of most of Sterne's erudition, Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).
So how exactly did Professor Horowitz set about distinguishing Henry James's work from all the other sludge in these ancient journals from the 1850s and 1860s? Philip Horne summarises the two, rather technical, appendices in Horowitz's book as follows:
First, by reading his way through the myriad American magazines and journals of the period, "using a set of critical discriminators". These included "the use of particular words, the employment of what I came to recognise as distinctive syntactical and word patterns, the use of puns and other wordplay, as well as the repetition of symbolic allusions, themes, and ideas". He also found "corroborating ideational evidence in the texts", which built up, in his vision, into "a coherent linguistic and philosophical framework that was consistent with the structures and themes of James's later, signed work". In other words, the evidence is massively internal, and interpretative - one might say subjective.It puts me in mind of that old hymn about Jesus we used to sing at Sunday School:
You ask me how I know He lives?In other words, I don't know, but I'd like to pretend that I do.
He lives within my heart.
This "I know it when I see it" argument, familiar from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's classic 1964 definition of obscenity, is backed up by some pretty hard science in Horowitz's case, however:
In an appendix called "The Computer and the Search for Henry James", Horowitz took the 20,783 words known to have been written by James between 1858 and 1871 and ran stylometric tests on the tales he'd attributed to James - the test being similarity of vocabulary (single words). This yielded a total of 72 stories by James, and another 12 "probably written by James". I was unable to follow the complicated details of his explanation, but confess to an impression that the hurdle set for identification as Jamesian was worryingly low. Stories with the same kinds of setting and with similar themes will surely generate many chimings of vocabulary without being being really similar in style. And there's no test of quality: some of these tales are pretty execrable.72 (+ 12 doubtful cases) is a pretty high number for us to credit. After all, these are stories James allegedly published, not simply wrote, during this period. He must have been banging them out, rain or shine, at a rate of about one a month!
But wait, there's more!
The allusion test, in another appendix called "Allusion as Proof in the Search for Henry James", turns out to mean echoes of things in books in Henry James senior's library, including the Arabian Nights and the King James Bible. Horowitz also detected his young Henry James in putative quasi-Oulipian games with his copy of Anthon's Latin Primer and Reader, taking English words from different columns of the Latin vocabulary lists to generate stories. The problem with these "tests" seemed to me that either the source was very widely known (for example the Bible) or that the words used were not so unusual as to be striking (the Anthon words used to cement Horowitz's case in the short passage he selects as most convincing include "with", "made", "will", "against" and "all") ...Even the most credulous of readers will probably part company with Horowitz when he starts to explain just how James could construct an almost unlimited number of stories out of odd words which just happened to be placed more-or-less contiguously in his Latin Grammar! It all sounds just a little too uncomfortably like those calculations about infinite numbers of monkeys tapping away on infinite typewriters.
Perhaps it's just as well that Horowitz never got to publish the follow-up book Searching for Henry James promised on the blurb for The Uncollected Henry James. At least, I don't think he did. I haven't succeeding in finding any allusions to it online, even in self-published form. What I did find, sadly, was the following obituary for the author himself.
From this I learned that Floyd Horowitz (1930-2014) taught Computer Science at Kansas University for over 30 years, then English at Hunter College, New York for another five years, until his retirement in 1996. He died on August 9th, 2014 "from complications of vascular dementia."
De mortuis nil nisi bonum, as the saying has it: Speak no ill of the dead. I can't help wondering a bit, though. There are some very odd statements - not to mention strikingly eccentric word-choices - in those two appendices at the end of Prof. Horowitz's book. Just how carefully did his editors actually check them before clearing the text for publication?
His obituary concludes, rather poignantly, "He is now at peace."
Constant J. Mews. The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France. Trans. Neville Chiavaroli & Constant J. Mews. 1999. The New Middle Ages. Ed. Bonnie Wheeler. Palgrave. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001.Mind you, just because it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck doesn't necessarily mean that it is a duck. I recall having a similar uneasy feeling roughly halfway through the book above, by Prof. Constant Mews, son of the composer Douglas Mews, whom I remember very well from my years singing in the Auckland University choir.
Mews's claim to have identified a lost correspondence between medieval scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard and his lover Héloïse d'Argenteuil seemed just a little too good to be true.
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Trans. Betty Radice. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.Pretty much everyone interested in the story of these two star-crossed lovers is familiar with the book above: a translation of a Latin correspondence between the two conducted many years after Abelard's seduction of the young girl Heloise, whom he'd been hired to tutor by her uncle Fulbert, a canon of Notre Dame.
The uncle, as you've no doubt heard, took a fearful revenge on the lustful philosopher. He arranged for him to be castrated by some hired ruffians. Abelard survived, just barely, but that and a number of other scandals (including accusations of heresy) made it almost impossible for him to advance in the church.
The story was so famous that it's even referred to in fifteenth-century jailbird poet François Villon's famous "Ballade des dames du temps jadis" [Ballad of Ladies of Past Times]:
Où est la très sage Heloïs,
Pour qui fut chastré et puis moyne
Pierre Esbaillart à Sainct-Denys?
Pour son amour eut cest essoyne.
[Where is the very wise Heloise,
For whom Peter Abelard was castrated
then made a monk at Saint Denis?
For his love had this travail.]
John Hughes: Letters of Abelard and Heloise to Which Is Prefix'd a Particular Account of Their Lives, Amours, and Misfortunes (1743)Most readers prefer Heloise's honest and insightful letters to the pompous, top-lofty prevarications of the great scholar, who presumes to lecture her on virtue despite his own obvious shortcomings in that regard.
Mews, however, argues that some earlier letters exchanged by the couple, possibly at the time they first met, have survived in the form of a book of "exemplary letters" for the use of students. As one reviewer commented:
Although the correspondence reproduced and translated [by Mews] has been available to scholars in Latin since Ewald Könsgen's 1974 publication, Mews' edition is the first to translate the letters into English and devote to them the comprehensive commentary they deserve. Könsgen may have made the first tentative suggestions that they might be the letters of Heloise and Abelard, but it is Mews who offers convincing evidence that they are.
In her own, more comprehensive review, Barbara Newman explains that:
Ewald Könsgen's edition of the twelfth-century Latin text he titled Epistolae duorum amantium: Briefe Abaelards und Heloises? [Correspondence of Two Lovers: Letters by Abelard and Heloise?] (Leiden: Brill, 1974), could not have appeared at a worse time. Scholars had been debating the authenticity of Abelard's famous exchange with Heloise for almost a century, but that controversy, after remaining at a simmer for decades, had just reached the boiling point. At a conference at Cluny in 1972, John Benton had proposed that the entire correspondence was forged in the late thirteenth century to influence a disputed election at the Paraclete. In the same year, D. W. Robertson argued in Abelard and Heloise (New York: Dial Press, 1972) that the real forger was Abelard, who created the literary fiction of Heloise's letters as part of an exemplary treatise on conversion ...Which is not to say that Mews's own claims for the correspondence have been accepted by everyone. His critics, however, are quick to deny the accusation that "they are motivated by professional envy at not having got there first."
In such a climate, no scholar could have been expected to stake his credibility on the anonymous love letters discovered by Könsgen in a late 15th-century manuscript from Clairvaux. Könsgen himself, after all, appended a question mark to his title, arguing only that the letters must have been composed in the Ile-de-France in the early twelfth century by two people "like" Abelard and Heloise. Even Peter Dronke, the staunchest defender of Heloise's writing, did not want to connect the famous lovers with this newly edited correspondence. Such an ascription would have seemed literally too good - or too self-interested - to be true. So Könsgen's edition attracted little notice and vanished without a ripple.
"It's not jealousy, it's a question of method," said Monique Goullet, director of research in medieval Latin at Paris's Sorbonne University. "If we had proof that it was Abelard and Heloise then everyone would calm down. But the current position among literature scholars is that we are shocked by too rapid an attribution process."While, as Barbara Newman reminds us, "the majority of scholars now accept the established letters as authentic", the burden of proof is certainly on Mews to demonstrate "beyond a reasonable doubt" that the authors of these newly unearthed letters "were indeed Heloise and Abelard."
Mews argues on both textual and contextual grounds, providing evidence that: (1) learned women did exchange Latin poems and letters with their male admirers in the early twelfth century; (2) the fragmentary narrative that emerges from the recently discovered letters is consistent in all particulars with what we know of Abelard and Heloise; and (3) most important, the philosophical vocabulary, literary style, classical allusions, and contrasting positions on love apparent in Könsgen's letters are so thoroughly consistent with the known writings of Heloise and Abelard that the supposition of their authorship is simpler than any alternative hypothesis.
I guess what surprised me most, after reading Mews's book, was the fact that there hadn't been a lot more fuss about so immense and exciting a claim. After all, the love story between Abelard and Heloise, and in particular the character of Heloise herself, have been revisited repeatedly in popular novels and movies, as well as being exhaustively picked over as a theme in medieval studies. Why, then, isn't Mews's book shelved beside Betty Radice's classic translation of the "established letters"?
Mews is certainly no fool, and his claims for these letters have been subjected to considerable scrutiny. The alternative explanations offered by some of his critics that it may be "a literary work written by one person who decided to reconstitute the writings of Abelard and Heloise," or "a stylistic exercise between two students who imagined themselves as the lovers, or that it was written by another couple," are perhaps rather less convincing than their own authors may imagine.
As Barbara Newman puts it:
the woman of the Troyes letters simply sounds like Heloise and like no other medieval Latin writer known to us.I wish that that could be the last word on the matter, but I fear that the jury will remain out for a long time yet: possibly forever.
Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever. Ed. Franklin H. Dennis. Introduction by George W. Hunt, S.J. Note by Matthew Bruccoli. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers, 1994.So, we have one probable attribution: the "new" Heloise and Abelard letters; and one rather more dubious item: the "uncollected" Henry James stories. Let's conclude with another bibliographical curiosity, these 13 stories by American author John Cheever.
This is how Wikipedia describes the débâcle surrounding their appearance:
The publication of Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever had its genesis in a copyright dispute beginning in 1988 between a small publisher, Academy Chicago Publishers, and Cheever's widow, Mary Wintemitz Cheever. Mary Cheever had entered into a contract with Academy for the nominal fee of $1500 to permit publication of a sampling of Cheever's uncollected early short fiction, pending family consultation. When the publisher sought to include all the works not published in The Stories of John Cheever (1978) — a total of 68 stories — a protracted legal struggle ensued.Here there are no doubts at all about the stories' status and genesis: just the desirability of having them in print, alongside the more mature work of this consummate fictional stylist.
Mary Cheever prevailed, but Academy Chicago succeeded in securing publication rights to a total of thirteen stories whose copyrights had lapsed. These are the stories that appear in Thirteen Uncollected Stories by John Cheever.
But that's not really how most academics think: they see the recovery of lost texts as the crown of their scholarly achievements. No wonder so many writers end up burning all their papers - if they get the chance, that is!
Having a foot in both camps, I can sympathise with both of these attitudes. For the most part, I tend to side with the writers. Who knows, though? Which of us isn't ready to call down blessings on the head of Max Brod for not heeding the instructions of his friend Franz Kafka to burn all of his unpublished literary remains, including The Trial, The Castle, and America?
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