Henry James : Novels 1871-1880: Watch and Ward, Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, Confidence (Library of America)

... the early novels of Henry James are extremely diverting, and this edition is "a lot of fine reading for a small price". I've reviewed all five novels separately, as I've read or re-read them over several months. Here's a compendium of those five reviews:WATCH AND WARD: New England Regionalist?"Watch and Ward" was the first novel of Henry James Jr, published in The Atlantic Monthly 1n 1871. "Junior" was 28 years old. "Watch and Ward" did not catapult him to literary fame, and has never been regarded as one of his masterworks, nothing more than a 'good start' toward "Portrait of a Lady". His masterpieces were not to be written until he was solidly middle-aged. James Junior, to put it bluntly, was not especially precocious. "Watch and Ward" is a brief, well-crafted but slightly bland novel -- a 'romance' actually, in the specific sense of that genre as practiced by New England writers of the generation of Henry James Senior. It's interesting to note that Junior had paid an extended visit to the elderly Seer of Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, around the time when he was working on "Watch and Ward". Neither Henry, Senior or Junior, was any sort of consistent transcendentalist, but their literary manners were learned at the knee of Emerson, so to speak. The style and the narrative of Junior's early stories and this first novel come straight from Brook Farm. I haven't encountered any scholarly criticism of Henry James that perceives the influence on him of Nathaniel Hawthorne or Luisa Alcott, but I'd say such an influence is obvious in "Watch and Ward", both in the syntax and the themes. W&W is even a "Twice-Told Tale", patently inspired by the Hellenic myth of Pygmalion. And it's both a "moral romance", close to Hawthorne's short story "Doctor Rappucini's Garden", and a Love Romance which readers of "Little Women" would have approved. Why, it has what might be called a 'happy ending' -- certainly the sort of resolution that James would never repeat.The plot concerns a fastidious, well-intentioned, somewhat priggish Boston gentleman who finds himself maturing in years and wealth without encountering a woman whom he can imagine as a wife. One day a desperate stranger, a 'westerner' of dubious character, approaches him begging for monetary aid, which he refuses. When the stranger later commits suicide, our gentleman rescues his scrawny, grimy, illiterate 12-year-old daughter and, without legally adopting her, launches into a fantasy life-plan of raising such a girl to become a model wife. James Junior was NOT yet the psychological novelist or the razor-edge dissector of human relationships of his later works; "Watch and Ward" is utterly naive from a post-Freudian perspective. So, of course, were most of the great novels of Victorian England that James must have aspired to match."Watch and Ward" is not a novel that you can't live without reading. If James Junior had written another dozen such novels, he'd have filled a niche as a regionalist comparable to Sarah Orne Jewett or Sherwood Anderson. Instead, it's astonishing to follow his evolution: "Daisy Miller" in 1878, "Washington Square" in 1880, "Portrait of a Lady" serialized in '80-'81, "The Bostonians" and "Princess Casamassima" in 1885 ...Henry James Jr has long been adored by critics and scholars as perhaps America's greatest novelist, yet his later novels -- complex, turgid, elusive -- have daunted and discouraged altogether too many readers. If you're a reader hesitating to give Junior a second chance, I recommend starting where he himself started, with his mellow New England romances. "Watch and Ward" is included in the Library or America volume of 'Novels 1871-1880', together with "Roderick Hudson", "The American", "The Europeans", and "Confidence". I've already reviewed the first three of that list.RODERICK HUDSON: The Marble Faun Authenticated ...... or the apotheosis of the American Romance! "Roderick Hudson" was Henry James's second published full-length novel and his last, I would say, in the shared literary idiom of his 19th predecessors. His final tribute, if you will, to the 'Gothic' romances of the Brontes and above all of Nathaniel Hawthorne. I don't believe many critics have linked "Roderick Hudson" to Hawthorne's "The Marble Faun", but the linkage is tight, even if James didn't intend any connection. I would include Herman Melville's grand dismal romance "Pierre" in the linkage, except that I'm doubtful James ever knew of it. Even though most of the narrative takes place in Roma, "Roderick Hudson" is a New England novel at heart.Published in serial in 1875, "Roderick Hudson" was not received with any great plaudits, and it hasn't been treated with the most ample respect by later literary critics. It's unquestionably true that James 'survived' -- luckily for us -- to write a dozen better novels than this one, beginning with his next, "The American". And yet "Roderick Hudson" is a very fine piece of writing! If James's next ten novels had been just as good but no better, he would still rank as one of the masters of the genre. What falls short for this reader in "Roderick Hudson" might ironically be exactly what could make it most enjoyable for other readers; it's a tale of drastic Passion, in which the characters are Larger Than Life. The excitement I find in reading James's more mature novels is that the characters are never dramatically exaggerated. They may be exceptional, but only in a manner well grounded in their ordinariness. The dramatis personae of "Roderick Hudson" are as sculptural as the intertwined and tormented figures of the Laocoön. The story portrays an anguishing Love Quadrangle:Roderick is a young self-taught sculptor of Genius ... the most meteoric genius-to-be of the Age, and the most insufferable narcissist ever bent on self-destruction.Christina Light is 'the most beautiful woman in Europe', raised by her odious mother to become literally a Princess. And a 'princess' she is, in the current derogatory American sense of the title! I might wonder if James's earliest readers found her credible, but I have no doubt that readers today will know what to expect of her. She is the Britney Spears or Sharon Stone of her epoch. She will reappear, by the way, as a character in a later James novel, chastened by experience but no less destructively alluring. Roderick of course is infatuated with her to the point of obsession.Mary Garland is the New England girl par excellence, the finely spirited and spiritually fine abandoned fiancée, whom the unworthy consider 'plain' but the worthy recognize instinctively as 'handsome'. Our Principal Character is one of the worthy.That Principal Character is Rowland Mallet, a wealthy American with no calling of his own except to be reliable and generous. His spontaneous recognition of Roderick's 'genius', and his decision to support Roderick's development by transporting him to Europe and subsidizing him there, is the launching point of the novel. Rowland is not a first-person narrator but nonetheless the focal lens of the narrative and the catalyst of most events. He is of course hopelessly in love with Mary Garland but incapable of self-interested disloyalty to his protegé. Almost colorless, he is nonetheless "the most interesting man in the world" in any interpretation of this novel.Henry James wrote "Roderick Hudson" under the spell of Italy, upon his first visit there, and the descriptive settings in Roma and Firenze are spellbinding. The whole story is operatic in its emotive lushness; stripped of its rich vocabulary and nuances of description, it could easily be rewritten as a Danielle Steele tear-jerker. I don't mean that as dispraise, but rather as the highest praise, that James could take such an 'excessive' drama and write such subtle psychological insights into it.This novel is included in the Library of America volume "Henry james: Novels 1871-1880" , along with 'Watch and Ward', 'Confidence', 'The American', and 'The Europeans'. I've already reviewed the last two. Some readers/reviewers have mistakenly suggested that Henry James is 'difficult' dry intellectual fare. I hope to persuade "you" of the contrary; James is juicy fun to read.THE AMERICAN: Why Did Nobody Mention ...... when I was served a full course of Henry James in college, that his novels were deliciously funny? Satiric thigh-slappers! In his early novels like The American and The Bostonians, James's wit is sharper than Mark Twain's elbow or Oscar Wilde's tongue! I suppose my dear professors of literature were entranced and bemused by the subtleties of James the Old Pretender, in The Golden Bowl or The Ambassadors. The late Henry James had his merits, I will grudgingly admit, but the mere beginner James -- The American was only his third novel, and in his century 'three' was barely a start on a career of writing -- was a formidable genius.The title-character of The American, Christopher Newman, is introduced, with sly condescension, as an awkward American, a westerner who has earned 'quite a bundle' in manufacturing and stock-jobbing. He's a caricature of the brash self-made democrat, confident and in fact intrepid, but aware of his own astonishing naivete and shallowness of culture. He's cashed in his chips, at age 38, and come to Europe knowing that he's looking for something more than 'success in business' but totally ignorant of what that something might be. In the course of things touristic, he sets out on the Grand Tour, a summer chasing culture from Amsterdam to the Alps to Venice, at the end of which he has little more insight than he started with. When he returns to Paris, it comes back to him "simply that what he had been looking at all summer was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not al been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers."There are several other American stereotypes for James to make mockery of, in the early chapters of The American, but eventually our fledgling novelist gets down to story-telling. Mr. Newman discovers, rather to his surprise, that what he really needs to complete his successful life is ... a wife! Being a practical man, he determines the parameters - the job specs - of the woman he would choose to marry, and, since of course this IS a novel, he finds her promptly, in the guise of a Countess of the proudest French aristocracy, a woman whose family is staunchly Royalist and snobbish to a degree incomprehensible to a parvenu American millionaire. The novel picks up steam as it depicts Newman's bluff American 'shoot-out' with class-conscious Europe society and the romance of the manufacturer and the countess. As for the denouement of that romance, I'll leave you in suspense. Suffice it to say that, after all the Victorian 'novels of manners' -- Austen, the Brontes, Trollope, Eliot -- the possibility that such a novel might NOT end in the proper marriage adds a good deal of suspense and subtlety to the tale.A caricature at first, Christopher Newman develops, or rather Henry James develops him, into a rather likable chap, someone for whom the reader cheers in his enterprise. And the more you like him, the more you'll like the book. He is, in the long run, the epitome of the best America has to offer in terms of honorable character. Henry James was seldom so generous with his male characters or with his American compatriots.THE EUROPEANS: Compared to Earlier and Later Works ...... The Europeans seems indeed to be merely "a sketch", a practice piece, worth reading only for James's masterly prose and for occasional sparkles of wit. Or perhaps it should be taken as James's effort to 'cash in' on the perennial market for romance novels for women readers, a market that was a lucrative in the 19th C as it remains today. That latter interpretation, I confess, is hindered by the absence of passion exhibited in any the four entangled 'love stories' of the narration. Marriages do occur eventually; I hope that's not too much of a spoiler, since I won't disclose how many or whom.One could also interpret The Europeans as a study of miscommunication. The title characters, a sister and brother whose mother was American but who have 'grown up' as thorough Europeans, come to visit their American cousins whom they've never met or known, who live quiet, sober lives in a Massachusetts village. The reader is 'encouraged' to suppose that the sister is both fleeing a milieu in Europe that has gone sour and seeking a 'fortunate' matrimonial opportunity. The American cousins and their social set are people of substantial means and insubstantial culture. Perplexed in every way by the arrival of such exotic relatives, nonetheless they generously welcome the travelers into their quaint puritanical family circle. What ensues is a minuet of misperceptions and miscues.James seems to have learned a good deal about the structural mechanics of novel-writing in the short time between "The American" and "The Europeans". Whereas in the former, he sometimes labors over describing a character in excessive external detail, in the latter he allows his characters to portray themselves through actions and dialogue. It's a subtler style of narrative, on a par with the polished best of Jane Austen or George Eliot. But of course the 19th C British 'novel of manners' was the model of all of Henry James's novels, a form he never abandoned. It's also quite plausible that James consciously intended "The Europeans" as a sequel to "The American," a thematic coda. It's not as exciting or insightful as its immediate predecessor, and it's barely a prophecy of the brilliance James would soon achieve in "The Bostonians". But it's too artfully written not to be entertaining as a display of craft.CONFIDENCE: Henry James Meets Charles Perrault on Beacon StreetThere may seem to be a certain chronological improbability about such an encounter; sadly, Charles Perrault died in 1703, while Henry james Jr would wait until 1843 to be born. But anything is possible in a fairy tale, n'est ce pas? Perrault was the author of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, Patient Griselda and many other beloved 'contes', a genre which he is credited with inventing. A 'conte' is not bound by laws of probability or plausibility; it floats in a suspension of disbelief. A really first-rate conte nearly always requires a beautiful princess, though the princess may be unrecognized as such, living in humble circumstances and treated with disdain by those who don't perceive her inherent royalty. The ideal princess of a conte will be clever, self-willed, disdainful of anything ordinary, perversely puzzling to run-of-the-mill companions. She's the one who sets impossible riddles to discourage would-be suitors, who risk being beheaded if they guess wrong. But, of course, as we know from the first sentence, her Prince WILL come."Confidence" -- James's fifth novel, published in 1879 -- has all the implausible contrivances and artifices of a Perrault fairy tale. And it has a finely pictured Princess -- Angela Vivian, a beautiful young American living on slender means with her Boston-bred widowed mother, whose sole task in life is patently to find a prosperous Prince for her daughter to wed. Angela is no angel in temperament, however. She's haughty, capricious, disdainful of males with any touch of mediocrity, especially mediocrity of wit. She is the central character of the novel, though we readers know her only third-hand, as she is perceived by the effective narrator of the conte, Bernard Longueville. I say "effective narrator" because the novel is written in third-person, a tale told by an omniscient author steadily observing the world over Bernard's shoulder. Bernard's evolving perception of the 'difficult' Miss Vivian is the central theme of the novel.Longueville is an American in his late thirties, a 'traveler' of unexplained independent means, who means to do something some day but who hasn't discovered any means to bring meaning to his gracefully meaningless life. He's snobbish, a trifle priggish, a witty dilettante and inordinately proud of his perspicacity. Why, he's the very model, one must say, of his author! He has an older, steadier, solider livelong friend, Gordon Wright, whose unspecified commercial activities earn him a princely income. Gordon is no fool but he lacks a certain confidence in his own understanding of women and attributes just such an understanding to his admired brotherly friend. Thus he invites Bernard to join him at Baden-Baden for the purpose of meeting a woman he has chosen to love -- Angela, obviously -- and to evaluate her mysterious personality. Gordon is a pragmatist; he's too sensible to marry a woman who will make him unhappy, however much he loves her. Since this is a fairy tale of sorts, the outcome is never in doubt. The fun is in the expectation that all will be wrought to an elegant conclusion. It's not a 'spoiler', therefore, to reveal that everyone will be wed to the appropriate mate in the end, presumably to live happily ever after.Henry James, in this early stage of his novel career, wrote with the supple grace of a thoroughbred horse, though a pacer or trotter rather than a sprinter. Critics might extend that metaphor to question whether James was best described as a stallion, a mare, or a gelding. It seems to me that "Confidence" affords some insight into the bachelor author's mentality at age thirty-six. A fairy tale inevitably exposes the wishfulness of the writer as well as of the reader. Just as Longueville is unconsciously seeking his Princess, I suspect Henry James Jr sustained a latent fantasy of finding himself 'in love' with a Woman precisely like Angela Vivian. Delving further into the subsoil of fiction, I'd venture that Gordon Wright is Henry Jr's portrayal (subconscious or not) of his solider, steadier brother, the psychologist William James. That would make Confidence a rather complex tale of sibling rivalry, sublimated into a 'competition' for the favor of the idealized Woman/Princess.Whatever, shall we say? I'm a musician, not a professor of literature. I read for pleasure. "Confidence" is not one of Henry James Jr's incomparable masterworks, but it's beautifully composed, sentence by sentence, and it's quite a charming little Romance in the end. The thrill of psychoanalyzing the author, after the last sentence, is 'value added' for readers familiar with James's other works.

This beautiful Library of America edition contains five of Henry James' earlier novels. I first began reading his works when I was much younger. He is a demanding writer in that the sentences can be long and have their own particular rhythm. But he rewards the reader's efforts. Recurring in his works are issues related to the conflicts and complicated relationships between Americans and Europeans. As a writer he is worlds away from the wham bam of much of contemporary writing. But if you stay the course with him his understanding of the subtleties in relationships are deep and rich. THE AMERICAN is a particular favorite of mine as he explores the experiences of an attractive young American businessman finding his way in Paris. A short story of his, The Beast in the Jungle, is also richly rewarding.Personally I have never been able to get into Proust although I have tried several times. But James is a whole other experience. This collection as well as Portrait of a Lady are novels which are very special.This particular quintet of his novels is beautifully designed and makes a great companion.

Excellent reading

I first read these novels more than twenty years ago and I look forward to reading them again. James' early novels and stories are very entertaining and easy to read. He was great story teller and during this period his writing was not so dense as it would later become.

My reading of “The American” is hindered by the insertion of a space before the apostrophe in common contractions, for example, “hasn’t” typeset as “hasn ‘t.” In the justly famous Library of America, such typographical errors are as astonishing as they are annoying.

When I received this item, we discovered that the dust jacket and book did not match. Fortunately, we were happy with the "surprise" book, so decided to keep it!