The Uncollected Henry James: Newly Discovered Stories
edited by Floyd R Horowitz
336pp, Duckworth, £20
"A door opened and shut in the hall, and a voice called at the foot of the stairs, 'Come, my daughter, you will be very late - James has been waiting for you a long time."' ("One Evening's Work") James has indeed been waiting for Floyd Horowitz, a former professor of English and of computer science, a very long time. But now, with Horowitz's arrival, 24 of the earliest tales James wrote and published, from the ages of nine to 26, can be read by the world for the first time since they were published in minor American magazines between 1852 and 1869. Or so Horowitz would like us to believe.
Horowitz has been working up to this collection for "almost three decades of exploration" - so his claims would deserve to be taken seriously, even if one weren't fascinated by the idea of a nine-year-old James contributing an Oriental tale ("The Pair of Slippers") to a journal aimed at youthful readers, New York's National Magazine, or, under the pseudonym of Mademoiselle Caprice, a wartime tale of love and temperance vows ("The Story of a Ribbon Bow") to Arthur's Home Journal in 1862 (Timothy Arthur was the author of Ten Nights in a Bar Room and Strong Drink). 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.
Horowitz was led to begin his quixotic quest by studying James's earliest story published under his own name, "The Story of a Year" of 1865. "I became increasingly convinced," he says, "that, woven into that text, beyond the literal level, was a highly ordered symbolic structure, involving a sophisticated set of allusions and philosophical themes." In fact, he names as an influence the late Quentin Anderson, whose The American Henry James presented James as a moralist, many of whose insights were derived from his eccentric philosopher-father's Swedenborgian philosophy: the "symbolic structure" Horowitz traces in these stories is said to be profoundly Swedenborgian.
The supposed sophistication made Horowitz wonder if "this young author, then twenty-two years of age, had practised his craft in earlier, unknown writings". The celebrated biographer and editor of James, Leon Edel, had shown that a search might be worthwhile by identifying a story published earlier than 1865 - "The Tragedy of Error", brought out anonymously the year before, but attributable through a mention in a letter by a James family friend.
How did Horowitz set about his massive task? 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.
But it has a technical aspect, explicated, though not altogether clarified, 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.
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"). From time to time one catches a whiff of Pale Fire mania in the confident circularity of Horowitz's logic.
The identification of James with "Leslie Walter", which very possibly is a pseudonym for someone, is problematic for unHorowitzian reasons. 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, and distinctly short on the verve and anticlerical energy displayed by HJ Sr (and by his brood, according to hilarious accounts of James family gatherings). Indeed, these tales often amount to cases of what he used to call with withering scorn "flagrant morality". Horowitz might have done better to claim they were parodies.
Not that poor "Leslie Walter", disinterred by the dubious shovel of 21st-century scholarship, isn't interesting in his or her symptomatic way, ploughing his or her narrowish furrow: dealing in the earlier stories with poor seamstresses driven to fatal illness by ruthless coquettes demanding their ball-gowns, and in the later with coquettes who have hearts of gold but mercenary habits and are driven to desperate choices. The fairly programmatic, sanctimonious misogyny of the tales, repressing and punishing uppity girls, isn't per se a proof that they're not by James, of course. But he did write stirringly, in an 1868 review, that "It seems to us supremely absurd to stand up in the high places and endeavour, with a long lash and a good deal of bad language, to drive women back into the ancient fold." There's also no real trace here of James's immense French reading or European upbringing (whereas the authentic James's "A Tragedy of Error" is set in France, and already seems to be implicitly answering Madame Bovary).
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.
Maybe James just outgrew being so mediocre, he might argue. The greatest value and interest of this collection, however, 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 and its now-unearthly preoccupations, with a pungency like that of an old document-chest in a dusty attic.
· Philip Horne is a professor of English at University College London, and is the editor of Henry James: A Life in Letters (Penguin)