Some Short Stories by Henry James

Some Short Stories by Henry James is a small Kindle collection of tales long out of copyright that can be downloaded for free and freely enjoyed. In some ways the best of them is “Brooksmith,” about a head butler who descends to the depths when the master whom he apparently was made to serve dies. After that comes “The Real Thing” about a socially threadbare couple desperate to find a way to make a living and finding that handsome though they are, they lack the spark and flair necessary to be good artist’s models. And then there is “Mrs.Medwin,” which is less about Mrs. Medwin than about Miss Cutter, an American who helps other Americans get a footing in the English social scene . . . for a fee, of course.

But the subject of all these tales is the perennial Jamesian theme of social relations, upside down or downside up, and their essence is not really the story but rather James’s unflagging craftsmanship in turning almost any toy box into a museum quality collection. These are not “great” stories in the way that A Portrait of a Lady or “The Turn of the Screw” are great stories, but they are excellent examples of what a brilliant writer who wrote for a living can do when there is no great story to be written. The “lesser” James is better than most other writers because of his psychological acuity, his skill as a stylist, and his tempo in presenting scene after scene in such a way that a complete fiction comes together at just the right time.

There are readers who probably could not care less about many of the characters in this collection who nonetheless will enjoy the way those characters are “worked up,” to use a Jamesian formulation. He is ironic but never unkind, penetrating but never excessively so. He has a knack for pinpointing the meaningful weaknesses of a figure without discrediting completely said figure’s innate dignity. In a sense James’s overarching purpose is to handle his work objectively but morally. He does not need war or political chicanery to hit this note because he is so deft in summoning the metaphors of war and political chicanery as he describes the antics of the drawing room, where ordinary people live subtly extraordinary lives in the works of a master.

Don’t read this collection first if you are new to James. Read it if you’ve read lots of him and want to read a bit more.