“What a miserable little snob Henry James is,” wrote Theodore Roosevelt to a friend in June of 1894.  Roosevelt had just read James’ short story “The Death of the Lion” in the April issue of a new periodical called The Yellow Book.  “His polished, pointless, uninteresting stories,” Roosevelt continued, “about the upper social classes of England make one blush to think that he was once an American.”  As an antidote, Roosevelt read something by an Englishman then living in Vermont:  “I turned to a story of [Rudyard] Kipling’s with the feeling of getting into fresh, healthy, out-of-doors life.”

Roosevelt seems to have been a stranger to irony, a deficiency for which Americans have been stereotyped.  What caused his outburst was James turning his gift for irony on himself:  the dying lion of the story is an aging author admired by all the best people, but they have no time in their busy social calendars to read his books.  As the old literary giant lies on his deathbed, no one in the stately old house can find the lone manuscript of his latest (and last) book that one of them had borrowed, although everyone is sure it must be brilliant.

Just as all Roosevelt could see in the story was an English country house populated with pompous aristocrats, many people today seem to think that Henry James’ stories are all about flower arrangements and antique furniture.  Merchant-Ivory’s lush film adaptations of three of James’ novels have helped create that impression, distracting from the two key elements in all James’ fiction, greed and manipulation.  Often an instrument in those machinations is sexual energy, and here the reader is left to find the lewd scene in, to take but one example, The Spoils of Poynton (1897).

Roosevelt was right about James being an expatriate.  Although born in New York City, James spent much of his boyhood abroad.  In 1875 James, at age thirty-two, moved to Europe, staying in Paris and Venice before settling in London and then in the English village of Rye.  In 1915, near the end of his life, James became a British subject, and early the next year King George V bestowed upon him the Order of Merit.

Still, Roosevelt apparently had forgotten James’ stories set in America.  One of the best known and most accessible may be Washington Square (1880).  Set in a fine old house in New York City, it depicts the sort of reserved, respectable people with whom the Roosevelt family might have associated.  In 1949 it was filmed as The Heiress, starring Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, and Ralph Richardson.  The heiress is plain, simple Catherine Sloper, only surviving child of a successful physician, and she refuses to believe her widower father’s insistence that Morris Townsend, a handsome young man rich only in charm, is courting her solely for her money.

It is the same plot as James’ The Aspern Papers (1888).  In that story, the unnamed narrator schemes to get his hands on rare letters, not money, but to do so he must woo Tita (in later editions, Tina), an unmarried, middle-aged woman living with her elderly spinster aunt in a faded palazzo in Venice.  Eventually Tita sees through his ploy and wounds the narrator more severely than if she had stabbed him.  Likewise, Catherine at last recognizes the truth of her father’s warnings and preserves her broken heart by never marrying.

“Catherine,” James mused, “became an admirable old maid.  She formed habits, regulated her days upon a system of her own, interested herself in charitable institutions, . . . and went generally, with an even and noiseless step, about the rigid business of her life. . . . She developed a few harmless eccentricities; her habits, once formed, were rather stiffly maintained; her opinions, on all moral and social matters, were extremely conservative; and before she was forty she was regarded as an old-fashioned person, and an authority on customs that had passed away.”

One is tempted to apply those words to James himself, especially when recalling that William Faulkner supposedly described James as “one of the nicest old ladies I ever met.”  Part of James’ attraction to England and the Continent was his sense of the past, an instinctive desire for layers of antiquity, for cultivated order and dignified heritage.  To James, the worst traits of America, vulgar arrested adolescence and crass egomania, were embodied in aggressive, volatile men like Theodore Roosevelt.

Yet, irony turned upon one of its supreme practitioners.  In 1908 James visited G. K. Chesterton, and, as Chesterton recorded in his Autobiography (1936), “the balanced tea cup and tentative sentence of Mr. Henry James” were rudely rattled and interrupted by the sudden and unexpected arrival of Hilaire Belloc and a friend, boisterous and scruffy after a few days of hiking.

Chesterton doubted whether James ever appreciated “the irony of the best comedy in which he ever played a part.”  Chesterton explained that James had “left America because he loved Europe, and all that was meant by England or France; the gentry, the gallantry, the tradition of lineage and locality, . . . and there, on the other side of the tea table, was Europe, was the old thing that made France and England, the posterity of the English squires and the French soldiers; ragged, unshaven, shouting for beer, shameless above all shades of poverty and wealth; sprawling, indifferent, secure.  And what looked across at it was still the Puritan refinement of Boston; and the space it looked across was wider than the Atlantic.”

Henry James was a snob, his stories are polished, but they are not pointless any more than they are uninteresting.  They do require patience, especially his later novels, long studies of reticent people of means, lapidary stories of desire and duplicity, marked by introspective and meandering sentences, replete, if one may so say, with subordinate clauses.  Best to start one’s sojourn with James in Washington Square.

By 1908, when James was being baffled by the rowdiness of Belloc, an Oxford-educated Member of Parliament, Theodore Roosevelt was winding down his presidential term and planning a safari to eastern Africa.  There he shot lion and other big game, while James was publishing a volume of his stories, including one from 1903, “The Beast in the Jungle,” about a man obsessed with some elusive future event that will define his legacy.

Daniel J. Heisey, O. S. B, is a Benedictine monk of Saint Vincent Archabbey, Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he is known as Brother Bruno.  He teaches Church History at Saint Vincent Seminary.