Less anthologized and less well known is Henry James's novella The Coxon Fund. The story is rather boring and most of the time it isn't very clear where the story is going. This can be explained by the fact that, oddly enough, the narrator does not seem to be really involved. It is as if the narrator is an agent who is standing outside the story. In fact, it is quite a jolt to realize that the narrator is probably Henry James. This first occurred to me in the off-hand comment the name-less narrator makes by comparing the speakers' scene in London with the speakers' circuit in Boston.

Reading fiction we are often warned not to identify the first person narrator with the author, but in The Coxon Fund this seems inevitable. This is because the narrator describes scenes that are not relevant to the story, with personages (that aren't characters in the story either) that the author may have known, e.g. the MP is his railway carriage.

The story itself is about two contestants for the fund, an endowment of a considerable sum. The narrator's reference to the scene in Boston seems to suggest that Frank Saltram is a fraud, although praise about his qualities and skill as a speaker seems to contradict this.

While the narrator seems in independent observer, aloof from the action, one wonders whether James ever had a real interest or envy about such funds and endowments for upcoming and promising talented artists. ( )

An odd choice for Melville House to drag out of irrelevance: James has oodles of novella length short stories that they could have made available. The Coxon Fund might be good for teaching, I guess. It would allow Professor (e.g.) Evans to yammer on about the relationship between money and the life of the mind, or to disquisite on the difficulty of working out whether someone is an authentic genius or a fraud. Unfortunately, James was never as good at first person narratives, and he runs into extra difficulties here, since he chose to make the narrator so stupid. One could interpret the book differently of course, by saying that the narrator isn't stupid, and Saltram really is a genius philosopher, but he certainly doesn't strike me as such. It seems clear from the start that he's a sophist, and the narrator is too dull to realize as much. But that limits James himself to the dull narrator. This is kind of like saying to Lebron James, yes, King, you can play basketball... but you can only take shots from half-court. You can't dribble or pass. And you can't play defense. Henry James being the Lebron James of the novel, more or less.

All of which would be fine if the prose was as charming as his earlier work or as rewardingly difficult as Late James. But it's not. ( )

The physical thing: there's one thing I can say about Melville House's "Art of the Novella" series, and that's that they have a striking trade dress. (Reminiscent, in many ways, of Faber and Faber's frequently minimalist design.)

As to the content: first off, it's Henry James being funny. It's not really something you'd expect from the man best known for "The Turn of the Screw", but it's the truth. Sadly, however, Victorian-era English-language literature has never really been my thing. As such, the humour mostly falls flat with me, and I'm left wondering what someone without the Victorian's stylistic choices could have done with it. ( )