Brooksmith by Henry James, 1891
The magic trick:
Starting off in search of one answer but then more fully pursuing a tangent
Henry James takes something fairly simple here – a previously engrossing social group that splits apart when the aged host dies – and turns it into a feast for literary analysis.
I think the key technique is making the narrator focused on just one particular element of the situation. The narrator is clear upfront that he is telling us this story as a way of exploring how a social salon works and what happened to the one he previously enjoyed years before.
The thing is, he’s most interested in exploring how the butler Brooksmith helped make it function and sidetracks the story away from the salon and fully into what became of Brooksmith himself.
As a result, the reader gets little in the way of answers to the question the story was purporting to be exploring. But instead, we get a million more questions to consider.
The way this story ends up being told gives us reason to consider questions of social class, gender, nostalgia, friendship, education, intellectual enrichment, intellectual snobbishness, even homosexuality.
It’s a remarkable story.
And that’s quite a trick on James’s part.
The selection:
How was it for instance that we never were a crowd, never either too many or too few, always the right people with the right people—there must really have been no wrong people at all—always coming and going, never sticking fast nor overstaying, yet never popping in or out with an indecorous familiarity? How was it that we all sat where we wanted and moved when we wanted and met whom we wanted and escaped whom we wanted; joining, according to the accident of inclination, the general circle or falling in with a single talker on a convenient sofa? Why were all the sofas so convenient, the accidents so happy, the talkers so ready, the listeners so willing, the subjects presented to you in a rotation as quickly foreordained as the courses at dinner? A dearth of topics would have been as unheard of as a lapse in the service. These speculations couldn’t fail to lead me to the fundamental truth that Brooksmith had been somehow at the bottom of the mystery. If he hadn’t established the salon at least he had carried it on. Brooksmith in short was the artist!
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