My feelings about Henry James are mixed, and reading “The Aspern Papers” made me remember why. It’s everything I love about Henry James and everything that I can’t love about him, in one short book.

The story is fairly simple. A man — a writer, a critic, and devotee of a certain long-dead poet named Aspern — comes to suspect that a long-ago love interest of the long-dead poet (who died young), now very old and living in a small, isolated way in Venice, is in possession of papers that would change the face of Aspern scholarship. She has already forcefully rejected people who have reached out to her seeking said documents. So the narrator decides to try to become a boarder in her home, a much too large, decaying Venetian palace.

Rather to his surprise, this gambit works: for an outrageous rent, he’s in. Then nothing happens for a long time; the old lady is not very sociable, nor is her middle-aged niece, also living in the home. So he decides to try to win over the niece, and in this way somehow get to the aunt….

Read more: The Aspern Papers

Sometimes James really funny. But I often get the sense of being not quite in on the joke. His narrators are snobbish, pretentious, and often seem hardly to know themselves. It’s both fun and disconcerting, this sense of James the author peeking out, barely visible from behind the mask of the narrators that surely represent some aspects of the author himself — but which aspects? And how much?

He had to know himself pretty well to be able to write like he did, I think. And yet. There’s something he’s not saying. And when you get to the end of “The Aspern Papers,” it’s pretty clear, at least to the modern reader, what this something is.

The longer James went on writing, the less readable I find him. (I loved “Portrait of a Lady” but I confess to giving up on both “The Golden Bowl” and “The Wings of the Dove” because I could not find my way through the morass of the words enough to understand what was happening. And probably to some people, that means I have forfeited all rights to have any opinions about James, at least any well-informed ones) “The Aspern Papers” is still relatively early Henry James, though, and the story hums along nicely, not too bogged down by sentences one gets lost in. The atmosphere of Venice more than a century ago is wonderfully rendered, and it’s fun to imagine that beautiful city before mass tourism made it into a ghost of itself.

What happens with the aunt, the niece and the papers is both comic and tragic, both inevitable and surprising. Is it as obvious to everyone else as it seemed to me that James was gay (as he did not feel free to be open about, unsurprisingly) and spent much of his fiction trying NOT to write about this fact?

Not that I mean, heaven forfend, to reduce him to his sexual preference, or to try to suggest that this explains everything about his writing in general, or “The Aspern Papers” in particular. People are complicated; Henry James certainly was!

It’s just, once you see this, you cannot unsee it.

Having read “My Search for Warren Harding” not much earlier definitely enhanced my appreciation of “The Aspern Papers”; the two novels are in dialogue with each other in such an interesting way that I think people should always be encouraged to read them together.