HENRY JAMES – The Aspern Papers. Macmillan, hardcover, US/UK, 1888. First published in three parts in The Atlantic Monthly, March-May 1888. Reprinted many times since.

Filmed as The Lost Moment: Universal Pictures, 1947. Robert Cummings, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Joan Lorring, Eduardo Ciannelli, John Archer. Screenplay: Leonardo Bercovici. Director: Martin Gabel.

   Well I got around to Henry James again and landed on his 1888 novella The Aspern Papers, probably his most accessible work except for Turn of the Screw. Which ain’t saying a whole hell of a lot, because James never uses one word where he can put twenty, and his notion of objectivity is to invariably leave his characters disappointed.

   Yet there is, withal, an easy grace in his prolix prose and a muted yearning in his plots that keeps me coming back. James’ characters long for the heroism their author denies them, a theme that doesn’t appear this consistently again in American Lit until David Goodis, and maybe it’s this that keeps drawing me back.

   Whatever the case, Aspern, as I say is a bit more engaging than most James, with something like a real plot, about a publisher/literary enthusiast looking for material relating to a romantic poet who died in the last century.

   It seems that a young woman with whom the poet had an affair still lives, incredibly old now, in a decaying mansion in Venice with her niece, and she may have love letters from her legendary paramour. In short order the poetry sleuth inveigles himself into the house, only to find he has entered their lives as well.

   It’s a fine, romantic premise for a book, and James handles it competently, with a realism in his characters that threatens at times to bleach all the excitement from the idea, but manages to keep it alive somewhere just under the surface of his inhibitions. The conclusion is typical of James as well: disappointing and yet somehow satisfying in its context.

   Universal studios, home of Abbott and Costello and the Wolfman, brought this to the screen in 1947. Or at least they brought the premise; James’ placid plot and wan protagonists are replaced in The Lost Moment by a noirish romanticism the author would hardly have recognized.

   The pusillanimous publisher is portrayed by an earnest Bob Cummings, and the reticent niece by sultry Susan Hayward, who seethes with pent-up passion even at her most spinsterish. A kindly dowager who sets the plot in motion on the first page becomes a venal painter with plans of his own (played by John Archer in a Melvyn Douglasmode) and the aged muse/lover of the dead poet is portrayed by a rasping Agnes Moorehead — at least they say it’s Agnes Moorehead; under all those veils and wrinkled makeup it could be Lon Chaney Jr for all I know.

   All this could easily have led to a massive betrayal of James’ novel, but it’s saved by a literate script by Leonardo Bercovici (a subsequently-blacklisted author who worked on off-beat romances like Portrait of Jennie and The Bishop’s Wife) and lush, romantic direction by Martin Gabel, of all people.

   Gabel always played it cold and constipated in the movies, and his work here as a smooth, moody auteur in the style of Max Ophuls is one of those minor miracles with which the cinema is occasionally blessed.