Levels of Disclosure: Voices and People in Henry James's 'Italian Hours'

The formal subject matter of James's "Italian Hours" encompasses the great names of art and history and the details of a familiar topography. But the reflective voice which emerges within the text identifies living faces in a crowd, individuals observed, friends preserved in anonymity, insights reaching towards narrative completion. Levels of intimacy range from the most cheerfully impersonal-the humorous American deliberately New World values, to a more veiled treatment of relations and friends whose rooms and villas surrender the detail of their own lives. The most revealing half-spoken longings for strangers, handsome and anonymous, reveal a James whose strength of desire is betrayed by a more searching and intuitive register often at odds with the more self-conscious urbanity of the professional essayist.