Royal54-05-2334The Aspern Papers

The National Broadcasting Company presents, transcribes Sir Ralph Richardson in Theatre Royal. This is Ralph Richardson. Our play today is based on a story by Henry James. Henry James, one of America's greatest writers, who born in America spent a great deal of his life abroad and his stories like this one are often stating the audibly.

A successful novelist, Henry James, had a lifelong ambition to achieve equal success as a playwright. During his lifetime he failed, but perversely, since then, several of his tales have been dramatized by other hems into successful plays.

You might, perhaps, recall that I myself appeared in a film version for one of those stories called the air. But now we present to you our adaptation of another work by Henry James, the Aspen Paper.

The world has long recognized Jeffrey Aspen for what he was, perhaps the greatest of American poets. But I still think it was the English critic John Comer and I who had recognized him the most. Our addition of his collected works had not merely been definitive, it had been a landmark in literary history.

Jeffrey Aspen had died young, in that he was emulsed by them, whom he was emulsed in many ways, and whose death had occurred at almost the same date. So that when I first heard the Julianna Baudelow was still alive in Venice, it was almost as if I had heard of the survival of Lady Hamilton. But if it was not her memories of

the poet that interested me, it was the rumour that she still had in her keeping the letters and the little paper which Aspen had left to her when he died. But all this fuss about a few old letters and papers when we think they contain the answers to the written of the universe. My dear Lady, if I had to choose between that