The Liar

The Liar is a short story by Henry James, first published in the Century Magazine in May and June 1888 and collected in A London Life in 1889. It is one of his sharpest middle period social stories and one of the most uncomfortable.

The narrator is Oliver Lyon, a successful English portrait painter, who arrives at a country house party and discovers among the other guests a young woman named Everina Brant, with whom he had been in love years before. Everina has since married Colonel Clement Capadose, a charming, popular, and entirely magnificent military man who is known to all his friends as a compulsive liar. Capadose tells extraordinary stories about his own adventures, his family, his connections, his exploits in obscure parts of the empire, none of which are true and most of which are immediately recognisable as inventions. His friends find him delightful and largely overlook the lying.

Lyon decides to test his theory about Capadose by undertaking to paint his portrait. The plan is to capture in paint the truth that Everina married, the man who lies as easily as he breathes, and to present that truth to her in a form she cannot avoid seeing. The story follows the painting of the portrait, the gathering of small evidence about Capadose, and the climactic scene when the painting is finally shown and the household has to face what it has been pretending not to see.

What makes the story so disturbing is the question of Lyon himself. His motives are not pure. He is partly trying to help Everina and partly trying to revenge himself on the man who took her from him. The ending of the story, with its reversal in the studio and the long final conversation between Lyon and Everina, leaves the reader to judge who has actually been lying throughout the situation. James does not make the judgement easy.

The story runs about sixty pages and is one of the best of the middle period pieces. For readers who liked The Aspern Papers and The Patagonia, this is the natural follow on. It pairs naturally with The Two Faces and with Sir Edmund Orme from the same general period of James’s work.