henry james

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BlueOtterTwo: James is like being stuffed into a corset and then force fed suet pudding untill you burst clobberthesaurus: I didn't like the Henry James I read. BlueOtterTwo: HE IS AWFUL

― anthony, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

i like it, esp late late late james: it is like a comma blown up to the size of mars

― mark s, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

He is THE MASTER!!

― Andrew L, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

I would like him more if I could get to the end of one of his sentences without having to take a toilet break.

― Archel, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

Surely Le Maitre.

― the pinefox, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

No, that was Alain-Fournier

― Matt Fallaize, Thursday, 9 May 2002 00:00 (11 years ago) Permalink

7 months pass...

ok to my surprise i found washington square (1880) laugh-out loud funny on almost every other page, and not hard work at all and highly page-turning

at one point the silly aunt says to the sinister suitor, "why don't you start a law suit against catherine's father", and the suitor says "i'll start a lawsuit against YOU if you don't shut up w.yr tomfool ideas" (slight rewording but only very slight)

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 6 January 2003 18:41 (10 years ago) Permalink

um, I'll try this later...is that late late late james or early early early or middle middle middle james?

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Monday, 6 January 2003 21:09 (10 years ago) Permalink

Early - on my copy Graham Greene sez it is "the only novel in which a man has successfully invaded the feminine field and produced work comparable to Jane Austen's", which always puts me in mind of William Faulkner's "Henry James was one of the nicest old ladies I ever met" crack.

― Andrew L (Andrew L), Monday, 6 January 2003 21:20 (10 years ago) Permalink

― Julio Desouza (jdesouza), Monday, 6 January 2003 21:43 (10 years ago) Permalink

James got more difficult--his sentences harder to parse--as he went along. [i]Washington Square[/i] is a page-turner; [i]The Wings of a Dove[/i] is extremely difficult by comparison. Lots of missing referents: "it," "that," "her," "him," etc. abound.
My favorite books of his are from mid-career, the best being [i]The Aspern Papers[/i]--which isn't a bad place to start, it's not very long. I think he's the greatest Eng-language author of his era, and one of the best literary critics as well.

― Amateurist (amateurist), Monday, 6 January 2003 22:01 (10 years ago) Permalink

I also get the feeling he would have been a killer dinner guest.

― Amateurist (amateurist), Monday, 6 January 2003 22:04 (10 years ago) Permalink

i beached in the wings of a dove: i can totally get him at sentence level, that's a lot of the fun, but i just wasn't grabbed by the story exactly and hurtled along to the finish (possible mistake: i've seen the film)... i finished portrait of a lady, but it was a bit of a slog

i'm retrying the bostonians (which was the first i ever tried and also beached in, ages ago when i wz quite impatient and shallow)

the pageturner element was i think looking forward to seeing how dr sloper actually gets his comeuppance, seeing as he's so obviously a total dick from page one

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 6 January 2003 22:40 (10 years ago) Permalink

i said i liked late late late james up top and it's true, i kind of do, except i also think he's left the surface of planet narrative — it's what stockhausen calls moment form, the microstructure totally gets in the way of the macrostructure (which is why seeing the movie was a mistake)

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 6 January 2003 22:46 (10 years ago) Permalink

the microstructure totally gets in the way of the macrostructure

Based on prefaces that he wrote for new editions toward the end of his life, this is what James was aiming for, if intentionality interests you at all.

― Amateurist (amateurist), Monday, 6 January 2003 22:52 (10 years ago) Permalink

well cool i guess and he wins a pie in the raffle, but why are they so long in that case?

― mark s (mark s), Monday, 6 January 2003 23:08 (10 years ago) Permalink

5 years pass...

The second volume of Shelden Novick's biography makes less of a to-do about his "psychosexuality," which is intensely boring anyway; all he cared about after 1900 was fantasizing about young men laying their hands on him, getting over gout and hemmorroids, and dictating novels to typists.

Anyone read The Other House? It and The Sacred Fount are the only ones I haven't essayed. Inspired by the Novick bio, I reread Ezra Pound's classic essay (Pound: "His plots and incidents are often but adumbrations or symbosl of the quality of his `people', illustrations invented, contrived, often facetiously and almost transparently, to show what acts, what situations, what contingencies woudl befit or display certain characters. We are hardly asked to accept them as happening." These are compliments).

― Alfred, Lord Sotosyn, Wednesday, 26 November 2008 03:52 (4 years ago) Permalink

OK, I JUST read 'The Other House': very entertaining, very clearly has its origins in a play, very odd psychological developments/character behaviour at the end that doesn't quite convince in a couple of cases. I was saying on ILB that with this and 'Watch and Ward' I seem to be doing all the deeply weird Jameses in one burst.

― James Morrison, Wednesday, 26 November 2008 05:30 (4 years ago) Permalink

on Monday morning I finished The Portrait of a Lady after faaarrr too long on it, and was mildly horrified when I couldn't understand the final sentence. I didn't read 650 pages for this! Finally worked it out last night, phew. Besides that little disaster averted, I thought it was great; lots of erections of the little hairs in the internal sections, lots of excellent dialogue, even a bit of tearjerking, while I'm in the library, GOD ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE ME LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT.

― Merdeyeux, Wednesday, 26 November 2008 13:09 (4 years ago) Permalink

1 year passes...

Osmond... always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great. To surround his interior with a sort of invidious sanctity, to tantalise society with a sense of exclusion, to make people believe his house was different from every other, to impart to the face that he presented to the world a cold originality--this was the ingenious effort of the personage to whom Isabel had attributed a superior morality. "He works with superior material," Ralph said to himself; "it's rich abundance compared with his former resources." Ralph was a clever man; but Ralph had never--to his own sense--been so clever as when he observed, in petto, that under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success. He lived with his eye on it from morning till night, and the world was so stupid it never suspected the trick. Everything he did was pose--pose so subtly considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse. Ralph had never met a man who lived so much in the land of consideration. His tastes, his studies, his accomplishments, his collections, were all for a purpose. His life on his hill-top at Florence had been the conscious attitude of years. His solitude, his ennui, his love for his daughter, his good manners, his bad manners, were so many features of a mental image constantly present to him as a model of impertinence and mystification. His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world's curiosity and then declining to satisfy it.

the final line there is just incredible.

― jed_, Friday, 20 August 2010 23:04 (2 years ago) Permalink

I could never finish "Wings of a Dove" or "The Golden Bowl" and it makes me feel inferior. ( u_u)

― Count Scrofula (corey), Friday, 20 August 2010 23:14 (2 years ago) Permalink

2 years pass...

The Heiress, the stage adap of Washington Square (before it was filmed), is being revived on Broadway with Jessica Chastain and David Strathairn.

― kizz my hairy irish azz (Dr Morbius), Friday, 21 September 2012 21:07 (8 months ago) Permalink

^could get into this for $69; considering.

― kizz my hairy irish azz (Dr Morbius), Sunday, 30 September 2012 17:46 (7 months ago) Permalink

1 month passes...

aaaand it gets a mixed review.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/theater/reviews/the-heiress-with-jessica-chastain-at-walter-kerr-theater.html?ref=arts&_r=0

― the ones that I'm near most: fellow outcasts and ilxors (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Friday, 2 November 2012 19:18 (6 months ago) Permalink

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