Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

I was the only person who loved The Aspern Papers when we had to read it for a class in tenth grade

so, agreed with horseshoe

I’m not saying he’s bad in general. I’m saying that his prose style in particular is bad. Does he have a reputation as a stylist?

Bbc loved him.for some reason and made a load of tv interpretations of his ghost/ supernatural work.
I thought that was because of his ability to maintain suspense and that had to do with his writing style.
But haven't read what I have by him.

i think you might be thinking of M R James there

Yeah was just going to correct that.

BBC still seems to have made a number of interpretations of Henry's stuff. Assume that is because he's a respected writer or is it just what is presented as a great one to aspire to. Cultural icon better than he he's worth or something.

'Turn of the Screw' is one of the first pieces of prose that James dictated to a typist, rather than wrote out by hand himself (he was literally suffering from writer's cramp). This late style is notoriously difficult, but that may or may not be the same thing as a 'bad prose style'. It certainly has a kind of poetry when read aloud, although I concede it's the poetry of evasion and interiority. I think the style is doing exactly what James wants it to do, for better or worse, and that human thought and feeling still lies at the heart of his subject matter, however obscurely rendered.

But just as a wordsmith, a composer of sentences, the James of Portrait of a Lady or The Aspen Papers or etc etc is pretty unimpeachable imho, and not radically different from similar writers of the era. Just better.

Washington Square is gorgeous, although I never finished it. I had to read Roderick Hudson as a student and was bored, but I suppose I might find it more bearable now.

I am probably in the minority but I absolutely despised Turn of the Screw. Interesting experiment to tell a ghost story by removing all the exciting bits, but it’s a prissy slog, and once you understand what James is trying to do, utterly monotonous.

It’s only a small book; I’d rather eat it than read it again.q

"If you really want to watch a film, you must be ready to recognize your own life slipping away. That takes a good deal of education. But you have to be stupid, too".

Challenge accepted my man.

Washington Square and The Europeans are what I recommend to new Jamesians.

TOTS is as wrong a place to start with James as Heart of Darkness is with Conrad.

Portrait of a Lady is breathtaking, a masterpiece of design and architecture.

"once you understand what James is trying to do"

Not sure I do, or could say.

Nor sure there is a right or wrong place either. HEART OF DARKNESS probably as good a place as any to start with Conrad.

The question of HJ's style (like anyone's), its + or - features, is still inherently interesting and it would actually be most interesting to see someone actually quote eg: 2 or 3 sentences or paragraphs, and explain why they were good or bad; eg on the HJ thread which I think exists here.

Just saying 'HJ is brilliant' or the opposite is fine as an opinion but doesn't really provide much information for anyone to go on or think about.

Right. I have heard all about him, but think all I have ever read myself has been Washington Square and “The Real Thing” in high school and then a university wall graffito that said he “chewed more than he bit off.”

he does have a reputation as a stylist! But it has definitely risen and fallen several times since his death. He was certainly v invested in style! I guess I would say the specific thing I appreciate about his style, esp late James, is his take on mimesis of consciousness (thinking of the passage on the sticky and the slippery at the beginning of Wings of the Dove) which I find very beautiful, though it can certainly be less than fully clear on a first read.

His prose is not transparent glass, for sure

Aw hell let me find my copy of Wings of the Dove and I’ll try to do what pinefox suggested.

I do think Portrait of a Lady is the best entry point into his work.

tbh i think PoaL is fairly clumsily structured in one major way (tho i am happy to accede to the other superlatives): it very much feels like it was written in two separate but sustained bursts and these are then ineptly glued together

on the whole i prefer the early funny stuff (washington square) or the super-creepy super-modern-seeming stuff (what maisie knew)

TOTS is hugely overpraised as a ghost story SORRY IF THIS OFFENDS: it's a story of someone's mind collapsing ftb relentless gaslighting (possibly by ghosts)

All my books are packed in boxes because we’re moving; it’s v disorienting

Is Washington Square funny?? I guess I need to reread it.

mark s on turn of the screw is otm

notable point of legacy: the early new yorker writers (like e.g. thurber) all ADORED him but all also acknowledge they only got good as writers themselves when they cast off his mannerisms (while such modernists as hemingway were dedicatedly all abt casting him off stylewise)

xp i found WS funny yes (disclaimer: effect may not transfer, i find all kinds of weird shit funny)

In 1913, 'a delightful young man from Texas' asked James to recommend five of his works as a starting point. James sent two lists, the second more 'advanced':

They were:

Roderick Hudson
The Portrait of a Lady
The Princess Casamassima
The Wings of a Dove
The Golden Bowl

The American
The Tragic Muse
The Wings of a Dove
The Ambassadors
The Golden Bowl

James added, "when it comes to the Shorter Tales the question is more difficult (for characteristic selection) and demands separate treatment. Come to me about that, dear Young Man from Texas, later on - you shall have your little tarts when you have eaten your beef and potatoes."
Now that's good writing!

I still haven't read any James but his quote (misattributed?) "write a dream, lose a reader" pops into my mind every single time I read a book with description of a dream in it.

I have definitely never seen that line attributed to HJ. Whether he said it or not, it doesn't sound like him.

Not sure I recall WASHINGTON SQUARE being funny, when I read it 21 years ago.

It occurs to me that the *late* HJ style at least might be compared to FINNEGANS WAKE, ie: it's not "good" writing, by anyone else's standards, but a particular, perverse mode of writing that's trying to do a particular thing, and not necessarily something that anyone else should think of emulating.

I don't now remember "early HJ style" clearly enough to opine whether it's good compared to anyone else.

LATE JAMES IS GOOD. ITS NOT FINNEGANS WAKE IMPENETRABLE. I KNOW I HAVE NO CITATIONS BUT MY BOOKS ARE IN BOXES

of course I have to be moving when ilx decides to slander Henry James

Right. I have heard all about him, but think all I have ever read myself has been _Washington Square_ and “The Real Thing” in high school and then a university wall graffito that said he “chewed more than he bit off.”

WS is quite funny even at Catherine's expense. The Europeans is more lol.

this is off-topic I SUPPOSE but horace fletcher's wikipedia is all-time

this summer i am reading horace fletcher's wikipedia entry :)

It’s funny cause it’s literally true: James was for a time an advocate of fletcherisation!

Washington Square is gorgeous, although I never finished it.

You absolutely must. The final sentence is one of the most perfect endings you can imagine.

I have definitely never seen that line attributed to HJ. Whether he said it or not, it doesn't sound like him.

Turns out I learned this via a post by user Eazy on the thread Chicago's Greatest Hits: 1982-1989

The Heiress is an excellent adaptation of the stage play based on WS. It amps up the melodrama. Fine, fine cast.

Yes, Ralph Richardson is amazing in the Heiress and he brings out some of the comedy that mark s suggests is present in the original novel.

It's funny to me that our resident James Joyce scholar is hating on Henry James. I'd rather have dental surgery than ever read Joyce again, whereas I'd read James again (or one of the novels I haven't read!) in a heartbeat.

I'm rereading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, first time in 20 years, and, yeah, it's harder going than I anticipated (and I still love the non-boring parts of Ulysses). I think I'm due for a James tune-up.

from The Europeans:

A few days after the Baroness Münster had presented herself to her American kinsfolk she came, with her brother, and took up her abode in that small white house adjacent to Mr. Wentworth’s own dwelling of which mention has already been made. It was on going with his daughters to return her visit that Mr. Wentworth placed this comfortable cottage at her service; the offer being the result of a domestic colloquy, diffused through the ensuing twenty-four hours, in the course of which the two foreign visitors were discussed and analyzed with a great deal of earnestness and subtlety. The discussion went forward, as I say, in the family circle; but that circle on the evening following Madame Münster’s return to town, as on many other occasions, included Robert Acton and his pretty sister. If you had been present, it would probably not have seemed to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers was treated as an exhilarating occurrence, a pleasure the more in this tranquil household, a prospective source of entertainment. This was not Mr. Wentworth’s way of treating any human occurrence. The sudden irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the Wentworths of an element not allowed for in its scheme of usual obligations required a readjustment of that sense of responsibility which constituted its principal furniture. To consider an event, crudely and baldly, in the light of the pleasure it might bring them was an intellectual exercise with which Felix Young’s American cousins were almost wholly unacquainted, and which they scarcely supposed to be largely pursued in any section of human society. The arrival of Felix and his sister was a satisfaction, but it was a singularly joyless and inelastic satisfaction. It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte, nor Mr. Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great promoter of reflection and aspiration, frankly adverted to it as an extension of enjoyment. This function was ultimately assumed by Gertrude Wentworth, who was a peculiar girl, but the full compass of whose peculiarities had not been exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext in the presence of these possibly too agreeable foreigners. Gertrude, however, had to struggle with a great accumulation of obstructions, both of the subjective, as the metaphysicians say, and of the objective, order; and indeed it is no small part of the purpose of this little history to set forth her struggle. What seemed paramount in this abrupt enlargement of Mr. Wentworth’s sympathies and those of his daughters was an extension of the field of possible mistakes; and the doctrine, as it may almost be called, of the oppressive gravity of mistakes was one of the most cherished traditions of the Wentworth family.

The western light shines into all his grimness at that hour and makes it wonderfully personal. But he continued to look far over my head, at the red immersion of another day—he had seen so many go down into the lagoon through the centuries—and if he were thinking of battles and stratagems they were of a different quality from any I had to tell him of. He could not direct me what to do, gaze up at him as I might. Was it before this or after that I wandered about for an hour in the small canals, to the continued stupefaction of my gondolier, who had never seen me so restless and yet so void of a purpose and could extract from me no order but “Go anywhere—everywhere—all over the place”? He reminded me that I had not lunched and expressed therefore respectfully the hope that I would dine earlier. He had had long periods of leisure during the day, when I had left the boat and rambled, so that I was not obliged to consider him, and I told him that that day, for a change, I would touch no meat.

There is the evocation of death and an uneasy acceptance of its reality and consumptive power, a straining toward escape, an inner tumult made manifest by the meandering of the boat in Venice's canals. The sentences become more complex as the sense of tumult grows. There is also the rejection of the flesh and an embrace of an ascetic attitude, a sudden change it seems, a renunciation of the subject as if it could just vanish upon this occasion.

James is an "interior" writer, to agree with what others have said, and so I think that he isn't for everyone. His style often embodies a conflict between the first person central and the first person peripheral, which can make it confusing. But the way he can evoke such complexities of his characters is through this conflict, I think, in that so often his protagonists are attempting to create their own story while trapped in a story of another's making.

Anyway, I love him.

it's interesting that TOTS was dictated. i should be honest: at least some of my reaction to his prose style is likely due to the fact that i listened to an audiobook (which is also why i don't have quotes to post). i feel like an audiobook is "reading" him on hard mode, simply because his sentences are so long?

i did enjoy TOTS as a story. but good grief the prose. contrasting it to return of the soldier (because i read it recently, not because they're related), which was published 20 years later, it's like a different language. tempting to attribute that to 20 years of changes in language, rather than James himself, but i don't remember having this reaction to dickens/melville/austen, etc. (or for that matter the russians or dumas in translation.)

James didn't sound like anyone writing in English. Meredith maybe?

Rebecca West published a book on James just two years before ROTS, interestingly

It was not long before I came upon certain other essays of a later date which were sealed, as absolutely as though by strips of gummed paper, by Mr. Henry James's latest style. I approached them in different ways. I read them as if they were writ­­ten in a foreign language, treating obscurities as idioms and translating every word into my collo­quialism. More desperately, as the hours grew smaller, I pretended that it was all right, and tried to send my intelligence winging up beside his soar­ing phrases, as though their flight was to be fol­lowed with composure. But the more I did so the stronger became the conviction that these di­vagations were not the gambols of a winged intel­lect in an element over which it had full command, but rather the disordered earthward spirals of wings so overworked that free and happy flight had become an impossibility. Every paragraph made it more clear that this later prose was the altar of a bloody sacrifice, on which everything that had in the past made Mr. James's prose liv­ing and radiant, a glorious part of the organic world, had been ruthlessly offered up to an in­creasing fineness of meaning. Gone was the loving command of the color of language which was shown at its most precious, perhaps, in "The Spoils of Poynton," in which we saw the bright "art tint" with which the abominable Brigstocks varnished the corridors of Waterbath, with a distinctness that, contrasting with the not less distinct glories of the Spanish altar-cloths and Maltese crosses of Poynton, gave us the final conviction of the importance of the battle which formed the idea of the story. Gone was that rhythm which made "The Altar of the Dead" sound like a sol­emn and consoling mass, and its worshippers seem not sentimentalists hugging an affectation, but earnest mystics.

All these aids to the ultimate significance of his work he has sacrificed to a desire to hammer out the immediate significance of each sentence to as thin a radiance as gold-leaf. He splits hairs till there are no longer any hairs to split, and the men­tal gesture becomes merely the making of agitated passes over a complete and disconcerting baldness. One does not deny that these excesses are inci­dental and that the prose still has a loveliness of its own; but it is no longer the beauty of a living thing, but rather the "made" beauty which bases its claims to admiration chiefly on its ingenuity, like those crystal clocks with jeweled works and figures that moved as the hours chimed, which were the glory of medieval palaces, and which so unaccountably fail to kindle our enthusiasm when we go abroad to-day.

https://newrepublic.com/article/117371/reading-henry-james-wartime-rebecca-west

I'm generally touched if anyone notices I exist, but I'm also puzzled by the notion that I've said anything hateful about James. Perhaps others have. Myself, I think I've said a) I'd like some close analysis and b) perhaps the late HJ style is comparable to FW (I'm not sure that's a good or bad thing or neither). On balance I think of myself as pro-HJ; but on the HJ thread I did make clear what felt like the disproportions of THE GOLDEN BOWL.

Joyce's Portrait I think can be hard going, for such a seemingly slim and manageable book. The style starts off fine and comic but becomes deliberately convoluted and self-regarding. Much of the content is tedious for many readers - until it reaches the last fifth and the tedium is perhaps forgotten as things become interesting again. Yet I think the writing probably does have a level of care and exquisiteness that sets it above precursors - Moore, certainly Hardy, for instance, though probably not Conrad or indeed James.

>>> James is an "interior" writer, to agree with what others have said, and so I think that he isn't for everyone.

But many many writers can be called that - Woolf is among the most obvious examples - and still seem, to many readers, more quickly readable than HJ.

I agree that HJ is a writer of the interior, and I think I agree that that produces his entanglement, but the puzzle remains that other writers also writing of consciousness don't get thus entangled, so it doesn't seem inherent in that general subject matter.

thank you for the link jmm!

>>> James is an "interior" writer, to agree with what others have said, and so I think that he isn't for everyone.

But many many writers can be called that - Woolf is among the most obvious examples - and still seem, to many readers, more quickly readable than HJ.

I agree that HJ is a writer of the interior, and I think I agree that that produces his entanglement, but the puzzle remains that other writers also writing of consciousness don't get thus entangled, so it doesn't seem inherent in that general subject matter.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, June 22, 2022 11:58 AM (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think it has to do with the manner of entanglement, as I mentioned in my previous comment regarding different first person perspectives colliding with each other.

Thanks for clarifying re yr position on HJ, but fwiw, when I read something like this— "Not sure I do, or could say" in regards to what HJ is "trying to do"— I get the idea that the writer doesn't much care for Henry James.

James became more interior in those late works, it seems like he acquired more of this quality just as the other modernists were starting off. He seems to cut across the 19th and 20th centuries like no other writer.