Henry James: Search and Destroy

That is very true. As our friend, Tracer Hand noted above you can, within the circumscribed limits afforded to you, actually begin, if you can ever actually really begin, to write things down in this very particular way.

^that was shite but cut me some slack, my friends.

I’m not sure James particularly likes Isabel. He has a great affection for her, but it often feels like a pitying affection. She’s tremendously vain. She’s obsessed with her own vague story, to the point of blindness to those around her apart from their impact upon her immediate happiness. He's constantly dropping remarks like "She was very observant, as we know, of what was good for her, and her effort was constantly to find something that was good enough." Which is, you know, her right, but it’s pretty wearing. And in some of the book’s situations it really borders on narcissism.

That said I'm only halfway through the book so I expect the creeping dread that accompanies every move of the maniacs around her will shortly be cashed in and I'll be feeling sorry for her.

Isobel Archer feels like a Jamesian SELF-portrait to me - or at the very least, the character that HJ most identified with in his own fiction.

I'm surprised by that. Ralph feels more author-like to me - his illness forcing him into the role of perpetual observer.

I have to admit I'm feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude at Isabel's life with Osmond. Ralph tried to warn her. But she, supposedly valuing Ralph's opinion so highly, just carried on down whatever road flattered her most. Osmond has exquisite taste, and he chooses her. Deal's a good 'un.

here's a extract from an essay that argues IA is partly a self-portrait but as much an echo of his beloved cousin minny: https://www.nku.edu/~emily/ludwig.html

self-portrait is not an outlier view critically iirc

Critics (or maybe just Leon Edel) have also speculated that Osmond is whom James feared he might become.

"His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world’s curiosity and then declining to satisfy it. It had made him feel great to play the world a trick."

what clown called it "portrait of a lady" and not "henry james: it me"

Henrietta Stackpole and Mr Bantling are each others' beards, this seems obvious to me.

Ralph's deathbed scene near the end feels utterly unfkwable. Like how can anyone even think of writing another deathbed scene after that? And the annihilatingly light scene-setting for his funeral: "Three days after this a considerable number of people found time, at the height of the London “season,” to take a morning train down to a quiet station in Berkshire and spend half an hour in a small grey church which stood within an easy walk."

"As if in acknowledgment of Ralph's influence on their too desiccated lives, they stood in this church erect, still, hands in their pockets."

Just - fine, hang me out to dry, Henry James, I'm done, I'm wrung out

Let's rank these novels.

Whither the Spoils of Poynton? I've only read half, saving the later epics for a rainy month, but I'd bump up The American up one (my favourite twist of the knife ending) and The Bostonians down to 'meh' (too mean spirited).

Poynton is magnificent up until the rather foolish ending.

just ran into this in turn of the screw (which i skim-read years ago and apparently missed a whole bunch of). anyway it made me laugh out loud, for the sheer fkn cheek of it

"I burst, as I had, the other time, made her burst, into tears"

lol Harry

hahaha

Lots of our views about HJ, from c.3 years ago, are here. Some of us even tried writing slightly like HJ.

Ezra Pound:

If one were advocate instead of critic, one would definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, impressions of personal tone and quality are his subject; that in these he gets certain things that almost no one else had done before him. These timbres and tonalities are his stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything else. It is all very well to say that modern life is largely made up of velleities, atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc., but if people really spent as much time fussing, to the extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal trifling, age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc., etc., life would scarcely be worth the bother of keeping on with it. It is also contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it.

I do not agree entirely but it is lol. Pound doesn't necessarily agree either. The essay's a marvelous example of atmospheres, nuances, impressions of personal tone and quality.

sleep is when im a velleity

A quite good discussion of HJ which I've just looked at again is Chapter 10 of Terry Eagleton, THE ENGLISH NOVEL: AN INTRODUCTION (2005).

Idea: compare Adam Verver, the American capitalist in THE GOLDEN BOWL (1904), with Holroyd and Charles Gould, the American and English / Costaguanan capitalists (via mining) in NOSTROMO (1904).

Rereading The Wings of the Dove is learning how to read a novel that forecloses the usual climaxes. We learn the important plot point mentioned in the paperback sleeve synopsis almost three hundred pages in. Pivotal conversations happen offscreen as it were. James tells and tells and tells without showing; he prefers we learn the goodness and vividness of Milly Theale when her friends praise her as such, which in a sense adduces the novel's mirroring of how our reality unfolds, i.e. we exist as legends our friends and enemies tell about us.

Thought this revival would be about the new film THE BEAST.