A reader chose The
Ambassadors (1903) as the first book by Henry James she would read. That may
have been a mistake. I admire her spirit but understand her inability to finish
reading it. She didn’t even make it to James’ Greatest Hit in Book V, Chap. 2,
when Lambert Strether exhorts “little Bilham” in Gloriani’s garden to “Live all
you can; it’s a mistake not to.” Late James rightly gets a lot of readerly and
critical attention and praise, but his rhythms, narrative indirection, syntax
and other stylistic convolutions can challenge even the most attentive readers.
Auden had good reason to call him “Master of nuance and scruple” – hardly qualities
prized by many readers.
James is a writer perhaps
best read in roughly chronological order. The earlier novels – Daisy Miller
(1878), Washington Square (1880) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881),
for instance – pose few technical problems. Or try some of his early stories,
especially “Madame de Mauves” (1878). All are accessible, emotionally powerful and
entertaining. Even
James’ beloved brother William, after reading The Golden Bowl (1904),
urged Henry to “sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in
the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the
dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the
style.” William wanted Henry not to be Henry, at least in print.
Henry published The
American Scene in 1907, based on his 1904-05 visit to the United States, his
first in twenty years. On May 4, 1907, in a letter to his brother, William described
the book as “in its peculiar way . . . supremely great.” Then he gets
down to business:
“In this crowded and hurried reading age, pages that require such close attention remain unread and neglected. You can’t skip a word if you are to get the effect, and 19 out of 20 worthy readers grow intolerant. The method seems perverse: ‘Say it out, for God’s sake,’ they cry, ‘and have done with it.’ And so I say now, give us one thing in your older directer manner, just to show that, in spite of your paradoxical success in this unheard-of method, you can still write according to accepted canons. Give us that interlude; and then continue like the ‘curiosity of literature’ which you have become. For gleams and innuendoes and felicitous verbal insinuations you are unapproachable, but the core of literature is solid. Give it to us once again! The bare perfume of things will not support existence, and the effect of solidity you reach is but perfume and simulacrum.”
William, of course, speaks for many readers, though Henry stayed the course and never gave up on “the bare perfume of things.”
3 comments:
The very first paragraph of Chapter 1 of his autobiography, "A Small Boy and Others" - which is 50 lines long in the Library of America edition - just about killed me.
His style is thick and dense and layered - like Brahms's chamber music, which I love.
You've really got to gird your loins in order to read late James.
One could start with The Bostonians, his political novel that has ideas that are easily accessible though for me the Ambassadors is by far his best work.
Early James, however, is lucid and charming - commercial, even. It's when a sore hand forced him to start dictating his novels that his style changed. He'd spend the morning dictating, and the afternoon fussing with the prose. Saul Bellow also dictated his novels, to far greater detriment. Based on these two cases, I'd say that dictating books is a bad idea. But I'm ready to change my mind if anyone can supply contrary examples.
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