Henry James

Wings a da Dove.

Completing his late trio of classic novels is one of my proudest reading achievements. I struggled with portions of The Golden Bowl especially and later read that by that point James was dictating his novels with no one editing, just a servant transcribing. It was illuminating.

He did not live "quietly" in "New England."

He led an active life from his English base and was quite noisy (fussy, condescending, perplexed, opinionated, funny) everywhere he went.

And he needed a good, long fuck that apparently he never got.

I think he is more beloved by Europeans, especially Brits, than Americans. I've never found his work to be relatable or enjoyable, it's almost like he's writing about a different country.

Windbaggian old lady

R2 Do you mean The Ambassadors, The Outcry, and Th Golden Bowl?

I think The Golden Bowl is next on my reading list. I have always wanted to try it, but I have been a little intimidated.

Unreadable, social climbing prick who seemed to feel that if you wrote 100 words where 10 would do, you were a genius.

R7 Tell us how you really feel

Wasn't he married to Betty Grable?

One of my favorite books is The Master by Colm Toibin, which is a biography in fiction. Most everything is true to his life in the novel, but there’s interior dialogue about sexuality and desire that can’t be proven so it couldn’t be a straightforward biography. Toibin did the same with Thomas Mann with last year’s The Magician.

Sadly, I’ve probably seen more adaptations of his books than actually read him. I don’t ever recall in high school or college him being mentioned. Maybe he was out of fashion in the 1980s? He’s most likely someone I should read more of, but haven’t, I don’t quite no why. If someone more well read could suggest what they thy think are the top three must reads and list them that would be helpful to maybe get started.

R10 I am not a James expert, but I do know The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl are ranked as his top books.

The Bostonians and The Europeans are good. Merchant Ivory made them into fun films.

Henry James is the great American novelist. I've read almost everything he's ever written. I would highly recommend some of his long stories like The Pupil or The Jolly Corner, if the novels are intimidating. But even more obscure works like The Princess Casamassima or The Awkward Age are absolutely magnificent.

I'm sorry to say that if you think he's unreadable you either are not a good enough reader or you have no appreciation for the art of omission. He is an author for proper adults.

The Turning of the Screw!

OP/R6, his late classics or late trio are TGB, The Ambassadors, and The Wings of the Dove. They were written in the same decade if memory serves and are, arguably, the only novels that entered the top tier of the canon alongside his much earlier Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square. (He has copious short fiction that is widely anthologized and taught as well, of course.)

It sounds snobbish but I agree with R12 on all points. James was for years my favorite writer and while I occasionally need to take a break and read less-dense material, I always go back to him. R12, it's pretty impressive that you've read most of his output--did you even read his letters?!

R14 -- not the complete letters, but I've read Philip Horne's "Henry James: A Life in Letters" — Maybe one day!

Of his novels, I would substitute Washington Square for The Bostonians to get the major quintet.

and yet despite thousands and thousands of pages, the mystery remains, "did he or didn't he?" (ever get fucked)

R16 — He got fucked fort the first by William Morton Fullerton in his middle age, who then, um, 'opened him up' to having gay love affairs for the rest of his life

fucked FOR THE FIRST TIME — jeez I can read but apparently I can't type

Who’s better, Henry James or Edith Wharton? And more importantly, who would have won in a cat fight?

I've tried repeatedly to read his books but rarely finish them. I get about 1/2 way in and realize I don't care what happens to any of his characters.

The Ruth and Augustus Goetz adaptation of James' Washington Square, called The Heiress on stage and in their brilliant film adaptation, is superior in every way to James' original short story. And I also loved Colm Toibin's book about James, The Master, far more compelling than anything James ever wrote.

James over Wharton (though she's fab; I'm a fan) in the literary arena. Wharton would have wiped the floor with James in a physical confrontation, however. He was, God bless him, unfathomably namby-pamby.

where are the receipts, R17

Wharton by far the better writer

We need both in our lives.

I finished The Ambassadors after an endless slog. It's amazing but not all that entertaining and it turned me off reading anything by him for a long time. I did eventually decide to read the Princess Cassimassima (or whatever) which I didn't much like either. I would ignore the big later books and focus on the earlier shorter novels. Anyway I prefer Edith Wharton too.

I heard that he died a virgin.

Through James I discovered his twink (possible) lover the sculptor Hendrik Christian Anderson. The last time I was in Rome I went to his amazing, yet somewhat obscure, museum, I’m convinced that some Romans have no idea it even exists. He must have been Hitler’s wet dream of a sculptor and city planner. I also went to see his grave and mausoleum in The Protestant Cemetery, which is nothing short of fabulous!

I also discovered through James, Constant Fenimore Woolson, a fellow writer and in fact one of the more prominent female writers of her time who is now barely remembered. I’ve read a collection of her short stories. I’m fascinated by her suicide, leaping from the upper floors of her palazzo in Venice to her death below. James came to settle her estate and meet her mother and sister. Because she was a suicide, her clothes were bad juju and could not be given away. So, he hired a gondolier and had him take him out into the lagoon to drown them. Unfortunately, they kept floating and popping up and they had to smack them down with oars. If I remember the story right, they actually filmed part of Wings of the Dove in her former palazzo.

He knew some really fascinating people.

Wharton was not the better artist.

James was and still is one of the greatest developers and advancers of the novel, which Wharton (and most writers) are not. People who go to art for a "good read," reinforcement of personal biases, "social learning," a happy time or a nice diversion are approaching it from a reduced perspective and their opinions must be judged in that context.

James was akin to Proust, Kafka and Joyce in being artists working to extend what the novel and other fiction modes could do.

If you don't get it, you don't get it. That's fine. But what you say reflects your understanding. I love Wharton, but she is both the lesser writer and the lesser artist, not because of her not shaking the medium fresh but because of a lack of universality in her work, a lack of placing her work in a larger perspective. It provides much of her appeal, but it also sets her apart from, for example, Austen and even, in an interesting way, Cather.

I read James and return to the late-phase trilogy of novels every few years: TGB, The Ambassadors, the Wings of the Dove.

I have read his letters to younger men (found in Dearly Beloved Friends, ed. by Gunter and Jobes) although they are embarrassing to read in the context of his novels. I refuse to speculate on where he ever got the BIG ONE or died a virgin.

The ghost stories are some of the best ever written. I did not enjoy The Outcry (his last unfinished [?] novel) based on one of his plays.

One book of particular interest for me was Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra. Gorra interprets James's life though a reading of The Portrait of a Lady.

^ oops. where he got the BIG ONE. I meant whether not where.

The Golden Bowl was a good movie.

Merchant-Ivory. Nick Nolte, Uma Thurman, Kate Beckingsale, Jeremy Northam, James Fox, and Anjelica Huston.

I could not finish The Golden Bowl.

Henry Adams is a dullard blowhard. Henry Adams. on the other hand, was a great writer.

Bombastic, verbose, over-writer who dedicated paragraphs to what could have been just as well written in a sentence. I truly believe the James was paid by the word by his publishers. I always recommend James to insomnia sufferers. Two pages and Zzzzzzzz.

Henry James was a dullard. Sorry.

Thanks R26 - That link to Hendrick Christian Andersen's work is wild... so florid, so in love with the male form and exuberant in depicting man naked with proper proportion of the penis to the body (Greeks and Romans intentionally sculpted male nudes with small penises).

The Portrait of a Lady is a masterpiece. Washington Square and The Turn of the Screw are very enjoyable too.

Verbose, stuffy and repressed. His sentences could run for half a page or more, but IMO lacked the spark of Wharton.

I read Bostonians, The Ambassadors and Portrait of a Lady. Was proud of myself for finishing them, but never had the least desire to read any one of them again. I have re-read Wharton, with great pleasure.

[quote]One of my favorite books is The Master by Colm Toibin, which is a biography in fiction.

I liked the book, though it was a bit of a slog, particularly the part about all of his futzing over decorating Lamb House in Rye. One of the most interesting stories was that Flora from "Turn of the Screw" was based on his sister. His sister sounded absolutely exhausting.

While I don't think The Master was an unflattering portrait, it made him sound like an emotional vampire in that he cozied up to these quirky and/or larger than life personalities (cousin Minnie, Constance Fenimore, Lady Woosley) and used their stories for his novels & short stories, but wasn't really there for them as human beings. It reminded of me James Gandolfini used to call David Chase a vampire because he'd take real life quirks from the actors on the show and incorporate them into his characters. Between is relationships with these women & lack of any kind of sex life, he sounded like more of an observer of life rather than an actual participant.

Why did he divorce Betty Grable?

I would've cruised him at Lord and Taylor's in 1885.

How much time did he spend in the US after he became an expat?

I’d be so confused having a first name for a last name.

I have read most of Henry James while younger, it really fascinated me. The latter works are heavy going, I finished The Wingers of The Dove with difficulty, it has a great plot but the meandering setences three me, so I haven’t read The Ambassadorr nor The Golden Bowl. At times it feels like you are reading a different, foreign language.

His earlier work, including The Portrait of a Lady, is much more accessible. I would advise to starting with Washington Square.

A lesser known work, The Other House is unintentionally funny. A group of civilized people occupy most of the book discussing a recently committed child murder with the guilty party in a sort of deranged garden party.

"The Spoils of Poynton" is one of the few times I have surprised by an author into laughing out loud.

"Washington Square", "The Europeans" and "The Turn of the Screw" are all great.

James is challenging, but I like the above comparison to Proust - he was a writer who pushed back the boundaries of what fiction could do.

Yes, r44, James is challenging.

Lots of people don't like being challenged.

Then lots of people can read something else.

I'm never sure why boasting about intellectual incuriosity is a thing.

I haven't read him yet but this article made me put him on my list.

Washington Square, quietly devastating.

I always found it interesting that Mark Twain and Henry James, two of the most celebrated writers in American literature, both from the same era, never made any comments about each other’s work, despite being highly opinionated about others in their criticism. I often wonder if they respected each other.

The problem with James, much like Proust, is that he lacked depth. He had an amazing facility with words and great intellect, but he preferred to skate over the surface of things. I'll take Woolf or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or Hemingway over either one of them.

James didn't create characters a reader could care about. And by care about, I don't mean the characters had to be likable.

[quote] The problem with James, much like Proust, is that he lacked depth. He had an amazing facility with words and great intellect, but he preferred to skate over the surface of things.

I have this same issue when reading Gore Vidal's novels. His essays are a joy to read, but his novels are always so superficial.

[quote] I'm sorry to say that if you think he's unreadable you either are not a good enough reader or you have no appreciation for the art of omission.

MARY!

Yas, Gott! Dee Turnink of dee Skrews!!!

Did he ever consider going by James Henry?

don't understand his work, too subtle for me

R12

Don't be a snob. James isn't everyone's cup of tea. It's a question of taste, not intelligence or reading ability.

R50

Proust did not lack depth. He conjured an entire world.

"Henry James lacked depth" is probably the most bizarre criticism of any American author I have ever seen.

I’m with r59. James could make a glance into a fireplace then out a window into a chapter, wending in and out and around and down his character’s mind and thoughts and thought structures for pages. I’ve never found his writing lacking depth.

So R59/R60, would you say that James was deep like Woolf and Hemingway were deep? I would say 'no'. James was an excellent observer, like Proust. James detailed every thought going through his characters' minds. But his characters were not deep and were mostly concerned with society and status. Thus James himself was not deep, as a writer. He did not plumb the depths of the human heart. Did her ever have a romantic affair? Did he ever love?

R57 is a typically relativist little snip who grounds her aesthetics in "save the philistines" rather than anything resembling an aesthetic model.

I don't care for much of Rubens' work. It IS a matter of taste. But the nitwits here base their comments on their short attention spans, their lack of capacity, their ignorance, their incipient homophobia and their dislike of the novel. I don't denigrate Rubens' skill, brilliance, vision, capacious spirit or standing. Van Dyke is quite another matter (i.e., hack).

Woolf is a poser and Hemingway a clod. They both wrote interesting works, but they are neither "deep" nor artists of the skills of Henry James.

R61, you seemingly haven’t read much James.

Woolf and Hemmingway were both brilliant, but the comparison to James or each other is apples to oranges. James is using language encyclopedically, Woolf is allowing language to proceed randomly in an attempt to mirror the thought process and Hemmingway is paring things down to essentials.

R62, Rubens and Van Dyke wrote novels?

van dyke was the beard for the fat reubens girls

R60, swap fireplace with dusty mirror and you’ve got the opening of Wings of the Dove and Kate Croy waiting for her blackguard of a father to come into the room. When I first read that scene as an 18-year-old first-year undergrad I was swept into a completely new world and way of describing it. I was hooked.

There’s nothing more sublime than following the meandering of a Jamesian sentence and trying to square his arch irony with the construction of meaning.

Can someone answer my question? Did James ever have a romantic affair? Did he ever love anyone? Did he ever have his heart broken?

That's the thing, r67. By the time I reach the end of an interminable Henry James sentence, I've forgotten how it started.

R65

I blocked R62, but I've known very bright people (800 SAT verbal), Ivy League English majors, et al., who could not stand Henry James. R62 is a snob who enjoys insulting others. It's as simple as that.

R68 you might want to look into the accident Henry James had when he was a teenager: "In 1914, James published the second instalment of his autobiography, Notes of a Son and Brother. The book covers James's early manhood, including the period of the civil war, during which he was exempted from military service because of an "obscure hurt" he had suffered as a teenager. Notes is written in the dense prose of James's mature years, and although he recalls the incident over several pages, his reminiscences have proved opaque enough to result in nearly a century of lurid speculation as to what, exactly, his injury might have been.

Let's hear it from James himself. In 1861, aged 18, he was helping to put out a fire when he was the victim of an unfortunate accident:

Jammed into the acute angle between two high fences, where the rhythmic play of my arms, in tune with that of several other pairs, but at a dire disadvantage of position, induced a rural, a rusty, a quasi-extemporised old engine to work and a saving stream to flow, I had done myself, in face of a shabby conflagration, a horrid even if an obscure hurt; and what was interesting from the first was my not doubting in the least its duration - though what seemed equally clear was that I needn't as a matter of course adopt and appropriate it, so to speak, or place it for increase of interest on exhibition.

This "horrid" but "obscure" form of damage went on, as James explained, to alter his fate "for ever so long to come". In his commanding biography of the writer, Leon Edel led the way in trying to sift through the rumours that attended the story. Was it a back injury? Possibly; but on the evidence, unlikely. This unmentionable hurt was referred to by James as "most entirely personal", "extraordinarily intimate", "awkwardly intimate". What, asked Edel, "after all is the most odious, horrid, intimate, thing that can happen to a man? However much different men might have different answers, in the case of Henry James critics tended to see a relationship between the accident and his celibacy, his apparent avoidance of involvements with women and the absence of overt sexuality in his work.""

Q.E.D., R71

R50 et al, what is your thesis? That James' lack of personal romantic love made him incapable of writing about it? Well, no. He *did* write about love, romantic and otherwise; TPoaL featured Isabel's push-and-pull relationships with various suitors, as one universally acclaimed example. Romantic love was a motivating theme in The Wings of the Dove, in The Ambassadors (the latter featuring characters who risked social status for it, in fact). Is it just that people haven't read much James but still feel like farting an opinion about him?

I'm sorry, he's not deep. He doesn't understand love, so he can't write about it. He can write about social relations, and classes, and political gatherings, and interpersonal calculations, but he can't write about love or any or deep human emotion, b/c he didn't feel them -- or sublimated them. Much like Proust. But at least with Proust you feel he really DID love St. Loup.

What you're doing goes beyond a biographical reading--it's an imposition of an artistic limit based on your imagined understanding of a dead man's biography. Do his novels not demonstrate an understanding of love? You don't say. You do say that because he didn't have a romantic relationship, he can't possibly write about romance, even though he....did....repeatedly. And that's not even touching on the other types of love, which you discard with your obsession with romantic connections.

You're tedious. Root your criticisms in the novels or keep your pissant musings to yourself.

[quote]Do his novels not demonstrate an understanding of love? You don't say.

I most certainly DID say, and I said NO. I repeat: NO.

You disagree. Well, bully for you. You don't need to be a condescending cunt about it.

"I can't, I can't, I can't"

What hilarious name-dropping this thread has become!

What the fuck do Rubens and Van Dyke possibly have to do with writing fiction?

Let's also talk while we're at it about Bernini, Saint-Gaudens, Canova, and the art of sculpture!

He is my ancestor...so suck it, gays!

The thought that people - particularly people in the past who may have been gay - did not experience or understand love because they were never in a relationship (a public one) is so fucking stupid to begin with that it appearing on a message board for gay men barely moves its idiocy up a notch.

Describing authors as "deep" or not is a stupid way to analyze literature. Samuel Richardson was as shallow as a puddle, and yet Clarissa is *the* great English novel.

Sez you, r81

The Turn of the Screw is a great spooky season read!

If it takes seven pages for a character to walk through a doorway the author can go fuck himself.

The Portrait of a Lady is an excellent book with so many gorgeous characters

I've read every single one of them except for the unfinished ones, Watch and Ward, and The Tragic Muse.

My favorites are The Europeans, Washington Square, The Spoils of Poynton, What Maisie Knew, and The Aspern Papers.

His marriage to Betty Grable was an odd union.