Reading Henry James

I love to read. Reading has long been one of my favorite recreations, since the days when I would visit the library as a child, on Saturday mornings, picking out books because the covers looked interesting. While I make my living as a writer, I currently only write ephemeral books and articles—I write about computers, software and digital music, all things that will be forgotten (at least in their current incarnations) in a couple of years. While my profession involves words, this doesn’t prevent me from enjoying words for their own sake in my time off.

I read widely and voraciously, but a handful of authors stand out for me. Some because of a single book that has changed my life: Henry David Thoreau, for example, the author of Walden, or Ross Lockridge Jr., author of only one novel, Raintree County. Others because of their ideas: Ralph Waldo Emerson, for the depth and accessibility of the philosophy he presents in his Essays, as well as his perceptive journals. Other authors are important because of their insight, or their characters; I think of Proust, Balzac and Joyce; of Richard Russo, Russell Banks, John Irving or Robertson Davies. Finally, there are authors whose work in certain genres provides entertainment; for, after all, we read not only to understand life, but also to enjoy it. I am an avid reader of mysteries and crime fiction, I read some science fiction (though in my adolescence I read much more), and I’m a big fan of Stephen King who creates worlds of wonder, and who is probably the Dickens of our time.

But one author stands at the top of the heap: Henry James. His books remain, for me, models of superior prose, but also contain profound analyses into their characters minds, experiences and motivations. While I don’t care for desert-island lists—how could you choose, for example, from among Bach’s cantatas if you only could take ten to a desert island? Or which ten Grateful Dead concerts could you select to listen to forever, neglecting all the others?—if there were only one author whose works I could take to a desert island, it would have to be Henry. (I feel I know him well enough to talk of him on a first-name basis; he would disapprove, of course, expecting to be called “Master”, or “Cher maître”, but so what?)

It’s hard to explain my infatuation with Henry’s prose. It is sinuous and graceful, it flows at times like a river, at others like a breeze, and I feel intensely relaxed when I read it. Now I don’t think inducing relaxation is, on its own, a characteristic of good writing, but I feel such a communion with Henry’s writing that it soothes my soul. But more than just his writing is the way he makes the reader inhabit the souls of his characters; the way you feel when reading a book by Henry James: that the characters are real.

Of course, no one is perfect, and Henry certainly has his detractors, and even his weaker works. Some will say that have of his books simply tell the same few stories over and again (an American girl goes to “the continent” to seek a husband; a marriage is in view, and there are complications; a writer or artist deals with his the complexities and questions of his art), and this is certainly true, to a certain extent. But just as all mysteries tell of crime, and each crime is unique, so is each of Henry’s stories and novels unique. His forte is characterization; in fact, he was one of the first writers in the English language to examine his characters and their motivations, rather than simply telling a story about their actions.

His insight is often so brilliant that with a few deft strokes, we know a character and their feelings. For example, take this phrase from The Wings of the Dove:

“”Les grands esprits se rencontrent!” laughed her attendant gentleman, a high but slightly stooping, shambling and wavering person who represented urbanity by the liberal aid of certain prominent front teeth and whom Milly vaguely took for some sort of great man.”

The “slightly stooping, shambling and wavering person” and the representation of “urbanity” by “certain prominent front teeth” tells us so much about this character that little more needs to be said.

One can criticize Henry’s “late style”, which he developed in his last few novels. This uniquely sesquipedalian style stems from Henry’s adoption of a new technology as a palliative for repetitive stress injury. Poor Henry wrote so much—not only fiction, but thousands of letters as well—that he developed, most likely, carpal tunnel syndrome, which was known, in his time, as writer’s cramp, and began dictating his work to a typist. The ramifications this had for both his stories and the future of literature were unimaginable at the time.

So, in order to get to know the works of this great author better, I decided that I would re-read all of his work. (I’ve read all his fiction at least once, some works twice.) Henry James, having been an extremely prolific author, has a huge body of work, so the “all” I used in the previous sentence needed some tempering. Would I read everything Henry had written? Impossible; of the 15,000 extant letters, only a couple thousand have been published, so there was no way I could include these letters and still claim to have read everything. (The first three volumes of a projected 140 volumes of his letters, covering some 10,000 of them, have been published recently; it is unlikely that the remainder of these volumes will go to press in my lifetime.) What about the non-fiction? There are thousands of pages of articles, of interest to me as an aficionado of Henry’s work, but that serve more as punctuation among his greater body of fiction. (Though it is worth reading the prefaces Henry wrote to the stories and novels he selected for his New York Edition.)

So I decided that this reading project would include all of Henry’s fiction. Of course, that choice, too, was more complicated than it may seem. For which versions of Henry’s works should I read? Henry wrote most of his works originally for magazines; both his stories and novels appeared in magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, Scribners and Macmillan’s. The shorter stories were published in a single issue, and the longer stories and novels were serialized. (Though several of the novels were only published as books.) When these periodical works were later published in book form, Henry revised them. He revised some of them again for later book publication, then, near the end of his life, selected the works he considered the most important and performed yet another revision for what was called the New York Edition; The Novels and Tales of Henry James. Published in 24 volumes between 1907 and 1909 (with two additional volumes published posthumously in 1918), this set included introductions specially written for each novel and volume of tales.

So the morass of different editions and versions of Henry’s work is complex and confusing, and it would make little sense to read each version of each work; after all, I’m not a literary scholar, I’m just a common reader tackling a literary Everest.

In the end, practical considerations led me to make the following choice: I would read all of Henry’s fiction in the Library of America editions, an excellent series of books which aims to publish all of his work. At the time I began this project, all of Henry’s stories were available in five volumes, and five volumes of novels had been published. This series had not, however, reached completion, with Henry’s last two major novels slated for future publication, but not in time for my expedition (at least not for its beginning; I have no idea when I’ll reach the summit). I therefore chose the Penguin editions of the last two novels, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. I also plan to listen to a couple of the novels in audiobook format, and watch several of the many film adaptations of Henry’s works.

However, there were still some disparate works that needed consideration. While it’s fair to consider that James’ oeuvre ends with the masterful novel The Golden Bowl, there was a later novel, The Outcry, which Henry adapted from a play that found no takers, and there were two unfinished novels, The Ivory Tower and The Sense of Place, as well as a volume of plays written at various times. I’ll look at Henry’s abortive experience with the theater in another post, but, at the outset of my project, I made a decision that I would not look too closely at his theater writings. I felt that the best thing would be to focus on Henry’s finished works of fiction, aside from the plays, and, eventually, read The Outcry, the unfinished novels and the plays. However, I would certainly read the prefaces from the New York Edition, for the insights they give about the various works; these are available in one of the Library of America’s volumes of Henry’s literary criticism.

Lets look at another perspective on this. All in all, the Library of America volumes of the fiction come to a bit over 10,000 pages, or roughly four million words. (I counted etexts of a couple of the novels to come up with an average of 400 words per page.) The final two novels – The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl – together come to 370,000 words. If I add the prefaces – 120,000 words – this puts Mount James at around four-and-a-half million words. (And if, at the end of my journey, I decide to read all the other non-fiction works, that’s about 1.8 million words. My guess is that when I have re-read all the fiction, I’ll want to re-read all the non-fiction as well. You can never have enough Henry James.)

Finally, throughout all this, just as a tourist needs a guidebook when traveling to a new land, I would need one as well. In fact, I chose two guidebooks, which I kept by my side at all times: Leon Edel’s monumental five-volume biography of Henry James, published in the 1960s, yet still the best biography of the man, and Robert L. Gale’s landmark reference work, A Henry James Encyclopedia, published in 1989, with entries for every novel, story, character, and significant person in Henry’s life. (See the Henry James Bibliography for other writings that have informed my understanding of Henry James, his life, and his work.)

So, as I set out to climb Mount James, I felt that this journey would lead me in many places, both in Henry’s works and in my own mind. For reading has two goals, beyond simple entertainment: to provide the reader with experiences that he or she can relate to, then interpret according to their own lives and feelings, and to help them discover parts of themselves that they need to unearth. The many lives and experiences in such a large body of work allow the reader to examine his or her thoughts on life, death, love, and many other values and ideas.

Henry James was not a philosopher; he would have bristled at the thought that his works could stand as a repository of feelings, thoughts and other examples of a life worth living. Yet, as I hope to find out during this expedition, any great author’s body of work bears these elements; this is what makes them great. Any oeuvre of this size and scope is bound to be more than just a bunch of stories. I truly believe that reading Henry James can change your life.

Mount James is the kind of pinnacle that seems to recede as one gets closer to it; its summit is high up in the clouds, yet it rises slowly and regularly, until, near the end, it reaches precipitous heights as Henry develops his “late style”. But like all journeys, what is important is much less the destination than the journey itself. Each step along the path is a step that takes one closer to death, what Henry called “the distinguished thing,” and understanding that is perhaps the greatest lesson that we can learn in our brief lives.

As I read this capacious oeuvre, I will present my thoughts on this blog. I will write about Henry’s writings, the stories and novels, as I read them; about Henry’s life, which I find to have been one of the more interesting literary lives, and whose incidents shed interesting light on his work; and whatever else crosses my mind as the stores and novels inspire me. I’m not a critic, so I won’t analyze the works, but rather look at them from the point of view of a “common reader”. Finally, I will share my thoughts about how climbing Mount James helps me to better understand the world in which I live, and how it changes my life.