Reading Henry James

The Nobel Prize for literature was today awarded to Herta Müller, a Romanian-born German author “who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed.” I must admit to never having read her work.

Yet again, Henry James was ignored, and was not awarded the prize, which he certainly deserved more than many of its winners. (Granted, they only give prizes to living authors, but the prize was awarded during 15 years of Henry’s life, and he certainly merited it more than some of the now forgotten authors who received it. Not that Henry needed such a prize to be recognized, but it is easy to notice that the Nobel committee pretty ignored American authors for the first thirty years of the prize. (Though they could have considered Henry to be English at the end of his life.)

House of Wits – An Intimate Portrait of the James Family
by Paul Fisher
2008, 693 pages

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This recent book is a family biography of the Jameses. While biographies of Henry James tend to mention the other members of the family in passing – especially brother William and sister Alice – this book looks at the family as a unit. Dealing with all the children, not leaving out the less-famous brothers Wilkinson and Bob, and giving Alice and the parents their fair share, Fisher draws an interesting portrait of one of America’s most famous intellectual families. Fisher looks closely at Henry James Sr., his past, and his alcoholism, and how his strong personality affected the different children. He relates the family’s many peregrinations across Europe, in different areas of the US, and its complex relations. And he tries to uncover the “dark side” of the family. As Fisher’s web site describes the book:

The James family, one of America’s most memorable dynasties, gave the world three famous children: a novelist of genius (Henry), an influential philosopher (William), and an invalid (Alice) who became a feminist icon, despite her sheltered life and struggles with mental illness. Although much has been written on them, many truths about the Jameses have long been camouflaged. The conflicts that defined one of American’s greatest families — homosexuality, depression, alcoholism, female oppression — can only now be thoroughly investigated and discussed with candor and understanding.

I’m a bit leery about anyone who tries to analyze someone from the past with such a prioris, and Fisher does speculate a bit much regarding these problematic elements. But this book is an entertaining read, and it focuses enough on Henry that you could read it to get an understanding of his life, even if you don’t want to read a biography dedicated solely to him. In fact, reading this book helps you better understand the curious relations that Henry had with his siblings, especially William.

I’d say this is an essential book for those interested in the life of Henry James, or of his brother William. Well-written and thorough, this book is a valuable addition to Henry James scholarship, and is fully accessible to all those who are simply curious about Henry’s life.

Henry James Goes to Paris
by Peter Brooks
2008, 288 pages

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I’m a sucker for biographical works about Henry James, and, for that matter, the rest of the James family, especially William. I’ll read pretty much anything about Henry; the publishers description of Henry James Goes to Paris seemed interesting:

Henry James’s reputation as The Master is so familiar that it’s hard to imagine he was ever someone on whom some things really were lost. This is the story of the year – 1875 to 1876 – when the young novelist moved to Paris, drawn by his literary idols living at the center of the early modern movement in art. As Peter Brooks skillfully recounts, James largely failed to appreciate or even understand the new artistic developments teeming around him during his Paris sojourn. But living in England twenty years later, he would recall the aesthetic lessons of Paris, and his memories of the radical perspectives opened up by French novelists and painters would help transform James into the writer of his adventurous later fiction. A narrative that combines biography and criticism and uses James’s writings to tell the story from his point of view, Henry James Goes to Paris vividly brings to life the young American artist’s Paris year–and its momentous artistic and personal consequences.

Alas, I’ve stopped reading halfway through the book. After a first chapter that relates Henry’s year in Paris (beginning in late 1875), his meetings with famous authors, such as Flaubert, Zola, Turgenev, and others, and how he tried to fit into French society, the book takes an odd turn. In fact, it has very little to do with Henry James in Paris, but more to do with critical analyses of some of James’s novels.

This dense critical study attempts – in vain – to link James’s future novels to that year he spent in Paris, and to repeated visits he made over the year. Its thesis is flimsy and hard to pin down: that James didn’t really like what he saw in Paris in 1875-1876, but he stored away all that he saw for his future works. This is flimsy because James’s repeated visits to Paris, and his links to the country through his reading, helped him appreciate what he didn’t appreciate during that first year. But it wasn’t so much an unconscious storing away of Parisian sensibilities that informed his work, but rather the constant reinterpretation of French literature that Henry James would make throughout the years, as he became closer to what the French were doing in 1875.

I may dip back into this book in the future, but don’t expect a story about Henry James in Paris, as the title suggests. It’s a shame that this book is presented more as a biographical sketch than a critical study – especially through its title – while it is essentially a dissertation on the fiction. I may come back to this book during my reading of Henry’s works, to see what Brooks has to say about them, but for now, having read half of it, I find his insights relatively uninteresting.

It’s an age-old debate: was the movie as good as the book? It’s safe to say that with movies adapted from Henry James novels, the book is always better; unless you haven’t read the book. And since most people haven’t read Henry James, they content themselves with the movies to get an understanding of his work.

This evening, I watched Wings of the Dove again. This is a very difficult novel to put on the screen, and I feel that the director and screenwriter did quite a good job of making a movie that works on its own merits in a mere one hour and a half. But it’s not Henry James.

First of all, too much sex. Not that I’m averse to seeing Helena Bonham Carter naked, but the way that sex scene was used – at the very end of the movie, in what is the key scene of the story – was quite out of place. There is a sex scene in the book, when Kate and Merton are in Venice. In the movie, it’s a quickie, done standing up in an ill-lit passage, but in the book it’s an understated scene where nothing is described but the feelings that come after, the next day, with a series of euphemisms suggesting what had happened the night before:

It played for him – certainly in this prime afterglow – the part of a treasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure of finding in its place when, with each return, he worked his heavy old key in the lock. The door had but to open for him to be with it again and for it to be all there; so intensely there that, as we say, no other act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost the hallucination, of intimacy.

But worst of all was the way the movie ends. Sorry if I give spoilers here, but, in the movie, Morten Densher returns to Venice, because he is in love with Millie’s memory:

“Your word of honour that you’re not in love with her memory.”
“Oh – her memory!”

The thing is, he never goes back to Venice, in the book, and the ending of The Wings of a Dove is one of those great open endings where you wonder what will happen; where the future of the characters is in your hands, in your mind. One of Henry’s great lines closes the book:

He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: “I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.”
“As we were?”
“As we were.”
But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. “We shall never be again as we were!”

The movie is certainly worth watching, and if it gets people to read the book, all the better. But they’ll find a story that’s quite different – and less sexy – than the one on screen.

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Addendum: My wife watched the movie with me, and, discussing it today, she thought that it was just a lame romantic story. She did not at all perceive the evil of Kate Croy, it having been masked so much by the way the film was made. She saw more of the costumes and love story, but totally ignored the manipulations and machinations of Kate Croy. I tried to explain to my wife – who has never read any Henry James – that James’ characters are rarely what they seem on the surface, and that this movie only kept the surface. But even the surface of Kate’s actions is evil, so it’s more the blandness of the movie that hid the truth of her character, at least as far as my wife was concerned.

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?)
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