I wish I could find a good copy if the Sargent portrait. I had a friend get me a copy from the National Portrait Gallery in London, but it’s very dark, and not very big. (For those interested, you can find it here.) Looking now, though, they have larger sizes that aren’t too expensive; maybe I should get one…

BTW, 15 shelves? Can you tell us some of the more interesting books about Henry that you have?

Yes, sensibility is, indeed, at the heart of Henry’s work. And looking as closely as I have at the first three stories has shown me that this is indeed present from the earliest works. I find it surprising that these early stories are sometimes derided; especially the third story, A Landscape Painter, which is, in my opinion, a minor masterpiece.

Thanks for sharing this journey with me.

Tedious, eh? I didn’t really think that myself, and having read both A Tragedy of Error and The Story of a Year today, with the awareness of all the James that I’ve read up until the end, I’m actually quite surprised by the consistency (within limits) of his technique, of the familiarity of images and methods. I’ll have more to say about that when I post about The Story of a Year, but even at the beginning, in this period derided by many, Henry was laying the signposts of what was to come. Not intentionally, of course, but the “germ” of the later Henry is visible in these early works.

“The young man’s movements, however, betrayed no consistency of attention — not even, for that matter, when one of his arrests had proceeded from possibilities in faces shaded, as they passed him on the pavement, by huge beribboned hats, or more delicately tinted still under the tense silk of parasols held at perverse angles in waiting victorias.”

Same image and diction, as if the Prince had been one one the bystanders in A Tragedy of Error whose attention had been arrested by the lady with the parasol in the carriage! I’m sure this parallel has been noted before, maybe by Kaplan or Leon Edel, but I don’t know it. There seems to be a lot of recurrence of images and “situations” in Henry James, which makes reading him so fun. You know, I thought at first that your starting at the very beginning of Henry would be tedious; now I’m not so sure! So thank you for that.

I find myself in the camp of those who point out the natural animosity between writers and critics as a starting point in my quest to pursue this question and I am reminded of my first inclinations as I finished the story – the book still warm in my hands. I think Vereker’s first words were right on the mark: he considered the writings of critics, and in all probability the critics themselves … “twaddle”. A writer’s creation is his child, and who among us has the patience to suffer their children to be manhandled by unfeeling strangers? Now, one would suppose Vereker was being truly sincere when he apologized to the narrator … but was he?

My first interpretation is the one which I hold to, that Vereker was playing a mildly malicious trick on the critic-narrator having first intuited that the narrator would spend enormous amounts of time and impatience to unravel the ‘secret’. One may assume that any critic who would be able to publicly get an affirmation from Vereker that he had found some underlying motif to his entire canon of work would be a made man in his profession, and therein lies the bait. It is suggestive, if this train of inquiry is valid, that Vereker would not want to inconvenience other innocent stander’s-by, thus, his request that their conversation be kept in strict secrecy. It is my contention that Corvick actually figured out what Vereker was up to and confronted him with his theory. Vereker, holding to to the dictates of honor, admits to Corvick that he is correct and now Corvick decides to have a bit of a go with the narrator as well by leaving him in suspense. Corvick dies but passes on ‘the secret’ to Gwendolyne, who was not particularly fond of the narrator as I recall, and she keeps the secret of the ploy to herself.

He is also the guy who is incapable of subtlety. His folks are menaced by overblown lumbering grotesqueries. Their feelings are whatever chunks of Standard American Reaction he thinks can be made to fit into the plot twist at hand. He is so very far from James, who was capable of imagining and describing the most complex reactions of the human heart*, that I’m tempted to think now that you were deluded when you initially said you were interested in his work. I’ve never seen a bigger example of biting off more than you can chew!

The bottom line is this. Sometimes high art makes us work… and it generally highly rewards us for doing so. Schlock, on the other hand, encourages us to veg out and let the cartoons unroll before our googely eyes. Afterwards, we tend to feel about like we’d just watched a whole season of “The Love Boat” on TV.

Looks like you’ve gone vegetative without a fight.

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*and James was also capable of producing works so precious that they do occasionally make us long to hire Stephen King to storm in and sweep away the teacups. Turning to GOOD James books is the better alternative, in my opinion.

A friend led me to this thread.

First, thank you for including our books in your blog. The fourth volume has just been published–and it’s more expensive that any previous ones! (The editors, of course, have no control over pricing.) Second, the Complete Letters edition is only for “the general public” to the degree that anything written by Henry James is for that audience. Their cost as print books is related to the expense of production, excluding editing. Scholarly books are expensive. I wish that this weren’t the case, but it is. About electronic publication: the fact is that my original plan for the edition included an e-edition (letters to be sold individually like songs from iTunes–this before iTunes) and we’ve done a fair amount of work on one. But in the end, we haven’t found an affordable and reliable way to publish the kind of edition Pierre and I have developed in a digital format. We’ve worked with two digital/internet publishers to create such an edition, but one fired us and we fired the other. There’s a lot to say about this, but we describe the aims of the edition in our General Editor’s Introduction. Anyone who comments on this subject should read the introduction first. In short, the limitations in browsers and screen technology (similar to the representational problems of the Kindle) prevent us from offering an e-edition right now that wouldn’t simply be a pdf version of the print edition. We could, of course, offer a clear-text version of the letters. But clear-text is not what we’re interested in doing, or we would have done that already. Anyone who has seen the print version of the Complete Letters has been impressed by its representation on the edited text page of the original documents. The degree of precision in the rendering is very difficult, in some cases impossible, to achieve on the computer screen. In addition, should a browser not represent a letter as we need it to be represented, if a font isn’t available or line endings are not maintained, then the apparatus will not function as it should. Line references in the annotation, that is, will not be maintained. And so on. Finally, the print edition is beautiful in the page and book design. It was the last project of the great designer, Richard Eckersley, who designed Avital Ronell’s The Telephone Book, for example. The letters edition is a composite of many of Richard’s contributions to book design and is, thus, a tribute to his great career. This is not to diminish the thread, but only to shift its emphasis.

Thanks again for highlighting the books. I hope you can find a way to read them. HJ would be proud to have them read where you live. We’re very proud not only of the edited letters, but of the textual and informational notes too.

Greg Zacharias, project director

* I’m not sure about her exact words, and I haven’t been to find it.

This is an enormous project, and I totally agree with you: ‘you can never have enough Henry James’. I think it’s definitely worth reading Leon Edel’s biography, but only after the fiction. It’s James’ distillation of it all that matters.