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Henry James: The Complete Novels

di Henry James

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[From Great Modern Reading, Nelson Doubleday, 1943, p. 525:]

It may be that after you have read [“The Beast in the Jungle”] you will find yourself sufficiently interested in Henry James to read some of his novels. In that case I would suggest your starting with The American. It was published in 1877, and so long before the period with which I am concerned, but it is very good reading. Henry James had the gift of luring you on from page to page to see what is going to happen, and that is as valuable a gift as a novelist can have. He never displayed it to better advantage than here.

But to my mind his best novel is The Ambassadors. In this he perfected his device of telling his novel through the observations and reactions of a single character who is not directly concerned in the action. It is a method that many novelists since have found highly useful. But besides this The Ambassadors is an entertaining and amusing book and the delicacy of its descriptions of Paris has never to my knowledge been equaled.

Henry James was an admirable technician, and his novels are beautifully constructed. That is something that you do not too often find in American novels, for the American temper seems more inclined to the short story than to the novel, and many American novels are no more than a collection of short stories loosely strung together by an artifice that is generally transparent.

[From Books and You, Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940, pp. 93-97:]

Henry James was not the greatest writer that America has produced, but surely the most distinguished. His gifts were conspicuous; but there was some defect in his character, one must suppose, that prevented him from making the most of them. He had humour, insight, subtlety, a sense of drama; but a triviality of soul that made the elemental emotions of mankind, love and hatred, the fear of death and the sense of life’s mystery, incomprehensible to him. No one ever plumbed the surface of things with a keener scrutiny, but there is no indication that he was ever aware of the depths beneath it.

He looked upon The Ambassadors as his best novel; I read it again the other day and I was appalled by its emptiness. It is tedious to read on account of its convoluted style; no attempt is made to render character by manner of speech, and everyone speaks like everyone else, in pure Henry James; the only living person in the book is Mrs Newsome who never appears in the flesh; and Strether is a silly, meanly inquisitive old woman. It would be intolerable but for Henry James’s great gift (the novelist’s essential gift) of carrying the reader on from page to page by the desire to know what is going to happen next, and by the wonderful atmosphere of Paris in spring and summer which no one, to the best of my knowledge, has so exquisitely conveyed.

I much prefer The American. It is written with lucidity and elegance, with some pomposity perhaps (people do not go away, they depart; they do not go home, they repair to their domiciles; and they do not go to bed, they retire); but that gives it a period flavour that I do not find displeasing. It is a curious novel in this respect, that it is a love story in which there is no love. Christopher Newman wishes to marry Madame de Cintré because he wants a mother for his children and she will grace the head of his table, and when the engagement is broken off his pride is humiliated but his heart is unaffected. The characters are not human beings; the men are stuffed shirts and the women are crinolines. Madame de Cintré, though charming, graceful and elegant, is a purely conventional figure who gives you the impression that she is drawn not from nature, but from a diligent perusal of Balzac’s novels. Balzac, however, was able to give his most conventional creatures something of his own exuberant vitality; Henry James had nothing of the sort to give, and she has no more life in her than a fashion-plate in a Lady’s Keepsake. Newman, the American, is the Western pioneer, and indeed, judging from the period at which the story is set, he may well have taken part in the gold rush to California; but Henry James seems to have know the sort of man he was trying to portray too little to give his hero even a superficial plausibility. Newman could scarcely have learned his epistolary style in a pool-room at St Louis or on the water front in St Francisco. My own belief is that he fooled Henry James, and the real reason why the aristocratic Bellegardes refused the projected alliance was not that Newman had made his fortune in business, but that, as they fortunately discovered in time, he was really an assistant instructor in English at the University of Harvard. But for all that The American is well worth reading. So great is Henry James’s skill in telling a story, so rare his sense of suspense and so sure his touch in working up to a dramatic situation, that you are held from beginning to end. It is as exciting as a detective story and, after all, no more incredible; and you cannot remain unconscious of the charm of contact with the author’s amiable, urbane and cultivated mind. The American is not a great book, but it is a very readable one: there are not many novels of which you can say that sixty years after their appearance.

[From The Vagrant Mood, Doubleday & Company, 1953 [1952], p. 212-14, 217:]

The great novelists, even in seclusion, have lived life passionately. Henry James was content to observe it from a window. But you cannot describe life convincingly unless you have partaken of it; nor, should your object be different, can you fantasticate upon it (as Balzac and Dickens did) unless you know it first. Something escapes you unless you have been an actor in the tragi-comedy. However realistic he tries to be, the novelist cannot hope to give a representation of life as exactly as a lithograph can give a representation of a drawing. With his characters and the experiences he causes them to undergo he draws a pattern, but he is more likely to convince his readers that the pattern is acceptable if the people he depicts have the same sort of motives, foibles and passions as they know they have themselves and if the experiences of the persons in question are such as their characters render plausible.

Henry James regarded his relations and friends with deep affection, but this is no indication that he was capable of love. Indeed he showed a singular obtuseness in his stories and novels when he came to deal with the most deeply seated of human emotions; so that interested and amused as you are (often amused at him rather than with him), you are constantly jolted back to reality by your feeling that human beings simply do not behave as he makes them do. You cannot take Henry James's fiction quite seriously as, for instance, you take Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary; you read it with a smile, and with the suspension of disbelief with which you read the Restoration dramatists. (This notion is not so far-fetched as it may seem at first sight: if Congreve had been a novelist he might well have written the bawdy narrative of promiscuous fornication which Henry James entitled What Maisie Knew.) There is all the difference between his novels and those of Flaubert and Tolstoi as there is between the paintings of Daumier and the drawings of Constantin Guys. The draughtsman's pretty women drive in the Bois in their smart carriages, luxurious and fashionable, but they have no bodies in their elegant clothes. They amuse, they charm; but they are as unsubstantial as the stuff that dreams are made of. Henry James's fictions are like the cobwebs which a spider may spin in the attic of some old house, intricate, delicate and even beautiful, but which at any moment the housemaid's broom with brutal common sense may sweep away.

[…]

If in these pages I have made Henry James, I hope not unkindly, a trifle absurd it is because that is what I found him. I think he took himself a good deal too seriously. We look askance at a man who keeps on telling you he is a gentleman; I think it would have been more becoming in Henry James if he had not insisted so often on his being an artist. It is better to leave others to say that. But he was gracious, hospitable and, when in the mood, uncommonly amusing. He had uncommon gifts and if I think they were too often ill-directed that is only what I think and I ask no one to agree with me. The fact remains that those last novels of his, notwithstanding their unreality, make all other novels, except the very best, unreadable.
1 vota WSMaugham | Jun 21, 2015 |
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