As part of my ongoing informal free public-domain classic literature self-education program, I decided to tackle the work of Henry James. I chose 2 novellas and 7 novels and read them in chronological order.
- 1878 – Daisy Miller (novella)
- 1880 – Washington Square
- 1881 – The Portrait of a Lady
- 1886 – The Bostonians
- 1897 – What Maisie Knew
- 1898 – The Turn of the Screw (novella)
- 1902 – The Wings of the Dove
1903 – The Ambassadors1904 – The Golden Bowl
I decided to drop the last two; you’ll see why. Below are my thoughts on the others, starting from the most recently read novel, The Wings of the Dove.
The Wings of the Dove
Ouf. The Wings of the Dove was a slog, and it’s because of the style. I started reading the introduction by the author, and immediately disliked the writing. I thought the book itself would be smoother; the other novels had been. Nope! It is with this work that James departs into the stylistic territory where he purposely makes sentences hard to follow. For the sake of psychological realism or whatever. The wandering sentences (and extreme “interiority,” meaning nothing actually happens) are, apparently, quite characteristic of the late work of Henry James; that’s why I decided not to read The Ambassadors or The Golden Bowl: they’re said to be even more extreme. TBH I’m a little worried that reading The Wings of the Dove has at least temporarily affected my writing style. I do not aspire to the writing style of the later Henry James. What does it sound like? Here’s an example:
“Then it has been—what do you say? a whole fortnight?—without your making a sign?”
Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December dusk of Lancaster Gate and on the matter of the time he had been back; but he saw with it straightway that she was as admirably true as ever to her instinct—which was a system as well—of not admitting the possibility between them of small resentments, of trifles to trip up their general trust. That by itself, the renewed beauty of it, would at this fresh sight of her have stirred him to his depths if something else, something no less vivid but quite separate, hadn’t stirred him still more. It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption had been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, on either side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her as she herself had immediately appeared: which was but his way indeed of taking in, with his thrill, that—even going by the mere first look—she had never been so handsome.
This is from Book X Chapter 1. You can see that even the characters speak in sentences that interrupt themselves. There are so many dashes, commas, adverbs, prepositional phrases, lists, pronouns, restatements and other minute little digressions that the rhythm is unbearably choppy. You’ve got to hold all the bits and pieces of the sentence in your head while you struggle to get to the end; then there’s another long sentence of the same kind, and another, and another, and there’s nowhere to pause and catch your breath, or stop and look around. And nothing happens! It’s all narration about people’s thoughts and reflections about implications and possibilities and it’s very vague and abstract and indirect.
I suppose this style is fine in small doses, but it’s exhausting after any length of time…. like even a couple of paragraphs. Compare this rewritten version:
“Then it’s been a fortnight and you haven’t made any sign?”
It was thus that Kate, in the December dusk of Lancaster Gate, asked him how long he’d been back. He immediately admired her system of not letting small resentments trip up the general trust between them. The renewed beauty of this instinct of hers would have stirred him to his depths if something else hadn’t stirred him still more: seeing her, he felt what their interruption had been. They met as persons whose perils and exiles were peculiarly strange. He wondered if he were as different for her as she was for him. Even at first glance, he’d been thrilled by the impression that she had never been so handsome.
I mean, I know I’m not the celebrated author Henry James—so how dare I!—and of course in my hastily stripped-down version, something is definitely lost. But in the original version, I would argue, it’s the reader who’s lost…. Anyway, now I know why Henry James has the reputation for being hard to understand. His early work is not, it’s basically the same difficulty level as any Victorian fiction, which, okay, is difficult compared to last year’s airport thrillers. But his later work… it requires a lot of concentration, and in my opinion, doesn’t repay the effort.
The main characters in The Wings of the Dove are Milly, Kate, Densher, Milly’s companion Mrs. Susan Stringham, Kate’s Aunt Maud Lowder, and Lord Mark. Kate and Densher are secretly engaged because Aunt Maud, who is rich, wants Kate to marry Lord Mark, whereas Kate and Densher are both broke. Milly is also rich, and an orphan, but has some sort of life-threatening disease, and everybody loves her. Her doctor encourages her to live life to the fullest; either because she might as well, or because it actually might help her live longer.
The setting is mainly London, but Milly is American and met Densher previously in New York. Then later everyone goes to Venice.
Mind if I spoil the plot? I’m not recommending this loopy maze of a book so I feel fine about telling you what happens. Basically, Kate tells Densher to flirt with Milly and make her happy. Eventually, he learns that Kate’s intent is for him to marry Milly so that when Milly soon dies, he will inherit her money and then be rich enough to marry Kate despite Kate’s Aunt Maud’s objections. Densher is willing to do whatever Kate says, as long as she gives him a reason to believe she loves him back, which she does. Milly, pleased with Densher’s attentions, makes him her constant companion, even rejecting a marriage proposal from Lord Mark. But then Milly takes a turn for the worse, healthwise, and stops seeing Densher. It emerges that she was devastated when Lord Mark, having been rejected by Kate, told Milly that Densher and Kate were secretly engaged. Densher does get to see Milly one last time before her death, and it seems he’s forgiven, because Milly wills him a large amount of money: in other words, Kate’s plan worked. But now, Densher doesn’t want the money! He realizes he really loved Milly—because how could anyone not—thus, taking the money seems like a betrayal. Now he only wants Kate. But Kate still wants the money! Things will never be the same again between them. The end.
If you’re interested in experiencing these events first-hand, in excruciatingly roundabout detail, you can get a legitimately free ebook of The Wings of the Dove from Standard Ebooks.
The Turn of the Screw (novella)
I feel like The Turn of the Screw is probably the most famous thing by Henry James. It’s a ghost story… or not. That’s the thing about it: it’s deliberately ambiguous. It’s a Rorschach test. You see in it what you choose to see, or rather, perhaps, what you’ve been conditioned to see.
In this gothic horror piece which may or may not involve ghosts, a governess accepts a position on a country estate where she assumes the care of two children, schoolboy (Miles) and his younger sister (Flora), while their uncle and guardian is elsewhere and mostly uncontactable. Either she starts actually seeing the ghosts of a deceased governess (Miss Jessel) and a deceased manservant (Quint), who are trying to interfere in the lives of the two children, or she starts going crazy and hallucinating because she’s isolated and imaginative and/or mentally unstable.
Sigh. This is not my genre. I admire the carefully constructed ambiguity, but I don’t actually see the story as ambiguous because, in fact, I don’t believe in ghosts. Ghosts don’t explain anything. They’re unnecessary. And creepy. I don’t like creepy stuff. Or unreliable narrators, for that matter! YMMV.
Do you like the idea of a governess who thinks she’s being haunted by another governess? You can get a legitimately free ebook of The Turn of the Screw from Standard Ebooks.
What Maisie Knew
What Maisie Knew is a story told from the limited but slowly evolving perspective of a girl (Maisie) whose parents have divorced. That’s only the beginning of the chaos, it turns out. Her parents are such trashy people…. They both remarry, and shuttle her back and forth at their convenience. Fortunately, Masie likes her step-parents. However, as it happens, her step-parents like each other a little too much. What a mess. Will Maisie ever have a stable home, or a respectable role model?
Curious to see divorce and adult abdication of responsibility through an innocent child’s eyes? You can get a legitimately free ebook of What Maisie Knew from Project Gutenberg.
The Bostonians
In The Bostonians, an attractive young woman (Verena Tarrant) catches the attention of a wealthy Boston feminist (Olive Chancellor) and her poor lawyer cousin from Mississippi (Basil Ransom), who is in town on business, when she gives an impassioned impromptu speech at a reform gathering. Olive pays off Verena’s lower-middle-class parents (Selah Tarrant is basically a con man) and takes her away from them to educate her in the ways of feminism, hoping to leverage her remarkable gift for public speaking to make a splash on the national political stage. Meanwhile, Ransom, a dyed-in-the-wool conservative, finds Verena so personally captivating that he conceives a wish to marry her, although he’s not the only one who does so. Doctor Prance, another Bostonian, exemplifies the type of feminism which has no time for rhetoric; she’s too busy being the change she wants to see in the world to have time to sit around and listen to people talk about it. Miss Birdseye, too, embodies feminism, but differently: at the time Olive and Ransom discover young Verena, Miss Birdseye is old, having been an abolitionist as well as a pioneer of the feminist movement. She’s depicted as soft and vague rather than distinct and incisive, but she’s widely respected and generous to a fault (i.e., completely broke).
Ransom finds Olive’s feminism—anyone’s feminism—a bit silly if not outright misguided and despicable, but he genuinely respects Doctor Prance and finds Miss Birdseye much more agreeable than his cousin Olive. Still, he’s polite to everyone, because that’s how Southern gentlemen are raised to behave. Olive, meanwhile, bitterly regrets that she ever invited Ransom to visit her, given that they have nothing in common ideologically, and given how dangerous he winds up being to the future she envisions for Verena. Poor Verena is caught between Ransom and Olive, with little if any space to choose her own path. Her story is told with insight and humor, shedding light on the social scene of her place and time.
I enjoyed The Bostonians, and I’ve pasted some amusing passages and nuggets of wisdom below. I don’t know why Henry James gave up this writing style in exchange for the kind of convolutions I’ve quoted above.
If [Selah Tarrant’s] wife asked him at dinner if the potatoes were good, he replied that they were strikingly fine (he used to speak of the newspaper as “fine”—he applied this term to objects the most dissimilar), and embarked on a parallel worthy of Plutarch, in which he compared them with other specimens of the same vegetable.
[Mrs. Tarrant] had a kind of doleful elegance, tried to be confidential, lowered her voice and looked as if she wished to establish a secret understanding, in order to ask her visitor if she would venture on an apple-fritter.
[T]o see a place for the first time at night is like reading a foreign author in a translation.
These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.
Want to watch Olive and Ransom embody the liberal vs. conservative culture war, which was already raging over a hundred years ago? You can get legitimately free ebooks of The Bostonians (Vol. 1) and The Bostonians (Vol. 2) from Project Gutenberg.
The Portrait of a Lady
Wikipedia says The Portrait of a Lady is a popular and critically acclaimed novel representing the pinnacle of the early Henry James. Like his other novels, this one deals with America vs. Europe, marriage, propriety, secrets, innocence vs. naivete, illness, and money, which can represent independence but also hidden danger. I really enjoyed this one.
[Ralph:] “Ah, one doesn’t give up one’s country any more than one gives up one’s grandmother. They’re both antecedent to choice—elements of one’s composition that are not to be eliminated.”
[Madame Merle:] “When you’ve lived as long as I you’ll see that every human being has his shell and that you must take the shell into account. By the shell I mean the whole envelope of circumstances. There’s no such thing as an isolated man or woman; we’re each of us made up of some cluster of appurtenances. What shall we call our ‘self’? […] One’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self; and one’s house, one’s furniture, one’s garments, the books one reads, the company one keeps—these things are all expressive.”
[Henrietta:] “[Y]ou can’t always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you’re very ready to do; but there’s another thing that’s still more important—you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that—you must never shrink from it….. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all—not even yourself.”
[Mrs. Touchett:] “Of course whatever novelty there may have been at first in my society has quite passed away, and you see me as I am—a dull, obstinate, narrow-minded old woman.”
“I don’t think you’re at all dull,” Isabel had replied to this.
“But you do think I’m obstinate and narrow-minded? I told you so!” said Mrs. Touchett with much elation at being justified.
Apologies, Mrs. Touchett intimated, were of no more use to her than bubbles, and she herself never dealt in such articles. One either did the thing or one didn’t, and what one “would” have done belonged to the sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea of a future life or of the origin of things.
[Isabel] considered, with the presumption of youth, that a morality differing from her own must be inferior to it.
Osmond lived exclusively for the world. Far from being its master as he pretended to be, he was its very humble servant, and the degree of its attention was his only measure of success…. His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world’s curiosity and then declining to satisfy it.
[Isabel] envied Ralph his dying, for if one were thinking of rest that was the most perfect of all. To cease utterly, to give it all up and not know anything more—this idea was as sweet as the vision of a cool bath in a marble tank, in a darkened chamber, in a hot land…. [Yet] deep in her soul—deeper than any appetite for renunciation—was the sense that life would be her business for a long time to come. And at moments there was something inspiring, almost enlivening, in the conviction. It was a proof of strength—it was a proof she should some day be happy again. It couldn’t be she was to live only to suffer; she was still young, after all, and a great many things might happen to her yet.
Want to find out whether Isabel marries well, and why or why not, and what her dying friend Ralph has to do with her choice? You can get a legitimately free ebook of The Portrait of a Lady from Standard Ebooks.
Washington Square
Washington Square depicts the conflict between a father (Dr. Sloper) and his daughter (Catherine) regarding a possibly mercenary suitor (Morris Townsend). The relationship is complicated by interference on the part of Catherine’s Aunt (Lavinia Penniman). Again we see the theme of independence and obligations associated with money, especially in connection with marriage; Dr. Sloper believes future possession of his money motivates Townsend, and also believes that threatening to withhold his money from Catherine will motivate her to reject Townsend. But he underestimates Catherine.
The Doctor had not proposed to Mrs. Penniman to come and live with him indefinitely; he had suggested that she should make an asylum of his house while she looked about for unfurnished lodgings. It is uncertain whether Mrs. Penniman ever instituted a search for unfurnished lodgings, but it is beyond dispute that she never found them.
[Mrs. Almond:] “[Lavinia] always wants to conceal everything.”
[Dr. Sloper:] “And yet at moments no one blurts things out with such crudity. She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!”
Morris reflected that a cellar-full of good liquor—there was evidently a cellar-full here—would be a most attractive idiosyncrasy in a father-in-law.
“What is the source of your interest in Mr. Townsend?”
“Why,” said Mrs. Penniman, musing, and then breaking into her smile, “that he is so interesting!”
The Doctor felt that he had need of his patience.
“He is looking for a position—most earnestly,” said Mrs. Penniman. “He hopes every day to find one.”
[Dr. Sloper:] “Precisely. He is looking for it here—over there in the front parlour. The position of husband of a weak-minded woman with a large fortune would suit him to perfection!”
[Dr. Sloper:] “I am glad she is not on my side; she is capable of ruining an excellent cause. The day Lavinia gets into your boat it capsizes.”
[Mrs. Almond:] “[Catherine] doesn’t take many impressions; but when she takes one she keeps it. She is like a copper kettle that receives a dent; you may polish up the kettle, but you can’t efface the mark.”
Want to find out whether Catherine marries Morris—or indeed, whether Aunt Lavinia capsizes the boat? You can get a legitimately free ebook of Washington Square from Standard Ebooks.
Daisy Miller (novella)
The novella Daisy Miller seems to be another of Henry James’s most read works, alongside The Turn of the Screw. But there are no ghosts here. The story tells of an American girl in Europe who pays a steep price for, however innocently, failing conform to the unwritten rules that prevail in her social surroundings.
Want to find out what rules Daisy breaks, and what price she pays? You can get a legitimately free ebook of Daisy Miller from Project Gutenberg.
Vocabulary of Henry James
Henry James is the only author I know of who uses the phrase “hang fire,” which apparently means “pause before responding.” And oh boy, does he use it a lot. Apparently it derives from a situation where you pull the trigger on a weapon but it doesn’t fire—at least not right away; it “hangs,” as if it’s a computer displaying the dreaded spinning wheel of death.
Oh and my gosh does he love the word “desultory.” Why anybody would feel the need to use it more than once per 100,000 words is a mystery to me, but it appears no less than eight times in Portrait of a Lady (~232,000 words)! Like “hung fire,” “desultory” jumps out at me every time I see it, maybe because this specific word particularly irks me. I’ve never forgiven it for being pronounced DESS-ul-tuh-ree and not, as I thought, dee-SUL-tor-ee. Oh well.
Henry James also seems to like the word “morsel.” Like “corpulent,” it sounds inherently funny somehow.
Want more Henry James?
In addition to the specific links above, you can get more works by Henry James from Standard Ebooks and even more works by Henry James from Project Gutenberg.
Even beyond that, Library of America has apparently published, like, everything Henry James ever wrote, in approximately 17 matching black hardcovers.
Given that the complete set is likely too overwhelming for anybody to be realistically very interested in, I recommend Library of America Volume 29: Henry James: Novels 1881-1886: Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Bostonians. Since I found all three of these novels genuinely enjoyable, and since I think the others I read can be safely skipped, this is actually an ideal grouping, if you ask me.
