My sister is a big fan of “Beast in the Jungle” by Henry James, and she’s been urging me to read it. Apparently, the plot is great, “once you get past the writing.” Well, I can’t. I made an attempt at his syntax, and my brain tried to wriggle out my nostrils to escape confusion. This evening, we watched, “The Innocents,” based on “The Turn of the Screw”. Awesome movie, great plot. I asked her for the book, and again, I could not manage his writing.
So is there a trick to it? Are these great plots simply locked away in a tangle of convoluted writing, only deciphered by a brave few? Seriously, how do I read this guy?
I can read almost anything by anyone and I read all the time. If there’s nothing else to read, I read the label on the cornflakes box at breakfast. I am, in short, what is known as an avid reader.
But I cannot read Henry James. I’ve tried. I toiled my way through Portrait of a Lady and when I was done I felt just worn out and fed up. That’s how he affects me. I think that Henry James is much admired by people who haven’t read Henry James.
People (some people) think because he’s hard to read he must be Great.
Bollocks.
I can, and do, constantly re-read Trollope and Dickens. I slog through Thomas Mann. Thomas Hardy is my chum. Those are Great Writers. Henry James? Not so much.
I had difficulty getting into the master’s periods when I first read The Ambassadors five or six years ago.
His work is, IME, both best read aloud and meant to be read aloud.
There are film versions of most of his novels, and not a few of his shorter things – even though most I’ve seen are crap, some are astonishing (“The Innocents” [from “Turn/Screw”]) and some are campy fun (“The Golden Bowl” with Nick Nolte and Uma Thurma [who goes topless for a sex scene]).
Given that there are a lot of these jerk-off Merchant-Ivory-style pictures, although the plots are often of only minimal importance to HJ and his appreciation and even more often are about fussy and puffed-up people, I think my second recommendation of having a somewhat detailed notion of what a given HJ novel is about snatches up gain in the estimation of any who would easily penetrate HJ’s work. This might be a good exercise in noticing and becoming captivated to the well-policed structures which are crucial to the abstract, modernist qualities of his best work.
You might as well have a look at some of what his disciples (anyone who might be called a literary impressionist or something similar especially of the high modernists owes everything to HJ, but I’m thinking of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and maybe even Pound could be included among disciples of a sort) have had to say about him or through his influence in their own works.
Every time I think the semicolon is getting short shrift and sentences are too simple, I think back to The Turn of the Thumbscrews and realize sentences should end. They should start out for a destination and reach it with a relative minimum of diversion. The alternative is prose you could use to plug all the holes in the Titanic or feed a herd of bison for a week.
If you can not read Turn of the Screw then you can never read its sequel, My Sexual Problem.
I’m about the opposite of vison. Although I like reading, I could never be called an avid reader. I read very slowly and can find little reading time as it is- as such, it can take me a very long time to finish a relatively short and non-prosaic novel.
Yet, non-reader that I am, I never had trouble with Henry James. Couldn’t call myself a Henry James scholar, but I’ve read Daisy Miller, Turn of the Screw, The Golden Bowl, and The Outcry. I enjoyed each of them, had no trouble reading them, and easily connected with a lot of humor- though talk of James rarely references any humor at all.
If you couldn’t do Turn of the Screw, I suspect James just isn’t for you. Compared to the rest of his work, I think it’s one of the easiest reads- Daisy Miller is easy as well. Since you had trouble on the easy side of his spectrum, I don’t know that you’ll feel any reward in advancing any further.
I’m a sporatic reader - I like reading, and read when I have time, and I have enjoyed a lot of books, modern and classic. I have never seen sentences the way Henry James writes them. The rambling length of them annoys me, but it’s his tendancy to use a pronoun without any clue as to what word is being replaced that makes me want to dig him up and kick him.
I’m gonna give “Turn of the Screw” one more go. I really liked that movie.
bienville, I feel almost the same way. I also read fairly slowly, no matter the material - and find myself with an opposite viewpoint of several posters here. I consider James to be a marvelous master of prose, but nothing particularly special on plots. They’re good enough, but I’d rather enjoy his writing for the writing itself.
Dickens is the one I consider to have concealed terrific plots in tired and almost unreadable prose (most of the time).
A writer, to please, must present us with characters, plot for the characters to act in, and finally, must present his tale in readable and compelling prose. Some writers can hit all three requirements. Some only one. Dickens had his failings, but he hit 2 out of 3. Most of the time.
James’ characters do not move me to feel anything but annoyance, the plots are mind-numbiningly boring, and the few (IMHO) well-written passages do not make up for the vast amount that aren’t well written but are tediously self-indulgent.
I think James belongs to the same category as James Joyce: mostly unreadable by most people. Some (a lot?) obviously do find these writers readable and enjoyable; I think more pretend to since to admire James and Joyce is believed to bestow literary good taste on the reader.
I was thinking something similar. James’ plots are not usually remarkable, and sometimes even resemble the creaky melodramas and pot-boilers of the day, with fortune hunters and infidelities and guardians disapproving of the people their young wards want to marry (“Wings of a Dove,” for example, which also features a heroine expiring of a Beautiful and Mysterious Wasting-Away disease very like the one that got Ally McGraw in “Love Story”). But the complexity of the characters and the depths of their inner lives makes the difference and give the stories that extra level that sets them other stories with the same sorts of plots. This is why I read his work and enjoy it–although I admit the prose can be somewhat tortuous if you’re not used to the style, and I sometimes get annoyed by characters who can’t give anybody a straight answer to a direct question but murmur obliquely.
My favorite James’ novels would be “Portrait of a Lady,” and “The Princess Casamassima.” The latter may be more accessible; IMO, it has almost a Dickensian feel to it.
As I said above, I agree that in many or most of James’s novels the plots are trivial and boring, and the characters mostly unlikeable. I can imagine an old queen like James or an old, old woman not yet senile really digging into these elements, however.
But in defense of James, the characters are round and complex, and the plot is secondary to the incredibly abstract, modernist precompositional structures.
Proust and Faulkner have zero plot and zero character, as far as I’m concerned (with the exception of the pretty funny send-ups in Proust of the secondary characters and their period analogs), but both authors can be read many times with pleasure.
I’d compare his scorn for juicy plots and his love for precomposition and structure to the work of the sound poets (Schwitters, The Four Horsemen, Raoul Hausmann, Bernard Heidsieck), non-objective painters, serial composers, the novels of the Oulipians, and so on.
This is only one reason James should not be compared with old, non-modern novelists, but with his proper circle, including Conrad, Ford, Proust, Faulkner, Pound. The above reason is, however, enough in itself to suggest this claim.
James’s problem was that once he became successful, he began dictating his stories. And when you dictate, you become wordy, because a new phrase occurs to you within the sentence and, like a swan flying south, it just continues onward, enjoying the journey, and flying off on tangents that, if you think about it, would probably not be all that interesting if it were not for the flight, but there they are and you can’t stop them, so you go onward, hoping and dreaming that somewhere, eventually, you will reach the end of the sentence, the gloriously long sentence with lots of beautiful commas that cause you to pause and take a breath, even if you don’t feel winded at all, because they are just such wonderful bits of punctuation, like little feet telling you to stop and smell the lilacs, which bloom ever so sweetly in May, and often June, and where you could go on and on forever until the scent takes you down to green patures near the river, the pastures your father and mother traveled in their youth, young and green as the ivy, to the place where cocoanut reigned, and where time had no meanings, nor sentences, nor even punctuations, yes, even the lovely comma, now forlornly watching the birds go by and what exactly was the point of this when I started, so very long ago, it seems, almost a lifetime, maybe more, yet just as live in my memory as Adam’s off ox.
Second, James thought it wrong to actually say anything, but rather to wander around the meaning and never come out and say it.
How does one read Hanry James? I think that those wires they use to hold open Alex’s eyes in A Clockwork Orange (Or those of the titular Robot Chicken )are your only hope. I’ve read A Turn of the Screw and The Beast in the Jungle , both for classes. I cannot imagine anyone reading them for any other reason. (Nothing happens in The Beast in the Jungle. The whole point of The Beast in the Jungle is that nothing happens in it. But it takes so damned long (and so many page-long sentences) to not happen! (There is, by the way, no Beast, and no Jungle, in the story, except in a long-winded metaphorical sense).
Henry James asking directions (an allegedly true story, related by Edith Wharton):
From here, although you can find it in several places:
