henry james

at one point the silly aunt says to the sinister suitor, "why don't you start a law suit against catherine's father", and the suitor says "i'll start a lawsuit against YOU if you don't shut up w.yr tomfool ideas" (slight rewording but only very slight)

i'm retrying the bostonians (which was the first i ever tried and also beached in, ages ago when i wz quite impatient and shallow)

the pageturner element was i think looking forward to seeing how dr sloper actually gets his comeuppance, seeing as he's so obviously a total dick from page one

Based on prefaces that he wrote for new editions toward the end of his life, this is what James was aiming for, if intentionality interests you at all.

The second volume of Shelden Novick's biography makes less of a to-do about his "psychosexuality," which is intensely boring anyway; all he cared about after 1900 was fantasizing about young men laying their hands on him, getting over gout and hemmorroids, and dictating novels to typists.

Anyone read The Other House? It and The Sacred Fount are the only ones I haven't essayed. Inspired by the Novick bio, I reread Ezra Pound's classic essay (Pound: "His plots and incidents are often but adumbrations or symbosl of the quality of his `people', illustrations invented, contrived, often facetiously and almost transparently, to show what acts, what situations, what contingencies woudl befit or display certain characters. We are hardly asked to accept them as happening." These are compliments).

OK, I JUST read 'The Other House': very entertaining, very clearly has its origins in a play, very odd psychological developments/character behaviour at the end that doesn't quite convince in a couple of cases. I was saying on ILB that with this and 'Watch and Ward' I seem to be doing all the deeply weird Jameses in one burst.

on Monday morning I finished The Portrait of a Lady after faaarrr too long on it, and was mildly horrified when I couldn't understand the final sentence. I didn't read 650 pages for this! Finally worked it out last night, phew. Besides that little disaster averted, I thought it was great; lots of erections of the little hairs in the internal sections, lots of excellent dialogue, even a bit of tearjerking, while I'm in the library, GOD ARE YOU TRYING TO MAKE ME LOOK LIKE AN IDIOT.

Osmond... always had an eye to effect, and his effects were deeply calculated. They were produced by no vulgar means, but the motive was as vulgar as the art was great. To surround his interior with a sort of invidious sanctity, to tantalise society with a sense of exclusion, to make people believe his house was different from every other, to impart to the face that he presented to the world a cold originality--this was the ingenious effort of the personage to whom Isabel had attributed a superior morality. "He works with superior material," Ralph said to himself; "it's rich abundance compared with his former resources." Ralph was a clever man; but Ralph had never--to his own sense--been so clever as when he observed, in petto, that under the guise of caring only for intrinsic values 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. He lived with his eye on it from morning till night, and the world was so stupid it never suspected the trick. Everything he did was pose--pose so subtly considered that if one were not on the lookout one mistook it for impulse. Ralph had never met a man who lived so much in the land of consideration. His tastes, his studies, his accomplishments, his collections, were all for a purpose. His life on his hill-top at Florence had been the conscious attitude of years. His solitude, his ennui, his love for his daughter, his good manners, his bad manners, were so many features of a mental image constantly present to him as a model of impertinence and mystification. His ambition was not to please the world, but to please himself by exciting the world's curiosity and then declining to satisfy it.

the final line there is just incredible.

I could never finish "Wings of a Dove" or "The Golden Bowl" and it makes me feel inferior. ( u_u)

The Heiress, the stage adap of Washington Square (before it was filmed), is being revived on Broadway with Jessica Chastain and David Strathairn.

^could get into this for $69; considering.

aaaand it gets a mixed review.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2012/11/02/theater/reviews/the-heiress-with-jessica-chastain-at-walter-kerr-theater.html?ref=arts&_r=0

Prompted by a triumphant rewatching of the film adaptation, I read The Wings of the Dove at last -- the only one of the major novels I hadn't touched. It has the same problem as The Bostonians: after a fine, crisp opening it bobs, mightily but idly, in a sea of suggestions and hints before a terrific denouement. I was struck by James' making clear -- insofar as he can -- that Densher persaudes Milly to fuck him as proof that she loves him, whereupon James devotes a few pages to Densher's smug postcoital amble around his room, noting how the reality of things has changed as a result.

I tried The Wings of the Dove the other day but after struggling through one chapter with the aid of a study guide I just couldn't carry on. It's been a while, maybe I need a warm up - I've started Confidence instead. It's like a Ladybird book in comparison.

Prefer The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl.