Lilacs Out of the Dead Land, What Are You Reading? Spring 2022

I'm rereading Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, first time in 20 years, and, yeah, it's harder going than I anticipated (and I still love the non-boring parts of Ulysses). I think I'm due for a James tune-up.

from The Europeans:

A few days after the Baroness Münster had presented herself to her American kinsfolk she came, with her brother, and took up her abode in that small white house adjacent to Mr. Wentworth’s own dwelling of which mention has already been made. It was on going with his daughters to return her visit that Mr. Wentworth placed this comfortable cottage at her service; the offer being the result of a domestic colloquy, diffused through the ensuing twenty-four hours, in the course of which the two foreign visitors were discussed and analyzed with a great deal of earnestness and subtlety. The discussion went forward, as I say, in the family circle; but that circle on the evening following Madame Münster’s return to town, as on many other occasions, included Robert Acton and his pretty sister. If you had been present, it would probably not have seemed to you that the advent of these brilliant strangers was treated as an exhilarating occurrence, a pleasure the more in this tranquil household, a prospective source of entertainment. This was not Mr. Wentworth’s way of treating any human occurrence. The sudden irruption into the well-ordered consciousness of the Wentworths of an element not allowed for in its scheme of usual obligations required a readjustment of that sense of responsibility which constituted its principal furniture. To consider an event, crudely and baldly, in the light of the pleasure it might bring them was an intellectual exercise with which Felix Young’s American cousins were almost wholly unacquainted, and which they scarcely supposed to be largely pursued in any section of human society. The arrival of Felix and his sister was a satisfaction, but it was a singularly joyless and inelastic satisfaction. It was an extension of duty, of the exercise of the more recondite virtues; but neither Mr. Wentworth, nor Charlotte, nor Mr. Brand, who, among these excellent people, was a great promoter of reflection and aspiration, frankly adverted to it as an extension of enjoyment. This function was ultimately assumed by Gertrude Wentworth, who was a peculiar girl, but the full compass of whose peculiarities had not been exhibited before they very ingeniously found their pretext in the presence of these possibly too agreeable foreigners. Gertrude, however, had to struggle with a great accumulation of obstructions, both of the subjective, as the metaphysicians say, and of the objective, order; and indeed it is no small part of the purpose of this little history to set forth her struggle. What seemed paramount in this abrupt enlargement of Mr. Wentworth’s sympathies and those of his daughters was an extension of the field of possible mistakes; and the doctrine, as it may almost be called, of the oppressive gravity of mistakes was one of the most cherished traditions of the Wentworth family.

The western light shines into all his grimness at that hour and makes it wonderfully personal. But he continued to look far over my head, at the red immersion of another day—he had seen so many go down into the lagoon through the centuries—and if he were thinking of battles and stratagems they were of a different quality from any I had to tell him of. He could not direct me what to do, gaze up at him as I might. Was it before this or after that I wandered about for an hour in the small canals, to the continued stupefaction of my gondolier, who had never seen me so restless and yet so void of a purpose and could extract from me no order but “Go anywhere—everywhere—all over the place”? He reminded me that I had not lunched and expressed therefore respectfully the hope that I would dine earlier. He had had long periods of leisure during the day, when I had left the boat and rambled, so that I was not obliged to consider him, and I told him that that day, for a change, I would touch no meat.

There is the evocation of death and an uneasy acceptance of its reality and consumptive power, a straining toward escape, an inner tumult made manifest by the meandering of the boat in Venice's canals. The sentences become more complex as the sense of tumult grows. There is also the rejection of the flesh and an embrace of an ascetic attitude, a sudden change it seems, a renunciation of the subject as if it could just vanish upon this occasion.

James is an "interior" writer, to agree with what others have said, and so I think that he isn't for everyone. His style often embodies a conflict between the first person central and the first person peripheral, which can make it confusing. But the way he can evoke such complexities of his characters is through this conflict, I think, in that so often his protagonists are attempting to create their own story while trapped in a story of another's making.

Anyway, I love him.

it's interesting that TOTS was dictated. i should be honest: at least some of my reaction to his prose style is likely due to the fact that i listened to an audiobook (which is also why i don't have quotes to post). i feel like an audiobook is "reading" him on hard mode, simply because his sentences are so long?

i did enjoy TOTS as a story. but good grief the prose. contrasting it to return of the soldier (because i read it recently, not because they're related), which was published 20 years later, it's like a different language. tempting to attribute that to 20 years of changes in language, rather than James himself, but i don't remember having this reaction to dickens/melville/austen, etc. (or for that matter the russians or dumas in translation.)

James didn't sound like anyone writing in English. Meredith maybe?

Rebecca West published a book on James just two years before ROTS, interestingly

It was not long before I came upon certain other essays of a later date which were sealed, as absolutely as though by strips of gummed paper, by Mr. Henry James's latest style. I approached them in different ways. I read them as if they were writ­­ten in a foreign language, treating obscurities as idioms and translating every word into my collo­quialism. More desperately, as the hours grew smaller, I pretended that it was all right, and tried to send my intelligence winging up beside his soar­ing phrases, as though their flight was to be fol­lowed with composure. But the more I did so the stronger became the conviction that these di­vagations were not the gambols of a winged intel­lect in an element over which it had full command, but rather the disordered earthward spirals of wings so overworked that free and happy flight had become an impossibility. Every paragraph made it more clear that this later prose was the altar of a bloody sacrifice, on which everything that had in the past made Mr. James's prose liv­ing and radiant, a glorious part of the organic world, had been ruthlessly offered up to an in­creasing fineness of meaning. Gone was the loving command of the color of language which was shown at its most precious, perhaps, in "The Spoils of Poynton," in which we saw the bright "art tint" with which the abominable Brigstocks varnished the corridors of Waterbath, with a distinctness that, contrasting with the not less distinct glories of the Spanish altar-cloths and Maltese crosses of Poynton, gave us the final conviction of the importance of the battle which formed the idea of the story. Gone was that rhythm which made "The Altar of the Dead" sound like a sol­emn and consoling mass, and its worshippers seem not sentimentalists hugging an affectation, but earnest mystics.

All these aids to the ultimate significance of his work he has sacrificed to a desire to hammer out the immediate significance of each sentence to as thin a radiance as gold-leaf. He splits hairs till there are no longer any hairs to split, and the men­tal gesture becomes merely the making of agitated passes over a complete and disconcerting baldness. One does not deny that these excesses are inci­dental and that the prose still has a loveliness of its own; but it is no longer the beauty of a living thing, but rather the "made" beauty which bases its claims to admiration chiefly on its ingenuity, like those crystal clocks with jeweled works and figures that moved as the hours chimed, which were the glory of medieval palaces, and which so unaccountably fail to kindle our enthusiasm when we go abroad to-day.

https://newrepublic.com/article/117371/reading-henry-james-wartime-rebecca-west

I'm generally touched if anyone notices I exist, but I'm also puzzled by the notion that I've said anything hateful about James. Perhaps others have. Myself, I think I've said a) I'd like some close analysis and b) perhaps the late HJ style is comparable to FW (I'm not sure that's a good or bad thing or neither). On balance I think of myself as pro-HJ; but on the HJ thread I did make clear what felt like the disproportions of THE GOLDEN BOWL.

Joyce's Portrait I think can be hard going, for such a seemingly slim and manageable book. The style starts off fine and comic but becomes deliberately convoluted and self-regarding. Much of the content is tedious for many readers - until it reaches the last fifth and the tedium is perhaps forgotten as things become interesting again. Yet I think the writing probably does have a level of care and exquisiteness that sets it above precursors - Moore, certainly Hardy, for instance, though probably not Conrad or indeed James.

>>> James is an "interior" writer, to agree with what others have said, and so I think that he isn't for everyone.

But many many writers can be called that - Woolf is among the most obvious examples - and still seem, to many readers, more quickly readable than HJ.

I agree that HJ is a writer of the interior, and I think I agree that that produces his entanglement, but the puzzle remains that other writers also writing of consciousness don't get thus entangled, so it doesn't seem inherent in that general subject matter.

thank you for the link jmm!

>>> James is an "interior" writer, to agree with what others have said, and so I think that he isn't for everyone.

But many many writers can be called that - Woolf is among the most obvious examples - and still seem, to many readers, more quickly readable than HJ.

I agree that HJ is a writer of the interior, and I think I agree that that produces his entanglement, but the puzzle remains that other writers also writing of consciousness don't get thus entangled, so it doesn't seem inherent in that general subject matter.

― the pinefox, Wednesday, June 22, 2022 11:58 AM (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think it has to do with the manner of entanglement, as I mentioned in my previous comment regarding different first person perspectives colliding with each other.

Thanks for clarifying re yr position on HJ, but fwiw, when I read something like this— "Not sure I do, or could say" in regards to what HJ is "trying to do"— I get the idea that the writer doesn't much care for Henry James.

James became more interior in those late works, it seems like he acquired more of this quality just as the other modernists were starting off. He seems to cut across the 19th and 20th centuries like no other writer.

Among poets with similar there/not there qualities, I'd include Thomas Hardy.

from the James thread, here's what Ezra Pound wrote in a loving, mostly accurate essay of a writer he revered:

If one were advocate instead of critic, one would definitely claim that these atmospheres, nuances, impressions of personal tone and quality are his subject; that in these he gets certain things that almost no one else had done before him. These timbres and tonalities are his stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything else. It is all very well to say that modern life is largely made up of velleities, atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc., but if people really spent as much time fussing, to the extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal trifling, age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc., etc., life would scarcely be worth the bother of keeping on with it. It is also contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it.

When I read late James (quite different from the early one), I see a reader not limning interiority so much as limning his own subtle, ponderous, lacey response to a character's interiority.

I like tables' quote the best: we're directed by a man in the atmosphere of his head watching another man looking at something as neither of him speaks; then he directs us to himself and a gondolier wandering the canals at the narrator's direction, relationship of him and gondolier, with words exchanged, some of them in a direct quote, a final sentence/decision that fits perfectly. This might be what West is missing in the later writing, and Alfred's quote from The Europeans seems like a transition: he makes his point in a droll way, giving us a tour of the circle, but then keeps on going a little too long.

What is your quote from, tables? I want to read it.

it’s The Aspern Papers, from the fifth section, I believe!

I read that novel c. 3 years ago and liked it. A length and density I could manage. An interesting topic - the legacy of a late poet. And a lot of emotional and moral ambiguity on top of all that.

"once you understand what James is trying to do"

Not sure I do, or could say.

FWIW this was actually a defence of HJ. Another poster said that TTOTS was utterly monotonous once you understand what HJ is trying to do. I said: I'm not sure I do understand. It would follow that I find it less monotonous, and more mysterious.

Does poster Alfred receive a commission from the Pound Estate every time he posts that quotation from EP?

If so I hope he's made several ... several ... pounds.

p.300 of George Moore, ESTHER WATERS.

I observe:

1) this is basically all about the English working class, making it remarkable that it’s by an upper-class Irishman. If you told me that George Moore was a cockney geezer who'd taught himself to read and write and written this novel from life, it would be more credible than the reality.

2) SO much of it is about horse racing! Technicalities and discussions that go on, and are not well balanced into any aesthetic whole. Maybe if you were into that sport you’d enjoy it.

Does poster Alfred receive a commission from the Pound Estate every time he posts that quotation from EP?

If so I hope he's made several ... several ... pounds.

― the pinefox,

Don't force me to paste the Cantos excerpt in which he fulminates against paper money

I dug my Aspern Papers and Washington Sqaure for a second try.

Books read this month: I'm loving Howards End, but I have a big work project due this month, and my brain couldn't cope with something so rich and dense, so I temporarily dropped it for a few easier reads:

* The Entropy Effect (Vonda N. McIntyre), a well-written Star Trek novel, a time-travel murder mystery with lots of Spock being a badass. Lots of fun but the descent into time-travel-paradox madness at the end gets resolved too quickly and neatly.

* The Fade Out (Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips), a graphic novel thriller set in late 1940s Hollywood: blacklists, murder, dames, poorly-drawn b00bs, etc. Not really pushing any boundaries for the creative team but mostly competently realised. The ending, as always with Brubaker, is a half-assed expectation-defying anticlimax -- but he's done too many of those endings now, and they're getting predictable, like Le Carre killing his leading man in the last chapter.

* My Phantoms (Gwendoline Riley) Starts off as a redux of First Love, but gradually goes to different places. Kicks off with a fifty page setpiece about her dickhead dad that's witheringly mean and totally exhilarating.

Back to Howards End and Henry James, then a tossup between Middlemarch, Lonesome Dove or Duma Key for my long summer read.

I love Forster's dialogue generally.

Same. It's my first Forster. I guess I was expecting something closer to to Henry James, or Somerset Maugham god forbid, but it's very breezy and fun. Like Gissing with better jokes.

It's why he attracted so many adaptations.

I haven't seen those films, but until now my main association with Forster was the six-foot tall Maurice poster on my older sister's bedroom wall.

I’m reading ‘Narrow Rooms’ by James Purdy at the moment, it’s amazing but also makes glaringly obvious why the guy is still a cult writer— a novel about a gay sadomasochistic death cult in the hollers of West Virginia, no matter how allegorical, is not going to be well-received by the mainstream establishment lmfao.

That said, I am loving it.

Yeah, it's bat shit crazy.

oooh gimme

I mean, look at this cover

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51AE63QPPhL._SX319_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

"A narrow room, you say? Hm."

I knew from the first two sentences that it was going to be infinitely more wild than I had even anticipated.

ESTHER WATERS chapter - unsure, I can't read these Roman numerals; pp.326-331 - is dedicated to the court verdict of a magistrate who condemns a woman for theft and gambling. It's a different narrative mode, in effect, as the report of the judge's verdict takes over, with a legalese voice, and interpolated with occasional parentheses about his hypocrisy, viz: his enjoyment of drink while condemning it in court.

'One law for the rich, one for the poor' (p.331) is an occasional theme.

On p.349 I detect a conceivable small point of influence for Joyce's 'Oxen of the Sun'.

Finally reading Pete Dexter's Deadwood and enjoying it a lot. Amazing he and David Milch took the same historical characters and both developed their own singular and entertaining vernacular around them. Also, Milch was full of shit saying he had never read this before developing the show.

I listened to the Blacklisted episode on the book a few months ago where they talked about that.
Episode is December last year. Did make me want to read the book.

I done went and did it:

Bright Remarks and Throwing Shade: What Are You Reading, Summer 2022?

I read them as if they were writ­­ten in a foreign language, treating obscurities as idioms and translating every word into my collo­quialism.

This actually makes me wish someone would write a translation of James into a more colloquial English. The architecture of those interminable sentences with their dependent clauses hanging off in all directions like the elaborate turrets, gables and dormers of some Victorian mansion gives me the willies. But someday I will steel myself to read one of his books.

Just now on the radio: a passing reference to Dave Chapelle playing the martyred artist card re trans people joeks, and it reminded me of how much more artful and implicitly fair-minded is Hemingway's kinetic portrait of Robert Cohn in The Sun Also Rises: "Nobody ever made him feel like he was a Jew" until he got to Princeton, and he's still the object of loud 'n' proud antisemitic outbursts from a couple of other characters, especially the more successful writer, who also likes to call for "irony and pity," but he's seriously pissed at Cohn---who is seriously shady, a manipulative underdog (good income from his mama, pissed a lot of it away in connection with his furtive first marriage, has recently let his obnoxious long-time fiancee down, with a lot of tears, tears, tears, on his part, making it all that much more disgusting---also he tries to shake hands with guys he's just punched out). He can even be a danger to himself and others, the way he inserts himself into situations where he's not or no longer wanted, beyond limited underdog appeal and/or financial usefulness). So Bill the bigot with the writer's eye shares the others' distrust of Cohn for good reason, but has to add "Jewish superiority," the kind of shit that's added to Cohn's scar tissue and outsideriness. (Hem's got me thinking The Merchant of Venice too.)
(Jake, the narrator with the Debilitating War Wound, also gets increasingly tired of Cohn, though mainly because he's gone off with Jake's love object, cracked lodestone, Brett, for a little time away from her rowdy, flailing fiance, Mike-with-an-allowance, who is not only bankrupt, but "a bankrupt," as he keeps yammering back to: it's becoming his ID: "Cohn's a Jew, I'm a bankrupt": paraphrasing, but not by much,
Jake does resent Brett's gay running buddies for what he takes as [their airs of superiority, but also he seems a bit challenged by her having platonic friends besides himself, since he's got the Debilitating War Wound.)

So a lot of this is about antagonism and destruction at different speeds (incl. possibly drinking yourself to death, killing bulls as art and fun, also getting yourself gored, also passing references to effects of "the war," a few years back, and we know they're between Wars/wars.) Also really trying and sometimes succeeding at having a lot of fun, killing time, working and playing around knowing that, while still being thirtysomething, so it's still not as sad as it may well come to be.

DUH Award, yes, because I just now finally read that: another brick in my 1957 liberal arts degree.

xpost there's also the 19-or-20-year-old matador whom Jake and Brett are smitten with, but Jake's not jealous of either of them, might be better if he were, to a large (not total) extent.
A previous reader of this book, who has underlined and otherwise marked up most of it, notes at the end that Hemingway has "renounced" fancy Henry James writing, and then quotes James, accurately or not: The greatest human virtue is renuciation." The only renunciation in this story seems a little out of character in terms of high-mindedness, but not in terms of desperation (gotta fly on no matter what, also gotta somehow see myself as a good person), and the author himself, though my impression was already formed by the collected stories, also seems like his wings are singed by high-flying vs. desperation, and reaching for principle, like Beyond The Old Man's Fancy Writing Towers, is part of that (lots of wounds and flashbacks and compulsive travel in those stories too).

Terrible James joek exchanged b/w Bill and Jake too.

I did not really admire THE SUN ALSO RISES. Disappointing.

I have definitely never seen that line attributed to HJ. Whether he said it or not, it doesn't sound like him.

Turns out I learned this via a post by user Eazy on the thread Chicago's Greatest Hits: 1982-1989

Looked into where I'd read this, and it turns out Martin Amis attributed "Tell a dream, lose a reader" to Henry James in a number of essays and interviews. More recently in Inside Story he amended it:

Tell a dream, lose a reader’ is a dictum usually attributed to Henry James (though I and others have failed to track it down). Dreams are all right as long as they exhaust themselves in about half a sentence; once they’re allowed to get going, and once the details start piling up, then dreams become recipes either for stodge or for very thin gruel. Why is this? Any dream that lasts a paragraph, let alone a page, is already closing in on another very solid proscription, Nothing odd will do long (Samuel Johnson). But it’s even more basic than that. Dreams are too individualised. We all dream, but dreams are not part of our shared experience.

Amis full of shit shocker

Ugh. Gave up in him long ago. Will still stan for Money, maybe.

On him. Maybe in him works too, somehow.

My tom-tom ticker gave out.

That Amis quotation is very poor.

He says something is "usually attributed to HJ", but admits that there is no evidence for it (and the rest of us haven't seen it thus attributed except by Amis), and doesn't observe that it doesn't particularly sound like HJ.

He then says that writers shouldn't write dreams. But aren't there actually good dreams in literature, including ones that aren't immediately presented as dreams?

Even "nothing odd will do long" is a very inapt quotation as it's usually quoted to show how wrong Johnson was.

lol yes, the complete johnson quote is "nothing odd will do long. tristram shandy did not last"

finnegans wake is a dream tho possibly amis and pinefox are as one in feeling this proves the dreams-are-bad-lit argt