Currently reading The Bostonians and really enjoying it so far...

Currently reading The Bostonians and really enjoying it so far. I have read The Turn Of The Screw previously and enjoyed that as well. I want to delve deeper into his work since he is among the authors I consider writing my Master's thesis about. What should I read next? Has any user here worked on him in an academic context? (I was a little surprised how much James scholars are still preoccupied with his (supposed) homosexuality.) What's Yea Forums's general opinion on him?

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There's a James chart somewhere which is pleasing to see. There are a few Jamesians on Yea Forums but a lot of posters here are turned off by the impenetrable late style and how domestic and feminine most of his books are. James can be an acquired taste, and tough to get into, though he provides enormous rewards for those who take a deeper dive.
Try Portrait of a Lady or Washington Square for good examples of his earlier style. While there isn't a single great collection that collects all his essential shorter fiction other than the complete yet bulky Everyman or American library hardbacks, it is well worth exploring too.
His three late masterpieces are Wings of The Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, though they can be very difficult so get used to him first.
I think current academia focuses on his sexuality as that allows them to drag him out of the 'dead white straight male' box and makes him more relevant to current mores

What are some books about waspy americans? Auchincloss, cheever, etc.

Daisy Miller

thanks for the reply! I have already heard a lot about how hard and at times incomprehensible his late work supposedly is. I still definitely want to look into it since I am usually not very easily turned off by more elaborate prose. Portrait of a Lady or The Golden Bowl are up next on my list. I study comparative literature in Vienna and I feel like he isn't discussed much in German/Austrian academia (though that might just be my experience). So I am now just finding my way into his massive body of work and the seemingly equally huge James studies.

The thing with his late prose is that it isn't opaque in the way eg Joyce or Pynchon or Faulkner can be, where sometimes you have to sort of feel what is being expressed rather than understanding it directly.
It's always in standard grammatical English, and almost always there is a straightforward unambiguous meaning. It's his use of syntax, alternating passive and active voices, double ironic negatives; switching between free indirect discourse, actual speech, omniscient third person, all in the same sentence that makes it difficult. He had complete mastery of all the techniques of English prose.

I think that's precisely what makes James so interesting for me. He kind of personifies the aesthetic and stylistic changes from late 19th century realism to 20th century modernist writing

OP I enjoyed "Reading Henry James" by Auchincloss as a sort of manual to his work.
Pleased to see my Auchincloss shilling is working out.

Just looked this up. Looks very interesting, thanks! David Lodge wrote a similar book "The Year of Henry James" which I also want to read

I've often felt some of the innovations of modernism, particularly stream of consciousness, were an attempt to get the same psychological interiority as James, but without having to go to the same elaborate lengths in conventional prose. There are sentences in The Golden Bowl, if you removed from which the prepositions, semi colons and commas, could come have straight from Woolf or Joyce.

damn that sounds fun though. can you give an example?

>He died a sort of super-Howells with a long row of laborious but essentially hollow books behind him. The notion that James is a mastermind is confined to the sort of persons who used to regard Browning as the greatest of poets. He was a superb technician, as Joseph Conrad has testified, but his ideas were always timorous...the daring of a grandma smoking marijuana

James probably gets more hate than any other 'canon' writer, he does have a narrow appeal. Can't expect everyone to like sentences like this
>She had got up with these last words; she stood there before him with that particular suggestion in her aspect to which even the long habit of their life together had not closed his sense, kept sharp, year after year, by the collation of types and signs, the comparison of fine object with fine object, of one degree of finish, of one form of the exquisite with another–the appearance of some slight, slim draped “antique” of Vatican or Capitoline halls, late and refined, rare as a note and immortal as a link, set in motion by the miraculous infusion of a modern impulse and yet, for all the sudden freedom of folds and footsteps forsaken after centuries by their pedestal, keeping still the quality, the perfect felicity, of the statue; the blurred, absent eyes, the smoothed, elegant, nameless head, the impersonal flit of a creature lost in an alien age and passing as an image in worn relief round and round a precious vase.
Though Mencken is being a pleb there

He has nothing but neat prose. His characters are all marionettes of no interest, his social situations aren't interesting or plausible, his descriptions are often amateurish (Nabokov points out that he fails to describe a cigarette with accuracy)

>taking Nabokov's criticism seriously
I find his social situations interesting, and I think his characters are the most richly psychologically detailed outside Shakespeare. Not even Dostoevsky portrays the successive layers of self and self delusion and self image so well

>His characters are all marionettes of no interest, his social situations aren't interesting or plausible, his descriptions are often amateurish
Even early James like Daisy Miller destroys these talking points
>Nabokov points out
Stop taking that dandy's nonsense about other writers seriously

>good literature is accurately describing a cigarette
His style is very elaborated and certainly not for everyone but I really can't understand how anyone could view his characters as uninteresting marionettes and his social situations as not plausible. James' psychological studies are rivaled by very few 19th century writers (especially when it comes to female characters) and saying that the way he depicts European and American society is not plausible just shows that you have no knowledge about history or sociology.

>taking Nabokov's criticism seriously
His criticism is spot on
> think his characters are the most richly psychologically detailed outside Shakespeare
They're made of cardboard
>Even early James like Daisy Miller destroys these talking points
If you keep saying it
Prove it then. You people keep saying this. When you dig beneath the surface, what do you find? A few easy mannerisms, not even thought up by the author, but plainly copied from daily observation. Take the men interested in Miss Archer in Portrait of a Lady. What excuse is there for them to fascinate themselves with her? They call her brilliant, but she utter a single intelligent phrase in the entire book. In fact, she makes a fool of herself. Her beauty is never once described and no tall, handsome Lord went around falling hopelessly in love with random women. Ralph is supposed to be a pretty discriminating and shrewd character, but he falls over as hopelessly a jackass as Warburton

>if you removed from which the prepositions
i like how you pretend to be interested in grammar

The relationship between Olive and Verena in The Bostonians is very rich for example. You can definitely read Olive's obsession for Verena and their feminist cause as ideological delusion but there night also be some homosexual undertones there. As the other user has said there are so many layers of self deception in play and so much unconscious work on self image that the characters seem very interesting and lifelike. The huge body of psychoanalytical studies on characters in James's novels are also proof of their depth

Obvious bait

cope

On the subject of the Bostonians, that book is so amateurish in parts that I could hardly believe it was written by a man considered by many as a master of narration. Endless enumerations of irrelevant facts filling in for significant plot movement, platitude characters consisting of nothing but two or three ideas and a certain demeanor, ideological questions of no artistic interest whatever.

>He thinks good literature needs significant plot movement
Cringe and bluepilled. You obviously don't have the mental capacity to read James

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No, Henry James thinks so, but he fails to accomplish it.

>no tall, handsome Lord went around falling hopelessly in love with random women
It's a good job that's not what happens. James describes in enormous detail how she reels him in. The whole opening section of the novel up to his proposal is an examination of how a clever woman can induce a man to fall for her. Did you not read that bit? I don't think you did, because you seem to think Ralph is in love with her which clearly he's not.

>ideological questions of no artistic interest whatever.
Dude, with the best will in the world, The Bostonians seems to have gone completely over your head.

>James describes in enormous detail how she reels him in
He falls head over heels for her the very hour they meet. The idea that a handsome Lord is charmed to this extent by a certain woman is unlikely, but stranger things have happened. We'll leave that up to the author. But when it does happen, he had better justify it and it had better make sense in the context of his world. The reader should believe it. In the entire book there is scarcely a single indicating that Isabelle is a remarkable woman.
>Dude, with the best will in the world, The Bostonians seems to have gone completely over your head.
It's a shallow book, the ideologies are uninteresting as is the subtext beneath them of pride, sensibility, propriety, and sexual tension.

Also, as to Ralph, whether or not he is actually in love with her is up for debate, but he does love her and is quite satisfied as to her worth as a human being. The impression I got was that he would not be averse to a relationship with her. Don't try to tell me he's gay or whatever.

Again, he is supposed to be something of a shrewd person and not shallow- why does he admire so much? What does she do? There is not a single remarkable thing in her. Warburton has certain admirable qualities, so does Ralph, so does Goodwood, even Pansy seems to me much more admirable than Miss Archer.

Recall the sheer adulation given to this woman if you think I'm exaggerating. Doesn't Warburton even consider marrying Pansy to get closer to her at one point? It's absurd.

>But when it does happen, he had better justify it
He does though, and at great length. About the first 100 pages of the novel is given over to describing how she flirts with and teases him. Did you not notice?

No, it isn’t. Absolutely nothing happend and he declares her remarkable within 5 minutes of their acquaintanveship

Just let it go. It is ok not to like James but you just seem like you either haven't read the novels you are talking about or have very poor reading comprehension

I'm sorry you can't defend any of your points with direct reference to the text, and I'm sorry your god Henry James is so easily exposed, but I'm not going to let up just because it hurts your feelings.

Warburton finds her remarkable within five minutes of meeting her. Show me what's remarkable about her right then and there. He wants to marry her not longer after. Show me what value she has shown that a handsome and charismatic English Lord should want her so soon. You only have vague platitudes? Then you don't have anything.

Many people in this thread have already pointed out how wrong you are in regards to the psychology of the characters, their motivation and the depiction of social situations. You just reiterate your statements about James which seem to be based on either lack of knowledge or misreadings of his novels without really acknowledging what others have said.
As has pointed out the whole opening of Portrait of a Lady explores the psyche of Ralph and sets the foundation of their relationship. Your rebuttal to that is to say that nothing happened which again shows that you don't have any grasp on James since plot is not what his fiction is about.

Are any of his ghost stories/mysteries besides The Turn Of The Screw good?

You remind me of an user who complained that Pride and Prejudice made no sense because he felt Darcy proposed out of nowhere at the end.
James constantly shows us Isabel socialising and being very good at it. Pretty much everyone who reads the book instantly grasps how charming and vivacious she is socially. Warburton is an amiable but not particularly bright aristocrat, and Isabel's manipulation of him is very realistic.

The Jolly Corner, Friends of The Friends and Owen Wingrave are all worth a read. Not quite as good as TTOTS, but then, not much is

Great, just point it our. Stop vaguely gesturing and justify it

Excellent, show me how remarkable she is in the five lines she speaks before Ralph

>people actually enjoyed The Turn of the Screw

Are you all boring boomers? The novel was dry and it was barely horrific. The kids sucked as characters. The main character was just some worrying bitch. I could barely care about the plot

>Reading for plot
Henry James turns out to be a great pleb filter

My grandpa was a henry james scholar

The plot is quite literally the preeminent aspect of turn of the screw

Disagree. For me, it's the characterization and the use of perspective, not the plot in and of itself

There is only one real character

If something has no plot, it has little substance besides trying to be clever.

Worst take in this thread

Yeah, well you're gay

The governess? I would be interested to hear some interpretations of The Turn Of The Screw because I couldn't really make sense of it

Have any of his writings you could share with us?

Has anybody by chance looked into his connection to German literature? I know his reception of French literature is well documented and explored but are there any German authors that have influenced him in a major way? He had such a great education and lived in Europe for so long that I find him interesting as a kind of link between European and American literature

I'm convinced that Auchincloss is destined to a greatness beyond anything we can currently imagine. He'll only be recognized for his genius 40 years from now, when white demographics collapse and WASP culture is all but forgotten. Maybe it'll happen later. But it's going to happen eventually.

This is a good thread. Thank you fellows.

This thread inspired me to get into Henry James. R8 my stack friends

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Any novels or stories that feature gay protagonists? I just read one that hinted at that--I forgot the title, it was the name of said protagonist--Bollywiggins or Berrybottoms or something.

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all good books, but golden bowl should definitely not be in your starter pack

I plan on reading that one last. I generally don't have problems with difficult prose though and wanted to get a taste of all his stylistic periods

Why does James trigger plotdependent brainlets so much? The other James thread is full of retards like this as well

>Turn Of The Screw
oooh ghosts
hats
am I deep yet?

I'm currently reading Turn of the Screw. The Governess just found out Peter Quinn was dead all along. I think James does a good job at the claustrophobic fear the spirits bring with them whenever they appear.

Absolutely agree. I think James really excels in creating the "unheimlichen" (uncanny) effect Freud describes when talking about horror literature and nightmares. These scenes are pretty unsettling in a relatively subtle manner

I figured it would be cheesy somehow and I gave the book until chapter five or so a chance but the sense of dread when she sees Quinn for the first time is really fucking good. The lake scene is written really well too.

Because he’s a brainlet whose books are all about characters and plot