Lawrence Durrell: "Would you rather read Henry James or be crushed to death by a great weight?"

Lawrence Durrell: "Would you rather read Henry James or be crushed to death by a great weight?"

Oscar Wilde: "Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."

E. M. Forster: "So enormous is the sacrifice that many readers cannot get interested in James, although they can follow what he says (his difficulty has been much exaggerated), and can appreciate his effects. They cannot grant his premise, which is that most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel. . . . Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James’s pages – maimed yet specialised."

Arnold Bennett: "It took me years to ascertain that Henry James's work was giving me little pleasure . . . In each case I asked myself: 'What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it's going to?' Question unanswerable! I gave up. Today I have no recollection whatever of any characters or any events in either novel."

T. S. Eliot: "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it."

Marilyn "Clover" Adams: "It's not that he 'bites off more than he can chew' but he chews more than he bites off."

H. L. Mencken: "An idiot, and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in the world."

Vladimir Nabokov: "He writes with a very sharp nib and the ink is very pale and there is very little of it in his inkpot . . . The style is artistic but it is not the style of an artist . . . Henry James is definitely for non-smokers. He has charm (as the weak blond prose of Turgenev has), but that’s about all."

More from Nabokov: "I have read (or rather reread) 'What Maisie Knew.' It is terrible. Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting upon the wrong one?"

Even more from Nabokov: "Henry James is a pale porpoise."

Virginia Woolf: "Please tell me what merit you find in Henry James . . . We have his works here, and I read them, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and as pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?"

Jorge Luis Borges: "Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life."

Cormac McCarthy (from a New York Times interview): Proust and Henry James don’t make the cut. “I don’t understand them,” he says. “To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."

Jonathan Franzen: "I tried to start Portrait of a Lady last night, which I had read only in college . . . maybe it was too late to read anything, but I became so impatient with the multiple redundancies in the first paragraph that I cast it aside in anger. The first paragraph alone! You really have to be in the mood for Henry James."

And finally, Mark Twain said he would rather "be damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than read Henry James's novel The Bostonians.

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I dislike Henry James' writing so much.

Tried reading Turn if the Screw and couldn't get into it. It's very rare that I put down a book I've made up my mind to read...but I did. It was tedious.

he was also a bumboy

LMAO Henry James pleb filtered all those dumb fucks. The Golden Bowl is a masterpiece.

All of them are correct.

Turn of the Screw was fun but his other works are stuffy social novels

oh look, the usual members of the Cope Club

I really wanted to like James. I thought he was an acquired taste that I was getting…eventually I realized I was dreading picking up his work that I had started. Quit and never looked back. Tedious and turgid

>filtered
Beat you guys to it

>Cormac McCarthy (from a New York Times interview): Proust and Henry James don’t make the cut. “I don’t understand them,” he says. “To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange."

based cormac mcarthy evincing healthy disgust towards faggots

Why are you so insecure about your opinion that you nees to use others to "prove" it? We can find authors saying such things about any well known author, just as we can find a great deal of people singing their praises. It proves nothing beyond how week of mind many are in that they will accept this as proof enough and never bother to find out for themselves.

> Cormac McCarthy
Reddit tier writer

He's honestly not worth it.

Nabokov is a petulant shrike, take all his opinions on literature and reverse them to get the truth

Even a broken clock is right once a day. Nabokov was right about James.

this

...is cringe.

>even a broken clock is right once a day

>spend your entire life honing your craft
>get shit on by some dweeb in one line

Why even live bros? Why struggle towards something some dude can reduce to the "weak blond prose of Turgenev"?

Half of the guys there are more based than James and the other half are not.

I imagine reading Henry James as someone who enjoys literature feels like reading any book as someone who does not.

I like this

>More from Nabokov: "I have read (or rather reread) 'What Maisie Knew.' It is terrible. Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting upon the wrong one?"
literally laughed out loud

does it mean that i can skip moby dick?

James is comfy. Never understood the hate. Plenty of novelists I never got into, don't hate any of them.

they're no-reading motherfuckers. pay them no mind

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this was from the last bit of Henry James I read, I like him best when he's in Italy
>Late in the afternoon I disembarked at the Piazzetta and took my way haltingly and gazingly to the many-domed Basilica, that shell of silver with a lining of marble. It was that enchanting Venetian hour when the ocean-touching sun sits melting to death, and the whole still air seems to glow with the soft effusion of his golden substance. Within the church, the deep brown shadow-masses, the heavy thick-tinted air, the gorgeous composite darkness, reigned in richer, quainter, more fantastic gloom than my feeble pen can reproduce the likeness of. From those rude concavities of dome and semidome, where the multitudinous facets of pictorial mosaic shimmer and twinkle in their own dull brightness; from the vast antiquity of innumerable marbles, incrusting the walls in roughly mated slabs, cracked and polished and triple-tinted with eternal service; from the wavy carpet of compacted stone, where a thousand once-lighted fragments glimmer through the long attrition of idle feet and devoted knees; from sombre gold and mellow alabaster, from porphyry and malachite, from long dead crystal and the sparkle of undying lamps, there proceeds a dense rich atmosphere of splendor and sanctity which transports the half-stupefied traveller to the age of a simpler and more awful faith. I wandered for half an hour beneath those reverted cups of scintillating darkness, stumbling on the great stony swells of the pavement as I gazed upward at the long mosaic saints who curve gigantically with the curves of dome and ceiling. I had left Europe; I was in the East. An overwhelming sense of the sadness of man's spiritual history took possession of my heart. The clustering picturesque shadows about me seemed to represent the darkness of a past from which he had slowly and painfully struggled. The great mosaic images, hideous, grotesque, inhuman, glimmered like the cruel spectres of early superstitions and terrors. There came over me, too, a poignant conviction of the ludicrous folly of the idle spirit of travel. How with Murray and an opera-glass it strolls and stares where omniscient angels stand diffident and sad! How blunted and stupid are its senses! How trivial and superficial its imaginings! To this builded sepulchre of trembling hope and dread, this monument of mighty passions, I had wandered in search of pictorial effects. O vulgarity!

>He had a mind so fine no idea could violate it

Destroyed holy shit

>palooka mistaking eliot's high praise for le epic dunk

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Cope. Read his essays. He thought James was boring af

Nice banter but James is great, I can see how his greatness could be missed by people with certain sensibilities though. The only thing that really irritates me here is the McCarthy quote, he’s such an incredible poser, really no better than the average Yea Forums pseud; Franzen on the other hand just gives me a good ol’ chuckle whenever I’m reminded of his existence. The king of the midwits. I relate deeply to his frustrated desire to achieve erudition.

this is fantastic

could you point me to those specific essays please

I did read one of his short stories called The Jolly Corner or something and it was a little dense. It was about a man showing a woman a house he was going to live in and he gets scared by a ghost or something.

>The most absurd of these episodes occurred on another rainy evening when James and I chanced to arrive at Windsor long after dark. […] While I was hesitating and peering out into the darkness James spied an ancient doddering man who had stopped in the rain to gaze at us. ‘Wait a moment, my dear—I’ll ask him where we are’; and leaning out he signalled to the spectator.
>‘My good man, if you’ll be good enough to come here, please; a little nearer—so,’ and as the old man came up: ‘My friend, to put it to you in two words, this lady and I have just arrived here from Slough; that is to say, to be more strictly accurate, we have recently passed through Slough on our way here, having actually motored to Windsor from Rye, which was our point of departure; and the darkness having overtaken us, we should be much obliged if you would tell us where we now are in relation, say, to the High Street, which, as you of course know, leads to the Castle, after leaving on the left hand the turn down to the railway station.’
>I was not surprised to have this extraordinary appeal met by silence, and a dazed expression on the old wrinkled face at the window; nor to have James go on: ‘In short’ (his invariable prelude to a fresh series of explanatory ramifications), ‘in short, my good man, what I want to put to you in a word is this: supposing we have already (as I have reason to think we have) driven past the turn down to the railway station (which in that case, by the way, would probably not have been on our left hand, but on our right) where are we now in relation to…’
>‘Oh, please,’ I interrupted, feeling myself utterly unable to sit through another parenthesis, ‘do ask him where the King’s Road is.’
>‘Ah—? The King’s Road? Just so! Quite right! Can you, as a matter of fact, my good man, tell us where, in relation to our present position, the King’s Road exactly is?’
>‘Ye’re in it’, said the aged face at the window.
he was a god

i'd give anything for a wire recording of james's voice

my sides

Plebs hate him because he was a composed gentleman.

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I want to know what Ezra said.

that's something else

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Interesting. I thought Eliot was English honestly.

yeah, he became a citizen

FUCK HENRY JAMES POSTER, WHERE ARE YOU

Where is this from

Travelling Companions

a retard, more like.

His style seems like a parody. I imagine a Dickens comic characters speaking like this:

> Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not--some people of course never do,--the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one's enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o'clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure. The persons concerned in it were taking their pleasure quietly, and they were not of the sex which is supposed to furnish the regular votaries of the ceremony I have mentioned. The shadows on the perfect lawn were straight and angular; they were the shadows of an old man sitting in a deep wicker-chair near the low table on which the tea had been served, and of two younger men strolling to and fro, in desultory talk, in front of him. The old man had his cup in his hand; it was an unusually large cup, of a different pattern from the rest of the set and painted in brilliant colours. He disposed of its contents with much circumspection, holding it for a long time close to his chin, with his face turned to the house. His companions had either finished their tea or were indifferent to their privilege; they smoked cigarettes as they continued to stroll. One of them, from time to time, as he passed, looked with a certain attention at the elder man, who, unconscious of observation, rested his eyes upon the rich red front of his dwelling. The house that rose beyond the lawn was a structure to repay such consideration and was the most characteristic object in the peculiarly English picture I have attempted to sketch.

But there is a very good line on the excerpt above:

>From five o'clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity

HAHAHAHAHAHA is this real?? he really does read like parody

Portrait of a Lady was so comfy. I should reread it.

It’s the first paragraph of Portrait of a Lady

Sometimes I'm glad Hemingway came to the literary scene and just fixed this awkward, long-winded nonsense. This guy should have been executed for being such a terrible writer.

>once

is the point that its like ambient slow literature or something? the prose really is not very good and flows poorly, especially considering this is the first paragraph.

Henry James is the kind of writer you read out of masochism and hatred. You just hate it but you keep on reading.

God this place is retarded.

if this highbrow count me out, I'd rather be a midwit who reads Orwell and Hemingway for the rest of my life

sad

he meant a digital clock running on 24 hour continental/military time

Blessed ascending triple-dubs.

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The curious thing is that his style doesn't seem to be so annoying and bad for being flowery, ultra-detailed, rhetorical, baroque, and so on. Many writers, and among them some of the best I know, could be accused of being rethorical, but with James the problem it's something else.

It seems like he spends a lot of energy and goes around and around details that are irrelevant; he doesn't seem to name something without first having to apologize to the reader in various softening terms:

>the elder man, who, unconscious of observation, rested his eyes upon the rich red front of his dwelling.
>the rich red front of his dwelling

Shakespeare has nothing simple and direct, and yet his metaphors, his mixing of the concrete with the abstract, his way of using tangible things to embody metaphysical questions, all make his language one of the densest, most beautiful, alive and interesting ones I've read, such as here:

Hamlet. Such an act
That blurs the grace and blush of modesty;
Calls virtue hypocrite; takes off the rose
From the fair forehead of an innocent love,
And sets a blister there; makes marriage vows2435
As false as dicers' oaths. O, such a deed
As from the body of contraction plucks
The very soul, and sweet religion makes
A rhapsody of words! Heaven's face doth glow;
Yea, this solidity and compound mass,2440
With tristful visage, as against the doom,
Is thought-sick at the act.

Othello. Had it pleased heaven2795
To try me with affliction; had they rain'd
All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head.
Steep'd me in poverty to the very lips,
Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes,
I should have found in some place of my soul2800
A drop of patience: but, alas, to make me
A fixed figure for the time of scorn
To point his slow unmoving finger at!
Yet could I bear that too; well, very well:
But there, where I have garner'd up my heart,2805
Where either I must live, or bear no life;
The fountain from the which my current runs,
Or else dries up; to be discarded thence!
Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads
To knot and gender in! Turn thy complexion there,2810
Patience, thou young and rose-lipp'd cherubin,—
Ay, there, look grim as hell!

Macbeth. Had I but died an hour before this chance,
I had lived a blessed time; for, from this instant,875
There 's nothing serious in mortality:
All is but toys: renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.
(...)
Macbeth. Who can be wise, amazed, temperate and furious,
Loyal and neutral, in a moment? No man:
The expedition my violent love
Outrun the pauser, reason. Here lay Duncan,
His silver skin laced with his golden blood;900
And his gash'd stabs look'd like a breach in nature
For ruin's wasteful entrance: there, the murderers,
Steep'd in the colours of their trade, their daggers
Unmannerly breech'd with gore: who could refrain,
That had a heart to love, and in that heart905
Courage to make 's love known?

I can't remember what novel it is, but there's legit a part where he takes an entire page to describe someone hanging up their coat.

Everyone should read In the Cage before deciding if they want to read Henry James. It's a great and short introduction to his style. It's a story about a woman working as a telegraphist and her creating stories in her head out of the telegrams she sends.