>Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.----Oscar Wilde>An idiot, and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in the world.----H. L. Mencken>Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James, his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life.---Jorge Luis Borges>Would you rather read Henry James or be crushed to death by a great weight?---Lawrence Durrell>Please tell me what you find in Henry James. ... we have his works here, and I read, and I can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?----Virginia Woolf>Mark Twain said he would rather "be damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than read Henry James's novel The Bostonians.>I read a collection of Henry James' short stories—miserable stuff, a complete fake, you ought to debunk that pale porpoise and his plush vulgarities some day.>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.>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?---Vladimir Nabokov>Henry James? That's not literature.---Cormac McCarthy
>>25236107>The massive head, the slow uplift of the hand, gli occhi onesti e tardi , the long sentences piling themselves up in elaborate phrase after phrase, the lightning incision, the pauses, the slightly shaking admonitory gesture with its “wu-a-wait a little, wait a little, something will come”; blague and benignity and the weight of so many years’ careful, incessant labour of minute observation always there to enrich the talk. I had heard it but seldom, yet it is all unforgettable. >I have heard no word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life; not worked out in the diagrams of Greek tragedy, not labelled "epos" or ""Aeschylus”. The outbursts in The Tragic Muse, the whole of The Turn of the Screw, human liberty, personal liberty, the rights of the individual against all sorts of intangible bondage! The passion of it, the continual passion of it in this man who, fools said, didn't “feel”. I have never yet found a man of emotion against whom idiots didn't raise this cry.>I am not here to write a full volume of detailed criticism, but two things I do claim which I have not seen in reviewers’ essays. First, that there was emotional greatness in Henry James’ hatred of tyranny; secondly, that there was titanic volume, weight, in the masses he sets in opposition within his work. He uses forces no whit less specifically powerful than the proverbial “doom of the house” — Destiny, Deus ex machina , — of great traditional art. His art was great art as opposed to overelaborate or over-refined art by virtue of the major conflicts which he portrays. In his books he showed race against race, immutable; the essential Americanness, or Englishness or Frenchness — in The American, the difference between one nation and another; not flag-waving and treaties, not the machinery of government, but “why” there is always misunderstanding, why men of different race are not the same.
>>25236167I find it impossible to not read Pound quotes in his voice.
>>25236107I can appreciate Wilde’s take. I like H.L Mencken, but he’s insulting James along with a whole city, so it’s not very accurate. The rest are unstable autists and schizos. Fuck’em. Never heard of Durrell.
He wrote excellent novels, novellas, short stories, criticism, memoirs, travel writing, and even some okay plays. He achieved more in a wider range of literature than any other American. He is the Master.
His real sin in the eyes of others was being better than the rest.
Sorry OP this board is too dumb for James
Anyone who makes people seethe this much must be doing something right.
