Henry James is the classic writer’s writer for the English language. If you don’t like Henry, you aren’t really a writer.
That’s not to say that Henry didn’t go overboard, a lot. The fuss and feathers quotient in his work was always high, but I’m a huge fan of The Bostonians, not to mention classic short novels like The Beast in the Jungle, The Turn of the Screw, and The Jolly Corner. I did not like Portrait of a Lady, at all, but I’m still a big fan of The Ambassadors, despite a fuss and feathers quotient that frequently reached the gag level and beyond.
This all prelude to suggesting that if you read Edmund White’s review of The Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855–1872 in the New York Review of Books here, do yourself a big favor by stopping at the paragraph that begins “The most peculiar letters in this collection are about James’s health,” because these letters are about, you guessed it, Henry’s bowels. Writing to his brother William (because if you can’t write about your bowels to your brother, to whom, pray, can you?) Hank lets it all hang out, so to speak, with frightening results. Ignorance, here, is bliss.
Afterwords
The Ambassadors is a great novel, but it’s very heavy going. Not only is Henry’s ponderously evasive prose style reaching its final “maturity,” but his misogyny, always a massive undercurrent, slid entirely out of control. Poor Madame de Vionnet is the first of a succession of “bad girls” who have to be punished, for having a vagina, really. The late novels are largely traps, constructed to give a bright, vivacious woman a “choice” between a brilliant life tinged with sin (“unspeakable sin” as Henry would define it) and a virtuous nullity. Naturally, they choose the former, and are crushed in recompense. Madame is the first to fall victim to Henry’s moral steamroller, followed by Kate Croy, who gets her ass handed to her by the unbearably virtuous Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove. The same thing happens to another chick in The Golden Bowl, which I only know through A Masterpiece Theater presentation back in the eighties.
Henry’s advice to us was “Live all you can. It’s a mistake not to,” but he really couldn’t forgive people who actually did live life. He identified, compulsively, with people who were separated from life by death. Poor Strether, the protagonist of The Ambassadors, lost both his wife and son as a young man. He tried to live, but life rejected him. Ralph Touchett, so tedious in Portrait of a Lady, is conveniently dying, so he can’t really be expected to bother with such things as marriage or a career. Milly Theale, another sicko, only becomes reconciled to life when she learns that she’s dying. People are so much more likable when you know that you’re not at all like them and won’t have to put up with them for very long.
