Wood & Henry James (critic)

[Michael Bailey]

how about that far from the madding crowd anyway?  i found it on
u-tube in 21 10-minute segments and watched a bunch of them the other
night and it's pretty trippy, a lot of costumes and accents and beards
... book any good?

so but anyway, you are saying that the young henry james was a rather
harsh critic of the elder generation, which is kind of funny (to me,
ymmv) because one thinks of HJ as a sort of fixed luminary ensconced
and captioned as a member of an older generation himself, somebody
with the patience to pace stuff in such a way as to clarify nuances
that ring down the generations and impress the heck out of such
luminaries as Phillip Roth, if his frequent references to HJ are any
token...

ie, the way he approaches the anarchist thingie in the Princess
Cassamassima, which is not devoid of merit (as if I were any judge of
*that*) but also although I couldn't find time to finish the thing
(yet) seemed of interest and quite possibly a decent read -- i say, i
say, the way he approaches that anarchism, and, like, everything else
as well, is long on considerations that are conservative and
well-considered and judicious and so forth ,,, And Daisy Miller and
the Beast in the Jungle and so forth, i mean none of them has a sort
of bounce or something that i would talk about in the same breath as a
young rebel...

know whut i mean, Vern?  but rebelling against the young rebels of the
(19)50s and 60s with deeply subjective and timebound notions and
admittedly spurious insights (like Kerouac, "you can't fall off a
mountain" in Desolation Angels I think) -- one might well find James's
well-considered considerations considerably refreshing

"the young rebel, harry james"  (i'd trade the fameses of a dozen hairy jameses)


On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 7:45 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Henry James was foul about Far from the Madding Crowd when it appeared
> in 1874. He was a young writer, ambitious, seething, silkily
> aggressive. There was ground to be cleared, and residents had to be
> deported. Thomas Hardy, with his knobbly rusticities and merry
> peasants, would not do. In the Nation, James complained that the novel
> had a ‘fatal lack of magic’, and was written in a ‘verbose and
> redundant style … Everything human in the book strikes us as factious
> and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the
> dogs.’
>
> Perfuming the Money Issue
> James Wood
> Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American
> Masterpiece by Michael Gorra
>
> to read the rest, go to London Review of Books



-- 
- where the bee sucks, there suck I