Felt like Kramer versus Kramer was remade by John Waters. Loved it.

Not one of Henry James's best works, I struggled to immerse myself in the story with events being viewed through a child's eyes. More a book of characters talking than doing so the plot was too stagnant for my liking.

According to The American Novel Since 1945 (Lecture 22), this book is told in a free indirect discourse through the consciousness of a child in an aristocractic family. Professor Hungerford says that the narrative is extremely confusing (but it would be a good example while studying various types of narrative).

Henry James is a heuristic writer. Know what I mean?

In other words, he remained throughout his life a Seeker. The overarching priority of Being over Becoming meant little to him, as a truth he could hold on to.

So, impelled by his own tumultuous and impetuous cravings - the cravings that comprised his inner Daemon - he was driven “down, down - to a sunless sea:” the world of deep and dangerous introspection...

Tonight, after re-dipping deeply into Henry James’ convoluted introspections in this novel again - the first time in fifty years, for I read it once academically - I’ve come to the sad conclusion that his late novels can be toxic to postmodern souls.

In fact, tonight, for this reason I’ve resolved never to attempt another of his later novels again.

Oh, I know I have a fascination for his lucidly moody interior rambles, and I know they’re addictive to me, like a hypnotic subject’s fascination with whirlpools - but that’s the long and the short of it, and this time I’m going to try to stick to my guns.

Happens every time I read James. You mosey through a paysage moralisé of profound aperçus, and before you know it, you’re hooked - but guess what? - you’re going down the drain.

Fast.

I do, anyway.

I lose my connection with the Primacy of Being too readily when I read James. Without absolutes, we risk finding ourselves being quickly set adrift in a depressive and restive ocean of ethical relativism.

As is always the case with James.

It’s like a mariner in a storm who loses track of where he is without the North Star. But James was so exclusively self-possessed he could do it, as long as he kept his Daemon relentlessly seeking through our modern age’s refuse for answers. Give it up, Henry - it’s only Junk!

But if you’re a seeker, you will search to the end.

And if you DO find your Pot of Gold, you’ll be content.

Your life will have PURPOSE.
***

But anyway, James is now passé: for now, we can’t sustain a restive introspection in our postmodern age. Media, education and conditioning have directed our gaze firmly outwards. So we turn to our books.

They’re escapes from too much reality.

The answer is Within.

So many of us read as long as we have a firm idea of who we are and where we’re going - as I do - but when we enter Henry James’ late labyrinths, we lose our connective touchstones.

Or at least I do. I guess that’s the experimental, transitional side of his modernism. It leads you “to an overwhelming question”:

Where, precisely, are you GOING with all this, Henry?

You’re almost sickly and cloying in your introspection, but with all your moral relativism we become deceived into believing there’s fresh air in it all.

There ain’t. It’s totally disconnected with exterior social reality and, as well, with any absolute reference point.

There seemed to be fresh air, finally, in The Ambassadors. Again, that threw me for a loop!

Turns out, of course, it’s a False Dawn at the darkest point of the night.

Yes, folks, read Henry James and, as Jim Morrison sang, you:

“Take the highway to the end of the night!”
***

Some people can still read the late novels of Henry James:

But not cantankerous me -

I just say: thank heaven some among us are “assured of certain certainties!”

So would you please pass me my Plutarch?

read this in high school and hated it. i hate the way he writes. “stream of consciousness” yeah that counts for like gossiping not about describing the color of the coach lining in detail for three paragraphs.

then i watched the movie and it was way better. modern adaptations for life.

Book Circle Reads 43

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: What Maisie Knew (1897) represents one of James's finest reflections on the rites of passage from wonder to knowledge, and the question of their finality. The child of violently divorced parents, Maisie Farange opens her eyes on a distinctly modern world. Mothers and fathers keep changing their partners and names, while she herself becomes the pretext for all sorts of adult sexual intrigue.

In this classic tale of the death of childhood, there is a savage comedy that owes much to Dickens. But for his portrayal of the child's capacity for intelligent wonder, James summons all the subtlety he devotes elsewhere to his most celebrated adult protagonists. Neglected and exploited by everyone around her, Maisie inspires James to dwell with extraordinary acuteness on the things that may pass between adult and child. In addition to a new introduction, this edition of the novel offers particularly detailed notes, bibliography, and a list of variant readings.

My Review: Ida and Beale Farange, Maisie's parents, resemble Winter and Dick Derus, my own parents, very very closely. When I read this book in 1996, I was smacked in the teeth by the eerie similarities between the parenting styles of the adults. I'm still a widge unnerved by it. I am completely certain my father's never read the book since I've never ever seen or heard tell of him reading a novel, and I'm pretty confident that my mother wouldn't have read it, being as she was a thoroughgoing anti-Victorian in her reading preferences.

But it's as if they absorbed it from the aether and used it as a how-to manual. Poor Maisie!

My opinion of the book, then, is strongly colored by the coincidence of its resemblance to my own life. I rate it and respond to it based on that resonance; but that would, all other things being equal, put this much closer to five stars than I rate it here.

I've cut a star off because I, unlike most of the professional critics who have discussed the book, find the long ending section set in Maisie's teenaged years (or so we all think, it's never made explicit) unconvincing and a lot too long to be anything but hamfistedly didactic and tendentious. Maisie faces a decision that no child should have to face and she handles it with an aplomb that I found convincing...for a while...because it was so clearly prefigured in the adults who surrounded her behaving so badly. But James was a moralist, and he grafted his Moral Point onto the logical, inevitable ruminations Maisie goes through to make her horrible decision, and ends up crashing the narrative car into the brick wall of Conviction.

I do so hate that.

The 2012 film gets 4* from me for its delicately handled updating, faithful to the spirit of the story but violent with its specifics. They are separate experiences; no way could the film have occurred in quite this way without the book but the book hasn't been tossed aside lightly. Well and truly ADAPTED for the screen not simply "they filmed the book."

Правдив портрет на английското общество и нравите му в края на 19-ти век и история на бързото и болезнено съзряване на едно дете - това е накратко "Какво знаеше Мейзи", към която подходих с много големи очаквания. И може би щяха да се оправдаят, ако книгата беше събрана в максимум половината от сегашния си обем.
Мейзи е момиченце с открадното от възрастните детство, използвано вместо разменна монета, средство за изкупление, оръжие за саморазправа, отмъщение и постигане на цели. Непрекъснато прехвърляно и разнасяно като ненужен багаж между различни странни хора, оплетени като в латиносериал в още по-странни връзки помежду си. Харесвано понякога, мразено, лъгано, заблуждавано, то жадува да бъде обичано и да обича, да има истинско семейство и се вкопчва като в спасителна сламка и в най-малката проява на внимание или загриженост.

Авторът влиза много добре в образа детето, но е прекалено обстоятелствен и поради това трудно задържа интереса и вниманието. Дълги сложни съставни изречения от по няколко реда, изобилно обяснителни и излишно много казващи, повтарящи, предполагащи и подсказващи (подобно на тези в ТВ сапунките) и не оставящи на четящия нищо за размисъл. Абзаци от около страница, с еднообразни, повтарящи се разсъждения и пояснения, в които или се губиш, или можеш спокойно да прескочиш. Почти абсурдни диалози и ситуации, в които всяко естествено поведение, мисъл или реплика са в разрез с тогавашния добър тон и морал.
Абстрахирам се напълно от факта, че те са ми абсолютно несмилаеми, както и тогавашният манталитет и въпреки огромното ми желание да харесам книгата, не успях. Дочетох я много трудно, не ми вървеше - мудна, бавна, отегчителна. Очевидно това не е моят тип класика. Бих я препоръчала горещо единствено на някого, страдащ от тежко безсъние.

I'm not quite sure what Maisie knew.

Oh, Henry. Impossible--diffuse--vague--redundant--and fascinating, with its suggestions of horrors lurking beneath the surface of social life. Lovecraftian, in its way.

"The Captain? What Captain?"

"Why when we met you in the Gardens-- the one who took me to sit with him. That was exactly what he said."

Ida let it come on so far as to appear for an instant to pick up a lost thread. "What on earth did he say?"

Maisie faltered supremely, but supremely she brought it out. "What you say, mamma-- that you're so good."

"What 'I' say?" Ida slowly rose, keeping her eyes on her child, and the hand that had busied itself in her purse conformed at her side and amid the folds of her dress to a certain stiffening of the arm. "I say you're a precious idiot, and I won't have you put words into my mouth!" This was much more peremptory than a mere contradiction. Maisie could only feel on the spot that everything had broken short off and that their communication had abruptly ceased. That was presently proved. "What business have you to speak to me of him?"

Her daughter turned scarlet. "I thought you liked him."

"Him!-- the biggest cad in London!" Her ladyship towered again, and in the gathering dusk the whites of her eyes were huge.

Maisie's own, however, could by this time pretty well match them; and she had at least now, with the first flare of anger that had ever yet lighted her face for a foe, the sense of looking up quite as hard as any one could look down. "Well, he was kind about you then; he was, and it made me like him. He said things-- they were beautiful, they were, they were!" She was almost capable of the violence of forcing this home, for even in the midst of her surge of passion-- of which in fact it was a part-- there rose in her a fear, a pain, a vision ominous, precocious, of what it might mean for her mother's fate to have forfeited such a loyalty as that.

I'm sorry Mr. James. I'm at page 175 and I just can't handle any more. I have no idea who "she" and "he" are referring to, and long long long long sentences where "she said" "he said" but absolutely nothing happens.

So I'll never know what Maisie knew.

Δύσκολα αφήνεις το συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο από τα χέρια σου. Νιώθεις ότι αν το κάνεις θα προδώσεις και εσύ την μικρή Μέιζι όπως οι γονείς της.