The Portable Henry James

I like Henry James, but this is just a really weird anthology - it has a few of his short stories, snippets from some of his introductions, snippets from pieces of his criticism, snippets of other people's criticism of him, basically just a lot of snippets. I'm not sure how useful this fragmentary collection is to me or anyone else.

That said, a couple parodies of James are included, and those are absolutely hilarious.

Spoilers ahead, read at your own risk

Daisy Miller
Daisy Miller is probably the best introduction you can have to Henry James. Lacking the pretension of later James, this story touches on contemporary issues in a timeless way. Sure, it's easy to laugh at the point where that one woman freaks out over Daisy being seen in public walking next to a man, but are we really so different? We have our own social taboos, they've just shifted from one place to another; we'd be wise to remember that and not think ourselves better than earlier eras. Furthermore, the central problem of the novella is a timeless one: what happens when there's a radical mismatch between one's lifestyle and one's societal context? In my opinion, it's inevitable that Daisy dies at the end, there's really no other way for the story to end. That predictability doesn't make it any less tragic, however, since we want to have hope that she'll learn to navigate a compromise between internal and external pressures. Those who are not willing to compromise on some points simply cannot live in a society. We all have to conform to some degree, whether in the speech we utter, in the clothes we wear, in the activities we partake in. In a more succinct and perhaps more empathetic way, James makes the same point that Emerson makes in Self-Reliance, namely that rebellion, true Rebellion, is an extremely difficult and lonely thing. We would be wise to dethrone rebellion as a virtue per se and temper it with strategy, since we can't rebel everywhere all the time.

Going just a bit further on Daisy, I feel that this novella accurately predicted the direction that feminism (then in its nascent stages) would end up: a hyperfixation on independence which would lead to a dead end. No one is happy with feminism today, not feminists, not anti-feminists. There's an incredible amount of infighting and disagreement about what the word even means, about where to go from here. He doesn't give any easy answers, but I think he does point out potential pitfalls, which we, the blind, of course have fallen into.

Lastly, here's a short reflection I wrote on the novella for my class:


Daisy Miller qua Sorceress (1987)

Initially, the chronological and social distance (dissonance?) between Daisy Miller and myself felt disorienting. That feeling persisted until a certain moment alluded to in my quotation below (#1) where Daisy was being dramatic, albeit in a lighthearted, playful, childish way. She wanted to be spontaneous in a rigid world, and the resulting disparity struck her down with a deadly fever. I realized in that moment of the story (p. 25) that I had known my own Daisys: “extroverts” who “chose” me as “their introvert;” they effortlessly got away with what us mere mortals wouldn’t even think of doing. I was the comparatively stiff Winterbourne, willing “to sacrifice [a mutual friend], conversationally” (20). These Daisys of mine were as frustrating as they were refreshing. The two contradictory characteristics seemed almost necessarily concomitant, an inevitable paradox.

Sarah Wadsworth’s explanation of the critical and literary history of “types” in and around Daisy Miller to some degree confirmed my above reading of the titular character. I especially thought her phrase “anxieties about class and sexuality” (34) was a great summary of the story, as well as another story. I recently saw a film called Sorceress, which, set in the 1300s, seemed at first to also be chronologically and socially disparate from us today. However, as the story unfolded, the (stereo)typical characters (an inquisitor visiting a quiet town, a domineering liege lord, a woman-of-the-forest, etc.) also flowered into complexity. The titular “sorceress,” like Daisy, toed the line with her every word and action, provoking and placating in equal measure. The inquisitor sought out heresy, but her natural remedies at worst were superstition, not heresy. Like in Daisy Miller, you could feel hierarchies looming overhead in Sorceress; sometimes they protected the vulnerable, like the nascent separation of church and state, but other times it hurt them.

What is the lesson of Daisy Miller? Using Sorceress as a lens works surprisingly well. Though the forest woman in the movie doesn’t die at the end, her near-demise acts as a mirror to transform the stiff, Winterbourne-esque inquisitor into a more nuanced man. She, like Daisy, proved to be the naive yet necessary gadfly needed to break up the strict rigidity of our inherited rulebook. Both embodied a form of physical, sensory knowledge and experience utterly at odds with the bookish, cold, and intellectual knowledge inscribed in our institutions. Us contemporaries may be tempted to criticize Winterbourne for many reasons, but, as Dr. Clark mentioned in class last week, one of the most dangerous things we can do is to assume that we are correct in all things, and that we have nothing to learn from the past, however unsavory. There are probably things you and I do which future generations will condemn with equal fervor. In other words, these stories, far from something to be scoffed at in self-righteous indignation (“She must not walk here with you two men. Fifty people have noticed her,” 40), can help us to realize our own rigidities, ultimately helping to disarm the self-assured inquisitor within all of us.

“Do, then, let me give you a row,” he said to the young girl.
“It’s quite lovely, the way you say that!” cried Daisy.
“It will be still more lovely to do it.” (25)


The Middle Years
In my opinion, this short story felt a bit too on the nose, and I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as The Beast in the Jungle. Here, James's anxieties around getting older shone through with such frankness that it felt more like venting than a real story. Yes, he made the main character older than he was when he wrote it, but its singlemindedness frustrated me. It seemed he was fixating on aging and didn't have much of anything else to say in the story. As we noted in class, this was one of the few times that he ever leaned on negative stereotypes/characterizations of female characters. Sure, there was something to be said about revision and viewing your own work with others' eyes, but such discussion took a serious back seat to the age-anxiety.


The Beast in the Jungle
This novella impacted me deeply. Rather than a straightforward depiction of anxiety about aging like we see in "The Middle Years," this novella took the inevitability of aging and multiplied it along a new axis, one he typified as the "beast in the jungle." Though at times it felt quite abstract, James managed to fashion the beast so that you could superimpose your own anxieties on it. But the beast isn't simply a blank canvas for readers: it also implies a fear of missed chances, a fear of intimacy, a fear of facing fears, a certain timidity which deadens in a way that only retrospect can fully understand. It's only when at May's gravestone that Marcher understands what she was trying to tell him. To me, this story takes the essence of The Ambassadors and distills it (in both senses of the word): it makes it much more compact, and thus much more impactful, more potent. Read this rather than that overlong novel.

I did try to watch a film adaptation of this novella (Beast in the Jungle, 2023), but it was so poorly made that I had to abandon it. Somehow, they managed to capture none of the feeling of the novella, and it felt vaguely insulting how miscast the actors were. Yes, Marcher is timid, but he has some redeemable qualities: he's mysterious, he's not made out of cardboard. Instead, Marcher is precisely the warning James strove to give to all of his readers; Marcher was what James feared most in himself, that he had wasted his life, that he had missed what was right in front of him. It's a powerful story and well worth reading (or listening to on audiobook).

Below, I've included a reflection I wrote for class which elaborates on some other aspects of the novella:


Before the Beast: A Light in the Eye

In Franz Kafka’s short story “Before the Law,” a peasant visits a gate guarded by a gatekeeper who forbids him entrance despite the gate remaining wide open. The peasant can look in, but dares not defy the gatekeeper, who warns of more terrifying gatekeepers deeper inside. Jacques Derrida argues that language, literature, and all other “laws” operate in the same way: language’s very arbitrariness and immateriality casts an unbreakable spell (because there is nothing actually holding us, nothing enforcing the “law”). John Marcher likewise forever sits outside of the gate of the Law, not daring to put into concrete action what his linguistic abstractions could hold at a distance. Derrida continues in that Kafka essay to remark on how language, like literature, like the law, holds you at a distance. You can only ever see it out of the corner of your eye, like when the center of your vision has been blinded by the sun.

Light likewise plays a central yet ambiguous role in The Beast in the Jungle. Early on, the light brings with it “blood” and a “burning recognition” (242); James puns off of “illumination” and “brilliance” more than a few times, often linking fire to light to knowledge. But later it glows in a ghostly, “strange cold light” (263); this latter reference is to May’s eyes, which originally locked with John’s in a nonverbal exchange of trust (243) and even carried kindness (244). However, like Jesus cryptically argues, “Therefore, when your eye is good, your whole body also is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your body also is full of darkness” (Luke 11:34). It seems Marcher’s eyes go bad squinting in the dark of his own self-imposed jungle; his fear of missed chances causes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy, “Knowledge kills action, action requires the veil of illusion;” Marcher’s shred of knowledge curses him with a sort of experiential tunnel vision. Ironically, it was the second chance to connect with May which re-ignites his “secret” and encourages a paranoid “watchfulness.”

Marcher’s indefinite deferral traps him “before” the beast: before as in “in front of,” but also never arriving; before, never after (until it’s too late). Like Lambert Strether seeing his missed youth via Chad, Marcher only sees the beast in retrospect, in the absence of the only eyes which could truly meet his. In death (the ultimate deferral), May’s eyes turn to stone, a microcosm of his past’s petrification: “if the face of the tomb did become a face for him it was because her two names became a pair of eyes that didn’t know him. He gave them a last long look, but no palest light broke” (276). Like the peasant in “Before the Law,” nothing can grant Marcher entrance now; not even the coins for Charon glint in the waning light: they are fumbled, they are lost to the jungle. He is left to dig blindly in the dirt, like “a worm and not a man” (Psalm 22:6).


Revisions
This section was quite interesting; it provided selected passages from James's work in both their original and final (New York Edition) versions, often decades apart. I usually preferred James' original wordings to his later, more specific additions. Yes, there is add specificity in those later editions, but the benefits of such specificity is often almost negligible compared against how much longer it makes things. This was the problem I complained about in The Ambassadors, since it bloated things so badly but added such small slivers of nuance.

The most notable (and most critically discussed) difference in revisions is the end of The Portrait of a Lady, where the original reads:

His kiss was like a flash of lightning; when it was dark again she was free.

But the revised version includes much more nuance:

He glared at her a moment through the dusk, and the next instant she felt his arms about her and his lips on her own lips. His kiss was like white lightning, a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. She had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned she was free.

That is definitely an example of the addition making a non-negligible improvement to the text, so I can't say his revisions always made things worse. Rather, I (along with quite a few of his early readers) felt mildly betrayed by his incessant revisions and re-writings of his own texts. I really do believe that once you release a work out into the world it takes on a life all its own, and in an important sense it no longer belongs to you. It's simultaneously a terrifying and a beautiful thing, but, being as trapped in the past as he is, James can never let his old works go, ever fiddling with them.


The Art of Fiction
This classic essay focuses on the way that "impressions" and "experiences" inform and supply the raw material for art (and, in his opinion, the standard for what "good" art is); though later James often feels quite elitist, this earlier James writes some pleasantly proletarian/egalitarian sentiments, especially his defense of female writers being able to write things outside their "experience." Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage seems to prove the optional nature of direct experience of a topic (in his case, he was never in a war), but I also fear that sometimes this goes too far, that the ruse doesn't always hold up. James expands the definition of "experience" to include passing observations, but sometimes I think that that waters down the word "experience," blurring the natural distinction between a physical, firsthand experience and a disembodied, distant, secondhand observation. Ultimately, all we have to write from is our own experience, so I find it ironic that James indirectly excuses his own lack of direct experience. It's almost like this earlier James hadn't yet learned the lesson from Beast in the Jungle. Maybe I'm being too harsh, or maybe I'm onto something.


Fragments
As other reviewers noted, there are quite a few scattered fragments at the end of the collection, and they're of variable quality. At times they're incomprehensible without their larger context, but other times they're quite enjoyable on their own, especially "An American is corrected on what constitutes 'the self'" ("There is no such thing as an isolated man or woman," "one's house, one's clothes, the book one reads, the company one keeps--these things are all expressive") and "The peaches d'antan" (which describes childhood in a way strangely relatable to me).

The only major work I didn't read in here was The Turn of the Screw, but I'll get back to that eventually.

I have read Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller so far, but am looking forward to reading the rest when time avails me. A fun side note.... This edition is edited by my literature professor at the University of Maryland.

this really is a good compendium; you have got to love a sentence long enough that you've forgotten the beginning by the time you have gotten to the end - it might actually be a good experience to see what it is like for children who have reading problems to read a "normal" sentence!

It took of course more than that particular passage to place us together in presence of what we had now to live with as we could -- my dreadful liability to impressions of the order so vividly exemplified, and my companion's knowledge, henceforth, -- a knowledge half consternation and half compassion, -- of that liability.

What precedes is a sentence from James' novella, "The Turn of the Screw." The story is intended to frighten the reader, but the terror generated by the story pales in comparison to the fear that an English teacher might ask you to diagram that sentence.

Unfortunately, his prose is filled with awful sentences like that, nearly impossible to read. The writing seems to have been pulled inside out and upside down. James uses long words to create long sentences jumbled into long paragraphs (How does James decide it is time to end a paragraph? Is it that he needs to pee?).

Some other observations:

Daisy Miller is a decent story (it was one of his earliest and his earliest are the most readable). The Beast in the Jungle is also a good story but written so painfully most people won't bother finishing it. Roughly half way through this book, there is a section showing revisions James made to Daisy Miller and to one of his novels (Portrait of a Lady). It is interesting because nearly all of the updates make the prose more verbose and less readable.

Henry James writes about people who are so wealthy they do not need to work.

The Legacy section at the end of this volume has some excellent material that made me rethink some of my earlier conclusions. I found Edith Wharton's piece to be most relatable for me. Max Beerbohm's parody was also delightful.

As I neared the end of this ponderous volume, I said to myself that this is enough Henry James for a lifetime. But, perhaps after a suitable interval, I may tackle The American to experience one of his novels.

I'll finish my review with a quote from the book: Henry James had a ponderously warm way of saying nothing in infinite sentences. Thomas Hardy penned this sentence; but he eventually decided that James was the finest living novelist..

Henry James is an interesting author and I like how Daisy Miller challenges the ideas of what society demands for women. The book is good. Boring at times but really good.

Of course, with James you'll want to head straight for the novels, but this is a great companion collection as it contains "The Art of Fiction," "The Turn of the Screw," and "The Beast in the Jungle."

What a bunch of doormats! I am not sure how doormat hood qualifies as Irony.