Lawrence Durrell: "Would you rather read Henry James or be crushed to death by a great weight?"
Oscar Wilde: "Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty."
E. M. Forster: "So enormous is the sacrifice that many readers cannot get interested in James, although they can follow what he says (his difficulty has been much exaggerated), and can appreciate his effects. They cannot grant his premise, which is that most of human life has to disappear before he can do us a novel."
Arnold Bennett: "It took me years to ascertain that Henry James's work was giving me little pleasure . . . In each case I asked myself: 'What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it's going to?' Question unanswerable! I gave up. Today I have no recollection whatever of any characters or any events in either novel."
T. S. Eliot: "He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it."
Vladimir Nabokov: "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."
More from Nabokov: "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?"
Virginia Woolf: "Please tell me what merit you find in Henry James . . . We have his works here, and I read them, and can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar, and as pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?"
Jorge Luis Borges: "Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life."
Jonathan Franzen: "I tried to start Portrait of a Lady last night, which I had read only in college . . . maybe it was too late to read anything, but I became so impatient with the multiple redundancies in the first paragraph that I cast it aside in anger. The first paragraph alone! You really have to be in the mood for Henry James."
And finally, Mark Twain said he would rather "be damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than read Henry James's novel The Bostonians.
This would be pretty much the opposite of 'damning with faint praise'. I've never read Henry's stuff and am now petrified to comtemplate the possibility.
ReplyDeleteThey should all be ashamed of themselves, wherever they are, since James could write circles around the lot of them. (Eliot knew better--with the remark out of context the reader may miss that it was high praise).
ReplyDeleteThanks for chipping in, Philosophy Teacher. But do you seriously believe that James could write circles around Nabokov? Have you read Lolita? Speak, Memory?
ReplyDeleteI've just read James' "The Beast in the Jungle". I struggled to maintain the interest in the characters necessary to move beyond the third chapter. It seemed over-analytical and indulgent, and their relationship psychologically unconvincing. I'm reassured that I'm not alone in failing to engage consistently with his work.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that, I can recommend "The Turn of the Screw" where his distinct style is well-applied in building suspense and suggesting horror indirectly. Based on this, I'm going to try "The Jolly Corner".