Posted on

A Chat with Italo Calvino

Italo-Calvino 284I discovered Italo Calvino late. But I did discover him. Evidently, it was my time to find his favorite works of literary criticism (Why Read the Classics?), to open up to some fantasy (“The Distance of the Moon”), and maybe to rehabilitate the neo-realist part of him (Difficult Loves) that he may have undervalued later in his writing life. Now, if I could only have a chat with him.

The translations in Why Read the Classics? include many essays involving writers of English. Calvino planned this collection before his passing in 1985 and the Twentieth Century authors included are those he revered the most.

One of the chats I would have enjoyed with Italo Calvino concerns his treatment of Ernest Hemingway. They were a generation apart; but both were journalists; both had seen war up close; and both took an intense, activist—rather than an intellectual anti-fascist stance, Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War and both of them during World War II. And both were authors of compelling fiction.

Calvino and his contemporaries began their writing careers seeing Hemingway as a god-like figure from their fathers’ generation and, starting out as neo-realists, they tried to mimic, or at least learn from, Hemingway. Most of them, Calvino wrote, moved on toward post-modernism after the war, with some (like him) moving into fabulism and fantasy.

Calvino and his contemporaries lived through difficult times “seriously and boldly and with purity of heart.“ They learned from Hemingway to value openness and generosity, practical—technical as well as moral—competencies in doing things that had to be done, and being straightforward. They learned to avoid self-contemplation and self-pity and to learn to gauge a person according to their gestures or handling of brusque exchanges. I would say that is quite a positive legacy if they took all of that from a member of their parents’ generation.

Ernest_Hemingway 284Calvino then explains his generation became more discerning after their first war and found Hemingway’s style had begun to “descend into mannerism.” He came to be seen by them as “too narrow.” They began to know and to think more about his life style, his philosophy of life, and they decided that his focus on “violent tourism,” his hunting and his shark fishing, were repulsive. Not dealt with in the essay is Hemingway’s inability to stay in a marriage very long, but that is such a commonly known fact that it seems implicitly bundled with the critique of his adventure seeking. So, it seems that Calvino and his contemporaries matured enough to have decided after some rumination, that there should have been more to Hemingway. Apparently, it was his reticence about sharing the details of the thinking and range of emotions in his fiction that prompted Calvino’s criticism of Hemingway’s work not having any real depth.

Some biographers and reviewers of them in the last few decades apparently have agreed and have suggested there wasn’t any thinking or any real emotions there in Hemingway to disclose.

I’d have asked Calvino about that. Is that what he was getting at with his commentary?

Did he think there was no thinking or emotion conjured in his own stories in Difficult Loves when he was trying to “apprentice” with Hemingway?

Is it possible Calvino’s criticism might have led astray those biographers who couldn’t or wouldn’t separate life style from the man’s work while mounting their attacks?

It seems to me that in much Hemingway’s fiction, we actually do find ourselves thinking and feeling a good deal about being looked to by other men and sometimes women for a proper response in a tense situation—not discourse, not sharing of emotions, not speculation, but decisive action, maybe even violent action, requiring some physical skill, some mental agility, some grit, and certainly, some control over one’s emotions.

I agree with Calvino that Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories offered us the experience of an apprenticeship along with Nick’s own that resulted in training to tolerate and, if not to understand, to survive as best we can the brutality of the world. It involves identifying yourself (as others will) with the actions you take. It involves a commitment (that you and others can recognize) to manual and technical dexterity so that you can make a judgment as to your utility and reliability to get things done. Like protagonists of Hemingway’s work, you try not to have other problems (or not to show them at least) that interfere with you “doing things well.”

Calvino says there is always something Hemingway is trying to escape. Calvino focuses on Hemingway’s need to keep validating his abilities in doing things well and suggests a sense of vanity about it. Calvino senses in there a desperation, a defeat, maybe a death. Calvino says that Hemingway’s focus on his strict observance of his own code and his apparent application of that code to other things gives it the stature of a moral code. He says that to Hemingway his fidelity and ethical code is the only reality he can be certain of in an unknowable universe.

Maybe to Hemingway, the code is the only thing he can be sure of and he will just have to deal with whatever else comes along. Calvino says this focus eliminates the realities of emotions and thoughts that for Hemingway seem unreachable. I would point out to Calvino that it doesn’t eliminate them as possibilities. It is just that in Hemingway’s world, you don’t talk about it. It is private. Work out your own thoughts and emotions on the subject.

I would bring up to Calvino that perhaps that focus doesn’t eliminate the thoughts and emotions for Hemingway—or for us—and that he, Calvino, in the same essay provides us with the explanation: Hemingway’s first rule was understatement. He doesn’t often mention the details of his thoughts or emotions or what he thinks of those had by others. That is not the way of men involved in any dangerous or grisly business that has to be done—to chat about it, to reflect on it. So, perhaps he, Hemingway the narrator, is still too much a part of the action for Calvino.

I would have asked about “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and whether he felt the thinking and emotions of all three characters in the former and of Harry the writer dying of gangrene in the wilds in the latter were not explicit enough.

Calvino says outright that Hemingway’s identification of men with their actions and determining whether or not they are able to cope with duties imposed on them is still a valid way of “conceiving of existence.” I’d have to point out that is still true in a time when women are included routinely in the ranks of firemen, policemen, and combat soldiers.

In a following essay on Jorge Luis Borges, Calvino follows Borges’ discussion about discovering patterns in perceptions which have to be recognized before one can choose a path with this caution: “Yet it is in the rapid instant of real life, not in the fluctuation of time of a dream nor in the cyclical or eternal time of myths, that one’s fate is decided.”

And so it is, I would say to Mister Calvino. And it is particularly true in the realm of Newtonian physics applied to the real world of cars, ships, planes, and firearms. Mister Newton is very unforgiving of neglect or incapacity. Calvino’s essay on Conrad discusses difficulty in writing about the “sense of integration with the world that comes from a practical existence, the sense of how man fulfills himself in the things he does . . . that ideal of being able to cope, whether on the deck of a sailing ship or on the page of a book.” Would Calvino accept Hemingway as succeeding as well as Conrad in writing about that?

Calvino acknowledges his debt to Hemingway in the writing of his own early neo-realist years and he says, in spite of his detracting comments, the ledger is still in the black for Hemingway. He also notes that Hemingway knew how to live in a world with “open, dry eyes, without illusion or mysticism, how to be alone without anguish . . .” He developed a style that “can be considered the driest and most immediate language, the least redundant and pompous style, the most limpid and realistic prose in modern literature.”

Calvino says when he reads Kafka, he finds himself constantly approving and rejecting the legitimacy of the adjective Kafkaesque that we hear and read all the time.

I would bring up to Mister Calvino the eddy currents he has brought to the conversation in writing classes and writers’ groups where some are tempted to use the adjective Hemingway-esque. Some of them deliver it with a sneer, seemingly knowing something, and other still deliver with approving awe.

For those eager to discuss Hemingway, Italo Calvino has fed both sides quite well.

 

Richard Perkins is a regular contributor to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review and a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. He is writing an historical novel and revising a collection of connected stories.

 

Posted on

Magical Realist Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov

Magical Realist Biographies: Vladimir Nabokov


V Nabokov_Statue_Montreux_284pxVladimir Nabokov

Born: April 23, 1899

Died: July 2, 1977

Little known facts:

Nabokov composed the first crossword puzzles offered in Russian.

He was a chess problem composer.

The genus Nabokovia was named after him in honor of his work in the field of entomology as were a number of butterfly and moth species that have labels alluding to Nabokov or characters from his novels.

 

Much better known facts:

Nabokov could read and write in English before he could in Russian. (Nabokov, 28)

Nabokov provided a new English word for vulgarity—the Russian word Poshlost, which he translated as “corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature” like “America is no better than Russia” or “We all share in Germany’s guilt.” (Paris Review)

There were serious discussions about Carl R. Proffer’s “Keys to Lolita” actually coming from Nabokov because the pedantry could be read as a parody on pedantry and because the name Proffer seemed like one Nabokov might adopt as a pseudonym. But Mr. Proffer was in fact a very serious Indiana University scholar. (Whitman)

 

Snap Shot

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov grew up in a wealthy, trilingual household known for high culture and commitment to public service in St. Petersburg, Russia. After two previous forced immigrations, he settled in the United States in 1939, living here until 1959. Nabokov’s American period included the writing of his greatest works, Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, as well as the translation of his earlier Russian novels into English. He also translated works by Lermontov and Pushkin and wrote several books of criticism. (Whitman)

He won popular recognition and the means to move to Switzerland with the publication of Lolita in 1958. His subsequent works, together with the publication of translations of his earlier novels from the original Russian, earned him a position amongst the best authors of the century. (Whitman) He is considered a major and unique contributor to 20th Century English and world literature—to the point that we have the adjectives “Nabokovian” and “Nabokovesque” in English.

 

Early Life and Non-Writing Career

Nabokov was the first and favorite of five children of loving, sensitive parents living in a townhouse in the heart of St Petersburg, on idyllic country estates, and at beach resorts. (Boyd) His father was the liberal lawyer, statesman, and journalist Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov and his mother Elena Ivanovna née Rukavishnikova. Vladimir learned to speak and read English before he could read Russian and he developed into an attractive, talented, disciplined and competitive youth. He learned to box and to play tennis, to solve chess problems and to collect butterflies. He wrote his first poem at fifteen. (Whitman)

After the February Revolution in 1917, Nabokov’s father became a secretary of the Russian Provisional Government (a constitutional monarchy) and, after the Bolshevik October Revolution, the family fled the city for Crimea for what they thought would be a short stay. They stayed at a family friend’s estate and in September 1918 moved to Livadiya, part of the first Ukrainian Republic. There Nabokov’s father became a minister of justice in the Crimean Regional Government.

After the German Army withdrew in November 1918 and the defeat of the White Army early in 1919, the Nabokov family finally they accepted they were going into exile. Though Vladimir had just inherited $2 million and an estate from an uncle, the whole family left for Western Europe with only a few jewels and clothing.

Vladimir enrolled in Trinity College, Cambridge, first to study zoology, then switching to Slavic and Romance languages. In 1920, the Nabokov family moved to Berlin, where his father started the émigré newspaper Rul’ (“Rudder”).

Nabokov followed his family to Berlin after completing his studies at Cambridge. In 1936, his wife Véra, a Russian Jew, lost her translating job because of the increasingly anti-Semitic environment and his father lost his life, taking an assassin’s bullet meant for another target, while he was second-in-command of the Russian émigré group. It was in that year Nabokov began seeking a position somewhere in the English-speaking world and in 1937, he left Germany for France, considering it a safer place from which to conduct his search. Besides writing and translating, Nabokov spent time during his exile composing chess problems that he published in the Russian émigré press.

After several years in France watching the security of their situation being eroded, he accepted an invitation to lecture on Slavic languages at Stanford in 1939. After Stanford, Mr. Nabokov taught at Wellesley from 1941 to 1948, first as a lecturer, then as a professor of literature, working concurrently as an entomologist specializing in lepidopterology at Harvard where he discovered several species and subspecies of butterflies, including Nabokov’s wood nymph. Because he never learned to drive, he depended on his wife Véra to take him to collecting sites. During the 1940s, he organized the butterfly collection of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. His writings in this area were highly technical and were regarded as significant contributions.

He wrote novels, poems, and short stories while teaching throughout the 40’s and 50’s. From 1949 until 1959, he was a professor at Cornell and an occasional lecturer at Harvard. He became a citizen in 1945 and lived in the United States for 20 years.

In terms of political orientation, Nabokov described himself as a classical liberal like his father. He described Lenin’s Bolsheviks as “grey rag-tag people” in a poem in 1917. While in the United States and later while living in Switzerland, he displayed contempt for student activism, collective movements, and the New Left movements of the 1960s. He found the protestors acting like “conformists” and “hoodlums.” Nabokov supported the Vietnam War effort, most anti-Soviet policies, and most of President Nixon’s policies.

 

Relationships

In 1922 Nabokov became engaged to Svetlana Siewert, but she broke off the engagement in 1923 because of her parents’ concern about his ability to provide for her. Later in 1923, he met Véra Evseyevna Slonim in Berlin and married her in April 1925. Their son Dmitri was born in 1934.

At the Montreux-Palace where the Nabokovs lived for the last quarter of his life, his wife, Vera, was his confidante, typist, chess partner, Scrabble adversary, and butterfly-hunting companion.

 

Health

In 1976 he was hospitalized with an undiagnosed fever. He was re-hospitalized in Lausanne in 1977 suffering from severe bronchial congestion. He died on 2 July in Montreux surrounded by his family. Mrs. Nabokov said that her husband “had been very sick for the past year and a half. He had some good moments but was very ill,” she said, adding that the exact virus that killed him had not been identified. (Whitman)

 

Writing Career

For the eighteen years after his 1922 graduation from Cambridge, he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing in Russian, using the pseudonym Sirin, and supporting himself through translations, teaching English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. (Boyd)

While he was lecturing at American universities, he was writing—poems, essays, stories for The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Partisan Review—using his own name.

The critic Edmund Wilson introduced Nabokov to the American literary scene. The two became intimate friends until the late 1950’s, when, as Nabokov liked to say, “a black cat came between us—Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago.” Nabokov was critical of it and Wilson praised it. The schism widened in 1963 when Mr. Nabokov published his annotated English version of Eugene Onegin, Alexander Pushkin’s romantic novel in verse form. Mr. Wilson attacked his translation, criticizing Mr. Nabokov’s Russian and their dispute continued in The New York Review of Books until their friendship was finally destroyed.

Nabokov’s first novel in English was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), the life story of a gifted novelist, reconstructed after his death by his half-brother. It was followed by Bend Sinister in 1947, a Kafkaesque novel about an intellectual’s striving to maintain his integrity in a totalitarian environment. Conclusive Evidence (subsequently republished as Speak, Memory) followed in 1951, offering a vivid account of Nabokov’s life in Russia. Pnin came in 1957, portraying a Russian émigré’s life in an American university.

Lolita was ultimately published in 1955 in Paris, in 1958 in New York, and in 1959 in London after much controversy in all three cities. Four American publishers rejected it for lewdness before G. P. Putnam’s Sons published it. The Chicago Tribune refused to review it and critical reception was mixed. Orville Prescott of The New York Times called it “highbrow pornography;” Graham Greene called it “a distinguished novel.”

With his royalties and screen rights, Nabokov became financially interdependent, resigned his teaching position, and returned to Europe, establishing himself in the Montreux-Palace Hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. He wanted to be near his son, Dmitri, who was an opera singer in Italy, and a sister who lived in Geneva. Lolita became his most famous novel, and is often considered his finest work in English.

Nabokov and his wife self-identified as synesthetes and associated colors with particular letters, though not the same letters. Their son Dmitri shared the trait as well. Nabokov created some of his protagonists as synesthetes and many of his characters have sensory appetites that seem like synesthesia.

 

Taking Another Look

Journalist Andrea Pitzer has recently published a very different biography of Vladimir Nabokov from those before her, in which she argues that, contrary to his claim that art and history should not mix, the author’s attention to history’s moral components kept him including backstories that alluded to the camps of German and the Soviet Union. She compares and contrasts Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn approaches to the condemnation of Lenin and Stalin and the horrors of their totalitarian regimes and gives new insight into the “mythical kingdom” of Nova Zembla as an allusion to the camp assignment (likely the islands of Solovki) from which no one escaped or returned. She notes the location of Soviet nuclear testing over decades on the real world Novaya Zemlya and that the crown jewels that were allegedly buried there (and were searched for in vain through torture and murder) were in fact a metaphor for the intelligentsia that was squandered in those remote reaches well above the Arctic Circle by two sociopathic tyrants. (Pitzer, 286)

She also examines the discord between Nabokov and Wilson in terms of the battle between them because Wilson would not accept the “history” of the early camps of the Lenin period. The recurring theme was brought again and again by Nabokov without success during his lifetime, though Wilson did acknowledge later in life he was slow to accept the true nature of Lenin’s shadow. (Pitzer 294)

According to Pitzer, Nabokov was bearing witness to the horrors he knew that forced him and his family to flee police states three times as well as those horrors he learned about from other emigres—mixing pure history with pure fiction at will. (Pitzer, 121)

 

Magical Realism

Like Faulkner and Lawrence, Nabokov continued to work his short fiction while he wrote his novels. His “A Visit to the Museum” (1939) develops the idea of museums as a human attempt to slow down the passage of time through labels, displays and models of human activity and combines that with the notion of the exile as a model of the human condition—dubious about the past, not feeling settled in the present, and anxious about the future. The confluence of comedy and suffering is a vivid example of the English adjective “Nabokov” applied to a short tragic comedy. (Young, 180) The more ambiguous the narrator’s dance between edges of perceptions of a French provincial village museum and a contemporary Russian scene which is in turn contrasted with the Russia of his youth, the more the neuroscientists and art critics would expect we would linger over this piece of literature. (Kandel, 192) And the more Ms. Pitzer lingered over Nabokov’s works, the easier it was for her to help us see Nabokov’s mixing of his own history and the larger histories in his fiction and the possibility his conscious (or perhaps his unconscious intent) was to have us all remember and try to understand the horrors of the camps in Germany and the Soviet Union in a more oblique way than Solzhenitsyn who we must remember “exported” his regime condemning works on the Gulag later. Both were concerned, she argues, with the continued health of their information sources and the reading audience’s recognition of the crushing power of successive police states.

 

The Nabokovesque/Nabokovian Epilogue

At the time of his passing, he was writing a novel titled The Original of Laura. His wife Véra and son Dmitri were his literary executors and though (like Kafka) he asked them to destroy his unfinished work, they (like Kafka’s secretary) chose not to carry out his wishes. The manuscript existed as 125 handwritten index cards that remained in a Swiss bank vault. Vera and Dmitri shared portions of the manuscript with Nabokov scholars. Dmitri published The Original of Laura on 17 November 2009.

 

A FEW OF QUOTES OF NABOKOV

“I was too much absorbed by the usual delights of youth . . . either to derive any special pleasure from the legacy or to experience any annoyance when the Bolshevik revolution abolished it overnight.” (Speak Memory, 74)

“The whole business (of the publication of his first collection of poems inspired by his affair with Tamara and the torturous reviews that were by his measure justified) cured me permanently of all interest in literary fame and was probably the cause of that almost pathological and not always justified indifference to reviews which in later years deprived me of the emotions most authors are said to experience.” (Nabokov, 239)

“My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses–the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.” (Random House)

 

A FEW QUOTES ABOUT NABOKOV

“In addition to its humor (much of it donnish to a degree, or Joycean), a Nabokov novel was a game, with the reader invited to figure out the illusive reality that the writer offered.” (Whitman)

“Only the long view reveals Nabokov’s strategy. As a casualty of history who found a way to escape, magically, again and again, he let his most famous characters find a parallel refuge in insanity. And he, too, hid his own treasures and grief inside his stories, with their created worlds cobbled out of the brittle past: the dead of the camps, the prisoners’ wild tales, the tenderness for those he had mocked, the reflections of a world steeped in cruelty, his sorrow at everything that had been lost. Whatever tales Nabokov wished to tell, whatever history he hoped we would remember, must be earned. It is inside his stories that he sits and waits.” (Pitzer, 348)

 

NOTABLE WORKS

Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), Pale Fire (1962), Speak, Memory (1966)

 

NABKOV’S AWARDS

Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) was ranked fourth in the list of the Modern Library 100 Best Novels; Pale Fire (1962) was ranked at 53rd, and his memoir, Speak, Memory, was listed eighth on the Modern Library nonfiction list. He was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction seven times, but never won it.

 

SOURCES

Eric R. Kandel. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain From Vienna 1900 to the Present. New York: Random House, 2012.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory. New York: Vintage, August 1989.

Pitzer, Andrea. The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov. New York: Pegasus Books, 2013.

Young, David and Keith Hollaman (eds.). Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology. New York: Longman Inc., 1984.

Boyd, Brian. “Vladimir Nabokov 100 Years: On Speak and Memory” Random House | Web. 11 November 2014.

Gold, Herbert. “Vladimir Nabokov, The Art of Fiction No. 40” Paris Review | Web. 1 December 2014.

“Vladimir Nabokov 100 Years: Biography” Random House | Web. 11 November 2014.

Whitman, Alden. “Vladimir Nabokov, Author of ‘Lolita’ and ‘Ada,’ Is Dead” New York Times on the Web July 5, 1977 | Web. 11 November 2014.

 

Richard Perkins is a regular contributor to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review and a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. He is writing an historical novel and revising a collection of connected stories.

 

Posted on

Magical Realist Biographies: Henry James

henry-jamesHenry James

Born: 15 April 1843

Died:   28 February 1916

Little known facts:

Henry James is cited more than a thousand times in the Oxford English Dictionary

Henry James’ writing recently was used to promote Rolls Royce automobiles; the use of “Live all you can, it’s a mistake not to” (originally spoken by The Ambassadors’ Lambert Strether) was highly ironic, considering the novel’s treatment of mass marketing.

 

Much better known facts:

In 1915 he became a British citizen as a protest of the US’s refusal to enter the Great War.

James’ novels contain understanding and thoughtfully drawn portraits of women; James himself was a closeted homosexual, but remained sensitive to basic sexual differences and the fact that he was a male.

 

Henry James was an American-born English essayist, critic, and a prominent 19th-century author of literary realism with well-established credentials in literature, psychology, and philosophy. He wrote 20 novels, 112 stories, 12 plays and a number of works in literary criticism.

James was born in New York City into a wealthy family that included well-known intellectuals such as his father, Henry James Sr., and siblings William James, philosopher and psychologist, and Alice James, a diarist. Henry Sr. saw to it that his family spent many years in Europe where his children were tutored in languages and literature, including the classics of English, American, French, Russian, and German literature. At nineteen James attended Harvard Law School briefly, but was more interested in literature. He published his first short story, “A Tragedy of Errors” two years later, and 1871-72 he contributed to the Nation and Atlantic Monthly.

His first novel, Watch and Ward (1871), appeared serially in the Atlantic and was written while he was visiting Venice and Paris. In Watch and Ward he told a story of a bachelor who adopted a twelve-year-old girl and planned to marry her.

James left America to live most of his adult life in Europe, living for a time in Paris before moving to England. In 1897 James withdrew from the frenzy of London to the calmer Rye in East Sussex, where he bought “Lamb House” and continued to write.

He declared that his writing models were Dickens, Balzac, Ibsen, and Hawthorne. Many consider his peak in producing fiction to be when he wrote The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Turn of the Screw (1898), and The Ambassadors (1903), and these have received the most intense critical study. He considered The Ambassadors to be his most perfect work and The Portrait of a Lady remains his most popular example of his long fiction.

In 1904 James travelled to America and conducted a lecture tour that inspired a series of essays published in North American Review, Harper’s, The Fortnightly Review then republished in 1907 as The American Scene.

James wrote many narrative romances with highly developed characters in settings that allowed much social commentary on politics, class, and status, as well as explorations of the themes of personal freedom, feminism, and morality. His short stories and novels are known by his use of interior monologue and point of view. His themes often compared the Old World with the New, usually emphasizing American naiveté and European wisdom and decadence. James became widely respected in North America and Europe, earning honorary degrees from Harvard and Oxford Universities, in 1911 and 1912 respectively.

James never married and appeared to live a life of celibacy. He became a British citizen in 1915 after the outbreak of World War I. In 1916 he was awarded the Order of Merit by King George V.

After several years of decline and a stroke, Henry James died of pneumonia on 28 February 1916. His ashes are interred at the Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts beneath a stone inscribed “Novelist, Citizen of Two Countries, Interpreter of His Generation On Both Sides Of The Sea”. A memorial stone rests in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, London.

He is best known for his novels describing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from the point of view of a character within a tale allowed him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting—entirely in keeping with the fin d’ siècle movement emanating from Vienna exploring the inner worlds and the interplay of subconscious and conscious.

As a psychological novel, The Portrait of a Lady explores the minds of his characters, and to some is almost a work of social science, exploring the differences between Europeans and Americans.

In The Wings of the Dove (1902) the character of Kate Croy is ambiguous—neither good or bad—and her motivations are subject to widely varying conclusions. Kate Croy is one of the first protagonists in American fiction within which an author suggests the interaction of conscious and unconscious mind.

One of James’s most famous tales is “The Turn of the Screw,” first published in Collier’s Weekly, and then with another story in The Two Magics (1898). The protagonist is a governess, working on an isolated and lonely estate in England, who tries to protect her two young charges, Flora and Miles, from the demonic influence of the specters of two former servants. Even though the children skirt her questions about the apparitions, she concludes the children really see them. When she tries to exorcize their ghostly sway, Miles dies in her arms.

The story prompted a debate over the “reality” of the traces and whether her visions were only hallucinations. Early in his career James had scorned “spirit-rappings and ghost-raising,” but in the 1880s he became attentive to the unconscious and the supernatural. Virginia Woolf thought that Henry James’s phantasms had nothing in common with the violent old ghosts and Edmund Wilson concluded that the story was “primarily intended as a characterization of the governess.”

One of James’ lasting examples of early magical realism in his short fiction is “The Jolly Corner.” He presents a mystery for the reader to solve—and ample reason to return for an alternative solution. The central ambiguity is about whether the protagonist, Spencer Brydon, has been hallucinating entirely on his own accord as he struggles with his feelings and perceptions about his “other path” that might have been had he not stayed on Europe for the last twenty years or if he has been teased into tracking and confronting his doppelganger through a delicately orchestrated hoax by Alice Staverton, a woman whose best years were very likely spent waiting for him to return from Europe.

James’s work spoke to a limited audience of educated readers in his time, but after his passing, some American critics expressed enmity towards him for his long expatriation and his naturalization as a British citizen.

However, James is valued today for his psychological and moral realism, his masterful creation of characters, his playful humor, and his command of the language.

In addition to his prolific production of fiction, James was a well-established literary critic and a major contributor to the history of the development of the modern novel in that his essay The Art of Fiction (1884) argued that freedom in a writer’s choosing both content and approach would provide the basis for the extension of vigor in narrative fiction over time.

 

A FEW OF HENRY JAMES’ QUOTES

“A novel is in its broadest sense a personal, a direct impression of life: that, to begin with, constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the impression.” (From The Art of Fiction, 1885)

“It is a real stroke of luck for a particular country that the capital of the human race happens to be British. Surely every other people would have it theirs if they could. Whether the English deserve to hold it any longer might be an interesting field of inquiry; but as they have not yet let it slip the writer of these lines professes without scruple that the arrangement is to his personal taste.

James wrote in 1908 that “Peter Quint and Miss Jessel are not “ghosts” at all, as we now know the ghost, but goblins, elves, imps, demons as loosely constructed as those of the old trials for witchcraft; if not, more pleasingly, fairies of the legendary order, wooing their victims forth to see them dance under the moon.”

“To be completely great a work of art must lift up the heart.”

 

A FEW COMMENTS AND QUOTES ABOUT HENRY JAMES

“Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life.” — Jorge Luis Borges

“Please tell me what you find in Henry James. …we have his works here, and I read, and I can’t find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?” –Virginia Woolf writing to Lytton Strachey

E.M. Forster criticism of James included his queasiness in the writing about sex and labeled his style as opaque because of his reliance on long sentences and “Latinate language.”

 

HENRY JAMES’ NOTABLE WORK

The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904)

 

HENRY JAMES’ AWARDS

Elected to American Academy of Arts and Letters (1904) Honorary degree from Harvard (1911)

Honorary degree from Oxford University (1912)

Order of Merit (1916)

 

SOURCES

http://www.online-literature.com/henry_james/

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/hjames.htm

http://www2.newpaltz.edu/~hathaway/

Eric R. Kandel. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain From Vienna 1900 to the Present. New York: Random House, 2012.

David Young and Keith Hollaman (eds.). Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology. New York: Longman Inc., 1984.

 

Richard Perkins is a regular contributor to The Doctor T. J. Eckleburg Review and a graduate of The Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program. He is writing an historical novel and revising a collection of connected stories.