Talk:Henry James

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• /Archive1 August 2003 - June 2006

[edit] James and Hemingway

Regarding the Hemingway quote ("Did you ever read Henry James? He was a great writer who came to Venice and looked out the window and smoked his cigar and thought"):

I haven't read an extraordinary amount of James, so I can't offer a completely expert opinion on what Hemingway meant. When one thinks of James and Venice, the terrific "Aspern Papers" obviously leap out. But I think it's more likely Hemingway had James' preface to Portrait in mind. The first paragraphs deal with James' experience writing in Venice. This is particularly of interest:

"I had rooms on Riva Schiavoni, at the top of a house near the passage leading off to San Zaccaria; the waterside life, the wondrous lagoon spread before me, and the ceaseless human chatter of Venice came in at my windows, to which I seem to myself have been constantly driven, in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase, of the next happy twist of my subject, the next true touch for my canvas, mightn't come into sight."

Hemingway may draw his picture of Henry James looking out of his Venice window, smoking and thinking, from these lines (the cigar being Hemingway's imaginative addition).

Lastly, there's another James-Hemingway connection that may have a place somewhere in the article. In The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton refer to Henry James (pps. 120-21 in the latest Scribner paperback edition, which I think is the standard). They're talking about the accident that evidently left Jake impotent, and Bill mentions James' mysterious accident. If this tidbit fits into the article, I'm not sure what the best place for it would be (maybe in the Legacy section with the other Hemingway stuff, or maybe in some sort of trivia section).

Yep, James's "obscure hurt" gets a mention in The Sun Also Rises. I guess the reference could be included in the article, but the Legacy section would get pretty long if we started writing about every reference to James in every book. Hemingway's 1954 letter seemed much more on-topic and frankly touching, considering Papa's encounter with the shotgun a few years later. Down the road, we might want to start spinning off separate articles about James' life, the sexuality issue (including the "obscure hurt"), his legacy, his critical reputation, his style, etc. This was actually suggested in the article's FAC, and something similar has been done with Shakespeare.

As for the Portrait of a Lady preface, it's possible that Hemingway had it in mind. But the unnamed narrator of The Aspern Papers actually smokes a cigar in Venice at one point in the story, unlike James in the preface. Really obscure trivia: Vladimir Nabokov got irate that James referred to the "tip" of a cigar. Nabokov insisted that the end of a cigar was blunt, so it shouldn't be called a "tip." (He was actually talking about What Maisie Knew, but the same gripe applies to The Aspern Papers.) Of course, from any distance at all, the tip of a cigar is, as Freud might say, just the tip of a cigar.

Anyway, I think it's a little unlikely that Hemingway waded through the New York Edition prefaces. It's much more probable that he read The Aspern Papers, one of James' most celebrated stories. But as I said in the article, Hemingway's allusion may be completely accidental. By the way, the Adeline Tintner book referenced in the footnotes offers twelve interesting pages of material on James and Hemingway. Casey Abell 12:38, 5 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Version 0.5

Thanks for the nomination and selection! Lots of people worked on the article since its inception almost four years ago, and they all deserve credit. Thanks again. Casey Abell 04:21, 12 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sturgis quote & Sexuality Qualifiers

I added the Sturgis quote because that link hasn't been properly investigated even by the HJ industry, in terms of its context i.e. the fact that HJ was on the perimeter and sometimes participated in a lively homosexual social circle. For example, Sturgis still doesn't have a biography (not even a Wikipedia entry!), yet he was a seminal figure in the lives of many, was as camp as Christmas (see his highly amusing letters in James Lees Milne's The Enigmatic Edwardian), and he and his boyfriend's estate, Queens Acre, seems to have performed a similar role to the home of marsala heiress Tina Whitaker in Sicily (see Raleigh Trevelyan's Princes Under The Volcano), in being a drop-in centre for every rich and cosmopolitan homosexual in C19th England: from E.F. Bensen to Ronald Gower to James.

Need it be said: more nonsense is written about HJ than possibly any other C19th literary figure. Reflecting the worst of this, the HJ page is a ghastly mess of qualifiers. Surely the HJ Sexuality academia industry should be reigned here with a single statement, rather than than all over the shop as it is at present. Something as straightforward as possible, along the lines of: 'HJ's subtleties, ambiguities, and evasions have made his sexuality a minefield for scholars. Most presume he was either homosexual or bisexual, but whether he ever had sexual intercourse with another male cannot be conclusively proven." Engleham 24 July 2006

Any article about James is going to need some qualifiers. That's just the nature of the beast (in the jungle). But I don't think the article is "ghastly." Judging from its selection as an FA and its recent inclusion in the Version 0.5 project, the article looks pretty good to outside reviewers compared to most on Wikipedia. The introduction of quotes from James' letters in the Life section slightly expands the article, but hardly turns it into a mess. After all, some mention should be made of Woolson and Andersen, because they take up so much space in the biographies. And it doesn't hurt to have some examples of James' letters in the section.

If the Life section expanded to ten times its previous size, that would be a little ridiculous. But it's still quite short compared to the article overall. As for your suggested statement, the article already says that the issue as to whether James ever experienced an actual sexual relationship may well be irresolvable. Right now I think the Life section is reasonably complete, balanced and qualified—and far from a ghastly mess. It's only about 900 words, after all, though I'll admit that footnotes are splattered all over. But the footnotes are the price of FA status. As I've said before, down the road we might want to spin off a separate, much longer biographical article on James. Casey Abell 13:44, 24 July 2006 (UTC)

Just did a complete word count. The Life section amounts to about 900 words out of 5600 in the entire article (exclusive of footnotes, which I'll concede are out of control, but I had to consent to them to get the article through FAC). Hardly seems unreasonable that about one-sixth of the article should be devoted to the biography. One reviewer on FAC wanted 10,000 words about The Portrait of a Lady alone. Casey Abell 14:15, 24 July 2006 (UTC)