I’ve been re-reading The Turn of the Screw, and I’m reminded of why I so dislike Henry James’s Late Style. I’ll give you a sample of why.
It was a pity that, somehow, to settle this once for all, I had equally to re-enumerate the signs of subtlety that, in the afternoon, by the lake had made a miracle of my show of self-possession. It was a pity to be obliged to reinvestigate the certitude of the moment itself and repeat how it had come to me as a revelation that the inconceivable communion I then surprised was a matter, for either party, of habit. It was a pity that I should have had to quaver out again the reasons for my not having, in my delusion, so much as questioned that the little girl saw our visitant even as I actually saw Mrs. Grose herself, and that she wanted, by just so much as she did thus see, to make me suppose she didn’t, and at the same time, without showing anything, arrive at a guess as to whether I myself did!
This is supposed to be not an impersonal narrative voice, not Henry James, not a novelist, but a governess.
A few (long) sentences later:
Yet if I had not indulged, to prove there was nothing in it, in this review, I should have missed the two or three dim elements of comfort that still remained to me. I should not for instance have been able to asseverate to my friend that I was certain—which was so much to the good—that I at least had not betrayed myself. I should not have been prompted, by stress of need, by desperation of mind—I scarce know what to call it—to invoke such further aid to intelligence as might spring from pushing my colleague fairly to the wall. She had told me, bit by bit, under pressure, a great deal; but a small shifty spot on the wrong side of it all still sometimes brushed my brow like the wing of a bat; and I remember how on this occasion—for the sleeping house and the concentration alike of our danger and our watch seemed to help—I felt the importance of giving the last jerk to the curtain. “I don’t believe anything so horrible,” I recollect saying; “no, let us put it definitely, my dear, that I don’t. But if I did, you know, there’s a thing I should require now, just without sparing you the least bit more—oh, not a scrap, come!—to get out of you. What was it you had in mind when, in our distress, before Miles came back, over the letter from his school, you said, under my insistence, that you didn’t pretend for him that he had not literally ever been ‘bad’? He has not literally ‘ever,’ in these weeks that I myself have lived with him and so closely watched him; he has been an imperturbable little prodigy of delightful, lovable goodness. Therefore you might perfectly have made the claim for him if you had not, as it happened, seen an exception to take. What was your exception, and to what passage in your personal observation of him did you refer?”
Said no one to anyone ever.
It makes me feel like Kingsley Amis writing to Philip Larkin – “No she didn’t, no he didn’t, no they didn’t.”
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28 responses to “Deploy all the commas”
That first block is only two sentences?
Oh gawd yes. Makes me grind my teeth.
–Oscar Wilde
It reminds me a little of Edith Wharton – but at least she usually wrote about fancy people who might think that way.
Have to admit I remain, adamantly, disinterested, in”literature”. I have a subscription to Harper’s Magazine, which does have excellent articles sometimes. But the….literature. The poetry. So…trite. The pompous, ponderous musings of the upper middle class or, these days, the just so pronouncements of “representatives of the victimhood classes.
On balance, I dislike James. But sometimes you’ll find something like this:
–buried in the midst of all the earnest verbosity like the hoped-for pony in the pile of shit.
P.S. For a fine literary ghost story, imo Muriel Spark’s The Portobello Road can’t be beat.
Lady M — did you excise some of Henry’s commas to make it flow so nicely?
I warmly agree, James grows more and more unreadable as he proceeds through life There was, I think I recall, a quarrel between him & H.G. Wells in which the latter made some some choice remarks about James’s supposed super-subtlety, which was not subtlety at all but a sort of bog of vacuity through which the reader had to wade, sinking ever deeper as he went. I also dislike James for the sniffy snobbishness he displayed towards Thomas Hardy – something that T.S. Eliot, another over-educated person, also displayed. Ezra Pound. on the other hand, admired Hardy, particularly for his poetry.
I think the only comma I’m excited about today is ,la.
twiliter — Good one! That took me a moment!
Classic examples of involuted sentences. It used to be considered a rather feminine way to write, if my vague recollection is correct. That may be why James wrote the governess’s voice that way.
*shrug*
I’ve never read any Henry James, though, so I’m just assuming a base level of sexism and spitballing.
I haven’t read James, so I can’t comment on his work, so I’ll talk about something else literary. Pardon this digression.
I recently read Moby Dick for the first time. It was quite interesting, but while I found that there were many places where Melville really sang, his clumsy, clunky dialogue dumped me out of the story completely, particularly when the dialogue in question was taking place in “action sequences.” (The character of Stubbs particularly irritated me. Nobody would talk like that, or that much, while urging his boat crew in pursuit of a whale.) Perhaps I’m spoiled by movies, but the truth and immediacy of actual speech is completely absent in these passages. Shakepeare, writing centuries before, despit the poetry and archaisms, has a much better ear for speech. When presented by skilled performers, it flows easily and sounds quite natural. I don’t think anyone could save Melville’s dialogue.
I was also disappointed in the needless “prophesy” that Ahab unintentionally and inadvertantly fulfills; it isn’t really that important, and could have been left out altogether. And compared to Bradbury’s screenplay for Huston’s movie, Ahab’s death (at Melville’s pen) is over in the blink of an eye, and seems the lesser in comparison, given the build-up that lead to it in the novel. Still, I’m glad I read it, but I’m unlikely to revisit it soon, if ever.
Nullius, no, he wrote everything that way (in the “Late” period).
Portrait of a Lady, now, is brilliant, but the “Late Period” stuff is as bad as the above sample AND WORSE.
#Nullius. The involuted style employed in James’s later works was used whether the narrator was male or female.
In grad school, we were assigned “The Ambassadors” to read in American Lit.
It was the one time I actually opened Cliffs Notes . . . It was either that or shoot myself.
Yeah. I’ve tried, hated it, hated it for reasons, stopped reading it. Applies to all the Late ones, every damn one. The writing is BAD.
I highly recommend William James — Henry not so much.
See, for a killer example, King Lear. Many of the most gut-wrenching lines in it are lines a child would be moved by. In other parts, where it needs to be, it’s elevated royalish speech. Dude knew how to write in different registers as needed.
Anna @ 3, to be fair to Wharton, she didn’t write anything like Later James. She wrote about people with money, for sure, but not in that elaborate twisting self-interrupting comma-strewing clause piled on clause way. I don’t know of any other novelist who wrote that way. Badly, yes, but badly in that way, no.
I have a book of letters between William and Henry James, and I think I recall William trying to tell Henry how shit his Later style was. I need to see if I can find it.
@ YNNB #11
I have tried or done Moby Dick 3 times.
The first time, as a youngster, I gave up because I got to Chapter 21, and they weren’t even on the damn boat yet!
The second time was as a high school junior. In our section we elected to forgo the abridged edition assigned for high schoolers, and read the full, unabridged version. I found it fairly tedious in parts. I also learned something about the significance of Bible themes in Western literature. I was not raised in a religious household and therefore missed a number of references, inexperienced as I was with the underlying mythology with which many writers assume ready familiarity. In Moby Dick it starts with the opening line: “Call me Ishmael.”
The third time was much more recent, within the last 12 months. I did it by listening to an audiobook reading of the unabridged novel. This reading was than 50 years after my high school engagement with the book. I have to say that it was by far the most enjoyable of the three. With someone else reading it (and no homework in multiple subjects hanging over my head), the story flowed very smoothly. I had time to appreciate the use of language. It was a much better adventure the third time. The end dropped off with a bit of a thud, though. Too abrupt an ending for my sensibilities, I guess.
I have read Moby Dick several times. It is one of my favorite books. I even read it out loud to my son as a bedtime story.
@Papito, how lovely.
Yes, Moby Dick is worth reading, and rereading, and reading again.
That passage reminds me of Sir Thomas Browne. I think maybe Melville was a fan – I think I’ve read that, but I can’t swear to it. Now, Browne had an ornate style, but in a good way. I think I’ve quoted him here before, many years ago…
Oh, not many years ago at all, only 4.
https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2020/but-the-iniquity-of-oblivion-blindly-scattereth-her-poppy/
I warmly agree with Papito & Lady Mondegreen. Moby Dick is one of my favourite novels – I re-read it again fairly recently and enjoyed its energy and humour enormously. I think that Moby Dick & Huckleberry Finn remain the two greatest American novels, and all the better since neither man set out to write that elusive Great American Novel which has proved such a Fata Morgana for more recent, and lesser, writers. And, forgive me, YNNB, I find the ending wonderful – all the time and energy spent confined on the ship seeking the white whale, and then it’s all over in a flash, leaving Ishmael alone on a wide, wide sea
And Sir Thomas Browne is another favourite of mine, as Ophelia knows.
M.R. James wrote some pretty good ghost stories.
My experience with Moby Dick was similar to what maddog describes. I started it as a teen, and gave up after a while, because it was so far along and they weren’t even on the boat. I didn’t try again, and I’m not going to. Add it to the long list of great books I will never read, which is filed next to the long list of great movies I will never see.
Ya I was thinking of M. R. James in connection with this. Pretty good indeed.
@Tim Harris
Strongly agree.
@Alison and O
I thought of him too!
My own favorite of his is Casting the Runes. It was made into a good film, (Night of the Demon–aka Curse of the Demon,) directed by the wonderful Jacques Tourneur.
Yes, ‘Casting the Runes’, and I would add ‘Count Magnus’. Though re-reading M.R. James now (it helps me to get to sleep – and then the dreams one has!), I do get a bit fed up with his constant condescension to characters who ain’t got a gent’s eddication and don’t know how to speak proper (sic).
There’s also a film of ‘Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,’ with Michael Hordern in the main role. I think it’s available on YouTube.