Hank James--The Bostonians (1886)

This is, in my opinion, one of the better Henry James books. It is not the only one that I have thought especially well-done, or been able, at least in my own mind, to follow, but it is one of the few that I can honestly say I have enjoyed and really looked forward to reading the next chapter every morning (the others that come to mind being the early The American and the much shorter Turn of the Screw and Aspern Papers). This middle period book has some of his clearest and best sentences in describing thoughts and motivations--not as exquisitely subtle, I suppose, as in the later masterpieces, but as I have not to this point really been able to follow the thought processes in those later books the full glory of their subtleties have been kind of lost on me. The IWE introduction notes that:

"The Bostonians is a novel of James's 'middle period.' He was in the realm of high society as usual, this time in the very starched Boston of the late 19th century. The novel was not successful when published and James was very unhappy. Among other things, it was considered wicked. Perhaps it was and still is, but it is among his most important works."

Here is my book, accompanied by some seasonal spirit. It is the Modern Library edition with one of their especially attractive jackets. I got it at a library book sale in 1986. 

The 'wickedness' I assume refers to the numerous blatantly lesbian characters and their implied domestic arrangements, though how x-rated in the physical sense matters really got between Verena and Olive (or even, for that matter, Dr Prance and Miss Birdseye), I don't have a great sense of. Also, on the overall Henry James starchiness scale, I would rate this one as being on the lower end. It's set entirely in America. One of the main characters is from Mississippi. The crowd in New York is rich and given to sumptuous dining and so on, but I don't remember encountering anyone there whose breeding would be considered by James or anyone else to meet the highest standard compared to the French aristocrats and the like who populate his other novels. Olive is perhaps the starchiest character in the book, and she is designated on multiple occasions as a "provincial." 

p. 18 "...the Back Bay (don't you hate the name?)" I've always kind of found the name unsatisfying too, for various reasons. When I used to take Amtrak in the 80s and 90s, the train always stopped at the Back Bay Station (I don't know whether it still does), which was modern and ugly, and no one ever got on or off, and I am still kind of vague as to what it is, or is supposed to signify (I know it was an actual bay that was filled in and made into a somewhat fashionable neighborhood around the time this novel was written, but I don't have much of a sense of what it is now).

p. 21 "'In sympathy with what, dear madam?' Basil Ransom asked, failing still, to her perception, to catch the tone of real seriousness. 'If, as you say, there is to be a discussion, there will be different sides, and of course one can't sympathize with both."

p. 31 "They sat there as if they were waiting for something; they looked obliquely and silently at Mrs. Farrinder, and were plainly under the impression that, fortunately, they were not there to amuse themselves."

I mark down these early quotations as a way of building up to anything it might occur to me to say later on. 

p. 43 "...the time hadn't come when a lady-doctor was sent for by a gentleman, and she hoped it never would, though some people seemed to think that this was what lady-doctors were working for."

(handwritten note I can't read--There are a lot of little (somethings?) of interest here).   

p. 46 "I am only myself, I only rise to the occasion, when I see prejudice, when I see bigotry, when I see injustice, when I see conservatism, massed before me like an army...I must have unfriendly elements..."

p. 50 "He had a passionate tenderness for his own country, and a sense of intimate connection with it which would have made it as impossible for him to take a roomful of Northern fanatics into his confidence as to read aloud his mother's or his mistress's letters."

p. 76 "But except when her mother made her slightly dizzy by a resentment of some slight that she herself had never perceived, or a flutter over some opportunity that appeared already to have passed...Verena had no vivid sense that she was not as good as any one else, for no authority appealing really to her imagination had fixed the place of mesmeric healers in the scale of fashion." I have met a few people in the course of my life of this genuine democratic mindset, mostly in northern New England. 

p. 116 "There was nothing in the house to speak of; nothing, to Olive's sense, but a smell of kerosene; though she had a consciousness of sitting down somewhere--the object creaked and rocked beneath her--and of the table at tea being covered with a cloth stamped in bright colors." The snobbery is really brutal whenever Verena's parents come into the story.

It is odd how reading these 100 year old books seems so outdated to me now in a way that it did not even in 1990. The world (social, institutional) of the past still seemed basically relatable then in a way that it doesn't now. So many things--the racial and cultural makeup of society, particularly with regard to peoples who were virtually unknown in Western countries even 30-40 years ago, male social roles, educational structures, in addition to the obvious technological changes with regard to consuming books and newspapers, have perhaps changed more in the last 30 years than they did in the previous 100, as far as the pursuit of literary engagement goes. 

p. 152 "She went so far as to ask Olive whether taste and art were not something...Miss Chancellor, of course, had her answer ready. Taste and art were good when they enlarged the mind, not when they narrowed it."

p. 248 On the Memorial Hall at Harvard, which you can still wander into today, or at least could 15 or 20 years ago: "The effect of the place is singularly noble and solemn, and it is impossible to feel it without a lifting of the heart. It stands there for duty and honor, it speaks of sacrifice and example, seems a kind of temple to youth, manhood, generosity. Most of them were young, all were in their prime, and all of them had fallen..." It is a rather beautiful place. I should make a point of going down and visiting it if it ever opens to the public again. I have frequently of late been afflicted with a more than usual longing to travel as a result of my reading--with The Betrothed, it was Milan, with Bonjour Tristesse it was Nice and the Riviera, with Boris Godunov it was Moscow. But I could actually go to Boston. Olive lived on Charles Street, which has a lot of upscale shops and the like now, but the nineteenth century buildings and atmosphere are pretty well-preserved.

Memorial Hall, Harvard University

James, who went to Harvard, saw it as decidedly inferior at that time to the European Universities, and perhaps it was, though the rise of American power and influence over the ensuing century have allowed many of its students and faculty members of this general period to remain well-known names.

p. 246 While touring one of the Harvard Libraries, there is a mention of the card catalogue. A system still current 100 years on, in 1986, when I acquired my copy of this book, but now of course antiquated.

The depiction of Verena's simplicity but "preternatural candor" is good. It is difficult to write a character like that. In fact I think all of the characters in this are quite well-done and multi-dimensional. It's one of his best books for that.

p. 280 "...he wanted to see her alone, not in a supper-room crowded with millionaires." Don't we all, pal.

In the present social environment, it is clear which characters we should sympathize with (not Ransom!), but H.J. is a little more ambiguous. I think he is more sympathetic to the claims of women than was usual in that era--he must have had something of a curious and open mind, if the ideas were presented in a guise adequate to his perceptiveness--but I do not think he saw how realistically these were supposed to come off on a societally broad scale. 

p. 343 "I am so far from thinking, as you set forth the other night, that there is not enough woman in our general life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great deal too much. The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it's a feminine, a nervous, a hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don't look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been." Dull-witted men never learn. 

p. 348 "...the beer-saloons, with exposed shoulders and sides, which in New York do a good deal toward representing the picturesque, the 'bit' appreciated by painters, announced themselves in signs of large lettering to the sky." The days when German and Irish immigrants (my people, or 3/4 of them) teemed in New York.

Is Verena, the "daughter of New England", the most appealing H.J. heroine? I think so, though most modern readers must be disappointed by her submission to such a distastefully anti-feminist man. I am not being sarcastic either, even I find it difficult to take the smug superiority of Ransom, who is the prototype of the mansplaining, mediocre, worthless white guy we have all come to know and hate. Unfortunately in 1880 there is no one who can really put him in his place.

Starbucks on Charles Street, Boston, MA

I did write this on Twitter as well, and it didn't get a bug response, but Henry James didn't like beer, I don't think. Whenever a character is drinking it, usually in a German tavern or beer-garden, we can take it as a fair sign that he is down on his luck.

This is, incredibly, the end of Henry James on the IWE list. We do not see him again. One could almost think (if they hadn't left out The Ambassadors) that they just took the first three of his books alphabetically and said, we've reached our quota of Henry James, we'll stop now. This was a decent sample--The American and this book, as noted above, are two of my favorites of his, though I would have chosen something else in place of The Awkward Age, which I made a fairly strenuous effort to get into but just could not. The choices do feel rather random. While the final three extremely difficult novels, along with Portrait of a Lady and maybe Turn of the Screw (?) seem to be the most highly regarded of his books now, what were the most celebrated ones in 1960? Portrait still, and perhaps Daisy Miller, neither of which were chosen for this list. I don't know. But it is nonetheless farewell to Henry James, unless we have the good fortune to encounter him sometime in our Challenge.   

The Challenge

1. Pride and Prejudice (movie-2005).....................................................................................14,920

2. Min Jin Lee--Pachinko.........................................................................................................6,426

3. Margaret Mitchell--Gone With the Wind..............................................................................4,674

4. Raina Telgemeier--Drama....................................................................................................4,427

5. Gregory Maguire--Wicked....................................................................................................3,475

6. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass........................................................................2,216

7. Philadelphia (movie-1993)..................................................................................................2,195

8. Nancy Isenberg--White Trash...............................................................................................1,849

9. Sharon Kay Penman--A King's Ransom..................................................................................450

10. Kira Jane Buxton--Hollow Kingdom.....................................................................................437

11. Chris Ware--Rusty Brown......................................................................................................303

12. Robyn Carr--The Wedding Party...........................................................................................282

13. Aiden Thomas--Cemetery Boys............................................................................................220

14. Arthur Conan Doyle--The Return of Sherlock Holmes.........................................................140

15. Gus Pelagatti--Wicked Wives.................................................................................................106

16. Tillie Walden--Are You Listening?..........................................................................................80

1st Round

A high qualifying threshold for this tournament, leaving out some books I have heard of. 

#16 Walden over #1 Pride and Prejudice

#15 Pelagatti over #2 Lee

Pelagatti had an upset.

#3 Mitchell over #14 Conan Doyle

IWE authors generally get an immunity through the first two rounds, unless they come up against a book with an upset, which is the case here.

#4 Telgemeier over #13 Thomas

Cartoon/graphic novel over a Young Adult novel featuring a trans protaganist. 

#5 Maguire over #12 Carr

Carr is a romance novel. I need to figure out a way to minimize their qualifying for the tournament, since when they come up they always have a lot of reviews, much more than popular history or science books.

#6 Douglass over #11 Ware

Ware is another comic book. I hope these aren't going to start qualifying in large numbers (though the acclaimed Persepolis is a past winner of this tournament, and I did read it).

#10 Buxton over #7 Philadelphia

The 1984 Merchant Ivory adaptation of the Bostonians did come up as an entrant for this tournament, but with only 69 reviews, it was the 17th place finisher and didn't qualify. I am putting it on my to-watch list anyway, although I suspect I am not going to like it that much.

#8 Isenberg over #9 Penman

As you know I am generally down on genre books as far as this competition goes unless they are regarded as classics of a kind.

Quarterfinals

#3 Mitchell over #16 Walden

Walden is another graphic novel.

#15 Pelagatti over #4 Telgemeier

Pelagatti is a novel based on the seventeen murders of husbands by their wives in Philadelphia in 1938, which I had never heard of, though apparently it really happened.

#5 Maguire over #10 Buxton

The Maguire book is highly celebrated. Buxton's is science fiction set in a post-apocalyptic Seattle.

#6 Douglass over #8 Isenberg

The white trash book got some positive press, but I am not that hyped to read it. 

Semifinals

#3 Mitchell over #15 Pelagatti

#6 Douglass over #5 Maguire

Championship

#3 Mitchell over #6 Douglass

Both of these books have appeared in this tournament before, both are of course very famous--there is some dispute over whether Gone With the Wind is worthy of being considered a classic, but it is at the very least iconic and has been well-loved by a certain class of reader. I have only avoided reading myself to this point because of its enormous length. It does have another upset to use here--it would be hard to justify passing over Douglass otherwise--and I think it is time to have a go at it.

Lew Wallace--Ben-Hur (1880)

So we come to Ben-Hur, a book that I bought a copy of (part of the green and gold spined 20 volume 1930s era "World's Greatest Literature" Series) at a barn sale in 1986 and, especially after I went to college, did not think for a long time that I would ever actually read. But having come to the point a few year's back where I had lost much of my enthusiasm for developing any further in a higher or more future-oriented direction, I came back to some of the unfinished business of childhood years which set me on the road, five and a half years later, to today's post.

As I mentioned in one of my monthly reports, even though I had owned this book for thirty years I had not really noticed how long it was, and if I ever had, I probably wondered if my edition was not abridged, because I always imagined it to be a doorstop type of book. But my edition was only 488 pages, and contained the whole book. The IWE introduction avows that "It is not great literature", but also asserts that "it would be hard to imagine anyone's packing more action into a single volume" The first statement is certainly true, the second is misleading, as if the book were fighting and other forms of physical exertion and struggle from one end to the other, when in fact there are long stretches of wandering and searching and decidedly non-violent episodes from the Bible. It does have a manly energy and thrust to it that compensates for some of its deficiencies, its author having been a general in the Civil War and President Arthur's ambassador to Turkey (joining Hawthorne and Irving, at least, as American authors who served as foreign ambassadors). The IWE, in its upbeat postwar way, refers to Wallace as "a successful Union general", which seems to be putting an extremely positive spin on the matter as he was accused of committing a major blunder at Shiloh, the most significant battle in which he took part, which resulted in a high number of casualties, the castigation of Ulysses S. Grant himself, and the removal from command for almost two years. And even when he returned to active command in 1864, his troops were defeated in the main battle (Monocacy) in which he took part, though he was credited with delaying the rebel force enough to prevent it from attacking Washington.

The book is written in a heavy 19th century style that is difficult to read if one's body has any inclination to go to sleep. Nonetheless I am so far gone in my nostalgic fantasies about the blue skies and epic vistas alike about the ancient world and pre-1960 literature and my own youthful ideas that when I can stay awake and concentrate for any amount of time I really do enjoy it. Manly contention as well as camaraderie among equals, or near enough equals, in strength and spirit, especially against the backdrop of great historical scenes, cities, empires, etc, is always inspiring or is at least a reminder of that feeling when one could believe in it.

As is often the case, I did not take any notes until page 377, then took quite a few over the last 100 or so pages. Sometimes it takes going through almost the whole book to figure out what the questions raised are.

1st note, p.337 "To the purely Christian nature the presentation would have brought the weakness of remorse. Not so with Ben-Hur; his spirit had its emotions from the teachings of the first law-giver, not the last and greatest one. He had dealt punishment, not wrong, to Messala."

p. 351 "As the mind is made intelligent, the capacity of the soul for pure enjoyment is proportionally increased...Wherefore repentance must be something more than mere remorse for sins; it comprehends a change of nature befitting heaven."

If a living priest or some other person in real life were to say these things to me in 90% or more of any such instances I would despise them, I have no doubt. Yet coming across them in the dead pages of a book they, and the belief system that they evidently represent, are soothing.

p. 361 "A country of hills changes but little; where the hills are of rock, it changes not at all."

p. 418 "The Egyptian has him in her net...She has the cunning of her race, with beauty to help her--much beauty, great cunning; but, like her race again, no heart. The daughter who despises her father will bring her husband to grief."

The despised father to boot is Balthasar, of the famous group The Magi. Wallace is an extremely pro-Jewish writer, especially in the religious sense, vis-à-vis almost all of the other nationalities that appear in this book.   

p. 419 "A man drowning may be saved; not so a man in love."

p. 424 "In his eyes there were tears which he would not have them see, because he was a man."

 

Maybe my favorite sentence in the book. Upon Ben-Hur's accepting that his mother and sister are dead, though actually they aren't.

p. 442 "He persisted as men do yet every day in measuring the Christ by himself. How much better if we measured ourselves by the Christ!"

The chariot race is the big action scene in the book as well.

I am about to speak heresy (it is a wicked and godless age), but why do we so easily excuse God/Christ for not immediately overthrowing the Roman power? Modern analytics/efficient practices would suggest that, in the absence of any proof of heaven that would be accepted on Twitter, that would have been a more optimal outcome for humans, though I suppose a worse story. Despite all of the forceful arguments asserting that Jesus Christ, if he ever existed, was the biggest phony in the annals of human history, that belief in supernatural religion is a joke, that spirituality is an invention of the human imagination and has no basis in science and so on, and that this is essentially what almost all genuinely intelligent people in today's world understand to be true, I have never been able to come around to ridiculing the pointless and misguided march of religious, and especially Christian history, which seems to me too important and powerful an--often for good--influence in human culture and psychological makeup to treat so callously. In fact I am admiring and often envious of the truly seriously religious, who seem to me to have a surer sense of who they are than all but the most intellectually invulnerable materialists, whose conception of the nature of the world within which they have found satisfaction is as yet too intricate for me to follow.

According to Wallace's autobiography, he was raised in the Christian tradition but wasn't a devout follower, and he does not appear to have been a member of any church. There are claims on the internet that he was an atheist who wrote Ben-Hur to disprove Christianity, which does not appear to be true, and which I do not believe anyway. Ben-Hur did almost to the last hour cling to the belief that Christ would either lead or inspire in the Jewish people a successful earthly rebellion against the Roman Empire, and he expressed more disappointment about this even after he realized to some extent what Jesus was doing than I would have expected, but the point was not to illustrate that Christianity was wrong so much as that it was difficult to comprehend and to live by.

p. 447 "The idea, old as the oldest of peoples, that beauty is the reward of the hero had never such  realism as she contrived for his pleasure..." The evil, tempting, exotic "other" Egyptian again.

To further comment on my thought above, I wrote "the humbling of Ben-Hur's worldly ambitions something of a surprise ending to me. It is more emphasized than in the film.

p. 477 "The sun was rising rapidly to noon; the hills bared their brown breasts lovingly to it..." At the crucifixion, which I thought was effectively described as a physical ordeal. Perhaps the soldier's sense at work?

The final paragraph of the book is a brief personal note from the author which I found warming. Most of these writers never address the reader so directly.

"If any of my readers visiting Rome, will make the short journey to the Catacomb of San Calixto, which is more ancient than that of San Sebastiano, he will see what became of the fortune of Ben-Hur, and give him thanks. Out of that vast tomb Christianity issued to supersede the Caesars."   

The Challenge

1. David Mitchell--Cloud Atlas..................................................................…..2,317

2. Edward Gibbon--Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire........................…..746

3. Simon Sebag Montefiore--Jerusalem: The Biography...……..................…..422

4. John Julius Norwich--Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History...…….111

5. David Graeber--Bullshit Jobs........................................................................…71

6. Margot Lee Shetterly--Hidden Figures (children's book edition)......….……..66

7. Bodie & Brock Thoene--Eighth Shepherd........................................................64

8. Robert Audi--Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy....................................….36

9. Bill Myers--Devoted Heart...........................................................................….20

10. Teyla Branton--Insight.................................................................................…17

11. G. J. Whyte-Melville--The Gladiators............................................................10

12. Monica Selveira Cyreno--Big Screen Rome...………………………………...7

13. Matthew S. Hedstrom--The Rise of Liberal Religions.................................….5

14. Alexa Person--The Zero Point.....................................................................….5

15. Georg Ebers--Serapis...……………………………………………………….2

16. Works of Lucian of Samosata...……………………………………………….2

Round of 16

#1 Mitchell over #16 Lucian

Lucian is worthy of some respect, his works being part of the Loeb classical series in eight volumes. Eight volumes is lot to overcome against any literary competition in this game, however.

#2 Gibbon over #15 Ebers

Gibbon is one of the last of the inner circle pre-1900 English language classics that I have never read. Its massive length is going to work against it in this format also. I know that I am going to get to it on my "A"-list at some point in the next 10-20 years, so I don't feel the pressure to read it sooner rather than later tightening around me yet.

#3 Montefiore over #14 Person

#4 Norwich over #13 Hedstrom

Hedstrom has no library presence, cannot compete.

#5 Graeber over #12 Cyreno

Big Screen Rome sounds like it might be an interesting book, but no one has it, and the Graeber book, despite its ungenteel and mildly abrasive title, is not one I can eliminate immediately on the basis of near certain dislike.

#6 Shetterly over #11 Whyte-Melville

The Shetterly is a children's picture book edition of the recent adult best-seller and mild sensation--perhaps that would have been a better entry in the tournament, but it was not the one that made it. Whyte-Melville's book, not available in any libraries, looks like another densely written, highly moralized triple decker Victorian novel with a Roman setting, just like Ben-Hur. While I don't mind one of these kinds of books on occasion, there are enough of them sitting on the IWE list that I don't need to add any additional ones for my "free reading".

#7 Thoene over #10 Branton

#8 Audi over #9 Myers

There is not much use for dictionaries on this kind of list, but the Myers book is, for the purposes of this list, a meatball, not being in libraries, being a genre book that does not appear to be published by an outlet with any stature, and thus cannot realistically defeat anything with the Cambridge imprimatur.

All the higher seeds win in the 1st round. The field was lopsided.

Elite 8

#1 Mitchell over #8 Audi

#2 Gibbon over #7 Thoene

If Gibbon keeps drawing red state American Christian novelists, he may triumph in this contest after all.

#3 Montefiore over #6 Shetterly

#4 Norwich over #5 Graeber

Norwich's Sicily book is reasonable in length, and its 29 extra pages over Graeber's are not enough to make us consider the upset.

Final Four

#1 Mitchell over #4 Norwich

Norwich would actually have won this based on shorter length, but Mitchell has the only upset to play in this entire tournament.

#3 Montefiore over #2 Gibbon

Even the Montefiore book is 650 pages. Gibbon proves a tough out in his 1st Challenge appearance.

Championship

#1 Mitchell over #3 Montefiore

Another pretty long book (509 pages) added to the wait list, but the shorter entries need to come through quality-wise. Also Mitchell is about my age and enjoyed the kind of literary success and critical adulation, at that time anyway--maybe he still does, or does any novelist really have that kind of status for life anymore?-- that I used to imagine must be my eventual lot, so looking into his book will be a kind of reckoning for me.

Henry James--The Awkward Age (1899)

The literary editors of the Illustrated World Encyclopedia write in their introduction to this book that "To the student of the novel almost no novel can be more important than The Awkward Age." This book is widely considered to belong to the transitional phase of James's later career that culminated in the three final masterpieces of the first half-decade of the twentieth century, The Wings of a Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl. It seems to me after reading it that it can be characterized pretty safely with this group, all of which I have at least read through, with varying degrees of success, The Golden Bowl being the one I would consider to have been the most satisfactory experience, in that it is the one I found the least wearying to get through. Given my longtime aspirations to be acceptably well-versed in literature above any other area of study, these great late Henry James novels have always been something of an obstacle to my satisfaction on this point. I have been convinced by enough of those Who Really Know of the importance, masterful construction, and, perhaps rarest of all, the highly satisfying mature intelligence at work in them, that to not be fully immersed in the experience of all of these qualities in the course of one's reading is to be dogged by a persistent sense of failure that one is ultimately unable to overcome. It is like keeping up in a difficult course at school. The determination may be there at the beginning and the persistence may not flag entirely, but once you lose the thread in any part there is no keeping up and it is impossible to fully rejoin the pursuit with any degree of mastery because everything significant in the story is dependent on and follows precisely from the various difficult and opaque scenes that have accumulated before it.

Keeping in mind that James's high seriousness and maturity are the qualities his fans admire above all, I nonetheless felt compelled to make a note that this was an actual paragraph in the book (p.91):


"The old man had got up to take his cup from Vanderbank, whose hand, however, dealt with him on the question of sitting down again. Mr Longdon, resisting, kept erect with a low gasp that his host only was near enough to catch. This suddenly appeared to confirm an impression gathered by Vanderbank in their contact, a strange sense that his visitor was so agitated as to be trembling in every limb. It brought to his lips a kind of ejaculation--'I say!'"


p. 96 Another classic Henry James sentence:


"Poor Mitchy's face hereupon would have been interesting, would have been distinctly touching to other eyes; but Nanda's were not heedful of it."


The prominent blogger Tyler Cowen once opined that Dostoevsky had become tiresome to read in our time because his concerns were not our concerns (though I don't think I personally qualify as part of the collective "our" referenced here). I often find myself having to ask "Are Henry James's?"


p. 173 On the salon-like atmosphere at Mrs Brookenham's:


"The men, the young and the clever ones, find it a house--and heaven knows they're right--with intellectual elbow-room, with freedom of talk. Most English talk is like a quadrille in a sentry box. You'll tell me we go further in Italy, and I won't deny it, but in Italy we have the common-sense not to have little girls in the room."


It certainly seems as if our time is suffering for a lack of "intellectual elbow-room".


p. 281 "The pause she thus momentarily produced was so intense as to give a sharpness that was almost vulgar to the little "Oh!" by which it was presently broken and the source of which neither of her three companions could afterwards in the least have named. Neither would have endeavoured to fix an indecency of which each doubtless had been but too capable."


My comment on the above passage: "Subtle, oh yes, but at some point you wouldn't mind seeing a neutron bomb detonated in the middle of these people."


p. 309 "Edward's gloom on this was not yet blankness, yet it was dense."


I am groaning at this point.

As I have mentioned somewhere in these blogs, I was afflicted by a kidney stone around the middle of this book, and the accompanying abdominal pain made it impossible to read for several days until I was put on some opioid pain medicine, which I actually found to be a great aid to concentration on the book during the days I was on it leading up to my operation. I don't know what it says for Henry James however that the optimal conditions for enjoying his later work in the 21st century may be to be hopped up on painkillers and largely confined to bed for the better part of a week.


I have not generally found editions of most Henry James novels from my preferred 1920-1970 period to be especially thrilling, so I opted to go with a fairly recent (1993) reprint from the Everyman series. This included a 25 page introduction by Cynthia Ozick which I read about a page of before determining that I was not going to find it helpful to understanding the book any more than I actually did.


By completing this I have now come to the end of the literary classics selection for volume 2 of the encyclopedia, as well as finally coming to the end of the "A" titles. It took slightly more than four years to accomplish this, though the "As" do represent about 10% of the entire list. I am still on pace to not finish the entire list until I am 83 however, so eventually I am going to have to pick it up a little. I believe once my children are older--I still have a two year old at the moment--that I will be able to do that.

The Challenge


1. Joe Hill--Twentieth Century Ghosts...........................................................474
2. Father Jonathan Morris--The Promise........................................................146
3. Michelle Paige Holmes--Yesterday's Promise...........................................116
4. Arthur Conan Doyle--The Return of Sherlock Holmes................................88
5. Petra ten-doesschate Chu--Nineteenth Century European Art....................28
6. Steven Levingston--Kennedy and King.......................................................26
7. Elizabeth Bowen--The Hotel.........................................................................7
8. Henry C Dethloff & John A. Adams--Texas Aggies Go to War...................1
9. Genderuwo (movie).......................................................................................0
10. Eric Harrison & Kendall Johnson--Critical Companion to Henry James...0
11. Henry James's Europe: Heritage and Transfer (ed. Harding).....................0
12. Miss Desirable--A Little Bit of Taani...........................................................0


1st Round


#5 Chu over #12 Desirable


I'm not sure if Desirable is an actual book or not.


#6 Levingston over #11 Henry James's Europe
#7 Bowen over #10 Harrison and Johnson


It's tough to earn a win coming in with 0 points against any kind of remotely serious book.


#9 Genderuwo over #8 Dethloff and Adams


Genderuwo is a 2007 Indonesian film that is all accounts quite dismal, but it has an upset on reserve in its account for this tournament.

Final 8


#1 Hill over #9 Genderuwo
#7 Bowen over #2 Morris


Father Morris is a regular contributor to Fox News, mainly as an authority on religious matters. He is also a campus minister at Columbia University, for what it's worth. Bowen's book, though not exceptionally well known, at least in this country, seems to be considered to have literary value. A handsome edition of it was published by the University of Chicago press in 2012.


#3 Holmes over #6 Levingston


None of Holmes's books are carried by any libraries, presumably because she is a romance novelist. But she had an upset coming in the tournament.


#4 Doyle over #5 Chu


The literary blue blood Doyle prevails over the game art expert in a well-played match.


Final Four


#1 Hill over #7 Bowen


The 45 year old author Joe Hill, a native of Bangor, Maine, seems to be the relatively incognito son of mega best-selling author Stephen King. My inclination would have been to favor Bowen's neglected-but-in-some-quarters-respected novel here but those designated upsets come into play.


#4 Doyle over #3 Holmes


Amusing coincidence in the name of Doyle's opponent.


Championship


#1 Hill over #4 Doyle


In overtime. Doyle does have at least two books on the official list, The Hound of the Baskervilles and A Study in Scarlet, so he will not be neglected. The main purpose of the whole "C" list being to expose myself to more contemporary or neglected literature and authors where plausible, Hill seems plausible enough to get the victory here.

Henry James--The American (1877)

Henry James makes his first appearance on the IWE list, which however only includes three or four of his books, and none of the longer, more difficult later ones. I have read numerous Henry James books--I think eleven--for my other list, including this one and the three notoriously dense and subtle ones that formed the capstone of his career and are now widely considered to be his masterpieces. The American, an early work, probably his first that is considered important, which I have recorded as reading previously in March, 2002, and The Turn of the Screw I remember as being the two I liked best. Of the three later books, The Wings of the Dove and The Ambassadors I cannot say I was ever really able to get into to the extent that the books mean anything to me. The Golden Bowl, which I read last of these three and a couple of years after the others, I was able to hang in with much better, though I still was not able to come away with a sense of why all of these fine nuances and minutely shades of meaning among this particular set of characters were supposed to matter as much as they presumably did. For the man, especially if he is a man of the quivering lipped, concave chested race of readers, who aspires to be admitted into the ranks of people who know anything about literature and whose mere acts of reading and thinking contribute to its ongoing vitality like those who prune and water do for a garden, understanding what Henry James is about and taking a proper adult joy in it is, if not mandatory, one of the surer ways to access the inner rooms of this intellectual fraternity. Here is my own history with the Master, with a brief observation on each book, by which my progress towards the state of Henry James connoiseurship can be measured:

Turn of the Screw--also read around 2002, liked the story, seemed more vivid, thoughts and impressions of characters more pertinent than in some of the other books.

The Wings of the Dove--August, 1995. I don't think I made heads or tails of it at the time.

The Ambassadors--August, 1996. My understanding did not improve much during that year.

The Bostonians--April, 2002. An earlier (1886) book, more readable, New England setting, I don't remember being blown away by it, but it wasn't bad. Learned about the term "Boston marriage". Also on the IWE list.

The Golden Bowl--May, 2002 (there was a question on the GRE literature exam, the source of my "A" list, for which the five answer choices were all Henry James novels. I got to this question obviously in 2002). See above.

The Portrait of a Lady--September, 1998. The early James masterpiece. Made no impression on me.

What Maisie Knew--June, 2002. I found a note I made on this, dated June 8, 2002:

"James is an extreme (though comparatively lucid) specimen of the cerebral, super-precise author. We can see that truly nothing makes its way onto the page without its *entire* purpose, mode of expression, point of view, etc., diligently thought out and accounted for. The question with me is always, how accurate--how naturalistic, in the end, are these characters, who are rather unlike anyone else in the whole of literature, though the technique and the philosophy behind it are very sound, logical, and even (at times) exquisite."

Nothing much stands out in my memory with regard to Maisie, other than that it was a characteristic Henry James novel of the late middle period, the sort of book (a lesser known but still considered good work by a celebrated author) that I often feel an exaggerated affection for while I am reading it, even if I recall very little of it in after years.

So I guess I have only read eight Henry James books, not the eleven I claimed earlier. And none in the last thirteen years. It really does not seem that long. At this rate I guess I'll be dead before I know it.

I do wonder sometimes with Henry James whether I would be able to tell that he was good if all of the most firmly situated experts did not constantly assure the world that he was. I think I might if I was handed one of his more conventional efforts, but there is some doubt there.

As noted above, I counted The American as one of my two favorite Henry James novels during this earlier period, so I was not unhappy to take it up again. The Marquis de Bellegarde and his mother are two of my favorite characters in literature, at least as far as being memorably drawn goes. They inform my idea of one extreme that aristocratic hauteur can reach. Valentin is more of a recognizable type, I suppose, but it is a lively depiction. For the others, it is well-established that in Henry James the ruling idea of a book is paramount, and that the role of the characters is to serve the idea. He was happy here in that the idea represented by the two most severe of the Bellegardes was so strongly impressed upon him as a living force that it could be embodied in two characters. Madame de Cintre and Newman are less convincing. Claire is supposed to be the most enchanting and exquisitely refined woman that can be imagined, though other than her conversation's being impenetrably correct and controlled at all times, she does not display a lot of personal agency or give much indication of having anything resembling passion for anything in her life. As to Newman it seems decidedly unlikely that a man who had amassed a colossal fortune in mineral extraction and railroads and other industries by the age of 35 would suddenly develop a Henry James-like interest in getting away from all of that money-making and lounging around Paris for a couple of years trying to ingratiate himself with a cloistered and decayed family clinging to its ancient nobility that at the time in which the book was set has no recognized rank or political authority in the eyes of the French state. But as noted, these kinds of incongruities are sometimes the price of admission to the undoubtedly unique world of Henry James.

I wanted to run a few of my favorite quotations from the book, most concerning my main man the Marquis Urbain de Bellegarde:

"He was 'distinguished' to the tips of his polished nails, and there was not a movement of his fine perpendicular person that was not noble and majestic. Newman had never yet been confronted with such an incarnation of the art of taking oneself seriously..."

There were at least two other occasions in the book where someone--I believe all of the persons thus described were Bellegardes--possessed a quality to the tips of his fingernails.

"His manners seemed to indicate a fine nervous dread that something disagreeable might happen if the atmosphere were not purified by allusions of a thoroughly superior cast."

"If he has never committed murder, he has at least turned his back and looked the other way while someone else was committing it."

"His tranquil unsuspectingness of the relativity of his own place in the social scale was probably irritating to M. de Bellegarde..."

"'We all know what Mozart is,' said the marquis; 'our impressions don't date from this evening. Mozart is youth, freshness, brilliancy, facility--a little too great facility, perhaps. But the execution is here and there deplorably rough.'"

This next one describes the follies of some highly sophisticated and intelligent Parisians who find themselves forced to settle down in a rustic inn in a nondescript Swiss village for a couple of days:

"At last the bishop's nephew came in with a toilet in which an ingenious attempt at harmony with the peculiar situation was visible, and with a gravity tempered by a decent deference to the best breakfast that the Croix Helvetique had ever set forth. Valentin's servant...had been lending a light Parisian hand in the kitchen. The two Frenchmen did their best to prove that if circumstances might overshadow, they could not really obscure the national talent for conversation..."

"Monsieur de Bellegarde appeared to have nothing more to suggest; but he continued to stand there, rigid and elegant, as a man who believed that his mere personal presence had an argumentative value."

Newman's vulgar American friend, Mr Tristram, on Paris:

"You know it's really the only place for a white man to live."

While we are still waiting for our first French book on the IWE list, this is the first one that is at least nominally set in Paris, though the peculiar flavor of Henry James's Paris is a bit of a departure from the way I usually experience that city, both through art and in actual life. Still, as I am undertaking this entire list as something of a farewell tour of all my youthful ideas and aspirations, perhaps ultimately even to life itself as I once imagined it, anytime the list brings us to Paris as the primary setting of a book, it is a momentous occasion.

As I read through these books I am making a collection of all of them, trying to get older hardback copies from the 1930-1970 era if I don't have them already. I am not looking for anything rare or unique. I like the Modern Library and other popular sets, for example, and any copy I generally find attractive will do. For The American however I decided to stick with the circa 2000 Penguin paperback edition I bought when I read it back 2002, as I had felt at the time it was a good reading edition, the notes were aimed at someone who was around my basic level of education and so on. It also contains the original 1877 text of the book; James evidently re-wrote a substantial amount of it thirty years afterwards and some editions of the book have that version of it, though the consensus seems to be that the 1877 version is the better one, and as the 1907 version presumably incorporates more of the opaque later James style, I am sure it is the one I would prefer in any event. This sort of thing, of there being two or more versions of a famous book, occurs more often then I had realized. The edition of Brideshead Revisited that I read a few years back for example I realize now was actually the 'corrected' 1959 version heavily re-written by Waugh, though I think the original 1945 publication is the one that most people are thinking of when they praise it. It is something I have learned to be on the lookout for.

Henry James at age 17?

Off-topic, and I don't want to go to much into it at this time because I want to finish this post, but I read something the other day where another novelist-critic, someone who could I suppose be considered a literary insider in some segment of the literary world that still possesses an identifiable enclosure, opined that The Canon was dead, dead, dead, that it would be impossible to define one from the mass of words that is being published nowadays and so on in that vein. I never use the term 'Canon' myself as this was never used at my school--they believed in Great Books, but the number of unassailable Great Books was really very small, limited to around ten or fifteen maximum even from the greatest centuries, only a minority of which were works of imaginative literature, of which a minority of these were prose fiction. I suppose it is possible that the Great Books in this sense are dead, though I have the confidence at least that if a genuine one does turn up, and passes one full time through the generational cycle--usually around eighty years--we should be able to recognize it at such. The Canon as I understand it is has a little bit broader membership and sort of includes everyone who has a claim to importance over some stretch of literary history. Similar to the Baseball Hall of Fame, it has an inner ring of the Real Greats (Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Dante, Tolstoy, etc) whose membership is not merely a given, but without whom the entire enterprise would be pointless, but there are also contentious arguments at the fringes about whether certain people really belong in or not (Highpockets Kelly, Dave Bancroft, Alice Walker, Norman Mailer). Henry James is solidly in the Canon, though (unlike his brother) seemingly not an inner ring Great Book, in baseball terms about the Three Finger Brown or Eddie Matthews level, a clearly superior and even unique player who amassed impressive statistics over a period of years in a highly relevant environment. Anyway, while there is a class of the most advanced writers and readers who pooh-pooh the idea of the Canon, and has been far as I can tell for most of literary history (I am reminded of Susan Sontag's constant referencing of writers that even the assiduous middle class reader of literary reviews would never have heard of as obviously the best and most important in the world), the lower tiers of the scholarly and reading public will for the foreseeable future I am pretty sure require something of the kind to take form, and thus certain books or writings from our era will by some consensus attain to canon-like status.    

The Challenge

I am disappointed that Henry James gave us such an incredibly weak challenge. Ten movies made the field. The movies are supposed to be like the teams from lower level leagues that are mainly in the tournament to allow the books to advance. In the pre-tournament era we were only getting two or three movies per Challenge, now the last two have been movie heavy. I am leaving them in for now because the score required to qualify for this tournament is 34, and books with fewer than 34 reviews are generally not readily available or well-known anyway, and of the books which turned up for this challenge, the only one that piqued my interest at all was a food memoir that had only three reviews and was not available at a single library in my entire state. So I had to accept a complete dud of a tournament.

1. Dan Brown--The Da Vinci Code..........................5,486
2. Godzilla (2014 movie)..........................................3,764
3. Melancholia (movie)................................................867
4. Robin Hood (2010 movie)........................................865
5. Out of the Furnace (movie)......................................672
6. Diana Gabaldon--Lord John & the Private Matter...385
7. Rebel Without a Cause (movie)................................357
8. Sklya Madi--Too Consumed (Book 2)......................206
9. A Late Quartet (movie).............................................195
10. Summer Stock (movie)............................................153
11. Scent of Green Papaya (movie)..............................140
12. Patricia D'Eddy--A Shift in the Water.....................116
13. Skyla Madi--Forever Consumed (Book 3)..............112
14. Game of Death (recent movie)..................................38
15. Suzanne Wright--Consumed: Deep in Your Veins....36
16. Liz & Dick (movie)....................................................34

1st Round

#16 Liz & Dick over #1 Dan Brown

The Da Vinci Code had finished first in one of the pre-tournament challenges, and I read a little bit of it, thinking that as it was so popular there must be something to it. In truth though it is really, like so many of these genre books that sell zillions of copies, stupefyingly boring. The characters are all ridiculously wealthy people at the top of their fields who have degrees from the best universities, clothes from the most elite tailors, world class private art collections, and yet they are incapable of expressing a thought or response to life that possesses any interest or spark of ingenuity.

I have decided not to make any rules around banning past winners from being eligible for future challenges. The only books that are ineligible for the challenge are those on the IWE list.

#15 Suzanne Wright over #2 Godzilla

Book over movie.

#3 Melancholia over #14 Game of Death

The pseudo-art movie over the high explosive modern action film

#13 Skyla Madi over #4 Robin Hood

#12 Patricia Eddy over #5 Out of the Furnace

#6 Diana Gabaldon over #11 Scent of Green Papaya

I am giving the books a wide path here.

#10 Summer Stock over #7 Rebel Without a Cause

Summer Stock is a few years older, and I have never seen it.

#8 Skyla Madi over #9 A Late Quartet

Elite 8

#3 Melancholia over #16 Liz & Dick

The pseudo-art movie over a TV biopic I have no desire to see.

#6 Gabaldon over #15 Wright

Gabaldon basically wins because her book exists in public libraries, and Wright's does not.

#8 Madi over #13 Madi

In the battle of two books from the same series I give the precedent to the one first in order (as well as the higher seed).

#12 Eddy over #10 Summer Stock

Final Four

#12 Eddy over #3 Melancholia

#6 Gabaldon over #8 Madi

Gabaldon is the only book left in the field that exists in libraries near me.

Championship

#6 Gabaldon over #12 Eddy

An embarrassingly easy championship for Gabaldon.

I have adhered to protocol and at least taken Lord John and the Private Matter out of the library. Set in 1757 London, the action opens with Lord John, hidden from view, observing a syphilis sore on the penis of the man to whom his cousin is betrothed. It soon becomes apparent that Lord John is highly familiar with eighteenth-century London's pulsating gay scene. Also his mother throws a dinner party at which Samuel Johnson is a guest and Lord John and his gay friends sneer at the Doctor as a tiresome, blustering buffoon. Hopefully we will get a better winner next time.