James

Four months ago, in a coffee-shop by the mid-morning traffic, I had just finished -- for what must have been the second time, although I have no memory of the first -- reading Ivy Day in the Committee Room. The stupid bewilderment that asserted itself that day continued -- as I made my way through the rest of Dubliners -- to grip me for most of the rest of my month-long visit to India. Clearly I knew very little about literature, and what I did seemed then tied only to its stylistic gestures, the aspects of its structure that had purely to do with (say) the lengths of sentences, of paragraphs, of the webs of commas and semi-colons that entangled a seemingly innocuous sequence of words and imparted to it a meaning which it would no doubt otherwise lack. Hardly would I begin a sentence in Dubliners, than I would be confronted by what had just passed before my eyes, a story perhaps, or even a paragraph, aesthetically deficient (or so an old but recognizable self would have claimed), but still endowed with enough meaning to propel it beyond any hope of criticism. Of what use were `rules' about nouns, verbs and adverbs, about indirect style, about aesthetic, when there were such authors as Joyce, authors able to regard their subjects with such uncompromising attention as to make even the most seasoned reader incoherent? It seemed I had to start over, and this time really understand what I wanted to say; not only that, but what the character needed to say, and how what I needed to say related to him. I was -- and had been, ever since my adolescent obsessions with David Mitchell and his kind -- on the `wrong' path, which is to say, on a path that could only yield so much if measured in terms of pure meaning.

Henry James has mostly rescued me from the despair -- fortunately short-lived in my case -- that is the inevitable consequence of reading too much Joyce. His style is of course impeccable, and re-asserts with a vitality that the longest of sentences, the ones that can speak of the subject -- inevitably a character -- with the greatest of specificity, those not distracted by a yearning for the accumulation of detail without reference to who it is that is accumulating it, is are the one ones best adopted. His characters are perfect bearers of his themes, at once universal and unrecognizable, slaves as much to their own aspects as they are to his, and simultaneously in harmony with the plot, which seems to proceed untrammeled by the vagaries of its inhabitants. His explorations of `consciousness -- a term that is perhaps too broad to comfortably encompass the essentially metaphysical that is the unique quality of every single James story -- form a corpus of psychological truth that shall probably forever remain unchallenged. Of course he is known as `The Master', and of course he is deified even amongst the most critical of literary connoisseurs. And today, on his 166th birthday, there will of course be thousands of writers everywhere who will remember his writings with nothing less than pure reverence.

It came over him that the test result would be positive. The words that were said every day to others would be said to him, in that quiet consulting room whose desk and carpet and square modern armchair would share indissolubly in the moment. There was a large tranquil photograph in a frame, and a view of the hospital chimney from the window. He was young, without much training in stoicism. What would he do once he left the room? He dawdled on, rather breathless, seeing visions in the middle of the day. He tried to rationalize the fear, but its pull was too strong and original. It was inside himself, but the world around him, the parked cars, the cruising taxi, the church spire among the trees, had also been changed. They had been revealed. It was like a drug sensation, but without the awareness of play. The motorcyclist who lived over the road clumped out in his leathers and attended to his bike. Nick gazed at him and looked away in a regret that held him and glazed him and kept him apart. There was nothing this man could do to help him. None of his friends could save him. The time came, and they learned the news in the room they were in, at a certain moment in their planned and continuing day. They woke the next morning, and after a while it came back to them. Nick searched their faces as they explored their feelings. He seemed to fade pretty quickly. He found himself yearning to know of their affairs, their successes, the novels and the new ideas that the few who remembered him might say he never knew, he never lived to find out. It was the morning's vision of the empty street, but projected far forward, into afternoons like this one decades hence, in the absent hum of their own business. The emotion was startling. It was a sort of terror, made up of emotions from every stage of his short life, weaning, homesickness, envy and self-pity; but he felt that the self-pity belonged to a larger pity. It was a love of the world that was shockingly unconditional. He stared back at the house, and then turned and drifted on. He looked in bewilderment at number 24, the final house with its regalia of stucco swags and bows. It wasn't just this street corner but the fact of a street corner at all that seemed, in the light of the moment, so beautiful.
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(From Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, a novel influenced and `in explicit dialogue with' Henry James. James himself is too varied to encapsulate in a blog quote.)