I want to appreciate him, but every sentence he writes goes something like
>Elizabeth, who, notwithstanding the fragility of her sex, carried on ignoring the gentleman's advances, was nevertheless curious of his intentions—he, with an eye to, if one might condescend to name it thus, her decency, having hidden them so well—and resolved to put the matter plainly to him, whatever the effect of such a course—for, she should bethink herself, this may certainly be a matter of course—to wit: that she was not to be won so easily.
>>24496429 (OP)I hate this man and his work. My only disagreement with E. Pound.
>>24496446If you agree with the man in all but one respect, which of the utmost respect is not less than the greatest sign, I could very well take you for that man in all but one respect.
>>24496457goodgawd, where the hell is the gin at!
>>24496429 (OP)>Be Elizabeth"You, sir, are a dried up tit."
>walk out decently
>>24496429 (OP)These run on sentences were common at the time. Mentally you adjust by elongating the pause you take at each comma, with each clause of the sentence being taken as a unit by itself, instead of the entire sentence being the unit, which tends to be how modern books are written.
Choose wisely, yte boi.
>Still—even before the occasional reappearance of the face to him—Pierre, for all his willful ardor in his gymnasticals and other diversions, whether in-doors or out, or whether by book or foil; still, Pierre could not but be secretly annoyed, and not a little perplexed, as to the motive, which, for the first time in his recollection, had impelled him, not merely to conceal from his mother a singular circumstance in his life (for that, he felt would have been but venial; and besides, as will eventually be seen, he could find one particular precedent for it, in his past experience) but likewise, and superaddedly, to parry, nay, to evade, and, in effect, to return something alarmingly like a fib, to an explicit question put to him by his mother;—such being the guise, in which part of the conversation they had had that eventful night, now appeared to his fastidious sense.
>Only the harp. Lovely. Gold glowering light. Girl touched it. Poop of a lovely. Gravy’s rather good fit for a. Golden ship. Erin. The harp that once or twice. Cool hands. Ben Howth, the rhododendrons. We are their harps. I. He. Old. Young.
>>24496429 (OP)That's why James is fantastic. It's really just a (you) problem, you need to get used to it and after some time WILL get used to it. Expand your mental capacity for comprehending large sentence lengths. You will be in AWE of the psychological complexity that comes across through those billowing, undulating waves of James' prose.
>Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.
----Oscar Wilde
>An idiot, and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in the world.
----H. L. Mencken
>Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James, his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life.
---Jorge Luis Borges
>Would you rather read Henry James or be crushed to death by a great weight?
---Lawrence Durrell
>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
>Mark Twain said he would rather "be damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than read Henry James's novel The Bostonians.
>I read a collection of Henry James' short stories—miserable stuff, a complete fake, you ought to debunk that pale porpoise and his plush vulgarities some day.
>He writes with a very sharp nib and the ink is very pale and there is very little of it in his inkpot . . . The style is artistic but it is not the style of an artist . . . Henry James is definitely for non-smokers. He has charm (as the weak blond prose of Turgenev has), but that’s about all.
>I have read (or rather reread) 'What Maisie Knew.' It is terrible. Perhaps there is some other Henry James and I am continuously hitting upon the wrong one?
---Vladimir Nabokov
>Henry James? That's not literature.
---Cormac McCarthy
>>24496937>Woolf hates both James and JoyceYeah, I feel justified in never reading a single work of hers.
>>24496928It’s not necessarily a problem if cognitive capacity. James wasn’t a great stylist. I can appreciate him sometimes but the way his mind works just isn’t congenial. Compare his long sentences to those of Thomas De Quincey, and you should be able to tell quite easily who was the superior artisan. OP, try De Quincey.
>>24496960She didnt hate she wa sjust being dramatic
>>24496937Is that Woolf wuote to Eliot? Eliot thouggt he was greaf
>>24497066He's right. His writing is awkward, long-winded and overly Latinate.
>>24497050>the way his mind works just isn’t congenialHe wasn't just born writing that way. His style continually developed and evolved over time to become far more complex. If you seriously deny his artistry and conscious intent, and just believe he was born writing and thinking like that, then James was necessarily a natural-born genius of gigantic proportions. And I very much enjoy exploring the mind of a genius.
>>24496948Trvke
>>24496429 (OP)So, you’re a low IQ zoomer who can’t follow a sentence that’s longer than the average text message, and that somehow means the greatest ever American author is actually bad?
>>24497066>>24497071It's about the musicality, which is about the naturalness of the style--or about prose achieving poetic affects. James isn't like that. Of course he had the highest culture and was very intelligent. But compare him to Joyce or Evelyn Waugh or Gibbon or Newman or Emerson--those are great stylists. This congeniality perhaps has something to do with one's own physiognomy of mind but I think someone like Carlyle is objectively more natural than James who is maybe too unique, when I read him his manner of thinking just feels abnormal.
>>24496937Some changes have been made but i am glad my pasta from 4-5 years ago has become a mainstay in James' threads kek.
>>24497102I appreciate your contribution. I post it when I can kek
top kek
md5: e5d292cea9fdbd12af9de01766c772d6
🔍
>Henry James
>the greatest ever American author
>>24496429 (OP)>>>24496429 (OP)>Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not--some people of course never do,--the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle ofa splendid summer afternoon.ChatGPT fists Flaubert until it sees daylight eclipsed by Humbert Humbert. James would've considered The Scarlett Letter pornographic.
>>24497096Personally, I savour in the unusualness of James' prose. It offers completely original aesthetic sensations, opening up a new world to our experience, which is part of the purpose of art. And it's odd that you mention Carlyle, because at his most extreme, such as in sections of Sartor Resartus, he really inaugurated the presence of unbalanced, assaulting sensations and psychological layers in English prose.
As someone who likes both James and Mccarthy, James was a great stylist. They are quite the opposite of each other but one thing they share is how unhinged and eccentric their styles were. If you care about art you must not shirk away from prose styles that are trying to be more than just besutiful. There are more than just one register in English and writers should be judged on how they use them rather than if they can use them.
don't waste your time, OP.
>>24497142I mention Carlyle perhaps because I don't want to give the impression that the problem is that James doesn't write like Orwell or whoever
A comparison might be made to David Foster Wallace--where for readers the stylistic idiosyncrasy is either an annoying barrier or one of chief causes of satisfaction in the work
>>24497175Okay, I can understand that comparison, for some people James' style is just too provincial and particular a thing, but I don't think you can deny that what James is saying nonetheless is of a universal importance. Whether his style is a barrier to appreciating that depends on the person.
>>24496538James is particularly extravagant with them, even for his time it was excessive. Apparently he talked that was too.
>>24496429 (OP)It makes me wonder if stimulants would have cleaned it up or whether he would have just become further lost in his own self felatio.
