Name: Henry, meet James. James — Henry.
Item: The turn of the screw
Author: yarb

The turn of the screw →

by Henry James

Henry, meet James. James — Henry.

yarb

Sep 03, 2024

When our daughter was a toddler, one of the other toddlers she regularly exchanged germs with at toddler social events was a boy named James, and James' dad's name was Henry. We would often run into the two of them, little snotnosed James sitting upon Henry's shoulders, and I got into the habit of referring to them as a single entity, "Henry James". Look, I'd say to my daughter — there goes Henry James! Or, you'll never guess who we saw at the playground today, I'd say to my wife — our friend Henry James!Of course, the real Henry James is no laughing matter. Reading him is like floundering in a slow-motion Sargasso Sea of language, the main clause an elusive seahorse, forever just out of reach. It's a maddening, but strangely addictive experience, playing Henry James bingo with his wild verbs of saying — adjure, pursue, asseverate — his junctures and obtrusions, his obsessive use of the feminine suffix — conductress, protectress, instructress, interlocutress. Even his shorter sentences can be maximally disorienting:

I had left her meanwhile in little doubt of my small hope of representing with success even to her actual sympathy my sense of the real splendor of the little inspiration with which, after I had got him into the house, the boy met my final articulate challenge.

It doesn't always work for me. I read The Wings of the Dove mostly while using the treadmill in a hotel in Bogotá, and the mental torture of that almost eclipsed the pain in my lungs and legs. But here, and in my favourite James, the spooky short The Jolly Corner, the murky sea of the prose replicates the psychological ambiguities of the story, and sometimes you just have to laugh out loud, as when he describes the expression on someone's face by telling us that "she had helplessly gloomed at the upper regions".

For further Jamesian comedy I refer you to Edith Wharton's experience of wayfinding with him.