The Reading Trail

Spending a couple of weeks at home on my own, I read as if maintaining a necessary substrate: with meals, between meals, before sleep, during insomnia. I have read two novellas by Henry James, three novels by Muriel Spark and her autobiography, whose evocation of publishing in postwar Britain led to Diana Athill's memoir Stet, which is about the same thing, and may in turn, through its chapter on Jean Rhys, take me back to Wide Sargasso Sea.

Entrenched in my own life, weather and upkeep, I need these versions of elsewhere, the parallel existence of other people. And I need it to be written. Novels write it, poems write it, memoirs write about it. Diaries take the plunge, eyes closed. All good. 

Diana Athill writes about Jean Rhys, and how, in her last years, she struggled to finish Wide Sargasso Sea. She could hardly speak but she could see the words she wanted to add. The pages of the novel had a physical photovoltaic existence, including all future amendments.

Muriel Spark read Henry James

I'd been reading Henry James and switched to Muriel Spark who also read Henry James, and, in Loitering With Intent, pulls herself up short for writing something Henry James would have written. She steers her writing passage through all she has read and all she has lived. She's abrasive and cool, if not nasty. Switched from being jew-ish to full Roman Catholicism. She was my parents' generation. They talked about Memento Mori with their friends circa 1960 — a novel in which everyone dies — with an excited contemporaneity beyond my emotional age. I took note. I re-read Muriel Spark rarely enough to forget the plots and often enough to know how this kind of wryness works, where she is in relation to what she writes, how she digs and evades. She's there all the time, that's for sure. The hand of Muriel is on yours from the start.

Henry James & Mahler

First The Spoils of Poynton then What Maisie Knew. As always with Henry James a materiality — the spoils of Poynton are priceless therefore must ultimately go up in smoke — and a bottomless enquiry. What poor dear Maisie knows is bottomless. She has two mothers two fathers and two governesses. As far as family can be stretched, she stretches it in her mind's eye: who is lying, who is afraid of whom and why, who will vanish or transform next. Now a governess then a stepmother.

Always an excess of love amid the sundering and reshaping of protofamilies. Life is for constant unpicking as it happens: is this Mr Merriam or Lord Eric or the Count or the Captain. Who will the next father be. What of the battle to be Maisie's mother.

Is it possible to write about reading Henry James without writing like Henry James.

While listening to Janet Baker sing Mahler songs.

Henry James, The Europeans

Eugenia and Felix are the eponymous europeans in Henry James' novel, siblings born in France and Vienna, but Americans, nonetheless. Europe is a dangerous spice. Eugenia and Felix stir things up when they go to visit their American cousins, Charlotte, Gertrude and Clifford in New England at the beginning of the twentieth century..

Henry James liked to deal with the crème de la leisurely crème, in New England, whence he came, or Old England, which he occupied for many years in his comfortable observer role. 

Comfortable observer is no longer comfortable.  I read Henry James when I want to be in observer mode. With pleasure and unease. As if I'm being judged by a clamorous generation in its thereness, nowness, and grievance.

READING NOTES HOME AND ABROAD

In northeast London, after reading too much crap, P goes back to Henry James and Joseph Conrad, back to the books he read at college where you had to pay attention to know what was going on. In Brighton, M is reading The Trial and The Waves, in respite from academe and other speaks. In a gallery in Cork, A is reading The True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Sightings by Budd Hopkins, under plain cover. In a café in Macroom, a woman is reading Keep the Aspidistra Flying, which is somehow invigorating, especially in January. 

Stuart Holland, Henry James, Colm Toibin

I wonder if Stuart Holland, political economist, who said to me circa 1972 that people like him worked in his way, among policy and debate, so that people like me could work in our way, among poetry and — he could not complete my sentences as I could not complete his.

Men who work the world not the land, who wield analysis and field opinion, do not know what to make of women who escape their grasp into a row of beans.

I have often remembered Stuart working for a world in which poetry could have an undisturbed, accepted place. I have thought of him and others I half-knew then who were working for a better world, I thought, with only such recognition or adulation as was due. One mutual friend said that Stuart was drawn up short by my, what was it, my immunity to his importance.

I was more egalitarian or innocent than he was; what I read as timidity, he read as strength. We're always at half-mast to our understanding of ourselves or of others.

I have continued reading Henry James this week, under the protective memory of Stuart Holland, who now divides his time, I learn, between Portugal, Hungary, and possibly Italy. I have read several novellas, one of whose principal characters, usually young, is dead at the end. I have thought about the relation of reading Henry James to streaming Netflix and watching the news. Henry James is one of those writers who demands to be situated, as if, out of a distinguished thinking family bridging the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he, like Stuart Holland, must be in relation to his times.

Now I'm reading Washington Square, which is more like a play, more like the art of (domestic) war and thus surely cousin to Netflix if not the news in any era. People who don't like Henry James like Washington Square, apparently, as people who don't like opera like Mozart opera, while Henry himself didn't choose to include it in his collection of tales. Too simple perhaps, too relaxing a tale of misogyny and polite exploitation, not enough clauses. Reading Henry James is like flexing your clause muscles; Washington Square, for some, including Henry himself, is not enough of a workout.

I have never read Colm Toibin's novel about Henry James. I would rather read Henry James than a novel about Henry James. Though I did like Czapski's account of Proust as remembered from a prison camp as a means of mental and spiritual survival.

Much of my reading, be it Henry James or a New Yorker story in a hot bath, is pointillist in manner: dot and space and shy image as images show through as in memory, with loose, absorbent edges.

The Aspern Papers, Henry James, Cyril Cusack

A review of the new film of The Aspern Papers sent me back to the Henry James nouvelle. Impossible to read Henry James without a wilful sense of purpose and some confused memories. Without becoming Henry James. That coolness and remoteness in the fastnesses of language. Where does that leave you, and Henry James? Is it, despite the odds, a warm embrace?

Margaret Roberts, Miss American Pie, as she liked to call herself, with the warmest of irony on a warm night in Chicago, announced she was going back to Henry James. Perhaps half Henry James readers are re-readers.

This time I read The Aspern Papers in the light of a film I haven't seen. The reviews are poor, but I enjoyed the sense of Vanessa Redgrave in her eighties guarding her memories and her papers in Venice, while local (Cork) boy Jonathan Rhys Meyer, whom I have somehow never trusted, as Morton, tries to extract her secrets, and Joely Richardson, Vanessa's daughter, playing Tita Bordereau, the niece, her name in the film changed to Tina, to avoid embarrassment. Henry James had faces and shadows to fit Bordereau, aunt and niece, and so do I.

You can withdraw into Henry James, if you need a certain coolness yet intimacy, some swift strokes of the pen, an amused distance, not much empathy. He can annoy, royally, as well, when you choose the wrong moment to read him; his sentences can be tortured; and you the reader are tortured, too.

I best came to terms with Henry James circa 1973 when I had a television for the first time and watched a BBC adaptation of The Golden Bowl, with Cyril Cusack, amused in his armchair, holding the tale by its subtleties at the close of each episode.

The fireside opening, travellers gathered, an intimate narrator with a tale of an English country house, a mysterious, absent owner, a new governess, an old housekeeper, two ghosts, two angelic children, several unexplained deaths by 10pm as I like to say of italian tv: you can revel in the tropes as in creamy summer seas. At least for a while.

The Turn of the Screw by was Henry James' most popular book and his shortest, which is why, snob that I was, I thought when I first read it that it must be an aberration, an exercise in 'general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain'. The children's beauty, the English country house, the English country garden, all are flawed like the golden bowl, not a hairline crack, more of a gash, or many spectral gashes half-revealed. There is more atmosphere than plot, more anguish than causes.

No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it the more I see in it, and the more I see in it the more I fear. I don't know what I don't see—what I don't fear!

Thus the governess. And one of her charges, the boy eventually admits that he was thrown out of school because he said things to a few people, the ones he liked.

Those he liked? I seemed to float not into clearness, but into a darker obscure, and within a minute there had come to me out of my very pity the appalling alarm of his being perhaps innocent. It was for the instant confounding and bottomless, for if he were innocent what then on earth was I?

The horror and the infamy that play about these two sunlit children and the two ghosts (of the previous governess and a valet) in whose power they seem to be held, anticipates the murky darkness of Freud, (The Turn of the Screw was first published in 1898), to say nothing of the lurid and graphic accounts of abuse and false memory to which we are now inured. We can't read it as a ghost story any more.

Not that Henry James knew what he was suggesting. Not exactly knew. (See Cynthia Ozick, What Henry James Knew). He is temperamentally and artistically inclined to leave things open, every motive uncertain, every outcome a maze of suggestion and unresolve. I used to love all that, and still do, when I want to be kind to a former self who grappled endlessly, obtusely with what could and couldn't be said.