#aitch james

[vermiculated]

The study of psychology, therefore, required experimentation, which is why [William] James became convinced that Harvard had to have a "psychological laboratory," a place where Mr. Hyde could be found by Dr. Seek. 

J Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman. New York, 2014. hbk, 25.

[vermiculated]

“I have almost forgotten that there is such a pursuit as literature in the arduous study of – bicycling!” The couple would often ride through Puddletown and all over Dorset, Thomas in his knickerbockers, Emma sporting a velvet green cycling outfit that matched her bike (also green and dubbed affectionately “the Grasshopper”). Contemporaries Arthur Conan Doyle and his wife rode a tandem; even Henry James, although stout and rather old, could be spied pedalling around Rye in peaked cap and knickerbockers, covering as many as 20 miles between luncheon and teatime.

C Jones, “Wheel life and fiction: bicycling in literature” July 1 2016. The Guardian.

[vermiculated]

"Dear Harry," William James begins. (It is hard to remember, hard to believe, that anyone ever called Henry James Harry, but if it had to be done, William James was the right man to do it.) "Last Sunday I dined with Howells at the Childs', and was delighted to hear him say that you were both a friend and an admirer of Rudyard Kipling. I am ashamed to say that I have been ashamed to write of that infant phenomenon, not knowing, with your exquisitely refined taste, how you might be affected by him and fearing to jar. [It is wonderful to have the engineer/hoist with his own petard.] The more rejoiced I am at this, but why didn't you say so ere now? He's more of a Shakespeare than anyone yet in this generation of ours, as it strikes me." 

R Jarrell, "On Preparing to Read Kipling." Kipling, Auden, and Co. New York, 1980. hbk, 332

[vermiculated]

Back in 1880, Henry James had said that Ellen Terry possessed "a face altogether in the taste of the period, a face that Burne-Jones might have drawn." (The Scenic Art, 143) In 1895, Irving hired Burne-Jones to design King Arthur. Both men knew that for Ellen Terry's Guinevere, psychological realism was out of the question. She could not play a mature, disobedient, and sensuous woman, even though she was one, but only a Guinevere translated into Ophelia, who is herself translated into a mystic, hieratic spirit of nature. Because Ellen Terry's Ophelia was so resonant a creation of artists, the artists who designed Lyceum productions translated her every possible character into Ophelia's emanation. 

N Auerbach, Ellen Terry. New York, 1987. hbk, 245

[vermiculated]

For who has not grown used to the paradox that in so many of the artists who seem to us now to have spoken most deeply of (maybe even for) bourgeois society -- Flaubert, George Eliot, Simmel, Manet, Marx, Menzel, Baudelaire, Ibsen, Henry James -- care seems indistinguishable from distaste? Bohemia was never as withering on the subject of bourgeois illusions as the great masters of the novel. The Communist Manifesto, we see in retrospect, is as much under the spell of Adam Smith and Balzac as looking for a way to set their world on fire. It is the great poem of capitalism's potential. And who are the heroines of the new order if not those who stare its horrible decencies most fully in the face: Olympia, Madame Bovary, Hedda Gabler, Kate Croy, The Daughters of the Vicar, Woman with a Hat? Maybe belonging and not-belonging, or respectability and disreputableness, just are -- were -- what is meant by bourgeois identity; they seem to be (again, in retrospect) what marks off this strange way of being-with-others-in-the-world from others before and since. 

 TJ Clark, Picasso and Truth. Princeton, 2013. hbk, 17-18

[vermiculated]

These early Stoics brought to the subject of their own death the same degree of nicety that Henry James reserved for morals. And this was appropriate, since the question of how they died became for them the final measure of discrimination. 

A Alvarez, The Savage God. New York, 1970. hbk, 61

[vermiculated]

The source of another species of long Baldwin sentence (by contemporary standards, almost all of Baldwin’s sentences are long) is Henry James. In his wide-ranging “Art of Fiction” interview with The Paris Review, Baldwin admitted to having learned narratorial control from James: “This is where Henry James helped me,” he said, recounting the process of writing his debut novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, “with his whole idea about the center of consciousness and using a single intelligence to tell the story.” That intelligence, in Baldwin as well as in James, is uncannily precise, and often unsparing on the topic of its country and those who make it up.

Baldwin’s Jamesian sentences are long, but long because they are almost legal in intent: Each dependent clause hedges, qualifies, clarifies, and eliminates room for specious readings

V Cunningham, "Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Isn’t Our James Baldwin." New York Magazine, August 5 2015. 

[vermiculated]

I blasted through reel after reel of the Detroit News, keeping my eyes peeled for the row of photographs that signified the dead girls. Invariably I would get moored up in the wedding pages until I realized my error: Not dead, just married. 

M Nelson, The Red Parts. New York, 2007. hbk, 77