jethrien

Title: The Turn of the Screw and other stories
Author: Henry James
Genre: Classic Literature (short stories/novellas)
Thingummies: 4.5

Synopsis: Several classic James stories, with the highlight being a strangely psychological ghost story about a young governess struggling to protect her charges from malevolent ghosts.

Thoughts: Apologies for any typos--I just gave blood and the band-aid on my finger from the iron prick is causing my hand to slide all over the keyboard.

James is rather legendary for being able to craft astonishingly detailed and complex sentences while transmitting very little real information at all. His prose is lush verging on florid, full of baroque clauses, focusing on deeply insightful commentary on his society and the characters he's created to live in it. But nearly every story is an elaborate dance around the edge of a gaping hole--each one centers on one or more critical, unspoken facts which may never be said aloud, merely alluded to. Why did the aging spinster never marry her dashing poet? What exactly did the angelic child do to be expelled from his boarding school? What unforgivable crime did an enemy commit, what unspeakable secret did the confidant whisper? The lives of James' characters are distorted by their secrets, and it is from these distortions that a reader must piece together the nature of the secret itself.

It's a fascinating commentary on James' views of his contemporaries. Most of the stories feature the relatively idle rich and upper middle class, swanning about Europe with very little to do. Most of their adventures are rather petty, but no less felt for their pettiness. James identifies with them, but his occasional wry description or sharp aside reveals a certain amused detachment. For all their luxury, though, the secretiveness and indirectness their society requires makes the entire thing seem rather unappealing to a modern reader, I think.

"The Turn of the Screw" is one of the more accessible stories. It's a distillation of the Gothic trope of the young governess trapped in the isolated, ominous house on the moor. How much of this famously unreliable narrator's terror is from genuinely supernatural events and how much is from her own fracturing mind is left ambiguous, as is the meaning of the ending.

"The Aspern Papers", about a biographer trying to beg, wheedle, or steal some letters by his subject from the old woman they were addressed to, makes me glad that I have visited Venice. The crumbling city is nearly a character in its own right. James' prose is so evocative I felt like I was back in the windy, shadowed canals.

I think "An International Episode" is probably considered to be a bit of fluff, compared to the weightier stories following it. However, I rather enjoyed the slightly satirical tale of reciprocated visits from an English lord and a pair of American middle-class women. I know, on the other hand, that "The Beast in the Jungle" is considered quite the masterpiece. To be perfectly honest, coming as it was at the back of the book, I'd read enough James at that point that my head felt rather full of indirect references in flowery language. I confess to nodding off in several places and getting myself a bit confused, to the point that I had to look up what secret the protagonist had shared to make the ending make any sense at all.

James, it seems to me, is the prototypical literary novelist. The deliberateness of his prose, the indirectness of his references, the prosaic subjects of the majority of the stories, and their ambiguous, unhappy endings all seem to me to be what many of the modern writers in the genre are aspiring to. I'll admit to being slightly annoyed with him for starting/encouraging a genre I tend to find irritating and disappointing. But he does it so very much better than his imitators that I can understand the appeal and grudgingly forgive him. His carefully drawn characters do tend to achieve some kind of resolution and his plots have clearly been planned from beginning to end. (This contrasts to a number of modern writers I've read recently, who tend to putter along spinning their word-tapestries and then suddenly become tired or get a lecture from their editor about deadlines and bring the narrative to a sudden, inconclusive halt that reveals that they had never quite figured out how they were going to end this to begin with.)

This is dense, difficult stuff. I found it rewarding in small doses, and am happy to have read it once. I'm not sure I will return, however, and I am doubtful of whether I have the endurance to pick apart an entire James novel. Perhaps, for the curious, it would be best to start with "The Turn of the Screw" as a safe place to dip in a toe.