“Casting the Runes” (1911)

This story by M.R. James is tagged in The Weird, the massive and essential anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, as James’s most famous. Indeed, one scene involving a slip of paper with runic symbols printed on it, a sudden wind, and a fire in a fireplace rang a few bells for me. Later I realized the story is the basis of the movie by director Jacques Tourneur, Night of the Demon (later edited and rereleased as Curse of the Demon), the source of my déjà vu. In a general way I have to admit I have some problems with the way James tells stories, drawing on semifictional documentary sources and slowly, slowly circling his points. Some themes work like time-release medicines. They hit you later. You’re generally required to do a lot of unpacking yourself, and later rereads are not a bad idea. In “Casting the Runes” we see the text of letters along with secondhand and even thirdhand details by way of conversation. It can be maddeningly indirect yet that is large part of the unease his tales can cause you. Most characters tend to deny the validity of the weird and ghostly stuff but at the same time are unnaturally interested in it. There’s a lot of busy business here—people urgently going from here to there to investigate. But it’s not hard to see what’s going on. A man with supernatural skills is hunting people for reasons of petty vengeance. The rules are complicated and a little mechanical, veering close to the unbelievable. The slip of paper, for example: you have to get someone to accept it freely as handed to them. These rules here are spelled out more clearly in the movie. If the paper is then consumed in flame it seals the curse. If, however, the person with the slip of paper can pass it to someone else, preferably the one who gave it to them in the first place, then that person is off the hook. Busy, busy—and perhaps too rational. But M.R. James establishes a reasonably good air of mystery and dread. The details here can be fleeting but they stick, living inside you in a way that insidiously provokes anxiety. A very strange advertisement in a bus, for example, has made me look at bus cards in whole new ways ever since.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
M.R. James, Complete Ghost Stories
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Me, the Mob, and the Music (2010)

I enjoyed this memoir by Tommy James, written with Martin Fitzpatrick. All the “Mob” portions were interesting, I suppose—a key reason James waited so long to write it was waiting for certain figures to die. Most notably that included his kinda sorta mentor Morris Levy, who died in 1990, operated the Birdland nightclub, ran the Roulette label, and never paid James a fraction of the royalties he owed him. I was more interested in Tommy James the teenybop star because he was an absolute favorite of mine in junior high days. He played his first gig (a high school talent show) at the age of 12 and was playing professionally a year later with his own band. For many years he had to worry about being underage in the venues he played. The amazing story of “Hanky Panky” is told here, one with many twists and turns that broke open his career. In retrospect, he was at his rock ‘n’ roll purest with “Hanky Panky” and, later, “Mony Mony”—raw blasts of infectious power. But as a kid I was more infatuated first with the hothouse teen drama of “I Think We’re Alone Now” and then with the faux mellow psychedelia of “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” which I had not thought of for years and then played six times in a row the other day. Beauty! I know it’s plastic, inauthentic, and all that, but I just love it. The stories of all James’s hits and more are covered here, along with his three marriages, drug adventures (mostly speed and booze, he may never have taken a hallucinogen), and eventual substance abuse recovery and turn to Christianity. I could have done with a little less of the latter, though he never goes overboard. For me he’s not that likable, more of a hypocritical hedonist and general opportunist. But there’s no question of his talent. He got his break in 1966 and rode it into the ‘70s and beyond. He wrote and/or recorded some great songs I will probably never stop liking. The organized crime angle of this memoir is interesting and no doubt part of his success. He indulges a little “I’m cool because I hung out with gangsters” attitude, but reading between the lines it’s apparent it caused him a good deal of pain. When he hired a lawyer at some point who used forensic accounting to uncover Levy (and/or the Roulette label) owing James $40 million in royalties, Levy threatened their lives and they backed off. Full of strange and harrowing anecdotes, James’s memoir is thoroughly enjoyable, informative, and compulsively readable.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“The Private Life” (1892)

This long Henry James story, as much bantering comedy as ghost tale, almost counts as classic weird in a way, with a pair of cerebral concepts that are a bit didactic and somehow a bit rational too, which undercuts. James never was comfortable with the irrational, which is one reason his ghost stories tend not to be that good. It’s also from the period in his career when James was becoming ever more prolix and abstruse by the year (partly related to dictating his drafts and fussing with the typescripts). On the one hand, here, we have a genial upper-class nobleman, who is a model of poise and charming manners, the popular man who attracts everyone. Then there is the novelist, who maintains two identities: the one facing his friends and the public, and the one facing the blank page. In this story the nobleman disappears when no one is with him, in his solitude, like the unheard tree falling in the woods. And there are two novelists: one who chats it up with everyone, and the other laboring at his manuscript in the dark. I like that detail about working in the dark. Still, overall, the story feels more awkward and heavy-handed than anything. The high concept is not delivered with a lot of clarity and it takes a while to get there. James mocks those at ease in the world as vacuous, hollow, empty, and he lionizes the brooding novelist. No self-interest there (let alone self-pity). So, while taken literally, both apparitions may qualify as weird and also uncanny and maybe other adjectives (strange, mysterious, etc.), they are not really meant to be taken literally. It’s poetic and metaphorical about society and art and stuff like that. If James really wanted to make it weird, really wanted to write a ghost story, he would have had to take out a certain amount of verbiage. It’s about 40 pages as it stands—can you get it down to 15, H.J.? I read somewhere that James was envious of Sheridan Le Fanu and tried to write his ghost stories on approximately that model. Le Fanu could go on and on himself, but the main distinction is that James can’t commit in the clinch to something he obviously feels is ridiculous and beneath him. I like some of his ideas, like the ones here. I just wish James had liked them more.

“interlocutor” count = 1 / 40 pages (“interlocutress”)

Read story online.

“Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad” (1904)

Three commas for the title: M.R. James has a nice way of letting his stories unfold, almost conversationally, but with subtly strange structures and digressions along with the twists and turns. I like how golf gets involved with this one and that the third-person narrator is a little put off by it, taking pride in being ignorant of the game. Our main guy, Professor Parkins, is taking some time off to stay in the country, work on some kind of writing or research project, and “improve his game” (that’s the golf). An acquaintance asks him to look into a nearby site while he is there that may have the ruins of a “Templars preceptory.” I had to look up both terms—the Templars were deadly serious knights of the Crusades, and a preceptory was more or less a school for them. Professor Parkins, after playing a round of golf, does look into the site and does find evidence of buried ruins there. He pokes around a little and finds a strange cylindrical object. Can you guess what it is? That’s right, it’s a whistle, and when he gets done scraping away the dirt he sees that it has strange markings on it. Of course we see the danger coming. Don’t blow on that whistle, we really want to tell this guy. But of course he does and then the trouble starts. I like the way James describes the whistle’s tone. “It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and, soft as it was, [Parkins] somehow felt it must be audible for miles round.” The wind comes up suddenly and it’s difficult to close the window. The wind blows all night, and he has strange dreams. The next day, when he walks by himself, he has the feeling he is being followed. But when he turns around he sees only a strange figure in the distance that never gains on him. No problems with the golf—in fact, he plays better the second day. Children report that, while he was out, they saw someone in his room waving to them from the window. On his return to the room he sees someone has been using an extra bed there. I should also mention that Parkins is a rationalist who holds no truck with ghosts or the supernatural. His objections are cerebral and almost comic in the circumstances, but he staunchly insists on them. Among other things he is having his mind opened in this story. The ghost—ultimately there is a confrontation in the room—appears to be draped with a sheet (it has a “linen face”). You see the sheet thing a lot in cartoons and TV shows, but not actually so much in ghost stories, where they are usually more like mist if they are visible at all. But there’s an animated sheet here. The illustration above (by James McBryde) was used for a 2005 Penguin collection and is a reasonable approximation of the harassment Parkins endures. Fortunately, a believer is on hand to shepherd Parkins through and play golf with. This guy takes it upon himself to throw the whistle into a deep part of the sea. Problem solved. Or is it?

M.R. James, Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

"A Warning to the Curious" (1925)

This M.R. James story was the selection of Ramsey Campbell for the My Favorite Horror Story anthology. I'm still not sure about Campbell and haven't always been sure about James either, though I think I'm coming around on him. In his introduction to the story Campbell compares it to Sheridan Le Fanu's "The Familiar," which is a pretty good call. Once again James deploys a narrative point of view that is highly nested. There is a formal first-person narrator, who grew up in the English seaside town where the story is set. He meets a man, far from the place, who has a story to tell about the town. Within that story is a young man who is basically the main character of this story. This is typical of James, building formal distances into his stories, which can make them, as here, fuzzy and second- or thirdhand, blunting the impact in stark contrast to the vividly strange events recounted. Many things are "told of." Very little is certain. It all proceeds from a local folk legend that claims there were three crowns of East Anglia buried to protect the coast in some mystical fashion from invasion by "the Danes or the French or the Germans." I see the connection with the Le Fanu story, as something menacing begins to shadow the young man after he carefully searches for, finds, and digs up one of these crowns—the last one undiscovered according to legend. The familiar that attaches to the man is only a dark shadow, seen fleetingly, but he is accompanied by a heavy vibe. These crowns are intended to stay buried and protect the coast, see? The young man gets the point and manages to put the crown back where he found it, but it's too late. His transgression will not go unmet, and he knows it. The first time I read this it struck me as patriotic British claptrap, but then I developed a taste for James and can appreciate it more now as a potent ghost story. I like the feeling it bears of implacable antiquity and forces beyond our ken. The crown is there to protect the coastal town from Germans and such, but it will make short work of you if you get in the way even if you are British yourself. James paints his tones in blacks, whites, and grays and the story's most dramatic motions all take place under the surface, in rippling currents. It gets under your skin because that's where it takes place. The things it tells stick with you.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)
Read story online.

Relic (2020)

This Australian picture is good at setting a mood and sustaining it but unfortunately can't make up its mind about two separate directions: a sensitive movie about aging and dementia on the one hand and a big ol' scary horror show on the other. Most of us already know one way or another—it's intuitive—that aging is its own horror show (like so many aspects of living as the better alternative to dying). Michael Haneke seemed almost gauche when he noticed this about aging with his gimlet eye in Amour. Relic starts with the disappearance of Edna (Robyn Nevin), who has been missing for days. People turn out to search the woods for her. She's a woman in her 80s who has been forgetful lately and it doesn't look good. Then one day after a week or so she's back again, with no explanations about where she was—won't even talk about it. Her daughter Kay (Emily Mortimer) and granddaughter Sam (Bella Heathcote) traveled to be in on the search and now they decide to stick around. All relationships are wary, tentative, and distant, but the bonds plainly run deep too. They're not really a happy family but we know their unhappiness. And now at long last is the old lady losing it? Well, possibly, these things happen, but then instead the movie develops a fascination with the house. Noises are heard beyond the walls—literally things that go bump in the night. More and more Relic becomes a story about the irrational space inside that house—that's where Edna went, apparently, and Sam spends some time there too. There's some mumbo-jumbo backstory about an older house on the property that was destroyed but its windows kept for the present house. A mistake, possibly. Portals, in short, maybe. After a few cycles of that we land again on the angst and unease of aging and constant peekaboo about dementia—is Edna losing it or isn't she? How sad if she is! Inquiring minds want to know but Edna wants inquiring minds to leave her alone. I think, out of this elegantly mounted mess, the better movie is the one about aging and dementia, but even the horror story would be better without the aging and dementia notes. So Relic for me was not really a win-win.

"The Mezzotint" (1904)

This M.R. James story is full of the fussy little complications I'm starting to like about him. The story's setup puts the most fantastic stuff at least at thirdhand account, for example, though you don't particularly notice. He uses such devices to distance and blur, as a kind of misdirection, even as he maintains a lucid if slightly stiff academic tone. The characters are stuffy people who work in libraries and museums along with the dealers they rely on. Our main guy is in charge of procuring topographical drawings and engravings for a university museum. One of his dealers alerts him to a mezzotint, a print using a technique that gives it a distinctive lustrous tone, all in silvers or sepia. The dealer thinks it may be of interest, but it's expensive. Send it over, says our guy. When it arrives, he is disappointed. He doesn't find it remarkable. It is only a lackluster image of a mansion with information about it missing. Later, a visitor likes it more than he does, pointing out the image of the figure entering in the foreground from the side. Hmm, our guy had not noticed that before. Even later, a third person has a strong reaction to it. Now the figure is on the lawn of the estate, creeping on all fours. The drama of the mezzotint proceeds from there, with our guy and his crew checking it regularly and getting a narrative out of what they see. Some minor flaws: at some point I for one would have sat and look at that mezzotint like I was watching TV—our team tries it late but it doesn't seem to change when they're watching. They also construct a big narrative out of the changing scene, as if that's the point, when in this situation I think the simple fact that it is happening would be sufficiently alarming or at least intriguing. Wouldn't we be getting the print into the lab for analysis of the ink and such? The changing picture is the really freaky thing here, not the story it is depicting, as satisfyingly horrible as that is when we learn more about the mansion and its history. Still, I have to admit James can cast a spell and I end up liking how fanciful some of his premises are—they're both playful and uncanny and they often work. The academic setting where art is prized is a nice one too. The mezzotint exists to be beautiful or informative or both, but there is also something disturbingly wrong with it. It's a good tension—good story.

Read story online.

"Count Magnus" (1904)

I admit M.R. James has been something of an acquired taste—he has felt consistently oversold—but stories like this are bringing me around. He has a strange dry way of telling them, ruminative and circling main points, though the details and violence as reported can be ferocious. They are often in the vein if not indeed classics of one of horror's favorite devices, first-person tales by librarians, scientists, and other researchers whose work introduces them to curious mysteries that deepen into the uncanny. "Count Magnus" is built out of documents found hidden in a house that has been purchased and demolished for new construction. I should say spoiler alert because this latter point is reserved as a reveal for the end. But it's only an empty formality, as it adds little to the foregoing. James sets up basically a historian's approach to assembling knowledge, summarizing and editing original documents (judiciously, we trust). This cerebral and sober distance can work to make fantastic events more believable but also less immediate; paradoxically, the impact is more strained but also more insidiously unnerving. You feel the spook later and it doesn't necessarily go away quickly. So there is our narrator, puzzling over details from the found documents, and there is Mr. Wraxall, a freelance writer who sold light travel pieces and created the documents—notes, mostly, for his pieces. The story involves Wraxall's experience in a region of Sweden where he died and specifically one estate, where his body was found. The local inquest rules it death by "visitation of God." "Count Magnus" is ambiguous enough in its details that it may be considered a ghost story (as Wikipedia and the Penguin collection above has it) but others take it as a vampire story—most horror writers of the day had at least one or two of them, the way all garage bands in the '60s covered "Gloria." The story has some great effects with various hideous deaths. Count Magnus is shown to be a cruel lord of the manor in the feudal times when he was alive, severely punishing the peasants on his estate for the smallest infractions. As Wraxall investigates, we see evidence that something is affecting him. He begins to have blackouts and periods of missing time and confusion. At one point he reports: "[I] found myself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate, and, I believe, singing or chanting some such words as, 'Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?' and then, something more which I have failed to recollect." This clouding minds business to me puts it squarely in the vampire realm, though we are spared any overt blood-sucking, purple lips, etc. You have to wonder what an inquest jury is getting at with the "visitation of God" ruling. Our narrator does not know because he only has the documents to go on, and Mr. Wraxall has long since been dead and unable to tell the rest of the story himself.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.

"The Haunted Dolls' House" (1923)

I haven't entirely connected with M.R. James so far, and I'd really like to ever since I found out Mark E. Smith of the Fall was a fan. I still haven't got to all his best regarded stories but consensus seems to lean toward "Casting the Runes" as very best and it didn't do much for me (the Tourneur movie Curse of the Demon is faithful, not bad, and about as good). This later story is not that impressive either—haunted dollhouse with tiny ghostly figures reenacting murders in an intricate tableau every night at 1 a.m., what's to be done? Still, I was struck by the glowing imagery of the dollhouse in its overnight convulsions. I thought the story ought to be an ideal candidate and good bet for a movie adaptation, particularly in the silent era it comes from. It's probably a little old-fashioned now but I imagine, say, director Guy Maddin (My Winnipeg, Tales From the Gimli Hospital) could do something with it. The detail I like is the sight of the dollhouse at night: " ... though there was no light at all in the room, the Dolls' House ... stood out with complete clearness.... The effect was that of a bright harvest moon shining full on the front of a big white stone mansion—a quarter of a mile away it might be, and yet every detail was photographically sharp." I like the image of our hero, Mr. Dillet, sitting up in bed in a dark room in the middle of the night and seeing that. Even silent movie technology in 1923 should have been able to handle it. Think of the French epic from 1923 La roue, or the 1924 version of Peter Pan, or certain effects in Metropolis that reduce actors to the size of dolls. Mr. Dillet is entirely rapt by his hobby of collecting antiques and especially dollhouses. When he brings home this one (it's not his first) he spends hours lovingly setting it up, arranging figures, furniture, and other accessories. That makes him likable even if he is moneyed and haughty, but it's also beside the point. As for the difficulties posed (mainly interrupted sleep) it appears you can do what Mr. Dillet finally does, put it in another room, and problem solved basically. It never seems to be threatening, only a nuisance at worst. Well, it might make you depressed to be reminded every night that some murders of innocents went apparently unpunished. That should never happen. But the magic, such as it is, is in the dollhouse and its ability to cast a campfire mood of comfort and thrilling strangeness.

The Big Book of the Masters of Horror, Weird and Supernatural Short Stories, pub. Dark Chaos
Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Read story online.

Henry James: A Life (1953-1985)

Does it say something about the tendency of Henry James toward prolixity that even the condensed version of his biography comes in over 700 pages? It might have more to do with making his three score and ten in a productive career, but that's still a big book, cut down from Leon Edel's original five volumes published between 1953 and 1972. It's enjoyable for anyone with more than passing interest in James and who can stomach people routinely calling him "The Master." Yes and yes for me, though just barely on the latter point. I learned a lot of interesting things. He knew Flaubert and Zola as a young man. He became close friends with Ivan Turgenev. His flirtation with theater was a humiliating disaster. Beginning midway through composing What Maisie Knew in the mid-1890s, he dictated to typists and revised from there. In fact, his personal life in the 1890s—acquiring a typewriter and having electricity installed in his flat—vividly place him in the far past. I should know, because typewriters did not become available until 1874, but it still blows my mind that James and all the others submitted manuscripts in longhand. No wonder he developed some kind of repetitive strain injury, which prompted the move to dictation. Maybe that's all beside the point. Edel is an assiduous biographer, meticulously chasing down points of detail via letters, diary entries, and any way he can find evidence. By his view, James was celibate all his life, and there's a strong sense he was probably gay in an era that would not countenance that. James saw what happened to a much younger man, Oscar Wilde (whose work he didn't think much of anyway, though I still suspect Dorian Gray had something to do with James's The Sacred Fount, doubtless unconsciously). Edel's insights can be striking and illuminating, notably in that 1890s period, when James's greatest personal failure was followed by some of his greatest work, through which Edel traces an ingenious restorative process. Edel lauds the last three novels above all others, as do most students of James, but his personal favorites appear to be the short novel The Aspern Papers and the long story "The Beast in the Jungle"—excellent choices. Along the way, James has interesting friendships with Edith Wharton, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, and the public at large, which has always been a little dubious about James, the wise course. For the rest of us, this is a great one-stop account of his life.

"interlocutor" count = 1 / 714 pages

In case it's not at the library.

"The Jolly Corner" (1908)

It's not his last story, but "The Jolly Corner" is a nice end-piece for Henry James. It's a ghost story, like The Turn of the Screw though more wistful, and again reverberates with the tensions of New World and Old—in this case, between a life lived in Europe or the States. Our hero, Spencer Brydon, left for Europe when he was 23. Now he is 56, returning to New York after a Jesus' age to deal with the properties that have supported him, including what he insists on calling "The Jolly Corner," the house in Manhattan where he was raised. He wonders what his life would have been if he'd stayed. He imagines an "alter ego" (James's italics), an ambitious and successful businessman, who seems to become ever more real as we go. In the wonderful (or exasperating) ambiguities of James, in the end it's not clear whether Brydon is alive or dead. It might work either way. It all turns on a nightly tour Brydon takes of his homestead, and a closed door that should be open. On such slender reeds are these things made. James's evasive allusive style is suited to a certain type of horror, where in many cases it's to the narrator's purpose to keep us in the dark, and blind. A lot of time is spent on that door. The path through three adjoining rooms is charted. We come away with a reasonable schematic in our heads for much of that section of the building. The room with the closed door is a strange architectural feature, and the door is the only access to it. Brydon is a man of habit and never shuts doors. Yet the door is shut. He is so filled with dread he cannot bring himself to open it. He takes his leave, then faints and falls, and comes to with his friend Alice Staverton cradling his head in her lap. Is it the afterlife? We'll never know. What's most haunting about "The Jolly Corner," its main charge for me, is the sense of a life that could have been, the road not taken, etc. This sense only increases and grows more complex as we age, growing apart by the vectors we have taken. We are many of us literally haunted by our own alter egos by the time we reach age 56. As it happens, I'm also someone who is a little haunted by the house I grew up in, much more so in fact than Brydon. He may have had it thrust on him, but I share his sense for the power of these physical locations, and not just in memory. They are places where ghosts dwell, and James is great at turning all that into a piece that is equally suggestive, mysterious, and powerful.

"interlocutor" count = 0 / 35 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

The Papers (1903)

This story from late in Henry James's career, which is long enough to qualify as a novella (whatever), bears interest for several reasons. First, it's more readable than usual for this part of his career. But the main attraction for me is that it reads like an early and prescient look at public relations, celebrity culture, and mass media. It feels very modern. The "papers" of the title are the tabloids and broadsheets of the time, published frequently and hawked on the streets, the Fleet Street of just over a century ago. The two main characters—with the usual ridiculous names: Maud Blandy and Howard Bight—are go-getters in their 20s attempting to carve out lives as freelance writers for the papers. They meet in coffee shops, stay up on all the latest news, and share information with one another. They're going to end up married but that's beside the point. The point is making a living in this fast-paced exciting world of eternal news. The story is also interesting because for some reason I sense more than anywhere else how much James relished being a Britisher, practically a European. One person who consumes Maud's and Howard's interest is a mysterious glittering celebrity who manages always to stay in the news and yet elude reporters. He has one of the most ridiculous names yet: Sir A.B.C. Beadel-Muffet K.C.B., M.P. (On the other hand, I just started reading my first Jeeves book by P.G. Wodehouse the other day and now I suspect these kinds of names are more like a British thing—perhaps the very reason this story feels so British to me.) Beadel-Muffet pulls off a cunning stunt of public relations, the kind of self-promotion still being worked by celebrities today. Howard intimates to others that he had something to do with it but that's likely more by way of impressing a client. Impressing clients is also something that feels modern in this story. Not that Beadel-Muffet's promotion is terribly original, as Jack the Ripper had already happened nearly 20 years earlier, a key harbinger of the celebrity and mass media times to come. James obviously has no better idea what to do about this phenomenon than we do now all this time later. Like us, he feels gravely suspicious of it. Also like us, he is fascinated by the way it moves and shines in the light.

"interlocutor" count = 2 / 97 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

"The Birthplace" (1903)

This late Henry James story is lauded on Wikipedia as witty and hilarious, warm words from the typically staid crowdsourced online encyclopedia. Well, maybe it's witty and hilarious. It's intended primarily as a send-up of tourist Shakespeare worship. The principal characters, Mr. and Mrs. Gedge, once again hail from the over-refined and underpaid refuge of the upper classes, whom James admired. The Gedges, who are in circumstances, take positions as guides and managers of the original Shakespeare home, where the Bard was actually raised. James appreciated the work of Shakespeare even as he doubted the authorship. Like James, Mr. Gedge subscribes to a theory other than single authorship and now his half-hearted guide patter is starting to bum the people out. This in turn is causing Mrs. Gedge nervous complaints, especially when the big boss shows up to set her husband straight. In the end, Mr. Gedge gets the Shakespeare religion, extols the legend enthusiastically, earns a raise, and Mrs. Gedge is happy again. Droll, very droll. I have no dog in any fight about Shakespeare so a key aspect of the premise already falls a little flat for me. And then it's also typical of James's later stuff, which requires patience and parsing. I was short on the former, as he might say, and so my interest in carrying on with the latter, nay my very ability, was perforce diminished. On top of that, the proofreading in the electronic version can be off. Many confusing commas, or lacks thereof, I'll put it that way. I like the electronic version because I often need help in the first place with vocabulary and untranslated foreign terms. Folks, this is why I'm sold on e-books. These days, when I read a printed book, I sorely miss being able to look up words in context as I go (and lugging out the dictionary is inconvenient), which is practically a necessity with many Henry James passages. Also, Delphi editions let you buy everything an author ever wrote, including letters and criticism, all in one giant product. I call them shelf products. Amazing, wonderful, convenient. I love them except for glitches like the proofreading or occasional botched navigation (see, or rather don't see, the Balzac edition). This Henry James story is not that perfect, though I might like it better in another mood. Sorry about the testimonial for e-books. I had to say it somewhere.

"interlocutor" count = 1 / 55 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

"The Story in It" (1902)

Skeptics of modern or postmodern self-consciousness are likely well advised to approach this odd story with caution. It's short but packed tight with Henry James's themes and preoccupations, which seemed to be shading inevitably more and more toward a darker cynicism in these later pieces from the turn of the century. Mrs. Maud Blessingbourne, a widow, is a house guest of Mrs. Dyott. Mrs. Dyott is having an affair with Colonel Voyt, which Maud does not know—we learn of it ourselves only in a comical scene of a few compact sentences. Maud, who likes to read romance novels from France, has a crush on Colonel Voyt, who is married in addition to his dalliance with Mrs. Dyott. When we see the three together, they discuss French novels, comparing them to English or American. Colonel Voyt wants to press the point that a woman making bad decisions is actually the essence of the romance, suggesting he is talking about not just sexual experience, but availability, knowingness, volition. The innocent lamb Maud maintains there is drama and tension in the story of a woman maintaining her virtue. This is how we go with James. The language and presentation are so dense and allusive in this story you have to read it through once just to figure out the basic situation. Then you can go back to start teasing out and unpacking all these subtleties going on. In a sense, that's one thumbnail definition of postmodernism—you can't look at anything just once, yet paradoxically you have to absorb the whole thing all at once, before you can make out the intricate pieces for what they are. And this is a reasonably short story—18 pages, albeit with "chapters." As Maud defends her ideas about romance and the virtuous woman, she is acting it out in her life at the same time. As Mrs. Dyott and Colonel Voyt argue their cases for romance lying in the woman and/or both of the lovers doing wrong, they are doing the same. That makes it an argument everyone gets to win. And in turn that makes this story a very neat trick, well done.

"interlocutor" count = 1 / 18 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

"The Altar of the Dead" (1895)

Henry James addresses an interesting life condition in this story—the deaths of friends. There is a typical James plot to go along with that, with the usual odd and suggestive ambiguities. But I wish he'd stayed with the friends a little more, and the sense of loss. James was in his early 50s when he wrote it, and our hero, George Stransom, is 55. His most painful loss was a fiancée, but there are many other friends as well, including one, Acton Hague, who offended Stransom so deeply he never forgave him. One day, mulling these matters the way James characters will, Stransom wanders into an unfamiliar church, has a strange inspiration, and wins permission from the church to dedicate one of their candlelit alcoves to his friends—all except Hague. Soon enough a woman is involved, who often sits in silence with Stransom at his altar of the dead. Years go by. Slowly Stransom and the woman warm to one another and finally speak and find personal connections. By an amazing coincidence (what a small town London can be), it turns out the woman not only knew Hague but he was important to her. She beseeches Stransom to add a candle for Hague, but Stransom can't do it. The never-specified wrong was too great. In the end, the story and Stransom bend toward forgiveness, but it's left fraught and ambiguous. Because the sin is never specified the situation becomes overly abstract. Sin is sin and forgiveness is supposed to be absolute, but really there's more nuance to it. It's hard to feel too much for or against Stransom without knowing the reason for his break with Hague. But I did like the sense of watching and even standing vigil as friends (and family, not discussed here) inevitably begin to die. The story has some access to the experience of living on with friends even after they have died. For example, a friend of mine died in June 2001, and I often wonder how he would have reacted to 9/11 and all its aftermath. But that kind of thing is not for James. The closest he gets is the loss of Stransom's fiancée, which is so much more intense than a pal they're barely even comparable. But it's a nice idea, and the scenes at the altar of the dead are notably beautiful.

"interlocutor" count = 0 / 36 pages

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014)

Marlon James's breakthrough third novel is actually not brief, at some 700 pages, nor is it particularly about seven killings, although I may have lost track in the blizzards of surging language and exploding violence. It's a sprawling and slippery mass. Its broad sections revolve around five separate specific dates in Jamaica and in New York City (December 2, 1976, etc.), populated by a babbling cacophony of a competing cast of characters like voices from the lake of fire: Jamaican gangsters and their women, CIA men, a rock critic who reads like a road never taken by Cameron Crowe, and many more. James, like Jonathan Lethem or Jonathan Franzen, bears certain sublimated rock critic impulses, but also like the Jonathans evinces a greater gift for fiction and novels. The narrative is rich with potent allusion. Much of the larger story revolves around the assassination attempt on Bob Marley that took place in December 1976, connecting it to the later epidemic of crack cocaine in New York in the '80s, and the shared fortunes that followed for Jamaica and the US. The first two sections of Brief History, nearly half the book, are dedicated to the day before and the day of the attempt on Marley's life. In terms of the in-your-face style of telling the story, probably the most obvious comparison is with William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. They both use short chapters written first-person by multiple characters, but Faulkner's book is compact and weak sister next to this, which is a hothouse of febrile voice, Jamaican patois, and homicidal fantasies even by the fragments. I got the sense that James wrote and wrote and wrote, then condensed and chopped, and then wrote and wrote and wrote some more. I wouldn't be surprised if the final version represents only a fraction of all that could have gone in. James here feels like Thomas Wolfe in the passionate throes of erupting great novels. A Brief History dwells in streams of consciousness, flowing deep into the heads of even incidental characters, but also feels as if it were written almost unconsciously, by a medium catching vibrations from the air. Reading it for the first time, I often lost the thread through its lush trails but it never really lets you go. It is usually deep inside heads or briskly moving the action along, and sometimes the edges blur. It's hallucinatory, with static bursts of writing as vivid as William Burroughs at his most fiendish, some of the scenes sticking with me still. James has done an impressive job of telling the story of Jamaica and the US, specifically from the '70s to the '90s, but the scope is tremendous historically and the ambition almost limitless. I can't wait to try this monster again.

In case it's not at the library.

The Golden Bowl (1904)

Henry James's last novel is one of those books I suspect many people read (or don't but say they did) for the sake of saying they have. I know I might have! It is an often overwhelming thicket of delicate nuance, most often dwelling inside its characters and their complex relations. Maggie Verver has married the Prince, a charming Italian fellow. She is the only daughter of her widowed father, the industrial baron and art collector Adam Verver (not to be confused with Adam West). Something about the family that verves together—swerves together? Lerves together? Adam and Maggie (now the Princess) are close, but she knows her marriage threatens their intimacy, and she fears he will be sad and alone now, like the father at the end of Late Spring. So she works with a woman improbably named Fanny Assingham to find him someone. That turns out to be an American woman of about the Princess's age named Charlotte Stang. By amazing coincidence, or not, Charlotte has a history with the Prince, which is rekindled after Charlotte's marriage to Adam. It's quite a predicament when the Princess figures out what is going on. But stop for a second to consider the situation in terms of James's familiar themes. Here, starkly, are European elites preying on American naifs. But it's not quite so simple. The Ververs are not that naif. They hold the cards of wealth and know it, and the Prince knows it too, and they know he does. Within these interior machinations, it's often a matter of what each one thinks or believes, which of course James keeps ambiguous (now a valued corporate trait). There's also the matter of the cloudy areas of who knows what and when do they know it. But it's all so cunningly conceived for balance you almost feel like you could put The Golden Bowl on top of a garden stake and it would just sit there spinning. If the Prince and Charlotte behave licentiously—and they do, think about it—I'm not sure the Ververs end up that much ahead of them morally. No one is talking about incest, only a kind of American clannishness that is not hard to recognize. For all the difficulty of James's language, and it often requires patience, it seems in the service of something subtle but real. The best scenes are when combinations of the four interact. The title conceit, a real object in a pawnshop, is obtuse, and as a plot device jarring, a blaring circus in the middle of all these restrained beiges and grays. But he had to call the book something. For the dedicated only, as you may have suspected.

"interlocutor" count = 6 / 518 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

The Ambassadors (1903)

A marriage usually looms large in Henry James's tales, which is the case in The Ambassadors, the second of his late three masterpieces. This novel also sees further returns to his themes around relations between the New World and the Old. Our hero, Lambert Strether, has been dispatched from Woollett, Massachusetts, to Paris, France, to collect the lone male heir of the Newsome family, who is wanted to run the family industry. The woman who sent him, Mrs. Newsome, is a widow Strether is interested in marrying for her money. The lone male heir is her nephew, Chad Newsome (compare Christopher Newman). Chad is 30 and presently having an affair with a married woman, Madame Marie de Vionnet. It's quite a pickle and the complications only start there. There are more characters, more intrigue, and more, many more, words. The language as always takes patience, but I'm happy to find The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove are both a cut above some of his novels of the previous 20 years. I'm still a little resentful of all the parsing and unpacking required, but the rewards are there. Strether, who is 55, is so charmed by Chad and Madame de Vionnet that ultimately he fails at his ambassadorial mission. The daughter of Mrs. Newsome, Chad's sister Sarah Pocock, is then dispatched to follow on and close the deal. Thus the plural of the title—first Strether and then Mrs. Pocock. This second team of diplomats, the Pocock entourage, is comical and a little horrifying, an early version of ugly American. In retrospect, perhaps, Mrs. Pocock is the one of them all that keeps her eye on the prize and maintains perspective. When I put myself in her place, and imagine a brother committed to a woman he can never marry—Madame de Vionnet is already married and also a bit older than Chad—I see the point. On the other hand, Chad's easy life and the gentle ways of European society near its best—well, I can see the appeal for Chad too. Mostly what surprises me is how well James keeps such a microscopic story of typical human foible interesting and even mysterious. The strange characters who populate this novel don't entirely make sense. I'm not sure what they're all doing here. But nonetheless something about it is so inspired it is positively a pleasure to battle through. And probably worth going back to as well.

"interlocutor" count = 6 / 518 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

The Wings of the Dove (1902)

After the miserable experience I had with The Sacred Fount, I was prepared for the worst with the last three (and generally most acclaimed) of Henry James's novels. But I should have remembered things are acclaimed for a reason, because I enjoyed The Wings of the Dove quite a bit. Yes, the sentences are long and the abstractions, not to mention the vague pronouns, piled high. It requires some patience. The most interesting character in the whole thing, and arguably the main character, Kate Croy, is also one of his best, even though she is kept mostly on the sidelines and out of sight. But she is responsible for the main plot, a complicated scheme about (what else?) marriage and money. There are points to groan over. As often with James, neither the characters nor the motivations seem quite recognizable as human, but more like fevered figments of James's hot stove brain. Yet the monstrousness of what he imagines them doing is hard to deny. It sets you back. I saw the 1997 film version when it was new, but it's little help. This is not a novel easily filmed. The dithering, smeary, precisely imprecise language is ultimately what makes it. Our narrator—clearly possessed of a sensibility, and perhaps an agenda, hiding some things from us as he reveals others—is perpetually forestalled in explicating concrete action, constantly checking himself and adjusting for nuance. James returns here, in sideways fashion, to his earliest themes, as Europeans are once again trifling with the naivete of Americans. What's maddening is how elusive the action seems, constantly raising the question of whether James has really settled on the single and best way to tell this story. It's quite arguable that he has not. So much happens offstage, for example, that could be emphasized differently or more strongly. That applies equally to the action we do see. It feels like an implicit declaration that reality is impossible to know. We have the facts of this story, a sense of intrigue among fewer than a dozen people, and a sense of how we might feel about them, but very little is certain. Almost nothing, in fact. There is so much more we could know. Yet the ending also feels satisfactory—there's a certain symmetry to the actions and all the ambiguity. James seems to be operating on a whole new level here. Is it perhaps some perspicacious new editor and/or publisher? I couldn't help noticing that the "interlocutor" level in these major novels drops off dramatically (the preferred tic for the usage largely become "companion," which I didn't count). If there is something clumsy in the insights, descriptions, and most obviously in the language, it also feels measured and careful. James seems to be doing exactly what he intends here, and there is a strong sense of clarity to the confident way it moves. In some ways, it feels like you could spend a lifetime reading it, or did.

"interlocutor" count = 4 / 608 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

The Sacred Fount (1901)

Henry James apparently disavowed this short but interminable novel, declining to include it in a comprehensive 1908 collection of his work. Whatever else it is, The Sacred Fount is difficult and annoying, that's for sure. Even the typically anodyne Wikipedia has a note of impatience in its summary: "[A]fter a while, the narrator's theories begin to drive everybody, including the reader, a little nuts." Yes, and what's more, as usual, finding the antecedents to the pronouns is the hard part, with generous portions of "that to which he had earlier referred" and the like. The consensus appears to be that this nuanced narrator is overly interested in various sexual affairs going on behind the scenes at a weekend gathering in the country, and that might indeed be what this novel is about. I'm struck, however, that the basic clue appears to be who has aged among the weekend attendees, and who, improbably, has grown more youthful. Some of these people are 40 and look 25, that is, but their descriptions are rendered in such excruciating detail that I'm halfway willing to believe they actually are younger, and this is some kind of science fiction twist (after all, we've seen that James likes detective and horror stylings). "The sacred fount" is not sex, as most take it, but literally the thing Ponce de Leon was looking for. These richies have a line on it. Although that doesn't explain some of the unnatural aging of some of the other characters, so fuck that. The novel is probably short enough it could be mistaken for a Dick Francis in mass market paperback, but don't let that fool you. You're going to want to hurl this one across the room frequently, and you can take that as a recommendation underlining James's own instinct to avoid it—I read it so you don't have to—or perhaps you can take it as a personal challenge. After all, it's so short. It does have a kind of spooky Twilight Zone air somehow, as if the narrator is the only one truly alive there and the others come to life only when he engages them in conversation. Otherwise they are like murmuring extras in party and dinner scenes in movies like Last Year at Marienbad. If you're going to read The Sacred Fount, see if you don't agree with me that there really is some kind of potion or elixir these wealthy privileged characters are sharing with (and/or denying to) one another. They are visibly becoming younger even over the course of the weekend. In another week they might be teenagers. What the point of that could possibly be, I admit, is not a question I'm ready to answer yet. One theory that occurred to me is that James read Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray and it made him mad with jealousy. Following this came arguably his greatest period of work.

"interlocutor" count = 14 / 172 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)