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October 28, 2003
OGIC: Grand tour
I love Casey Abell's selection of the best six-step introduction to the work of Henry James (his favorite novelist and mine). His list rang at least five bells for me; it's been long enough since I read Roderick Hudson that I can't say for certain whether it would make my own list. The beauty of Casey's list is that it gives you tastes of all the important phases of James, from the discovery of many of his career's most resonant, abiding themes in Roderick Hudson to the still-Victorian high realism of The Portrait of a Lady, the attempt at a great social novel in The Princess Casamassima, the heady, virtuosic point-of-view innovations (following nearly a decade away from long fiction) of What Maisie Knew, and then full-flowering late James in The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove, novels of the Major Phase that manage to reconcile the psychological embeddedness of Maisie with the keen social observation of Portrait and Princess. This list will get you far.There's much more on Casey's James page, as you'll see for yourself if you simply scroll down. His commentary on the harder-to-find among James's published letters is both a fun read and a useful resource for anyone doing research on James. It has inspired tonight's double dose of fortune cookies (above).
One little point of dissent: more than most filmed versions of James, I loathed Iain Softley's Wings of the Dove. Casey by no means loves it, but he's kinder about it than I could be. I thought that Agnieszka Holland's Washington Square was worthwhile, with its achingly restrained Jennifer Jason Leigh performance. For some unfathomable reason I haven't seen William Wyler's The Heiress nor The Innocents, the 1961 adaptation of "The Turn of the Screw" that is said to be so chilling.
But the best Jamesian cinematic experience I know is Jacques Rivette's new wave film Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau. David Thomson calls it "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane" (in his New Biographical Dictionary). It's very loosely based on the obscure James novella that was brought back into print a couple of years ago by New York Review Books, The Other House--so loosely that it can't rightly be called an adaptation; rather, call the novella its inspiration. There's a little Jamesian world tucked inside the wider world of the movie, which is as far from Jamesian as possible, and the characters get sucked into it. And into it. And into it. Not unlike your trusty blogger and Mr. Abell.
Posted October 28, 2003 2:05 AM
