I'm determined to sell someone else besides me on Henry James before I die. It's not that he doesn't already have his fans (though probably not in the same number as Dickens or Austen) or that I'm the first person to ever hear of him. And I'll admit it's quite easy to make fun of his long-winded ways and his serious side profiles (he
always is so stern in any picture I've ever seen of him.) But if you can wade through some of his runaway train sentences (which actually are quite lovely at times) you'll can find surprisingly 'modern' stuff like this:
“Oh no, that is not necessary,” Miss Daintry rejoined, with more exactness. “There are one or two, however, who always appreciate a pretty speech.” She added in an instant: “Do you remember Mrs Mesh?”
“Mrs Mesh?” Florimond apparently did not remember.
“The wife of Donald Mesh; your grandfathers were first cousins. I don’t mean her grandfather, but her husband’s. If you don’t remember her, I suppose he married her after you went away.”
“I remember Donald; but I never knew he was a relation. He was single then, I think.”
“Well, he’s double now,” said Miss Daintry; “he’s triple, I may say, for there are two ladies in the house.”
“If you mean he’s a polygamist – are there Mormons even here?” Florimond, leaning back in his chair, with his elbow on the arm, and twisting with his gloved fingers the point of a small fair moustache, did not appear to have been arrested by this account of Mr Mesh’s household; for he almost immediately asked, in a large, detached way – “Are there any nice women here?”
“It depends on what you mean by nice women; there are some very sharp ones.”
“Oh, I don’t like sharp ones,” Florimond remarked, in a tone which made his aunt long to throw her sofa-cushion at his head. “Are there any pretty ones?”
She looked at him a moment, hesitating. “Rachel Torrance is pretty, in a strange, unusual way – black hair and blue eyes, a serpentine figure, old coins in her tresses; that sort of thing.”
“I have seen a good deal of that sort of thing,” said Florimond, abstractedly.
I especially like the part about throwing the sofa-cushion...who knew people in polite society had such thoughts back then? And apparently it was just as hard for single men and women as it is now:)
I remember when I first read James back in college...Washington Square was the first work of his I ever read and it touched me profoundly...and through all his (sometimes) dry way of putting things, I saw that he could see right through the veneer of proper society and heavy clothing to the heart that beats in anyone who has ever been manipulated or spurned in the name of love...or lack of it.
