Critics From The United States

"You can hope for lucky encounters only if you walk around a lot."

"There is a New Orleans city accent... associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans. “You’re right on that. We’re Mediterranean. I’ve never been to Greece or Italy, but I’m sure I’d be at home there as soon as I landed.” He would, too, I thought. New Orleans resembles Genoa or Marseilles, or Beirut or the Egyptian Alexandria more than it does New York, although all seaports resemble one another more than they can resemble any place in the interior. Like Havana and Port-au-Prince, New Orleans is within the orbit of a Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic. The Mediterranean, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico form a homogeneous, though interrupted, sea."

"Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one."

"Show me a poet, and I'll show you a shit."

"People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news."

"The subject [of Stalin's death] permitted a rare blend of invective and speculation—both Hearst papers, as I recall, ran cartoons of Stalin being rebuffed at the gates of Heaven, where Hearst had no correspondents—and I have seldom enjoyed a week of newspaper reading more."

"As a result of its generous stand [Robert Maynard Hutchins’ controversial policy of admitting students after their second year of high-school], the University of Chicago’s undergraduate college acts as the greatest magnet for neurotic juveniles since the Children’s Crusade, with Robert Maynard Hutchins…playing the role of Stephen the Shepherd Boy."

"No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connection of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us forever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody's right and ease and the other somebody's pain and wrong."

"Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty, and wastes upon mean motives and imperceptible 'points of view' his neat literary style, his felicitous phrases, his swift and caustic satire."

"He dictated beautifully. He had a melodious voice and in some way he seemed to be able to tell if I was falling behind. Typewriting for him was exactly like accompanying a singer on the piano... They seemed to spread out across the page like a beautiful and rambling architecture of this medieval town, to give his work a lonely individuality and a particular place in literature."

"In 1895 the novelist Henry James acquired electric lighting; in 1896 he rode a bicycle; in 1897 he wrote on a typewriter; in 1898 he saw a . Within a very few years he could have had a Freudian analysis, traveled in an aircraft, understood the principles of the jet-engine or even space travel."

"Henry James is at once the most and least appreciated figure in American writing. His authority as a novelist of unique quality and as an archetypal American has grown immeasurably in the years since his death, and in some literary circles his name has of late been turned into the password of a cult. But at the same time he is still regarded, in those circles that exert the major influence on popular education and intelligence, with the coldness and even derision that he encountered in the most depressed period of his career, when his public deserted him and he found himself almost alone."

"James's repressions and evasions are many, varied and exhausting. Why more people are not seen rushing shrieking from libraries, shredding James novels in their hands, I cannot say. I used to wonder whether enthusiasm for him was based on identification, since his passive, tentative heroes resemble many academics. Perhaps what is intolerable is his enshrinement in a soporific criticism. So much must be overlooked to crown him with laurel."

"I am reading another Henry James called The Ambassadors the man is uncanny the way he unravels a psychological situation. He writes in about five dimensions – and in that gorgeous convoluted style which, if you give it your closest attention, is nevertheless not obscure."

"After a luncheon party of which he had been, as they say, "the life", we happened to be drinking our coffee together while the rest of the party had moved on to the verandah. "What a charming picture they make," he said, with his great head aslant, "the women there with their embroidery, the..." There was nothing in his words, anybody might have spoken them; but in his attitude, in his voice, in his whole being at that moment, I divined such complete detachment that I was startled into speaking out of myself. "I can't bear to look at life like that," I blurted out, "I want to be in everything. Perhaps that is why I cannot write, it makes me feel absolutely alone..." The effect of this confession upon him was instantaneous and surprising. He leant forward and grasped my arm excitedly; "Yes, it is solitude. If it runs after you and catches you, well and good. But for heaven's sake don't run after it. It is absolute solitude." And he got up hurriedly and joined the others."

"To listen to him was like watching an artist at work; the ample phrases slowly uncoiled, with much pausing and hesitating for the choice word, and out of them was gradually constructed the impression of the scene or the idea in his mind; when it was finished the listener was in possession of a characteristic product of Henry James's art. It was hardly to be called conversation, perhaps; it was too magnificent, too deliberate, for the give-and-take of a mixed gathering; but his companionable humour, his quick sensibility, his ornate and affectionate courtesy, set it further still from any appearance of formality or display. Though in any company he was certain to be the dominant, preponderant figure, his interest and his participation in the life around him were unfailing, and he seemed to have the gift of creating a special, unique relation with every one who came his way."

"Even the most enthusiastic admirers of James's later work have sometimes felt that the importance of his subjects was hardly equal to the immense elaboration of his treatment of them—a judgement more crudely expressed by saying that ‘nothing happens’ in his books, for all their densely packed extent. It is true that his central theme, baldly stated, is often a small affair, and that he seldom allows a glimpse of the fiercer passions that are the common stock-in-trade of the novelist. But this criticism implies some misunderstanding of his view of a subject—the importance of which he held to depend primarily on the value, the intelligence, and the sensibility, of the people involved. An event is nothing in itself; the question is what a fine mind will make of it; and more and more, in James's books, the characters tended to become men and women of rare and acute perception, capable of making the utmost of all their experience. A very simple theme, entrusted to a few such people, would give him more than enough for dramatic development; and if their deeper feelings remain all but hidden under the delicate surface-play of their reflections and reactions, it was because the last results and furthest implications of a thing were to him always more significant, more charged with history, than the thing itself in its nakedness could possibly be. Hence his dislike of the raw, the crude, the staring, his love of the toned and seasoned and civilized, both in literature and in life."

"His sensitive appreciation of the minute distinctions, the fine shades, the all but inaudible tones, in the intercourse of very civilized people, together with his now complete mastery of his craft, began to give his work the strange and deeply individual aspect which it wore increasingly to the end. His style, matching the extreme subtlety of his perceptions and discriminations, developed an intricacy which might sometimes appear perversely obscure, though at its best it is really the simple expression of the effects he sought—suggestive, evocative effects, that gradually shape out a solid impression."

"When I was working on China Men, I remember reading a critic who was praising the great male writers, like Flaubert and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Henry James, who were able to write great women characters. I don't remember if they said women had done men in this way or not, but I remember thinking that to finish myself as a great artist I'd have to be able to create men characters. Along with that, I was thinking that I had to do more than the first person pronoun."

"He is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare in the history of poetry."

"James's earlier work had often substituted a character's impression of an event for the event itself. These pages do more - they change our very sense of what counts as an event in fiction. Sitting still counts; thinking, doing nothing, not moving. Emotions count, and the activity of perception as well."

"... A page of Mr James's later novels is like some vast, high-lifted park, exposing its densely-clad slopes to the rays of a late sun, embossed with the domes of verdure of a hundred shades of green, elms, oaks, and beeches contrasting with dusky pines and the slender silvery poplars of France the whole slope drinking, absorbing the light, blending and fusing its myriad tones and shades. Eidullia, little pictures of an infinite grace, come, as in Dante, to enhance the distinguished charm of the composition."

"I took H.J. to a secluded seat, and we had a talk... I questioned him about his ways of work. He admitted that he worked every day, dictated every morning, and began a new book the instant the old one was finished. He said it was his only chance because he worked so slowly, and excised so much. I asked him when the inception and design of a new book was formed; and he gave no satisfactory answer to this except to roll his eyes, to wave his hand about, to pat my knee and to say, "It's all about, it's about —— it's in the air —— it, so to speak, follows me and dogs me.""

"It took me years to ascertain that Henry James' work was giving me little pleasure: In each case I ask myself: "What the dickens is this novel about, and where does it think it's going to?" Question unanswerable! I gave up. To-day I have no recollection whatever of any characters of any events in either novel."

"I don't, for example, conjure up characters for the express purpose of despising them, of breaking their humps in public. I used to be astounded at Henry James et al., so nice nasty about it too, soooo refined. Gothic is of no interest to me. I try not to lend energy to building grotesqueries, depicting morbid relationships, dramatizing perversity."

"(What's the difference between a spokesman and a witness?) A spokesman assumes that he is speaking for others. I never assumed that I never assumed that I could. Fannie Lou Hamer, for example, could speak very eloquently for herself. What I tried to do, or to interpret and make clear was that what the Republic was doing to that woman, it was also doing to itself. No society can smash the social contract and be exempt from the consequences, and the consequences are chaos for everybody in the society. (Are there any white writers you would describe as witnesses?) Dostoyevsky, Dickens, James, Proust."

"The book was very hard to write because I was too young when I started, seventeen; it was really about me and my father. There were things I couldn't deal with technically at first. Most of all, I couldn't deal with me. This is where reading Henry James helped me, with his whole idea about the center of consciousness and using a single intelligence to tell the story. He gave me the idea to make the novel happen on John's birthday…The first person is the most terrifying view of all. I tend to be in accord with James, who hated the first person perspective, which the reader has no reason to trust-why should you need this I? How is this person real by dint of that bar blaring across the page?"

"It's not that he "bites off more than he can chaw," as T. G. Appleton said of Nathan, but he chaws more than he bites off."

"Life's too short for chess."

"Ideas are, in truth, force."

"Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact."

"the fraternising, endlessly conversing group of us...under the rustling pines....[talked of] a hundred human and personal things....[It was] high talk [in the] splendid American summer drawn out to its last generosity....[the talkers constituted] a little world of easy and happy interchange, of unrestricted and yet all so instructively sane and secure association and conversation, with all its liberties and delicacies, all its mirth and earnestness."

"The terrible fluidity of self-revelation."

"In art economy is always beauty."

"The ever importunate murmur, "Dramatize it, dramatize it!""

"We are divided of course between liking to feel the past strange and liking to feel it familiar."

"The historian, essentially, wants more documents than he can really use; the dramatist only wants more liberties than he can really take."

"To criticize is to appreciate, to appropriate, to take intellectual possession, to establish in fine a relation with the criticized thing and to make it one's own."

"The effort really to see and really to represent is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement. The great thing is indeed that the muddled state too is one of the very sharpest of the realities, that it also has color and form and character, has often in fact a broad and rich comicality."

"To see deep difficulty braved is at any time, for the really addicted artist, to feel almost even as a pang the beautiful incentive, and to feel it verily in such sort as to wish the danger intensified. The difficulty most worth tackling can only be for him, in these conditions, the greatest the case permits of."

"There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth... than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and the degree of the artist's prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs."

"Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so."

"[S]he had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned there, in her cave of treasures, like a lamp in a Byzantine vault."

"She was a woman who, between courses, could be graceful with her elbows on the table."

"When it's for each other that people give things up they don't miss them."

"[T]here are women who are for all your "times of life." They're the most wonderful sort."

"Live all you can — it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had?[…] What one loses one loses; make no mistake about that.[…] The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have.[…] Live!"

"People talk about the conscience, but it seems to me one must just bring it up to a certain point and leave it there. You can let your conscience alone if you're nice to the second housemaid."

"Most English talk is a quadrille in a sentry-box."

"I never really have believed in the existence of friendship in big societies—in great towns and great crowds. It is a plant that takes times and space and air; and London society is a huge "squash," as we elegantly call it—an elbowing, pushing, perspiring, chattering mob."