The Henry James Effect

Is there anyone else out there, I wonder, who is, or was (or ever will again be), hopelessly addicted to Henry James? There can’t be many, I suspect. If indeed there are any at all. People are much too busy, these days, to struggle with the rotund, the resonating, the too-rococo sentence. The allusive, over-subtle approach irritates them, and the parenthetical tendency defeats. You have only to take that word parenthetical itself, for example. It’s a James word if ever I heard one, yet I can’t be absolutely sure it actually exists. But there it is: the ordinary vocabulary can sometimes sag a little, when the rococo in prose is under consideration. And needs must anyway, as they say, when it’s Henry James who drives!

No, it’s the short, sharp, staccato sort of thing that works best for people these days, I’m told. I even seem to remember that there was an instruction to that effect in a little book I bought recently on the practice, and art, of blogging. The implication having seemed to be, that since everyone is so very much too busy now, to do battle with protracted sentences, the potential blogger had very much better forget all about them, and do what he can to go with the current stream instead. It seemed rather a pity to me, I confess it. I have a lingering fondness for the protracted sentence - and parentheses have always seemed to be one of the staples of the compositional life. ‘Playing the Proust Game’, I have always called it; and it’s better than crosswords or sudoku, by half. For exercising the brain there's really nothing else quite like it - since it involves staggering all the way to the end of the sentence, without once going back to see how it started out!

It was a comment left on my fictional blog, I Beatrice, yesterday, as a matter of fact, that has prompted me to go down the Henry James route this morning. Somebody wrote to say that, although it was a long time since she had read James herself, she nevertheless thought she detected something in my own style of writing, that put her in mind of his. I was humbled by the comparison of course - since though one always dares to aspire (as why wouldn’t one, if one were trying at all?), one never does quite presume to hope. (Too many ‘ones’ there, I acknowledge it. But it’s a hard road to escape from, once having started out!)

I was humbled – but I was also vaguely troubled - by the comparison. Because there was a time when the Henry James thing was the only one I really knew, or wanted for myself. All through the sixties and seventies, when my own children were small ( and when I really, according to the standards set by today’s so-very-much-busier Mummies, oughtn’t to have had time for any such thing) ……. at every available spare moment in those busy years, nonetheless, I was to be found with a Henry James novel somewhere about my person. To such an extent indeed, that if I happened to have sat down for a moment without one, my small children would feel impelled to run anxiously off and fetch it for me! Small wonder then, that at that period in my life I began to write, to think - to talk even, I don’t doubt ! – like Henry James.

One small anecdote from that period springs to mind, and I relate it here , because I think it probably illustrates my past addiction better than anything else could do. It concerns my elder son, who is a lawyer of rising distinction these days, but who was then a rumbustious boy of five or six. He wasn’t ordinarily the sort of child to pre-occupy himself with a book - and especially not one of "Mum’s Henry James sort"! But he had happened to be watching a Quiz programme on television that day, and so astonished was he by something he heard there, that he must run in to me at once, crying “Guess what, Mum? That man didn’t even know who wrote The Golden Bowl !”

That little recollection somehow epitomises all that the Old Master meant to me in those far-off days. And seems to illustrate, as nothing else quite could, the long struggle I have had to free myself from his influence since. I no longer wish to write like that. It’s not that I love him less – I can’t help remembering what Virginia Woolf once wrote of him, for one thing: how she said that in the history of the novel, there was no-one else who, having gone to all the lengths of constructing his sentence, could bring himself to smash it so resoundingly at the end! No, I certainly don’t love him less; but I seldom read him any more. I have come to recognise that such a style as his is hopelessly addictive, and that, even could one have hoped to emulate it, for today’s tastes, it simply doesn’t ‘do’. It has taken me many years to free myself from his influence, though, and I genuinely believed I had done it at last.

Which is why it came as something of an unpleasant jolt, as well as a pleasure, yesterday, to be told that to someone else, my style had seemed vaguely reminiscent of his. Somebody had discovered my guilty secret, that's what it was – and I felt somewhat shame-faced as a result!

Not that it wouldn’t give me the most enormous pleasure, just the same, were somebody else to write in and confess to having had (or having still), an addiction rather like mine.