Henry James

I am not sure how many people read Henry James these days. I had avoided him for long years because his writing is said to be very difficult. It is. However, not long ago, I saw a copy of a collection of his novellas at a much reduced price and figured, why not.

It was well worth the effort. James' writing is very dense. People do not write that way anymore, and reading his takes some effort, and considerable time. But, dense or not, the writing is exquisite, a richly descriptive prose.

The stories are the thing. He sets them among the nearly upper class of Europe and brings an American eye to the subject, often, one of the characters, frequently the narrator, is American. He sticks to the adage that writers should write about what they know. James was an American who spent much of his life in Europe, not among the impoverished nor among the Nobility, but among those who would be considered 'well off.'

His stories, always display a deep understanding of his characters, their motives and fears, especially the fears. They are primarily concerned with the psychological interplay of those inhabiting his stories. Human psychology is a tangled web and James' has the good sense to not give any definite  diagnosis, instead leaving things sort of vague and cloudy.

Daisy Miller, The Aspern Papers, Altars of Death, and The Beast in the Jungle are all very fine stories, but the real star is The Turn of the Screw. The Turn of the Screw is a very unusual horror story. It is a ghost story, but it never quite becomes a gothic type horror story. Like all of his stories, it is a very ambiguous tale, and I will say no more about it because I want you to read it.