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“... such (sensible) thoughts have not occurred and this particular routine, which might be called ‘Henry James at the End of the Fork’, leads us in turn to think about Burroughs’s own relationship with America and the success be has made of it. The monstrous and unreadable nature of much of the fiction, the careful management of the revolt and the ...”

“... Priestley did not want to ask that question. For him, as he says in Literature and Western Man, Henry James was a writer who had no substance, no gusto, no power of living, ‘as if a ghost should write better than a man’. The more fully and robustly he lived, the better the author. Look at Hemingway. Priestley’s misapprehension came not only from ...”

“... d’esprit, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’, he was playing with the same idea which Henry James would explore elaborately in his story ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. In both cases a narrator awaits, hopes and seeks for the arrival of the true thing, the Big Experience. And the awareness of looking is itself the indication that it will not ...”

“... from Moretti’s taxonomy. How would his system cope with, say, Daniel Deronda or the novels of Henry James? Or, in a different register, with the novels of Tolstoy or Hardy (the latter gets only one footnoted sentence on Jude the Obscure)? In the case of Tolstoy and Hardy there is, I think, an ...”

“... approximation. It isn’t just that the words ‘an American at all’ were said by Eliot of Henry James, not of himself, but that the letter has comedy, pathos, resilience, and – because of the rueful third-person and the movement of it all (no pause after ‘and who so was never anything anywhere’) – an entire absence of self-pity. Ackroyd ...”

“... theatres, parties and country-house weekends. He begins to wonder if he has fallen into a Henry James novel, with Rosemary as the beautiful worldly corrupt European villainness. He turns out indeed to be as spellbound as Chad in The Ambassadors, for when the long-awaited peace-making letter arrives from his wife Roo, he doesn’t answer it. Yet ...”

“... it was just something that Europe happened to muddle into. Allied intellectuals agreed with Henry James, for whom the war was a ‘bleak and hideous tragedy’ that would ‘undo everything’: German ones were more likely to welcome it, whether as a long-desired reunion of ‘might and mind’ (Thomas Mann) or quite simply, as for Rilke, ‘a god ...”

“... and it haunts the books under review. A fact is what won’t go away, what we cannot not know, as Henry James remarked of the real. Yet when we bring one closer, stare at it, test our loyalty to it, it begins to shimmer with complication. Without becoming less factual, it floats off into myth. Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar looks at the sky, his lawn, the ...”

“... Yankee cognoscenti fled the parboiled American plains for the amenities of English civil life. Henry James dined out on transatlantic discrepancies until they nearly killed him and to this day there is still a kind of American for whom England is an America. But increasingly, these are the disoriented few. Something that never really was – money ...”

“... of the woman he loved. Her ideas of their relationship counted for nothing against his will. Both Henry James and Choderlos de Laclos would have deeply admired the skill with which Lawrence exploited his apparent powerlessness in the face of three amoral but powerful and realistic women – Frau von Richthofen and her two daughters – scheming to give ...”

“... shares certain affinities, is Iris Murdoch (the other novelist who comes to mind in reading her is Henry James). She is interested, that is to say, in the mixing but not the muddling of traditions, and in psychoanalysis as inescapably a moral enterprise – ‘tending as it does towards greater freedom in the making of moral choices’ – that has to ...”

“... Florine Stettheimer​ was a rich New Yorker who found artistic inspiration in Europe, like a Henry James heroine, looking at Old Masters and Rococo interiors. One of her early paintings riffs on Botticelli’s Primavera: Stettheimer thought his Flora was ‘too fat to move’. Her Spring (1907) shows a slim, nonchalant woman in a powdered wig, flutter sleeves and high heels, attended by squirrels and ferrets and showing a lot of leg ...”

“... club of Bellow, Mailer, Updike and Roth. Like Grace Paley’s short fictions, or the novels of Henry James, Fox’s novels don’t confine themselves to the smaller disturbances of man. What they do instead is find a scale, a language, in which the small disturbances can register – and the larger upheavals be illuminated. Free of ...”

“... but this is precisely the reason they cannot be pineapples. The most they can do is create what Henry James called the ‘air of reality’ of pineapples. In this sense, all realist art is a kind of con trick – a fact that is most obvious when the artist includes details that are redundant to the narrative (the precise tint and curve of a ...”

“... his overall production as a canon unto itself. No other American writers except Gertrude Stein and Henry James have managed this successfully, and I suspect it’s a further source of irritation to those who find Burroughs irritating anyway. He was a rare example – Faulkner was another – of a writer who can write while intoxicated and he wrote nearly ...”