Henry James

It’s not one of the big ones but The Spoils of Poynton is a novel by Henry James and I read it!

Let’s stop and consider Henry James. Difficult to read; never-ending, complex, convoluted sentences; known more for avoidance than for having actually been read; more painful than a Merchant Ivory production. Scary, even. Except for a brief stint, I have successfully avoided Henry James and, until fairly recently, almost all classical American Literature. I never took a college level course in American Literature. I did maintain a great interest in American poets and American playwrights, but I thought the fiction writers were worthy of my disdain, at least the older ones. Oddly, I considered experimental writers as being outside of any nationalistic concerns in many instances, I probably didn’t even know the author’s nationality … experimental writers were their own literary species.

But I have over the last ten or twenty years been trying to catch up on American Literature, having discovered that it’s not all bad. Still, the stories about Henry James haven’t enticed me to start reading his works. The few that I have read haven’t really left me with fond memories. But I got a copy of The Spoils of Poynton at the Book Exchange and since it wasn’t too long, I started reading. What I discovered was a moderately interesting drama by the proponent of Trans-Atlantic Literature … an American writing about society in England and Europe. Thinking back, I seem to remember another novel which was about a New England family that was visited by members of the English society. Exciting?

Not really, but I found the novel read easily with long, luxurious sentences, and enough lack of action to relax me and take away the tensions of the day. Imagine the angst generated by a son who intends to marry and then move into the ancestral home, relegating his still-living mother off to a smaller house that once belonged to an aunt. The intrigue is a woman named Fleda Vetch who becomes the mother’s spy and bait to lure her son away from his unfortunate choice of a bride. And as the society in the 19th century might expect, this reluctant bride dictates that her undying love will only be consummated if she gets the big house with all its furniture and bric-a-brac. Ah, true love … but what about Fleda?

I enjoyed this novel and will be pulling down a few of those Henry James novels that have been gathering dust on my bookshelves. But I’m not sure I’ll actually read the books since I can drop them off at the book exchange and just use Project Gutenberg to fill my iPad with Henry James. The Reverberator intrigues me.

How is your experience reading Henry James? Here is the author’s bibliographic information (taken from Wikipedia):