This turned out to be about Henry James
Aug. 18th, 2003 10:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyHad extremely complicated WWII spy-thriller dreams last night. Also dreams about LiveJournal and being able to use a graphic interface to change the color of people's hair to match their text. Consequently feeling a little scattered and a lot lazy. Work is waiting for me, and I'm not ready for it yet.
I'm reading Leon Edel's one-volume biography of Henry James (thanks again to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
heres_luck who is letting me depredate her shelves). I don't much like James as a writer--except for The Turn of the Screw, which is brilliant--but I'm finding that I like him rather a lot as a person. We have things in common. Which is a fucking weird thing to say, but there you are.
In a lot of his early stories (Edel helpfully provides capsule summaries), the heroes and heroines fall into fevers and die after having some crushing disappointment. And I'm wondering, is that just a literary convention which the youthful James couldn't quite shake off, or is he transcribing some actual part of Victorian life? Because if people died of crushing disappointments today, there'd be a lot fewer people in the world. It's like "brain-fever," which is the most wonderfully convenient illness in the whole of literature, useful for everything. I know they thought of it as real--at one point William James writes to their parents from Italy saying Henry has a "sort of brain-fever"--but what was it?
I'm reading Leon Edel's one-volume biography of Henry James (thanks again to
heres_luck who is letting me depredate her shelves). I don't much like James as a writer--except for The Turn of the Screw, which is brilliant--but I'm finding that I like him rather a lot as a person. We have things in common. Which is a fucking weird thing to say, but there you are.In a lot of his early stories (Edel helpfully provides capsule summaries), the heroes and heroines fall into fevers and die after having some crushing disappointment. And I'm wondering, is that just a literary convention which the youthful James couldn't quite shake off, or is he transcribing some actual part of Victorian life? Because if people died of crushing disappointments today, there'd be a lot fewer people in the world. It's like "brain-fever," which is the most wonderfully convenient illness in the whole of literature, useful for everything. I know they thought of it as real--at one point William James writes to their parents from Italy saying Henry has a "sort of brain-fever"--but what was it?
