The Portable Henry James Read Online Free PDF

rewriting the world, and showing it—a “real” world so close only a few years before—as farther away than anyone knew and as more uncanny and complex than anyone had ever guessed.
    The terrors are countless in The Turn of the Screw, but above all there is the tremendous moral ambiguity, and then at the end there is the weight of the dead child, his forehead glistening with a perfect dew of sweat. But perhaps the real fear comes from the isolation the tale comprehends: that here is a life one can make with intelligence, that an attentive, thoughtful, and well-meaning person—even a person who reads Henry James with confidence and care—may in fact be a solitary prisoner in a dream or a nightmare of a world and may never suspect it for a moment.

I V.
    The narrator of James’s 1896 “The Figure in the Carpet” seeks the “ secret, or latent intention” in the oeuvre of the novelist Hugh Vereker, but that secret remains hidden—if indeed there ever was one. In recent years a hunger for such a clue has focused on the sexuality of Henry James. Although this general introduction can pay scant attention to James’s complex biography, it must note the related revolution that has come to the criticism, for although it was with trepidation that James’s early biographers circled the ground around “latent homo-erotic tendencies,” recent biographers and recent critics have often identified homosexuality as the figure in the carpet.
    Yet such considerations are not new. As early as 1902 J. P. Mowbray wrote, “In trying to form anything like a comprehensive estimate of Mr. James’s mature work, the effeminacy of it has to be counted with. One cannot call it virile.” When in Hemingway’s 1926 The Sun Also Rises Bill Gorton advises Jake Barnes about the sexually debilitating injury he received in the war, he recommends, “That’s what you ought to work up into a mystery. Like Henry’s bicycle.” The reference is to the injury that James reported in his 1914 autobiography Notes of a Son and Brother : “Jammed into the acute angle between two high fences . . . I had done myself . . . a horrid even if an obscure hurt.” A legend soon grew concerning what James had described as “a private catastrophe or difficulty, bristling with embarrassments.” Evidence suggests a back injury, but this is what that legend developed: the young Henry James had fallen from a high bicycle, or from a horse, onto a picket fence, and he had, in some way, been castrated. Some took his admission as an explanation of why he never served in the Civil War. Others said it accounted for his lifelong celibacy.
    Some agreed with Blackmur’s judgment that, “Like Abélard who, after his injury, raised the first chapel to the Holy Ghost,” Henry James turned to art. Others hinted at less theological aspirations. By the time of Hemingway’s novel, the “mystery” was so generally well known that the two easygoing fishermen could chat about “Henry” and Hemingway could expect his readers to get it. “It wasn’t a bicycle,” Jake corrects his friend:
    “He was riding horseback.”
    “I heard it was a tricycle.”
    “Well,” I said. “A plane is sort of like a tricycle. The joystick works the same way.”
    “But you don’t pedal it.”
    “No,” I said, “I guess you don’t pedal it.”
    “Let’s lay off that,” Bill said.
    “All right. I was just standing up for the tricycle.”
    “I think he’s a good writer, too,” Bill said.
    Such oblique and suggestive wordplay—about a bicycle, a tricycle, a pedal, and a joystick—is uncharacteristic of Ernest Hemingway. The two men sense a lapse of decorum and they change the subject. The key to this strange passage is surely the fact that since at least the 1920s in France—and Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton are on their fishing trip in southern France— une pédale has been a common term for a male homosexual.
    Hemingway went no further. Critics go much further today. Do more