Henry James Goes to ParisHenry James's reputation as The Master is so familiar that it's hard to imagine he was ever someone on whom some things really were lost. This is the story of the year--1875 to 1876--when the young novelist moved to Paris, drawn by his literary idols living at the center of the early modern movement in art. As Peter Brooks skillfully recounts, James largely failed to appreciate or even understand the new artistic developments teeming around him during his Paris sojourn. But living in England twenty years later, he would recall the aesthetic lessons of Paris, and his memories of the radical perspectives opened up by French novelists and painters would help transform James into the writer of his adventurous later fiction. A narrative that combines biography and criticism and uses James's writings to tell the story from his point of view, Henry James Goes to Paris vividly brings to life the young American artist's Paris year--and its momentous artistic and personal consequences. James's Paris story is one of enchantment and disenchantment. He initially loved Paris, he succeeded in meeting all the writers he admired (Turgenev, Flaubert, Zola, Maupassant, Goncourt, and Daudet), and he witnessed the latest development in French painting, Impressionism. But James largely found the writers disappointing, and he completely misunderstood the paintings he saw. He also seems to have fallen in and out of love in a more ordinary sense--with a young Russian aesthete, Paul Zhukovsky. Disillusioned, James soon retreated to England--for good. But James would eventually be changed forever by his memories of Paris. |
From inside the book
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... James largely failed to appre- ciate or even understand the new artistic devel- opments teeming around him during ... James into the writer of his adventur- ous later fiction . A narrative that combines biog- raphy and criticism and uses ...
... James to the basement for tea , over which James expressed " the disturbed hes- itations which Matisse and Picasso aroused in him , " while Fry attempted to explain " that Cezanne and Flaubert were , in a manner of speaking , after the ...
Peter Brooks. most of all triggered James's longstanding hesitations about Flaubert , offering a cautionary tale in the infringement of certain commitments to representation . James in 1912 was a modernist master , but one who clung to a ...
... James's biog- rapher , Leon Edel , notes that after 1895 James seems already to have left the nineteenth century behind , and to be moving toward the fic- tional experimentation of Joyce , of Woolf , of Proust . James the modernist is ...
... James wants to take on . James's modernism will always be tempered by this commitment to a form of representation he tends to exemplify in the person of another French novelist who had died in 1850 : Balzac . Nonetheless , much that he ...
Contents
To Paris | 7 |
The Dream of an Intenser Experience | 53 |
What a Droll Thing to Represent | 79 |
Flauberts Nerds | 101 |
The Quickened Notation of Our Modernity | 129 |
The Death of Zola Sex in the French Novel and the Improper | 156 |
For the Sake of This End | 177 |