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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... kind of fiction . Yet , the comparison of Flaubert and Cezanne , which we may find entirely apt - especially when we think about the late work of these two restless innovators — was perhaps less reassuring to James than Fry intended ...
... kind of shimmering impression recorded by the eye and the mind . As in Picasso in his cubist phase , the observed reveals different sides and aspects as the observer moves , studying intently that which needs observation , revaluating ...
... kind of detective story where the detective , Lambert Strether , eventually gets it all wrong because he's wilfully blinded himself — yet in getting it wrong discovers the perspec- tives in which it is all right . And The Golden Bowl ...
... kind of epistemological anguish , the anxious difficulty of figuring out what one knows about other people and the world , and how to know it ? Many things of course happened , including , notably , James's attempt to write for the ...
... kind of return of the repressed in his work from the mid - 1890s on . It's as if it lay for some twenty years in what James called " the deep well of unconscious cerebration " before he was ready for it — before he saw that it could be ...
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 |