The Portable Henry James by Henry James Read Free Book Online Page B

Henry James”: Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. I (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967), 284 (first published in 1920).
    xii “I have visited some literatures”: Jorge Luis Borges, “The Abasement of the Northmores,” in Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999), 247-48 (first published in 1945).
    xii “the death of Henry James”: Graham Greene, “François Mauriac,” in Collected Essays (New York: Penguin, 1951), 91 (first published in 1968).
    xii “He is as solitary”: Graham Greene, “Henry James: the Private Universe,” in Collected Essays (New York: Penguin, 1951), 34 (first published in 1936).
    xii “a great writer”: André Maurois, preface to Georges Markow-Totevy, Henry James, trans. John Cumming (New York: Minerva Press, 1969), vii.
    xiii a “botched civilization”: Ezra Pound, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, V. xiv the “fault of Venice”: “Venice” [1882], in Italian Hours.
    xv “Decay is in this extraordinary place”: “The Grand Canal” [1892], in Italian Hours.
    xv “the power of the most extravagant of cities”: “New York Revisited,” in The American Scene.
    xvi “vieille sagesse”: The Ambassadors, Book Ninth, I.
    xvi communities of will, and communities of faith and obedience: H. G. Wells, The Outline of History (Garden City, New York: Garden City Books, 1940), 735.
    xix it was only “Elementary”: Although iconic in film adaptations, “Elementary, my dear Watson” was never said, exactly, by Holmes in the Conan Doyle tales. But the following passage appears at the end of “The Crooked Man,” and he is speaking to Dr. Watson: “ ‘Elementary,’ said he. ‘It is one of those instances where the reasoner can produce an effect which seems to his neighbour, because the latter has missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction. . . .’ ”
    xx “murders, mysteries, islands of dreadful renown”: “The Art of Fiction.”
    xxi “Four Hundred Large Pages”: “James’s The Ambassadors: Four Hundred Large Pages in Which Little Happens,” Chicago Tribune, 21 (November 1903): 13; reprinted in Kevin J. Hayes, ed., Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 404.
    xxi Graham Greene: In the essay “François Mauriac,” noted earlier; see also Greene’s essay, “Henry James: The Religious Aspect,” in Collected Essays.
    xxi “I forgot that every little action”: Oscar Wilde, De Profundis.
    xxii “We are all under sentence of death”: The 1873 conclusion to Pater’s The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry.
    xxii “near-infinite Irishman”: “Flaubert and His Exemplary Destiny,” in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999), 393.
    xxii “unrelenting examination”: “Joyce’s Ulysses, ” In Weinberger, ed., Selected Non-Fictions, 13.
    xxiii “the threshold of the drawing room”: The Portrait of a Lady, chapter XL.
    xxiv “Like some microscopist”: Claude Bragdon, review of The Golden Bowl, Critic (January 1905), xlvi, 20.
    xxiv seven hundred tense words: See The Golden Bowl, Book Second, XXXVII; the passage begins with Adam Verver’s question, “But to what in the world?”
    xxv “Really, universally, relations stop nowhere”: New York Edition preface, Roderick Hudson.
    xxv “the whole conduct of life”: New York Edition preface, The Golden Bowl.
    xxv “He smoked a minute”: The Golden Bowl, Book First, IV.
    xxvii Blackmur . . . “pure intelligence”: R. P. Blackmur, “Henry James,” in Robert E. Spiller, et al., Literary History of the United States: History, third revision (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 1048, 1063.
    xxvii “our father, caring for our spiritual decency”: Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (1913), in Autobiography (New York: Criterion Books, 1956), 126.
    xxvii “the most intelligent man of his generation”: T. S. Eliot, “In Memory” and “The Hawthorne Aspect,” Little