– Voulez-vous être mon amie, mon amie la plus chère, l'âme de mon âme, mon tout, mon bonheur pour toujours et à jamais ? (…)
– Est-ce que vous ne m'aimez pas un peu trop ?
– Évidemment, que je vous aime trop ! Quand j'aime les gens, je les aime toujours trop. Mais naturellement, je ne vous demande pas de m'aimer vous-même comme cela, sur-le-champ, ajouta Olive Chancellor. Attendons le temps qu'il faudra.. Le temps qu'il faudra. Lorsque quelque chose me tient à cœur, je sais être très patiente.
Comme ce serait agréable de vivre toujours de cette manière ! De prendre simplement les gens tels qu'ils sont et de n'avoir pas besoin de penser à tous leurs défauts ! Comme ce serait agréable, au lieu de se tourmenter à propos de tant de choses, de savoir à l'avance que tout s'arrangera très bien! Alors on aurait le droit de s'enfoncer dans un bon gros fauteuil de cuir de Cordoue, rideaux tirés, volets fermés contre la nuit et le droit, contre le monde énorme, mais effrayant et cruel (…)
Tout en parlant, elle imaginait les belles soirées d'hiver sous la lampe, avec la neige au-dehors, le thé servi sur la table, et les belles traductions qu'elles pourraient faire, sa compagne et elle, des poèmes de Goethe, le seul auteur étranger qui lui plût vraiment (…)
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, 2 ½ incydent tall, published in 2003 by Del Prado. In this classic ghost story, a governess witnesses how her two wards are haunted by ghosts with vague but evil intents. For all that, not much really happens, and the action just sort of stops at the end without much explanation. I’m sure that’s part of the style, but it just felt kind of unresolved.
Now that I have read more James, I can confirm that it indeed is part of the style and that it’s actually pretty great!
Gilmore Girls reference #730, #731, #732, #733, #734, and #735
Season 2 Episode 4: The Road Trip to Harvard
Henry James is an American author best known for writing such books as “The Turn Of The Screw” and “The Portrait Of A Lady.” John Adams was the second President of US and he was in office from 1797 until 1801. W.E.B Du Bois was an American sociologist, civil rights activist, and author. Some of his many accomplishments include being the first African American to earn a doctorate. He was a professor of history, sociology, and economics at Atlanta University and in 1909 he was one of the founders of NAACP. Yo Yo Ma is a cellist who was born in France. He graduated from Julliard and Harvard. He has released 90 albums and has received 18 Grammy Awards. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. In 2020, he was on Time’s list of the 100 most influential people. Fred Gwynne was an actor best known for his starring role as Herman Munster in the TV series “The Munsters” (which has one of my favorite TV theme songs btw) :)
“Ah yes, I know; thank you.” General Fancourt was distinguished, there was no doubt of that, for something he had done, or perhaps even hadn’t done—the young man couldn’t remember which—some years before in India. The servant went away, leaving the glass doors open into the gallery, and Paul Overt remained at the head of the wide double staircase, saying to himself that the place was sweet and promised a pleasant visit, while he leaned on the balustrade of fine old ironwork which, like all the other details, was of the same period as the house. It all went together and spoke in one voice—a rich English voice of the early part of the eighteenth century. It might have been church-time on a summer’s day in the reign of Queen Anne; the stillness was too perfect to be modern, the nearness counted so as distance, and there was something so fresh and sound in the originality of the large smooth house, the expanse of beautiful brickwork that showed for pink rather than red and that had been kept clear of messy creepers by the law under which a woman with a rare complexion disdains a veil. When Paul Overt became aware that the people under the trees had noticed him he turned back through the open doors into the great gallery which was the pride of the place. It marched across from end to end and seemed—with its bright colours, its high panelled windows, its faded flowered chintzes, its quickly-recognised portraits and pictures, the blue-and-white china of its cabinets and the attenuated festoons and rosettes of its ceiling—a cheerful upholstered avenue into the other century.
We have been studying James’ novella at college this year and it was really this book that got me more interested in the gothic romantic genre. It’s the story of a governess who takes care of two children, Miles and Flora, at a large country house in Essex named Bly. Throughout the book James portrays the governess as mad and delusional, but at the same time, it is possible to interpret it in another way - she’s sane and the house is truly haunted by the ghosts of a previous servant, Peter Quint and the children’s previous governess, Miss Jessel. The governess, if she is delusional, eventually scares Flora into a fever, is almost oblivious to Mrs Grose, the housekeeper’s true feelings and kills Miles as she desperately defends him from Quint’s ghost. If, however, she is correct and the children have been influenced and ‘corrupted’ by the apparitions, then the novella may end with Miles being purified - not killed.
To be frank; you can’t be sure which way to read it - James leaves the whole tale up to interpretation by the reader. The context and themes are very important to attempting to understand the novella. It does seem that a lot of social critiques are made, especially of sexuality, religion and class; but what is interesting is how we understand the story now, compared to how someone would have read it in the late 19th/early 20th century.
Personally, I prefer to read it as a typical ghost story, but in any case, as Oscar Wilde said, The Turn of the Screw is 'a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale’.
The current state of my TBR pile - and that’s excluding PygmalionandThe Hunchback of Notre Dame on my Kobo, and Bands of Mourning on hold for me at the library. It’s gonna be a busy winter.
Ashe Vernon said, “You are a language I am no longer fluent in but still remember how to read.” and Anne Sexton said, “I like you; your eyes are full of language.” and Salma Deera said, “My love translated sounds like a dead language.” and Czesław Miłosz said, “Language is the only homeland.” and Alice Notely said, “I can’t translate myself into language anymore.” and Hishaam Siddiqi said “One day I woke up and we no longer spoke the same language. I haven’t heard from you since.” and Jane Austen said, “and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in.” and Henry James said, “She is written in a foreign tongue.” and I am in awe of language.
I will be welcoming the new year with Henry James’ letter to Grace Norton. “I don’t know why we live- the gift of life comes to us from I don’t know what source or for what purpose; but I believe we can go on living for the reason that (always of course up to a certain point) Life is the most valuable thing we know anything about and it is therefore presumptively a great mistake to surrender it while there is anything left in the cup.” I hope to enter into 2022 remembering that darkness will come, “but it is only a darkness. It is not an end, or the end.” and recalling the words of wisdom he wrote to her “Don’t melt too much into the universe but be as solid and dense and fixed as you can.” “You will do all sorts of things yet, and I will help you. The only thing is to not melt in the meanwhile.”
Dear my future self,
“You are marked out for success, and you must not fail. You have my tenderest affection and all my confidence.”
I really like the word tergiversate, It’s a bit odd that people can feel affection for single words, but I don’t think I’m alone in doing so. It can be hard to identify the source of such affection. Is it just the sound, or the meaning, or some association with the first time you read it? Attraction is always hard to pin down or explain.
The trouble with ‘tergiversate’ is that I can’t imagine ever using it in earnest. I try to make it a rule only to use a word if it expresses the precise meaning required and it can be understood by my audience. I first met 'tergiversate’ in one of Henry James’s novels, and I had to look it up. It doesn’t seem reasonable to expect anybody who reads my stuff to have a more extensive vocabulary than I do, so I won’t ever have a character tergiversate.
If I was an intellectual literary writer (“… a worthy successor to Italo Calvino”, The Times Literary Supplement) I could write a poignant story about the unrequited passion of a writer for a word he couldn’t use. Alas, I am not that clever. The full quote from the TLS reads “The writer who calls himself the Glumsh apparently considers himself a worthy successor to Italo Calvino. One can only regard such self-deception with pity, while recommending the reader to steer clear of his pedestrian prose and juvenile ideas.”
