The Portrait of a Lady ~ Hardback ~ Henry James

Henry James is best known for a number of novels showing Americans encountering Europe and Europeans. His method of writing from a character's point of view allowed him to explore issues related to consciousness and perception, and his style in later works has been compared to impressionist painting. His imaginative use of point of view, interior monologue and unreliable narrators brought a new depth to narrative fiction. I have always fondly remembered a remark that I heard fall years ago from the lips of Ivan Turgenev in regard to his own experience of the usual origin of the fictive picture. It began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him, soliciting him, as the active or passive figure, interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were. He saw them, in that fashion, as disponibles, saw them subject to the chances, the complications of existence, and saw them vividly, but then had to find for them the right relations, those that would most bring them out; to imagine, to invent and select and piece together the situations most useful and favorable to the sense of the creatures themselves, the complications they would be most likely to produce and to feel. "To arrive at these things is to arrive at my 'story, '" he said, "and that's the way I look for it. The result is that I'm often accused of not having 'story' enough. I seem to myself to have as much as I need -- to show my people, to exhibit their relations with each other; for that is all my measure. If I watch them long enough I see them come together, I see them PLACED, I see them engaged in this or that act and in this or that difficulty. How they look and move and speak and behave, always in the setting I have found for them, is my account of them -- of which I dare say, alas, QUE CELA MANQUE SOUVENT D'ARCHITECTURE. But I would rather, I think, have too little architecture than too much -- when there's danger of its interfering with my measure of the truth. The French of course like more of it than I give -- having by their own genius such a hand for it; and indeed one must give all one can. As for the origin of one's wind-blown germs themselves, who shall say, as you ask, where THEY come from?" -- Henry James