Hello Darlin'

Last night when I came to bed, as usual, the TV was on. My beloved husband, A., was fast asleep at that hour, but he seems to find the television nothing but restful after midnight, so I left it on. I settled in with my book. Then I watched a whole hour of something called, "The Will: Battle for Conway Twitty's Money," even as I read Roderick Hudson, by Henry James. Yeah, you read that right. I was reading Henry James even as I spent an hour in Twitty City, so to say. (And that, my friends, I would bet you my last nickel, is the first, last and only time that that sentence will be written in this or any other language. You read it here. Who says there is nothing new under the sun? The Bible? Well, yet again, brother, the Bible's wrong.) Yup, I was watching disgruntled adult Twitty daughters, with an unfortunate resemblance to they Daddy, fight they step-mama when she auctioned off they baby-pictures, even while I read the New York Edition* of Henry James' first novel. I read in the commercials mostly, but let me tell you, that is a good book, but that was one interesting program, boy.

I'm not recommending this combination, by the way. I note it here for it's uniqueness. The experience of reading while watching and or listening to either music or television is however absolutely normal to me. My beloved husband, A., is just enough older than me to identify more with an earlier generation and he will insist, when we're actually watching one of our shows together, that I "put the book down." I have learned to never ask, "What happened?!" -- if I should miss something, like, say, Johnny Bananas falling off yet another scaffold on Real World Road Rules Challenge: Battle of the Exes, while I was reading. The husband hates that. Mine is the television/stereo generation. Our parents, though they grew up with radio, could never understand how we could read and watch and or listen. Of course, the fact is that we can't. It is also a fact that we do.

Now our kids, or grandkids I suppose, some of us, can text etc. while pissing and without setting down either their beer or cigarette. What a wonderful world. Right? So, one has to assume that keeping Rye Rye's Sunshine playin' while reading The Figure in the Carpet on a phone must be no problem.

A few years back, in what has become a rather infamous report from the NEA, titled To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence, the decline and fall of reading in America was predicted. The actual report is still worth a read, but it was justly criticized at the time for it's rather blinkered opposition of reading books to "being online"; suggesting that what happens on a computer -- or now on a phone or a tablet or pad -- was fundamentally unlike reading print. Only 2008 or 2009 when this report blew up in the news, but how very quaint that now sounds, yes?

The opportunities to read, just for example, Henry James, online, are now so many and so various as to shame the shelves of most American bookstores, sad as that is for a bookseller like me to say. The famous Prefaces over which James so heroically labored for the New York Edition, the prefaces which have maintained a reputation, independent of that unfortunate edition, as a model of self-criticism and insight perhaps unique in American and English letters, can be had at the click of a mouse. Reading a novel by James, for school or pleasure? Try a preface, even if it isn't in the edition you've picked up to read. And this to say nothing of the editions of the novels themselves available to download from commercial websites and or online sources like Open Library.

Now, before anyone who knows me is sent into shock by this uncharacteristic endorsement of the wonders of online reading, let me just quickly add that if anyone has the impulse to read much of James in an electronic format, you'd better have better eyes than mine, and a very good -- device, is it? Is that what we've decided now to call the things? I can think of no writer more conscious of the linear foot of fiction and the rectangularity of a paragraph on the page than James, so a well-designed presentation of one of his novels is almost a prerequisite of reading him. I have a theory that many a potential reader of not just James, but many a great book has been put off forever by some crabbed or stingily printed paperback where the shape of the text was crowded beyond recognition by footnotes and the necessities of cheap editions for students. (Who ever wanted to read another poem after meeting one for the first time on the dead grey page of a Norton Anthology?)

The NEA report and the resulting, all too brief hullabaloo mentioned above did make some solid arguments against media saturation, and offers at least some scientific basis for suggesting that while Americans, kids specially, can and do read as much or more than ever, that what we read, and how we read is changing so quickly now as to dizzy even less grey and hard heads than mine. The major point I took away from the study at the time was that reading books for pleasure, and here I might narrow my nostrils even further and call the thing before us literature, was "in danger." I don't agree, but I do worry. (A very American reaction, that.)

Without any like statistical or objective support of any kind, let me argue then -- oh so predictably -- for the superiority an old book. Much as necessity has taught me that, yes, I can take in the tragedy of Conway Twitty -- my Mama's favorite singer -- cut down before his time and leaving an estate in most fascinating chaos -- while reading even the densest of dense ol' darlings like HJ, my best experience of my favorite novelist is still with a handsomely made old book, in a quiet room without so much as nicotine gum or a vodka-rocks to distract or impede me. Again, I argue here only for the optimal. Witness below, just a couple of pages of the old darling from the edition I'm reading. Note the lovely, creamy color of the pages, the wide margins, the good-sized print in a good, clean font. It isn't just a snobby preference for gentlemanly leisure pursuits. Art is made with certain expectations of the audience. The novels of Henry James are meant to be read, even the earliest, do admit, without undue distraction, just as, say, a portrait by John Singer Sargent was meant to be seen, at it's best, at full length, in the right light, and without a tour-guide buzzing in one's ear. Doesn't mean either might not be experienced otherwise -- how many old moneyed millionaires do I know that will invite me to have a glance at dear great-grandma's painting? But to use a very dirty word, I can go to a proper museum and see a proper painting on a proper wall, yes?

I hesitate to mention museums for obvious reasons. One doesn't like to even hint at literature being something best served behind a velvet rope or under glass. I deny the calumny! But what I do think is required to read a good book is still a good intention, and while we still obviously nearly all of us have just that when we pick up a book like Roderick Hudson, I fear we may forget how best to achieve what we actually intend. I don't say someone other than me might just as well read this novel on a Kindle or an iphone. I will insist that it is still better, and really, almost likelier, that the experience will be closer to what a novelist like James requires with a lovely old book in one's lap.

One last point, and then I let you get back to watching Johnny Bananas complain of the wedgie he gets from his safety harness, or listening to the great Conway Twitty, or even dear little Rye Rye. As foreign frankly as the idea of saying so is to my every instinct, I suppose I must at least in passing remind some one or two of you still reading this -- and there's a large assumption, isn't it? -- that reading a great novelist like Henry James is worth doing and worth doing in preference to almost any other human activity I can think of, not excluding sex or food or some combination of the two. (Really? Well, yes.) One of the chief and lasting glories of great literature, one of it's true superiorities to almost any satisfaction on offer otherwise, is that one need do nothing else, in fact ought not to, in order to enjoy it best. Think of that. No batteries required, to indulge the cliche, but likewise no one else need be present, no comfortable position need be better than another, and yet pants are, indeed, optional.

Top that.

Mr. James, I'm not through loving you yet.


*The New York Edition of Henry James was the writer's much revised, and reviled attempt to secure both his reputation and his fortune with a definitive version of all his books. James wrote new introductions to each of the 24 volumes, and carefully edited each, and had he stopped there there would have been every chance of a critical, if not a financial success. But James could not help himself and "improved" his earlier books, sometimes rewriting whole passages, if not whole books, and in largely his later, more opaque style. The whole undertaking was something of a disaster with both critics and the public, not that most of the public then or since paid the least mind to HJ, revised or original recipe.

Nowadays, it is hard to find any of the novels reprinted in the New York Edition. My copy, pictured above, is from 1917. I picked it up to read specifically because I don't know that I've ever read one of the early books in the New York Edition. Don't know that I'd ever read Roderick Hudson, in any edition, now that I am, but I liked the idea of reading this one. As I really had no occasion to mention above, may I just say here how delightful a reading experience it has been so far? Because of the age of my copy, and because I want to keep it, I've stopped carting it around in my bag every day, but I have been on and off for weeks and it will survive even worse. It is a well made object. Still, I'm now reading it mostly in the evenings, in bed, a little at a time. I'm making it last. Don't misunderstand me please; there's nothing narcotizing about the book, just the opposite; it is actually quite sprightly prose -- for James, you understand -- and the central, homo-affectional relationship between the young American artist and his rich, young, American patron in Rome, is nearly as interesting for what does not happen as for everything that does. And the girl in the story, Christina Light, is so charming, she rather swamps the rest, so much so, James brought her back as the title character of his 1886 novel, The Princess Casamassima. James in his preface admitted that she was too fascinating a character to be dropped after only one appearance.

For anyone thinking of giving James a go for the first time, or the first time since some horribly boring college lecture on Portrait of a Lady, I'd still recommend the longer short stories, or The Americans, etc. , but nothing wrong with this one either, in or out of James' final version.