/lit/ - Literature

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>>17616409
No thanks, prose cuck.

>>17616409
Didn’t one of them fuck their sister?

>>17616986
Huh?

Henry really got the short end of the stick in terms of facial genetics.

>>17617448
>Alice and her brother William had a close relationship that has been argued to consist of eroticism. William would write “mock sonnets” to Alice and read them to her in front of their family. One such sonnet has William declaring his desire to marry Alice to which she replies that he had told her not “to hope for love from [him].” William concludes the sonnet by saying that he will commit suicide because Alice will not marry him. There were also times where his letters to her were candidly erotic—he would describe her physical and personality characteristics and state how “desirable” and “lovable” they made her.[2]

>William used his artistic skill to draw five sketches of Alice. These pictures also demonstrate erotic overtones. Three of the sketches form a triptych. All of the panels exhibit Alice drawn older than she was at the creation of these sketches as she was 11 at the time. She is sitting in a chair on a top floor while William is in a room below her. William is seen hunched over an instrument as he is serenading his sister in the first panel. He stands more erect in the next two panels. William is wearing a large head feather in each of the panels which progressively gets closer to the ceiling until it is pushing against it in the final panel. Growing from the outside of the building is a full bush in the first panel. The bush in the second panel is almost completely devoid of leaves and in the third panel, it is no longer there. The walls of the building shrink throughout the panels until they are almost nonexistent in the final panel. It has been argued that this triptych is a visual representation of a defloration fantasy.[2]

>The fourth sketch created by William of his sister contains a drawing of her head when she was a young teen. Alice’s eyes are cast downward and underneath her head, William wrote the caption “The loveress of W.J.” The fifth sketch William drew of Alice when she was in her late teens. She is seen wearing a tight bodice and a feather hat. Across from her eye is a heart with an arrow through it, suggesting that she is in love. William’s initials are drawn on the sleeve covering Alice’s arm. This has been suggested to mean that William has branded his sister as his, and she was content with this as she wore her ‘heart’ on her sleeve.[2]

>In 1878, William married Alice Howe Gibbens. Soon after, his sister became ill. When Alice James was close to death in 1892 she wrote this in her journal: “the fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me...since the hideous summer of ’78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace.”[2]

>>17617460
I always wonder when I see brothers like that if the mother had been 'wandering' a bit

>>17616409
Holy shit, I didn't know they were brothers. I thought the identity of surnames was accidental. Are there any sources on what was Henry's view of his brother's philosophy and conversely William's view of his brother's writing?

>>17617460
I guess being a homosexual effects your physiognomy.

>>17616409
It's pretty cool when two siblings are both highly successful. Anyone have any other /lit/ examples of this?

>>17617853
Well, I really want to make fun of you for this but I won't. I'm in a charitable mood today I took in some sun.

>>17617873
Bronte sisters.

>>17617888
Thank you, your Grace.

>>17617781
hot

>>17617781
Jfc

>>17617888
A temperament like William's, and the trips confirm it!

>>17617781
It's just brotherly-sisterly love.

>>17618073
*Henry's

>>17617853
Not true. gayson tends to be better looking.

>>17617873
Mann and Wittgenstein brothers

>>17618349
I have literally never seen any discussion of Thomas' or Lugwig's brother (I never even knew Ludwig had a brother until now).

>>17616409

>>17616986
>henry james
>fucking any women at all
wat

>>17618582
It's William. see>>17617781

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>>17617818
I would like to know to

bump

>>17617853
Gay men are usually better looking than straight men, studies have shown this

>>17617460
Not really true

tfw my favorite writers are gay incels

>>17616409
>waste your time reading boring shit
No thanks

>>17621308
faggot

>>17617781
>When Alice James was close to death in 1892 she wrote this in her journal: “the fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me...since the hideous summer of ’78, when I went down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace.”

>>17621308
go back to the Witcher 3 and leave the books to the men

bump

>>17621714
Witcher 3 is better written than Henry James'.

>>17622867
>I share a literature board with retards like this

>>17622886
Henry James IS for retards, you nerd.

>>17622896
You need to be very high iq to understand Henry James

>>17622904
High IQ in Brainletism

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>>17622867
It's stupid niggers like you who give anyone who plays vidya a bad reputation

>>17623252
But it is. Hearts of stone is better written and paced than any James book. What have you read of James?

>>17620778
You are a crazy black nigger, studies have shown this

>>17616986
I think I recall something about William writing sexually-charged letters to / diary entries about his sister Alice. Also that he loved painting her too.

>>17618367
Paul Wittgenstein was a famous pianist. Ravel composed his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand for Paul after he lost his right arm in WW1.

bump

>>17616409
Will outshined Henry in almost every way. Smarter, more polymathic, had a far greater impact on a variety of fields, and was possibly even a better writer.

>>17625928
wrong

>"Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty"
----Oscar Wilde

>"Despite the scruples and delicate complexities of James, his work suffers from a major defect: the absence of life."
----Jorge Luis Borges

>"Please tell me what you find in Henry James. ... we have his works here, and I read, and I can't find anything but faintly tinged rose water, urbane and sleek, but vulgar and pale as Walter Lamb. Is there really any sense in it?"
----Virginia Woolf

>I read a collection of Henry James' short stories—miserable stuff, a complete fake, you ought to debunk that pale porpoise and his plush vulgarities some day
----Vladimir Nabokov

>Henry James? That's not literature.
----Cormac McCarthy

>E.M. Forster complained about what they saw as James's squeamishness in the treatment of sex and other possibly controversial material, or dismissed his late style as difficult and obscure, relying heavily on extremely long sentences and excessively latinate language.

>>17626021
this is what being filtered looks like

>>17626188
This is what seethe looks like.

>>17626021
>>E.M. Forster complained about what they saw as James's squeamishness in the treatment of sex

this is kinda hilarious because that's the exact criticism leveled at forster who didn't writer about sex until maurice. james is terrible tho

>>17624053
based

>>17626021
BASED BASED BASED

>>17626188
the irony

>>17626021
Borges thought James was great btw. Compared him to Shakespeare in an interview.

>>17626793
Post source then

>he novelist W. Somerset Maugham wrote, "He did not know the English as an Englishman instinctively knows them and so his English characters never to my mind quite ring true," and argued, "The great novelists, even in seclusion, have lived life passionately. Henry James was content to observe it from a window."
>Colm Tóibín observed that James "never really wrote about the English very well. His English characters don't work for me

T.S. Eliot: “James's critical genius comes out most tellingly in his mastery over, his baffling escape from, Ideas; a mastery and an escape which are perhaps the last test of a superior intelligence. He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it. [...] In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought. [...] James in his novels is like the best French critics in maintaining a point of view, a view-point untouched by the parasite idea. He is the most intelligent man of his generation."

>>17626911
>In England, ideas run wild and pasture on the emotions; instead of thinking with our feelings (a very different thing) we corrupt our feelings with ideas; we produce the public, the political, the emotional idea, evading sensation and thought
>an American praising another American for deviating from the English
stupid, see >>17626815

>>17626911
I’m convinced. I’ll read him. Where do I start?

>>17626957
portrait of a lady. or if you don't feel like going through a 600-700 page book now read his short stories. pic related is a really good collection.

>>17626911
>>17626957
TS Eliot anagrimes with Toilets. Don't take his word you pseud. See>>17626021

John Cowper Powys on Henry James: "One does not, in reading these great authors, savor the actual style on every page, in every sentence. We have large blank spaces, so to speak, of straightforward colorless narrative. But there are no “blank spaces” in Henry James. Every sentence is penetrated and heavy with the fragrance of his peculiar grace. One might almost say—so strong is this subjective element in the great objective aesthete—that James writes novels like an essayist, like some epicurean Walter Pater, suddenly grown interested in common humanity, and finding in the psychology of ordinary people a provocation and a stimulus as insidious and suggestive as in the lines and colors of mediaeval art. This essayist attitude accounts largely for those superior “inverted commas” which throw such a clear space of ironic detachment round his characters and his scenes.

.....

The world created by Henry James is like some classic Arcadia of psychological beauty—some universal Garden of Versailles unprofaned by the noises of the crowd—where among the terraces and fountains delicate Watteau-like figures move and whisper and make love in a soft artificial fairy moonlight dimmed and tinted with the shadows of passions and misty with the rain of tender regrets; human figures without name or place. For who remembers the names of these sweet phantoms or the titles of their “great places” in this hospitable fairy-land of the harassed sensitive ones of the earth; where courtesy is the only law of existence and good taste the only moral code?"

"No novelist who has ever lived has "taken art" so seriously. But it is art, and not life, he takes seriously; and, therefore, along with his methods of elaborate patience, one is conscious of a most delicate and whimsical playfulness--sparing literally nothing.

.....

The subtlety of Henry James is a subtlety which is caused not by philosophical but by psychological distinctions and it is a subtlety which enlarges our sympathy for the average human nature of middle class people to a degree that must, in the very deepest sense of the word, be called moral. The wisdom to be derived from him is all of a piece with the pleasure--both being the result of a fuller, richer, and more discriminating consciousness of the tragic complexity of quite little and unimportant characters. To a real lover of Henry James the greyest and least promising aspects of ordinary life seem to hold up to us infinite possibilities of delicate excitement. It is indeed out of excitement--partly intellectual and partly aesthetic,--that his great effects are produced. And yet the final effect is always one of resignation and calm--as with all the supreme masters."

>>17627025
Who tf is powys?!
See>>17626021

>>17627162
>who tf is powys
why are you on a literature board? and see>>17626188

>>17627025
you wish

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>>17626021
>>Henry James? That's not literature.
based

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>>17617818
same

>>17617818
Idk but I believe they were pretty close

>>17616409
Read Peirce instead.

>>17629702
Why