Tag: Henry James
Stealing from the Classics: The Turn of the Screw
by Joshua Malbin on Aug.14, 2009, under Books
As it turns out, it is possible, through the injudicious use of commas, among other marks of punctuation, the endless repetition of certain idioms, and the convolution of sentence structure, to so flatten one’s narrative, as to make even a ghost story boring.
Why one would choose to do such a thing, is beyond me.
My charming work was just my life with Miles and Flora, and through nothing could I so like it as through feeling that to throw myself into it was to throw myself out of my trouble.
Or:
“The man. He wants to appear to them.” That he might was an awful conception, and yet somehow I could keep it at bay; which, moreover, as we lingered there, was what I succeeded in practically proving. I had an absolute certainly that I should see again what I had already seen, but something within me said that by offering myself bravely as the sole subject of such experience, by accepting, by inviting, by surmounting it all, I should serve as an expiatory victim and guard the tranquility of the household.
When a friend was in graduate school at CUNY, he asked André Aciman if he could study James with him to prepare for his comps. “James!” Aciman said disgustedly. “Henry James wrote as if English were a dead language.”