Camino Placid

Emilio Estevez, dir. & writ.: The Way (USA, 2010)

The poster was everywhere. I remember finding it exceptionally soppy and sentimental-looking. The Way, indeed! It reminded me of that pseudo-documentary The Secret which was all the rage a couple of decades ago:

Drew Heriot, dir.: The Secret, writ. Rhonda Byrne (Australia / USA, 2006)

However, lacking a convenient alternative, one day we cracked and went off to see it.

It was good. I won't say great, since there's a certain predictability about Emilio Estevez's buddy-movie approach to the subject of walking the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrim way to Compostela through Northern Spain. But there is something genuinely moving about it, even so: the echoes of the actual father-son bond between the director and his star, Martin Sheen, in the intimate story of mourning and loss Estevez's film sets out to tell.

Marly Camino: Camino de Santiago routes

The real star is the landscape, though. It was hypnotic - entrancing. It made even lazy old me want to get on my feet and start trudging those dusty roads. The whole ancient romance of Spain and the Pyrenees came to life in those vistas.

Tourradar: Walking the Camino de Santiago

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Anyway. All that was in 2010. It seems now as if we were inhabiting a different world: pre-Covid, pre-Gaza, pre-Trump. But that's not where the trail stopped, by any means. Having been alerted to the Camino and its significance, I began to run into references to it everywhere.

David Lodge: The Year of Henry James (2006)

The first was in David Lodge's book of essays The Year of Henry James.

Lodge was enraged when his long-meditated novel Author, Author! (2004) - about Henry James's various ill-starred attempts to forge a new career as a playwright in the 1890s - was (slightly) overshadowed by Colm Tóibín's The Master (2004).

The two books are actually very different. Tóibín provides an overview of James's entire career, in a pastiche version of the Master's late prose-style. Lodge, by contrast, focusses on James's horror, in the mid-1890s, at the contrast between the meteoric success of his artist friend George du Maurier's novel Trilby and the almost complete failure of his own highly crafted works of dramatic - and novelistic - art.

George du Maurier: Trilby [Svengali] (1894 / 1982)

Trilby is famous - or should I say notorious - for the creation of the character Svengali, who hypnotises the young orphan girl Trilby O'Ferrall into becoming a great singer. When his influence is finally withdrawn, she subsides into silence. The Henry James of Lodge's novel sees this as a sly reference to his own influence over du Maurier, previously a popular cartoonist, but now one of the most famous novelists of the day - to the Master's own detriment.

There's a very strange section in Lodge's The Year of Henry James where he recounts his first meeting with Colm Tóibín - on the Camino de Santiago - where the latter saw fit to approach him to try and discuss the unfortunate coincidence of their two Henry James novels.

Getty: Colm Tóibín (1955- )

It's a little hard to understand why this should be such a source of indignation to Lodge. The venue was, perhaps, unfortunate. And the two had not been previously introduced. And then there was the fact that Colm Tóibín (as the name would suggest) is Irish. What's more, he's gay - and sported (even at the time) a shaved head. All these factors apparently added up to a feeling of grievance. Who can figure out English etiquette? Not a mere colonial like me, that's for sure ...

I could, admittedly, be misinterpreting the passage. Perhaps it was the implied offense to the spirituality of his pilgrimage by the discussion of "business" in such a setting which really upset Lodge. What it sounds like, though, is something akin to his description of Henry James's reaction to the news that his protégé du Maurier was about to overtake him in popular - and, alas, even critical esteem.

Svengali is stabbed and left to die by one of his accomplices just before Trilby's failure on stage. As the villain of the piece, he can clearly expect no mercy - let alone gratitude - from the friends of the former artist's model Trilby. As for Trilby herself, she dies shortly afterwards.

Wilton Lackaye as Svengali (1905)

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Alan Brunton: Grooves of Glory: Three Performance Texts (2004)

Then there's the long performance piece "Compostela - A Walk" included in New Zealand poet and playwright Alan Brunton's posthumous book Grooves of Glory. Looking at it again, I was a little surprised to discover that I myself was the first to publish it, in brief 25 (2002).

There's a wonderful introduction to the script by Brunton's wife and collaborator Sally Rodwell at the front of the book:

Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port

In 1987 we drove to Spain and Portugal in a red diesel van bought untested from the Utrecht van market. It had poor front tyres. We did a deal in Normany at a fly-by-night wreckers - 'deux pneux'. We were had. They were two sizes too small. So the van bounced through the French countryside like a circus bicycle. With the help of friends in Bourdeaux, we balanced the vehicle once more and set out for the Pyrenees. Ruby, our daughter, was two. We stopped at Lourdes on the way. It was a great holy place, with thousands of pilgrims, some on their knees, making their way to the founts of healing water. There was something going on here - it reminded us of our former home in Chimayo, New Mexico. We had lived close to the Sanctuario, a sacred chapel visited by pilgrims to collect the holy mud that miraculously appeared in the floor, The chapel walls were hung with dsicarded braces and walking sticks, tributes to its healing power. At Easter pilgrims walked to Chimayo in vast numbers along the state highways of the South West. There was also a statue of Santo Niño there, peering serenely at the world above a small mountain of baby shoes, gifts from thankful parents.

El Santuario de Chimayó

Later in Portugal we found the shrine of Fátima, where the blessed Virgin had appeared to three children. Fátima was also teeming with pilgrims seeking relief from illness and troubles. We collected water there too. Leaving Portugal in the North, some weeks later, we entered Galicia. I remember we crossed a stone bridge and were once again in Spain. It was hot. We drove towards Santiago de Compostela (Saint James of the Field of Stars). Nothing prepared us for the beauty of the stone buildings of the city, burnt orange in the evening sun, nor the heartstopping grandeur of the cathedral. Once again there were pilgrims everywhere, shops selling cockle shells, tapes of medieval pilgrim songs, prayer cards, rosaries, postcards, all the trappings of the pilgrim trade. There were guidebooks in Spanish and English. Alan bought one of each. We knew at once that we would follow the pilgrim trail, albeit backwards, from Santiago to St Jean de Pied de Port in France.

The Cathedral of Santiago De Compostela

We were guided by the yellow arrows painted on stone walls and boulders, along a route that was far from the highway, along quiet country roads, through ancient stone towns. We did not enter the modern age, except for brief excursions into the great cities of Burgos and Pamplona. At night we camped, or stayed in small hotels. It was a voyage of discovery, and every few miles we would stop to visit a shrine, a church, a hospice, a convent, a house, a gate, a cross. Later Alan travelled the right way in his performance work Compostela - A Walk, imagining the road that ran all the way from France to Santiago ... The first performance was at Bats Theatre, Wellington on 7 April 2000 ...

Bats Theatre, Wellington

Alan's text is far too long and detailed to do justice to here, so I'll just quote a short piece from near the beginning:

we'll live the life
of the romero
the strangers who always
walk on new roads 
we'll live the life
of the romero
without a job, without a name
with no place to call home
we'll live the life 
of the romero 
the strangers who always 
walk on new roads 
where do you come from, Romero?
Romero, where do you go?
We come from nowhere
But we go to Compostela

Annie Goldson, dir.: Red Mole: A Romance (2023)

Those of you who've watched Annie Goldson's fascinating documentary about Brunton and Rodwell's theatre troupe Red Mole will be familiar with the peripatetic life led by them and their collaborators before returning to Wellington in the 1990s. As he himself explained it to his daughter Ruby in Fq (2002):

you will live in an era of new
proprioception, quatre étoiles, bright
locofocos over Ocean City, leaving me in
my old age growing up again in the fuzzy
town of my childhood where nothing was
original, not even our peccadillos, where I
promised with my hand stuck to a
tree by a knife I’d eat the wind all my life and
ramble from commune to commune ...

There was to be no such old age - but at least we have his body of work to explain that intensely Kiwi desire to escape: to leave "the fuzzy town" of our childhood and eat the wind all our lives ...

Ave atque vale, Alan - till we all meet again.

Alan Brunton (1946-2002)

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1. Lydia Smith, dir.: Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago (USA, 2013)

The avalanche of post-The Way Camino-centred feature films and documentaries began innocuously enough with Lydia Smith's Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago in 2013. This was followed by a film of Hape Kerkeling's bestselling travel book I'm Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago (2006):






2. Julia von Heinz, dir.: Ich bin dann mal weg (Germany, 2015)

Dutch director Martin de Vries took a more direct approach to the subject in his "feature-length selfie" Camino:






3. Martin de Vries: Camino, een feature-length selfie (Holland, 2019)

Our own New Zealand contribution to the genre, Camino Skies, stressed the element of pilgrimage - not so much for religious reasons, but mainly because of some personal tragedy or loss that needed to be addressed somehow, in a way which could not readily be encompassed within everyday life.






4. Noel Smyth & Fergus Grady, dir.: Camino Skies (NZ, 2019)

These moving and, at times, quite beautiful documentaries gave way to fictional buddy-movie narrative again with Birgitte Stærmose's Danish film Camino:






5. Birgitte Stærmose, dir.: Camino (Denmark, 2023)

In the meantime, Australian Bill Bennett decided that a kind of mockumentary might make an agreeable variation on the theme: a portrait of the artist as an irascible, unreasonable old prick ... Despite everything, though, even Bennett's protagonist manages to achieve a reconciliation of sorts with his long-suffering wife at the end of his peregrinations:






6. Bill Bennett, dir. & writ.: The Way, My Way (Australia, 2024)

It's always a bit difficult to fathom the humour of other cultures. The French adore Jerry Lewis and Jacques Tati. Americans find Rodney Dangerfield funny. Italians, it would appear, find atrocious buffoon Checco Zalone rib-ticklingly amusing. It's hard to see why. But he too (inevitably) finds an epiphany of a sort in his enforced sojourn on the Camino.






7. Gennaro Nunziante, dir.: Buen Camino, writ. Checco Zalone (Italy, 2025)

By now, such films needed little introduction beyond the single word "Camino" (for English-speaking viewers) or "Compostela" (for Europeans). Why, then, you may ask, do I keep on watching them?






8. Yann Samuel, dir.: Santiago: The Camino Therapy (France, 2026)

The fact that a subgenre has become predictable and unchallenging is no reason to give up on it altogether. There's such a thing as cinematic comfort food. When my wife's nephew Finn was asked why he insisted on watching rom-coms in preference to anything else on screen, he replied: "Because they're just good movies."

I'm not sure that Camino films are always good movies, but then, I'm not sure that the majority of rom-coms are either. The truth is that, like Finn, I love them. I love the scenery; I like their sense of mission, and the promise they seem to offer of a higher purpose to the everyday lives we live.

I like it that there's almost always a tear-provoking moment when everything seems to come together in the majestic surrounds of Santiago de Compostela - or even on the rugged Atlantic coast which most of our cinematic pilgrims now seem to regard as the rightful conclusion of their journey.

Maybe David Lodge had a point after all. Maybe the road to Compostela is not the place to argue about the timing of your latest book-tour. I don't know if I'll ever get the chance to walk it myself, but I'm pretty sure that I'll keep on enjoying it vicariously through the eyes of more ambitious travellers.

I really can't see much harm in that.






9. Laurent Granier, dir.: Compostela: The road of stars (France, 2026)

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The Worst Novel Ever?

Dan Brown: The Lost Symbol (2009)

Recently I've been entertaining myself by rereading a few of the masterworks of Dan Brown: Angels and Demons (2000), The Da Vinci Code (2003), and (for the very first time) The Lost Symbol, which I found in a Hospice Shop the other day.

I was, however, intrigued to see, on the wikipedia page devoted to the novel, the fact that "Slovene philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek [has] described the book as 'a candidate for the worst novel ever'."

The worst novel ever ... Really? I mean, even by Dan Brown's standards, it's pretty bad - a tired rehash of all the same characters and situations as its two rather livelier predecessors. It's so bad, in fact, that it drove me online to see if it was just me, or if other readers had noticed a certain lack of the old pizzazz in Brown's barking dog of a novel. Boy, did they!

The New York Times critic, while stressing the basic readability of the book, went on to liken the character Inoue Sato to Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars prequels. Ouch! Other reviewers called it "contrived," "a heavy-handed, clumsy thriller,' "filled with cliché, bombast, undigested research and pseudo-intellectual codswallop," and, finally, "a novel that asks nothing of the reader, and gives the reader nothing back."

Yes, true, all true, and (after all) even the author must have known that it was not his best work. It took so much longer than its predecessors, to start with - with the publication date repeatedly put back - and anyone could be forgiven for suffering a bit of performance anxiety after the disproportionate success of the Da Vinci Code, both as a book and as a movie.

In any case, whether it's good or bad, it was also "the fastest selling adult-market novel in history, with over one million copies sold on the first day of release" - so Brown might well feel justified in riposting something to the effect of yar boo sux Slavoj Žižek: give me a buzz when one of your books does the same thing.

David Lodge: Ginger, You're Barmy (1962)

I did feel a certain sense of déjà vu about the whole controversy, though. I remember having precisely the same discussion about what actually was the worst novel ever written with a classmate at graduate school in the 1980s. She told me that she had in fact stumbled upon it quite recently - it was by David Lodge, and it was called Ginger, You're Barmy, a thinly disguised autobiographical account of his time in the army under national service.

The reason that this sticks in my mind with such vividness, some thirty years later, is (first) because I had in fact read this particular David Lodge novel. And that - by some outrageous coincidence - my own candidate for worst novel ever written was another book by the very same author! I ask you, what are the chances of that?

David Lodge: How Far Can You Go? (1980)

How Far Can You Go? is a kind of social novel exploring the pointless non-dilemma of how far a bunch of Catholic characters can go in terms of adultery and general naughtiness without forfeiting their right to feel morally smug and satisfactorily insured against hellfire. I suppose it's meant to be a comic novel, really, but it's hard to imagine anyone laughing or even smiling at any of the lacklustre situations his unmemorable characters manage to get themselves in. Compared to that, as I maintained to Claire at the time, Ginger, You're Barmy qualifies as quite a lively read.

She remained unconvinced. Nothing, she said, could be as bad as Ginger, You're Barmy. The surprising thing was that the very paper it was printed on could bear to maintain those words and sentences in perpetuity - that copies of the book did not spontaneously combust out of sheer self-disgust ... (We may have had a certain collective tendency towards hyperbole in those days).

A David Lodge Trilogy

The funny thing is, I quite enjoyed some of David Lodge's other books - his trilogy of campus comedies, Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1988) was rchly amusing, I thought - and I've found some of his essays on literary theory extremely clear and useful at critical moments in my own 'academic career' (if you want to call it that).

Soul Man (1986)

I know that we've all indulged in those conversations where you sit around listing the worst movies ever made - my own personal pick, after all these years, remains the tasteless blackface comedy Soul Man (1986), whereas Bronwyn steadfastly maintains the counter-demerits of Brown Bunny (2003) - but the quest for the worst novel ever written should have somewhat stricter rules, I feel.

The Brown Bunny (2003)

First of all, there's no point in lambasting bad novels by obscure nobodies. Where's the fun in that? It's just cruel and spiteful.

Nor is it fair to choose a novel which you didn't succeed in reading to the end - what if it picks up in the last thirty pages?

Nor is it sporting (I believe) to choose an author whose work you find uniformly distasteful. Why bother to select a particularly poor novel by Dean Koontz or Jeffrey Archer, for instance - are there any good ones?

These, then, must be the rules of the competition:

1. You can't pick a novel by an author you entirely despise
2. You can't pick a novel you didn't manage to finish
3. There's no point in selecting something completely obscure

Let the games begin - and may the odds be ever in your favour!

I have to say, in conclusion, that I doubt severely that Žižek would be able to find merit in any of Dan Brown's books, which objection - if maintained by the stewards - would constitute a fatal obstacle to his otherwise quite compelling choice of The Lost Symbol as the worst novel ever written.

However, since Bronwyn and I both enjoyed reading my old classmate Mark Haddon's book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003), I think that that validates her selection of his more recent The Red House as her own candidate for worst novel ever written.

Mark Haddon: The Red House (2012)

Ever since I started writing novels myself, I guess I've been a bit more chary of parlour games such as this. There is, however, no accounting for tastes, and it can come as a shock that something you mildly enjoyed yourself can be right up there on someone else's hitlist. A lukewarm response is the worst fate any book can receive, in any case, so I don't think being on a list of world's worst novels is likely to do lasting harm to any of the books (or authors) mentioned above.

David Lodge: Changing Places (1975)

It does put me a little in mind, though, of that wonderful game "humiliation" described in David Lodge's novel Changing Places:

The essence of the matter is that each person names a book which he hasn’t read but assumes the others have read, and scores a point for every person who has read it.

Since all Academics feel secretly guilty about not having ever read works that they are generally expected to be familiar with (Paradise Lost, Middlemarch - you know the kind of thing), this is a great chance to come clean. But you can only win by exposing your own ignorance. There's no point in naming anything extra difficult and pretentious, since no-one else present is likely to have read it either, and you won't get any points.

In the novel, the game is won by a Drama Professor who admits to never having read Hamlet. The sequel, however, is not quite so risible:

Howard Ringbaum unexpectedly flunked his review three days later and it’s generally supposed that this was because the English Department dared not give tenure to a man who publicly admitted to not having read Hamlet.

Harry Medved & Randy Dreyfuss: The Fifty Worst Movies of All Time (1978)

Henry James: The Legend of the Master

Simon Nowell-Smith: The Legend of the Master (1947)


At the Grave of Henry James

The snow, less intransigeant than their marble,
Has left the defence of whiteness to these tombs;
For all the pools at my feet
Accommodate blue, now, and echo such clouds as occur
To the sky, and whatever bird or mourner the passing
Moment remarks they repeat.

"A great and talkative man," W. H. Auden called him in this magnificent elegy, first published in Horizon in 1941. I too - to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous - have already written a short post on Henry James, some years ago, but solely in connection with his prowess as a writer of ghost stories.

His importance to Auden appears to have been as a kind of final court of literary appeal:

All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.

Others, too (Graham Greene among them), found his example strangely inspiring in the 1940s, as the brute beasts trampled the earth, and utter darkness threatened to swallow up the exquisite niceties of perception for which James stood for, both as man and writer.

Do I find him easy to read? Not really, no - with the exception of such fine early works as "Daisy Miller" or The American. I've never undertaken the task of reading a James novel without a certain trepidation. And there are still great gaps in my knowledge of his œuvre.

Paradoxically, though, I find him very easy to read about. I've worked my way through Leon Edel's magisterial, multi-volumed biography a couple of times now, and find it, alas, more enthralling than any of the Master's own books.

Of course it's only one among many biographies. And - just to make things simpler - it exists in a number of diverse forms. There's the original, five-volume edition, in which it first appeared between 1953 and 1972:

Leon Edel: Henry James (1978)

1. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Untried Years: 1843-1870. 1953. New York: Avon Books, 1978.


2. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Conquest of London: 1870-1881. 1962. New York: Avon Books, 1978.


3. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Middle Years: 1882-1895. 1962. New York: Avon Books, 1978.


4. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Treacherous Years: 1895-1901. 1969. New York: Avon Books, 1978.


5. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Master: 1901-1916. 1972. New York: Avon Books, 1978.

Then there's the unabridged, but slightly reorganised British paperback edition:

Leon Edel: The Life of Henry James (1977)

1. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 1: 1843-89. 1953, 1962, 1963. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.


2. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 2. 1963, 1969, 1972. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

And then, finally, there's the one-volume abridgement of 1985, which unfortunately contains some extra material, and therefore needs to be acquired by the fastidious collector (though it turned out to consist mostly of some rather tenuous speculations about some possible new sources for "The Turn of the Screw"):

Leon Edel: Henry James: A Life (1978)

1. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. 1953, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1972 & 1977. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1985.

That really is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Jamesiana, though. There's the disreputably entertaining work by Simon Nowell-Smith pictured at the head of this post. And, if it's the Master's domestic arrangements that preoccupy you, there's the almost equally interesting work below by H. Montgomery Hyde:

H. Montgomery Hyde: Henry James at Home (1978)

1. Nowell-Smith, Simon. The Legend of the Master: Henry James as Others Saw Him. 1947. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.


2. Hyde, H. Montgomery. Henry James at Home. London: Methuen, 1969.

Then there are the curious events of the so-called 'Year of Henry James' - 2004 - when a whole series of novelists seem to have decided simultaneously to make him the star of their books. David Lodge and Colm Tóibín are the most prominent among them, but Lodge lists a number of others in his book of essays on the subject:

David Lodge: Author, Author (2004)

1. Lodge, David. Author, Author: A Novel. Secker & Warburg. London: Random House, 2004.


2. Lodge, David. The Year of Henry James or, Timing is All: The Story of a Novel. With Other Essays on the Genesis, Composition and Reception of Literary Fiction. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2006.


3. Tóibín, Colm. The Master: A Novel. Scribner. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Colm Tóibín: The Master (2004)

What other ways are there to fritter away your time in the beguiling province of Henry-Jamesia without venturing to scale the daunting mountain ranges of his late prose? I can think of a few answers.

First of all, there are a number of other books by Leon Edel to sample - not to mention an intriguing book on 'The Turn of the Screw' by Auckland University lecturer Dr Elizabeth Sheppard. But the real motherlode lies in the books by and about the rest of the family: not just his polymathic elder brother William, but also his fiercely intelligent 'professional invalid' of a sister, Alice:

Leon Edel, ed.: The Diary of Alice James (1964)

1. Edel, Leon. The Psychological Novel, 1900-1950. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955.


2. Edel, Leon. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.


3. Edel, Leon, ed. The Diary of Alice James. 1964. Introduction by Linda Simon. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999.


4. Hardwick, Elizabeth, ed. The Selected Letters of William James. The Great Letters Series. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961.


5. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Great Books of the Western World, 53. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.


6. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. 1901-2. Introduction by Arthur Darby Nock. 1955. The Fontana Library: Theology & Philosophy. London: Collins, 1968.


7. Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. 1991. An Anchor Book. New York: Doubleday, 1993.


8. Sheppard, E. A. Henry James and The Turn of the Screw. Auckland: Auckland University Press / Oxford University Press, 1974.


9. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, ed. The Death and Letters of Alice James. 1981. Boston: Exact Change Books, 1997.

Sooner or later, of course, you'll have to bite the bullet and just start reading The Portrait of a Lady, or some other reasonably approachable early or mid-period novel, but even that can be put off for some considerable time if you choose to go via the distinctly less daunting letters-and-notebooks route:

Lyall H. Powers, ed.: Henry James and Edith Wharton (1990)

1. Matthiessen, F. O., & Kenneth B. Murdock, ed. The Notebooks of Henry James. 1947. A Galaxy Book GB 61. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1961.


2. Edel, Leon, ed. The Selected Letters of Henry James. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955.


3. James, Henry. Letters I: 1843-1875. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1974.


4. James, Henry. Letters II: 1875-1883. Ed. Leon Edel. 1975. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1978.


5. James, Henry. Letters III: 1883-1895. Ed. Leon Edel. 1980. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1981.


6. James, Henry. Letters IV: 1895-1916. Ed. Leon Edel. The Belknap Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 1984.


7. James, Henry. Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. The Belknap Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 1987.


8. Edel, Leon, & Lyall H. Powers, ed. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1987.


9. Horne, Philip, ed. Henry James: A Life in Letters. Viking Penguin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.


10. Powers, Lyall H, ed. Henry James and Edith Wharton. Letters: 1900-1915. London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited, 1990.


11. Smith, Janet Adam, ed. Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948.

Once again (as usual), it's Leon Edel who leads the charge, with his four-volume edition of the Letters, as well as a couple of one-volume selected editions. But, as you can see from the list above, there are also number of correspondences with particular friends and fellow authors to be savoured - not to mention one of those 'Life in Letters' compilations which offer such a good way of selling essentially the same material twice.

All of which brings me to what is (ostensibly, at least) the actual subject of this post: the decision to complete my set of the Henry James volumes included in the Library of America. If you've read my recent piece on the subject, you'll know more than enough already about my obsession with this black-backed series of classics.

Their Henry James collection includes the complete novels (in six volumes), the complete stories (in five volumes), the collected travel writings (in two volumes), the collected literary criticism (in two volumes), and the complete autobiographical writings (in one volume): 16 volumes in all. When I receive the last couple of volumes of novels, I'll be proud to say that I have them all:

Henry James

1. James, Henry. Novels 1871-1880: Watch and Ward / Roderick Hudson / The American / The Europeans / Confidence. Ed. William T. Stafford. The Library of America, 13. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983.


2. James, Henry. Novels 1881-1886: Washington Square / The Portrait of a Lady / The Bostonians. Ed. William T. Stafford. The Library of America, 29. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1985.


3. James, Henry. Novels 1886-1890: The Princess Casamassima / The Reverberator / The Tragic Muse. Ed. Daniel Mark Fogel. The Library of America, 43. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1989.


4. James, Henry. Novels 1896-1899: The Other House / The Spoils of Poynton / What Maisie Knew / The Awkward Age. Ed. Myra Jehlen. The Library of America, 139. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2003.


5. James, Henry. Novels 1901-1902: The Sacred Fount / The Wings of the Dove. Ed. Leo Bersani. The Library of America, 162. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2006.


6. James, Henry. Novels 1903-1911: The Ambassadors / The Golden Bowl / The Outcry / Appendix: “The Married Son.” Ed. Ross Posnock. The Library of America, 215. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2011.


7. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 1: 1864-1874. Ed. Jean Strouse. The Library of America, 111. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1999.


8. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 2: 1874-1884. Ed. William L. Vance. The Library of America, 106. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1999.


9. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 3: 1884-1891. Ed. Edward Said. The Library of America, 107. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1999.


10. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 4: 1892-1898. Ed. David Bromwich and John Hollander. The Library of America, 82. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996.


11. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 5: 1898-1910. Ed. Denis Donoghue. The Library of America, 83. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996.


12. James, Henry. Collected Travel Writings. Great Britain and America: English Hours; the American Scene; Other Travels. Ed. Richard Howard. The Library of America, 64. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993.


13. James, Henry. Collected Travel Writings. The Continent: A Little Tour in France; Italian Hours; Other Travels. Ed. Richard Howard. The Library of America, 65. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993.


14. James, Henry. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel & Mark Wilson. The Library of America, 22. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.


15. James, Henry. Literary Criticism: French Writers; Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel & Mark Wilson. The Library of America, 23. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.


16. James, Henry. Autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others / Notes of a Son and Brother / The Middle Years / Other Writings. 1913, 1914, 1917. Ed. Philip Horne. The Library of America, 274. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2016.

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Henry James: Autobiographies LOA N°274

Henry James: Novels 1903-1911 LOA N°215

Henry James: Novels 1901–1902 LOA N°162

Henry James: Novels 1896–1899 LOA N°139

 

Henry James: Complete Stories 1864–1874 LOA N°111

Henry James: Complete Stories 1884–1891 LOA N°107

Henry James: Complete Stories 1874–1884 LOA N°106

Henry James: Complete Stories 1898–1910 LOA N°83

Henry James: Complete Stories 1892–1898 LOA N°82

Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: The Continent LOA N°65

Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America LOA N°64

Henry James: Novels 1886–1890 LOA N°43

Henry James: Novels 1881–1886 LOA N°29

Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, Prefaces to the New York Edition LOA N°23

Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers LOA N°22 

 

  

Henry James: Novels 1871–1880 LOA N°13

•

James (according to Leon Edel, at any rate) had an obsession with collected editions. His aspiration, from the very beginning, was to create a kind of American Comédie humaine in the spirit of Balzac's monumentally comprehensive portrait of nineteenth-century France. The set of Balzac he himself read was in 23 volumes. Hence the 23 volumes he attempted to compress his works into for the late New York edition (1907-9) of his works.

Unfortunately it sprawled into 24 volumes instead, and eventually included two posthumous volumes as well, so it's safe to say that his long-meditated enterprise didn't go quite as planned.

What's more, it was a financial disaster. He'd rewritten, revised, and radically pruned his early fiction to fit the aesthetic dictates of his late style, and the result was hardly pleasing to fans of the works in their earlier form. The elaborate prefaces he wrote for each volume, though subsequently collected as a kind of treatise on the art of fiction, were also seen as somewhat excessive.

This - as he perceived it - ruin of his life's work drove him into a depression, and it wasn't really until the pressure of war work in 1914 awoke him from lethargy that he was able to recover the will to live, let alone to write.

When he died in 1916, he accordingly left an immense but disordered legacy. Above all, there's the problem of which texts to read: the original versions or the revised ones? Leon Edel, by and large, preferred the novels and stories as they first appeared, and he attempted to restore them to popular attention in the many, many collections of James's works he edited or oversaw.

The most prominent of these was probably his 12-volume set of the Master's complete short stories:

Leon Edel, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James (1962-64)

1. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 1: 1864-1868. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.


2. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 2: 1868-1872. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.


3. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 3: 1873-1875. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.


4. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 4: 1876-1882. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.


5. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 5: 1883-1884. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.


6. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 6: 1884-1888. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.


7. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 7: 1888-1891. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.


8. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 8: 1891-1892. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.


9. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 9: 1892-1898. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.


10. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 10: 1898-1899. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.


11. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 11: 1900-1903. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.


12. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 12: 1903-1910. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.

Leon Edel, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James (Vol 10: 1898-1899)

I wouldn't want you to walk away with the impression that the Library of America edition of James is in any way complete, however. Perish the thought! Conspicuous among the absences are James's last two novels, unfinished and posthumously published: The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past (consituting, respectively, the last two volumes of the New York edition).

Then there are the plays (available in another fine edition by Leon Edel).

Leon Edel, ed. The Complete Plays of Henry James (1949)

Then there's his one, full-length biography, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903):

Henry James: William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903)

Of course, there are reasons for allowing at least some of these to sink into oblivion. The biography was a duty job: forced upon him as an obligation to some friends, and not written from the heart (he didn't even like the sculptor Story very much).

The plays, too, were a kind of slow-motion disaster which had occupied much of his time in the 1890s, and came very near to breaking his heart:

"I'm the last, My Lord, of the Domvilles," as the eponymous hero of his play Guy Domville intoned in its one, abortive production.

"And it's a bloody good thing y'are!" a rough voice shouted from the stalls.

What else? There are facsimile editions of his annotated copies of early novels intended as guides for his later revisions - there are reprints, selections, re-editions, in basically every series of modern classics known to man. Truly, once you start, there's no obvious end to the number of books you need to collect to see this strangest of beings, this - in many ways - most loveable of writers, whole.

As a teacher of creative writing, I often find myself quoting his precept for young writers: "Dramatise!"

Even more often, though, I think of his three rules for civilised conduct:

1. Be kind
2. Be kind
3. Be kind

John Singer Sargent: Henry James (1913)

Henry James
(1843-1916)

Novels:


1. James, Henry. Watch and Ward. 1871 & 1878. Introduction by Leon Edel. 1959. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1960.


2. James, Henry. The American: The Version of 1877 Revised in Autograph and Typescript for the New York Edition of 1907. Reproduced in Facsimile from the Original in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Introduction by Rodney G. Dennis. Houghton Library Manuscript Facsimiles, 1. 1976. London: Scolar Press, 1978.


3. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady: An Authoritative Text / Henry James and the Novel / Reviews and Criticism. 1881. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975.


4. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Ed. Geoffrey Moore. 1984. Notes by Patricia Crick. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.


5. James, Henry. The Princess Casamassima. 1886. London: Heron Books / Macmillan & Co., n.d.


6. James, Henry. A London Life and The Reverberator. 1888 & 1908. Ed. Philip Horne. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.


7. James, Henry. The Tragic Muse. 1890. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.


8. James, Henry. The Other House. 1896. Introduction by Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948.


9. James, Henry. The Spoils of Poynton. 1897. Penguin Modern Classics, 1922. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.


10. James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. 1897 & 1908. Ed. Douglas Jefferson & Douglas Grant. 1966. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.


11. James, Henry. The Awkward Age. 1899. With the Author’s Preface. New York Edition, 1908. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.


12. James, Henry. The Sacred Fount. 1901. With an Introductory Essay by Leon Edel. 1953. A Black Cat Book. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1979.


13. James, Henry. The Wings of the Dove: An Authoritative Text / The Author and the Novel / Criticism. 1902 & 1909. Ed. J. Donald Crowley & Richard A. Hocks. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.


14. James, Henry. The Ambassadors: An Authoritative Text / The Author on the Novel / Criticism. 1903. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1964.


15. James, Henry. The Golden Bowl. 1904. With the Author’s Preface. Penguin Modern Classics, 2449. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.


16. James, Henry, with William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jordan, John Kendrick Bangs, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Wyatt, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Alice Brown & Henry Van Dyke. The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors. 1908. Introduction by Alfred Bendixen. New York: the Ungar Publishing Company, 1986.


17. James, Henry. The Outcry. Methuen's Colonial Library. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1911.


18. James, Henry. The Outcry. 1911. Introduction by Jean Strouse. New York Review Books Classics. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2002.


19. James, Henry. The Ivory Tower. Preface by Percy Lubbock. 1917. With an Essay by Ezra Pound. 1954. Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst. New York Review Books Classics. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2004.


20. James, Henry. The Sense of the Past. The Novels and Tales of Henry James: New York Edition, Volume XXVI. Preface by Percy Lubbock. 1917. Classic Reprint Series. N.p.: Forgotten Books [www.forgottenbooks.org], 2010.

Stories:


21. Aziz, Maqbool, ed. The Tales of Henry James. Volume One, 1864-1869. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.


22. James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories. 1879-1910. Introduction by Michael Swan. Collins Classics. London: Collins, 1956.


23. James, Henry. Ghost Stories. Ed. Martin Scofield. Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2001.

Plays:


24. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Plays of Henry James. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949.


25. James, Henry. Guy Domville: A Play in Three Acts. With Comments by Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett. Preceded by Biographical Chapters, Henry James: The Dramatic Years. Ed. Leon Edel. 1960. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961.


26. James, Henry. The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, 1872-1910. Ed. Allan Wade. Foreword by Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949.

Travel:


27. Kaplan, Fred, ed. Travelling in Italy with Henry James: Essays. A John Curtis Book. London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1994.

Literary Criticism:


28. James, Henry. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Introduction by Richard P. Blackmur. 1934. New York & London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.


29. James, Henry. The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel. Ed. Leon Edel. 1957. Mercury Books, 24. London: The Heinemann Group of Publishers, 1962.


30. James, Henry. Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Morris Shapira. Preface by F. R. Leavis. 1963. A Peregrine Book Y73. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Biography & Autobiography:


31. James, Henry. William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections. In Two Volumes (Combined). 1903. London: Thames & Hudson, n.d.


32. James, Henry. Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others; Notes of a Son and Brother; The Middle Years. 1913, 1914, 1917. Ed. Frederick W. Dupree. London: W. H. Allen, 1956.

John Singer Sargent: Henry James (detail)