HENRY James, no stranger to depression himself, responded to a worryingly emotional letter from Grace Norton, a
with a stunning letter
"I hardly know what to say to you,” contains some of the greatest, most compassionate advice ever put to paper #James24
lettersofnote.com/2012/03/20/s...
I started reading The Jolly Corner, a short story by Henry James, and though the names are different, these two could easily be Strether and Miss Gostrey. #James24 #TheAmbassadors
Thank you for reading! #James24 #TheAspernPapers #HenryJames #readinganactofsharedsolitude #ReemReel #paperpills💊 #AThingOfBeauty #beedoubleokayess📚🐦
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Poor Miss Tins's sense of her failure had produced a rare alteration in her, but I had been too full of stratagems and spoils to think of that.
#James24
The man that hath no music in himself
Not is not moved with concord of sweet sounds
Is fit for treasons, strategems & spoils.
The worst part of it was that she looked terribly like an old woman who at a pinch would, even like Sardanapalus, burn her treasure.
#James24 #TheAspernPapersThe Death of Sardanapalus (La Mort de Sardanapale) is an oil painting on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, dated 1827.
#James24 #TheAspernPapers Die Aspern-Schriften
tr./Nachwort: Bettina Blumenberg
…Der Erzähler wechselt vom Nacherzählen zum Berichten, vom Vorgreifen zur Rückblende und zur Rückkehr in die Erzählzeit, sodass ein zeitliches Flirren und damit ein besonders intensives Empfinden von Jetztzeit entsteht…
#James24 #TheAspernPapers [9]
As you sit in your gondola the footways that in certain parts edge the canals assume to the eye the importance of a stage, meeting it at the same angle, and the Venetian figures, moving to and fro against the battered scenery of their little houses of comedy,
1/
Here she did what I had not done when I quitted her—she paused long enough to give me one look. I have never forgotten it and I sometimes still suffer from it, though it was not resentful. No, there was no resentment, nothing hard or vindictive in poor Miss Tina
#James24
“What shall you do—where shall you go?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. I have done the great thing. I have destroyed the papers.”
“Destroyed them?” I faltered.
“Yes; what was I to keep them for? I burned them last night, one by one, in the kitchen.”
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
She stood in the middle of the room with a face of mildness bent upon me& her look of forgiveness, of absolution, made her angelic. It beautified her; she was younger; she was not a ridiculous old woman.
Why not, after all—why not? It seemed I was ready to pay the price.
#James24
I found myself aware of this almost as soon as I opened my eyes; it made me jump out of my bed with the movement of a man who remembers that he has left the house door ajar or a candle burning under a shelf. Was I still in time to save my goods?
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
As the day went on I grew to wish that I had never heard of Aspern’s relics, and I cursed the extravagant curiosity that had put John Cumnor on the scent of them.
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
What in the name of the preposterous did she mean if she did not mean to offer me her hand? That was the price—that was the price! And did she think I wanted it, poor deluded, infatuated, extravagant lady?
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
In a moment she was facing me again, with her streaming eyes. “I would give you everything—and she would understand, where she is—she would forgive me!”
“Ah, Miss Tina—ah, Miss Tina,” I stammered, for all reply.
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
Well, that if U were a relation it would be different.”
If I were a relation?
If U were not a stranger. Then it would be the same for U as for me. Anything that is mine—would be yours, and U could do what U like. I couldn’t prevent U—and U would have no responsibility.
#James24
“You don’t mean to say you made her a deathbed promise? It was precisely against your doing anything of that sort that I thought I was safe. Oh, I would rather she had burned the papers outright than that!”
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
“I have got them but I can’t show them,” she added.
“Not even to me? Ah, Miss Tina!” I groaned, with a voice of infinite remonstrance and reproach.
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
After that there would be nothing left for me but to go to the station; for seriously (and as it struck me in the morning light) I could not linger there to act as guardian to a piece of middle-aged female helplessness.
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
But she evidently had been crying, crying a great deal—simply, satisfyingly, refreshingly, with a sort of primitive, retarded sense of loneliness and violence. But she had none of the formalism or the self-consciousness of grief- with
her hand full of admirable roses
#James24
I left Venice the next morning, as soon as I learned that the old lady had not succumbed, as I feared at the moment, to the shock I had given her—the shock I may also say she had given me.
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
They glared at me, they made me horribly ashamed.
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
#TheAspernPapers
#HenryJames
#James24
“Now I'll go home." Miss Tita laid her hands on the back of her aunt's chair and began to push, but I begged her to let me take her place. "Oh, yes, you may move me this way—you shan't in any other!"
I kept thinking about Byatt's Possession as I was reading Henry James' The Aspern Papers. Those two stories fit well together. She must have read it at some point and maybe was even inspired by it.
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
#TheAspernPapers
#HenryJames
#James24
“You have been guilty?"
"I have sailed under false colors."
„I feel as if you were a new person, now that you have got a new name.“
#James24 #TheAspernPapers [8]
#TheAspernPapers
#HenryJames
#James24
I foresaw that I should have a summer after my own literary heart, and the sense of holding my opportunity was much greater than the sense of losing it.
Miss Bordereau stood there in her nightdress, in the doorway of her room, watching me; her hands were raised, she had lifted the everlasting curtain that covered half her face, and for the first, the last, the only time I beheld her extraordinary eyes.
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
I touched the button with my hand—a mere touch would tell me; and as I did so (it is embarrassing for me to relate it), I looked over my shoulder. It was a chance, an instinct, for I had not heard anything.
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
Did she know I was there and was she just keeping quiet to see what I would do—what I COULD do? But what could I do, when it came to that? She herself knew even better than I how little.
#James24 #TheAspernPapers
