The Turn of the Screw

A few months ago it was Dana Gioia I was so glad to 'discover', however belatedly. Now, it's Henry James who looks like taking high order among the writers of fiction that I've ever read. The tendency to want to make lists persists. It seems unhealthy but when one pronounces something as a 'favourite', it's useful to have defined to what degree. Not everything can be a priority, not everything a specialism and not everything a favourite. I'm less sure of my fiction writers than I am poets but, on the evidence of two novellas, Henry James looks destined to be very highly regarded.

The Turn of the Screw was better than The Aspern Papers and that was great. I'm glad the Introduction says that, like Hamlet, it,

will continue to inspire widely differing interpretations.

One is especially never sure in ghost stories exactly what is going on but Flora and Miles, the children, are impossibly charming yet increasingly and disconcertingly threatening. The presence of past domestic staff at Bly, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, as apparitions has something to do with it. It keeps the pages turning, especially with James's prose being so sumptuous and not as forbidding as I've assumed for so long without ever have checked for myself.

It's tempting in the first blaze of being impressed to put him ahead of long-established rivals. By all means, he's in many ways more sophisticated than Hardy and maybe George Eliot but it remains to be seen how he compares further down the line. I'm not throwing over Hardy on a whim after fifty years but it is much to James's credit that the comparisons even arise. It happens once in a while that the rest of a writer's back catalogue set me up for an extended session of reading. There is a lot of James. It is to be hoped that the two or three I pick up next are good choices. Much will depend on them as to how far into his work I go.