Not a sound from the pavement

 From time to time here I say that such and such a writer is one that will be worth returning to, and sometimes I do. Henry James was a pleasant if vague memory and The Turn of the Screw was helpfully only 132 pages long. It confirmed the impression I'd had of him before. He is famous for his prose style but it's a luxurious one. I wasn't clear what the ending of The Turn of the Screw 'meant' but it's a ghost story and ghosts needs must involve the unknown. And so Henry James continues on an upward trajectory. 

I do sometimes wonder at the point of all this reading, though, when I can remember so little about the books not long after. I couldn't even remember which Henry James it was I read earlier this year - Portrait of a Lady. I can usually remember whether they were any good or not but with BBC4 showing the vintage dramatisation of the Raods to Freedom trilogy, which I read in January, I had to check back here to see what I thought about it. I thought Nausea was much better and read the trilogy more out of duty and diligence than with relish.

One remembers things more clearly from longer ago, they are solidified permanently like foundation stones. Especially set books for exams when, after all, one had only read a couple of dozen books and assumed that that was most of literature accounted for. Hamlet, The Woodlanders, probably The Catcher in the Rye and as much as you could want of Larkin, I could talk about until the cows come home or, more likely, the audience make their excuses and go to theirs but nowadays it seems books go in one eye and out of the other 'leaving just their picture behind'. While the poetry of Holland-Dozier-Holland and Smokey Robinson readily comes to mind and can be quoted at length, I couldn't give you much verbatim Rosemary Tonks even though her attitude and charisma are compelling, compulsive and glorious.