Henry James as lyrical mosaicist

image courtesy Susanne Urban


The Henry James of the Portrait/Ambassadors/Dove/Golden sentiment.

Awash, sloshing in the seiche, a thousand thousand peels of consideration and distinction and hue and cut, fugal and harmonizing, the reader holds her in his arms, her warm breath is a fog on his lips. Carvings, whittles, shreds, flakes, and shavings are melted into a sort of creamy sorbet; we delect the thousand-flowered hill Henry confects; as to stand before the oceanic wheatfields of the North American prairies, and its eye-endless waves of grains and grains. Henry Senior's Syracuse real estate revenues showered 'pon the boys and Alice centuries of daydreams, one result of which was a European excursion for the Schenectady-shedding Daisy and her wee bruvvo. Seeking respite from the task of sorting through the peelings, one might today drive out James Street, in Syracuse, eventually (and inevitably, in New York State) crossing the Erie Canal. The novelist never visited Syracuse, the uffluffy counterpane beneath which he napped and dreamed for us a thousand thousand stalks of wheat and maize, which you called corn.