(no subject)

[landingtree]

For reasons I was never put, from beginning to end, entirely in possession of, the book of choice for my flat to read aloud in the long swaddled afternoons of these coldest winter days I have enjoyed, the coldest to have tried my patience, since any residence of mine was ever howled around by Wellington's much-heralded June through August winds, has been The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James.

The book's joys - had my time required a nicer parceling-out or the friends with whom I read pleased my heart less, I might have added, 'where it had any' - alternated for me between an audience member's, complete relaxation on the sofa nearest the heater and a settling off into closer and closer following of windy subtleties, approaching yet fending asymptotically off the threshold of sleep, and a performer's, that testing of my ability to pronounce each word in the shadow of its predestinate future, to englobe clauses in pockets of intonation as they, frequently, passed, to avoid every blind alley of potential emphasis, to which I relished being, in my own judgement, generally equal.

I will confess redundancy in raising a mirror to that which, itself a mirror hinged in figure as a book is, outside figure, hinged, is already capable of being brought to reflect upon itself, and thus unhinged. Sex jokes, hanging low, can be gotten off easily. To make the text in general absurd requires a mere salt of comic timing. Toward the beginning, especially, of each reading session, these were frequently supplied. But I was pleased to find that the more passionately and, often, rapidly, the sentences, this one's superior, are read, the more clearly in the voice's natural light they show. It is interesting to read an early text of ghosts. The defining fearsomeness of these is that they remain on the other sides of barriers - lake, class, window - from the viewer, somehow more frightening for their necessary distance: the peril lies in being drawn, or in the possibility - speaking of unhinged mirrors - that they are already nearer than they seem. I do not much respect the art of vagueness, yet it affects. That little which is concrete looms like something in a mist. And I do love, as well as the exact, the minimally-stated.

(But as my vote for next reading book, if we have one, I've gotten out The Haunting of Hill House and left it suggestively on the sofa).

Comments

[rushthatspeaks]

You remind me delightedly of the time Max Beerbohm wrote "Henry James writing about a small child considering a Christmas stocking":

It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left it. But just where the deuce had he left it? The consciousness of dubiety was, for our friend, not, this morning, quite yet clean-cut enough to outline the figures on what she had called his "horizon," between which and himself the twilight was indeed of a quality somewhat intimidating.


Or in other words, a thousand times yes, with the notes that the film The Innocents is my favorite version of The Turn of the Screw, and also that Hill House reads aloud extremely well.

[landingtree]

I was put in mind of your review of that book! In fact I'd forgotten who wrote The Turn of the Screw when we started reading, but that bit of Beerbohm had clearly stuck in my mind, because after about a chapter and a half I went, "hang on, this is what that guy was parodying, isn't it?"

Thank you for recommending The Innocents! I think my flatmates would be keen to watch it.