Acephalous

What AM I Trying to Say? or, Henry James DID Do It, So Why Can't I?

In the comments to the first of Ogged's two posts about "serious reading," A White Bear writes:

One of the reasons I think it's important to teach pre-1800 texts is that it takes practice to tease out long sentences if all you've been reading is Chuck Palahniuk. Long, well-crafted sentences are more likely to offer examples of subtle, careful rhetoric. I've said before that I'm really attracted to dudes who know how to use a subordinate clause—not because I like Ivy-League dudes who are way into Milton, but because it's a sign that the mind is supple and sees in more colors than black and white.

Later, JL quotes Donald Hall on late Henry James:

Late James is the best prose for reading aloud. Saying one of his interminable sentences, the voice must drop pitch every time he interrupts his syntax with periphrasis, and drop again when periphrasis interrupts periphrasis, and again, and then step the pitch up, like climbing stairs in the dark, until the original tone concludes the sentence. One's larynx could write a doctoral dissertation on James's syntax.

Sandwiched between these two statements are numerous complaints about Twitter, text-messaging, and how they rob one of the ability to discern the subtleties of long sentences generally and late James specifically.  When AWB or Hall praises complex sentences, they do so because such sentences require an ear for subtlety the dessicated literalism of a pay-per-word culture deafens one to, i.e. you wouldn't catch James resorting to ALL CAPS for emphasis, because his readers could tease the emphasis from contextual clues.

Only as the transcription guide [.pdf] to "Dear Henry James" attests, James frequently employed the nineteenth century equivalent of ALL CAPS: the underline.  When his letters are transcribed, his underlining is preserved using ALL CAPS or italics for single underlines, ALL CAPS for double, UNDERLINED ALL CAPS triple, &c. 

So James' famous exhortation to Edith Wharton usually looks like this: "DO NEW YORK!"  The ALL CAPS is understandable there, as it marks the exhortatory nature of an exhortation; however, James regularly underlined words which are already emphatic, such as the emphatic do: "DO be so far as possible his Lady Ripon."  Happens quite a lot.  Perhaps this double emphasis is conventional, and that in the course of one of his long, winding late-period sentences he would include no twitter-markers.  Here's his 1907 account of a car accident (from a letter to Wharton):

Apropos of smashes, two or three days after we had crossed the level crossing of Caianello, near Caserta, SEVEN Neapolitan "smarts" were ALL killed dead—and this by no coming of the train, but simply by furious reckless driving and a deviation, a SLIP, that dashed them against a rock and made an instant end. The Italian driving is CRAPULOUS, and the roads mostly not good enough.

I don't think anyone would accuse Wharton of being an unsubtle reader, yet James writes as if his emphasis couldn't be gleaned from contextual clues.  All of which leads me to believe that such DEVIATIONS and SLIPS might not represent the DECLINE of comprehension so much as the continuation of a traditional emotional register of no small communicative import, INDEPENDENT of standards of literacy; such that the comprehension of READERS should not be thought the worse for merely reading what AUTHORS want to express with a VEHEMENCE unrelated to understandability. 

Henry James & Fletcherism; or, "The Gospel of Much Chewing"

Reading through Wharton's correspondence with Henry James, I came across a passage in which he extols the virtues of "the Fletcher diet."  According to L.F. Barker in The New York Times (8 March 1907), its inventor, Horace Fletcher,

was refused a few years ago on applying for life insurance because of stomach trouble.  That frightened him, and he began to think over the question of what he ate and should eat.  He came to the conclusion that food swallowed before it is dissolved is very much in the situation of clinkers in a furnace—likely to cause trouble and the loss of a great deal of energy in getting rid of it ... So he decided to chew everything he ate until it had thoroughly dissolved in his mouth. 

"The Gospel of Much Chewing," according to the Massachusetts Ploughman and New England Journal of Agriculture (27 February 1904), came to Fletcher when he realized

that the malassimilation which causes ["most, if, indeed, not all, of the ills to which humanity is supposed to be heir"] must arise from some voluntary violation of nature's laws, since subconscious action is of necessity in accord with them.

As the action of the stomach and lower digestive tract is involuntary, he reasoned that the difficulty must be in the mouth ... and he began at once to study its office in connection with digestion.  He soon discovered, among other untabulated physiological facts, that, after he had formed the habit of so thoroughly insalivating his food, both liquids and solids, that it became tasteless, he swallowed it without voluntary effort, and also that he experienced a curious inability to swallow food not so thoroughly masticated; finding that the throat through no act of will closed against that which had not been reduced to the consistency of cream.

While making these experiments Mr. Fletcher found that a young garden onion required 722 bites before it disappeared by involuntary swallowing, but that when this was accomplished it left no odor.

Simply put, Mr. Fletcher's contention is that the office of the teeth is so to reduce food that each particle can be acted upon by the saliva, which is freed by the action of the mouth for this purpose.

By practicing this thorough insalivating of his food, Dr. van Someren ["a practicing physician in Venice"] says that he has been cured of inherited gout and of eczema, frequent boils and severe headaches when all remedies known to the medical profession failed to give him relief ... In fact, he declares that most diseases would disappear if this method of eating was a universal habit.

In sum: Henry James praises a method of eating which entails sitting down to a delicious dinner and chewing, chewing, chewing, chewing, chewing until the food loses all flavor and is the consistency of cream.  Can you resist the temptation to analogize his post-1900 diet and his post-1900 prose style?

I, for one, cannot.

Note to Self: Remain on Henry James' Good Side

James' description of "Vernon Lee" (Violet Paget), as transcribed by Edith Wharton:

The long lean face of a starved horse, large and intelligent eyes not wholly devoid of obliquity, a flabby pendulous nose covered with cutaneous scabs, an underhung jaw revealing a dental display of really deplorable character, and on her head, my dear boy, from nine to thirteen hairs.

Have I plugged the Lee biography enough yet?