By J. Bradley
Henry James remained all through his existence interested by his boyhood and early manhood, and correspondingly on more youthful boys and males, and John R. Bradley illustrates the way it is within the context of such narcissism that James constantly handled male hope in his fiction. He additionally strains a extra refined yet comparable trajectory in James's writing from a Classical to a Modernist homosexual discourse, which in flip is proven to were paralleled via a shift in James's fiction from naturalistic beginnings to later stylistic evasion and obscurity. This radical publication, which covers the complete of James's occupation, will quick be famous as a defining textual content during this rising box of James reports.
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He had a face of classic beauty, pensive and rather sad in response, but which lit up when he smiled, like a pool touched by the sun. Antinous must have looked like this, I thought, when Hadrian first saw him in the Phrygian woods. The boy moved with effortless grace, walking as women walk who have carried vessels on their heads since childhood. 52 One can imagine it appealing to James. We know of two of his encounters with Italian boys discussed in similar classical contexts – the first was relayed by James himself in a travel essay of 1873 on Venice, the other by Mrs Humphry Ward concerning a visit in 1899 James made with her in the same country.
He had lifted it delicately as if he were smelling it. ’ ‘Ah, but I can’t wear mine,’ smiled the visitor. ‘I don’t see why you shouldn’t! com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08 38 39 ‘I honestly believe,’ Max says of Sloane, ‘that I might come into his study in my night-shirt and he would smile upon it as a picturesque désebillé {sic}’ (LM, 363). Nowhere else in James’s oeuvre is the suggestion of homosexual seduction so unambiguously stated. Given that Sloane’s only encounter with heterosexuality was with a woman he married for her money when he was young, who ‘considerately’ (LM, 357) died three years afterwards and left him her fortune, it might be assumed that the memoir Sloane is writing in some way documents an ‘alternative’ lifestyle.
Either way, her paragraph demonstrably traces a movement away from the sensory and towards the imaginative: from the boy to his name and finally to James’s verbal manifestation of his enchantment. It is significant that Mrs Ward, a notoriously moral individual, was not scandalised by anything she witnessed: the ease with which she could relate James’s admiration of Aristodemo to her classical knowledge seems to have excused both James’s indulgence and her own complicity in it. In a letter to Mrs Ward, James later referred to his fond memories of ‘the Nemi Lake, and the walk down and up (the latter perhaps most)’, and he added that ‘the strawberries and Aristodemo were the cream .
