COMPETITION
Henry on Henry
Jaspistos
In Competition No. 1397 you were asked to imagine the impression, recorded in a letter to a close friend, made on Henry James by Henry Miller, or vice versa, after a meeting at Lamb House.
The irreverent fantasy actually came to me in Lamb House in the middle of the night, and in the morning the many por- traits of the Great Butler seemed to reveal a just detectable approving twinkle. I once tried to entertain Henry Miller myself, in London. I asked him what he would like to do on a certain day. He said that he'd like to play ping-pong with me. Certainly, delighted to oblige. But it must be in the Open air. All right, but supposing it was raining? 'But it's great playing in a drizzle.' Luckily, after I'd fixed it laboriously up, on the day it poured, and I was saved. I remember that I also asked him which of his books he'd most like to see back in print. There was a long pause, then he laughed with a touch of embarrassment: 'It may sound crazy but, Jesus, I can't recall their names right here and now.' Some- times I lie awake, uneasily wondering if he was pulling my leg in both cases.
Among the many enjoyable losers, John O'Byrne came closest to a prize, but spoiled his paper by two mistakes: Miss Bosanquct could, by no stretch of prurient imagination, be described as a 'luscious, leggy, succulent typist', and James would not at that date be referred to, even by Miller, as 'some dude'. But the ending was strong: 'Caught a glimpse of some titles on the way out. What do you make of The Reverberator, The Turn of the Screw, Covering End? I reckon his work must be seminal.' Twelve pounds apiece to the four winners below, and George Moor takes the bonus bottle of Volnay Santenots-du- Milieu 1982 Comte Lafon (the gift of Morris & Verdin, Wine Merchants, 28 Churton St, London SW1).
Yet, dearest Edith, is not the innocence of which I wrote already and irreversibly, like the shrink- ing virgin snow of the peak in summer, vanishing, if not vanished, from our precocious land of the Pilgrims, so that in my final enormous frailty I may complacently claim that, with whatever happiness or not, I caught the retreating thing, as they say, in the nick of time? For compare the innocence of the bawdiness of Chaucer's Pilgrims, the sunny inoffensiveness of their physical encounters, with what the descen- dants of our Pilgrim Fathers and such youth as come as pilgrims to my breathing bones in Rye afflict on me in the way of Miller's tales. I have experienced a naked brutality, a carnage of word and image that, beyond Whitman's fine self-deprecatory yawp, in its boisterous barbar- ism destructive of those hesitancies and nuances that constitute civilisation, I find overwhelming- ly repellent. (George Moor)
Dear Chuck, What is interesting about James is not his setting — which stinks of the usual Anglo-phoney charm — nor his appearance — a sly overfed eunuch — nor his work — not a single good lay in a couple of million words — but his weird verbal intercourse — though whether you can call it that when there's goddam little inter about it — more a perpetuum- fucking-mobile of a monologue — would you believe it, the asshole told one anecdote about a duchess — it started with the soup, went right through the fish and was still wriggling around in a quagmire of parentheses when we were half-way through the entrée — what I can't figure out about the guy is whether all this is a form of sex or a surrogate for sex — or what the hell. All I know is that when one of his stories
eventually comes, it must be the most sensation- al case of ejaculatio postcocks in clinical history . . . . (Andrew McEvoy) When a young namesake (not to mention fellow countryman, scribbler and Francophile) begs leave to call, it needs no dusty letter of introduction for one to bid that gentleman welcome; it cannot be unduly optimistic, moreover, for his host to anticipate a bout of that agreeable sort of literary intercourse such as it behoves even the most reclusive of us to indulge in on occasion: imagine, then, my dismay on discovering that our Mr Miller, a young barbarian whose rough drawl would, I fancy, draw disapprobation even from the demi- monde of Brooklyn or Harlem, appeared disin- clined to expatiate on any other aspect of his sojourn in Clichy (a Parisian suburb of which I should welcome more intimate knowledge) than some startlingly frank accounts of philo- progenitive activity, leading me to conclude painfully that his days there have been very far from quiet. (Peter Norman) Dear James, As you suggested, I called on that lapsed American Henry James at Lamb House, Rye. He took me into the Garden Room and immediately launched into a ten-minute oration on 'My excellent amanuensis Miss Bosanquet'. Then at tea, a twenty-minute eulogy on 'My dear, dear little house'.
I was benumbed by his elaborations of phrase, his pointless parentheses, his polysyllabic eva- sions of theme. Bare verbs this guy won't tolerate. He splits his infinitives and stuffs them with adverbial garbage. Every irrelevant collo- quialism is grabbed by the balls and aimed at the rhetorical grand geste. I retired anaesthetised from the profusion of broken-backed sentences embellished with trailing vines of — There! He's got me at it.
He led me to the station, blessed me and said, 'When I envisage my barren past I wish I had claimed more, risked more, and . . . sinned
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