ink – ink – ink pots, yes, yes, yes - Henry James is everywhere.

If I have felt little urgency to read James, I blame his continual presence in my reading.  He rivals anyone but  Samuel Johnson as a subject of anecdotes, quips, and opinions.  He supplies examples of whatever literary subject is at hand somewhere in his fiction or criticism.  Henry James is everywhere.

No, but I do feel that I know a lot about him, given how little of him I have read.  I know about the first time he met Virginia Woolf:

Henry James fixed me with his staring blank eye – it is like a childs marble – and said “My dear Virginia, they tell me – they tell me – they tell me – that you – as indeed being your fathers daughter nay your grandfathers grandchild – the descendant I may say of a century – of a century – of quill pens and ink – ink – ink pots, yes, yes, yes, they tell me – ahm m m – that you, that you, that you write in short.”  This went on in the public street, while we all waited, as farmers wait for the hen to lay an egg – do they? – nervous, polite, and now on this foot now on that.*

I will credit Woolf with some poetic license here, but not much.  “In short” is a bit too much like a punchline.

Levi Stahl describes, in a guest-star packed post (Wharton, Spender, Sei Shonagon), a 1948 book of nothing but James anecdotes.  “I – I have trifled with the exordia.”  It is worth knowing the context of that real-life Jamesian sentence, as good as it is by itself.**

When did I read about Henry James and his odd entanglement with Constance Fenimore Woolson?  I have no idea, but I was prepared when, while reading X. J. Kennedy’s The Lords of Misrule: Poems, 1992-2001, I came across “The Ballad of Fenimore Woolson and Henry James.”***  Fenimore may have fallen in love with James:

Now a diffident hat-tilt from Henry
Might fend off her loneliness,
But Henry was wedded already, it seemed,
To his ethical consciousness.

Poor Fenimore perishes by her own hand, but the story has a happy ending:

Henry went back to his writing desk,
Spread paper like an open chart
And he drew dear Fenimore into his arms
And transformed her to a work of art
Sill living,
Transformed her to a work of art.

In a note Kennedy admits that “a subtle history has been crudely simplified,” which is likely also a fine description of my own pieced together scraps of second- and third-hand knowledge of Henry James.

*  The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1, 1888-1912, August 25, 1907.  The misuse of apostrophes is Woolf’s.  Other errors quite likely mine.

**  In the comments of Stahl’s post, I am accused of contributing to the decline of civilization, a rare pleasure.

***  The ballad is also included in In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955-2007.

This inhuman monster is I - adorable Apollinaire, with bonus Raoul Dufy

Did I say something about writing about Goethe?  I’m too fidgety.  I need something lighter.  Something easier.  Something fluffier.

Devilfish (Le Poulpe)

Squirting his ink to the sky,
Sucking his lovers’ blood,
Finding the taste of it good,
This inhuman monster is I.

Well, that’s not all that fluffy.

The poem is by Guillaume Apollinaire, and translated by X. J. Kennedy.  The woodcut is by Raoul Dufy.  They can be found side by side, along with the French poem, in The Bestiary, or Procession of Orpheus (John Hopkins University Press, 2011).  It is Apollinaire’s first book of poems, originally published in 1909, just thirty little poems, one woodcut per poem, and it is not particularly innovative or odd.

I had read a couple of the poems in an Apollinaire anthology, and they slipped past me.  They make sense as a book.  In three poems, Orpheus introduces animals by group – mammals, then insects, then fish, then birds, roughly.  The ox is a bird.  Look, the classifications have some problems.  Some of the poems have some allegorical significance (see above), some are merely clever.

Maybe I can find one fluffier than that devilfish.

Cat (Le chat)

I hope I may have in my house
A sensible right-minded spouse,
A cat stepping over the books,
Loyal friends always about
Whom I couldn’t live without.

That’s nice.  Honestly, though, Raoul Dufy steals the show (click for more Dufy, courtesy of The Blue Lantern).  My favorite is this Art Nouveau peacock.

Peacock

When opening his fanlike tail
This bird whose plumes behind him trail
Looks lovelier than when it’s shut,
But he reveals his naked butt.

That really is pretty much how the French goes (“Mais se découvre le derrière”).

Ask your library to buy this book for you.  Don’t buy it yourself – it’s, like, $45 for a comic book.  Nuts.  While you’re at it, ask for X. J. Kennedy’s little book of selected poems, too, The Lords of Misrule (2002), which includes “The Ballad of Fenimore Woolson and Henry James” and is generally excellent, even better than Apollinaire’s Bestiary, although not half as cute.