Not long ago, a comparison was made here between the
hardboiled style exemplified by Dashiell Hammett and the
labored, labyrinthine style of Henry James.
The other day, while reading Thurber's _Lances and Lanterns_,
I came across an excellent essay on Henry James, which,
surprisingly, starts thus:
One night nearly thirty years ago, in a legendary New York
boite de nuit et des arts called Tony's, I was taking part in
a running literary gun fight that had begun with a derogatory
or complimentary remark somebody made about something, when
one of the participants, former Pinkerton man Dashiell
Hammett, whose The Maltese Falcon had come out a couple of
years before, suddenly startled us all by announcing that his
writing had been influenced by Henry James's novel The Wings
of the Dove. Nothing surprises me any more, but I couldn't
have been more surprised then if Humphrey Bogart, another
frequenter of that old salon of wassail and debate, had
proclaimed that his acting bore the deep impress of the
histrionic art of Maude Adams.
[Thurber then proceeds to analyze, quite brilliantly, The
Wings of the Dove and its relation to The Maltese Falcon, as
well as the work of James as a whole.]
For those who might have the essay in another collection, its
title is
_The Wings of Henry James_.It appeared originally in The New
Yorker.
In any case, it's ironic that a connection between these two
stylistic opposites seems to exist...
Best,
mrt
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