About this title: In Henry James's first novel, an egocentric sculptor from New England, Roderick Hudson, travels to Rome with his patron, the wealthy Rowland Mallet, who provides the moral center of the story. Away from home, Hudson becomes increasingly unstable and depressed, and comes to a violent end in the Swiss Alps--the first of James's American characters to be destroyed by Europe.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Harper, New York
Date Published: 1960
Description: Very Good. xvii, 334 p. 21 cm. "First published serially in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875. The present edition includes the revisions first published in 1909. " read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. 1977-Paperback----Used-Good-Hall Street Books proudly ships from Brooklyn, NY. All orders are processed and shipped within 24 hours, M-F. 100% money back No-Worry guarantee with expedited delivery and delivery confirmation available. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Published: 1986
ISBN-13:9780140432640ISBN:0140432647
Description: Acceptable. Overall below average used book. May have highlighting, underlining, notes, price sticker on cover, or be an ex-library book. read more
Description: Good. 0140432647 The cover has some faint creasing of the corners. Still a good reading copy. Thank you for browsing our selections at OldTowneBooksandBrew! read more
Description: Very Good. Binding tight; slight crease to spine; shows little shelf wear; pp 460-526 have slight water damage and there are two scuffs on back cover. read more
Description: Shelf 841. 5 by 7.5 inches. Hardcover with dj. Published by John Lehmann 1947. Good condition. Picture pasted to front cover. Pages clean and binding firm. Light browning on edges. read more
Description: Good. 8vo. Hardcover, . The dust jacket in fair condition and is encased in a mylar overcover The usual ex-library treatments are present. The joints and hinges are strong, and the textblock is sturdy. The pages are clean and intact. Smudge along lower corner of textblock, otherwise very clean condition. Reprint ed., no date, but looks to be from the 1960s or 1970s, has publisher's marking, A-8.61[MH], xx, 527 pp. Offered by the Antiquarian, Rare, and Collectable Books section at Better World ... read more
"What a surprise! I had always heard this was a first novel that really didn't need to be read and that The American was his first good work. I was captivated by it. His dis descriptions of Rome were lovely and I loved the final scene with the storm. Maybe a little melodramatic but worth reading for sure. And I loved all the details about the rincess Casamassima. How like Balzac to include a character in more than one book. Though I honestly don't know if she is as fascinating as he thought her. A Hitchcock sort of thing going? Fascination with a beautiful woman (albeit dark hair)?"
"This book hit me like a punch in the stomach. It left me brooding for days. It was not a pleasant experience, and for that I must give it four stars because it was so effective for me."
"A story about a male artist who possesses the opportunity, but not the discipline to become a great artist. I read this in the same week as Phelps' "The Story of Avis." Read in a sort of tandem, they play off each other, highlighting the problems faced by men and those faced by women who try to answer the call of Art."
"I thought it fitting that James should have commenced his 1909 preface to this novel, his first, with a disquisition on the difficulty of representation-the difficulty of establishing a selective system of observation that will enable an author "to give the image and the sense of certain things while keeping them subordinate to his plan, keeping them in relation to matters more immediate and apparent, to give all the sense, in a word, without all the substance or all the surface, and so to summarise and foreshorten, so to make values both rich and sharp"-because the eponymous character (from whose point of view, incidentally, the story is not told) resembles as, a subject, the heroine of the last James novel I read, while greatly, signally differing from her both in depth of treatment and in represented scale. Roderick Hudson and Miriam Rooth (the tragic muse of 'The Tragic Muse') are both possessed of stunning natural talent in their lines (sculpture his, declamatory drama hers) but begin the novels trapped floundering in backwaters far from the rigorous training and worldly influence required for their future, far-off fruition. Both are taken up by, and find appreciative benefaction from, connoisseurs of independent means, a theatre-going English diplomat in Miriam's case and an aesthetic American bachelor in Roderick's.
There the resemblance ends. Roderick is called a genius, quickly achieves vaguely described but plausible sculptural triumphs while resident amid the marmoreal glories gathered in Rome, and then, after being spurned by what I take to be the only recurring character in the James oeuvre (she rejects Roderick to marry the Prince of Casamissima), goes to pieces, makes a few tempestuous scenes, romantically vanishes into an Alpine storm, and (perhaps?) commits suicide by flinging himself from a precipice, during a intendedly-not to mention ironically-recuperative Swiss sojourn. Miriam unfolds more slowly, subtly: James devoted hundreds of pages and dozens of situations to depicting the growth of her talent, her gradual assimilation and supersession of diverse advisors and models, her ever-more conscious connection of aimless people-watching to professional character-building. When 'The Tragic Muse' concludes, or rather terminates, she has yet to reach her fullest expression.
I had mixed reactions to this perceived divergence. On one hand I was happy for the brisk pace of Roderick's development, and glad to have avoided another clunky kunstlerroman clotted with belabored explorations of yet one more dimension of a particular character's situation or plight. But I also thought the briskness too often bordered on the scanty. Roderick Hudson (1875) needs about 50 more pages; The Tragic Muse (1889), about 75 fewer. James admits in his preface that the narration of Roderick's breakdown (and, I would add, of his whole artistic development) is not given sufficient time-widely spaced and sufficiently elaborated scenes-to appear plausible, to appear the situation of a normal enough human collapsing under stress, and not a madmen already poised on the brink when the story starts. Roderick is on the whole a failure as a character, boring and quite unable to sustain interest.
This failure, coupled with James's constant and utterly unembarrassed use of eavesdropping and coincidental encounter to advance the plot (the worst I've ever come across, in any book), might have poisoned my interest but for the deftly-drawn subsidiary characters, and the awesome beauty of the prose. James shows that he can compose rounded, pompously lovely Augustan periods with the best of them-a century too late to compare as a contemporary of Johnson and Gibbon, but admirable all the more for that. I particularly I love this book for the freshness of its Italian impressions. Just listen:
"There are accidents of ruggedness in the upper portions of the Coliseum which offer a very fair imitation of the mighty excrescences in the face of an Alpine cliff. In those days a multitude of delicate flowers and sprays of wild herbage had found friendly soil in the hoary crevices, and they bloomed and nodded amid the antique masonry as naturally as if they were the boulders of a mountain."
"...some sunny empty grass-grown court lost in the heart of the labyrinthine pile."
"His studio was a large empty room with a vaulted ceiling, covered with vague dark traces of an old fresco which Rowland when he spent an hour with his friend used to stare at vainly for some surviving coherence of floating draperies and clasping arms."
The description of Roderick's corpse is also striking:
"He had fallen from a great height, but he was singularly little disfigured. The rain had spent its torrents upon him, and his clothes and hair were as wet as if billows of the ocean had flung him upon the strand. An attempt to move him would show some hideous fracture, some horrible physical dishonor, but what Rowland saw on first looking at him was only a strangely serene expression of life. The eyes were those of a dead man, but in a short time, when Rowland had closed them, the whole face seemed awake. The rain had washed away all blood; it was as if Violence, having done her work, had stolen away in shame. Roderick's face might have shamed her; it looked admirably handsome.""
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