Roderick hudson biography books
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Pool, Villa D’Este, Tivoli, from Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas and Gardens
Dear friends and readers,
Over the month of August on Trollope19thCStudies a very few of us read Henry James’s Roderick Hudson, if not James’s first novel, his earliest in print and still read. I had not read it since I was in my early thirties when I probably read it naively as all I had to go on was (quoting Dean Flowers on the vast superiority of the recent 2 volume biography of James by Sheldon Novick) “the suave sterilities” and evasive misleading generalities of Leon Edel. Since getting on the Net in the mid-1990s, and participating in a Henry James listserv community, coming across and reading Colm Toibin’s The Master and other essays on James, and simply growing up into candour at long last, I’ve become aware of how central to James’s oeuvre is his homosexuality. Still, I was astonished when I was confronted with this frank text, not just for its time and place (homosexuality was still a seriously prosecutable crime, and led to harassment and blackmail by the unscrupulous, as described by J. M. Forster), but for James himself. How it leaps out at us.
At first I thought it might make Roderick Hudson a clearer book than any other J
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Roderick Hudson
No, the main character is called Rowland, and he is introduced to the reader in the very first line of the book.
When I read that first line, I immediately thought of the eight century knight of Charlemagne's court who is the hero of the epic poem, 'Le Chanson de Roland'.
However, since the early chapters of this book are set in Northampton, Massachusetts in the late nineteenth century, I quickly forgot that thought.
When I reached page 188, where Rowland's sculptor friend Roderick is lying under a tree in a garden near Rome reading Ludovico Ariosto's 'Orlando Furioso', an Italian version of eight century Roland's adventures, I remembered my thought, and I had a further thought: That's peculiar. What is Henry James up to here?
The book so far had been about art and artists, and the balancing of temperament and talent, themes which have no obvious link with the sacking of Saracen cities by the knights of Charlemagne's court, whether in the French version or in the Italian.
So what hidden connection lay behind the choosing of Rowland's name and Roderick's reading material?
I love puzzles so I indulged in a little detective work.
The 'Chanson de Roland' is an example of the 'chival
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Roderick Hudson
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