Henry James

Kevin Crossley-Holland's "Oxford Book of Travel Verse" (Oxford University Press: $21.95; 423 pp.) is a rewarding anthology, the more rewarding for its editor's wise decision to confine his volume to British travelers: Englishmen mostly, with a sprinkling of such Scots, Welsh and Irish as would not mind being called British.

It is night in an upscale Manhattan apartment. A child, tucked safely into bed, drifts toward sleep to the sounds of her parents tearing each other apart in the next room. Her eyes close, the fighting rumbles on, their words wielded with lethal precision at each other's most vulnerable spots. We are in Maisie's world and about to find out in uncomfortable detail just "What Maisie Knew. " Directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel have created a smart - and smarting - film based on the novel "What Maisie Knew," one of Henry James' lesser-known works.

Henry James (1843-1916), that most prolific of American authors, "the writer's writer," a man who seemed more to have observed life than to have lived in it, has provided one of the mainstays to biographer Leon Edel's career. Besides editing four volumes of James' letters, Prof. Edel published five volumes, "The Life of Henry James," between 1958 and 1972 for which he gleaned deserved prizes and praise. The present new book is a condensation of those five volumes, by Catharine Carver.

Divorce and its impact on children caught in its crossfire may be thought of as an issue of recent generations, but more than 115 years ago, Henry James made it the foundation of his novel "What Maisie Knew. " A new film version of the 1897 book, updating James' story of a young girl's emotional education to contemporary New York City, opens May 17 in Los Angeles. Co-director David Siegel calls the film "more of a touchstone than an adaptation," and as it opens, we find Susanna (Julianne Moore)

Henry James wrote 20 novels of high intelligence, moral discrimination and intricate complexity. He composed more than 100 elegant short stories, many the length of novelettes, using techniques of symbolism that foreshadowed 20th-Century modernists. He dashed off biographies and innumerable essays, reviews and travel pieces. He was the progenitor and master of the "international novel," a precursor of the multicultural world literature that emerged in the post-World War II era.

Having just been vacationing with Henry James in Italy, I wish to recommend him as a traveling companion. Personally, he may be something of a cumbersome fussbudget on the road, as Edith Wharton has intimated, but the new edition of his "Italian Hours" passed the ultimate test for a travel book in today's carry-on world: I took it as my only book on a two-week trip, and was not tempted to add literature to my luggage along the way. I might have traveled with the undauntable Mrs.

About a year ago, having nothing new to read, I picked up Henry James' "Portrait of a Lady," which I hadn't read in 20 years, and began rereading it. It was an astonishing experience. The book was much better than I had remembered it; more to the point, I was a much better reader of it. Isabel was infinitely more appealing to me than she had been when I was her age: I felt I understood, finally, what she thought she was doing with her life.

Back in the 1960s, when an ambitious and talented group of "postmodern" writers were calling for fresh approaches to the art of fiction, Henry James (the "godfather" of novelist criticism) was an obvious target for attack. James was accused of being "fussy" and "prudish," his definition of realism was "old fashioned," his approach to aesthetics and culture was "elitist" and "conservative." This was all very convenient: Father figures need to be ritually ridiculed, slain, dismembered.

Henry JAMES (1843-1916) presents a special set of problems to the biographer. On the face of it, his life was uneventful -- no wars fought in, no fortune made or lost, no marriages or children or interruptions to the work. He wrote and wrote and wrote. In addition to James' own continuous and inward-facing reportage, Leon Edel's five-volume biography might seem to have sufficed. Those books appeared from 1953 to 1972, and in recent years more information has emerged.

In 1947, three years after pub lishing "Henry James: The Major Phases" (1944), F. O. Matthiessen published three collections of writings by Henry James and his family: "The American Novels and Stories of Henry James," "The James Family" and, with Kenneth B. Murdock, "The Notebooks of Henry James." Matthiessen aimed them at the literate reader, although the last work became a scholarly resource of inestimable value.

Few authors manage to shuffle off this mortal coil just as their final, finished work hits bookstores. Heirs are understandably tempted to let those incomplete works come to light -- with varying degrees of success. Ernest Hemingway's "The Garden of Eden" Begun in 1946, it was published in 1986, 25 years after Hemingway's suicide. Two thirds of Hemingway's unwieldy manuscript was excised. E.L. Doctorow lamented, "this cannot have been the book Hemingway envisioned. " Generally awful, it is remembered mostly for its explicit threesome scenes.

“Ghost-Writer,” now in its West Coast premiere at International City Theatre, starts off sluggishly, with an extended expositional monologue that, while poetical, seems a somewhat logy way to commence. Ignore that static prelude.  Playwright Michael Hollinger, who has penned such well-regarded works as “Opus” and “Incorruptible,” soon has us in the grip of his assured creative hand. The play was inspired by an anecdote about Henry James' secretary, who claimed she continued channeling the master's words after his death.

At the peak of Richard Chamberlain's thrillingly malevolent performance in “The Heiress,” the audience at the Pasadena Playhouse started hissing. If we had had tomatoes, we probably would have thrown them. The theater might want to frisk future ticketholders for produce, or add an anger-management session to the bill: It's that hard to handle the emotions provoked by this gorgeously directed and acted revival. You might not think you'll be so invested in the marital prospects of a young woman in New York society in 1850, especially since Ruth and Augustus Goetz's “The Heiress” (1947)

My assignment: Read almost 300 literary biographies in more than 800 pages, all of English-language authors, beginning in the 17th century and ending in the present day. "That's like reading a reference book!" said a shocked friend. Yes, but no: Every entry in "Lives of the Novelists" is written by just one person, British critic John Sutherland, so the book has an internal continuity that makes it read like history, not an encyclopedia. And Sutherland's writing is just plain delightful.

Foreign Bodies A Novel Cynthia Ozick Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 256 pp., $26 Cynthia Ozick's sixth novel, "Foreign Bodies," is a piece of literary sleight of hand: It is modeled on Henry James' 1903 novel, "The Ambassadors," the story of an American who travels to Paris in pursuit of his patron's wayward son only to find himself enthralled by the city's sophistication. "Foreign Bodies," though, is neither homage nor update; it is instead a counterpoint. Ozick may consider James an inspiration ?

A biographer's task is simple: to make history into a compelling tale. But the novelist who chooses to add his own layer to the palimpsest of real-life events has a far more complex challenge -- to make sure story isn't overwhelmed by back story. And telling a rollicking saga that never happened using people and events that did is yet another animal altogether.

In the mid-1970s, Floyd Horowitz embarked on a long, one-man literary journey to discover early, uncredited stories by Henry James, stories that had never appeared in book form. Thirty years later, thanks to tireless research and the emerging field of statistical literary analysis, the former English professor declares his project a success. "I vowed to continue with this as long as I kept finding interesting material.

The American Girl. Not least among Henry James' many innovative and enduring literary achievements was his masterly, searching and profoundly sympathetic portrayal of that fascinating new phenomenon. Embodied in Daisy Miller or Isabel Archer, the Jamesian heroine is a fresh, venturesome spirit, unconventional not so much in the sense of deliberately defying convention, but in the sense of neither knowing nor caring about it.

THE FATHER, Henry James Sr., was the fifth of 11 children of one of the richest men in the state of New York. As a teenager, his leg was burned and amputated. Addicted to alcohol, he grew into the black sheep of his family. Although he was born again and studied for the ministry, his father all but cut him out of his will. Henry sued, won and was "leisured for life."

Cynthia OZICK is double-barreled. She's an inventive and revelatory fiction writer and an exacting, battle-ready critic; an impish writer of conscience and a creative intellectual. In this quartet of long stories, a supple form well-suited to Ozick's wit and insight, she pursues her fascination with opposites and parallels, and she extends her inquiry into how language can be both liberating and oppressive.