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Apropos of the last, a certain corniness-more than the nineteenth-century average-is often to be found in historical novels of the period.

Sir Walter Scott was certainly the elephant in this room, accompanied by Balzac, and James Fenimore Cooper. that such things are ‘superior to art’ but we understand least of all what that may mean, and we look in vain for the artist, the divine explanatory genius, who will come to our aid and tell us.” The phrase “loose baggy monsters” has since entered the lexicon of critical vituperation, and the list of indicted books can be expanded well beyond James’s count. “There may, in its absence, be life, incontestably, as ‘The Newcomes’ has life, as ‘Les Trois Mousquetaires,’ as Tolstoi’s ‘Peace and War’ have it but what do such large loose baggy monsters, with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary artistically mean? We have heard it maintained. “A picture without composition slights its most precious chance for beauty,” James wrote. It was basically a picture without “composition,” by which he meant selection, focus. What’s the problem?Īccording to James, the problem was that this was not art. He’s a great writer, so why should anyone object if he interrupts his story to give us a lesson on the whiteness of the whale or the succession wars in northern Italy in the seventeenth century? He’ll come back to the main story. In the mind of your typical nineteenth-century historical novelist, this is obviously O.K. for the novelist, having dealt with his story from one angle, to wander off and then come back to it from a different angle. At bottom, it’s not about length but about whether it’s O.K. In fact, however dense the surface of his texts, James is the captain of the opposing team, the non-meanderers. On first acquaintance-with his late novels, in any case-he may seem one of those fog-bound fellows whom younger writers feel they no longer have to bend the knee to. I have never heard a modern novelist say that he has not read Joyce’s “ Ulysses”-there are limits-but I’ll bet that such a one is lurking out there, waiting to strike.Ī writer who belongs at the center of this story is Henry James. Jonathan Franzen told a journalist that he had never got past page 50 of “ Moby-Dick.” Others have said that they have not read “ Vanity Fair,” or “ David Copperfield,” and didn’t intend to. In recent years, some celebrated writers have come clean about which fat masterpieces they have never read. Ironically, this way of thinking may have emboldened some people to avoid the big books altogether. The assumption was that the author had already pared his novel or poem down to its bare bones, every word of which was essential to the true picture. You didn’t toss out the parts you didn’t like. A friend of mine told me that once, when he was talking to a group of Russian-literature professors, he confided to them that he and his American colleagues often had difficulty with the many highly detailed accounts of battles in “ War and Peace.” Oh, the Russians answered, we skip those parts! So boring! You should skip them, too, they said.Īmericans are unlikely to take that advice.

Likewise their children and grandchildren. But, from what I can tell, even readers of that time occasionally grew tired of the grandiloquence, and when they did they were not afraid to skip. For great events, great language was needed. It recorded sweeping changes: kingdoms rose and fell, peoples were enslaved or freed. This fullness, overfullness, was endemic to the genre to which “Les Misérables” belonged, the nineteenth-century historical novel, a form that was immensely popular in its day. Even after the trims, his version is still more than twelve hundred pages long. “It is not uncommon to find eight or ten adjectives appended to a single noun,” Denny noted, with wonder. Or he said them too many times the first time. But others, he was not ashamed to say, were due to his feeling that the book was just too long-winded. Certain of them, he said, were for sense. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Ī few years ago, reading the introduction to an English-language version of Hugo’s “ Les Misérables,” I found the translator, Norman Denny, confessing that he had made a number of cuts in the French text.

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