825 Henry James's Ghosts (with Morgan Lloyd Malcolm) | My Last Book with David Womersley

Hello.

Professionally speaking, January 5th, 1895 might have been the worst night of Henry James' life.

That night, he attended the opening of his play, Guy Domville, and the London crowd rejected him in a spectacular way.

They rioted.

He was booed, jeered, and assaulted with tomatoes.

James felt he had, quote, "Fallen upon evil days.

Every sign or symbol of one's being in the least wanted, anywhere or by anyone, having so utterly failed." End quote.

It was not a great stretch for James, who was fifty-one at the time.

For the past few years, the sales of his novels had declined.

Even more importantly, perhaps, The Atlantic, the most popular literary magazine of his era, had stopped accepting his works.

He was feeling irrelevant as an artist and even as a human being.

That old feeling of not having lived was always nearby, and it haunted him.

Personally, he was affected by the deaths of several of those closest to him.

His sister Alice had died in 1892.

His literary friends, Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson, both died in 1894.

Woolson's death in particular shook him to his core, layering with feelings of guilt and bewilderment, his biographer later said.

One might think that James would shrink from activity.

The public shaming, the rejection of his old magazine might lead him off the stage, so to speak, perhaps never to return.

But he believed that writing was the path to lead him out of his depression.

Two weeks after being bombarded by tomatoes, he wrote to his friend William Dean Howells of, quote, "All these melancholies." End quote.

And he said, "I did say to myself, produce again, produce.

Produce better than ever, and all will yet be well." End quote.

And indeed, the man often called the Master had ahead of him some of his greatest works, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.

All those would come later, after seven years had passed.

But the work he turned to first, the work he wanted to produce to pull him out of his grief and sorrow and feelings of failure, became one of his most famous and beloved, The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story based on a story he had heard while vacationing in the English countryside just days after the humiliation on London's stage.

Hello.

Professionally speaking, January 5th, 1895 might have been the worst night of Henry James' life.

That night, he attended the opening of his play, Guy Domville, and the London crowd rejected him in a spectacular way.

They rioted.

He was booed, jeered, and assaulted with tomatoes.

James felt he had, quote, "Fallen upon evil days.

Every sign or symbol of one's being in the least wanted, anywhere or by anyone, having so utterly failed." End quote.

It was not a great stretch for James, who was fifty-one at the time.

For the past few years, the sales of his novels had declined.

Even more importantly, perhaps, The Atlantic, the most popular literary magazine of his era, had stopped accepting his works.

He was feeling irrelevant as an artist and even as a human being.

That old feeling of not having lived was always nearby, and it haunted him.

Personally, he was affected by the deaths of several of those closest to him.

His sister Alice had died in 1892.

His literary friends, Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson, both died in 1894.

Woolson's death in particular shook him to his core, layering with feelings of guilt and bewilderment, his biographer later said.

One might think that James would shrink from activity.

The public shaming, the rejection of his old magazine might lead him off the stage, so to speak, perhaps never to return.

But he believed that writing was the path to lead him out of his depression.

Two weeks after being bombarded by tomatoes, he wrote to his friend William Dean Howells of, quote, "All these melancholies." End quote.

And he said, "I did say to myself, produce again, produce.

Produce better than ever, and all will yet be well." End quote.

And indeed, the man often called the Master had ahead of him some of his greatest works, The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.

All those would come later, after seven years had passed.

But the work he turned to first, the work he wanted to produce to pull him out of his grief and sorrow and feelings of failure, became one of his most famous and beloved, The Turn of the Screw, a ghost story based on a story he had heard while vacationing in the English countryside just days after the humiliation on London's stage.