Henry James Filmed

ELT 46 : 2 2003 does Cevasco—that the "yellow book" was Louys's Aphrodite, which however, was published in 1896 after the Wilde trials. In 1990, AMS Press published Brian Banks's The Image of Huysmans , which devotes a lengthy chapter to the impact made by Huysmans in England and America, the remainder of the book devoted to Huysmans's life and works. Cevasco, however, devotes entire chapters to Moore and Wilde—as indicated above—as well as to Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm, John Gray and André Raffalovich, Count Stenbock and Yeats, James Joyce and Evelyn Waugh, and, the final chapter, "Beyond the Nineties," which briefly discusses such figures as Proust, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Ronald Firbank, Henry Miller, and Hemingway. Cevasco 's survey is illuminating, for Huysmans has not often been associated with many such later writers. Since Cevasco pursues Huysmans into the modernist period, one final point should be mentioned: on p. 17, Cevasco contends that Decadence "denotes an aesthetic theory or practice that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century and became part of the mainstream of Modernism." Indeed, in David Weir's Decadence and the Making of Modernism (1995), the point is convincingly presented. Despite the fact that Cevasco quotes Weir ("an authority on Modernism") that "Des Esseintes is a precursor of the inert, cerebral anti-hero of twentieth-century literature ," Cevasco states on p. 37 that the "scandal surrounding Wilde and Douglas brought about the demise of The Yellow Book and sounded the death knell for British Decadence." On p. 189, Cevasco states at the opening of his final chapter that the Decadent Movement "was in its death throes" at the "turn of the century." Although establishing accurate literary periods is frequently a thorny one, one hopes for consistency . Nevertheless, Cevasco's major study of Huysmans is impressive in its research, both in its use of published works as well as manuscripts. Equally impressive is the clarity of the critical analyses. Richly textured and eminently readable, this lively study provides a refreshing view of the Decadence à rebours. Karl Beckson ______________ Brooklyn College, CUNY Henry James Filmed Susan Griffin, ed. Henry James Goes to the Movies. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. 386 pp. $27.50 206 BOOK REVIEWS THERE SEEM to have been a lot of Henry James movies recently. But as the astonishing filmography, compiled by Sara Koch, which concludes this volume makes plain, this is nothing new. Movie-makers from the 1930s onwards seem at times obsessed by James—there is hardly a text from his oeuvre left unadapted. The entry in Koch's filmography on The Turn of the Screw alone runs to two pages. The editor of this volume, Susan Griffin, commenting on the phenomenon, suggests that James's acute visual sense, his obsession with perception and the richness of his characterization accounts for much of his "filmability": his concern with matters central to contemporary culture—issues of gender and power— also ensues a continuing relevance. This book is handsomely produced, generously illustrated, carefully indexed—and the book jacket is fun. Griffin helpfully groups the essays into early adaptations, "Isabel and Catherine," films of the 1990s, latest adaptations and film/bibliography. Given the dominance of The Turn of the Screw in Jamesian filmhistory , Anthony Mazzella's essay on Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) is a good start. Mazzella asks how a film can accomplish in image and sound what James accomplished in words, and concludes that Clayton "comes close to answering that question." Mazzella points to the way in which, when giving an apparently subjective shot, Clayton surrounds it "with images and events that both undermine and reinforce the ghosts' objective reality." The "flights and drops" of the governess's consciousness are rendered in shots of empty spaces and dizzying camera movements, and only in the film's final vertiginous moments are the ghosts seen through a viewpoint other than hers. As in the novella, we are "possessed by the need to know." Peter Bogdanovich's Daisy Miller has worn well and essays here and elsewhere indicate that it is now more highly regarded than when first shown in 1974. Peggy McCormack, in her lively essay...