Roderick Hudson
1875
Henry James's debut novel announces a master. Written when he was just thirty-one, it burns with the confidence of a writer who knows he has found his calling. The story follows Rowland Mallet, a wealthy but restless New Englander who travels to Rome seeking purpose, and discovers Roderick Hudson, a devastatingly talented young sculptor whose genius is matched only by his recklessness. Rowland becomes Roderick's patron, and the two form an intense, codependent bond that thrums with unspoken attraction, James writes their connection with such heat that decades of readers have sensed what couldn't be named in 1875. Rome becomes the crucible where Roderick's talent either flourishes or consumes him, and Rowland watches helplessly as the artist he shaped becomes his own worst enemy. This is a novel about creation and destruction, about what America demands of its artists and what Europe offers (and corrupts). It endures because James understood something dangerous about the relationship between genius and self-destruction, between admiration and desire.
Editions
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“True happiness, we are told, consists in getting out of one's self; but the point is not only to get out - you must stay out; and to stay out you must have some absorbing errand.””
— Henry James
“If you have work to do, don't wait to feel like it; set to work and you will feel like it.””
— Henry James
“..her smile, which was her pretty feature, was never so pretty as when her sprightly phrase had a scratch lurking in it.””
— Henry James
“I would give all I possess to get out of myself; but somehow, at the end, I find myself so vastly more interesting than nine tenths of the people I meet.””
— Henry James
“Take the word for it of a man who has made his way inch by inch, and does not believe that we'll wake up to find our work done because we've lain all night a-dreaming of it; anything worth doing is devilish hard to do!””
— Henry James
“He was an awkward mixture of strong moral impulse and restless aesthetic curiosity, and yet he would have made a most ineffective reformer and a very indifferent artist. It seemed to him that the glow of happiness must be found either in action, of some immensely solid kind, on behalf of an idea, or in producing a masterpiece in one of the arts.””
— Henry James
“The will, I believe, is the mystery of mysteries. Who can say beforehand that his will is strong? There are all kinds of indefinable currents moving to and fro between one's will and one's inclinations. People talk as if the two things were essentially distinct; on different sides of one's organism, like the heart and the liver. I believe there is a certain group of circumstances possible for every man, in which his will is destined to snap like a dry twig.””
— Henry James
“He had sprung from a rigid Puritan stock, and had been brought up to think much more intently of the duties of this life than of its privileges and pleasures.””
— Henry James
“..if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking models of grandeur.””
— Henry James
