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    The Altar of the Dead
    The Altar of the Dead
    The Altar of the Dead
    Ebook70 pages1 hour

    The Altar of the Dead

    By Henry James

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateJan 1, 1980
    Author

    Henry James

    Henry James was born in New York in 1843, the younger brother of the philosopher William James, and was educated in Europe and America. He left Harvard Law School in 1863, after a year's attendance, to concentrate on writing, and from 1869 he began to make prolonged visits to Europe, eventually settling in England in 1876. His literary output was both prodigious and of the highest quality: more than ten outstanding novels including his masterpiece, The Portrait of a Lady; countless novellas and short stories; as well as innumerable essays, letters, and other pieces of critical prose. Known by contemporary fellow novelists as 'the Master', James died in Kensington, London, in 1916.

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    • 4/5
      In Henry James’ ‘The Altar of the Dead’ , a man, George Stransom, is horrified by the idea of how brief our time is and how quickly we are forgotten and so he builds an altar of candles for the people he has known who have died in an effort to keep their memories alive for a bit longer. There are candles for all of his late acquaintances except for one, who did him a terrible injustice. After some arrangements this altar is installed in a church and the man visits regularly. A woman begins sitting at the altar, also visiting her dead. Eventually, bound by grief, they begin a sort of friendship, until a revelation occurs that seemingly makes their companionship untenable.The entire story is a sort of literary memento mori , which I enjoy, and the writing is itself like multiple candles in the night–both luminous and dark. It’s the sort of story that can be read multiple times without losing its capacity to impress.The idea of a person not truly being gone until they are forgotten is also covered in Kevin Brockmeier’s quite good The Brief History of the Dead , which is based on the belief of some African tribes that there are three types of people, the living, the recently departed (whom the living still remember) and the dead whose names are only known.
    • 5/5
      The Altar of the Dead is my all-time-favorite by HJ. Inspired!
    • 3/5
      The only other James I've read is Wings of the Dove and I wasn't a huge fan. Wings of the Dove reminded me of D. H. Lawrence, in its pretentious rambling on and on about relationships, but always in this rarefied, unrealistic way. That said, I've always meant to give him another chance or two, just to see if my opinion has changed, or his other books or better, you know? So when I saw this I figured it might be a good way to try to break in.Altar of the Dead is only about 50 pages long and it tells the story of a man who spends his life mourning and celebrating "his Dead," ie those he has loved who are now dead. He meets a fellow mourner who is also a woman, and they develop a friendship slowly and carefully, by means of their shared passion.This story focuses on relationships, both with the living and the dead, and how they influence the other events of our life and other relationships. It's a slower building story, but moves forward with a steady unfolding of the plot. Both of the characters are finely drawn, so the reader can understand them, even though so little is known about either in some ways. In the end, then, I think this ended up being a fortuitous James choice for me, and makes me think I'm ready to brave a longer work soon.

    Book preview

    The Altar of the Dead - Henry James

    The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Altar of the Dead, by Henry James

    This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

    almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

    re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

    with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

    Title: The Altar of the Dead

    Author: Henry James

    Release Date: November 9, 2010 [eBook #642]

    [This file was first posted on September 10, 1996]

    Language: English

    Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

    ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD***

    Transcribed from the 1916 Martin Secker edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org

    THE ALTAR OF

    THE DEAD

    BY HENRY JAMES

    LONDON: MARTIN SECKER

    number five john street adelphi

    This edition first published 1916

    The text follows that of the

    Definitive Edition

    CHAPTER I.

    He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure.  Celebrations and suppressions were equally painful to him, and but one of the former found a place in his life.  He had kept each year in his own fashion the date of Mary Antrim’s death.  It would be more to the point perhaps to say that this occasion kept him: it kept him at least effectually from doing anything else.  It took hold of him again and again with a hand of which time had softened but never loosened the touch.  He waked to his feast of memory as consciously as he would have waked to his marriage-morn.  Marriage had had of old but too little to say to the matter: for the girl who was to have been his bride there had been no bridal embrace.  She had died of a malignant fever after the wedding-day had been fixed, and he had lost before fairly tasting it an affection that promised to fill his life to the brim.

    Of that benediction, however, it would have been false to say this life could really be emptied: it was still ruled by a pale ghost, still ordered by a sovereign presence.  He had not been a man of numerous passions, and even in all these years no sense had grown stronger with him than the sense of being bereft.  He had needed no priest and no altar to make him for ever widowed.  He had done many things in the world—he had done almost all but one: he had never, never forgotten.  He had tried to put into his existence whatever else might take up room in it, but had failed to make it more than a house of which the mistress was eternally absent.  She was most absent of all on the recurrent December day that his tenacity set apart.  He had no arranged observance of it, but his nerves made it all their own.  They drove him forth without mercy, and the goal of his pilgrimage was far.  She had been buried in a London suburb, a part then of Nature’s breast, but which he had seen lose one after another every feature of freshness.  It was in truth during the moments he stood there that his eyes beheld the place least.  They looked at another image, they opened to another light.  Was it a credible future?  Was it an incredible past?  Whatever the answer it was an immense escape from the actual.

    It’s true that if there weren’t other dates than this there were other memories; and by the time George Stransom was fifty-five such memories had greatly multiplied.  There were other ghosts in his life than the ghost of Mary Antrim.  He had perhaps not had more losses than most men, but he had counted his losses more; he hadn’t seen death more closely, but had in a manner felt it more deeply.  He had formed little by little the habit of numbering his Dead: it had come to him early in life that there was something one had to do for them.  They were there in their simplified intensified essence, their conscious absence and expressive patience, as personally there as if they had only been stricken dumb.  When all sense of them failed, all sound of them ceased, it was as if their purgatory were really still on earth: they asked so little that they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day, of the hard usage of life.  They had no organised service, no reserved place, no honour, no shelter, no safety.  Even ungenerous people provided for the living, but even those who were called most generous did nothing for the others.  So on George Stransom’s part had grown up with the years a resolve that he at least would do something, do it, that is, for his own—would perform the great charity without reproach.  Every man had his own, and every man had, to meet this charity, the ample resources of the soul.

    It was doubtless the voice of Mary Antrim that spoke for them best; as the years at any rate went by he found himself in regular communion with these postponed pensioners, those whom indeed he always called in his thoughts the Others.  He spared them the moments, he organised the charity.  Quite how it had risen he probably

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