（外文电子版资料）Robert Silverberg - The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James.pdf

Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, /abclit.html OMNI Internet The Martian Invasion Journals of Henry James By Robert Silverberg Editors Note: Of all the treasures contained in the coffin-shaped wooden sea-chest at Harvards Widener Library in which those of Henry Jamess notebooks and journals that survived his death were preserved and in the associated James archive at Harvard, only Jamess account of his bizarre encounter with the Martian invaders in the summer of l900 has gone unpublished until now. The rest of the material the box contained --the diaries and datebooks, the notes for unfinished novels, the variant drafts of his late plays, and so forth--has long since been made available to James scholars, first in the form of selections under the editorship of F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (The Notebooks of Henry James,Oxford University Press, l947), and then a generation later in the magisterial full text edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (The Complete Notebooks of Henry James,Oxford University Press, 1987.) Despite the superb latter volumes assertions, in its title and subtitle, of being complete, authoritative, and definitive, one brief text was indeed omitted from it, which was, of course, the invasion journal. Edel and Powers are in no way to be faulted for this, since they could not have been aware of the existence of the Martian papers, which had (apparently accidentally) been sequestered long ago among a group of documents at Harvard associated with the life of Jamess sister Alice (1848-1892) and had either gone unnoticed by the biographers of Alice James or else, since the diary had obviously been composed some years after her death, had been dismissed by them as irrelevant to their research. It may also be that they found the little notebook simply illegible, for James had suffered severely from writers cramp from the winter of l896-97 onward; his handwriting by l900 had become quite err