Why do so many notable authors despise Henry James?

By midnight-lynx47

From what I’ve been able to tell, at least Borges, Mark Twain, T.S. Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Nabokov, Lawrence Durrell, Arnold Bennett, Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Franzen, and H.L. Mencken have all said pretty nasty things about James’ writing. I get that there’s no such thing as everyone agreeing, and even big name authors always have critics—but this feels like an unusually big, loud, and harsh amount of pushback for someone who’s also clearly one of the most celebrated writers around. The main thing I keep seeing is that he’s supposedly hard to get through and kind of dull. I can see how that might land for his later stuff, but I also don’t really buy it when I look at the parts people tend to praise, like Washington Square, Daisy Miller, The Turn of the Screw, What Maisie Knew, or The Portrait of a Lady. Those seem pretty readable and engaging to me. Anyway, I’m curious—what are the other takes on why he seems to rub so many people the wrong way?