Henry James spent his life avoiding sex and contriving in his fictions strategies of reluctance and shyness in its regard. But the age of Daisy Miller has yielded to that of Diana Spencer, and the Jamesian repressed has returned with a vengeance. A recent biography of James, Henry James: The Young Master by Sheldon M. Novick, presents itself as a chronicle of the writer’s erotic life, and a new film of his great 1881 novel, The Portrait of a Lady, by filmmaker Jane Campion thrusts into visibility the story’s sexual subtext.
Novick, the author of a biography of Oliver Wendell Holmes, is clear enough in his preface about what he is up to: He is going to imagine James’s emotional life. “I have taken it for granted that Henry James underwent the ordinary experiences of life: that he separated himself from his enveloping family, that he fell in love with wrong people, that his first sexual encounters were intense but not entirely happy.” And these sexual encounters were with “young men. . . . James’s sexual orientation, as we now say, has been an open secret for a hundred years.” Novick also frankly announces his intention to strip-mine the novels for sexual/emotional autobiography: “When James described some experience with apparent firsthand knowledge, when he evoked with stunning sensuality the experience of being kissed by a man or the memory of a successful seduction, his raw materials — as he always insisted [did he?] — most likely were his own memories.” Fair warning.
