What Henry Knew

Cultivating his consciousness—identifying its origins—seemed not just interesting but imperative to an author approaching his seventieth year. “You see,” he continued to Adams, “I still, in presence of life (or what you deny to be such), have reactions—as many as possible—and the book I sent you is a proof of them.” Reactions, also, in the presence of death—for his brother William having died in 1910, he shared Adams’s feeling that all the lights of their generation were being put out. It was time to record one’s past.

Hence A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother, and The Middle Years, which James left unfinished at his death exactly 100 years ago this month: books tracing the growth of his own imagination, certainly, but also containing piquant drawings of the paterfamilias Henry Senior, the siblings (especially William), friends of youth (including the painter John La Farge), English luminaries like Dickens, George Eliot, and Tennyson, and the Albany cousinage (most poignantly Mary Temple, who died of tuberculosis at 24).

Having, since 1983, published all of James’s novels, tales, travel writings, and most of his criticism of fiction and poetry, the Library of America now offers the autobiographies, combining the aforesaid trilogy and eight sketches of reminiscence. In 2011, the University of Virginia Press published a two-volume critical edition, masterfully edited by Peter Collister; but critical editions are for specialists. Philip Horne’s notes in this Library of America edition, full but not fulsome, are for the common reader.

But who, exactly, was the author of these autobiographies? There’s an old jest about the Three Jameses—James the First, James the Second, and James the Pretender—indicating the development of his prose style from tolerably straightforward (“Daisy Miller”) to increasingly nuanced and difficult (The Turn of the Screw) to challengingly and sometimes intolerably roundabout, ambiguous, and metaphorically expansive. This late manner marks the “major phase” novels—The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl (1902-04)—the latter especially inviting not just echoes of Samuel Johnson’s remark about Paradise Lost (“None ever wished it longer than it is”) but a strong disinclination to ever again read it.

You should start at the beginning, with novels such as The Europeans, Washington Square (compressed and witty, the most Jane Austen-like of his works), and The Portrait of a Lady (his best all-round), and tales such as “Daisy” and “The Aspern Papers.” Certainly read The Bostonians, not being scared off by the allegedly incorrect picture it offers of 1870s emancipated women; Turn of the Screw, taking it straight as a ghost story but recognizing how James raised that Victorian subgenre to its highest moral and psychological level; and seeing what he could do with the children of Turn, try the matchless What Maisie Knew, in which a girl grows up surrounded by sex-addicted adults whose infidelities to one another are exceeded only by their callousness, at last, toward her. Finally, if all three “major phase” novels seem too daunting, take on Wings.

What, strictly within the completed Small Boy and Notes, will you find? Two discoveries stand out: of Henry James’s Americanness and of his vocation as an artist. The latter is classically portrayed in Small Boy, in which he recalls his and William’s many visits to the Louvre, where the massed collection “arched over us in the wonder of their endless golden riot and relief .  .  . breaking into great high-hung circles and symmetries of squandered picture,” punctuated by deep windows through which he could glimpse “the rest of monumental Paris somehow as a told story.” Indoors was art, outdoors—the “told story”—was history.

Young James liked best the works of art that were patently connected with history—canvases with a story on them like Thomas Couture’s Romans of the Decadence or, allegorically, Eugene Delacroix’s Apollo Slays Python, which in 1850-51 became the central panel of the ceiling of the Galerie d’Apollon (dedicated to the Sun King, Louis XIV), which the Second Republic was renovating. Delacroix depicts the sun god overcoming darkness, civilization defeating barbarism; it was a conquest that would have many reprises (and reversals) and that the artist, in an order-out-of-chaos conquest of his own, beautifully replicates. No wonder Henry’s “intense young fancy,” taking in so much history and art, was struck by “a general sense of glory,” the “fame” to be won by the artist or man of action who possessed “power.”

What he calls “the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare of my life,” presumably dreamt as a boy but spontaneously recovered “many years later,” took place in the Galerie d’Apollon.

The cowering boy mounts a Napoleonic counterattack against this “dimly-descried” bogey—”the awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was, whom I had guessed, in the suddenest wild start from sleep, the sleep within my sleep, to be making for my place of rest.”

All very uncanny, this creature rising out of “the sleep within my sleep,” but in the context of Small Boy, it’s clear that the “appalling” intruder is what we might label the everyday world, with its insistence that a boy should grow up and get a job. He should go into business or into a profession like law, medicine, the army, or the church—those spheres of endeavor from which the elder Henry James, with his inherited wealth, may have held aloof but which the younger Henry’s three brothers would variously enter. Not Henry himself, however. The “immense hallucination” of hot pursuit in the renowned gallery was nothing less than an affirmation of his own desire to become an artist. “Routed, dismayed, the tables turned upon [the creature] by my so surpassing him for straight aggression and dire intention, my visitant was already but a diminished spot in the long perspective,” down which “he sped for his life, while a great storm of thunder and lightning played through the deep embrasures of high windows at the right.”

That thunder and lightning render this a melodramatic “scene,” no question, an “intellectual experience” unequaled in its “educative, formative, fertilising” impact. In Apollo’s hall, the would-be artist proves himself more “appalling,” more puissant, than the agent of normative expectations.

The elder James’s experiment in character-formation—treating all of childhood and adolescence as a sort of Wanderjahr, touring in place of formal schooling—may not have helped either the scientifically oriented William or the other siblings who didn’t happen to have an artistic vocation. But it did succeed for the “really fortunate” Henry. He had a genius for discriminating the gold and silver “threads” among the “straggling clues”—the tangled sensibilia—noticed during his wanderings. And soon, while pretending to study law for a year at Harvard, he began finding the verbal forms—the “Style”—in which, through reviews and short stories, he could display those precious threads.

So much for the self-portrait of the artist as a young man. In Notes James depicts another crucial discovery, the one having to do with a cosmopolite’s understanding that he belongs to a particular polis after all. Yes, he had spent precious periods of his boyhood in Europe, and he found the “ancientry” of its multilayered civilization so rewarding to his aesthetic sense and so fructifying to his storytelling impulse (all those culture-clash plots about Americans in Europe and, occasionally, Europeans in America) that he spent most of his adult years there.

What his homecoming trip in 1904-05 revealed to him, however—his deep Americanness—had, in fact, been evident from the earliest years in Albany and Manhattan and, subsequently, from the Boston years of the Civil War. His younger brothers enlisted, and Henry would have liked to serve. But why couldn’t he?

He blames an “obscure hurt” that he incurred operating a pump while fighting a fire in Newport, and that has given psychoanalytic critics plenty to speculate about. In the years between the world wars, some of them, noting James’s lifelong celibacy and apparent evasiveness, wondered if he hadn’t somehow “castrated” himself—or at least, like Jake Barnes, suffered a wound that made him impotent. Following F. O. Matthiessen, Leon Edel sensibly inferred that the hurt was simply a back injury, whether “a slipped disc, a sacroiliac or muscular strain.” The injury occurred just after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, but James, unmanned by this accidental physical debility, was confined to the sidelines, where, sharply observant and cheering on the great and the good, he was effectually to spend the rest of his life.

He remembers his noncombatant’s compensatory effort to identify with the combatants: “measuring wounds against wounds .  .  . one was no less exaltedly than wastefully engaged in the common fact of endurance.” For weren’t he and his cousins, as “the huge battle of Gettysburg” began, in “a Newport garden .  .  . actually listen[ing] together, in their almost ignobly safe stillness, as to the boom of far-away guns”? And didn’t he visit the wounded in a nearby army hospital, finding “that the American soldier in his multitude was the most attaching and affecting and withal the most amusing figure of romance conceivable”? The soldiers told him plaintive tales of camp and combat “in what seemed to me the very poetry of the esoteric vernacular,” while he “sealed the beautiful tie, the responsive sympathy, by an earnest offer, in no instance waved away, of such pecuniary solace as I might at brief notice draw on my poor pocket for.”

Handouts for the boys in blue: It will seem embarrassingly hapless to most of us, but James was at least trying and could, retrospectively, “a little rejoice in having to such an extent coincided with, not to say perhaps positively anticipated, dear old Walt.” Walt Whitman would famously write some superb poems relating his experiences as a nurse in the hospitals near Washington, and James admits to lacking “the familiar note and shared sound” Whitman had with the ordinary soldier. But for the Brahmin novelist-to-be, who had never lived or worked in such company, there were “gulfs of dissociation” that made the army tents seem like “the glazed halls of some school of natural history.” Were these specimens, he asked, his countrymen? Absolutely, he grasped.

At the beginning of the new century, however, he was less sure about “the common Americanism” recognized and cherished during the Civil War years. As he notes in The American Scene (1907), the waves of new immigrants, notably Jews from Eastern Europe, were flooding cities like New York. It wasn’t the American language being spoken in the streets of the Lower East Side; it was Yiddish. Thus his shocked “recognition,” in Notes, “of the point where our national theory of absorption, assimilation and conversion appallingly breaks down.” It was so different from “the old, the comparatively brothering, conditions” of the war, when he had known “what an American at least was.” We realize now that all those immigrants needed was time: They would, over the next two generations, assimilate as much as any scion of old-money New York might have wished, and by midcentury, Jewish intellectuals like Edel and Philip Rahv were explaining to other Americans why the almost-forgotten novelist was important.

Rahv once interrupted Alfred Kazin enthusing about the mountains, prairies, rivers, and forests of our “native grounds” with an abrupt “Our forests, Alfred?”—meaning, were Jews really at home in America? Hasn’t an affirmative, “comparatively brothering,” answer to that challenge been long evident?

The stammering style of Henry James’s autobiographies may prompt the question whether this “son and brother” hadn’t, for all practical purposes, written himself off his “native grounds.” Not at all. If, as he said, “the house of fiction has .  .  . not one window, but a million,” so does American culture; and James occupied and handsomely furnished whole suites of rooms in that house.

Thomas L. Jeffers, who teaches English at Marquette, is the author of Norman Podhoretz: A Biography.