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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Serie: Blackwell Critical Biographies
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
Discover anew the life and influence of Henry James, part of the acclaimed Wiley Blackwell Critical Biographies series. In The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, Peter Collister, an established critic and authority on Henry James, offers an original and fully documented account of one of America's finest writers, who was both a creative practitioner and theorist of the novel. In this volume, James's life in all its personal and cultural richness is examined alongside a detailed scrutiny of his fiction, essays, biographies, autobiographies, travel writing, plays and reviews. James was a dedicated and brilliant letter-writer and his biographer make judicious use of this material, some of it previously unpublished, evoking in the novelist's own words the society within which he moved and worked. His gift for friendship, often resulting in close relationships with both men and women, are sensitively explored. Near the beginning of his long and highly productive life, James left America to immerse himself in European culture and history - a necessity, he felt, for the developing artist. In an ironic symmetry he witnessed in his youth the effects of the American Civil War and in his last days, finally becoming a British citizen, despaired at the unfolding tragedy of the Great War in Europe. Sustained, nevertheless, by his own creative energy, he never ceased to believe in the capacity of the arts to enhance and give significance to life. * Provides well-informed accounts of Henry James's youth in New York City, his unconventional education, his extensive travel in Europe, his eventual assimilation into British society, his development as a writer and his personal relationships as a single man. * Features discussions of James's major works in a variety of genres from an assured theoretical and historical perspective. * Assesses James's developing quest for dramatic form in his fiction - the 'scenic art' - as well as his critical writing which was to have a lasting influence on the literature and aesthetic values of the twentieth century. * Discusses his achieved aspiration to be 'just literary', to become what he called that 'queer monster', an artist. * Charts James's lifelong interest in art and theatre. An incisive discussion of the life of an author of major stature, The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography offers a refreshingly lucid and human account of a novelist and his often challenging, but rewarding, writing. Peter Collister, a former college Assistant Principal, has published many essays in Europe and America on a range of nineteenth-century British and French authors. He is the author of Writing the Self: Henry James and America and later edited for the university presses of Cambridge and Virginia the award-winning volumes: The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art and Drama, James's autobiographical writings, A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and The Middle Years, as well as The American Scene.
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BLACKWELL CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES
General Editor: Claude Rawson
This acclaimed series offers informative and durable biographies of important authors, British, European, and North American, which will include substantial critical discussion of their works. An underlying objective is to re-establish the notion that books are written by people who lived in particular times and places. This objective is pursued not by programmatic assertions or strenuous pointmaking, but through the practical persuasion of volumes that offer intelligent criticism within a well-researched biographical context.
Also in this series
The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer
Derek Pearsall
The Life of Samuel Johnson
Robert DeMaria Jr.
The Life of Robert Browning
Clyde De L. Ryals
The Life of Joseph Conrad
John Batchelor
The Life of William Faulkner
Richard Gray
The Life of Walter Scott
John Sutherland
The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Rosemary Ashton
The Life of Evelyn Waugh
Douglas Lane Patey
The Life of Thomas Hardy
Paul Turner
The Life of Goethe
John R. Williams
The Life of Céline
Nicholas Hewitt
The Life of John Milton
Barbara K. Lewalski
The Life of William Shakespeare
Lois Potter
The Life of William Wordsworth
John Worthen
The Life of George Eliot
Nancy Henry
The Life of Daniel Defoe
John Richetti
The Life of D. H. Lawrence
Andrew Harrison
The Life of Robert Frost
Henry Hart
The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Worthen
The Life of Henry James
Peter Collister
The Life of W.B. Yeats
Terence Brown
The Life of Henry Fielding
Ronald Paulson
The Life of Henry James
A Critical Biography
Peter Collister
This edition first published 2023
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Collister, Peter, author.
Title: The life of Henry James : a critical biography / Peter Collister.
Description: Chichester, West Sussex : John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023. |Series: Blackwell critical biographies | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023003648 (print) | LCCN 2023003649 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119483076 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119483083 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119483090 (epub) | ISBN 9781119483120 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: James, Henry, 1843-1916. | James, Henry, 1843-1916--Criticism and interpretation. | Authors, American--19th century--Biography. | LCGFT: Biographies.
Classification: LCC PS2123 .C65 2023 (print) | LCC PS2123 (ebook) | DDC 813/.4--dc23/eng/20230228
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003648
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003649
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For Linda and Claude,
those ‘willing and prepared hearers‘.
Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Note on the text
Abbreviations
Prelude: James and Biography
Part I The Early Years
1 ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City (1843–1855)
2 Europe and Newport: In Search of a ‘Sensuous Education’ (1855–1861)
3 Civil War and ‘a Consecration to Letters’ (1861–1869)
Part II Independence and Europe
4 Italy and the ‘Complex Fate’ of Being an American (1869–1872)
5 Return to Italy and ‘an Incalculable Number of Gathered Impressions’ (1872–1873)
6 Rome and Paris: Roderick Hudson: An Experiment in Journalism (1873–1876)
7 ‘The Wheel of London Life’ and Early Novels (1876–1879)
8 Friendships Begin and End: The Achievement of The Portrait of a Lady (1879–1881)
Part III The Lure of the Theatre
9 Family Deaths: New Friendships in Europe (1881–1884)
10 A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson (1885–1887)
11 ‘The Sawdust & Orange-peel Phase’ Begins: The Tragic Muse (1887–1891)
12 Deaths and Losses: Theatrical Ventures (1891–1895)
Part IV The Later Years
13 Return to ‘The Sacred Fluid of Fiction’ (1895–1899)
14 A Roman Encounter: ‘Letting Yourself Go’ (1899–1902)
15 ‘Dearly Beloved’ Young Men: The Final Novels (1902–1904)
16 The ‘Agreeable and Absorbing Adventure’ of America: The New York Edition and Last Stories (1904–1909)
17 Loss of William, ‘So Shining a Presence’: Autobiographical Writing: The Great War and Death (1909–1916)
Letter Details
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
CHAPTER 01
Figure 1 Henry James with...
CHAPTER 03
Figure 2 Henry James as...
CHAPTER 11
Figure 3 Henry James, March...
CHAPTER 13
Figure 4 Title illustration by...
CHAPTER 14
Figure 5 Henry and William...
CHAPTER 17
Figure 6 Henry James, 1913,...
Guide
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on the text
Abbreviations
Prelude: James and Biography
Begin Reading
Letter Details
Notes
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
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Acknowledgments
The literature on Henry James, biographical and critical, is enormous and my indebtedness to the books and articles I have managed to read is correspondingly great. Even in death, Leon Edel stands at the portal for students of James. In recent years he has been criticized on several counts – for his sometimes cavalier editorial methods, for his predominantly Freudian interpretation of events in James’s life, and for his exclusive control over the availability of manuscripts – yet the breadth of his work as biographer and editor in making James’s writing available to readers is undeniable. Edel’s own writing is invariably engaging and persuasive and his biographical endeavours have an assurance which comes from his having met many of the protagonists in James’s later life. Of more recent biographers of James and members of the James family I have found the work of Fred Kaplan, Sheldon Novick, R.W.B. Lewis and Alfred Habegger most helpful.
The most significant event in biographical terms in recent years has been the project to publish The Complete Letters of Henry James undertaken by the University of Nebraska Press which began in 2006. Given the number of his extant letters (some 10,000), this is an ambitious undertaking which, as it progresses, is already proving of immense benefit to those investigating James’s life and work. Based on the Calendar and Biographical Register created by Steven H. Jobe and Susan E. Gunter, the collection of Complete Letters (fifteen volumes so far) contains a wealth of detailed biographical information, the product of extensive research by editors Greg W. Zacharias, Pierre A. Walker, Michael Anesko and Katie Sommer. It has been the indispensable resource for the first forty-three years of Henry James’s life and my indebtedness to this team of scholars will be apparent.
Editions of James’s fiction are now appearing under the aegis of Cambridge University Press and, as well as supplying a reliable text, they provide a range of editorial matter which helps contextualize his work in personal and cultural terms. When available (there are currently ten volumes – the eleventh, Washington Square, arrived too late for me to consult), this is the edition I have used when discussing James’s novels.
For much of my work I have relied on the resources of the British Library and, once again, I am pleased to record my gratitude to its staff in the Rare Books and Music Reading Room whose professionalism and helpfulness remain unparalleled. Also in London, I wish to thank Kate Jarman, Trust Archivist, Barts Health NHS Trust, who gave me useful advice as well as access to the archive at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City. I am especially grateful to Bay James, James’s literary executor, for granting me permission to quote from previously unpublished material held at the Houghton Library, Harvard College, at the Henry James Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, where Dr Philip S. Palmer was especially helpful. Meredith Mann of the New York Public Library also arranged for me to use the resources of the New York Public Library.
For granting permission to reproduce the Mathew Brady daguerreotype of Henry James with his father (Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1092-9 (4597.6), I am grateful to Leslie A. Morris, Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Houghton Library, on behalf of the president and fellows of Harvard College. On literary executors and permissions I received some useful advice from Michael B. Winship. In Rome the helpful and well-informed volunteer staff at the Non-Catholic Cemetery on Via Caio Cestio made me feel very welcome. At Wiley Blackwell I am grateful for the support and advice given by Nicole Allen, Britta Ramaraj, Liz Wingett and Ed Robinson.
I am indebted to the two anonymous readers appointed by Wiley Blackwell who offered detailed and sometimes challenging comments on my manuscript. They saved me from a number of errors: I am to blame for any remaining. I am grateful, too, for the encouragement and advice offered over the years by Pierre A. Walker, Adrian Poole, Peter C. Caldwell, Michael Anesko and Greg Zacharias (who provided copies of James letters as well as advance sight of the most recent volumes of the Complete Letters). I also spent an illuminating hour with Alexander Nemerov looking at the Holbein portrait of The Ambassadors in the National Gallery, London. From the beginning, Linda Bree and Claude Rawson have been involved in the progress of my manuscript and have made many valuable suggestions: I am grateful to them both for their kindness and support. Finally, it is a pleasure to express my gratitude to John Aplin who has been an enthusiastic and encouraging partner in my study of James both in Britain and America.
Note on the text
Currency values
At certain points in the biography I note Henry James’s earnings from his writing and lecturing. It is very difficult to assess their equivalent current values, but it might be worth noting that in the last decades of the nineteenth century the average US worker in manufacturing earned roughly $345 per annum (£71). Exchange rates for dollars and pounds sterling remained fairly constant from 1875 through to the 1900s when £1 sterling (with minor annual changes) was equivalent to $4.85 (see Lawrence H. Officer, ‘Dollar-Pound Exchange Rate from 1791’, MeasuringWorth, 2022.
URL: http://www.measuringworth.com/exchangepound).
Methods of Documentation
The practice of the editors of James’s Complete Letters is to reproduce the MS text as it appears; any slips or spelling mistakes are reproduced without editorial intervention and I have followed this principle.
References to frequently-quoted texts are given in parentheses; all other references appear at the end of the volume. To avoid cluttering my narrative, information on the dates and recipients of letters from which I quote, each with a cue phrase, is provided in ‘Letter Details’ at the end of the volume.
Translations
I have included translations only of less familiar French words or phrases.
Abbreviations
AS
The American Scene
, ed. Peter Collister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
CH
Henry James: The Critical Heritage
, ed. Roger Gard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)
CL55-72
Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855–1872
, 2 volumes, ed. Pierre A. Walker, Greg W. Zacharias (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006)
CL72-76
Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872–1876
, 3 volumes (2008)
CL76-78
Complete Letters of Henry James
,
1876–1878
, 2 volumes (2012–2013)
CL78-80
Complete Letters of Henry James, 1878–1880
, 2 volumes (2014–2015)
CL80-83
Complete Letters of Henry James, 1880–1883
, 2 volumes (2016–2017), ed. Michael Anesko, Greg W. Zacharias
CL83-84
Complete Letters of Henry James, 1883–1884
, 2 volumes (2018–2019)
CL84-86
Complete Letters of Henry James, 1884–1886
, 2 volumes (2020–2021)
CN
Complete Notebooks of Henry James
, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
CP
The Complete Plays of Henry James
, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949)
CR
Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews
, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
CT
The Complete Tales of Henry James
, ed. Leon Edel, 12 volumes (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962–1964)
CTWC
Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: The Continent
, ed. Richard Howard (New York: Library of America, 1993)
CTWGBA
Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America
, ed. Richard Howard (New York: Library of America, 1993)
CWHJA
The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art
, ed. Peter Collister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
CWHJD
The Complete Writings of Henry James on Drama
, ed. Peter Collister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)
CWJ
Correspondence of William James
, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 12 volumes (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992–1999)
DBF
Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men
, ed. Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001)
HJC
Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene
, ed. Pierre A. Walker (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999)
HJL
Henry James: Letters
, ed. Leon Edel, 4 volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974–1984)
HJ&EW
Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters: 1900–1915
, ed. Lyall H. Powers (New York: Scribner, 1990)
LC
1
Henry James: Literary Criticism
:
Essays on Literature: American Writers: English Writers
, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984)
LC
2
Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers: Other European Writers: the Prefaces to the New York Edition
, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984)
LHJ
Letters of Henry James
, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 volumes (London: Macmillan, 1920)
LL
Henry James: A Life in Letters
, ed. Philip Horne (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1999)
NSB
Notes of a Son and Brother
(1914) and
The Middle Years
(1917), ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011)
SBO
A Small Boy and Others
(1913), ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011)
TMY
Notes of a Son and Brother
(1914) and
The Middle Years
(1917), ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011)
WWS
William Wetmore Story and His Friends from Letters, Diaries, and Recollections
, 2 volumes (London: Blackwood, 1903)
HJ
Henry James
AJ
Alice James (sister)
HJ Sr
Henry James Senior (father)
MWJ
Mary Walsh James (mother)
WJ
William James (elder brother)
AGJ
Alice Gibbens James (wife of WJ)
Prelude: James and Biography
‘The Real Right Thing’ (1899), a strange, ghostly story by Henry James, outlines some of the pleasures and (more emphatically) the anxieties of writing biography. Just a few pages long, it is less a story than a record of changing circumstance. The widow of a recently dead author approaches one of his younger, obscure friends, offering him all her husband’s papers and his warm, comfortable study to work in so that he can record his life. It is a convenient arrangement, but she is a strange Gothic figure clad in black, her face half-obscured by a black fan, as she silently appears and disappears in stairways and rooms. And her intentions soon become clear – she will ensure that her role in the author’s life is represented as she wishes.
Initially the work goes well and Withermore, the emblematically named young man, senses the benign presence of his friend: ‘the light breath of his dead host was as distinctly in his hair as his own elbows were on the table before him’ (CT 10: 478). If he only were to look up from his work, he knows he would see him across the table. Both widow and aspiring biographer acknowledge his presence. Then, one evening, Withermore realizes that he has been abandoned. He presses on, but it is hopeless. He stands with the widow in the hall, the world of the living illuminated by electric light and furnished with fashionable rugs from Tottenham Court Road stores, and they recognize that ‘some monstrous oppression … was closing over both of them’.
Withermore’s earlier conviction that the ‘artist was what he did – he was nothing else’ is confirmed (475). The dead man is vulnerable and helpless, and his admirer has to acknowledge the effrontery of the intrusion: ‘“[w]e lay him bare. We serve him up. What is it called? We give him to the world”’ (483). Finally, his biographer must surrender as his subject seems to stand in the darkness at the top of the stairs, projecting the incontrovertible wishes of the dead: ‘[h]e strains forward out of his darkness; he reaches toward us out of his mystery; he makes us dim signs out of his horror’. It is not the horror of death or oblivion but rather his helplessness – he is not indifferent and his strength of feeling has the power of a curse. Withermore finds the door to his room guarded by his presence, ‘“[i]mmense. But dim. Dark. Dreadful”’ (484, 485).
This is one, sensationally sinister version of the biographical enterprise, though other acts of investigation, or intrusion, and entailing alternative horrors, feature in James’s fiction. In ‘The Aspern Papers’, the posthumous privacy of Jeffrey Aspern is threatened by the inquiries of the dishonourable American scholar who turns up in Venice to befriend the two women who can help him. Aspern is finally saved when the unnamed man (who also narrates) is frightened off by the final bargain offered to him: the unpalatable prospect of marriage to the younger of the women – his own life and body in exchange for the real object of his desire: Aspern’s papers. James’s great essay of 1907 on Shakespeare and The Tempest endorses the completeness and untouchability of the poet’s works, the corresponding irrelevance of his personal circumstances and the futility of scholars’ biographical enquiries.
By contrast, the novelist assumed the biographer’s role himself in the portraits and sketches he wrote in the manner of Sainte-Beuve, the French critic he so admired, which combine the critical with a selection of biographical detail, ‘life’ made to serve ‘letters’. In an early monograph on Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879), James distances himself from the genre from the beginning by affirming that he will give ‘this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography’ (Hawthorne, p. 1). The title of his other biographical essay, William Wetmore Story and his Friends (1903), indicates the broader nature of James’s interest beyond its principal subject. The life of this expatriate Bostonian, resident in Rome, established sculptor and aspiring dramatist, is approached through impressions of Italian landscapes and cities and sketches of celebrated writers such as James Russell Lowell and Robert and Elizabeth Browning. James confessed that ‘there is no subject – there is nothing in the man himself to write about. There is nothing for me but to do a tour de force, or try to – leave poor dear W.W.S. out, practically, and make a little volume on the old Roman, Americo-Roman, Hawthornesque and other bygone days’.1 The text of this biography is, naturally, more circumspect, though ‘the interesting boxful’ of materials to which he refers seems to be a formal invocation of the biographer, a rhetorical aside, rather than raising the romantic possibilities and mysteries attaching to his subject, the dark mood of ‘The Real Right Thing’.
In his own latter years, James, clearly and acutely aware of the biographical curiosity attaching to great authors, sought continuously to preserve his own posthumous privacy. He insistently (and often fruitlessly) advised friends to destroy his letters, and the scene of his supervising the burning of papers in his back garden in later years must have seemed like an episode from one of his short stories. He did not wish – quite understandably – to leave ‘personal and private documents at the mercy of any accidents’.2 Many of his letters to family and friends are finely written and engaging documents, but those to the young men he loved in later life, make the reader feel, even now, as if intruding on the novelist’s privacy.
Finally, recording a time long past, a society and culture quite distinct from a present that was preparing for world war, James embarked on his own autobiography, highly original in its avoidance of the ponderousness of many Victorian memoirs, affectionate in its recollection of people and incidents otherwise forgotten, and faithful in its adherence to the prevailing motive which was to follow the development of a life pursuing the ambition to be ‘just literary’. He exploits allusion and a style rich in possibility which conveys (at least initially) ‘the indelibility of the childish vision’ (AS, p. 92). In these two and a half volumes, A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother and the incomplete Middle Years, James discloses a wealth of unique biographical detail and has thus determined how posterity will learn of his earlier life. In addition, his text contains other less obvious messages, minor revelations which yield their secrets when innocent assertions are examined. His last typist and amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, recalls the scene of their composition and the fluency of James’s thoughts as he paced the room, ‘sounding out the periods in tones of free resonant assurance. At such times he was beyond reach of irrelevant sounds or sights’.3
The process had not been without hazards for James himself: the genesis for the autobiographical writing was a projected edition of his late brother William’s letters, though his handling of these soon led him to his own childhood memories which take up the first volume, A Small Boy and Others. The second volume, Notes of a Son and Brother, contains a generous selection (closely ‘edited’ by James himself) of family letters, written principally by his brother, father, and cousin, Minny Temple. The fact that they were now all dead clearly allowed him a revisionary freedom that he sometimes exploited, whatever others said. Editorial criteria have, of course, changed over the years, but James’s confidence in handling such documents never wavers. In Notes of a Son and Brother, he assumes an assured authorial stance, a role as informed mediator and arranger of information uniquely qualified and therefore to be trusted: ‘I allow myself not to hang back in gathering several passages from another series for fear of their crossing in a manner the line of privacy and giving a distinctness to old intimate things. The distinctness is in the first place all to the honour of the persons and the interests thus glimmering through; and I hold, in the second, that the light touch under which they revive positively adds, by the magic of memory, a composite fineness’ (NSB, p. 207).
If these volumes have indeed negotiated a ‘line of privacy’ and honoured to some degree those ‘old intimate things’, they may stand then as an authorized life quite literally, and they offer the richest resource for the biographer. But the dangers of the biographical process are many and forbidding, not least in diminishing or compromising the mystery and autonomy of the individual. James himself, who in his later years gave an interview whose premises he then denied, spells out his own anxieties to what may have been his surprised interviewer – though his change of mind or disowning of the process nevertheless was included as part of the final published portrait. He seems struck by the potential vulgarity of any association with the press and its ‘reverberations’, and, more forcefully, by the horror of his private self publicly paraded: ‘“I have a constituted and systematic indisposition to having anything to do myself, personally, with anything in the nature of an interview, report, reverberation, that is, to adopting, endorsing, or in any other wise taking to myself anything that any one may have presumed to contrive to gouge, as it were, out of me. It has, for me, nothing to do with me – my me, at all; but only with the other person’s equivalent for that mystery, whatever it may be. Thereby if you find anything to say about our apparently blameless time together, – it is your little affair exclusively”’.4
Given that biography demands such violent intrusion – and James has been unusually emphatic here – it must also be alive to the mystery of its subject and to the darkness, mysteriousness or ghostliness which he sees as a potential consequence of enquiry. The late short story, ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908), raises a comparably unsettling biographical vision: when the mature expatriate (with much experience in common with James himself) returns to New York, to the house of his youth, he there pursues and confronts his alternative self, the man he might have become, in whose spectral presence he finally collapses.
Part I The Early Years
1 ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City(1843 –1855)
On the fine late-summer afternoon of 1904 when the ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm II arrived from Southampton and docked at Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City, the passengers who gathered to disembark included the distinguished and highly respected novelist, Henry James. Now tending to corpulence, he was 61 years old, representing himself archly to his readers as a ‘mere ancient contemplative person curious of character’ (AS, p. 19). Though born in America, he had lived in England for most of his adult life. As for his personal circumstances: he was a celibate bachelor in indifferent health, enjoying a variety of close friendships with both men and women, though his passions were engaged by younger men; his closest family was that of his brother William James, America’s foremost philosopher and professor of Psychology at Harvard University.
Henry, too, was a public figure, and this visit to his homeland which would last almost a year, partly answering a personal need, had a public dimension; his progress was reported regularly by newspapers across the country. He planned a book that would record his impressions, to be published in 1907 as The American Scene, and he went on to deliver two lectures at numerous venues. He was a name and a celebrity, though comparatively few had read his fiction which, short on action, returned most characteristically to the theme of innocence and its loss, dramatized within intricate relationships in settings both American and European. He had last visited America in 1883 and now he was particularly shocked at the transformation of New York; the once prominent spire of Trinity Church in Manhattan’s Financial District, had been dwarfed by skyscrapers – some reaching as high as 21 stories. The city’s population had tripled and it had become a centre of commerce and industry. When walking its streets, James was shocked both by the place and its occupants.
The place in which James had spent many of his boyhood years was mid-nineteenth-century New York: he was born on 15 April 1843, at 21 Washington Place, into a family which belonged to the privileged classes. The city had recently become America’s largest conurbation, boasting fresh running water for its inhabitants from the Murray Hill Reservoir, and offering cultural diversion with the founding of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. James’s twentieth-century return acted powerfully, it seems, to draw him back to his memories of that earlier time, a retreat later made more pressing by the death of William in 1910 and a planned edition of his brother’s letters. As a consequence, James embarked in his last few remaining years on a major autobiographical project. In A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) and The Middle Years (1917), he found a new voice and evolved a new medium of autobiographical expression. As he explained to his nephew, Harry, ‘It must be an absolutely original, personal, unprecedented thing’.1
The first two-thirds of A Small Boy and Others has New York for its setting, and this city of the 1840s and fifties provides a rich and complex setting for his tender, sometimes self-effacing account of his early life. A short story of 1884, ‘Georgina’s Reasons’, refers to this ‘primitive epoch’ with pointed nostalgia, and it clearly has a kind of Arcadian status for the narrator as he recalls a time when ‘the battered rotunda of Castle Garden echoed with expensive vocal music’, and ‘Hoboken, of a summer afternoon, was a genteel resort’ (CT 6: 17). In James’s late memoir, its houses, streets, parks, entertainments, shops, transport, are itemized in detail and in their different seasons – in summer time, for instance, the dusty smell of the city, down in ‘the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters’, and the bushels of peaches transported from Middlesex County, New Jersey (SBO, p. 60). Even the playbill advertisements on Fifth Avenue were read and pondered with serious concentration. It is an idealized version of the past, as he readily admits, of locations viewed ‘in a dusty golden light that special memories of small misery scarce in the least bedim’ (p. 161). It was a place of such innocence – his own, at least – that, as he wandered alone, Broadway itself ‘must have been then as one of the alleys of Eden’ (p. 164). It is a place which no longer exists, as ephemeral as his own childhood, a form of personal construction. Everything, it seems, was noticed, nothing wasted, such, as he confesses, was ‘the measure of my small adhesiveness’ (p. 82).
The James Family
James’s paternal ancestry was predominantly Irish; the grandparents of his grandmother, Catharine Barber, had emigrated in the previous century, while his grandfather, William James, had travelled to New York from County Cavan more recently in 1789. James believed that his grandmother represented ‘the only English blood’ in the family (SBO, p. 8), though this has been questioned or modified by later commentators.2 Her family had been Scottish Presbyterians, a form of dissent shared by William, and they had emigrated from Ireland. When the two married in Albany, New York, in 1803, Catharine became William’s third wife, both of her predecessors having died young; this partnership in which eight children survived to adulthood could not have been especially happy – Alfred Habegger regards her as ‘simultaneously disregarded and depended on’3 – but it lasted almost thirty years until William’s death in 1832. Their substantial house in Albany, with Catharine at its centre, became a home for her children and grandchildren within an extended family whose members seem to have been especially prone to illness and early death. Aside from her own children (the last born when she was forty-six), there were three from her husband’s earlier marriages; Catharine’s younger sister had also died, leaving eight children. James, in his memoir, remembers this home as ‘a nurseried and playroomed orphanage’ and it is clear that his grandmother, daughter of a former Minuteman, gentleman farmer and judge, had become the kindly but exhausted centre of the large family establishment at 43 North Pearl Street.
Money was not a problem, for William James was a shrewd businessman whose fortune was originally built on trading and importing goods. He had later purchased land in the distant Midwest, in Syracuse, New York, and also Manhattan, and had invested widely and successfully. He had been an early proponent of the construction scheme which linked Lake Erie with the Hudson River; the building of the Erie Canal linked the Great Lakes, and thus the Midwest, with the Atlantic Ocean, an ambitious and highly lucrative venture. The chief speaker at the ceremony celebrating the completion of this historic project on 2 November 1825 at the Albany Capitol was William James. Forceful, irascible, he had become rich, leaving an estate on his death of over a million dollars (some say $3 million) – a fortune which allowed the next generation (including Henry Sr, the novelist’s father) the luxury of never having to seek employment. His will proved contentious, however: he bequeathed just $3,000 per year in her lifetime to his wife, and seriously reduced amounts to two of his sons, one of them Henry Sr, with whom there had been a falling-out; he received a mere $1,250 per year, much less than what most of his more compliant siblings received. But the will was successfully contested and the estate more equitably divided; Henry Sr’s inheritance worked out at $10,000 per year.
There had been conflict within the family and Henry Sr, whatever his father’s high-handedness, had also been a source of disappointment. The crucial point in his young life had been the major accident he suffered as a boy of thirteen; in a school game (or possibly experiment) illustrating how hot air rises which involved flying balloons with a burning rope attached to them, a hayloft had been set ablaze; he had tried to douse the fire but his trousers, soaked in turpentine, ignited. One of his legs was so badly burnt that he spent two years in bed and underwent two amputations, the last removing the leg from above the knee. He would later use a cork prosthetic limb, though his capacity to walk would always be compromised. Henry Sr’s tutor, the brilliant Joseph Henry, went on to become a professor at the Smithsonian Institution, a connection ‘of grateful pupil with benignant tutor’ which Henry Jr is keen to mark in his biography of William Wetmore Story, the artist commissioned to execute a bronze sculpture of the eminent scientist (WWS 2: 269).
In 1828, Henry Sr, a bright boy of seventeen, enrolled at Union College, Schenectady, an institution not far from Albany to which his father, a trustee, had been a generous donor. He followed a classical curriculum including Latin, Greek and rhetoric, and was popular with fellow students and members of staff. Student life there, was, however, too strict for Henry. Drinking excessively, he quickly ran into debt and eventually dropped out. Having returned, he graduated in 1830, though his academic record remained mediocre. Eventually he gave up alcohol, but his dependency had blighted much of his early manhood.
Having taken up gambling, he followed an uncertain path in the years following. He also became, however, religiously enthusiastic, enrolling in 1835 on a course at Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, well known for its strong Calvinistic tendencies. He intended to prepare for the ministry, but his religious views here became extreme and he was still beset by his addictions; at this time, some years after the death of his father, his inheritance came through, and he realized that he need never work to maintain self or dependents; after almost two years he left the college and set off on the long journey to England and Ireland, much of his visit spent quietly in London. He returned once more to Princeton, but by now vocally hostile to established religion, he soon dropped out. His later writings, original and sometimes controversial, chart James Sr’s earnest, lifelong spiritual questing and social engagement, though, as F.O. Matthiessen points out, he was ‘always talking about potentiality rather than actuality’.4 Two and a half chapters of his autobiography survive, attributed, as his son William observes, to ‘an entirely fictitious personage’. Immortal Life: illustrated in a brief Autobiographic Sketch of the late Stephen Dewhurst. Edited with an Introduction by Henry James, reflects his spiritual and emotional commitment, often in highly dramatic detail.
This fragment is included in The Literary Remains of Henry James, a collection selected by William James, who attempts to synthesize the essentials of Henry Sr’s philosophical belief: ‘[i]n the first place, he felt that the individual man, as such, is nothing, but owes all he is and has to the race nature he inherits, and to the society into which he is born. And, secondly, he scorned to admit, even as a possibility, that the great and loving Creator, who has all the being and the power, and has brought us as far as this, should not bring us through, and out, into the most triumphant harmony’. William includes, however, a warning for his readers: ‘[d]o not squeeze the terms or the logic too hard!’, for ‘he despised every formulation he made as soon as it was uttered’.5
A fellow student and room-mate of Henry Sr at Princeton, Hugh Walsh, introduced him to his sister in New York City, Mary Robertson Walsh, who (after he had made another trip to Europe) became his wife in 1840. The civil ceremony took place at Mary’s home in Washington Square, accommodating Henry Sr’s distaste for formalized religion; the bride wore ‘India muslin and a wondrous gold headband’ (SBO, pp. 184–185). A year older than her husband, she came from a wealthy New York family; her father had died long ago in 1820, and her sister Catharine (who also found Henry Sr’s original thinking attractive), would, as ‘Aunt Kate’ become a semi-permanent member of what became the James household. Mary clearly offered her husband a reassuring stability, and her son Henry (despite portraying some grotesque family dynamics in his fiction) invariably speaks of her with warmth. The couple would have five children, and the marriage seems to have been happy, though from the beginning when Mary had renounced her ‘rigidly devout’ faith,6 it was largely she who deferred to her husband’s often idiosyncratic needs.
Children quickly arrived: William in 1842, Henry in 1843, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) in 1844, Robertson (Bob) in 1846, and Alice in 1848. Theirs was a peripatetic childhood owing to Henry Sr’s restlessness. When Henry Jr was just six months old the family travelled to England and also visited France before returning to New York a year later, in autumn 1844. The following year they were living at 50 North Pearl Street, in what is now downtown Albany, close to grandmother James, where they remained until early 1846. Albany, high up on the Hudson River, some 150 miles north of Manhattan, was at this time considered to be on the edge of frontier territory, a thriving river port, and one of the country’s biggest cities, though Henry recalls it as bathed in a golden light redolent of a painting of a Dutch street scene, his grandmother’s house (demolished in 1860) with its ‘yellow archaic gable-end’, a memory of ‘brick baked in the land of dykes’, and cobbled streets (SBO, p. 13). The family then returned to New York, travelling between the two cities until 1848, when they moved into a newly built house bought by Henry Sr at 58 West Fourteenth Street. Here they stayed until 1855 when once again the entire family crossed the Atlantic; they remained in Europe for almost three years, living in Switzerland, France and England. They returned, not to New York, but to Newport, Rhode Island, when, having stayed for a year, they left once more for Switzerland in 1859. By October 1860 they were back again in Newport, and here they stayed until 1864. The next move was to Boston, Massachusetts, and, in 1866 they crossed the Charles River to Cambridge. Their house at 20 Quincy Street would become the family home until Mary’s death in 1882.
European travel was the norm for comparably wealthy, privileged American families in these ‘classic years of the great Americano-European legend’ (LC 2: 1167), but such relentless movement and long-distance travel are exceptional. Doubtless, however servanted and supported, the weight of organizing travel arrangements for small children and for creating some form of domestic order fell upon Mary James’s shoulders. The intellectual excitement, meantime, was for her husband; in London in the winter of 1843, carrying a letter of introduction from Ralph Waldo Emerson, he met Thomas Carlyle as well as a range of other British luminaries, including John Stuart Mill, Alfred Tennyson (not yet a Lord) and George Henry Lewes. The following year while staying near Windsor he suffered what he described as a ‘vastation’. The term applies primarily to the idea of laying waste, as in war, but by the middle of the nineteenth century (OED quotes Emerson’s ‘Swedenborg; or, the Mystic’ (1847) as an example) the term had come to mean ‘the action of purifying by the destruction of evil qualities or elements’. James Sr’s account indeed dramatically describes ‘some damnèd shape squatting invisible to me … raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life’,7 as if some demon within, perhaps expressing the kind of inherited guilt derived from formative religious teaching, needed to be exorcized. He attributed his long and difficult recovery from this crisis to the writings of Swedish philosopher and mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, whose ideas he would study for the rest of his life. William James suggests that ‘his philosophy indeed is but the statement of his cure’.8 Henry Sr had been drawn to Swedenborg by the anonymous articles of the British doctor, James John Garth Wilkinson, who would become a close friend, and for whom his third son would be named. Emerson, too, published an important essay on Swedenborg, examining the relations between mysticism and scientific reasoning.
The effect of the Jameses’ migratory life on the children was enduring: apart from the six years they spent in New York, every home and any local friendship would have seemed temporary; education was similarly piecemeal, provided through a range of establishments or private tutors. On the other hand, they lived in a stimulating, unconventional and loving environment, and were exposed to an extraordinary range of experiences as they moved between two continents and appreciated at first hand the riches of European culture. In later years William James, commenting on his younger brother Henry and his long residence in England, offered a more general insight applicable to the dynamics of their family and the rich interdependencies it engendered: ‘[h]e’s really … a native of the James family, and has no other country’.9
The ‘Dispensaries of Learning’
Henry Jr’s education, as he recalls it, was curiously haphazard, allowing him little opportunity to distinguish himself. School didn’t begin well: brother William had preceded him to the Dutch House in Albany and ‘was already seated at his task’; Henry, by contrast, was dragged there, ‘crying and kicking’, quickly retreated and refused to return (SBO, p. 12). The two brothers, we are told (possibly with some exaggeration) were never again in the same schoolroom together. Always ‘round the corner and out of sight’, William would never be caught up with, and Henry projects his own role as secondary and subservient. His schooldays in New York City emerge as generally uninspiring and uncertain, both stressful and dull, peopled by Dickensian grotesques among the adults and unleavened by peer friendships. He began in Dames’ schools, feeling some ‘humiliation’ at being taught by genteel women who ‘handled us literally with gloves’ (p. 17): their names survive – Mrs Daly, Miss Rogers, Miss Sedgwick, Mrs Wright (Lavinia D.). He was tutored at home in French, by ‘small brown snappy Mademoiselle Delavigne’, and ‘a large Russian lady’, with ‘Merovingian sidebraids’ who had arrived, it seems, ‘straight from Siberia’ (pp. 19, 21). He takes pleasure in summoning up ‘certain faint echoes, wavering images’ of other teachers now consigned to anonymity, ‘ladies and gentlemen, dimly foreign, mere broken syllables of whose names come back to me’ (p. 160), though the name of the formidable Count Adam Gurowski, a Polish émigré, fluent in French, German and Russian, survives, however brief his tenure.
Later Henry was enrolled at the Institution Vergnès, probably on 166 East 10th Street (though he says Broadway, SBO, p. 160) which offered a wide variety of modern languages (such schools were fashionable at the time) as well as commercial arithmetic and higher mathematics. There he witnessed, sitting alongside ‘[l]ittle Cubans and Mexicans’ much ‘whacking’; among ‘infuriated ushers, of foreign speech and flushed complexion’, Henry sat ‘unscathed and unterrified’, protected simply by his own insignificance (p. 163). In 1853–1854 he attended with William the school of Richard Puling Jenks at 689 Broadway,10 ‘a small but sincere academy’ whose drawing- and writing-masters, Mr Coe and Mr Dolmidge, are recalled with affection (p. 170). Benjamin H. Coe looked like the formidable war veteran General Winfield Scott, but produced small, treasured ‘drawing cards’ for his pupils. Handwriting and calligraphy were important elements in the curriculum of the time, and Mr Dolmidge becomes an emblem of his discipline, ‘a pure pen-holder of a man’ and likened to a Phiz or Cruikshank illustration for Dickens’s fiction (p. 165). After a year the boys were withdrawn, ostensibly because Mr Jenks moved premises, and in 1854–1855 Henry came under the tutelage of Messrs Forrest and Quackenbos in a shop-like if fashionable establishment at 71 West Fourteenth Street, where, once again, he languished. Having failed to succeed at Latin in Mr Jenks’s school, Henry was compelled to study ‘the theory and practice of book-keeping’, while William was promoted to the first floor ‘classical’ department. Here at least, with Mr Forrest, ‘awful and arid’, school became reassuringly predictable: ‘we didn’t, under his sway, go in terror, only went exceedingly in want’ (pp. 170, 172).
Henry attended some dozen schools and experienced a range of curricula, but remained passive and unengaged, preoccupied ‘with almost anything but the fact of learning’ and receiving no ‘throb of assurance or success’ (pp. 169, 158). Though we are reliant here on the elaborate medium of the writer’s recollections, a few points emerge: the large number of establishments attended, enough to ‘excite’ the author’s ‘wonder’ (p. 17), his seeming imperviousness to most of what was offered, and his confessed insignificance. No blame is attached to the parents who were paying these school fees, and for whom the idea of continuity seems to have been absent. It was not unusual for boys at this time to attend a number of schools (as occurred with some of the James cousins) though even in subsequent years in Switzerland, James Sr’s choice of schools was, at best, eccentric. Henry’s vocabulary as he recalls his relationship to his education as ‘inapt’ and of his having shown ‘inaptitude’ – terms much less common than ‘inept’ and ‘ineptitude’ – may signify some unease, a sense of opportunity lost.
Aside from the Dickensian references which represent Henry’s young self as a kind of innocent, haplessly abandoned to the world, James invokes in these pages of recollection another work of fiction, Alphonse Daudet’s Jack (1876). The young hero of the title attends the Gymnase Moronval, described in consistently colonialist language as a ‘multi-coloured school’, located in ‘one of the finest quarters of Paris’,11 having been deposited there by his self-indulgent mother. James sees his own schooldays as presaging this work, a fictionalized account of ‘contemporary customs’, as if he had already lived certain of the experiences it narrates and can vouch for their authenticity. He sees himself in the moment, so absolute and unavoidable as such childhood moments are, when Jack looks around and believes he, a native of the place, is as bereft as those of his contemporaries who have come from the distant tropics, the ‘pays chauds’: ‘It seemed to him that his life was now to be thrown amongst orphans, forsaken children, himself as forsaken as though he also had come from Timbuctoo or Tahiti’ (Jack, p. 51). Such sensations of isolation, institutional carelessness, parental negligence, enacted in privileged conditions, are powerfully – forensically – recorded, though the pain and irritation have become tempered in the elaborate nuances and allusive gestures of late-Jamesian prose.
Adopting a more direct, assertive voice, James himself offers a strange (if touching) justification of his parents’ approach to education – namely, an encouragement of their children to ‘Convert, convert, convert!’ all experience, even ‘things vain and unintended’, for their best moral development (SBO, pp. 173–174): not to pursue the vain idea of ‘success’ but to aspire to ‘spiritual decency’ – as if life itself didn’t already offer enough opportunities for boredom or disappointment. In the public arena of his writings Henry Sr affirmed portentously that he wished any child of his to become ‘an upright man’, by ‘instructing his understanding by moral truths, and investing him with a certain responsibility over his own conduct’.12 By contrast, his son’s most unguarded, and significantly retrospective comment on his education is direct and untypically bitter; it appeared not in print but in a letter of 8 November 1906 to his niece, Peggy James (William’s daughter), with reference to himself as that distant ‘small boy’: he looks tenderly at his past self, as if he were a neglected Dickensian child: ‘No one took any interest whatever in his development, except to neglect or stunt it where it might have helped – and any that he was ever to have he picked up wholly by himself’. The conclusion is corroborated independently by the youngest of the James children, Alice, when she advised William on his children’s education: ‘What enrichment of mind and memory can children have without continuity and if they are torn up by the roots every little while as we were! Of all things don’t make the mistake wh. brought about our rootless and accidental childhood’.13
Young Henry’s early education may have failed him, though he was to find less formal means of apprehending the world. For instance, the British illustrated weekly magazine Punch, with its humorous satirical commentary on current figures and institutions, which he describes, with a nod to Matthew Arnold, as its ‘“criticism of life” … gentle and forbearing’,14 with contributions from William Makepeace Thackeray (a favourite author) and illustrations by John Leech, provided insights into alternative social and political systems in the most entertaining way for this ‘silent devotee’. It must have helped form part of that soon-to-be-fulfilled dream of Europe; indeed, he recalls how, for him, ‘Punch was England: Punch was London; and England and London were at that time words of multifarious suggestion to this small American child’ (CWHJA, pp. 358, 359).
For the time, though, New York itself could offer him a richly diverse, potentially dangerous, set of experiences. The most important opportunity was to be found in the operation of the city itself and his parents’ apparent willingness to let him wander its ‘beguiling’ streets alone, ‘master of my short steps’, like some child in a Perrault fairy tale, though he, at least, remained a ‘safely-prowling infant’ (SBO, pp. 24, 85). He sees himself once more as the small boy, smelling ‘the cold dusty paint and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his contemplative nose’ (p. 25), yet such a natural habit of observation also anticipates a future adult calling to be played out on the streets of Europe’s great cities. It is an activity which he self-deprecatingly calls ‘dawdling and gaping’, a pursuit ostensibly unambitious and inactive, but which denotes a sensitivity, a capacity to receive an impression, to feel a relation or ‘vibration’ which is the distinguishing mark of the creative artist.
Mid-nineteenth-century New York City retained a semi-rural or -agricultural character, with poplars, pigs and poultry in evidence near Henry’s Fourteenth Street home. Soldiers still rehearsed their parades in Washington Square seven blocks from home. But even now the city’s infrastructure was changing: as Henry and William walked back from school along Fourth Avenue, they witnessed with excitement ‘a riot of explosion and a great shouting and waving of red flags’ as work began on the Hudson River Railroad which would link Manhattan with Albany (p. 23). For the James family it meant that the twelve-hour overnight voyage up the Hudson by steamboat would be replaced by a shorter rail journey along its banks, and the consequent loss for young Henry of that ‘peculiar note of romance’ (AS, p. 164) as the boat docked ‘in dim early dawns’ (p. 146).
New York City: Art and Theatre
The young Henry was also taken to art galleries by his parents, having an especially vivid memory of a painting which would achieve an almost mythological status as a patriotic emblem of the heroic in American history. Emanuel Leutz’s Washington Crossing the Delaware
