The Unique James Family
Notes of a Son and Brother, by Henry James. [Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.]
Whatever the deprecators of Henry James’s later manner may have to say about the difficulties of his involved style there are some situations, some plots, for which it is most happily suited. Was so haunting a ghost story ever written as that truly horrible one which involved two children—the name of which has unfortunately escaped me, for I should like to recommend it for nocturnal perusal. And in The Golden Bowl the gradual way you are led to perceive the wrong relationship between two of the characters, which, had it been offered bluntly, with no five degrees of approach and insinuation, would have lost half its mystery of guilt. As he himself says, in the Notes of a Son and Brother, “I like ambiguities, and detest great glares.”
Unfortunately, the style that is fitting to a slow unfolding of a psychological situation does not lend itself well to biography. The direct way is the only possible way there, if the reader is to keep an unflagging interest, and the direct way is simply not possible for Henry James. And one asks nothing more than to be told simply of the student days at Switzerland and Germany, and the life afterward at Newport, just as the Civil War was beginning or best of all throughout the story of a united family—the four boys, little sister, father, mother, and aunt, quite unlike, I imagine, any other family in the world. The quality of the genius of the brothers seems to have sprung from the association with a father as unlike as possible to the American father of today. He did not influence them, we are told, by any power of verbal persuasion to his own ideas. It was quite simply himself, his personality and character, the way he lived life, that took hold upon his sons’ imagination. Of course that is the only way anyone ever is influenced, but I think most parents do try the verbal persuasion as well. Henry James says of his father:
I am not sure, indeed, that the kind of personal history most appealing to my father would not have been some kind that should fairly proceed by mistakes, mistakes more human, more associational, less angular, less hard for others, that is less exemplary for them (since righteousness, as mostly understood, was in our parents’ view, I think, the cruellest thing in the world) than straight and smug and declared felicities. The qualification here, I allow, would be his scant measure of the difference, after all, for the life of the soul, between the marked achievement and the marked shortcoming. He had a manner of his own of appreciating failure or of not, at least, piously rejoicing in displayed moral, intellectual, or even material economies, which, had it not been that his humanity, his generosity, and, for the most part, his gaiety were always, at the worst, consistent, might sometimes have left us with our small saving, our little exhibitions and complacencies, rather on our hands.
Speaking of the “detached” feeling they had after returning from Europe to settle in Newport, he says:
I remember well how, when we were all young together, we had, under pressure of the American ideal in that matter, then so rigid, felt it tasteless and even humiliating that the head of our little family was not in business....
Such had never been the case with the father of any boy of our acquaintance; the business in which the boy’s father gloriously was stood forth inveterately as the very first note of our comrade’s impressiveness. We had no note of that sort to produce, and I perfectly recover the effect of my own repeated appeal to our parent for some presentable account of him that would prove us respectable. Business alone was respectable—if one meant by it, that is, the calling of a lawyer, a doctor, or a minister (we never spoke of clergymen) as well; I think if we had had the Pope among us we should have supposed the Pope in business, just as I remember my friend Simpson’s telling me crushingly, at one of our New York schools, on my hanging back with the fatal truth about our credentials, that the author of his being was in the business of stevedore. That struck me as a great card to play—the word was fine and mysterious; so that “What shall we tell them you are, don’t you see?” could but become on our lips at home a more constant appeal.
Very interesting are the occasional letters telling of Emerson and Carlyle. Especially so to me are the side lights on Carlyle, as chiming in somehow with the series of impressions I seem gradually to have accumulated about him as time goes on. Perhaps it really isn’t fair, as a large amount of those impressions I feel sure I owe to Froude, but I can’t help wondering what our times, with modern surgery and therapeutics, would have accomplished with Carlyle’s indigestion, and what resultant difference there would assuredly have been in his philosophy. To quote from a letter of the elder Henry James:
I took our friend M—— to see him [Carlyle], and he came away greatly distressed and désillusionné, Carlyle having taken the utmost pains to deny and descry and deride the idea of his having done the least good to anybody, and to profess, indeed, the utmost contempt for everybody who thought he had, and poor M—— being intent on giving him a plenary assurance of this fact in his own case.
And again in a letter to Emerson:
Carlyle nowadays is a palpable nuisance. If he holds to his present mouthing ways to the end he will find no showman là-bas to match him.... Carlyle’s intellectual pride is so stupid that one can hardly imagine anything able to cope with it.
An earlier letter has this delicious bit about Hawthorne:
Hawthorne isn’t to me a prepossessing figure, nor apparently at all an enjoying person.... But in spite of his rusticity I felt a sympathy for him fairly amounting to anguish, and couldn’t take my eyes off him all dinner, nor my rapt attention.... It was heavenly to see him persist in ignoring the spectral smiles—in eating his dinner and doing nothing but that, and then go home to his Concord den to fall upon his knees and ask his heavenly Father why it was that an owl couldn’t remain an owl and not be forced into the diversions of a canary!
And in the postscript of the same:
What a world, what a world! But once we get rid of Slavery the new heavens and the new earth will swim into reality.
Which shows how much in earnest the Abolitionists really were—it was a tenet of faith with them. Sad and strange and illuminating to us of a later generation, who are now struggling for other abolitions of slavery, and still hoping for a new world.
I wish I could quote from the delightful letters of William James, but they must be read entire, with the author’s comments, to place them correctly. Pending a biography of the man, these letters will be to many readers the most interesting feature of the book. One of the most magnificent things about the book, however,—if I may use a large word for a large concept—is the spirit running through it of filial and fraternal love, never expressed in so many words, but apparent throughout, which makes, as I said before, the James family unique in the history of American letters.