Selected Tales of Henry James Henry James

Early years, 1843–1883

James was born at 21 Washington Place (facing Washington Square) in New York City on 15 April 1843. His parents were Mary Walsh and Henry James Sr. His father was intelligent and steadfastly congenial. He was a lecturer and philosopher who had inherited independent means from his father, an Albany banker and investor. Mary came from a wealthy family long settled in New York City. Her sister Katherine lived with her adult family for an extended period of time. Henry Jr. was one of four boys, the others being William, who was one year his senior, and younger brothers Wilkinson (Wilkie) and Robertson. His younger sister was Alice. Both of his parents were of Irish and Scottish descent.[4]

Before he was a year old, his father sold the house at Washington Place and took the family to Europe, where they lived for a time in a cottage in Windsor Great Park in England. The family returned to New York in 1845, and Henry spent much of his childhood living between his paternal grandmother's home in Albany, and a house, 58 West Fourteenth Street, in Manhattan.[5][6] A painting of a view of Florence by Thomas Cole hung in the front parlor of this house on West Fourteenth.[6] His education was calculated by his father to expose him to many influences, primarily scientific and philosophical; it was described by Percy Lubbock, the editor of his selected letters, as "extraordinarily haphazard and promiscuous."[7] Once, a cousin of the James family came down to the house in Fourteenth Street and, one evening during his stay, read the first instalment of David Copperfield aloud to the elders of the family: Henry Junior had snuck down from his bedroom to listen surreptitiously to the reading, until a scene involving the Murdstones led him to "loud[ly] sob," whereupon he was discovered and sent back to bed.[8]

Between 1855 and 1860, the James household travelled to London, Paris, Geneva, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bonn, and Newport, Rhode Island, according to the father's current interests and publishing ventures, retreating to the United States when funds were low.[9] The James family arrived in Paris in July 1855 and took rooms at a hotel in the Rue de la Paix.[10] Some time between 1856 and 1857, when William was fourteen and Henry thirteen, the two brothers visited the Louvre and the Luxembourg Palace.[11] Henry studied primarily with tutors, and briefly attended schools while the family travelled in Europe. A tutor of the James children in Paris, M. Lerambert, had written a volume of verse that was well reviewed by Sainte-Beuve.[12] Their longest stays were in France, where Henry began to feel at home and became fluent in French.[11] He had a stutter, which seems to have manifested itself only when he spoke English; in French, he did not stutter.[13]

In the summer of 1857, the James family went to Boulogne-sur-Mer, where they set up house at No. 20 Rue Neuve Chaussée, and where Henry was a regular customer at an English lending library.[14] In the autumn of that year, Henry Senior wrote from Boulogne to a friend that "Henry is not so fond of study, properly so-called, as of reading...He is a devourer of libraries, and an immense writer of novels and dramas. He has considerable talent as a writer, but I am at a loss to know whether he will ever accomplish much."[14] William recorded in a letter to their parents in Paris, while the boys were staying in Bonn, that Henry and Garth Wilkinson would wrestle "when study has made them dull and sleepy."[11]

In 1860, the family returned to Newport. There, Henry befriended Thomas Sergeant Perry, who was to become a celebrated literary academic in adulthood, and painter John La Farge, for whom Henry sat as a subject, and who introduced him to French literature, and in particular, to Balzac.[15] James later called Balzac his "greatest master", and said that he had learned more about the craft of fiction from him than from anyone else.[16]

In July 1861, Henry and Thomas Sergeant Perry paid a visit to an encampment of wounded and invalid Union soldiers on the Rhode Island shore, at Portsmouth Grove; he took walks and had conversations with numerous soldiers and in later years compared this experience to those of Walt Whitman as a volunteer nurse.[17] In the autumn of 1861, James received an injury, probably to his back, while fighting a fire. This injury, which resurfaced at times throughout his life, made him unfit for military service in the American Civil War.[16] His younger brothers Garth Wilkinson and Robertson, however, both served, with Wilkinson serving as an officer in the 54th Massachusetts.[18]

In 1864, the James family moved to Boston, Massachusetts, to be near William, who had enrolled first in the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard and then in the medical school. In 1862, Henry attended Harvard Law School, but realised that he was not interested in studying law. He pursued his interest in literature and associated with authors and critics William Dean Howells and Charles Eliot Norton in Boston and Cambridge and formed lifelong friendships with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the future Supreme Court justice, and with James T. Fields and Annie Adams Fields, his first professional mentors. In 1865, Louisa May Alcott visited Boston and dined with the James family; she was to write in her journals that "Henry Jr....was very friendly. Being a literary youth he gave me advice, as if he had been eighty, and I a girl."[19]

His first published work was a review of a stage performance, "Miss Maggie Mitchell in Fanchon the Cricket", published in 1863.[20] About a year later, "A Tragedy of Error", his first short story, was published anonymously. James's first literary payment was for an appreciation of Sir Walter Scott's novels, written for the North American Review. He wrote fiction and nonfiction pieces for The Nation and Atlantic Monthly, where Fields was editor. In 1865, Ernest Lawrence Godkin, the founder of The Nation, visited the James family at their Boston residence in Ashburton Place; the purpose of his visit was to solicit contributions from Henry Senior and Henry Junior for the inaugural issue of the journal.[21] Henry Junior was later to describe his friendship with Godkin as "one of the longest and happiest of my life."[21] In 1871, he published his first novel, Watch and Ward, in serial form in the Atlantic Monthly. The novel was later published in book form in 1878.

During a 14-month trip through Europe in 1869–70, he met John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, and George Eliot. Rome impressed him profoundly. "Here I am then in the Eternal City", he wrote to his brother William. "At last—for the first time—I live!"[22] He attempted to support himself as a freelance writer in Rome and then secured a position as Paris correspondent for the New York Tribune through the influence of its editor, John Hay. When these efforts failed, he returned to New York City. During 1874 and 1875, he published Transatlantic Sketches, A Passionate Pilgrim and Roderick Hudson. In 1875, James wrote for The Nation every week; he received anywhere from $3 to $10 for brief paragraphs, $12 to $25 for book reviews and $25 to $40 for travel articles and lengthier items.[23] During this early period in his career, he was influenced by Nathaniel Hawthorne.[24]

In the fall of 1875, he moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris. Aside from two trips to America, he spent the next three decades—the rest of his life—in Europe. In Paris, he met Zola, Daudet, Maupassant, Turgenev and others.[25] He stayed in Paris only a year before settling in London, where he established relationships with Macmillan and other publishers, who paid for serial installments that they published in book form. The audience for these serialized novels was largely made up of middle-class women, and James struggled to fashion serious literary work within the strictures imposed by editors' and publishers' notions of what was suitable for young women to read. He lived in rented rooms, but was able to join gentlemen's clubs that had libraries and where he could entertain male friends. He was introduced to English society by Henry Adams and Charles Milnes Gaskell, the latter introducing him to the Travellers' and the Reform Clubs.[26][27] He was also an honorary member of the Savile Club, St James's Club and, in 1882, the Athenaeum Club.[28][29]

In England, he met the leading figures of politics and culture. He continued to be a prolific writer, producing The American (1877), The Europeans (1878), a revision of Watch and Ward (1878), French Poets and Novelists (1878), Hawthorne (1879), and several shorter works of fiction. In 1878, Daisy Miller established his fame on both sides of the Atlantic. It drew notice perhaps mostly because it depicted a woman whose behavior is outside the social norms of Europe. He also began his first masterpiece,[30] The Portrait of a Lady, which appeared in 1881.

In 1877, he first visited Wenlock Abbey in Shropshire, home of his friend Charles Milnes Gaskell, whom he had met through Henry Adams. He was much inspired by the darkly romantic abbey and the surrounding countryside, which feature in his essay "Abbeys and Castles".[26] In particular, the gloomy monastic fishponds behind the abbey are said to have inspired the lake in The Turn of the Screw.[31]

While living in London, James continued to follow the careers of the French realists, Émile Zola in particular. Their stylistic methods influenced his own work in the years to come.[32] Hawthorne's influence on him faded during this period, replaced by George Eliot and Ivan Turgenev.[24] The period from 1878 to 1881 had the publication of The Europeans, Washington Square, Confidence and The Portrait of a Lady.

The period from 1882 to 1883 was marked by several losses. His mother died in January 1882, while James was in Washington, D.C., on an extended visit to America.[33] He returned to his parents' home in Cambridge, where he was together with all four of his siblings for the first time in 15 years.[34] He returned to Europe in mid-1882, but was back in America by the end of the year following the death of his father. Emerson, an old family friend, died in 1882. His brother Wilkie and friend Turgenev both died in 1883.

Middle years, 1884–1897

In 1884, James made another visit to Paris, where he met again with Zola, Daudet, and Goncourt. He had been following the careers of the French "realist" or "naturalist" writers, and was increasingly influenced by them.[32] In 1886, he published The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima, both influenced by the French writers that he had studied assiduously. Critical reaction and sales were poor. He wrote to Howells that the books had hurt his career rather than helped because they had "reduced the desire, and demand, for my productions to zero.”[35] During this time, he became friends with Robert Louis Stevenson, John Singer Sargent, Edmund Gosse, George du Maurier, Paul Bourget, and Constance Fenimore Woolson. His third novel from the 1880s was The Tragic Muse. Although he was following the precepts of Zola in his novels of the '80s, their tone and attitude are closer to the fiction of Alphonse Daudet.[36] The lack of critical and financial success for his novels during this period led him to try writing for the theatre;[37] His dramatic works and his experiences with theatre are discussed below.

In the last quarter of 1889, "for pure and copious lucre,"[38] he started translating Port Tarascon, the third volume of Daudet's adventures of Tartarin de Tarascon. Serialized in Harper's Monthly from June 1890, this translation – praised as "clever" by The Spectator[39] – was published in January 1891 by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington.

After the stage failure of Guy Domville in 1895, James was near despair and thoughts of death plagued him.[40] His depression was compounded by the deaths of those closest to him, including his sister Alice in 1892; his friend Wolcott Balestier in 1891; and Stevenson and Fenimore Woolson in 1894. The sudden death of Fenimore Woolson in January 1894, and the speculations of suicide surrounding her death, were particularly painful for him.[41] Leon Edel wrote that the reverberations from Fenimore Woolson's death were such that "we can read a strong element of guilt and bewilderment in his letters, and, even more, in those extraordinary tales of the next half-dozen years, "The Altar of the Dead" and "The Beast in the Jungle".[41]

The years spent on dramatic works were not entirely a loss. As he moved into the last phase of his career, he found ways to adapt dramatic techniques into the novel form. In the late 1880s and throughout the 1890s, James made several trips through Europe. He spent a long stay in Italy in 1887. In that year, he published the short novel The Aspern Papers and The Reverberator.

Late years, 1898–1916

In 1897–1898, he moved to Rye, Sussex and wrote The Turn of the Screw; 1899–1900 had the publication of The Awkward Age and The Sacred Fount. During 1902–1904, he wrote The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl.

In 1904, he revisited America and lectured on Balzac. In 1906–1910, he published The American Scene and edited the "New York Edition", a 24-volume collection of his works. In 1910, his brother William died; Henry had just joined William from an unsuccessful search for relief in Europe, on what turned out to be Henry's last visit to the United States (summer 1910 to July 1911) and was near him when he died.[42]

In 1913, he wrote his autobiographies, A Small Boy and Others, and Notes of a Son and Brother. After the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, he did war work. In 1915, he became a British citizen and was awarded the Order of Merit the following year. He died on 28 February 1916, in Chelsea, London, and was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium. A memorial was built to him in Chelsea Old Church. He had requested that his ashes be buried in Cambridge Cemetery in Massachusetts.[43] This was not legally possible, but William's wife smuggled his ashes onboard a ship and sneaked them through customs, allowing her to bury him in their family plot.[44]

Sexuality

James regularly rejected suggestions that he should marry, and after settling in London, proclaimed himself "a bachelor". F. W. Dupee, in several volumes on the James family, originated the theory that he had been in love with his cousin, Mary ("Minnie") Temple, but that a neurotic fear of sex kept him from admitting such affections: "James's invalidism ... was itself the symptom of some fear of or scruple against sexual love on his part." Dupee used an episode from James's memoir, A Small Boy and Others, recounting a dream of a Napoleonic image in the Louvre, to exemplify James's romanticism about Europe, a Napoleonic fantasy into which he fled.[45][46]

Between 1953 and 1972, Leon Edel wrote a major five-volume biography of James, which used unpublished letters and documents after Edel gained the permission of James's family. Edel's portrayal of James included the suggestion he was celibate, a view first propounded by critic Saul Rosenzweig in 1943.[47] In 1996, Sheldon M. Novick published Henry James: The Young Master, followed by Henry James: The Mature Master (2007). The first book "caused something of an uproar in Jamesian circles"[48] as it challenged the previous received notion of celibacy, a once-familiar paradigm in biographies of homosexuals when direct evidence was nonexistent. Novick also criticized Edel for following the discounted Freudian interpretation of homosexuality "as a kind of failure."[48] The difference of opinion erupted in a series of exchanges between Edel (and later Fred Kaplan filling in for Edel) and Novick, which were published by the online magazine Slate, with Novick arguing that even the suggestion of celibacy went against James's own injunction "live!"—not "fantasize!"[49]

A letter James wrote in old age to Hugh Walpole has been cited as an explicit statement of this. Walpole confessed to him of indulging in "high jinks", and James wrote a reply endorsing it: "We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours & mine, what we are talking about—& the only way to know it is to have lived & loved & cursed & floundered & enjoyed & suffered—I don't think I regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth".[50]

The interpretation of James as living a less austere emotional life has been subsequently explored by other scholars.[51] The often intense politics of Jamesian scholarship has also been the subject of studies.[52] Author Colm Tóibín has said that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet made a landmark difference to Jamesian scholarship by arguing that he be read as a homosexual writer whose desire to keep his sexuality a secret shaped his layered style and dramatic artistry. According to Tóibín, such a reading "removed James from the realm of dead white males who wrote about posh people. He became our contemporary."[53]

James's letters to expatriate American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen have attracted particular attention. James met the 27-year-old Andersen in Rome in 1899, when James was 56, and wrote letters to Andersen that are intensely emotional: "I hold you, dearest boy, in my innermost love, & count on your feeling me—in every throb of your soul". In a letter of 6 May 1904, to his brother William, James referred to himself as "always your hopelessly celibate even though sexagenarian Henry".[54][55] How accurate that description might have been is the subject of contention among James's biographers,[56] but the letters to Andersen were occasionally quasierotic: "I put, my dear boy, my arm around you, & feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of our excellent future & your admirable endowment."[57]

His numerous letters to the many young homosexual men among his close male friends are more forthcoming. To his homosexual friend Howard Sturgis, James could write: "I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you. Meanwhile, I can only try to live without you."[58] In another letter Sturgis, following a long visit, James refers jocularly to their "happy little congress of two".[59] In letters to Hugh Walpole, he pursues convoluted jokes and puns about their relationship, referring to himself as an elephant who "paws you oh so benevolently" and winds about Walpole his "well-meaning old trunk".[60] His letters to Walter Berry printed by the Black Sun Press have long been celebrated for their lightly veiled eroticism.[61]

However, James corresponded in equally extravagant language with his many female friends, writing, for example, to fellow novelist Lucy Clifford: "Dearest Lucy! What shall I say? when I love you so very, very much, and see you nine times for once that I see Others! Therefore I think that—if you want it made clear to the meanest intelligence—I love you more than I love Others."[62] To his New York friend Mary Cadwalader Rawle Jones: "Dearest Mary Cadwalader. I yearn over you, but I yearn in vain; & your long silence really breaks my heart, mystifies, depresses, almost alarms me, to the point even of making me wonder if poor unconscious & doting old Célimare [Jones's pet name for James] has 'done' anything, in some dark somnambulism of the spirit, which has ... given you a bad moment, or a wrong impression, or a 'colourable pretext' ... However these things may be, he loves you as tenderly as ever; nothing, to the end of time, will ever detach him from you, & he remembers those Eleventh St. matutinal intimes hours, those telephonic matinées, as the most romantic of his life ..."[63] His long friendship with American novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson, in whose house he lived for a number of weeks in Italy in 1887, and his shock and grief over her suicide in 1894, are discussed in detail in Edel's biography and play a central role in a study by Lyndall Gordon. Edel conjectured that Woolson was in love with James and killed herself in part because of his coldness, but Woolson's biographers have objected to Edel's account.[nb 1]