These are books, as nineteenth-century reviewers might have said, to be savored rather than swallowed, with long, unparagraphed pages presenting long, snaking sentences. He did this, as writers will, in pursuit of the story he wanted to tell: how his brother’s ascent to intellectual dominance forced him into a lesser role as attendant observer, but how, in that lesser, watching role, he eventually found his vocation in life, a vocation defined by its disabilities. He cleaned up muddy incidents, placed events in the wrong time-all the usual things that writers do. Certainly, Henry fabulated and shaped various details and incidents.
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His fan the essayist Max Beerbohm made a sour list of twenty instances in which he thought that James had falsified documents. Not surprisingly, Henry misrepresented a lot of what had happened.
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(The answer, briefly, is their father’s strange, restless nature and his eventual conversion to the mystical circles of Swedenborgianism, which sent him travelling in pursuit of spiritual illumination.) There is much family detail but very little comprehensible family history. We learn little about who the Jameses were how, in the generation of Henry’s Irish-immigrant grandfather, they got the money that bought them freedom from obligation why they went back and forth so often between Europe and America-we learn that Henry and his siblings were “hotel children” but not what got them to the hotels. But it soon became a free-form memoir-free-form because almost none of the normal duties of the memoir writer are met. The autobiographical project began, as Philip Horne explains in an afterword to the reissues, as a plan to collect William James’s letters, after his death, in 1910, with commentaries provided by his one-year-younger brother. Barnum’s American Museum can take up pages. Years disappear unremarked, but one good day at P. We are always in one place, Henry’s head, as he peers back from his early-twentieth-century home in England, seeking out extremely specific sensations lost. To say as much, though, gives the books a chronicler’s purposefulness that their sentences belie. The second mostly relates what happened to the James brothers during the Civil War-when the two older boys stayed home, and Henry made a brief, doomed effort to go to Harvard Law School-and so is set largely in Boston and Cambridge. The first book is set mostly in New York and Albany, where the James family was based, with side trips to France and England. James’s memoirs have a shimmer, a charm, and an openhearted immediacy that cuts the fussiness. Feeling ourselves in a desert of true feeling, we look for a feeling of truth. In a time of linguistic overkill, like the nineteen-forties, we look to literature for a language of emotional caution in an age of irony, we look for emotional authenticity. David Foster Wallace, the saint of under-thirty readers, mentions James not at all in his critical writings, and though one might take his qualifications and circlings back as Jamesian, they are employed to discriminate not more finely but to discriminate not at all-to get it in, rather than to pare it down. James remains a classic, of course, but a classic is not necessarily a presence. Eliot stood above all other writers for sighs and scruples, could use a new infusion of objects. Although the sentences are always labyrinthine and sometimes exhausting, the feeling at the end of each chapter is one of clarity rather than of murk: a little piece of memory has been polished bright.Ĭertainly, the great cult of the later James, which arose in the propaganda-fearing nineteen-forties and fifties, when he and T. For freshness of voice, firmness of purpose (if a firmness always subject to scruples and second thoughts), and general delight on the page, the memoirs are fully alive to the contemporary reader in a way that James’s late novels may no longer be. It may then seem Potterian to say that the later Henry James obviously looks more appealing in his nonfiction than in his novels, but something close to that conclusion may present itself to the reader happily making his way through the two books of Jamesian autobiography, “A Small Boy and Others” (1913) and “Notes of a Son and Brother” (1914), just reissued in a single volume, together with some other first-person stuff, by the Library of America. Stephen Potter, the English satirist and the inventor of “Lifemanship,” pointed out once that the essence of “reviewmanship,” being one up in book reviews, is perverse praise: giving writers credit for qualities they are supposed to lack, or criticizing them for not having ones that they clearly possess-i.e., extolling the open sadism of Jane Austen or lamenting the sexual timidity of D.
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In the memoirs, years disappear unremarked, but one good day at P.