Brief Lives: Henry James

By Hazel Hutchison

Henry James is famed for the psychological depth of his characters and his remarkable ability to penetrate the inner life, yet the story of his own inner life remains curiously obscure— until now The best known facts about James— his illustrious, wealthy family and famous siblings; his prolific literary output with its numerous quirky female heroines; his long-term bachelorhood and the rumors that accompanied it; and his flamboyant adoption of British citizenship in 1915— have created a certain mythology surrounding the author. In this succinct new biography, Hazel Hutchison examines the man behind the writing. Exploring the author's life, works, and critical heritage, this fresh take on one of the central figures in the English canon is perfect for both the general reader as well as the James enthusiast.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Dec 8, 2023
• ISBN: 9781780940687

Book preview

Childhood

Henry James’s earliest recollection was of sitting in a carriage with his parents, waggling his feet under his long baby clothes, looking out of the window at a stately city square where a high stone column reached towards the sky. It was 1844 and the Jameses were in Paris, having spent several months in England. As his parents confirmed to him later, the family group had driven down the Rue Saint-Honoré, passing the Place Vendôme, site of the Colonne Vendôme with its statue of Napoleon. It was, he wrote in his autobiography, a ‘miracle’ of memory. He was less than two years old, but the image of the memorial column dominating the urban perspective, framed by the clear window of the carriage, stamped itself on his mind. For the rest of his life, he would be fascinated by the elements of this scene, and they would recur again and again in his life and fiction; transatlantic travel, human relationships, the power of memory, the encounter with art and architecture, the glamour of fame and, perhaps most of all, the impact of an external impression on the observing mind. Forty years later in his essay ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), he would argue that the most important quality for a writer is ‘a capacity for receiving straight impressions’. Clearly, James began receiving impressions very early.

Henry James was born on 15th April 1843 at 21 Washington Place, New York, a three-storey townhouse near Washington Square, where his mother’s family lived. He was the second son of Henry James Senior and Mary Robertson Walsh, who had married in 1840. Young Harry already had an older brother, William. Three more children, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky), Robertson and Alice, would be born in the next five years. Henry James Senior was a radical young intellectual of independent means. He was one of the eleven heirs of a self-made millionaire, William James of Albany. This William James had arrived in America at the age of eighteen from County Cavan, Ireland, in 1789. He brought with him a small sum of money, a Latin grammar and a wish to visit the battlefields of the recent Revolutionary War; he also brought a stern Presbyterian work-ethic, which formed him into a shrewd and successful businessman but an exacting father. He started as a clerk in a New York shop, but soon set up his own business, and by 1793 he was rich enough to move out of the city and settle in Albany. He bought land in upper New York State, ventured into banking and salt mining, and gave his name to the town of Jamesville, New York. When he died in 1832, he left a fortune of three million dollars.

His son Henry, one of the children of William’s third wife, Catherine, rebelled wholeheartedly against the rigid morality and probity of his father’s values. Limping through life on a wooden leg after a childhood accident, Henry made up for his physical containment with an outgoing personality. As a student at Union College, Schenectady, he ran up bills for oysters, cigars and books, and rarely went to bed sober. For this behaviour, he was punished in his father’s will with an annuity of little more than $1,000. However, he was not the only one unhappy with his inheritance. William James had also attached conditions to his bequests to his other children, insisting that they shun ‘prodigality and vice’ and live lives of ‘economy and usefulness’. The family went to court and successfully challenged the will. Henry found himself with $10,000 a year, enough money to ensure that he would never have to earn his living.

The Walshes were also Presbyterians of Scots-Irish descent, and like the Albany Jameses lived in an atmosphere of pious industry and sobriety: no opera, no concerts, no theatres and little society beyond immediate family. It was an intimate, hard-working, sometimes stultifying way of living that Henry James would later recreate in his novel Washington Square (1880). Henry James Senior met Mary through her brother Hugh, with whom he had struck up a friendship during a brief spell at Princeton Theological Seminary. He was twenty-nine and she was thirty years old. Mary James emerges through her son’s writings and through her own letters as a mild, unflappable figure. Visitors sometimes found her rather dull, especially in contrast to her lively and opinionated sister Catherine. However, Mary was sufficiently rebellious to refuse a church wedding, and to insist on being married at home in a civil ceremony performed by the Mayor of New York. She also resigned from Murray Presbyterian Church, embraced her husband’s liberal theology, and got to know his forward-thinking friends: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau.

Although he was financially settled, and beginning to publish religious writings, Henry James Senior remained restless, both in mind and body. When little Henry was six months old, the family set off, with William as a toddler, Fanny the nursemaid and Aunt Kate for company, for an extended trip to Europe. They spent most of their time in England, first in London, where, with letters of introduction from Emerson, they met Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill and Alfred Tennyson. They visited the cultural sites, including the great British Museum founded in 1753, which Fanny loyally claimed ‘fell short for one who had had the privilege of that of Albany’. They also plundered the bookshops, establishing a James family penchant for ‘the strong smell of paper and printer’s ink’ that became known to the children as ‘the English smell’. After London, the family took a cottage in Windsor, where Henry Senior began to read, and to work in earnest on the philosophical and theological problems that had troubled him since the death of his father. One day in May 1844, sitting alone after dinner, he experienced what doctors diagnosed as a breakdown, but which he himself later would always refer to as a ‘vastation’. He was suddenly aware of a brooding and malignant presence, ‘some damnèd shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life’. Within seconds he felt himself ‘reduced from a state of firm, vigorous, joyful manhood to one of almost helpless infancy’. Unable to secure relief in books, religion or medical cures, he finally found help in the form of a Mrs Chichester, who suggested turning to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. The books were ordered from London and in them Henry Senior found a religious and philosophical system that offered relief for his present predicament and hope for organising his intellectual future.

Swedenborg (1688–1772) trained as a mining engineer and served for many years in the Swedish parliament. However, in mid-life he became subject to an astonishing series of visions of heaven and hell that he recounted in the many volumes of his writings, which were read widely on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. His work demonstrated a blend of mysticism, moral consciousness and social politics, which gave Henry Senior exactly what he needed: the possibility of profound religious experience, and a focus for his social conscience, without the restrictive Calvinism of his father’s faith. Henry Senior would devote much of his life to lecturing and writing in defence of Swedenborg’s religious beliefs. He would also sink a great deal of the family’s money into associated social causes. ‘Father’s ideas’ would become a familiar element of life within the family. Henry James would later describe his father’s set of beliefs as a temple which ‘stood there in the centre of our family life’ but into which he ‘never paused to peer or penetrate’. The great drama of his father’s ‘vastation’ was, he felt, a play he hadn’t ‘been to’, which perhaps accounted for his lack of interest in the whole scheme. He remarked, ‘That was the trouble; the curtain had fallen while I was still tucked in my crib’. Even Mary James, always supportive and attentive to her husband’s emotional needs and receptive to his thought and work, would dismiss his system lightly with the much-repeated phrase, ‘Your father’s ideas, you know –!’ Nevertheless, Henry Senior’s ideas would leave their mark on his children. A deep moral sense but a dislike of moral pedantry, an awareness of evil, a fascination with heightened or distorted states of consciousness, an interest in the shape of experience, a curiosity about spiritual and supernatural questions: they would inherit all of these in some measure, Henry and William in particular. They would also acquire a sense of exclusion. Henry Senior was so opposed to organised religion that he would never even join a Swedenborgian congregation, leaving his offspring envious of other youngsters whose fathers had more regular occupations and whose families had more conventional ways of keeping Sunday. The children were troubled by ‘this particular crookedness of our being so extremely religious without having, as it were, anything in the least classified or striking to show for it’.

Back in America, the young Harry, as the family called him, was collecting more impressions to add to his earliest European memories. Initially the Jameses returned to Albany, where his paternal grandmother, Catherine Barber James, lived in a large double-fronted house very like the one that James would describe as the childhood home of Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881):

There were two entrances, one of which had long been out of use but had never been removed. They were exactly alike – large white doors, with an arched frame and wide side-lights, perched upon little ‘stoops’ of red stone, which descended sideways to the brick pavement of the street. […] There was a covered piazza behind it, furnished with a swing which was a source of tremendous interest; and beyond this was a long garden, sloping down to the stable and containing peach trees of barely credible familiarity.

Until Harry was twelve, the Jameses divided their time between Albany and New York, where they bought a house in the newly built Union Square. There were also summer trips to New Brighton, Fort Hamilton and Staten Island, then a rural retreat. Harry grew up with the sense that New York was ‘home’, but that Albany was ‘holiday’. He remembered the taste of the peaches from the trees in the garden; the sight of his grandmother reading a novel with a bare candle placed between her eyes and the page; the company of ‘many-sized uncles, aunts, cousins’, especially his orphaned cousins the six Temple children, including his favourite, Mary, known as Minny. Albany was also the site of an elementary school, the Dutch House, to which he was brought for his first day of schooling. But nobody could drag the small boy crying and kicking over the threshold, and he had to be taken home. The exemplary William, on the other hand, was ‘already seated at his task’, which seemed to James in retrospect to symbolize their boyhood relationship. Wherever they went and whatever they did, William was always one step ahead: ‘I never for all the time of childhood and youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him.’

School dominated the boys’ horizon in New York, not least because their father never seemed to be satisfied with their education and moved them around continually. At first, there was a succession of ‘educative ladies’, as James would later call them, including Mrs Daly, a stout, red-faced Irish lady, who ‘viewed her little pupils as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life and on which she was to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling’. Then, there was a series of schoolmasters: at the Institution Vergnès, where the boys rubbed shoulders with the children of wealthy Cuban and Mexican planters; at the Broadway school of Richard Pulling Jenks, where the teachers looked like Cruikshank illustrations from Dickens novels; at the socially prestigious school of Forest and Quackenboss on Sixth Avenue, which James mostly remembered for his failure to discover any ‘secrets for how to do sums’, and for the sticky waffles sold by a black woman with a portable stove in a lane behind the schoolyard. For a long time after, ‘the oblong farinaceous compound, faintly yet richly brown, stamped and smoking,