Memories of a Mandarin

HENRY JAMES: AUTOBIOGRAPHY (622 pp.)--edited by Frederick W. Dupee-- Criterion ($7.50).

"I sit heavily stricken and in darkness," wrote Henry James to a friend in the summer of 1910. His "ideal elder brother," Philosopher William James, had just died, and at 67, Henry was the sole survivor of four James brothers and one sister. As he sat down to write his autobiography, James must have felt that the face of life had not really smiled on him for two decades. His plays had pitiably flopped. At the opening-night curtain of one of them he was hooted off the London stage. His late novels, with their labyrinthine sentences and ideas, scarcely sold, and even fond brother William had been forced to confess: "I for one am no longer able to read a word he writes." Yet James was sustained by glimmerings of posthumous greatness which he revealed in a letter to Fellow Novelist William Dean Howells: "Some day all my buried prose will kick off its various tombstones at once."

And so it has. In the 1940s the best of his lavish literary output (about 60 novels, short stories and plays) was re-issued and re-evaluated. Though it provoked its share of cultist nonsense, the rediscovery of James placed him firmly where he had always neglectedly been, at the hard core of great American novel writing along with the other 19th century greats, Hawthorne, Melville and Mark Twain. Over and above the others, James proved to be an enlightening bridge to the greatest of 20th century writing. In his psychological probings, he prefigured Proust's monumental Remembrance of Things Past. And in his "wonder of consciousness in everything," he pebbled the bed on which James Joyce's "stream of consciousness" was later to flow.

Spiritual Geography. The autobiography, long out of print and first published about 40 years ago, reveals still another James, dissimilar though at times more trenchant than the Henry Adams of the Education. It covers little more than James's first 26 years, and its editor, F. W. Dupee, an able biographer of James, concedes that it is written in the novelist's "late late style," which makes some of its insights tortuous though rewarding. But the book offers undivided nostalgic charm in its portrait of the carriage-trade world of pre-Civil War New York. And for those who relish tranquillity recollected in tranquillity, it affords a rare glimpse of the quietest fecundity in nature, an artist sinking roots in the soil of his creative imagination.

"He is a native of the James family and has no other country," said brother William of Henry. As spiritual geography this was true enough, but in point of physical fact, Henry's boyhood was spent in a roomy house on Manhattan's 14th Street. Though he was "a very town-bred small person," little Henry had to walk no farther north than the corner of 18th Street and Fourth Avenue to find an estate with "grounds," and peep wide-eyed through the iron railing at an esoteric menagerie of fawns, peacocks and guinea fowl. But usually the James boys romped close to home, and little Henry tagged behind "big brother Bill" like a shadow.

Together the boys suffered a bevy of "educative ladies," who viewed them "as so many small slices cut from the loaf of life" on which "to dab the butter of arithmetic and spelling." At home their mother warmed them with love, while their father taught them to sit in the cold draft of a wide-open mind without catching intellectual sniffles. One of twelve heirs to a $3,000,000 real-estate and utilities fortune (second only to John Jacob Astor's in the New York of that day), Henry Sr. had the means to practice what he preached. His lack of a fixed occupation rather embarrassed his young sons. Beset by a boy who said that his father was a stevedore, Henry Jr. implored Henry Sr.: "What shall we tell them you are?" Replied his father: "Say I'm a philosopher, say I'm a seeker for truth, say I'm a lover of my kind . . . or, best of all, just say I'm a student."

Spray of Ideas. When the boys raised the question of religion, Henry Sr., himself a disciple of Emanuel Swedenborg,* gave them some more prickly answers: "I recall, to hear our father reply that we could plead nothing less than the whole privilege of Christendom . . . even that of the Catholics, even that of the Jews." To "ignore them all equally," wrote James, "was what we mainly did." The boys continually felt the vigorous spray of what their mother called "your father's ideas." The family friend Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to this spray as "elegant Billingsgate."

Social and intellectual restlessness made Henry Sr. cart self and family off to Europe for a five-year stay in 1855. Henry was only twelve, but he felt his first twinge of vocation: "One way of taking life was to go in for everything and everyone, which kept you abundantly occupied, and the other way was to be as occupied just with the sense and the image of it all, and only a fifth of the actual immersion." It was a way of life, and a literary method, which he was to use and abuse, i.e., that "impressions are experience." As "gaping pilgrims," the Jameses grand-toured Europe. The discovery that the height of New York fashion could be ludicrous in Europe was the kind of acorn from which James's mighty oaklike theme--American innocence and artlessness v. European decadence and cultural splendor--was later to grow.

After the outbreak of the Civil War, Henry suffered an obscure back injury. Younger brothers Bob and Wilky went off to war and officered with distinction. Henry was reduced to cultivating his "desperate receptivity" and "seeing, sharing, envying, applauding, pitying, all from too far-off." Just "to be vague about something," the 19-year-old Henry entered Harvard Law School, but never practiced. He consoled himself with the thought that everything he soaked up "would matter somehow" somewhere, sometime.

"Live All You Can." Over the next half-decade or so, the autobiography's "fadograph of a yestern scene" loses its glow of childhood happiness. But as he marched to the threshold of his middle years, James located himself: "What had I ever been and could I ever be but a man of imagination at the active pitch?" Much like James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the autobiography ends with James ready "to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

William Faulkner has called Henry James "one of the nicest old ladies I ever knew." But allowing for all that was overly fastidious, snobbish and unworldly about him, the James who emerges from the autobiography looks much more like a staunch culture hero. More than any other 19th century U.S. literary figure, with the possible exception of Poe, he pioneered the idea that the art of fiction was not peripheral and frivolous, but central and serious. Master of an elegantly involuted style which Critic Cyril Connolly has dubbed the "Mandarin," James sometimes carried it to the point of "euphonious nothings," but far more frequently captured "the subtlest inflections of sensibility and meaning." In durability and steady growth of craft and vision, he evaded the fate Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. James's last novels (The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl, The Wings of the Dove) are his best.

Henry James lived life too much at second hand, and knew it. He tried to make up for lack of experience with intensity of perception. He said his yes to life in his late fiction, but it had behind it the pathos of a shy lifetime of noes: "Live all you can; it's a mistake not to. It doesn't so much matter what you do in particular, so long as you have your life. If you haven't had that, what have you had? . . . The right time is any time that one is still so lucky as to have . . . Live, live!"

*An 18th century Swedish scientist and philosopher who professed to have received a revelation of the Second Coming of Christ. He believed that God Himself was the Divine Man, that through infinite love Man could become the image of his Creator. The Swedenborgian Church still claims 5,647 U.S. members.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.