In the three autobiographical volumes, James completes all his previous developments during his fifty-year career as a writer, and also the recapitulation he began in The American Scene (1907)—his most elaborate essay on American culture—continued in the Prefaces written for the New York Edition of his tales and novels. His autobiography is the critical justification of his career as a novelist, the revelation of the man inside the writer, his “final preface” about the value of art and imaginative life, as he calls it in a letter to Henry Adams:
A Life of the Imagination
James’s approach to the autobiographical genre is quite unusual. By the end of the nineteenth century, the writing of autobiography had become “sufficiently widespread to generate the kind, if not the degree, of popular, critical, and scholarly interest that we take for granted today” (Spengemann 177). But Henry James delineates mental states rather than external facts, applying his center of consciousness technique to the author himself, considering that a life of the imagination is as adventurous as a life of action:
When James wrote his autobiography at the age of seventy, he knew that
his own life had been far different from other novelists, and for this
reason A Small Boy and Others (1912), Notes of a Son and Brother
(1913) and The Middle Years (1917) can be read as James’s justification
for his choice to live his life as observer and artist. This explains why
throughout his literary career he presents a series of male characters
who alter the traditional equation of masculinity with action on behalf
of passive males. The complex style in the latest part of his fiction permitted
him to portray a range of masculine behavior against the usual forms of
manhood in European and American societies: the lives of Ralph Touchett
in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess
Cassamassima (1886), or Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors
(1903), among others, are excluded from patriarchal privileges. This literary
form, which permits a more intimate, inaccessible James to emerge, consists
essentially of “taste achieved through intelligent discrimination: the
end of the process of aestheticising experience” (Cox 7). James’s purpose
in all his works was to register the slightest motions of consciousness.
In the densely textured prose of his Autobiography, where he narrates
the experiences of his later years, he does this mainly in a new form that
can be considered his “fourth phase.” In the first volume, he also sets
down the experience of his boyhood, not probably as it was, but as it lives
in his memory, as it re-emerges when he allows his mind to play upon it
and to see it as preliminary to all that followed. James’s study in the
“perspectives of memory,” according to M. H. Abraham, “shares a number
of features with creative autobiography—the more-or-less fictional work
of art about the development of the artist himself—that began with Wordsworth
in the nineteenth century and includes Proust, Yeats, Joyce and Nabokov
among its practitioners in the twentieth century” (80). In fact, to read
James’s Autobiography, “the mediacy of self-consciousness as well
as the immediacy of feeling” are required, since we understand James’s
language to be “a genuine activity of shaping reality” (Getz 207).
A Small Boy ...
Most critics have reacted favorably toward the subjectivity of A Small Boy and Others, and this can in part be explained by James’s reputation in England during the previous two decades: The Tragic Muse (1890) had been received with certain indifference, almost ignored, since James had lost that wide public appeal he had acquired at the height of his “international phase,” but during the next decade he began to develop “a passionate following among a young generation of artistic and intellectual elite” (Holly 574). To understand the curve of James’s career as a whole we must recognize that when he abandoned the “international theme” in the 1890s, he had already found “the different ways to establish the outsider character of his hero and heroine: the protagonists are doubly strangled—kept from their spiritual inheritance by a social world that limits and defines them, and isolates them within that world by their aspirations and fineness of spirit” (Lyons 65). Also, in the novels that follow this period, What Maisie Knew (1897), The Turn of the Screw (1898), The Awkward Age (1899), and The Sacred Fount (1901), that possibility is ambiguous or even ironically fulfilled, but it is tempting to see James’s technical experimentation in these works, mainly in the shift of the point of view and the absence of a direct authorial voice which will be an important element in the late novels. What happens is that James “shifts the drama of consciousness from being merely compensatory to being efficacious, from being an escape from reality to being a means of transforming it—there is an access of power that has enlarged the scope of the imagination’s force and task” (Lyons 76).
Pre-Freudian critics approached A Small Boy and Others for insight into what the nineteenth century defined as central to the artist’s soul, i.e., his creative genius. What they found, however, “was indistinguishable from James’s own” (Holly 575).They also observed an absence of historical signposts, which “arouse[d] the sort of impatience that had been directed at James’s writings since the late 1890s, because of his complicated and abstract style” (Holly 577). This is not the case with The American Scene, where Donald Wolff finds a literary form that he calls “rhetorical historiography,” since it “approximates Hegel’s conceptual history, which focuses not only on the cultural life of a nation but also uses that material to speculate about the future, about the direction of history in general” (Wolff 155)
If there is nothing in James’s Autobiography for creating a historical background—even though its background is solid and interesting—it is because the story is intentionally shaped along artistic rather than historical lines. James attempted to “reconstruct the childhood of a boy of genius not only by discovering the critical instants at which new horizons were unveiled to him but also by estimating the value of his impression or vibrations” (Holly 576), by changing the traditional role of author-agent into that of an observer, placed out of the scene:
James sees his childhood as a marvelous experience for the senses, a joyous uproar of the mind, while he wanders through the streets of New York without any fixed direction, feeding himself with impressions, vibrations. Yet, what is more important, he applies to another literary genre, an autobiography, the subtle psychological analysis he had introduced into his novels, and the result is probably the most exquisitely accurate record of the growing consciousness of “a small boy” in all literature, a small boy who notices his otherness, but without realizing what it means:
James emphasizes his slowly growing passion for the sense of Europe, instilled in him during his infancy abroad and enlarged throughout his life:
In his Autobiography James presented his literary vocation as a kind of second birth which required all kinds of sacrifices. And although it sometimes became a success, it was a bitter struggle: “at that age mustn’t I quite have succumbed to the charm of the world seen in a large way? For there, incomparably, was the chance to dawdle and gape” (Autobiography 19-20). He places the narrative in his own reminiscing consciousness, permitting his memory to flow in a way that Carol Holly calls “controlled association.” However, trying to approach the autobiographical genre from a different perspective, James avoids an overly dangerous psychological terrain and recollects his “myriad memories from the past” more or less in the order in which they occur to him, reshaping them into “the story of his developing consciousness of the past as it lived in the present,” becoming “both the subject and the medium of the book” (578). Thus, it offers the clues that can help us to solve most questions about his ambivalent behavior: “Can the peculiar void at the center of Henry James’s personality be explained?” Richard Hall asks, “Can there be some reason for his adoption of the life unlived, the beast forever crouched, as the central metaphor in his work be offered?” (25) Cándido Pérez Gállego also asks himself: “What is Henry James’s purpose with so many unhappy endings in his love stories?” (222). There is a central episode in A Small Boy and Others which can help us to understand those questions. It refers vaguely to a dark hurt James suffered in his youth:
There is also an important event; in fact, this is the climax of A Small Boy and Others —which may help to clarify James’s behavior: the dream, or nightmare, of the Gallerie d’Apollon, in the Louvre Museum. This episode shows James pushing back suddenly a spectral pursuer who threatens to destroy him:
The Jameses belonged to an age which can be called “the classic years of the great American-European legend”: they were pioneers in the American rediscovery of Europe, the evaluation of Art, the growing of personality and the spiritualization of the Old Continent’s values. And the ambivalence produced by his “father’s ideas”—he wanted all the family to travel from one town to another all over Europe and his children to change schools, while they went to museums, concerts, theatres—modeled him as a cosmopolitan writer:
The love Henry James Sr. felt for his wife is also essential for the development of the novelist’s career. Knight Aldrich thinks that “the myth of the mother is a question-key in James’s fiction; this symbolizes possession in most cases” (373). An example of it is Mrs Grose in “The Turn of the Screw”: she “may have represented his mother, in reality a destructive woman, but a woman of whom James was so afraid that he had to repress his perception of her evil characteristics and consciously could only see her as good” (373).
Thus, based on James’s thought that the husband derived his strength
from his wife and, reciprocally, the woman could appropriate the man’s
life, Edel developed his “vampire” theory, since “the wife helped her husband
so much that he could not live by himself.” This was what happened to his
father, who died some months after his mother, “being even a menace for
him, who submitted to a ridiculous dependence” (55). It is the main theme
of The Sacred Fount, and if Love meant danger and to be taken to
the conjugal bed meant death, perhaps for this reason James chose the safest
way and remained single, without thinking of getting married for the rest
of his life.
The Heroine of the Scene
This lack of feminine contacts has also been related by his critics to a passional frustration in Minny Temple. Nevertheless, James’s ambiguous personality could be better understood after the publication of his cousin’s letters in Notes of a Son and Brother, the second volume of his memories, and the expressions he dedicated to her explain her legendary meaning for the writer:
As can be seen, we cannot understand James’s work fully without a deep knowledge of the fine work that his Autobiography is. The Middle Years was not finished; so, to find out the end of the story we must look into the pages of his works. Despite his reasons for not finishing the third volume—he was sick and depressed because of the First World War—he instinctively knew that he had already said everything he needed. James was convinced that the artist disappeared in his work, and that the life of a writer ceased to be interesting when Art became the only reason for his life, his own personality being no longer interesting as theme of fiction. As he explained in some of his autobiographical stories about writers, such as “The Figure in the Carpet,” “The Death of the Lion,” and “The Lesson of the Master,” the essential life of the artist is kept in his work, where he shows distinctly his genius. Thus, all his books form a kind of supreme autobiography which keep every important event until the end of his life.
In short, with his Autobiography Henry James finally reached the summit of his literary career, by combining all his previous artistic achievements in a synthesis of the past and present, and by using a new literary form, which permitted not only these conflicting frameworks to exist but also both views to be contained simultaneously, since for him
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