Eclipsed by the Sons

...A mediocre student at Union College, James ran up substantial bills for oysters and cigars and began to gamble seriously...

...James, well aware that his previous animadversions had tried the patience of most of the journal's readers, nevertheless responded with seven lengthy installments...

...nor do the explanatory terms and categories he provides overrun the account...

...The elder James must have been quite a man....' So far, posterity has vigorously disagreed with Whitman's judgment...

...Moreover, the author is no mere antiquarian...

...She bore him five children and presided over the household, first in New York and later in Cambridge, with years of traveling around Europe in between, as her husband pursued an eccentric scheme of broad education for their two elder sons...

...But we are in Habegger's debt for making the man seem less remote...

...Yet the mixture was so highly idiosyncratic, not to mention volatile, that it attracted only a handful of committed adherents...

...Readers and correspondents without a large dictionary at hand may not have realized that when he complained of a pamphlet's timidity about the "scortatory," he was demanding more discussion of nonmari-tal sex, or that when he called Whitman's work "stercoracious," he was saying it smelled of shit...

...When, much later, his youngest son Robertson began to go on binges, James wrote to him of his own youthful alcoholism: "When I was 10 years old I was in the habit of taking a drink of raw gin or brandy on my way to school morning and afternoon...

...Henry Sr...

...James' childhood was in some ways difficult...

...and reproduced in many particulars by their extrafamilial successors, that Henry James Sr...

...But the life, as Habegger capably recounts it, requires the space his capacious text allows...

...Yet Habegger, through a combination of candor and painstaking research, has rendered a composite portrait of the famous father that seriously challenges the received image...

...American Literature "SONS OF THE BIG MEN are rarely big," Walt Whitman once opined to Horace Traubel...

...Look at the younger Henry James—I don't see anything above common in him: he has a vogue—but surely his vogue won't last: he don't stand permanently for anything...

...His energetic thought and expression helped form the minds of his children, detaching them from the usual pieties and pushing them to make their own high-level syntheses...

...It is easy to get the impression from the James family story, inaugurated by William and Henry Jr...

...Her brothers seem to have been incapable of venting their filial ambivalences with such force and clarity...

...Because he admired the fiction of his friend Thackeray, for him Dickens was "a mere adipose rumor of sympathy, running pailfuls at every puncture...

...He also continued to drink heavily, but when he was 24 a concerned friend and his wife helped him stop...

...Jane Carlyle found Mary James and her sister Catherine rather dowdy—they called on the Carlyles wearing black stockings with light-colored dresses?but otherwise Mary seems to have attracted little criticism...

...At once passionately devoted and detached, overwhelming and inscrutable, James inspired in his offspring responses so intensely mixed that each consumed prodigal amounts of psychic energy, well into adulthood, coming to terms with them...

...One wrote in: "Henry James is wonderful, but he is hard to bear...

...I doubt that this biography, fine as it is, will create a demand for reissuing the chief works of Henry James Sr...

...For instance, the general ruin of James' brothers and their children—the madness and suicide gilded and glossed over by the younger Henry in his memoirs—touches on a painful aspect of American society that is today often mindlessly glamorized...

...ambition...

...Habegger cites numerous instances of James' attraction to "the fecal metaphor...

...Although his wish was successfully challenged in the courts, it still took 14 years of legal wrangling to sort out the estate...

...James was an enormously complicated person...

...James' sons have supplied some of our most useful models for negotiating the boundaries between the highbrow and the vernacular in a great range of works, from Henry Jr.'s The Turn of the Screw to William's Varieties of Religious Experience...

...In writing that James cultivated "something flagrantly shameless" in his essays, or asserting that the James children "couldn't see how their parent's domestic fatherliness was a performative version of himself," he shows the influence of the most recent work in gender studies and "queertheory" by such scholars as Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick...

...Three years earlier his father had died of an "apoplectic shock," possibly the upshot of a strong dissatisfaction with Henry and the other sons in general...

...After marriage she seems to have had almost no existence apart from her husband...

...This was not an occasional thing but, as I say, habitual...

...Over a long intellectual career, he took up a series of positions that would have broken anyone less well favored by temperament and fortune...

...She enthusiastically shared his interests and beliefs, and when in the early 1850s he became notorious for his association with the free love movement, her approval of him did not visibly waver...

...Henry's life was transformed at 13, when in a bizarre accident he badly burned his leg...

...A learned vocabulary enabled James to be extremely nasty yet decorous...

...Habegger's occasional summary assessments of James' significance are similarly well-informed and thoughtful...

...His father was an Irish Presbyterian immigrant from middling stock who had turned himself into a model capitalist...

...The son of "the richest man in New York after John Jacob Astor," he had ample leisure to develop his theology...

...Even the two younger sons, Wilkie and Robertson, who paradoxically distinguished themselves by being (unremarkable, were accorded their own dual biography, by Jane Maher, in 1986...

...Even the tiny minority of subscribers who professed enjoyment of his contributions sometimes expressed mixed feelings...

...In her Diary, Alice remembered watching her father intent at work at his writing desk and wanting to knock his head off...

...Gangrene repeatedly threatened him until, one month before his 17th birthday, the leg was finally amputated...

...James was in his day a prominent and widely published controversialist, a friend and sparring partner of the ranking sages of his time (Emerson, Carlyle and others), but in the course of the 20th century his reputation has been thoroughly eclipsed, initially by his two elder sons and more recently by his daughter, the brilliant and acerbic Alice James, whose journal has attained classic status...

...Some of his contemporaries admired what they saw as sublime flexibility...

...He left a will that denied his heirs their patrimony for 21 years after his death...

...Habegger tells of a weary editor, late in James' career, who reluctantly granted him yet another opportunity to answer his critics...

...While much of the writing of the novelist Henry James and his equally illustrious brother William remains in the widest circulation, the output of Henry James Sr.—The Nature of Evil, Substance and Shadow, Lectures and Miscellanies, The Secret of Swedenborg—seems to have attracted almost no readers since his death in 1882...

...The author is also forthright, and occasionally witty, about the theologian's meanness in public exchange...

...in a strange Christmas letter published in the New York Tribune he spoke of Christ redeeming "the excrementitious product of human history...

...A shrewd and tireless business developer—saltworks, flour mills, real estate—and a loyal supporter of powerful political figures, he made at times a distant parent...

...Subsequently, drinking "all manner of stimulants" helped him get through his years of confinement...

...Despite these and other piquant traits exhibited by his subject, though, the biographer produces little in the way of grand hypotheses about him, psychological or otherwise...

...His judiciousness makes Habegger an unfailingly helpful guide to the less familiar phases of Anglo-American intellectual life that James passed through...

...Coming of age as he did during the last flowering in America of theological con-troversialism and hatred, James was both a vituperative and a highly invidious adversary...

...One of these accurately reflects his general attitude toward his subject: "James crossed established boundaries, he made connections no one else would ever think of, his diction constantly transgressed the line between the correct and the vulgar...

...James could not leave any criticism of his work unanswered or give any opponent the last word...

...The broad outcry against James for undermining the foundations of Christian family life with his moral revisionism also has a distinctly contemporary ring...

...James began to find his way as he courted and married Mary Robertson Walsh, a young New York society woman both snobbish and devoutly religious...

...By turn an austere Calvinist, a Sweden-borgian adept, and a Fourierist champion of free love (at least in theory), James never really abandoned any of these beliefs, combining and recombining elemerits of them into an entirely personal religion...

...His informative and carefully nu-anced study is an outstanding example of the biographer's art, avoiding both infatuation with its subject and preoccupation with alleged personal pathologies...

...Even before his years of physical suffering and invalidism, however, he had acquired a disabling drinking problem...

...Habegger grants James his idealisms, contradictory as they were, and not only helps the reader make sense of them but explains the way they motivated him...

...others deplored what struck them as a rich man's extravagant capacity for self-indulgence...

...Newspapers and journals that allowed him space to rebut his critics often found themselves with a regular contributor on their hands...

...Indeed, the main title of Alfred Habeg-ger's full-dress biography, the first since Austin Warren's much shorter one 60 years ago, reflects the fact that Henry Sr...

...For several years thereafter he was confined to the family home and often to his bed...

...associate editor...

...Habegger's book enriches our appreciation of how much they and their siblings gained—perhaps as much by reaction as by imitation—at their father's hands...

...was a benevolent, otherworldly, even angelic soul who tragically failed to find an audience for his abstruse and highly speculative writings...

...In an early essay he declared that we must "defecate ourselves of private...

...has figured in the ever-growing literature on the Jameses almost exclusively in his role as "the father" of a remarkable set of children...

...Henry James Sr.—a renegade theologian, an ex-alcoholic, an amputee, an agitator for sexual freedom who happened to be happily married, and a devoted and exasperating parent—emerges here as an altogether more compelling figure than we had previously known...

...died quite soon after she did, as if he were literally dependent on her for life support...

...Confronting Habegger's hefty new volume, the reader may wonder what there is left to say about the senior James and whether it is worth entertaining at such length...

...At the same time, he was parochial, obsessed, hermetic, invariably seeking to confirm and disseminate his special doctrines...

...He amply demonstrates that James did have an audience, and goes on to show how variegated and divided that audience was and how it changed over the writer's lifetime...