HENRY JAMES
HOFFMAN, FREDERICK J.
Henry James Henry James: Autobiography. Edited, with an introduction, by Frederick W. Dupee. Criterion Books. 622 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Frederick J. Hoffman WHILE Henry James may scarcely be...
...The third, had it been finished, might have given us crucial insights into Henry James himself...
...The three autobiographical works that James wrote in the last five years of his life have always been rather rare and expensive titles...
...Everywhere one has the sense of a family circumstance fortunately endowed with every opportunity for the cultivation of mind and taste...
...The fragment which Percy Lubbock edited the year after James' death scarcely does that, but it does suggest it, and we have the letters to add to the brief self-examination herein contained...
...The remembrance of things past is motivated by an enduring affection, of course, but the act of remembering is set in the mature years of the James who is an accomplished master of his art and must have wanted to see his youth in the light of that accomplishment...
...The second title of the autobiography is in the nature of a second installment...
...it was intended to do so, to bring us to the James scene proper, to the engrossing spectacle of Henry's effort to decide what he must make of his life and what quality that life should have...
...It would certainly have been strange if James had not indulged in such reminiscence as all great artists are entitled to and many are only too happy to offer...
...Something is of course lost as a consequence...
...The style, involved and heavily burdened by the qualifications of phrase and diction of his late writing, gives the early years a curious quality of maturity...
...As was so often the case, this modest project grew in achieving, until it became a sizable, wide-ranging, and ingratiating record of the family of Jameses and of Henry James himself...
...Dupee speculates on what the work might have been had James written it at the time of Daisy Miller...
...the autobiography is his revelation of the man within the novelist...
...the wit, ever present in James but becoming progressively involved, lends to the telling the atmosphere of drawing-room reminiscence...
...they were Americans enjoying a cosmopolitan experience which was vitally to affect the novelist's sensibility...
...James makes no real effort to see himself in the past in terms of what he was or how he sensed himself then...
...But the story of the man seen with his own eye and in the perspective of age looking back upon youth is also in the canon...
...The autobiography is the portrayal of James and of his family as a man who has achieved not only a reputation but a condition of mature contemplation sees them...
...The one-volume record now offers us the opportunity for seeing James from two perspectives, as the member of a family and as the boy and young man anticipating the mature artist...
...he began dictating to Theodora Bosan-quet, his secretary at the time, a memoir to accompany the letters...
...The book, in short, changed from memoir to autobiography...
...Now, in a handsome, excellently edited one-volume edition, they appear, to take care of a long-felt need...
...Dupee explains the circumstance: in the winter of 1911-1912 James began preparations for a selection of the letters of his distinguished brother, William...
...The quality of the three-part autobiography is affected also by its being written at such a late time in James' career...
...One feels a "vocation" in this record, as though it were present almost from the beginning...
...As Dupee concisely puts it, "The prefaces [1907-1909] are his critical justification of his practice as a novelist...
...The change is understandable when we realize that James, a bachelor who depended mostly upon the past for family attachments, needed at the end of his life to place himself and to explain himself and the admirable family from which he had come...
...The initial freshness of the events may therefore suffer from this perspective, but the events gain from it a significance any reader of James would want...
...The Jameses were scarcely American in the exclusive sense...
...The two are not really isolated from each other...
...In a genuine sense, it is another exercise in the "literary portraiture" of the Hawthorne sketch and the full-length study of William Wetmore Story...
...In the Notebooks (edited by F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth Murdock) and in the prefaces to the New York edition of his novels and tales we have a veritable "autobiography" of his craft and mind...
...There is nothing here that suggests youthful petulance or easy protest...
...the fully mature intelligence, at 68 years, is not concerned to look narrowly at the cultures that shaped him...
...it is still attentive to family matters and to family identities, but again it brings us to the perspective of Henry James seeing himself in terms especially of father and brother...
...The letters are in themselves remarkable documents...
...Reviewed by Frederick J. Hoffman WHILE Henry James may scarcely be called the conventional autobiographical hero, he has nevertheless left several testimonies of himself...
...in volumes edited variously by Percy Lubbock, Elizabeth Robins, Janet Adam Smith, and Leon Edel, they illuminate his work, his life, his taste...
...As such, it satisfies a genuine need—the need to define himself, as a James, as an American, as a member of the European-American community responsible for his distinctive quality as artjst...
...Originally published in 1913, 1914, and 1917, A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and the fragmentary The Middle Years have not been reprinted until this year...
Vol. 20 • June 1956 • No. 6
