JAMES, HENRY (1843-1916)

LIFE

James was born in New York City on Apr. 15, 1843,

the second son of Henry James, a noted Swedenborgian theologian and social theorist, and the younger brother of William James, the psychologist and philosopher.

James' childhood and early youth were passed in unusually stimulating surroundings.

He belonged to a novel-reading, playgoing family,

Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, were frequent visitors to the household.

The family had a substantial income--Henry James, Sr., had inherited his father's estate of $3 million--and periodically lived in Europe.

James went to a number of schools and was provided with private tutors.

His education came from his walks, his reading, especially of novels, and his visits to the parks and museums of European cities where he observed the people around him.

In 1860 the James family returned from Europe and settled in Newport, R.I.

There the 17-year-old Henry developed a friendship with the painter John La

Farge, which is reflected in his fiction: many of James' major characters are artists, and his imagery is often derived from painting.

In 1861 James received a back injury which prevented him from enlisting with the North at the outbreak of the Civil War.

In 1865 James' first signed short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Its editor,

William Dean Howells, became a lifelong friend.

James made his first independent trip to Europe in 1869, going first to

London and then to the continent. He observed not only the countries

themselves but also his fellow citizens: Americans adrift in the Old World,

bewildered by an environment with deep historical associations, filled with a

profound sense of human corruption but also an appreciation for beauty and

the sensuous texture of experience. This year abroad provided James with the

"international" theme of much of his fiction: the collusion of the Old and the

New Worlds, usually in the form of some innocent American lured but finally

betrayed by Europe.

James published his first novel, Watch and Ward, in 1870. His first significant short story, "A Passionate Pilgrim," was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1871. His early tales, usually depicting American manners and relationships, reflect the influence of Dickens, Balzac, Hawthorne, and George Eliot.

Roderick Hudson (1875), a novel describing the disintegration of a young American sculptor living in Rome,

In 1875 he took up residence in Paris

a friend of the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev

the literary circle composed of Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet, and Edmond de Goncourt

The American (1877),

James felt himself an outsider in France, and in 1876 he emigrated to England.

James lived in London for two decades, occasionally journeying to the

continent to gather material for his travel writing.

his fiction focused on the international theme

Daisy Miller (1878)

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

Washington Square (1881)

The Bostonians (1886)

The Princess Casamassima (1886)

The Tragic Muse (1890).

In 1897 James purchased Lamb House in Rye

he divided his time between writing and entertaining visitors

James led a remarkable social life

he records dining out 107 times one winter

a great favorite with the ladies, he never married

James' emotional life has long fascinated critics.

His fiction is unusually cerebral in nature, continually emphasizing

intellectual perception rather than immediate physical experience.

With the turn of the century, James entered into his final and greatest period

of writing, producing three massive novels,

The Wings of the Dove (1902),

The Ambassadors (1903),

The Golden Bowl (1904).

In 1904 he returned to the United States and toured the country. The product of this trip was The American Scene (1907), a somewhat pessimistic analysis of American life.

During the remainder of his life, James chose and revised the pieces to be

included in the 24-volume "New York edition" of his works; he wrote his

famous prefaces on the art of fiction for this edition.

Between 1910 and 1914 he completed two volumes of a projected 5-volume autobiography: A Small Boy (1913) and Notes of a Son and Brother (1914).

He also started two novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, and a volume of

autobiography, The Middle Years, which were never finished.

In 1915 James became a British subject to protest the neutrality of the United States during the early years of World War I. Later that same year he was awarded the Order

of Merit by George V. He died in London on Feb. 28, 1916, and his ashes

were returned to Cambridge, Mass., for burial in the James family plot.

WORKS

Before discussing James' work, it is necessary to summarize his theory of

fiction. As a critic James asked such questions as: What makes a good novel?

How does an author construct one? What is the relationship between the way a

novel is constructed (its form or shape) and the vision of life it contains?

From what point of view should the story be narrated: Should it be told

directly by the author, who presents the thoughts and feelings of all the

characters, or, as James came to think, should the narrator be a single

character in the novel, who only knows what he sees, feels, and observes?

Although the English novel had existed for over a century, these questions had

never before been considered in a systematic fashion.

Thus James was one of the first great--and conscious--experimentalists in the

craft of fiction, exploring new ways of seeing and shaping life through new

ways of telling a story. A novel, he said in his famous essay "The Art of

Fiction," has only one obligation, to be "interesting." In its broadest definition,

the novel is "a personal, a direct impression of life; that, to begin with,

constitutes its value, which is greater or less according to the intensity of the

impression." But by "life," or experience, what James really meant was "a mark

made on the intelligence." Hence, he preferred not to render "the affair at

hand," but rather someone's impression of the affair. In his late fiction

especially, the story is told through the eyes of an interested, usually

perceptive observer. James felt this made the work more compelling since the

reader sees only what the observer sees and follows the workings of his mind

as he tries to understand the meaning of various appearances in the world

around him. Typically, these appearances are misleading. The "action" in the

novels consists of the observer gradually penetrating appearances and

comprehending the truth. James' technique of dramatizing thought profoundly

altered the history of the novel. His influences can be seen in the works of

such authors as Joseph Conrad, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and

James Joyce.

Early Period. During his lifetime James produced 20 full-length novels, a

dozen novellas, and over 100 tales; in addition he wrote autobiographies,

essays, criticism, biography, travel literature, and thousands of letters. James'

critics usually divide his career into three periods. The first or "early" phase

(1865-1882) was the period of apprenticeship as a writer, culminating with

the publication of The Portrait of a Lady in 1881. Pervading the early period

is the so-called "international" theme, a complicated concept because, for

James, America and Europe each had both a positive and a negative side. The

positive aspect of the American character was its vitality, reliability,

innocence; the negative, a tendency to over-simplify life and to mistrust

beauty, art, and sensuality. The European character was positive in its

appreciation of beautiful and pleasurable experience as well as in its

sophisticated awareness of the complexities of human nature, and negative in

its amorality and expedience. (To get what they want--usually money--James'

European characters deceive their American friends, manipulating, betraying,

and even destroying them.) James' novels may be viewed as an attempt to find

a way of life that would combine the good aspects of both worlds. However,

he never succeeded and, in spite of a profound comic sense, his vision of life

is essentially tragic.

The novella Daisy Miller and the novels Roderick Hudson and The American

concern generous but naive Americans who are defeated by a corrupt

European environment. The Europeans (1878) reverses the theme and deals

with a European thwarted in America: the Baroness

Eugenia-Camilla-Dolores-Münster comes with her brother to New England

from Europe to stay with some wealthy American cousins in the hope of

making her fortune, but is rejected for her amorality by the bachelor she had

hoped to marry.

The Portrait of a Lady, the outstanding novel of the early period, concerns a

young American girl, Isabel Archer, who is brought to England by her aunt.

Isabel is ardent, vibrant, hungry for experience, and so deeply committed to

the idea of her own personal freedom that she rejects several attractive offers

of marriage. Isabel's cousin, Ralph Touchett, falls in love with her but,

seriously ill, gives up hope of wooing her and persuades his father to leave her

a fortune when he dies so that she can be truly free. Isabel is subsequently

betrayed by her "friend" Madame Merle into marriage with Gilbert Osmond, an

American expatriate. Isabel believes him to be a man of impeccable taste with

whom she can share an intense but liberated existence. In fact, he is cynical,

dilettantish, and totally conventional. Eventually Isabel discovers that he and

Madame Merle had been lovers and that her marriage to Osmond was plotted

by himself and Madame Merle to obtain Isabel's fortune. One of the fine

ironies of the novel is that Isabel thought she had freely made the choice that

would bring her the most freedom, when in fact she had been beguiled into

making the one that would bring her the least. Though the novel is a brilliant

rendering of a proud spirit trapped by a combination of circumstances, critics

have found inexplicable the fact that it ends with Isabel's decision to remain

with Osmond, choosing, in effect a kind of living death.

Middle Period. In the second or "middle" phase (1882-1900), James

abandoned the international theme, and eventually fiction itself, for drama,

writing seven plays in five years. Failing in the theater he again returned to

fiction, utilizing, however, the theatrical techniques he had learned. Most

notably he demonstrated a keen facility for creating vivid "scenes" by means of

dialogue that was not simply talk between the characters but that revealed

some secret or increased suspense. Such works as The Spoils of Poynton

(1897), What Maisie Knew (1897), and The Awkward Age (1899) reveal the

effects of James' flirtation with drama.

The first two novels of the middle period are concerned with reformers. The

Bostonians, which grew partly out of the contemporary feminist movement,

focuses on two women--charming, delicate Verena Tarrant and the

strong-minded, aggressive suffragette Olive Chancellor. The contrast between

their two personalities produces a conflict, with certain sexual overtones, as

Olive struggles with her cousin Basil Ransome for Verena's allegiance. The

novel is notable for its emphasis on the effects of environment, a concern that

reflects the influence on James of such authors as Flaubert, Zola, and Daudet.

Environment, in this case London, is also central to The Princess

Casamassima. Its hero, Hyacinth Robinson, disgusted by the appalling social

conditions in London, joins a radical underground movement. When he is

selected to perform an assassination, however, he is torn between his belief in

socialism and his duty as a civilized member of society, and he finally

commits suicide. The novel, in which James presents his own views on

socialism, is considered his best "political" work.

During the middle period James became preoccupied with ghost stories ("The

Jolly Corner," "The Friends of the Friends") and with stories about tortured

childhood and adolescence (What Maisie Knew, The Awkward Age). These

concerns come together in his famous novella The Turn of the Screw (1898).

James had been fascinated with a friend's tale about "a couple of small children

in an out-of-the-way place, to whom the spirits of certain `bad' servants, dead

in the employ of the house, were believed to have appeared with the design of

`getting hold' of them." James based his story on the notion of the "bad dead"

coming back to corrupt innocent children, but added his own crucial

variations. The narrator of the story, the governess of the small brother and

sister, belives the ghosts to be appearing with increasing frequency and gaining

hold over the children. But, admittedly, she is the only one who actually sees

the ghosts. Thus, it is possible that they are figments of her own

imagination--obviously a "bad" imagination. In this interpretation, the children

are indeed being corrupted, but by their neurotic governess. Though critics

have argued endlessly over which interpretation is correct, it is impossible to

establish one or the other. The real genius of The Turn of the Screw is that

every detail is susceptible to both interpretations. The tale brilliantly

exemplifies James' theory of the horror story: to suggest rather than state the

horror, letting the reader imagine his own evil since what he imagines will be

more frightening than an explicit statement.

The middle period is also notable for two of James' small masterpieces, The

Aspern Papers (1888) and "The Beast in the Jungle" (1903), although the

second is often grouped with his last period. In the former work, a novella, the

narrator hears that the aged mistress of the dead romantic poet Jeffery Aspern,

living in seclusion in Venice with a middle-aged niece, has in her possession

some unpublished poems and letters of the poet. Determined to get his hands

on these papers, the narrator becomes a boarder in the ladies' house and

constantly intrudes himself on them. The old woman finally dies, and when the

narrator subsequently calls on her niece, Miss Tina, he is gently informed that

he can have the papers if he marries her. Upon his shocked refusal of this

offer, Miss Tina burns the papers. Her innocent assumption that in the

narrator's eyes she might be equal in value to the priceless papers is a fitting

rebuke to the "publishing scoundrel," who allowed his lust for relics of the past

to defile the privacy and humanity of two living people.

The hero of "The Beast in the Jungle" is a refined, egotistic gentleman, John

Marcher, who feels that an extraordinary fate will overtake him. He confides

his belief to a close friend, May Bartram, and then waits for "the hidden beast

to spring." It is only upon his friend's death that Marcher realizes the truth of

his fate: he is the man to "whom nothing was to have happened"; his obsession

had blinded him to May Bartram's love and thus to his one chance for a rich

and meaningful life.

Both these tales illustrate a theme dominant in James: the immorality of that

excessive dedication to ideas or ideals--literary, artistic, or metaphysical--that

violates human considerations.

Last Period. In his third and major phase (1900-1904) James returned to the

international theme to write his three greatest novels, The Wings of the Dove,

The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, all of which are characterized by a

masterful use of symbolism and a radical complexity both of style and of

moral vision.

The Wings of the Dove concerns a young American heiress, Milly Theale,

who is at once possessed of a great capacity for life and doomed by a fatal

illness. A famous physician in England tells her that with sufficient will she

may have a chance to survive. He suggests that falling in love may save her.

She does fall in love, with an impoverished young journalist named Merton

Densher, who, unknown to Milly, is in love with her friend Kate Croy, a

brilliant, beautiful, but penniless English girl. Kate loves Merton but, also

desiring wealth, conceives a plot: Merton will marry Milly and, when she dies,

inherit her fortune. Then Kate and he will marry and live in great style on the

inheritance. Milly discovers the plot and the discovery kills her. James says,

however, that everything that happened to Milly constituted "what she should

have known"; she should not have trusted appearances. The irony is that she

would have died sooner had she not trusted appearances--she was doomed

either way. In the end, she leaves Merton her fortune anyway. This act, in its

rather scalding generosity, causes Merton to loathe what he has done and to

fall in love with Milly's "memory," turning against Kate when she wishes him

to keep the money. Thus all three characters are ravaged. The novel is a

profound study of interlocking human guilt and woe.

The Ambassadors also deals with a trusting, innocent American who is

deceived. The hero, Lambert Strether, a gentle middle-aged widower, is sent as

an "ambassador" to Paris from Woollett, Mass., to fetch back to his family

young Chad Newsome, whose lengthy stay abroad is interpreted by the family

to mean that he is in the clutches of an immoral woman. Initially, Strether too

assumes that the female in question is surely "not even an apology for a decent

woman," and is eager to free Chad from her spell. When he arrives in Paris

Strether is completely overwhelmed by the beauty of the city and the richness

of life there. On meeting the objects of his mission, he sees that Paris has

changed Chad from a mediocre bore to a brilliant man of the world and that the

woman, Madame de Vionnet, is charming, warm, and radiant; nothing about her

seems "immoral." Strether concludes that the attachment between the two is

"virtuous," that is, not sexual. All of his European acquaintances encourage him

in this interpretation.

A second shift in Strether's attitude comes when he discovers that the relation

is sexual, that Chad has been only superficially transformed and is, in fact,

considering leaving Madame de Vionnet and returning to Woollett, and that he,

Strether, has been deceived by everyone. But this time something has

happened to Strether's conception of virtue--he no longer equates it with

chastity. His final stance is that even though the affair is adulterous, Chad

would be a "criminal of the deepest dye" to abandon a woman who has

sacrificed so much for him and who loves him so deeply.

Upon these two shifts in Strether's attitude hangs a tale, half comic, half tragic,

of the awakening of a complex and somewhat befuddled psyche to the beauty

and the possibilities of life. However, Strether does not act upon his new

awareness. He rejects an offer of marriage from his understanding American

friend Maria Gostrey, and also the possibility of a warm relationship with

Madame de Vionnet, and returns to the United States, exiled spiritually from

both Europe and his homeland. His reason for this renunciation is "not, out of

the whole affair, to have got anything for myself." For Strether his perceptions

are enough.

The Ambassadors dramatically exemplifies the effectiveness of James'

narrative technique. The novel is presented through the hero's consciousness;

its events are his perceptions; its theme is the lasting value of the insights

gained from these perceptions. The following quotation illustrates not only

the quality of Strether's mind, which apprehends a rural scene in terms of art

and literature, but also James' indirect method of presenting the workings of

that mind:

He had taken the train, a few days after this, from a station--as well

as to a station--selected almost at random; such days, whatever

should happen, were numbered, and he had gone forth under the

impulse--artless enough, no doubt--to give the whole of one of

them to that French ruralism, with its cool special green, into

which he had hitherto looked only through the little oblong

window of the picture frame. It had been as yet, for the most part,

but a land of fancy for him--the background of fiction, the medium

of art, the nursery of letters; practically as distant as Greece, but

practically also as consecrated.

The style of this section, typical of James, with sentences turning back upon

and qualifying themselves with dashes and clauses as further feelings and ideas

suggest themselves, has been criticized as fussy and convoluted. However,

James' concern was to reflect processes of thought and sensibility whose

complexity and progression could, he felt, only be captured by a parallel

complexity in syntax and diction.

The Golden Bowl centers around another of James' "American princesses,"

Maggie Verver, who lives in London with her millionaire father, Adam.

Intensely devoted to one another, the two lead a comfortable, self-indulgent

life, spent mostly in acquiring pieces of art. In time Maggie marries Prince

Amerigo, an impoverished young Italian nobleman, and later decides that her

father should have a wife. She arranges a marriage between him and her old

school friend Charlotte Stant, unaware that Charlotte and prince Amerigo were

once lovers. Even after their marriage, however, Maggie's and Adam's

relationship to each other is all-absorbing. They treat their respective spouses

as if they were beautiful art objects which, once collected, need only

occasionally be admired. Thus deprived of their humanity, Charlotte and the

prince resume their affair. Maggie eventually perceives the true nature of the

relationship between her husband and her step-mother. The discovery forces

her to acknowledge Prince Amerigo's value, and she acts to hold him. The

novel ends with Charlotte's and Adam's return to the United States. Separated

from her father, Maggie can now expend her great capacity for love on her

husband.

Although Maggie Verver--unlike Isabel Archer, Strether, or Milly

Theale--after apprehending the truth of her situation moves positively to

embrace life, the ending of the novel is not totally happy. The fate of Adam

and the formidable Charlotte in the United States is uncertain, and there are

vague doubts as to whether Maggie and her prince will be able to survive the

suffocating intimacy of interminable years together.

The Golden Bowl is often considered James' most difficult work. The plot

itself is complicated since the characters are usually acting upon knowledge

they are attempting to conceal from each other. Also, perhaps because James

dictated the novel, its style is especially oblique and convoluted. In spite of its

difficulty, however, The Golden Bowl is a great moral study of suffering,

masterfully depicting the anguish that accompanies all important human

relationships.

James' last great novels have had a mixed critical response. Some readers have

condemned them for their lack of "vitality" or direct action, for their moral

ambiguity, and for their elaborate and involuted style. Others, however, have

praised them for their intricate structure, their profound and sometimes

harrowing vision of life, their richness of texture and metaphor, and their

depth of imagination.

Critical Writings. James' treatment of novelists in such works as French

Poets and Novelists (1878) and Notes on Novelists (1914) was acutely

perceptive. His studies of George Sand, George Eliot, and Balzac, and the

essays on Turgenev, Trollope, Daudet, Maupassant, Loti, and D'Annunzio are

particularly worthy of note. Hawthorne (1879) has been said to be more

valuable as a reflection of James than of its subject, yet it accurately states

Hawthorne's excellences and limitations as a novelist. James' prefaces to the

"New York" edition of his works comprise one of the outstanding examples of

a creative artist's commentary on his own performance and are regarded as

essential to a truly comprehensive understanding of the art of fiction.

Further Reading.In addition to the current editions of James' individual works,

there are several compilations of his writings, including The Art of the Novel:

Critical Prefaces by Henry James (New York, Scribner's, 1935) edited by

Richard P. Blackmur and The Portable Henry James (New York, Viking,

1951). Important critical and biographical works are: Henry James: The

Major Phase (New York, Oxford, 1944) by F. O. Mathiessen; Joseph Warren

Beach's The Method of Henry James (rev. ed., Philadelphia, Saifer, 1955);

Henry James: A Reader's Guide(Ithaca, Cornell U.P., 1966) by S. Gorley

Putt; Leon Edel's indispensable The Life of Henry James (5 vols.,

Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1953-1972, also published in a single, abridged

edition in 1985); Adeline R. Tintner's The Book World of Henry James and

The Pop World of Henry James (Ann Arbor, UMI Research Pr., 1987 and

1988); Alfred Habeggar's Henry James and the “Woman Thing” (New York,

Cambridge U.P., 1989); and Fred Kaplan's biography Henry James(New York,

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