In a recent volume of essays, Fiction and the Figures of Life, William Gass suggests a difficulty for any biographer of Henry James. It is the possibility that the real psychic dramas in a life so exclusively literary may have lain, not in the events and emotions usually considered as the core of any writer’s story, but in his struggle with words. What if James’s mysterious accident on the fence in the fire in Newport, or the death of Minnie Temple, or the suicide of Constance Fenimore Wool-son, or even the homoerotic friendship with the young Norwegian sculptor were minor episodes compared with his failure to write good plays or with the tortured development of his late style? Might Gass’s idea not be the key to a different emphasis in the whole art of literary biography?

Did James perhaps have a sense of this himself? Did he realize that his heart, like his mind, was more dedicated to words than to people? This could explain his belief that a writer should not marry, a theory easily rebutted by the lives of countless authors who managed both to write and to marry well. It might also explain why he embraced his friends, in Gass’s phrase, as though he were conferring degrees, why he made near parodies of his grave professions of affection, and why his correspondence is so larded with what he himself called “the mere twaddle of graciousness.” He could have been making up for what he