The first volume of Sheldon M. Novick’s biography takes Henry James’s career up to the publication of The Portrait of a Lady in 1881, when he was thirty-eight. By then he had behind him not only The Portrait, the first of his novels of which one can say that it exhibits genius as distinct from high accomplishment, but also Roderick Hudson, The American, The Europeans, Washington Square, and a large number of tales best exemplified by “Daisy Miller.” Physically nomadic but intellectually consistent, James had staked out his abiding theme in a magazine article of 1878:  

It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of comparing one race with another, and weighing in opposed groups the manners and customs of neighboring countries; but it is certain that as we move about the world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is especially the case if we happen to be infected with the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite—that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none.

James’s quest for a way of life which should unite the virtues of the old and new worlds was both lifelong and lonely. For him, as for Man in Henry Vaughan’s poem of that title, “God ordered motion, but ordained no rest.” Mr. Novick’s observation that, “denied the possibility of completion in his own life, he lived for others, and, imaginatively, lived through them” is more damaging than he seems to realize, but it explains the eventual atrophy of James’s art, the tedium and lifelessness of his so-much-vaunted last phase. It may explain, too, his destructive tinkering with his early works, in which, having run out of material, he seems to have tried to exact revenge on his younger, more vital self by ruining what he had written.

James’s childhood and adolescence were passed in constant peregrinations: by his thirteenth year he had known New York, London, Paris, Geneva, and Boulogne. The reason was his father’s inability to settle. (“I am not a settler,” says Felix Young in The Europeans, “I am a European.”) Henry James, Sr., does not emerge very credibly from Mr. Novick’s account. His philosophy, an idiosyncratic blend of Swedenborg and Fourier, which he propagated tirelessly on the lecture platform, and in magazine articles and books, reduced religion to a branch of science, banished the numinous, scorned creeds and liturgies, and fixed its eyes on the transcendental unity of all being. He poured money into utopian communities of the kind that Hawthorne had satirized in The Blithedale Romance. Indeed, Bronson Alcott, who, like Hawthorne, had lived for a time on Brook Farm, mocked the elder James’s air “of a man with Kingdom-come in his brain,” better avoided “on pain of being gobbled down.” Mr. Novick has a terrifying description of him in later life, “intensely, dangerously charming,” but with “something bleak and bottomless behind his eyes, something like a yearning for the embrace of white emptiness,” almost like D. H. Lawrence’s Gerald Crich. His constant changes of scene and direction deprived his son of a coherent education (there was a bewildering succession of schools and private tutors) or the chance to form secure friendships.

Young Henry had a wide circle of acquaintance, but only a few intimates, the closest of whom, Minny Temple, died in 1870— only to die again, in an artistically unsatisfactory manner in The Wings of the Dove. James was attracted to melodramatic deaths as a fictional device, but his deaths are not followed by resurrections and there is no point in trying to make his novels into religious allegories; his father’s “religion,” which called itself Christianity but rejected doctrine, left him spiritually bereft. He was an acquiescent son: his father prohibited him from enlisting in the army when the Civil War broke out, but he also forbade him to go to university. Invited to Oxford in 1877, he wistfully noted its “air of liberty to care for the things of the mind assured and secured by machinery which is in itself a satisfaction to sense.” This he had been denied; but he was no Jude the Obscure, hanging around the college entrances in a sulk. He learned early on that his university, indeed his whole life, should be constructed inside his own head—a decision which both saved and limited him.

The temptation to make art into a religion must have been strong, and although James’s essays on Flaubert, for instance, show us how far he was from sterile aestheticism, his devotion to his labors had more than a tinge of the sacerdotal. As Quentin Anderson argued years ago in The American Henry James (Rutgers University Press, 1957), the father’s Swedenborgian system and symbolism counted for a great deal in the son’s fiction, in which James can be seen wrestling with the problem of contriving an equilibrium between novel and romance, realism and symbolism--contriving, sometimes, too overtly, but also sometimes allowing the symbols to float in solution in the narrative more successfully than his mentor Hawthorne.

In the works up to and including The Portrait, James draws on his sojourns in America and Europe to probe the question of what constitutes “civilization.” That exploration is sustained, subtle, and dialectical, and resists glib summary. England, Italy, and France all provided formative experiences. Mr. Novick is unwearying (although his reader may not be) in tracing the social round James undertook. What, however, of the inner life? Here reservations intrude. Mr. Novick has many harsh and justified things to say of Leon Edel, whose irresponsible Freudian fantasies go near to vitiating his mammoth biography: but he is not free from fantasy, or irresponsibility, himself. A certain amount of press attention has been attracted by his claim that James was sexually initiated by Oliver Wendell Holmes (the subject of Mr. Novick’s previous biography) in the spring of 1865. This matter occupies two and a half of five hundred pages of text, and the case remains unproven. Mr. Novick quotes from a notebook entry of 1905 recalling James’s “initiation première” forty years earlier in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ashburton Place, Boston, where the James family lived. The passage suggests an emotional, not necessarily physical, involvement, an overwhelming experience of love for an unnamed other party. The whole entry, which can be found in F. O. Mathiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock’s edition of The Notebooks of Henry James (University of Chicago Press, 1947), does mention Holmes but in the context of his absence in England. All we can safely infer is that James was romantically attracted to someone and that that someone may have been Holmes; it is not clear that the feelings were reciprocated, still less that there was any sexual contact. Indeed, Mr. Novick notes that Holmes, then drinking heavily, seems to have attached little importance to his meetings with James at that time. He also cites a passage from The Wings of the Dove, in which Merton (whom he calls Morton) Densher recalls the first time he and Kate Croy became lovers, seeking to see in this an autobiographical reference by James.

Such a melange of fact and fiction is found elsewhere in Mr. Novick’s book. He is not free from basic errors; in summarizing the plot of “Daisy Miller” he conflates the characters of Eugenio and Giovanelli. He shows that Leon Edel transferred the action of the story “Poor Richard” to James’s life, where it never occurred, but he himself offers a close paraphrase of a passage in “The Pupil” as a factual account of a conversation James is said to have had, in boyhood, with one of his tutors. Novick implies that James was the object of an attempted seduction by another tutor, adducing in support the “fact” that “in The Turn of the Screw and ‘The Pupil,’ young boys die at the moment of sexual awareness, precipitated by tutors”—as though James had not engineered a triumph of obliquity to prevent us being able to say anything so definite! Again, he is confident that, in Roderick Hudson, Roderick, and not Mary Garland, is the real object of Rowland Mallet’s passion. Yet it will not do to say that the novel is “stronger if Mary Garland is simply ignored.” Admittedly, Mary is not a strongly drawn character compared to the two men. But we cannot “simply” ignore what the author chose to include in order to deter us from just such simplification. Mr. Novick’s most startling psychological insight comes in a boldly metaphorical moment in his chapter on The Portrait of a Lady, where he tells us, “Costumed as Madame Merle, James performed his greatest impersonation.” To conceive of Henry James as a drag artist is to exhibit a peculiarly infelicitous form of originality.

Later in his book, Mr. Novick refers to James’s relationship with Paul Zhukovsky, the Russian painter whom he met in Paris in 1875. Again the nature of the relationship is sketchy. James described Zhukovsky as “a most attachaut human creature, but a lightweight and a perfect failure”—a disquietingly embittered comment. There is an anecdote of this period, told by the intermittently reliable Edmund Gosse, who claimed to have it from James himself, of James, in tears, keeping vigil on a city pavement, watching a particular lamplit window in the house opposite for the glimpse of a face which never came. Mr. Novick speculates, albeit with justified caution, that this is a memory of Zhukovsky and Paris. It recalls the seventh section of Tennyson’s In Memoriam (“Dark house, by which once more I stand”); which should remind us that intense male friendships in the nineteenth century, not to mention the twentieth, may elude our neat sexual categories. Perhaps James provided the best comment on these matters in a letter of 1880 to Grace Norton:

If I were to marry, I would be guilty in my own eyes of an inconsistency… . I am not moved to that way, because I think my opinion of life on the whole good enough. I am attached to it, I am used to it—it doesn’t in any way incapacitate or paralyze me (on the contrary), and it doesn’t involve any particular injustice to anyone, least of all to myself.

This says as much, and as little, as he wished us to know, biographically. We may be prompted by Mr. Novick’s reminder that Paul Zhukovsky was the model for Gilbert Osmond to reread chapter 42 of The Portrait of a Lady, which James himself judged “obviously the best thing in the book,” and follow Isabel Archer’s dawning realization of the sham that is her marriage:

Suffering, for Isabel, was an active condition; it was not a chill, a stupor, a despair; it was a passion of thought, of speculation, of response to every pressure.

This is what makes hers such a rare and fine nature; it is also what makes her a tragic figure. The ability to make us see her in this way is what makes her creator, in turn, so rare and fine—and tragic. Perhaps one of the most impressive things about James is that, in his great moments (and this chapter is only one, in a novel full of them) he achieved an “impersonal” scrutiny of his own experiences in the full T. S. Eliot sense of that word: a sense, however, which makes simple biographical deduction perilously presumptuous.

Of course, the problem for the biographer is that, by the time James came to dictate his memoirs he could say nothing unambiguously—not even that the sun was shining, let alone that he had been in love with younger men. His homosexual leanings are not in question, but where and why these began, how he dealt with them in his life, above all how he transmuted them in his art, are more elusive matters than Mr. Novick appears to think. Mr. Novick might say that James was debarred by propriety from treating homosexuality openly in his fiction, and that with hindsight we can see what the novels are “really” about. But this pinpoints a weakness in the psychological approach to biography and criticism: the work is not to be trusted (the opposite of Lawrence’s “Never trust the teller, trust the tale”), so the more explicit a meaning appears to be, the more likely it is to be misleading.

In the last resort, if justification is needed of a flat contradiction between the implications of the narrative and the preferred interpretation, the psycho-critic can always claim that the author was “in denial,” sublimating the truth so deeply that it was hidden even from himself. The poems of Browning, Mr. Novick avers, “opened to Henry an understanding of what the heterosexual relation could be.” A man who has to learn about sex by reading Browning is clearly in a bad way. I should like to believe James was less desperate than that.

Notes
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Henry James: The Young Master, by Sheldon M. Novick; Random House, 550 pages, $35. Go back to the text.

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