Henry James
From Philosopedia
Henry James (15 April 1843 - 28 February 1916)
James, son of Henry James Sr., was born in New York City. His father, Henry James Sr., was a Swedenborgian philosopher and theologian, a man of letters, a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thomas Carlyle. One of twelve children, he lost a leg to amputation when burned trying to stomp out a fire in a barn. He and his wife, Mary Robertson Walsh, had three children, William, Henry, and Alice, all of whom became writers.
Henry Jr., with his brother William, received a cosmopolitan, eclectic education that involved their father's wanting them to be citizens of the world, not forming definite habits of living or of intellect until prepared to make wise choices when they were old enough to do so.
As a result, Henry was privately educated by tutors until 1855. When the family went to Europe for a three-year stay, he switched from school to school. In 1858 and from 1860 to 1862, he lived in Newport. In 1862 he entered Harvard Law School and after 1866, although he had lived in various places in Europe, he made Cambridge, Massachusetts, his home. In 1865 he wrote literary reviews and short stories.
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Novels
His work as a novelist has been described in college classes as falling into three periods:
- the impact of American life on the older European civilization; e.g.,
- Roderick Hudson (1875); Portrait of a Lady (1881); The Bostonians (1886)
- English subjects; e.g.,
- The Magic Muse (1890); What Maisie Knew (897); Te Awkward Age (1899)
- Anglo-American Attitudes
- The Wings of a Dove 1902); The Ambassadors (1903
James is described as being the acknowledged master of the psychological novel, one who was a major influence on 20th century writers.
James's Passion
In 2008, Sheldon M. Novick's Henry James: The Mature Master followed his Henry James: The Young Master (1996). The earlier book described James as a man of sublimated desires, a repressed artist who wrote about life rather than erotically lived it. He suggested that when young he had loved jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes.
The mature James, Novick found despite having no solid evidence had "jacked off" the future justice. Slate in an online article contains a letter from Novick to Leon Edel in which he argues about James's initiation première" in Cambridge and in Ashburton Place during "the 'epoch-making weeks' of the spring of 1865!"
The Complete Letters of Henry James
In 2007, the University of Nebraska Press published the first two volumes of a projected 140-plus set of James's complete letters. They have been edited by Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias, with an introduction by Alfred Habegger.
Edmund V. White in The New York Review of Books (11 October 2007), reviewed the first two volumes, stating that the the complete collection of letters will number over 10,000, exceeding Leon Edel's 4-volumes of 1,084 letters published between 1974 and 1984.
James is put off by Pope Pius IX, saying in a letter the Pope seems effeminate and "I'm sure I saw one of the pontifical petticoats hanging out to dry."
- When you have seen that flaccid old woman waving his ridiculous fingers over the prostrate multitude & have duly felt the picturesqueness of the scene - & then turn away sickened by its absolute obscenity - you may climb the steps of the Capitol & contemplate the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius.
Personal
As more of the letters are published, James's views on religion and philosophy will become clearer as well as information about his alleged homosexuality - John R. Bradley's Henry James and Homo-Erotic Desire (1998) suggests that
- James himself is presented sexually as having been a rather self-confident individual who was cautiously attracted to, and frequently fell in love with, younger men and boys, with whom (particularly during his later years) he may well on occasion actually have made love. The social gay liberation movements of the Victorian period distressed him as well as interested him, not because he wished to deny his sexuality, but because he understandably did not wish to be compartmentalised. This would not in itself be worth mentioning if Jameseans (for reasons best known to themselves) had tried to cover up James's homosexuality, or explain it away, over the years.
(Edmund White, in "Portrait of a Sissy" in The New York Review of Books (6 March 2008), writes about James and Howard Sturgis, "a beloved, amiable sissy who made no effort to hide his embroidery frame and the basket of silk thread he kept beside him at all times." White's 2008 introduction to Belchamber by Sturgis contains details of their friendship. For more information about his philosophic outlook, see the entry for his brother, William James).
