by Paul Fisher
Little, Brown, 704pp, £16.99
Review by LESLEY McDOWELL SO MANY QUESTIONS, SO FEW answers: the life of Henry James, a writer who specialised in ambiguity both personally and professionally, has puzzled biogra
phers and critics for decades. Was he gay or just shy of sex? Did his close female friend Constance Fenimore Woolson kill herself because he'd rejected her love or mocked her writing, or was it nothing to do with him?
In choosing as his subject the entire James family, not just its most famous son, or the elder, prestigious psychologist brother, William, Paul Fisher has shifted the focus from these age-old questions to posit some new ones, and it's to his credit that in doing so he manages to resist falling foul of the most Freudian of family romances.
This monumental, but never prurient, portrait brings to the fore the presence and influence of the James parents, Henry senior and his wife, Mary. It's not hard to see where novelist son Henry got his ambitions from: Henry senior, the son of an extremely wealthy industrialist who made over a million dollars from land speculation at the end of the 18th century, could afford the life of a literary gentleman. Philosophic, passionate, alcoholic: all the ingredients for the stereotypical life of a writer were there, but even though he published, lectured and made friends with the likes of essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, true fame as a writer eluded him.
Like many disappointed individuals, Henry senior seems to have focused his hopes on his children, specifically his two eldest sons: William and Henry junior, known as Harry. Mary, Fisher argues, has usually been written out of the James story, dismissed for her lack of intellectualism, her acquiescence to her husband's crazier schemes (he took his family to Europe more than once in search of what he called a 'sensuous education', although without ever truly defining what he meant by that). But she was a strong presence, a much-needed balance for her five children, all struggling to impress their father.
Younger sons Wilkie and Bob were the ones who went to fight during the Civil War and gave the family glory, in spite of their father's tendency to dismiss them; only daughter Alice suffered repeatedly from being ignored or worse, told that a woman could never hope to write a decent book or become a real intellectual. Henry Senior was hardly an ogre but he was undoubtedly a difficult father and he's possibly the reason that the James children had quite dysfunctional relationships with each other, never mind with the outside world.
Having finally settled in Boston after unsatisfying trips to Europe, the James parents seem to have accepted that their children would go their own ways eventually, but both William and Harry were late developers, William living at home until he married at the age of 30. William's relationship with his sister, who of course lived at home too, was often flirtatious and even erotic, Fisher argues, and although he pulls back from accusing William of incestuous feelings towards his sister, he does blame him for toying with her in inappropriate and confusing ways. No wonder, he says, that when William did finally marry – a woman named Alice, strangely enough – his sister had a nervous breakdown and couldn't attend the wedding.
This focus on other members of the family inevitably means that much of what Fisher has to tell us about Harry, the novelist, is familiar to those who know about his life, and he doesn't attempt to shed any new light on those conundrums previously suggested, except to come down quite firmly on the side of Henry's publicly undeclared, but certainly felt, homosexuality (the same side that Colm Toibin came down on in his novel, The Master, but which David Lodge, in his Author, Author, disputed). But this scarcely matters – what counts here is the family atmosphere that gave rise to one of the greatest novelists of the 19th and early-20th centuries.
And that family atmosphere is full of the kind of repression, ambiguity and stifling love that permeates James's novels. Fisher also gives space to Aunt Kate, Mary's sister who, after abandoning her husband of only a few weeks, spent the rest of her life with Mary and Henry senior, helping to raise their children; to Mary Temple, or Minny, the young cousin both Harry and William were fascinated by, and who died in her twenties from TB; to Alice Gibbens, William's often long-suffering wife and mother of his five children, whom he would abandon for months each time she gave birth. That these more marginal figures are all women is no surprise in a society that rarely gave women a public voice. But their presence in a family was a different matter.
This biography manages to be simultaneously large and small, and in the best ways. It is indeed an "intimate" portrait, but at 600 pages , it's also a mammoth read, an all-encompassing work. It's to Fisher's great credit that he draws us into the lives of those closely bickering, often sentimental, James siblings and their parents, and really makes us feel as though we were there, in those cramped and heavily draped drawing rooms, with them.
The full article contains 899 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
