Sheldon M. Novick - Henry James: The Young Master

Sheldon M. Novick

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"I read this book with fascination. It has some of the ingredients of a nineteenth-century novel and is irresistibly readable. Beneath the leisurely and informal style there is rigorous scholarship that inspires confidence. Sheldon Novick is not a debunker but a revisionist who skilfully interweaves the writing with the life. He is not afraid to cross swords with the legendary Leon Edel in his attempt to demythologize Henry James and introduce him to a new generation of readers."

Michael Holroyd

It was more than forty years ago that Leon Edel began to publish what at the time and for decades later was accepted as the definitive portrait of Henry James. In the five-volume work, however, James emerged as a somewhat bloodless man of little passion and no courage.

But now Sheldon Novick, with his Henry James: The Young Master, has succeeded in bringing James fully to life by showing us a man with boldness of spirit and a profound capacity for affection.

We share James's childhood in New York in the mid-nineteenth century, suffer with him through illnesses, sexual encounters, early loves; journey with him to London,Paris, and Rome as he tries to find both professional success and personal fulfilment. And as the world opens to him as an internationally famous writer, we share the experience of writing a series of celebrated novels,culminating with Washington Square (on which the play The Heiress is based) and the masterpiece The Portrait of a Lady.

This landmark life follows the author's exceptional biography of Justice

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Honorable Justice: The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Collected Works of Justice Holmes(edited by Sheldon M. Novick)

HENRY JAMES

For Carolyn

What he wanted himself was ... the very tick of the old stopped clocks. He wanted the hour of the day at which this and that had happened and the temperature and the weather and the sound, and yet more the stillness, from the street, and the exact look-out, with the corresponding look-in, through the window and the slant on the walls of the light of afternoons that had been. He wanted the unimaginable accidents, the little notes of truth for which the com-mon lens of history, however the scowling muse might bury her nose, was not sufficiently fine. He wanted evidence of a sort for which there had never been documents enough, or for which documents mainly, however multiplied,would never be enough.

Henry James The Sense of the Past

No one sees a life as a whole except the person who lives it. The story; when there is one, lives in memory alone. The biographer therefore must make a choiceto penetrate that private reality and write a book that gives some sense of the life as it was lived; or to write some other sort of book, a commentary from the outside.

To gain a true sense of a life as it was lived is not always possible. The data may have been lost, the world in which the life was lived may have vanished beyond recall. But when the critical details of ordinary life can be reconstructed, there is a sensibility, almost a separate sense, that one may use to understand the subjective existence of another person. We use this sensibility to understand almost without speech people we care for, and so writing a life is a little like falling in love. One need not like or even admire the subject of a life, but one must be able to use this particular sensibility.

In the case of Henry James, the materials for such a life are ample,thanks in large part to the work of devoted scholars. It is true that he did his best to conceal his private affairs from the public; he hated newspaper photographs. But like many private persons, James left clues to his inner life, hoping to be understood. In his last years he prepared a revised edition of his novels and stories, with prefaces explaining their genesis; he wrote memoirs of his father and brother, and a scattering of autobiographical essays and stories; all of this taken together amounts to a huge self-portrait of Henry James as an artist. He felt it was his duty to the young, to his inheritors, to record his own development, and inthis great work of his old age he embedded the best of his fiction in the matrix of his own story, revising his fiction into a single tale, the story of its own telling. He could not resist including in these last works recollections even of his first sexual encounters. But to read the books of his old age in this way one needs a fund of sympathy, and must immerse oneself in the language and customs of Jamess private world. The style of his last work requires patience and attention, more ever, and many of his memories are shrouded in private references and multilingual puns. He built up portraits of people and events by a pointillist technique,so that a great deal of description must be absorbed together, without direct statements of fact.

When the necessary trouble has been taken, however, the auto-biographical works provide a unique self-portrait of an acutely self-aware artist, doing his painstaking best to explain himself, the processes of his art, and the manner in which his work evolved itself from his life. In preparation for writing the book that follows, I have traced the private references, and have compressed his vast impressionist self-portrait into a thinner and more conventional sketch. Jamess published and unpublished writings were my primary mate-rials, but I have tried also to re-create the context that gave them meaning. I have taken a standpoint a little outside and above Jamess,but as far as possible I have used Jamess own sensibility as a lamp to illumine the subject matter, in the way that he himself used the sensibility of a fictional character to light the scenes of his novels.

The historical Henry James is, of course, a large, stubborn, and unwieldy tool. Trying to use him as a camera or a paintbrush is like the royal game of croquet in Through the Looking Glass, in which flamingos were used as mallets. He wrote some of the greatest stories and novels in the English language, and originated a whole new school of critical theory. He served as the gatekeeper to Europe for two generations of Americans, was mentor to numberless writers and painters and scientists, and labored artfully to help build an English-speaking alliance in Europe. But above all, he was a master of personal relation,of love and friendship. He devoted all his artistry, experience, and force to shaping the sensibility of his readersyou and me, dear reader. With a powerful but most benevolent intention, he rests his dove-like hand upon your shoulder; he grasps you by the nape of the neck; and soon you are gazing through his eyes, recalling his memories as if they were your own.