4. The Father

HENRY SENIOR WAS a fond father, but he could be a puzzling and even an appalling one. Harry recalled that “he used to spoil our Christmasses so faithfully for us, by stealing in with us, when Mother was out, to the forbidden closet and giving us a peep the week or so before.” One acquaintance called him Absolute James; he once referred to himself as Saint James the Less. In his own eyes he may have been a minor apostle, but he never doubted that he was an apostle. His bottomless princely indulgences extended to his whole flock. Ice cream was his universal cure. In 1860, on the trip to Bonn that was to be so short, the father said—and William, who plainly adored the parent he was learning to oppose, wrote down, perhaps partly for its metrical lilt—“My children shall live upon ices in Bonn, whenever they are in ill health.”¹

He worked at his writing table at home in full view of the family, turning out one long book after another, each a theological tirade in a private, sealed language interspersed with brilliant flashes of insight and imagery. Harry later looked back on the dreadful—and moving—futility of his father’s intellectual labors, on “the pathetic tragic ineffectualness of poor father’s lifelong effort, and the silence and oblivion that seems to have swallowed it up.”² William’s comment at the time was to draw, one night, a frontispiece for his father’s book; it showed a man beating a dead horse.

The elder Henry James’s life had been cut in two by a boyhood accident in Albany when he was thirteen. He and his friends were accustomed to playing with hot-air balloons, which were, like modern ones, open at the bottom. Beneath the open hole, on a platform that hung by strings from the balloon canopy, sat a ball of tow or rough twine, saturated with turpentine and set afire. The heat from the burning tow would cause the balloon to rise. Sometimes the balloon caught fire, the ropes holding the platform would burn through, and the flaming ball of tow would fall to earth, where the boys would kick it around. One day when young Henry James “had a sprinkling of this [turpentine] on his pantaloons, one of those balls went through the open window of Mrs. Gilchrist’s stable. [James,] thinking only of conflagration, rushed to the hayloft and stomped out the flame, but burned his leg.”³

The burned leg did not heal, and a doctor amputated it. Anesthesia had not yet been invented. What remained of the leg refused to heal; the doctor performed a second amputation. James carried the scars, inner as well as outer, of this accident all his life. In 1858, when he was forty-seven, he wrote an essay attacking surgery and those who maintain that “surgery is good... it often saves lives.” His answer was “Doubtless; but at the expense of making the patient limp horribly all his days. It is the devil’s method of dealing with disease—the method of the knife and cautery, the method of force... For my individual part, I would vastly rather die at once.”⁴

It may have been this boyhood episode, as much as anything else, that gave edge and heat and immediacy to the elder James’s stinging and lifelong sense of evil. It forms the subject of some of his most vivid writing, and his sense of the reality of evil was communicated in one way or another to all of his children. “Every man who has reached even his intellectual teens,” he wrote in 1863, “begins to suspect this; begins to suspect that life is no farce; that it is not genteel comedy even; that it flowers and fructifies on the contrary out of the profoundest tragic depths, the depths of the essential dearth in which its subject’s roots are plunged... The natural inheritance of everyone who is capable of spiritual life is an unsubdued forest where the wolf howls and every obscene bird of night chatters.” Evil was for him a daily and practical matter. The one great evil in the universe was, he thought, “the principle of selfhood, the principle of independence in man.” He once told his youngest son, Bob, that “to seek our own private pleasure, this precisely is our conception of the devil.”⁵

As a boy and as a young man, Henry had rebelled wildly against his father, Old Billy. At the age of ten, well before the accident, he was drinking gin or brandy every morning on the way to school. He did wretchedly at Union College, from which he eventually dropped out. His drinking got worse. He rejected everything his father stood for, except money. Even after Old Billy’s death, young Henry kept up his revolt, abandoning his studies altogether, leaving Albany and falling in with professional gamblers, before finally coming to his senses and turning a corner in 1835.

Henry Senior’s adult convictions were—are—strong, idiosyncratic, and not easily located in the history of thought. His originality is at least partly owing to the strange and lonely road by which he had come. He started out attending the First Presbyterian Church in Albany, the family church. At the age of eight he entered Albany Academy, where he was a student for five years and where he first came in contact with Joseph Henry, the self-educated physicist, co-discoverer with Michael Faraday of electrical induction, and later the first director of the Smithsonian Institution. After his college years, broken only by a short stint of working in Boston for the Christian Examiner, the leading Unitarian journal of the time, Henry hit bottom, experienced a turnaround, and appealed to his older brother William for help. “I want drilling and disciplining—I want advice and support in study,” he wrote to his brother.

William was a moderate, literary Presbyterian minister in Rochester, New York, whose eager enemies brought Charles Grandison Finney, the great revivalist, to town as a rebuke to the old-fashioned, sedate, intellectual William. Henry became active in the Presbyterian church in Albany in 1835, at age twenty-four, then went almost immediately as a student to Princeton Theological Seminary, a Presbyterian school then in the midst of intense factional debate. The so-called New School faction pulled out of Princeton and started Union Theological Seminary in New York City in 1836, the year after Henry James went to Princeton. Princeton had strong antitranscendental Calvinists such as James W. Alexander, and moderate “school of conciliation” theologians such as Charles Hodge. It was Hodge who said of Princeton, “I am not afraid to say that a new idea never originated in this seminary.”

Dissatisfied with Princeton, and with Hodge in particular, Henry turned next to the tiny sect of Sandemanians, who believed, with the Englishman Robert Sandeman (1718–1771), that there was no basis in Scripture for pastoral authority. The radically anticlerical Sandemanians were Calvinists, and Henry found a temporary home with a group of these primitive Christians in New York City. The group was headed by a layman, James Buchanan, who called on everyone “to come out from every system of worship in which the authority of man in any manner or way, has place.”⁶

In 1838 Henry went to England and met Michael Faraday, the self-made scientist who was also the world’s most eminent practicing Sandemanian. Returning to New York, Henry fell in love with Mary Walsh and married her in 1840, not in a church, to be sure, but in a civil ceremony. By then Henry had shifted his spiritual allegiance from the Sandemanians to John Walker of Ireland and a small sect called Separatists. Walker was an admirer of Jonathan Edwards, and one can see a strong thread of Calvinism in Henry’s odyssey. It is perhaps most helpfully thought of as personal Calvinism, meaning no clergy, no churches, no liturgy, just the always inadequate individual living in a meaningless and vicious chaos called Nature. That was one side; an unknowable God was on the other side.⁷

Sometime around 1842, James met and came under the influence of William Henry Channing, nephew of the famous Boston Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing. William Henry was then a Christian socialist, and has been described as “a self-tormented creature, earnest, hypersensitive, torn by doubts, a ‘concave man’”—Thoreau’s phrase—who was “convinced, as a friend remarked, that ‘Christ did not understand his own religion.’”⁸ Channing and Emerson were together responsible for turning Henry James Sr. from sectarian theology to philosophical theology, from church reform to social reform, and from salvationism to utopianism. In 1843 Henry Senior wrote his old teacher Joseph Henry, pressing the idea that “all the phenomena of physics are to [be] explained and grouped under laws exclusively spiritual, that they are in fact only the material expression of spiritual truth—or as Paul says the visible forms of invisible substance.” This conviction helps explain why Henry Senior had wanted to meet Faraday and why he wanted a scientific education for his own son.⁹

In 1844, while living in England, James suffered his breakdown—his vastation—from which he recovered only after being introduced by Sophia Chichester to the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. James was soon drawn to Swedenborg’s vast enterprise of showing that every single thing in the physical world is an expression of something in the far more basic spiritual world, that the physical and the spiritual are what we might now call parallel universes, with minute, point-by-point parallel details connecting every rock, plant, and animal. For Swedenborg, as for James, the spiritual universe is the real one, the one that matters and that gives direction to the merely physical universe.

Within two years, as more children came and the household grew more numerous and complicated, Henry became interested in Fourierist socialism—called in America at that time Associationism—which is a sort of Swedenborgianism applied to the political and social worlds. Fourier envisioned a world free of sexual repression and boring, repetitive factory labor. In a Fourierist community each person would be encouraged to have a full range of sexual relationships and would also be able to work at half a dozen different tasks a day, each one engaging and freely chosen.

With five children, his wife and her sister, and five serving girls in the house, Henry became sharply critical of monogamous marriage and interested in the free and spontaneous expression of affections. He wrote against marriage and also against the new women’s movement. His cut-and-thrust newspaper articles stirred up small storms of heated rhetoric. He abandoned the Swedenborgians. Institutionalized religion was at an end, he thought; the Swedenborgians had not understood this and had simply set up a new institution. With his gaudy gift for scatological invective, James grumbled about the “stagnant slipslop” of the papers that opposed him. He wrote to the New York Tribune that Christ had salvaged and recycled the “excrementitious product of human history,” and he blasted the poor Swedenborgian church for “emptying itself of all... struggle... against established injustice in order to concentrate its energy and prudence upon the washing and dressing, upon the larding and stuffing, upon the embalming and perfuming of its own invincibly squalid little corpus.”¹⁰

Even the gentle Bronson Alcott got so riled up during a public confrontation with Henry Senior that he lost his composure and called the one-legged patriarch of the James clan “damaged goods” to his face. But there was always more to Henry than battle relish and vituperative glee. And in the mid-1850s he found his true subject, which he set forth in a book called The Nature of Evil. James’s treatment of this subject caught and held the attention of the philosopher Charles S. Peirce, who must therefore be considered James’s greatest follower. In a piece called “Evolutionary Love,” written in 1893, Peirce credited Henry James Sr. with having disclosed “for the problem of evil its everlasting solution,” and he quoted the following from Henry Senior’s volume Substance and Shadow: “It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in another, to love another for his conformity to one’s self: but nothing can be in more flagrant contrast with the creative love, all whose tenderness ex vi termini [to the farthest limit of one’s strength] must be reserved only for what intrinsically is most bitterly hostile and negative to itself.”¹¹

When Thoreau’s friend the poet Ellery Channing met him in the early 1840s, Henry James the elder was in New York, married, with two small children. Channing described him as “a little fat rosy Swedenborgian amateur, with the look of a broker, and the brains and heart of a Pascal.” Photographs show a self-satisfied man with a lively direct gaze, an uneven mouth, and a crooked, enigmatic little smile.¹²