2.

A NATIVE OF NO COUNTRY

AT THE END of the 1860s the Royal Mail steamship China made a regular circuit between Liverpool and New York under the command of E. M. Hockley. At 1,500 tons the ship wasn’t a large one, and she tossed and rolled even on a passage of relative calm; though for her period she was quick enough. A manifest handed in on her May 1868 arrival in New York suggests that along with the mail the China carried about 70 passengers. Few of them were immigrants, most were American citizens, and 15 of them listed their occupation as “gentleman,” though a Mr. George C. Power defined himself as a “miser” and the teenaged Thomas Scarby was a jockey. The young man who boarded the China in New York in February 1869 had published a dozen stories, but he too would have put himself down as a “gentleman.” He was twenty-five years old, and after a ten-day passage he disembarked in Liverpool, where he celebrated his arrival with a cup of tea and promptly wrote to his parents. He had been taken to Europe as a child, but this was his first visit as an adult: a stay of fourteen months that would take him through England and France and down into Italy. They are the months in which the figure we know as Henry James becomes recognizably himself, the months in which he began to inhabit the transatlantic world he would make so distinctively his own.

Yet nobody is without antecedents, and least of all Henry James. Part of what made this time so important, in fact, is that it gave him his first sustained period away from his family, and if we want to understand him, we will need some account of the people, places, and events of his early life. He was a second son, and had been born in New York on 15 April 1843, at his parents’ house on Washington Place. The street runs for a few blocks west from Broadway to Washington Square, and was then quietly fashionable. Or at least it was for the moment. Manhattan’s grid pattern already defined its layout, but as late as 1840 there were unbuilt streets within a few blocks of James’ birthplace, and only a few spindles of development went up as far as 30th Street. The city’s growth was already unstoppable, however, and the census of 1840 put New York’s population at 312,000, fully 100,000 more than it had been in 1830. In 1850 it broke half a million, and by the time of James’s birth the fashion had for fifty years been moving steadily uptown, from the Battery to the Bowery to Lafayette Place; even Washington Square itself would soon enough seem outmoded.

He was just fifteen months younger than his brother William, but the gap looked determinative. The older boy appeared to be “always round the corner and out of sight,” and in childhood the two were scarcely ever in step. Nor was William’s priority limited to age. No other American family has produced two such minds in the same generation, and their relationship has been obsessively analyzed; I use that last word advisedly, while recognizing that the obsession doesn’t figure as heavily in William’s biographies as it does in Henry’s. Leon Edel has read the pair in terms of the relations of Jacob and Esau, a sibling rivalry in which the younger eventually outdoes his elder; more recent accounts see Henry as following after his brother in a haze of homoerotic desire. And there is evidence for all of it. Henry established himself as the rising star of the Atlantic Monthly while William was still suffering from one spasm of professional uncertainty after another. The future author of The Varieties of Religious Experience didn’t publish his own first book until 1890, but early on he seized the right to criticize. Their relations became tender with age, and yet William never lost his sense of competition; the more wavering his own path, the more faults he found with Henry’s steady application. As for the question of desire, much can and has been made of a letter Henry wrote from London on William’s marriage in 1878, in which he described his own absence from the ceremony in terms of being “divorced from you.”

I would tell a different story, albeit one that does stress William’s earlier birth. But to understand it we need to look at their parents, and in particular at their father. Henry James, Sr., had been born in Albany in 1811, a city where his own father had made a fortune. An Irish Protestant immigrant, the first William James had begun by importing everything from rum to window glass, before moving on to banking and real estate. He eventually owned the land that would become the downtown of Syracuse, a city that developed around the saltworks he founded, and he had thirteen children by three wives. The James family lived in great comfort—but also, in Henry Sr.’s case, in great pain. At thirteen he was so badly burned in trying to put out a fire that he lay bedridden for years, and finally lost a leg. He became an adept user of his day’s prostheses, with his cork leg stumping along a sidewalk. But he did need sidewalks, and that meant that the family life he later established with Mary Walsh—they married in 1840—was therefore an urban one. At seventeen he entered Union College, and his career there was so marked by extravagance that his father cut down his share of his estate. Henry Sr. broke that will in court, and is said to have murmured “Leisured for life” at the judgment that gave him an income usually estimated at $10,000 a year in the dollars of his time.

What he did with that leisure was to become one of the most incoherent of American religious thinkers. He went to divinity school, dropped out, abandoned Calvinism and returned to it, traveled, drank, swore allegiance first to the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and then to the French social philosopher Charles Fourier. In 1844 he suffered a breakdown that he described as a great “vastation,” produced by the sense that there was “some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room.” His recovery took two years, but he then found what was, for him, a stable faith, one that matched his belief in the literal divinity of humankind with a bitter condemnation of anyone so foolish as to worship a God of punishment. He had a talent for aphorism but could not carry an argument; his many books went unread. In an America that already worshiped business, he was an anomaly, a man without an office, and even his children found his position strange. It didn’t help that he answered their questions about what he “was” by telling them to “Say I’m a philosopher, . . . say I’m a lover of my kind, . . . or, best of all, just say I’m a Student.”

The elder Henry James found his true career in the peculiar education he constructed for his children. Eventually, there were five of them—two more boys, Wilky and Bob, and at last a solitary daughter, Alice. His own quest for answers had made him take his family abroad soon after Henry’s birth; they were in England when the “vastation” hit. They soon came home, but after a decade of New York he was ready in 1855 to go again, only this time to Switzerland and in search of schools. He followed the rumors of progressive education wherever they led, and sometimes moved his children from one establishment to another for the sake of change alone. In New York the older boys went to ten schools in eight years, and in Europe they quickly retreated from Geneva to Paris to Boulogne. James gives Isabel a version of this upbringing, describing her as having neither a settled home nor a coherent education. But he adds that Isabel herself would dispute that description, and believed that her own “opportunities had been abundant.” Still, the results could be comical, and in 1859 his parents decided that “Harry” was too fond of books and sent him to an engineering school instead.

In all this the father consulted his own preferences, but in the late 1850s he began to heed William’s desires as well. Henry was a quiet boy, with a marked stammer, and happiest when left alone. William was energy embodied, and his plans and ambitions seemed to change by the week. He craved a more systematic education than the family practice had as yet allowed, he was interested in science, he wanted to be an artist, and the Jameses returned from Europe not once, but twice so that he could work in the Newport, Rhode Island, studio of the painter William Morris Hunt. All told, the family was abroad from 1855 to 1858, and again between 1859 and 1860. Those years gave the future novelist so decided a command of French that his English would later be convicted of Gallicisms. More important, that experience reinforced the family’s sense of isolation from the central experiences of American life. They lived apart from the turmoil of the years before the Civil War, estranged from the defining issues of their nation and their day. The Jameses learned of Bloody Kansas or John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry only from outdated newspapers, and the young Henry never quite got over that sense of disengagement from public life. Years later he wrote that their expatriation left them “interested in almost nothing but each other,” and his words give some point to William’s 1889 statement that the novelist was “a native of the James family, and has no other country.”

That country had a most irregular landscape. Henry remembered that they “breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions.” The enveloping clouds of parental concern hung heavy and low, but their father changed his mind so often that the children’s world sometimes seemed to shift its shape, and they might be told that the canyons suddenly at their feet had been put there in their own best interests. Not that that world looked the same to everyone who lived in it. Most observers thought Mary James was far more conventional than either her husband or their children; a benign but passive presence, and so fully subsumed by motherhood that no biographer has yet been able to separate her from that role. And the terrain that Alice had to negotiate looked especially trackless and strange. Her father believed that women had their lives in a separate and subordinate sphere, and she did not share her brothers’ education. She was taught instead at home, and spent her adult life as an invalid, the victim of indefinable ailments that kept her in bed for years at a time, apparently unable to walk. Yet she had a caustic tongue, which her brothers enjoyed, even if Henry also found himself disturbed, after her 1892 death from breast cancer, by the frank and intimate pain of the diary she left behind.

Alice’s future would forever be on hold, but by the time the family came back to America in 1860, the question of a career had become pressing for her two oldest brothers. Their father rejected the idea of college—it was narrowing, a restriction of the mind’s free motion. He wanted his children to proceed by mistakes, to experiment with careers, not choose one; an interesting life was enough, it needn’t be “paying” as well. But his fortune wasn’t large enough to give his children the same freedom that he had had. Choice was required, and at this point a barrier fell between the older boys and their younger brothers. On their return the family settled in Newport, but Wilky and Bob were sent away to the new Concord Academy, whose curriculum stood for their father’s latest thing—a fusion of Abolition and Transcendentalism. William painted, and Henry looked on, reading quietly in a corner of Hunt’s studio, where the other pupils included John La Farge. The New York–born La Farge is now remembered for his stained glass above all, but his 1862 portrait of the writer is the best early one, and shows the young James in full-lipped and moody profile.

Newport had by the middle of the century become the most stylish of summer resorts, though by the standards of the century’s end both the fortunes and the houses were modest. But the town with its shipyards and close-packed eighteenth-century streets had its own independent life as well. It had been a center of fine cabinetmaking and was the site of both the first synagogue and the oldest lending library in America; a port city with its own traditions, and its own old families. James’s best friend in town belonged to one of them. He was a boy named Thomas Sergeant Perry, whose grandfather Oliver Hazard Perry had been a hero of the War of 1812, defeating a British squadron in the Battle of Lake Erie. Perry would later teach at Harvard and become a noted critic, and in his teens he gave the young Henry James someone to talk to about novels; someone, moreover, who knew things that James didn’t. For Perry was a passionate reader of American literature, and introduced his friend to the works of Hawthorne.

When the Civil War began, Henry Sr. did not at first support it. He had backed Lincoln in the 1860 election, yet thought the president’s initial war aims—restoration of the status quo ante—too limited to be worth dying for, and spoke of having to keep “a firm grasp upon the coat tails of my Willy and Henry, who both vituperate me” because he wouldn’t let them enlist. Perhaps they did not try very hard. William at this period began to suffer from eye strain. He left Hunt’s studio and persuaded his father to let him enter the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, where he worked with the Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz. He enrolled there in the fall of 1861, just a few months after the war’s start. Two years later he switched over to the medical school, and then interrupted that study as well to join Agassiz on an expedition in the Amazon. He finally earned his M.D. in 1869, though he never practiced, and years later wrote that civic life needed to find a sense of collective purpose in what he called the “moral equivalent of war.”

His two youngest brothers did not need that equivalent. Wilky was bigger and more athletic than his elders, Bob had an inborn sense of aggression, and their school had made them militant. Wilky joined up at seventeen, and Bob was even younger. They each gained commissions in the Union’s new regiments of black soldiers, and Wilky was badly wounded in the 1863 assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina; the battle is commemorated in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bas-relief in honor of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, across the street from the State House in Boston. He never fully recovered from his wounds, and died in 1883, before he reached forty. His father shuddered at what he called the sight of “so much manhood so suddenly achieved.” But he was proud to have some sons in uniform, now that Abolition had become central to Lincoln’s purpose; and Bob would always believe that the two of them had been discarded.

Henry had a peculiar war. In October 1861 he joined a volunteer crew in helping to put out a Newport fire. There were many hands on the pumps, men working in too-close quarters, and as James frantically tried to ensure the water’s steady flow, he found that “I had done myself, in the face of a shabby conflagration, a horrid even if an obscure hurt.” Yet this account has a number of uncertainties about it. In the later 1860s, Henry’s bad back became a family byword, and Edel speculates that he may have suffered a slipped disc. Immediately after the fire, however, he went up to Boston; whatever damage he had suffered was clearly not incapacitating. By the next year the pain had kicked up, although a doctor found no trace of physical injury. Edel adds, however, that the hurt was “exacerbated by the tensions” of the war, and in his autobiography James himself puts the trouble earlier, associating it with the start of combat “during the soft spring of ’61.” He writes there of a “passage of personal history” that seemed to have a close and yet inexpressible connection with the war itself, and other critics have seen that passage as a psychic and not a physical one: an instant of self-examination that revealed how fully he shrank from doing the expected masculine thing. His survival depended, and not just in a bodily sense, on accepting his place on the margins. Still, in 1863 he did appear before the Rhode Island Board of Enrolment; he received an exemption, apparently because of his back. His physical troubles were real, and they did get worse. In 1880 he told a friend that a “muscular weakness of his spine” meant that he had to lie down for several hours each day. Yet in thinking of him at the time of the Civil War it’s hard not to see those problems—it would have been hard for him not to see them—in the terms one of his characters uses to describe Ralph Touchett: “Fortunately he has got a consumption; I say fortunately, because it gives him something to do. His consumption is his career; it’s a kind of position.”

In the fall of 1862, James made an attempt at another métier. Shortly after that September’s slaughter at Antietam he enrolled for a year at Harvard Law School, which then occupied but a single building at the edge of the Yard. His memoirs describe the place in metaphoric terms, as though attendance were an equivalent of military service, and he even suggests that for him the campus was “tented field enough.” At the end of his life he spoke with deep admiration of Walt Whitman, who spent the war as a nurse in military hospitals; James visited such hospitals in Rhode Island, but could offer only a helpless goodwill and a bit of pocket money. He mourned the death in battle of two cousins, and read and reread his brothers’ letters home, but his own record was one of “seeing, sharing, envying, applauding, pitying, all from too far-off.” He never had to prove himself as they did, and he never lost his “sense of what I missed.” There is more regret than guilt here, I think, but a regret that depends upon an awareness of his own limitations. In 1884 his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had received one of his three wounds at Antietam, gave a Memorial Day speech in which he claimed that “through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.” Henry had only worked the pump, and it wasn’t that kind of fire anyway; no metaphor could make it so. As the war ended, he and William each looked set for a career as an invalid, with their different troubles of backs and eyes, and in William’s case a species of depression. Henry’s health would be rescued by his travels and expatriation. William’s would take longer, and his recovery came only with the marriage he both wanted and resisted.

And yet in these years James did make a start at something. In 1864 he knew the pleasure of holding in his hand a dozen greenbacks, payment for an essay in the North American Review—his first piece of professional writing.

James began to write in his teens. The first record we have of it comes in an 1860 letter from Wilky to their Newport friend Perry, in which he noted that “Harry has become an author I believe, for he keeps his door locked all day long, & a little while ago I got a peep in his room, and saw some poetical looking manuscripts lying on the table.” James himself would soon claim that in these “secret employments” he was a stranger to no style, and we can imagine him as engaged in pastiche, training himself by imitating one kind of work after another; indeed, as late as 1878, and with half a dozen books behind him, he described himself as still going through a conscious process of evolution, one slow and deliberate step after another. He knew when he entered law school that he wanted a literary career, and spent as much time as he could reading Sainte-Beuve rather than Blackstone. In fact, as he wrote to Perry, his ambition then was to do for English literature what that shrewdly omnivorous French critic had done for his own. As indeed he would—no novelist, in any language, has left a more important body of criticism.

In his autobiography James recalled a moment in childhood when he went with his father to an uncle’s estate on the Hudson. There was a cousin of his own age there, a girl named Marie who refused to go to bed when she was told. “Come now, my dear,” his aunt said, “don’t make a scene—I insist on your not making a scene.” Immediately the boy began to read a world into that phrase—to understand that life itself was a series of scenes, and “we could make them or not as we chose.” His aunt’s words stuck because they had made it a scene even without the little girl’s help, and in time James would himself develop what he called a “scenic method” of novelistic construction. His books never simply flow or meander, but are instead built around a series of carefully prepared dramatic incidents. Some of them are conversations for which his characters might themselves prepare, knowing that a scene in Marie’s sense is imminent. Others are moments of recognition, or else tableaux that James drew with an eye to their effect on the reader, as in the Portrait’s opening chapter.

The scenes he himself made were largely on paper. But his life did have its episodes of understated drama, and an important one opened in North Conway, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1865; a scene whose central figure would influence the whole course of his future work. James’s favorite cousin was a young woman called Minny Temple, the daughter of his father’s sister. She was an orphan and lived with her paternal relations, but they too were in Newport and he saw her often. Henry found her full of a vivid life, playful and possessed of a rare intellectual grace. His sister Alice was reserved, as tightly wound as her own plaited hair; Minny’s temperament was in contrast as open as a window in summer, and “afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder.” She believed that a distant chance of the best thing was preferable to a certainty of the second-best, she had a talent for uncomfortable questions, and the rest of Henry’s family weren’t sure they liked her. Minny was no respecter of persons. She was irritated by her uncle’s attitude toward women, and feared that he disliked her “for what he called my pride and conceit.” Alice was suspicious of any young woman of whom her brothers appeared fond, and though William’s most recent biographer suggests he was drawn to her, he also at times proved hostile. The truth is that Minny was very much like him, and in spite of her charm she yearned for a sense of certainty. She had an earnestness that was too full of doubt to be sanctimonious, and used her letters as an occasion for self-scrutiny in a way that her more guarded cousins did not. She was maybe a bit spiky, and certainly she could shock; a picture of 1861 shows her with hair cropped short like a boy’s.

She spent the summer of 1865 in the White Mountains with her sisters, and Henry decided to join her there. He was twenty-two that year and Minny just twenty, but she drew others around her as well—two young army officers from Boston who were already on the way to eminence. One of them was a lawyer named John Gray, a man with an angular jaw and dark insistent eyes. He would found the most Brahminical of old Boston law firms, and eventually became the dean of Harvard Law School. The other was a family friend whom I have already mentioned, the twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Holmes—a tall man who later wore the handlebars of a matinee villain. Henry was slighter than either of them in both build and height; he had a characteristic way of tilting his head a bit to the left, and parted his hair in the middle. Picture them there: the windy hump of Mt. Washington sits in the distance, and on the lawn of a wood-framed New England house, the young people sit and talk. To the soldiers it must all seem strange, an atmosphere of lemonade and muslin after years of blood and bullets. But the summer breeze is pregnant with futurity, and James would remember that their conversation was full to the brim with freedom. They spoke as though they were all fresh-faced, and yet in a way that it would be crude to call innocent.

Day passes day, the evenings begin to demand a shawl, and a few early leaves flush red. In James’s memory they form “the most delightful loose band conceivable,” but of course there are tensions. The future justice prefers girls who aren’t so intellectually demanding. Minny thinks he’s arrogant, and at first she finds Gray a bit stiff. Still, she appears to hold the young men hostage, and in James’s mind the summer’s drama lies in the fact that she cares nothing at all about the flutter around her. But there is another drama here too, and if in memory he made a scene around Minny, we ourselves can make one around him, one that lies in James’s own contemplation of the other men, in the contrast he cannot help drawing. They are men of mind and yet also men of action, with a kind of glitter “that I had no acquisition whatever to match.” He listens to their stories, but can’t join in them, and probably his own experience had best remain unspoken. The war has touched and tested them, they have survived the nation’s great questions, while he—he had published a few book reviews and two pieces of short fiction.

One of them, true, had appeared that spring in the Atlantic Monthly; though only eight years old, the magazine already provided a mark of high-toned aspiration and achievement. Yet “The Story of a Year” defines the same limit to James’s knowledge as did that North Conway summer. It begins with the engagement of John Ford and Elizabeth Crowe, but when the young man’s regiment calls him up, the tale refuses to follow him into battle. Its concern lies instead with the girl Lieutenant Ford has left behind, with the period’s “unwritten history . . . the reverse of the picture,” and above all with the new relations she forms in his absence. It is not, in truth, a very good story. Nevertheless, its suggestion that life doesn’t stop when the hero goes away does point to the young author’s developing sense of realism.

So would his conversations with an editor who joined the Atlantic in the following year. William Dean Howells was the son of an Ohio printer, and six years older than James. He was old enough to have helped in Lincoln’s 1860 campaign, and was rewarded with the job of American consul in Venice; an experience he turned into an open-hearted account of Italian manners called Venetian Life. When he returned to the States, he joined the staff of a new political weekly called The Nation, where James was already a contributor, before moving in 1866 to Cambridge and a position as the publisher J. T. Fields’s assistant on the Atlantic. Howells was portly, with a soup-strainer mustache, and self-consciously a family man. He saw the writer as a middle-class professional, a responsible citizen like a doctor or a lawyer, and would soon become a creature of tuition bills and summer vacations. Howells recognized James’s ability from the start, but what James remembered above all was that he had “published me at once—and paid me,” money less important in itself than as a promise of his own future independence.

The James family had moved up from Newport to Boston in 1864, and then over the river to Cambridge in 1866. Henry Sr. took a large house in Quincy Street, just across from that of Harvard’s president, and on the site of what is today the university’s faculty club. He had many years left, but his own travels were over, and the address would hold until the death of Mary James in 1882. William’s long career at Harvard would probably not have been possible without that move; he may have drawn the family north in his path, but he didn’t start teaching until 1873 and remained largely under his parents’ roof until his marriage. From Henry’s point of view, however, the most important consequence of the move might well have been his growing friendship with Howells.

Neither of them could remember when they first met, but it was probably just after the Atlantic had accepted another story about the war’s home front, this one called “Poor Richard.” Howells had told the reluctant Fields to take it, and everything else the author might produce, though he also believed that James’s very artfulness meant he would have to create his own audience. Of course, Howells himself would help with that. He took over from Fields in 1871, and as the Atlantic’s editor for the next decade published a number of James’s stories and five serialized novels, culminating with The Portrait of a Lady itself. About Howells’s own fiction James would for many years remain ambivalent. He liked his prose and yet thought he needed a larger subject, that he was too absorbed by his American world. But he admired the picture of city life and social unrest in the other writer’s best book, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), and recognized that he could not match its Balzacian range.

In December 1866, Howells wrote to a friend that the evening before, the two young men had talked for hours about their own aesthetic principles, and in a memoir left unfinished at his death in 1920 he noted that “we seem to have been presently always together.” James had had literary friendships before, but this one was different, an elective affinity between adults, in which his family and their connections had played no part. And like most friendships, it developed habits. There were a series of what Howells recalled as long aimless walks through the Cambridge streets by night, and daytime wanderings in the woods around Fresh Pond. A few years later they spent an afternoon on that small lake, Howells rowing, while James told him the story of Roderick Hudson, the book about an American sculptor in Rome that the editor had bought for the Atlantic. Two or three evenings a week they met at the older man’s Sacramento Street home, and “sat reading our stuff to each other.” Yet though each of them remembered the fact of those talks, their substance went unrecorded, and I would give a good deal for the kind of oral history that we find today in accounts of moviemaking—that testimony to the act of collaboration in which the cinematographer talks about the director, who answers with an anecdote about an actress.

For their conversation was a collaboration indeed, and one that we can only recapture by reading what they wrote to and about each either for the next half-century. They would have spoken of Dickens, who visited Boston in 1867, leaving James with a memory of the Englishman’s all-consuming eyes, and probably they spoke about audience: about what American readers wanted and how they might be nudged into wanting something else. Neither of them liked the multiplotted novel of the Victorians, the twisted strands of seemingly divergent narratives that make up a book like David Copperfield. They wanted instead to tell a single story, and to make that story’s ending grow directly out of its characters, rather than be imposed through the deus ex machina of sudden or startling events. So as they walked along the Charles, they would have talked about plot, or rather about what their critics called plotlessness; years later, Thomas Hardy would contrast his own kind of forcefully knotted fiction to that of Howells in particular. Above all, they spoke of the need for a distinctively American realism. They both admired the recently dead Hawthorne, but nevertheless wanted to tamp down the metaphysical conceits on which his work relied. They similarly ruled against the kind of sentimental fiction that, for readers today, is exemplified by the death scenes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Such books were enormously popular, and there was a trace of misogyny in the way they thought about such writers as Elizabeth Stoddard or even Harriet Beecher Stowe herself. But they took more from such novels than they would have been willing to admit; with James it shows in the way he idealizes his heroines, idealizes them so fully that he has to knock back a chaser of irony too.

Howells was never as much of a spectator as James, and he was in aesthetic terms by far the more conservative; he no more allowed himself James’s sense of ambiguity than he did the violent operatic grandeur of Hardy. He believed the American novel needed to recognize what he called the “smiling aspects” of life, and later opposed his own kind of realism to the naturalism of Émile Zola and such American followers as Frank Norris. As an editor, he tried to cajole his friend into providing the happy endings he thought their readers required. James fobbed him off with the charming but inconsequential Europeans (1878), which finishes with a handful of marriages while refusing to let the most interesting of its possible unions come off. They did not agree about everything, but between them they created an American novel of manners, the novel of our eastern seaboard.

The best of James’s early pieces is probably “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” a tale of sibling rivalry decked out as a ghost story. His work in the 1860s has often been read as a transparent indication of his own psychic state; and perhaps inevitably so, given its often clumsy narrative machinery. This story is different, both cold-blooded and playful in the revenge it allows a younger sister to take upon her elder; as though James winkingly knew precisely what he was up to. In truth, however, none of his apprentice fiction would have survived without the warrant of his later career. His ferociously capable criticism is a different matter, and scholars of Dickens and George Eliot among others still need to consider his early pieces on them. In these years he could most often be found at his parents’ house in Quincy Street. He was publishing regularly but not making enough to live on, and one detail in Howells’s memories strikes a curious note. James often knocked at their door on Sunday evenings, around suppertime, but “he joined us only in spirit,” for he took nothing except a digestive biscuit which had been prescribed for him, and which he didn’t eat so much as crumble. In the later 1860s he suffered from what Howells understood to be indigestion. It was in fact a prolonged period of constipation, and one that James believed made his back troubles worse. The biscuits did not help, and at times he seems to have felt both hungry and surfeited, reluctant to eat lest he exacerbate the difficulty.

We cannot prescribe at a distance—cannot determine the proportion of the psychological and the physical in the postwar disorders of both Henry and William James. They each craved and yet resisted an adult life, and in this there was a marked contrast with their younger brothers. Using their father’s capital, Wilky and Bob attempted after the war to grow cotton in Florida, hiring freed slaves as a labor force. They paid them fairly, but they had no experience of farming, and moreover encountered the forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually they both moved to the Midwest, settling and marrying in Milwaukee. In the spring of 1867, William went to Europe, where he tried out a series of Teutonic spas and, more consequentially, began his love affair with German academic life. Their friend Perry was also abroad, and Henry’s letters to him are full of a longing for travel. On the one hand, that longing is professional—he thought he needed a few years in England before he could work as he wanted. But he also had a more primitive desire for escape, for the Paris that haunted his imagination. William came back—and then, with much complication and delay, it was Henry’s turn. His parents thought he was traveling for his health, and so he was; but not for his bodily ailments alone.

James’s friendship with Minny Temple had endured and deepened in the years since that New Hampshire summer. He was not in love with her, not in any physical sense, but he did love her. He found her a necessary presence, and her frank, playful independence already provided an inspiration. Yet that independence wore a curb, for she now lived with a married sister; not quite a poor relation, but not her own mistress either. And there was something more. In 1868 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the disease that had killed her parents. She had never cared much for the marriage market, but now that shop looked closed to her. In the Portrait, however, James took the idea of cousins marrying seriously enough to make Ralph reject it as a bad idea, and to argue as well that people in his stage “of pulmonary weakness had better not marry at all.” Those words might have their origin in a letter Minny sent James in June 1869, when he was already in Switzerland. “I wish I were there too,” she wrote, and then added that “if you were not my cousin I would write to ask you to marry me and take me with you, but as it is it wouldn’t do.” Yet Minny could write that way precisely because such questions were not at issue between them. She struggled against her illness through a fiction not of love but of travel, of a health-giving voyage to the warm south; in the same letter she sketched a plan to get herself to Rome, and wondered if he would be there to meet her. James conspired with her in telling that story, and in his autobiography remembered that in their leave-taking they kept at bay the significance of her periodic hemorrhages. Those memoirs were written, however, with the blurry hindsight of over forty years, and it’s more accurate to say that Minny helped him not to know. She was more open in writing to John Gray, with whom she had developed a rich friendship. James’s autobiography aside, most of what we know about her comes in fact from the letters Gray preserved, letters that make a black comedy out of her different doctors’ prescriptions.

Henry James went to England, and to Paris. He hiked through Switzerland and traveled down into Italy, to Venice and Florence and then Rome, where he found himself “reeling & moaning thro’ the streets in a fever of enjoyment.” None of the letters he wrote to his cousin have survived, and the truth is that during his first ten months abroad he does not seem to have thought much about her; in writing to Quincy Street he mentions her but rarely. Perhaps his emotional landscape changed with his physical one; perhaps he took her affection for granted. Still, he read with pleasure of her plans for a trip to California, and wrote to Cambridge of his disappointment when the project fell through. In February 1870 he went back to England, to the spa town of Malvern in Worcestershire. There he learned that she had suffered a series of new hemorrhages and felt glad he had just sent her a letter. Now the envelopes from home began to carry their load of bad news, though it took some time for him to register its weight. On March 19 he wrote to his father that there was “somehow too much of Minny to disappear” just yet, and noted his plans to write her once more, as if making up his arrears.

But by that time her body was cold. She died on March 8, 1870; she was just twenty-four. The letters James sent on getting the news carry all the volubility of grief, and have been obsessively read by his biographers. He wrote to his parents within hours that it was all “more strange and painful than I can find words to express.” Mrs. James’s last account of Minny hadn’t prepared him for the thought of that “poor struggling suffering dying creature,” the girl who now survived only in memory—and yet given her suffering, who “would have her back to die more painfully?” Death is a release; so far, so Victorian. James also spoke, however, about her trouble in reconciling herself to the social world around her and suggests that her release wasn’t from a medical condition only. He dropped the letter and took it up again in the evening, claiming that he seemed already to have accepted her death, and yet wishing too that they had been in closer touch during these last months. But he also returned to his sense of the difficulties she would have faced in any future life, and in writing to William a few days later he struck that note once more. Minny was a victim of her own intelligence, and unlikely ever to have found happinesss. Nevertheless, she had taught him so much about the “reach & quality & capacity of human nature,” and he went on to evoke her strenuous, exacting presence for a dozen manuscript pages. But at the end of it all he still had to accept that no matter how long he might “sit spinning my sentences she is dead.” Nothing changed that, and he recognized then that he was trying to fight off his knowledge, to change her death from hard fact into the most billowy of ideas.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote, punningly, that “the death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world,” and many readers have found something ghoulish in James’s loggorhea, in the speed with which he reconciled himself to Minny’s loss. The fullest account of their relationship can be found in Lyndall Gordon’s Private Life of Henry James, which suggests that James’s inattention during his year away contributed to a loss of spirits that hastened her along. He was too fully absorbed by his own illness, too self-absorbed to commit himself to her plan of meeting in Rome. She turned her face to the wall. That reading owes too much to the plot of James’s own Wings of the Dove (1902) to be entirely persuasive, and yet that novel does in itself suggest a retrospective recognition of his own limitations, his own inability to sense the depths of another person’s need. I would stress something else about those letters. They resemble nothing so much as his later notebooks: notebooks in which, once given a nubbin of anecdote, he plots out such masterpieces as “Brooksmith” or “The Real Thing” in a few rapid moments, imagining characters and sketching possibilities. Wish away Minny’s consumption and there would be problems still. What would she do, and how would she live? Her unlived future goes on in his head. These letters are ghoulish only if that means they are written by a novelist, by someone whose job is to turn life into narrative.