2

A straight dive into the past

Henry James

I move here, indeed, between discretions and disappearances … ¹

Henry James

In the late spring and early summer of 1913, soon after his seventieth birthday, Henry James sat almost a dozen times for a portrait by John Singer Sargent at the painter’s studio in Tite Street, Chelsea. The painting was a gift from nearly three hundred of James’s friends and admirers; slightly embarrassed, yet no doubt flattered to sit for his old friend, James eventually gave the finished likeness to the National Portrait Gallery. It wasn’t the first time he had been to the Tite Street studio as a model: there had also been three sittings only the previous year, between January and March, for a charcoal drawing commissioned by his energetic younger friend Edith Wharton. Neither Sargent nor Wharton was satisfied with the result of this attempt (even though James himself wrote to Wharton that it was a “complete success”).² Leon Edel describes the charcoal portrait as a “stern heavy-lidded accusing-eyed”³ James; and the drawing doesn’t quite do justice to its subject. It projects his unease, and a look of haunted sadness. Yet this trial run must have informed Sargent in his painting the following year, which gives us a much more grand, portly, settled image of the Master, full of earned and brooding gravity. At closer quarters this portrait still betrays a certain infinite weariness in James’s expression—and a tension most surely glimpsed in the awkward clutch of his left hand. But James enjoyed these sessions, only a few streets away from his new flat by the river at 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, and to which Sargent encouraged him to invite friends to talk to, “to break the spell of a settled gloom in my countenance,”⁴ as James put it.

James was always quick to make analogies between painting and writing—he often describes the writer as “the painter of life”⁵ or “the painter of character”⁶—and he was intrigued to see a painter of Sargent’s stature at work. At the time of both these portraits, he was himself also working on a similar task. During the first sittings for the charcoal drawing early in 1912, James was deep into the dictation of A Small Boy and Others; a year later, this had been published, to some acclaim, and he was working on a sequel, Notes of a Son and Brother (1914). These two volumes, together with the unfinished, posthumous The Middle Years (1917), form his Autobiography—a title which was not his, but that of F. W. Dupee, who collected and edited the three books after James’s death in 1916.⁷ Where the Sargent portrait shows us the social James who dined out endlessly, wrote almost embarrassingly gushing and gracious thank-you letters, and was such an affable guest, his autobiographies present a shy, timid boy, taking his earliest uncertain steps in the world before eventually discovering the path of art. James’s avoidance of the title Autobiography was surely deliberate, although he does once or twice use the term in correspondence about the books, which cover only a small fragment of his long life, before he really found success as a professional writer.

These are books of youth, written by an old man who had been sick at heart. Yet they seldom deal with disappointments or dismay, preferring instead to reconstruct, in tones of charmed wonder, the American and European worlds of James’s childhood and adolescence, which took him backwards and forwards so often across the Atlantic. As a writer whose rallying cry while composing fiction was “Dramatize it! Dramatize it!,”⁸ James must have guessed early on that his own externally placid early life would never be the real subject of the books, which end up by realizing the “monstrous” project he had glimpsed a few years before, of writing “the history of the growth of one’s imagination.”⁹ But it took some time for this inner subject to become apparent to James. He began much more humbly, with a slightly distanced little figure of himself, one which had appeared in his work years before, in an essay on his friend George du Maurier. This was the “small American child, who lived in New York and played in Union Square,”¹⁰ who lived and breathed Europe through the pages of English and French periodicals and books.

A Small Boy and Others takes us from James’s very earliest beginnings up to 1857, when he was fifteen, ending with his illness from typhoid in Boulogne. Notes of a Son and Brother pushes on to 1870, with James turning twenty-seven, ending with the death from consumption of his young cousin Minny Temple. The Middle Years, which is really only a fragment, begins by backtracking slightly to James’s momentous first solo trip to London in 1869; it then recounts his early London years, before trailing off mid-sentence in a house in Northumberland. By far the shortest, and the weakest of the books, The Middle Years also carries the burden of its glumly self-ironizing title. This refers to James’s earlier short story of the same name about a dying writer, Dencombe, who realizes too late that he has taken too long to produce his real, best work, and that there will be no “second chance” to make amends. By the time that James was writing this third volume, in the autumn of 1914, the First World War had begun. He seems to have lost heart in the project, if not in writing altogether, as civilization crashed down around him.

James was an unlikely autobiographer. Even in his fiction, he usually claimed to be wary of writing in the first person, a mode which he thought marred the novels of his difficult, “cheeky” friend H. G. Wells. For James, first-person prose was “a form foredoomed to looseness,” marred by “the terrible fluidity of self-revelation.”¹¹ It is a telling expression: James often imagined art and life as being sealed off from each other. He noted the way that Turgenev “cut the umbilical cord that bound the story to himself”;¹² and the recurring complaint he had of Wells’s work was its “leak.”¹³ Writing in the first person, James felt the danger of a “leak” between art and life to be far greater than ever, and for this reason he mostly avoided it. But he had written novels and many stories in this mode, as well as autobiographical non-fiction—not least in the series of prefaces to the ill-fated New York Edition of his novels (1907–1909), which can be seen as an autobiography of his creative life, the “story of his stories.” Glancing snatches of autobiography appear throughout his travel sketches and literary essays, where he occasionally draws attention to himself.¹⁴ And privately, in his notebooks (especially in what Edel calls the “American Journals”), James had often written “of all that comes, that goes, that I see, and feel, and observe,” so as “to catch and keep something of life.”¹⁵

Strangely, we also catch sight of James throughout his two-volume biography of the American sculptor William Wetmore Story (1903), written largely in the first person, as James used his own memories of Rome and Italy to pad out what he felt to be a terminally mediocre subject. If James was suspicious of first-person prose, he had equally strong reservations and qualms about biography. Much more so than his previous attempt at writing a life, Hawthorne (1879), the book about Story uncomfortably enacts his own ambivalence about the whole genre. His early view of literary portraiture, as set down in an essay on Robert Louis Stevenson, was that it should aim for compression and an almost photographic immediacy, trying to “fix a face and a figure […] seize a literary character,” “catch a talent in the fact, follow its line, and put a finger on its essence.”¹⁶ This was fine with a writer he admired as much as Hawthorne; but he struggled with Story, producing a book that, page by page, reads like a battle between biographer and subject. This was partly a struggle for dominance, yet there was also a moral dimension. James was aware of the ways that biography could vie with an artist’s work, increasing or reducing its power. There was, he knew, something ghostly about biography—not least the obscure pact it made with the death of its subject. And, as he had so memorably suggested in “The Aspern Papers,” there was also something deadly in the negotiations biographers had to strike with the keepers of biographical documents. In his short story “The Real Right Thing,” James had written of a hapless young biographer, Withermore, who sets up shop in his subject’s study, in his subject’s house, at the request of his subject’s widow. But he is eventually barred from his new workplace by a vision of his subject’s ghost, who guards the threshold of his study.

This tale, and this struggle for mastery, hauntingly mirrors the genesis of James’s autobiographies. The “germ” or “seed”¹⁷ of the memoirs, like so many of his other books, initially came accidentally, from someone else—in this case sadly prompted by his brother William’s death in the summer of 1910, while Henry was staying with him in Chocorua, New Hampshire. After the death, Henry remained at his brother’s house in America on and off until the following summer. In an echo of “The Real Right Thing,” it was William’s widow Alice who suggested to Henry that he write a “Family Book” using William’s letters.

This was how the autobiographies began, while Henry stayed on, eerily living in his brother’s place. As the English writer W. Somerset Maugham, who dined with Henry in America that winter of 1910, recalled:

Henry James was troubled in spirit; after dinner the widow left us alone in the dining room, and he told me that he had promised his brother to stay at Cambridge for, I think, six months after his death, so that if he found himself able to make a communication from beyond the grave there would be two sympathetic witnesses on the spot ready to receive it […] But hitherto no message had come, and the six months were drawing to their end.¹⁸

Henry had just been through some of the worst years of his life. In October 1908, he had received the first annual royalty statement for the New York Edition, which was crushingly small. Perhaps in imaginative sympathy with his brother’s heart condition, Henry felt that he too had problems with his heart, and booked a session with a specialist in February 1909, who seemed to think he was fine, if overweight. In October 1909 came another meager royalty statement for the Edition. Towards the end of the year he had a bonfire in the garden of his house in Rye, East Sussex, in which he burned over forty years’ worth of letters and papers. In the New Year, he collapsed, beginning what he would later call “the disaster of my long illness of January 1910,”¹⁹ which manifested itself with gout, an aversion to food, depression, exhaustion, and nausea.

It took some time before he was to define this illness as a kind of nervous breakdown. His young nephew Harry, William’s eldest son, came over from America to stay at Lamb House in February 1910, and one evening found the Master in the oak-panelled bedroom in a state of utter despair: “there was nothing to do but to sit by his side and hold his hand while he panted and sobbed for two hours until the Doctor arrived,”²⁰ as Harry reported back to William. In the Pocket Diaries which James kept for the last years of his life, the entries for 1910 changed nature entirely from the social engagements listed throughout 1909, turning from a record of visits into a grim medical and psychological log. On March 24, 1910, James wrote, “Harry left 1 p.m.” to sail the next day; on March 27, Easter Sunday, “Edith Wharton and Teddy called—in motor from Folkestone”; on April 7, “William and Alice arrived 1:30.” From then on, many notes were curt and ominous, exclusively health-related. April 10: “Bad day.” April 11: “Bad day and night (vertigo from peptonized cocoa).” April 12: “Bad day and night (‘grey powder’ from Skinner p.m.).” April 14: “Bad day—bad, very, very bad—night.”²¹

William and Alice had crossed the Atlantic to look after him, planning that William could take a cure for his heart at Bad Nauheim. After spending some time in Rye, William went on ahead to Switzerland; Henry and Alice joined him in June. By that time, Henry had decided to go back with William and Alice to America, writing to Wharton that “I am wholly unfit to be alone.”²² He needed their company. Later, in Geneva, Alice heard that their brother Robertson James had died of a heart attack. She kept the news to herself for two days, before breaking it to Henry. They all returned to London in July, sailed for Quebec from Liverpool on August 12—and before the end of the month, after reaching his home in New Hampshire, William had died too.

*

The year or so during which Henry remained in America, only returning to England at the end of July 1911, was a fragile, painful, solitary period. Being back in America for the first time in years recharged Henry’s memories of his youth, the years before he left so decisively for Europe. He was always prompted into reflective thoughts about his life when he was in America, as he revisited the haunts, and the people, of his past, and memories of place triggered associations. Of all his notebooks, which mostly deal with ideas for novels and stories, the two “American Journals” are the nearest to autobiography. The first, written in 1881–82 when James was thirty-eight, revisiting Boston, took stock of his life so far, and above all the last six years, as, with his fiction temporarily suspended, James tried to persuade himself that he was at least gathering impressions for future work. “Here I am back in America,” James wrote in this journal, “[…] after six years of absence […] I am glad I have come—it was a wise thing to do. I needed to see again les miens, to revive my relations with them, and my sense of the consequences that these relations entail. Such relations, such consequences, are a part of one’s life, and the best life, the most complete, is the one that takes full account of such things.”²³

The second American Journal, meanwhile, was written in 1904–5, during the trip Henry took to research The American Scene (1907), and reads more like sketches in autobiography for that travel book, as James retrod old ground and found memories everywhere around him. He self-consciously knew that he was storing up material for the book he would write back in England. “Everything sinks in,” he wrote in this journal in March 1905, “nothing is lost; everything abides and fertilizes and renews its golden promise, making me think with closed eyes of deep and grateful longing when, in the full summer days of L[amb] H[ouse], my long dusty adventure over, I shall be able to [plunge] my hand, my arm, in, deep and far, and up to the shoulder—into the heavy bag of remembrance—of suggestion—of imagination—of art—and fish out every little figure and felicity, every little fact and fancy that can be to my purpose.”²⁴

In 1910–11, staying on with Alice after William’s death, Henry once again found himself swamped in possible material—this time, for the projected “Family Book.” Now he was the last member of his family left still alive. William, Robertson, Alice, Wilky: all of his siblings had gone. The past dissolved the present, made it seem like a dream. “Walked with Harry … ” Henry wrote sadly, in the usually telegrammatic and brief Pocket Diaries one afternoon, as if overcome by visions of remembrance: “lovely winter day with such hints of spring, such a sunset and such melancholy, tragic hauntings and recalls of the old far-off years.”²⁵

Yet if this was a difficult and reflective time, he was not entirely reclusive. In New York that October, he stayed at the Hotel Belmont, dining with Edith Wharton, Walter Berry, and Morton Fullerton, the day before Wharton sailed for France; and there were other social events. The Diaries oscillated uneasily between such visits and the ongoing medical log, as if James was not quite able to tell how ill he was. He sought psychoanalytical help. In Boston, he saw James Putnam, a student of Freud, for long talks, which he later acknowledged as being pivotal; in New York, he also began seeing Joseph Collins at the Neurological Institute, every morning at 11 a.m. throughout late March. In July, James stayed with Wharton at her huge house The Mount in Massachusetts for several very hot days, before eventually returning to England and Rye—ending what would be the last of his American sojourns.

What he wanted, of course, was to start writing again. He had not done much work at all for two or three years, since the Edition and his illness. His confidence in producing fiction had been shaken. He was never again to complete a novel, yet he still needed, almost as a matter of psychological survival and recovery, to get back to a major literary task. Work had always played such a large role in his life, that without it, he was completely lost. Now, from his talks with Alice, and with his memories replenished by his recent travels, he had a new project, the “Family Book”; and he was returning with packets of William’s letters. But once back at Rye, he couldn’t face another lonely winter there. Over the years, he had known many of the other writers who had settled fairly close by for a time—Conrad in Pent Farm, at Aldington, and at Orlestone; Wells at Sandgate; Ford at Winchelsea; Rudyard Kipling in Burwash. G. K. Chesterton had even lived next door to James. But by 1911, life in Lamb House was, as James had partly always wanted it to be, rather solitary, quiet. And it still held associations of his recent illness. So he decided to spend the winter mostly in London, at the Reform Club.

He began the “Family Book” straightaway, once back in England, initially without his typist Theodora Bosanquet. At the end of October, he wrote to her that he needed some rooms in London, “having got back to work and to a very particular job.”²⁶ Bosanquet found two rooms next to her flat at 10 Lawrence Street, Chelsea. This is where A Small Boy and Others was written, and initial progress on the project was rapid, impatient. By mid-November, James was writing to Wharton, with a sense of slight triumph and excitement at his resumption of activity.

I have in any case got back to work—on something that now the more urgently occupies me as the time for me circumstantially to have done it would have been last winter when I was insuperably unfit for it, and that is extremely special, experimental and as yet occult. I apply myself to my effort every morning at a little repaire in the depths of Chelsea, a couple of little rooms that I have secured for quiet and concentration—to which a blest taxi whirls me […] every morning at 10 o’clock, and where I meet my amanuensis.²⁷

James’s letters to Wharton often blend candor, slight mockery, and genuine fear. He called her a “devastating Angel” and a “Firebird,” for the way that she would swoop down on him with her lavish lifestyle, her motorcars, her romantic dilemmas, her plans. But it is clear that he relished and looked forward to the hectic times he spent with her. Wharton was a “devastating Angel” because her motor trips, particularly, which James enjoyed so much, threw all his plans for work—and his relatively meager finances—into disarray. In this letter, no doubt to prevent her from distracting him now he was finally working again, he fails to tell her exactly where his “little repaire” in Chelsea is, and he shrouds the new project in mystery. Yet the terms he uses for the book he is writing—“extremely special, experimental and as yet occult”—are honest.

At first, Henry didn’t know how to deal with the project of the “Family Book”; and he had never written anything along these lines before. What Alice and Henry’s nephew Harry might have envisaged, it seems, was something like a Victorian “Life and Letters” biography of William: a biography with long quotes from William’s letters, and personal memories by Henry—perhaps bearing in mind how William had edited their father Henry James Senior’s Literary Remains after his death. What Henry began writing in Chelsea that winter of 1911, however, was quite different.

*

Whenever somebody writes about another member of their family, or writes about themselves in terms of any family relationship, the lines between biography and autobiography become blurred. Some lives—family lives particularly—connect at such essential points that it is often hard to tell where writing about someone else becomes a form of self-disclosure, and writing a portrait of oneself becomes biography of others. This aspect of the projected “Family Book” initially confused Henry. Above all, he wasn’t sure, at first, how to work with the documentary material he had been given: the letters. As “The Aspern Papers” showed, Henry knew very well the lengths to which biographers will go to obtain letters, and here he had them at his disposal. But did he really want to write a biography of William based on his letters? In a series of long epistles of his own to Harry and Alice back in Boston—the keepers of William’s literary estate, as it were—he began a parallel, evasive correspondence about the progress of the “Family Book.” This continued for the next few years, as he told them how he was getting on with it, asked for more family documents to be sent over, reassured them, and requested their unconditional support.

If James’s last attempt at biography, about William Wetmore Story, had been a battle between biographer and subject, the “Family Book” was even more so. And, whether because Henry didn’t know how best to utilize the documentary materials at hand, or how to write about William so soon after his death, he again found the solution instinctively in writing more about himself than the proposed subject: writing autobiography more than biography. With all his experience in novelistic point of view, he knew he could only write about William from his own vantage point. And, for all their interest, the letters which he had must have appeared fragmentary and piecemeal compared to this rich inner source of potential material. As Henry wrote to Bosanquet, before they set to work, “I find the question of the Letters to be copied or dictated baffles instant solution […] It is a bit complicated, and I may let it wait till I begin to come. I shall rather like to begin with something that goes very straight so as to get the easier back into harness.”²⁸ This proved to be much more about his own life experiences, than about William. Over the following months, as he continued in this vein of autobiography, indeed until the following summer, James tapped into a flood of reminiscence which at first had a wonderfully therapeutic effect. He was back at work, finally, and the work made him feel not only mentally better, but even had a corresponding physical effect.

Throughout the dictation of A Small Boy and Others, James was improvising; and once he found the source of this recovery through autobiography, it was crucial for him not to stop or interrupt his progress. He was unused to the delicate, close, implicating nature of the subject-matter; yet unlike when composing fiction, he dictated straight off, without notes. At times, the language of the memoir is more like the language of the creative notebooks, where he chases ideas like a butterfly-catcher, following the “tip” of “the tail” of an image, as “vague, dim forms of imperfect conceptions seem to brush across one’s face with a blur of suggestion, a flutter of impalpable wings.”²⁹ But in the composition of A Small Boy and Others, James was chasing memories.

*

Each morning, as Bosanquet tells us, after arriving at his “Chelsea cellar”—a “quiet room, long and narrow and rather dark”³⁰—James would read over the pages written the previous day. “He would settle down for an hour or so of conscious effort. Then, lifted on a rising tide of inspiration, he would get up and pace up and down the room, sounding out the periods,”³¹ while Bosanquet kept up with him on the Remington typewriter. Although the dictation seems to have come freely, without much recourse to notes or reference books to check names and dates and facts, sometimes James did use other props as an aide-mémoire. This, it seems, was the initial use he made of William’s letters while writing A Small Boy and Others, rather than quoting from them yet at any length. At other times, he used old photographs to spur his memory.

But it soon became apparent that James was hardly in need of props. The problem—and it did become a problem, eventually—was that he remembered too much, not too little. What he discovered during the experiment of dictating A Small Boy and Others was not only how plentifully stocked the “precious store”³² of his memory was (as he commented throughout the book), but also how to stir it into action. The process of reflection and imagination that lay behind his fiction—all the hours of dreaming and plotting laid bare in the New York Edition prefaces and the notebooks—could also be placed at the service of memory.

Once started, he found the act of recollection almost embarrassingly easy. During the morning sessions, as his typist tells us, until around 1:45 each day, “a straight dive into the past brought to the surface treasure after treasure.”³³ He had been hoarding experiences for his fiction for years: his own, and as a voracious, devouring, “incorrigible collector of ‘cases’ ”³⁴ and scenarios, those of other people. All the vicarious store of perception that he had collected for fiction—gathered for instance, on long evenings walking the streets in the “great grey Babylon” of London as “possible stories, presentable figures, rise from the thick jungle as the observer moves, fluttering up like startled game”³⁵—was also filed away for instant use. The appetite for other people’s lives is what fed his fiction, which was able to sustain and nourish itself from the faintest hints and suggestions. This was the secret of his own, outwardly dull life at his desk, even its greatest “joy”: the nourishment that art and life gave to each other, “the constant quick flit of associations, to and fro, and through a hundred open doors, between the two great chambers […] of direct and indirect experience.”³⁶ “Did nothing happen to Henry James except the writing of an extremely long shelf of books?”³⁷ asks Leon Edel in his five-volume life of James. “Could a man produce so much having, as it is claimed, lived so little?”³⁸ Yet this endless dance between art and experience was what life to James was all about.

While dictating A Small Boy and Others, he seemed only to need the smallest of clues, and like the protagonist John Marcher in his short story “The Beast in the Jungle,” he found himself remembering more—“the impression operating like the torch of a lamplighter who touches into flame, one by one, a long row of gas jets.”³⁹ To use another analogy, his memoir revealed the structure of his memory, tangled up as it was with his imagination, as a giant spider’s web, made of impossibly intertwined, fragile materials. In James’s labyrinthine remembering consciousness, everything was linked and connected to everything else; each memory leads and hangs on to another memory, until “the pages […] overflow with connections”⁴⁰ and it becomes an act of violence to break the threads. His memory worked outwards from shards or fragments of objects or hints of sensations—the taste of peaches, or a piece of clothing, or a billboard on Broadway—and from each fragment, a world reappeared to surround it. Each of the long-gone worlds James remembered was meticulously reconstructed out of small pieces and details, from which he gained a toehold to the next moment of recall.

In the memoir, James presents himself as a child whose education took place on the streets of New York, and with his cousins in Albany, for his first twelve years, until the family made the long-promised trip to Europe in 1855—his first sight of the continent that would become his lifelong home (although Henry claimed, prodigiously, to remember a glimpse of Paris from a visit during his first two years of life, in 1843–45). A Small Boy and Others recreates the entire “small warm dusky homogenous New York world of the mid-century,”⁴¹ and the sense and texture of James’s early life there; walking alone and with his father along Broadway; going to church and the ice-cream parlor; being tutored by a succession of governesses, before entering a series of creaky educational establishments. In a sequence of disconnected, fragmentary scenes, James traces the gropings for his “earliest aesthetic seeds”⁴² in visits to Barnums, or in evenings of watching acrobatics and dancers at Niblo’s, before formative trips to the theaters in the Bowery, and adventures deep in the pages of English books.

James wanted to show the earliest nourishments of his perception, in as much detail as he could. Inadvertently, perhaps, the story which emerges from the American youth James recounts is one of repeatedly seeking aesthetic replenishment in a culture which didn’t provide it for him. Everywhere, in his portrait of early youth, he emphasizes the ramshackle roughness of New York and Albany, and the improvised unsuitability of his formal education. The undercurrent of the memoir shows how James triumphed over this, and somehow made his own education in art, despite all the humorous and inappropriate efforts of his teachers. If, as a writer, James’s watchword had been “Dramatize it! Dramatize it!,” here in A Small Boy and Others, it was “as if the authors of our being and guardians of our youth had virtually said to us but one thing […] one word, though constantly repeated: Convert, convert, convert!”⁴³ Perhaps only in this way, through converting and distilling experience, could they understand and use artistically everything that happened to themselves, however raw or seemingly unsuitable.

Once in Europe, “at last,”⁴⁴ in 1855, almost two-thirds of the way through the memoir, James writes of the family’s arrival in London, before they traveled to Paris, Lyons, and Geneva—Henry taking in “a larger draught of the wine of perception than any I had ever before.”⁴⁵ As he recreates it in the pages of A Small Boy and Others, it was the London of Dickens and Hogarth, and the immense galleries of the Paris of the Second Empire, rather than America, which served as his sites of artistic enlightenment and self-discovery, as he gradually became aware of his vocation. The self-portrait is of a dawdling, gaping, wondering boy, whose only desire is to look at the spectacle of life and take his fill of the multitudinous scenes and impressions he sees everywhere around him, much more than to actively participate in them. This small boy took some time to see how all these impressions could be transformed, and to find his direction in life, compared to William, who is only glimpsed in these pages.

*

All autobiography has a certain span or reach, which could be defined not as the period covered within its pages, but the distance between what is being remembered, and the present act of recollection. James had written in the New York Edition prefaces how he delighted in what he called “the visitable past”—not the past of documents and archives, or even further back, but the past lying within the bounds of personal experience, which “we may reach over to as by making a long arm we grasp an object at the other end of our own table.”⁴⁶ While working on the memoir, pacing up and down each morning in the dim room to the rhythmic clacking of the Remington, James soon found that he was interested in trying to represent the reach of his memory as much as his memories themselves. This was perhaps one reason why he seldom troubled to consult notes or references while composing the book, instead preferring to court the free play of his recall. He wanted to try and put memory down on the page as it was: in all its inconsistencies, in its lapses and blurrings just as much as its constant astonishments.

For James, forgetting was intrinsic to his autobiography in an unusual way, in that he seemed to remember everything, but with blots and erasures, distortions. Often, he portrays figures not only as they were, but as he sees them while he tries to remember them: such as his uncle Robert Temple, whom he seemed to see standing before him in his regimental uniform “as a person half asleep sees some large object across the room and against the window-light.”⁴⁷ James later wrote to Harry about that “conception of an atmosphere which I invoked, as, artistically speaking, my guiding star.”⁴⁸ Along with all the “personal and social and subjective (and objective) furniture”⁴⁹ of the past, James also catches the glowing, glimmering, flickering atmosphere of memory in which its characters now all sit embalmed in his mind. The effect is impressionistic, as James uses blurred daubs of the brush to seize an essence. Sometimes, he seems to slow down time and fuse habitual scenes together—such as when Henry writes of his father that he seems to see him always in the same pose, writing at his desk facing the window, or of his brother that he seems to see him “drawing and drawing, always drawing.”⁵⁰ The compression of the portraiture freezes many figures in this way, in a startling, telling pose—almost aiming for the effect of a striking visual image.

In A Small Boy and Others, as in his novel What Maisie Knew (1897), James was also increasingly interested in representing not only what happened to himself when he was a little boy, but in recreating—even reliving—a young child’s consciousness. The dual perspective which results in the memoir is accordingly tightly limited at both ends: on the one hand, by James the old autobiographer, working with his avowedly faulty memory, and at the other end of the spectrum, almost being taken in hand by his older self, by the young child whose knowledge of the world was also necessarily partial, blind, and occluded. Perhaps much of James’s recovery from his breakdown lay, precisely, in the success with which he managed to live back into his younger self, and his recreation of the times—what he called “the general Eden-like consciousness”⁵¹—before his sense of the world became fallen and tainted.

The prose in the memoir, because of this, revels in unabashed superabundance. The late style of James’s novels, and of the New York Edition, had been notoriously rich and convoluted; these pages—“late late James”⁵² as Dupee describes this style—are even more glutted with life. The sheer number of people James puts into the book almost makes the memoir feel crowded, like a gallery in which too many pictures have been hung. Discovering the extent to which autobiography can accommodate group biography, or small sketches and portraits of a group, A Small Boy and Others is consequently sometimes almost more revealing of the “others” of the title—except William, and other close family members—than of Henry, who often seems a mere observation post. James felt that the wraithlike figures who strayed across his path, as he looked back across his life, all begged for treatment, pleading not to be ignored and abandoned. He felt a moral compulsion to get them all into his pages, even though by doing so, he had to cram them together. He had faced a similar dilemma as a biographer, writing early in his book about Story on

the appeal, the ghostly claim […] of […] a vanished society. Figures innumerable, if we like to recall them, and if, alas! we can, pass before us […] and meet us […] Boxfuls of old letters and relics are, in fine, boxfuls of ghosts and echoes, a swarm of apparitions and reverberations […] We desire for them some profit of the brush we have given them to make them a little less dim.⁵³

Writing to his nephew Harry the following July of 1912, to tell him how the projected “Family Book” was coming along—James had by this time written well over 100,000 words without having even reached the commentaries for William’s letters—he explained to his nephew, perhaps slightly shame-facedly, about the extent to which he had already overwritten in recounting his memories of childhood:

[…] in doing this book I am led, by the very process and action of my idiosyncrasy, on and on into more evocation and ramification of the old images and connections, more intellectual and moral autobiography (though all closely and, as I feel it, exquisitely associated and involved), than I shall quite know what to do with—to do with, that is, in this book.⁵⁴

*

The first phase of dictation to Bosanquet had been a miraculous return to health and work for James, written in a sustained creative burst which reassured him that his powers were not failing, despite all he had been through the years before. During this phase of reminiscence, the Pocket Diaries testified to his recovery, and a busy social life despite the rapid productivity in his mornings with Bosanquet. From the winter of 1911 until the summer of 1912, there were frequent journeys between London and Lamb House; several long weekends as a guest at Howard Sturgis’s country house Queen’s Acre in Windsor; and numerous, sporadic visits to friends in town, among them to two old acquaintances from Kent: to Wells, who was now living in Hampstead,⁵⁵ and to Ford, at South Lodge, as James noted, when he briefly “met Violet Hunt and F. M. Hueffer and went home with them for ½ an hour.”⁵⁶ James was frequently out and about all this time, at lunches and dinners, and trips to go shopping or to the theater.

Wharton came over from Paris at the end of July with her motor, resting at Lamb House before taking James off to Queen’s Acre and a stay at Cliveden, above the Thames, of several days, where he had a slight, if worrying, relapse from overdoing things. Yet the work went on. And taking stock that summer of 1912, as James wrote to Harry and to his agent, James B. Pinker, he began to realize that he would need two books, not one, for his family memories. As his material “of brotherly autobiography, & filial autobiography not less”⁵⁷ had become increasingly personal and extensive, he decided that a separate book to be based around William’s letters would have to come before a memoir based on the long flood of memories which he had just dictated. Then he switched this order around. A Small Boy and Others, Henry suddenly realized, should come before, not after, the volume on William’s letters. There had been a tension between biography and autobiography in the project from the start—and between William and himself. This change in the running order now put Henry clearly first. If, as Edel suggests, there had always been rivalry between Henry and William, this change in sequence was a significant psychological fact, with the younger brother finally asserting himself.

The titles Henry finally settled on for the two memoirs make a subtle, if clear, demarcation between the various roles his former self plays in each of them. Arrived at with great care, after much deliberation, these titles are much more specific than the general label Autobiography. In A Small Boy and Others, autobiography had won out, and the small boy is the hero of the book; in Notes of a Son and Brother, as Henry more dutifully implied, biography would now come first, and he would finally play the more humble family roles. Where A Small Boy and Others only uses the family letters to help prompt Henry’s memory, in Notes he now planned to quote from them at length in the text. Partly because of this, the writing of Notes of a Son and Brother proved to be more difficult, even if some of its material was drawn from the surplus of the first phase of reminiscence. In October 1912, with A Small Boy and Others complete and sent off to Scribner’s except for a short concluding section, Henry fell ill again, back at Rye, with “vivid red welts—sores—blisters”⁵⁸ appearing along his left side. Dr. Skinner—the irony was not lost on James—was called in again from Ashford, and diagnosed shingles. As James took to his bed, the Diaries resumed their medical log until just after the move to Carlyle Mansions at the start of 1913, when social life began again, and the final part of A Small Boy and Others—ending, not coincidentally, with an account of James’s illness from typhoid in Boulogne in 1857 and subsequent loss of consciousness—was also dispatched.

Illnesses recurred throughout 1913, while Notes of a Son and Brother was being written, although James had got over the worst of his shingles by the spring. But it was uncanny that his physical well-being should also suffer, now that he was finally writing about his brother and his father. And this seemed to have something to do with his problems over how to use the letters. Nephew Harry was now planning his own edition of William’s letters—and he was keeping a watchful eye on Henry, pestering him with queries about exactly which letters he planned to use, and how he was progressing. Henry’s irritation over these practical questions, as he wrote to his nephew wrangling over the letters, began to become almost physical. To stem queries, Henry deployed his shingles, asking his nephew not to push him too far, hinting that his illnesses were aggravated by the literary restrictions he felt from the family. “I wish I could persuade you to a little greater confidence, through all these heavy troubles of mine, in my proceeding with the utmost consideration,” Henry wrote to Harry. “I shall feel this confidence most,” he continued

[…] if you won’t ask me too much in advance, or at any rate for some time to come, to formulate to you the detail of my use […] of your Dad’s Letters […] Let me off […] from any specified assurances now; I am not fit to make them, and the sense of having so much to report myself is, frankly, oppressive and blighting. Don’t insist, but trust me as far as you can.⁵⁹

In Notes of a Son and Brother, Henry duly tried to take on the self-effacing guise of family chronicler or biographer, with much more success. He picks up the story of the James family’s European stay, where A Small Boy and Others had tantalizingly left off with Henry’s swoon into unconsciousness; but the focus is more directly on William and Henry James Senior. Henry himself is still to be seen, of course, but there is a subtle shift in perspective from the outset, so that he appears slightly more on the periphery of the book than at its true center. And alongside the long excerpts from William’s and his father’s letters, Henry also uses many letters by his brother Wilky—several of which referred to Henry and saw him in the third person, almost from the outside.

Notes of a Son and Brother tells initially of the family’s periods in Geneva, Bonn, and Paris, before they returned to America and Newport, ostensibly so that William could study painting with William Hunt. Hunt’s studio in Newport is portrayed as a magical place, as William James practiced drawing from life there—and Henry reached his own realization that if he himself could not draw, like William, then perhaps he could write, and so, in that way, “live by the imagination.”⁶⁰ The pages remembering the seaside world of Newport throb with revelation, even if Henry insists how he had been marked by his European experience. His literary influences now looked towards Europe, even while he was back in America, as he wrote of how he devoured the pages of the Revue des Deux Mondes, and through the influence of John La Farge, discovered Balzac and Browning.

Where A Small Boy and Others shows Henry’s widening perception, and traces his imagination in that way, the growth of his literary talent throughout the 1860s is depicted more directly in Notes of a Son and Brother, if very gradually and in secretive terms, as Henry nurtured it under various other guises. The book never quite comes out and tells how James’s actual writing evolved, so much as it implies how it slowly blossomed under adverse conditions, even during Henry’s unhappy stint as a Harvard law student in 1862. This growth of Henry’s writerly self is the real autobiographical theme of the volume, even though it is told in a submerged way, carrying on beneath the more explicit family events: the move from Newport to Boston in 1864; William’s trip to the Amazon in 1865; the Jameses finally settling down in Quincy Street, Cambridge in 1866. By the mid-1860s, Henry’s writing becomes a more open theme, as he began to feel more sure of the potential revelations of art and the imagination, cultivated on his own, in such an externally uneventful way. “Seeing further into the figurable world made company of persons and places, objects and subjects alike,” Henry writes. “It gave them all without exception chances to be somehow or other interesting, and the imaginative ply of finding interest once taken (I think I had by that time got much beyond looking for it), the whole conspiracy of aspects danced around me in a ring.”⁶¹

As Henry quoted extensively from the letters at his disposal in Notes of a Son and Brother, he also told the stories of the others in his family in a more impartial way, giving his comments, as it were, in the margins—almost as if he was an editor, more than a writer; detached, if curious, more than personally involved. Many letters were included only as they came to hand, arriving in packets from across the Atlantic as the book was being written. As it moved into the years of the American Civil War, an inevitable narrative began to build through its letters from the front by Wilky, who was fighting in it, as was Bob. The sense Henry referred to, throughout the autobiographies, that “real” life was always elsewhere, and that he was not born to participate, so much as observe it—and ultimately depict it—from afar, intensifies as he remembers the dispatches his two more active brothers sent home; and even more so as Wilky was wounded and brought home on a stretcher. James visited soldiers, as he writes in this second memoir, at Portsmouth Grove, yet he never took part in the conflict. His sense of his own passivity reaches a crisis in the book, as he tells of his non-participation in the war, due to the unspecified, ambiguous “obscure hurt”⁶² which he did himself while helping to put out a fire—weirdly, just like his father, who suffered a serious injury in youth while also putting out a blaze. James makes the “obscure hurt” so obscure, in fact, that he almost implies he faked it.

At the climax of the second memoir, James wrote himself even further out of the picture, with his arrangement of a sequence of moving letters between his cousin Minny Temple and her friend, John Chipman Gray, which James had received almost by chance while writing the book. In piecing these letters together to tell the story of Minny’s death from tuberculosis in 1870, James again chose to take the vantage point of an observer—even though he had been much more directly involved in these events. Minny, he wrote, “was really to remain […] the supreme case of a taste for life as life, as personal living”⁶³ to him—as opposed to Henry’s perpetual life-at-one-remove. Her death, he writes in the last line of the book, represented the end of his and William’s youth. But the death also symbolized and assisted Henry’s own birth as a writer. He went on to redraw, and to give new life, over and again, to versions of Minny in his work, notably in Daisy Miller (1878) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Just as he could only write about his family in his Autobiography once they were all dead, Minny’s death bequeathed her to his fiction. When he was writing these final pages, Henry dictated with her image “before me as I write”:⁶⁴ the faded photograph of her taken in September 1869. And this story of physical deterioration—“essentially the record of a rapid illness,”⁶⁵ as James writes—was also a form of displaced autobiography of the present, for James the ageing writer, who, as he finished Notes of a Son and Brother in Rye in November 1913, had been ill, on and off, all that year.

Portraiture in visual art frequently succumbs to the urge to flatter its subject. This has often had to do with the circumstances of a portrait: the way in which a portrait is commissioned or bought by the subject. The painter or photographer, and the subject, often collude in the likeness, and their closeness while the portrait is being made might tempt the portraitist to flatter. Visual self-portraiture removes this worldly agency; and the artist is free to employ absolute candor. Where self-portraiture in painting is free to be as honest as it likes, the same doesn’t always apply to autobiography, which is often likely to have the same issues with discretion as biography, since autobiographers know their subjects so well, so intimately—and since their subjects are more likely to be alive than in biography.

In A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, James was always a flattering autobiographer. This was not so much in his portrait of himself—which was modest and shy to the point of self-negation—but in all his portrayals of everyone else. While writing his memoirs, depicting lost friends and family, James’s imagination brought them back to life by his side; and he wanted to portray them all in the best possible light. Where this was not possible, he often simply left things out. He dodged, fudged, blurred, and was discreet. As he had written in the Story biography, he again felt the need to ensure that all the figures in his memoirs would gain from this “profit of the brush we have given them.”

This was one reason why, when he finally came to tackle William’s and his father’s letters, Henry retouched and rewrote these letters as he went along. Perhaps this was also why he changed the content of the family history in the memoirs—condensing two trips to Europe and back into one, for instance, mainly to make his father look less indecisive and prone to acting on a whim. Addicted to retouching the style of his fiction for years, as evidenced by the laborious rewriting of his entire oeuvre for the New York Edition, he seems to have found himself unable not to do the same to the family documents. He had such a strong “sense for fusions and interrelations, for framing and encircling,”⁶⁶ as he later wrote to his predictably incensed nephew Harry, that he claimed he couldn’t help himself. He himself acknowledged that this was a mistake—writing to Harry, he averred that “the sad thing is I think you’re right in being offended”⁶⁷ and declared that he should never again stray from his “proper work,” meaning the writing of fiction, where such attention to form and style was only ever for the best. But there is little doubt that his often very slight and mild doctorings and rewritings of the letters were done with good, if misguided, intentions. The actual changes Henry made, if numerous, were often very small: minor corrections and smoothings out of syntax, grammar, or rhythm.⁶⁸ He was, however, also guided by a general tendency to minimize family discords. Henry wrote to Harry about how he wanted so much in the “Family Book”

to show us all at our best for characteristic expression and colour and variety and everything that would be charming […] I found myself again in such close relation with your Father, such a revival of relation as I hadn’t known since his death, and which was a passion of tenderness for doing the best thing by him that the material allowed, and which I seemed to feel him in the room and at my elbow asking me for as I worked and he listened.⁶⁹

It was quite deliberately a nicely blurred view of the James family that Henry wanted to create in the memoirs; and he trod carefully, scared of offending the ghosts he summoned up. Memory’s “snares” and “traps” which Henry referred to throughout the books were not only in its superabundance, but in all the gnarly subject-matter which had to be delicately handled or put aside gently, to bring out this “charming” family portrait.

As Lyndall Gordon writes, Henry’s memoirs “of the ‘happy working of all our relations, in our family life’ blots out the wreckage of three of the five children”⁷⁰—especially the prolonged nervous illness and subsequent death of his sister Alice James. Alice hardly appeared in the autobiographies, other than in glimpses from William’s letters. Henry complained that he didn’t have enough letters from Alice to use in Notes of a Son and Brother. But as he well knew, Alice had also written extensive, brilliant, and quotable diaries, whose existence Henry wanted to keep private.

As for his two other brothers, Wilky and Bob, Henry portrays them falsely as heroes in the Civil War, without dwelling on how their later lives were marked by disappointments. (After great financial troubles, Wilky died young, while Bob was a chronic alcoholic.) Where he couldn’t show them as being “charming,” he moved on to something else. And the long portrait of his father in Notes of a Son and Brother vaguely glosses over the accident which left Henry James Senior lamed and embittered for life, with a cork leg—rather like the Mathew Brady photograph of him, whose frame ended just below the knee. Henry eventually does mention his father’s lameness. But at first, he merely writes that his father preferred walking on hard city pavements to being out in the countryside. Discretion tips over into outright evasion: whenever characters couldn’t be shown in a good light, they tend to simply disappear from the memoirs. For all that, in the portrait of his father in particular, Henry was still capable of a slyly humorous tone. He lamented that as a devout follower of Swedenborg, for instance, his father never seemed to meet any other fellow Swedenborgians; he noted sadly that his father’s writings, which he spent a lifetime slaving over, found so few readers. Henry implied what he knew—the hard fact that his father’s life had been a failure in many ways—but he didn’t say so outright. Perhaps the only way to transform this material was in the gently comical tone that he took.

With Minny Temple’s letters, Henry also rewrote and retouched many phrases, and destroyed the originals, without asking or telling anyone, even though these letters were not his. In doing this, he later claimed success or otherwise on purely aesthetic grounds—ignoring the moral position of a right to privacy which he would have held fiercely if the same thing had happened to him. In the phrase with which he defends the doctoring of both William’s and Minny Temple’s letters, he saw everything in the autobiographies, even other people’s correspondence, as being ultimately all his own truth, “to do what I would with.”⁷¹ Obsessive about retaining his own privacy, James dealt with others’ differently, as one of Leon Edel’s anecdotes implies. Theodora Bosanquet remembered a day at Lamb House in July 1908 when James showed her his neighbor, the “unspeakable Chesterton,” from the window of the Garden Room. Edel continues with a scene which can be found in H. G. Wells’s reminiscences:

Chesterton’s presence in Rye produced another incident which H. G. Wells remembered. On this occasion it was William James who climbed the gardener’s ladder to peep over the wall at Chesterton. Henry apparently felt it all right to look out of his own window at Chesterton as passer-by, but that it was wrong to invade privacy in William’s fashion. They quarrelled about this, Wells remembered, when he arrived in a car to fetch the William Jameses and Peggy for a visit to his home in Sandgate. James appealed to Wells. “It simply wasn’t done, emphatically, it wasn’t permissible behaviour in England”— this was the gist of the appeal.⁷²

Sometimes James hides behind his high aesthetic principles while writing his family portrait, using his avowed attempt to seize and preserve the truth of memory and atmosphere as an excuse for his slight trespasses, and for avoiding or blurring subjects he wanted to avoid. But his alterations and evasions erred on the side of privacy, not prurience. James’s use of other people’s letters in his autobiographies might have been unorthodox; but his embrace of the randomness with which he came by these letters was entirely consistent with these views on privacy. It was a literary way of not climbing a ladder to look over the wall at someone else.

He had not actively sought very much in the nature of documentary materials for the books. He had tended mainly to use whatever came his way circumstantially. If this made him a haphazard autobiographer or family chronicler, then it was likely that he did so quite consciously. He was always a literary passer-by, in his portraits of others, and didn’t intrude. Aesthetically, too, James felt it was important that his reach remained limited. In his 1908 Preface to “The Aspern Papers,” he even used the image of the wall and ladder in a slightly different way, noting that “the charm of looking over a garden-wall into another garden breaks down when successions of walls appear. The other gardens, those still beyond, may be there, but even by use of our longest ladder we are baffled and bewildered—the view is mainly a view of barriers.”⁷³ As an autobiographer, James sometimes put up those barriers himself. Arguably, destroying Minny’s letters—as he had destroyed forty years’ worth of his own, from other people, in 1909—was his way of carrying further his beliefs about personal privacy, which he had thought about many times over the years.

In his notebooks, James had long ago mused on “the idea of the responsibility of destruction—the destruction of papers, letters, records, etc., connected with the private and personal history of some great and honoured name and throwing some very different light on it,”⁷⁴ which he turned into the story “Sir Dominick Ferrand.” This was primarily an idea for his writing, but it did appear from his own destructive tendencies towards letters that he, personally, actually believed in this “responsibility.” The reasons behind this belief were subtle and devious. They lay as much in a hope that through such destruction, literary biography would be raised to the level of an art, as in a straightforward desire for the preservation of privacy.

In an 1897 essay on George Sand, James reflects on the ethics of biography and reading other people’s letters. This is “the greatest of literary quarrels,” James writes, musing on his own enjoyment of the salacious details—and the artistry—that he finds in Sand’s letters. It is “the quarrel beside which all others are mild and arrangeable, the eternal dispute between the public and the private, between curiosity and delicacy.”⁷⁵

James understood the urge to know every fact about a subject better than anyone—“when we wish to know at all we wish to know everything.”⁷⁶ But for writers in particular, he found biography denuding, mystery-shedding. Where his own novels and autobiographies shrouded their subjects in a haze of suggestion, the biographical facts did the opposite: stripping subjects remorselessly of their secrets and their magic. More than the moral right to privacy, it was this aesthetic paring down which troubled James. Biography had a leveling effect on a writer’s work. With a great writer, the facts served to cut the work down in size: to humanize, demystify, reduce. This leveling also went the other way, generating interest in work which would otherwise be forgotten. (In Sand’s case, James writes, her letters had stood the test of time almost better than her fiction.) Style, in the telling, could also redeem the most squalid biographical material, James realized. It was not the squalor of biographical facts that bothered him, so much as the fear of how they might be told, in relation to the work.

But where did this leave the artist, like himself? How could he ensure that he would be biographized with skill and sympathy? James knew it was impossible to avoid biographization altogether after death—that lay completely out of one’s hands. What one could do was destroy things, remove the substructure for any future chronicles. By destroying letters, especially, James hoped, he would increase his own unknowability in future incarnations. He would raise the stakes of the biographical enterprise so high that any biographer who wrote of him would be forced to extremes of ingenuity which made their work, effectively, an art, a fiction—and would leave the work intact and impenetrable. James sets all this down in the essay on George Sand. “The reporter and the reported have duly and equally to understand that they carry their life in their hands,” James writes, evolving a metaphor which goes further than the wall and gardener’s ladder:

There are secrets for privacy and silence; let them only be cultivated on the part of the hunted creature with even half the method with which the love of sport—or call it the historic sense—is cultivated on the part of the investigator […] Then at last the game will be fair […] Then the cunning of the inquirer, envenomed with resistance, will exceed in subtlety and ferocity anything we to-day conceive, and the pale forewarned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, the invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the siege of all the years.⁷⁷

The extraordinary rhetorical power of this passage suggests how much passionate thought James put into reflecting on what he calls the “game” of biography. If he had been less than completist when using the family letters, and indeed slightly altered them, this all fitted with his scheme; if he had been evasive and sparing with the facts, this was only in tune with his views about privacy. His memoirs cover his family’s tracks; and often, in key scenes, make things seem more, not less, mysterious. All this is hardly surprising from a writer whose whole life’s work had been spent inventing fictions; and who, in A Small Boy, writes that even when young, “what happened all the while […] was that I imagined things […] wholly other than as they were, and so carried on in the midst of the actual ones an existence that somehow floated and saved me.”⁷⁸ The autobiographies themselves reveal how much this very process of imagination made reality bearable for James and was the guiding motivation of his art.

Wells wrote in his own Experiment in Autobiography (1934) many years later—long after their quarrel over Wells’s satire of James in Boon (1915)—that James never “scuffled with Fact.”⁷⁹ This is not quite fair as an assessment of James’s autobiographies, which are saturated with facts and precisely recalled details, and whose reminiscential processes revealed James’s growing fascination with the real circumstances of his early life as he grew older. But James was keenly aware of the ways in which facts were also, often, limited and limiting: in an 1893 review of Flaubert’s correspondence, he had written persuasively: “Some day or other surely we shall all agree that everything is relative, that facts themselves are often falsifying, and that we pay more for some kinds of knowledge than those particular kinds are worth.”⁸⁰ When James misremembered names in his autobiographies, as one reader wrote to Scribner’s to point out, he initially remained only mildly contrite. It was all true to him, and remained so, even if he made a slip. Yet he was more concerned when his error was more serious, and concerned the Civil War.⁸¹

The way an event is remembered by someone seems as true to the person remembering as what actually happened; there are infinite degrees and shadings of truth; yet at extremes of experience we should never deny the existence of fact. Rather than as a factual record, James’s autobiographies are uniquely successful, above all, in representing what memory feels like. They capture memory’s textures, its failings, its distortions, its atmospheres, its accretions, its revelations. Few books come close in this attempt—although when the first volume of Proust’s immense novel appeared in 1913, an English reviewer compared it to A Small Boy and Others.⁸² Readers immediately sensed just how much James was pushing at the boundaries of the form of autobiography in this venture into the world of his past, and his explorations of the span or reach of memory.

There is another way the reach of any autobiography can be measured, other than the span between the act of recollection and the memories recounted. This is looking forwards, not backwards—towards the final span between the writing of autobiography, and the writer’s eventual death. The ill-health which had plagued James throughout 1913 was a foretaste of future ailments. He perhaps knew that he didn’t have long to live. When Notes of a Son and Brother was published in March 1914, he was again encouraged by good reviews, writing to Harry that “If I am myself able to live on and work a while longer I probably shall perpetrate a certain number more passages of retrospect and reminiscence.”⁸³

Passages, not volumes—although, with Notes of a Son and Brother, James had only reached 1870. At roughly the same rate of progress, the Autobiography as a projected whole would perhaps have had another four volumes: one for each decade of his life until 1914. As it is, we are left with a huge gap in the middle of how James might have seen his life, just as he was, in the memoirs, becoming a writer. As Wells wrote, again, in his Experiment, it was “a great loss to the science of criticism” that James died before he finished “his slowly unfolding autobiography.”⁸⁴ James did work on The Middle Years in the autumn of 1914, before putting it aside, perhaps to try and progress further with his fiction. He had two unfinished novels to complete, The Ivory Tower, and The Sense of the Past. But he was to finish no more books before, on February 28, 1916, he died.

Ford Madox Ford, c.late 1920s.

Source: Ford Madox Ford collection, #4605. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.