Henry James:
The Imagination of Genius
By Fred Kaplan
Norton, 598 pages, $25
Fred Kaplan, previously the author of biographies of Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle, has given us a new biography of Henry James. It is a book that brings complexity, intelligence and feeling to the major issues of its subject`s busy life.
Some of those issues are social. The much-traveled James knew many important figures, like the older English poets Tennyson and Browning, the European novelists Turgenev and Flaubert, the American painter John Singer Sargent and both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt. This breadth of acquaintanceship opens the way for some lively chitchat from Kaplan about both politics and Anglo-America`s upper bohemian world of art and publishing. That world, in particular, was one that James knew well, for he always tried to publish his works in serial form on both sides of the Atlantic before bringing them out as books.
James is rightly thought of today as the supreme novelist of consciousness. In works like ”The Wings of the Dove” (1902), he criticized, refined and worked over each of his motifs, nuance by nuance, in order to gain a desired effect. Kaplan`s description of Lambert Strether, the main character of ”The Ambassadors” (1903), as ”an observer observing himself making observations” applies just as strictly to James. The phrase illuminates both James`s lifelong penchant for self-examination and the celebrated, or infamous, complexity of his language and thought.
But James was more than a connoisseur of minute moral discriminations. The rich social life he cultivated included teas, dinners and receptions, along with evenings at both the theater and the opera; he notes in his diary having dined out some 107 times during London`s 1879 social season. Such notations permeate Kaplan`s rich study, which misses few chances to give insight into its subject.
Thus, for a new generation of readers, Kaplan repeats the story about the writer`s brother William, the famous pragmatist and psychologist, drawing a sketch of a man flogging a dead horse to be smuggled onto the title page of one of their father`s quasi-philosophical books. He shows a thick-waisted Henry taking fencing lessons in the 1880s in order to lose weight. He describes the joy Henry took in cycling in the following decade. Kaplan also recounts the fun James found in the collaborative, social effort of playwriting after many years of solitude as a maker of novels and short stories.
Thorough and painstaking, Kaplan is also inspired. One sign of his skill is the shock caused by the fraught last sentence of the book`s 14th chapter:
”Suddenly, in late January 1910, at almost 67 years of age, he became seriously, debilitatingly ill.”
The depression that flattened James` spirits had been steadily evolving. Being a writer gave him freedom, but it also imposed boundaries he respected both as an artist and as an offshoot of a conservative yet eccentric New England family that was ruled by a strong sense of propriety, even
prudishness.
Charmed by the sensuality of Venice, for instance, James could never surrender himself to it, although living abroad in ”this rich old Europe”
did stimulate his imagination. He found the United States too raw and confining and also needed to be away from his family, particularly the exuberant William, who found his brother`s late novels perverse and unreadable.
Yet if William was an ordeal for Henry, he also provided a major support system. Living abroad made Henry feel homesick and give him the ache of being a permanent outsider. His practice of observing, rather than participating, deepened his woes, robbing him of the chance to fend off boredom, loneliness and financial problems.
Money always worried him. This ”most famous unread writer in the world” never wrote a book that earned a profit for its publisher. His royalties for 1895-96 on 16 books brought out by Macmillan`s came to slightly over 7 pounds. The last major artistic effort of his life, writing the prefaces, some 5,000 words apiece, to the 23 volumes in the New York Edition of his work, only earned him $211 in 1908, the year most of the volumes appeared.
Nor was sex an outlet for James` frustrations. He understood women and enjoyed their company, and among male novelists writing in English only George Meredith and Thomas Hardy among his contemporaries and D.H. Lawrence among his successors can rival James as creators of female characters. Yet the same female identification that helped him portray a Daisy Miller or a Maggie Verver (of ”The Golden Bowl”) inclined him erotically toward men.
Accepting the passive, traditionally feminine, role in most of his relationships, James fell in love with a number of men. But he conducted his amours with the same fastidiousness, restraint and emotional control he brought to everything else. Because erotic abandon would have disrupted both his writing schedule and his New England sense of propriety, he forfeited sexual bonding. This proved a mixed blessing, at best. The early story, ”A Light Man” (1869) and the late masterpiece, ”The Beast in the Jungle”
(1903), show James using the impersonality of art to struggle with both the evasions and the obsessiveness that ruled his psyche.
That unresolved internal drama comes to vibrant life in ”Henry James:
The Imagination of Genius,” the greatest boon of which is the vital circuit it traces between its subject`s life and art. Kaplan leavens his insight into James with his decades of experience as a biographer. His new book has a fullness and a ripeness the Master himself would have relished. Also worthy of being savored is Kaplan`s style. His prose, fixed and denotative without being flat, has a brightness and a rhythm that contrasts admirably with James`s smoky, involuted prose.
Perhaps Kaplan includes more of James` prose than he needs to. Having had access to ”more than 10,000 unpublished letters” stored in Harvard`s Houghton Library may have hamstrung as well as helped him. His tendency to let James speak for himself slows narrative flow, deprives Kaplan of control and probably also shackled his imagination.
Kaplan omits all mention of James`s previous critics and biographers, which smudges the validity of his subtitle, ”The Imagination of Genius.” And he says too little about either James` work or his artistic growth. Aware of the tensions that undergird his man`s art, Kaplan can capture the substance of one of his works quickly without being superficial. The merit of his literary analyses makes one wish that they could have been extended.
But those disclaimers pertain to the biography Fred Kaplan did not write. The one he has written supplies psychological shadings, depths and resonances within a moving framework of social history. The Henry James that emerges from it chose the life he wanted and then lived it, accepting its pitfalls along with its rewards. The power and the tact with which Kaplan records this twilit intensity should make his fine new biography the definitive statement on James` life for the next generation.
