HENRY JAMES: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES
In the mid 1850s, a father made this observation about his
14-year-old son's unexceptional performance in school: "Harry
is not so fond of study, properly so-called, as of reading....
He has considerable talent as a writer, but I am at a loss to
know whether he will ever accomplish much." The father need not
have worried. Within fifty years, "Harry" (as family and
friends called Henry James) would be known among his peers as
"The Master." He is known to us today as one of the greatest
novelists to have written in English.
Henry James was born in New York City on April 15, 1843, into a
family that was as eccentric as it was wealthy and as brilliant
as it was eccentric. Henry James Sr., was a philosopher who
counted among his visitors many of the noted thinkers of the
day, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. His
oldest son, William, would in time also write on philosophy and
psychology, surpassing his father to become one of the most
important figures in American intellectual history. The James
family made frequent and lengthy trips through Europe, giving
the young Henry a formal education that was at best haphazard,
but also exposing him early to the continent, that would become
the setting and the subject of so much of his writing.
Wealth, leisure, and travel should perhaps have made Henry
James's childhood an idyll. But it was an idyll shadowed by
James's fears and insecurities. Compared to his confident older
brother, Henry felt frail and unmasculine; sometimes mocked by
other boys, he retreated into the company of his mother, sister,
and aunt. In 1860 the family had settled at Newport, Rhode
Island. There, the following year, while helping others fight a
stable fire, James suffered an injury he described as "a horrid
even if an obscure hurt." Throughout his life he remained as
mysterious about the specific nature of this injury as he would
be about the evil in The Turn of the Screw, but it severely
affected him. It prevented him from fighting in the Civil War.
Some critics also contend that it was the cause--or perhaps
simply the convenient excuse--behind James's apparently total
lifelong rejection of sexual relationships. In any case, the
physical and psychological pain it gave him was one more force
isolating him from the rest of the world. It was to compensate
for this sense of isolation, to make some connection with
others, that James turned to writing.
After giving formal schooling one final try at age 19 in a
miserable and unsuccessful year at Harvard Law School, James
determined to make literature his career. He began to publish
his first book reviews and stories. Some of these early works
have been described as being "like the faint and confused
