Prelude: James and Biography

'The Real Right Thing' (1899), a strange, ghostly story by Henry James, outlines some of the pleasures and (more emphatically) the anxieties of writing biography. Just a few pages long, it is less a story than a record of changing circumstance. The widow of a recently dead author approaches one of his younger, obscure friends, offering him all her husband's papers and his warm, comfortable study to work in so that he can record his life. It is a convenient arrangement, but she is a strange Gothic figure clad in black, her face half-obscured by a black fan, as she silently appears and disappears in stairways and rooms. And her intentions soon become clear - she will ensure that her role in the author's life is represented as she wishes.

Initially the work goes well and Withermore, the emblematically named young man, senses the benign presence of his friend: 'the light breath of his dead host was as distinctly in his hair as his own elbows were on the table before him' (CT 10: 478). If he only were to look up from his work, he knows he would see him across the table. Both widow and aspiring biographer acknowledge his presence. Then, one evening, Withermore realizes that he has been abandoned. He presses on, but it is hopeless. He stands with the widow in the hall, the world of the living illuminated by electric light and furnished with fashionable rugs from Tottenham Court Road stores, and they recognize that 'some monstrous oppression . was closing over both of them'.

Withermore's earlier conviction that the 'artist was what he did - he was nothing else' is confirmed (475). The dead man is vulnerable and helpless, and his admirer has to acknowledge the effrontery of the intrusion: '"[w]e lay him bare. We serve him up. What is it called? We give him to the world"' (483). Finally, his biographer must surrender as his subject seems to stand in the darkness at the top of the stairs, projecting the incontrovertible wishes of the dead: '[h]e strains forward out of his darkness; he reaches toward us out of his mystery; he makes us dim signs out of his horror'. It is not the horror of death or oblivion but rather his helplessness - he is not indifferent and his strength of feeling has the power of a curse. Withermore finds the door to his room guarded by his presence, '"[i]mmense. But dim. Dark. Dreadful"' (484, 485).

This is one, sensationally sinister version of the biographical enterprise, though other acts of investigation, or intrusion, and entailing alternative horrors, feature in James's fiction. In 'The Aspern Papers', the posthumous privacy of Jeffrey Aspern is threatened by the inquiries of the dishonourable American scholar who turns up in Venice to befriend the two women who can help him. Aspern is finally saved when the unnamed man (who also narrates) is frightened off by the final bargain offered to him: the unpalatable prospect of marriage to the younger of the women - his own life and body in exchange for the real object of his desire: Aspern's papers. James's great essay of 1907 on Shakespeare and The Tempest endorses the completeness and untouchability of the poet's works, the corresponding irrelevance of his personal circumstances and the futility of scholars' biographical enquiries.

By contrast, the novelist assumed the biographer's role himself in the portraits and sketches he wrote in the manner of Sainte-Beuve, the French critic he so admired, which combine the critical with a selection of biographical detail, 'life' made to serve 'letters'. In an early monograph on Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879), James distances himself from the genre from the beginning by affirming that he will give 'this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography' (Hawthorne, p. 1). The title of his other biographical essay, William Wetmore Story and his Friends (1903), indicates the broader nature of James's interest beyond its principal subject. The life of this expatriate Bostonian, resident in Rome, established sculptor and aspiring dramatist, is approached through impressions of Italian landscapes and cities and sketches of celebrated writers such as James Russell Lowell and Robert and Elizabeth Browning. James confessed that 'there is no subject - there is nothing in the man himself to write about. There is nothing for me but to do a tour de force, or try to - leave poor dear W.W.S. out, practically, and make a little volume on the old Roman, Americo-Roman, Hawthornesque and other bygone days'.1 The text of this biography is, naturally, more circumspect, though 'the interesting boxful' of materials to which he refers seems to be a formal invocation of the biographer, a rhetorical aside, rather than raising the romantic possibilities and mysteries attaching to his subject, the dark mood of 'The Real Right Thing'.

In his own latter years, James, clearly and acutely aware of the biographical curiosity attaching to great authors, sought continuously to preserve his own posthumous privacy. He insistently (and often fruitlessly) advised friends to destroy his letters, and the scene of his supervising the burning of papers in his back garden in later years must have seemed like an episode from one of his short stories. He did not wish - quite understandably - to leave 'personal and private documents at the mercy of any accidents'.2 Many of his letters to family and friends are finely written and engaging documents, but those to the young men he loved in later life, make the reader feel, even now, as if intruding on the novelist's privacy.

Finally, recording a time long past, a society and culture quite distinct from a present that was preparing for world war, James embarked on his own autobiography, highly original in its avoidance of the ponderousness of many Victorian memoirs, affectionate in its recollection of people and incidents otherwise forgotten, and faithful in its adherence to the prevailing motive which was to follow the development of a life pursuing the ambition to be 'just literary'. He exploits allusion and a style rich in possibility which conveys (at least initially) 'the indelibility of the childish vision' (AS, p. 92). In these two and a half volumes, A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother and the incomplete Middle Years, James discloses a wealth of unique biographical detail and has thus determined how posterity will learn of his earlier life. In addition, his text contains other less obvious messages, minor revelations which yield their secrets when innocent assertions are examined. His last typist and amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, recalls the scene of their composition and the fluency of James's thoughts as he paced the room, 'sounding out the periods in tones of free resonant assurance. At such times he was beyond reach of irrelevant sounds or sights'.3

The process had not been without hazards for James himself: the genesis for the autobiographical writing was a projected edition of his late brother William's letters, though his handling of these soon led him to his own childhood memories which take up the first volume, A Small Boy and Others. The second volume, Notes of a Son and Brother, contains a generous selection (closely 'edited' by James himself) of family letters, written principally by his brother, father, and cousin, Minny Temple. The fact that they were now all dead clearly allowed him a revisionary freedom that he sometimes exploited, whatever others said. Editorial criteria have, of course, changed over the years, but James's confidence in handling such documents never wavers. In Notes of a Son and Brother, he assumes an assured authorial stance, a role as informed mediator and arranger of information uniquely qualified and therefore to be trusted: 'I allow myself not to hang back in gathering several passages from another series for fear of their crossing in a manner the line of privacy and giving a distinctness to old intimate things. The distinctness is in the first place all to the honour of the persons and the interests thus glimmering through; and I hold, in the second, that the light touch under which they revive positively adds, by the magic of memory, a composite fineness' (NSB, p. 207).

If these volumes have indeed negotiated a 'line of privacy' and honoured to some degree those 'old intimate things', they may stand then as an authorized life quite literally, and they offer the richest resource for the biographer. But the dangers of the biographical process are many and forbidding, not least in diminishing or compromising the mystery and autonomy of the individual. James himself, who in his later years gave an interview whose premises he then denied, spells out his own anxieties to what may have been his surprised interviewer - though his change of mind or disowning of the process nevertheless was included as part of the final published portrait. He seems struck by the potential vulgarity of any association with the press and its 'reverberations', and, more forcefully, by the horror of his private self publicly paraded: '"I have a constituted and systematic indisposition to having anything to do myself, personally, with anything in the nature of an interview, report, reverberation, that is, to adopting, endorsing,...