HENRY JAMES: AUTOBIOGRAPHY (622 pp.)—edited by Frederick W. Dupee— Criterion ($7.50).
"I sit heavily stricken and in darkness," wrote Henry James to a friend in the summer of 1910. His "ideal elder brother," Philosopher William James, had just died, and at 67, Henry was the sole survivor of four James brothers and one sister. As he sat down to write his autobiography, James must have felt that the face of life had not really smiled on him for two decades. His plays had pitiably flopped. At the opening-night curtain of one of them he was hooted off the London stage. His late novels, with their labyrinthine sentences and ideas, scarcely sold, and even fond brother William had been forced to confess: "I for one am no longer able to read a word he writes." Yet James was sustained by glimmerings of posthumous greatness which he revealed in a letter to Fellow Novelist William Dean Howells: "Some day all my buried prose will kick off its various tombstones at once."
And so it has. In the 1940s the best of his lavish literary output (about 60 novels, short stories and plays) was re-issued and re-evaluated. Though it provoked its share of cultist nonsense, the rediscovery of James placed him firmly where he had always neglectedly been, at the hard core of great American novel writing along with the other 19th century greats, Hawthorne, Melville and Mark Twain. Over and above the others, James proved to be an enlightening bridge to the greatest of 20th century writing. In his psychological probings, he prefigured Proust's monumental Remembrance of Things Past. And in his "wonder of consciousness in everything," he pebbled the bed on which James Joyce's "stream of consciousness" was later to flow.
Spiritual Geography. The autobiography, long out of print and first published about 40 years ago, reveals still another James, dissimilar though at times more trenchant than the Henry Adams of the Education. It covers little more than James's first 26 years, and its editor, F. W. Dupee, an able biographer of James, concedes that it is written in the novelist's "late late style," which makes some of its insights tortuous though rewarding. But the book offers undivided nostalgic charm in its portrait of the carriage-trade world of pre-Civil War New York. And for those who relish tranquillity recollected in tranquillity, it affords a rare glimpse of the quietest fecundity in nature, an artist sinking roots in the soil of his creative imagination.
"He is a native of the James family and has no other country," said brother William of Henry. As spiritual geography this was true enough, but in point of physical fact, Henry's boyhood was spent in a roomy house on Manhattan's 14th Street. Though he was "a very town-bred small person," little Henry had to walk no farther north than the corner of 18th Street and Fourth Avenue to find an estate with "grounds," and peep wide-eyed through the iron railing at an esoteric menagerie of fawns, peacocks and guinea fowl. But usually the James boys romped close to home, and little Henry tagged behind "big brother Bill" like a shadow.