The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (review)

Looking at Henry James Sr., his wife Mary, and sister-in-law Catharine Walsh through Jane Carlyle’s “cruel eyes,” Alfred Habegger notes, “one sees an obnoxious cripple followed by two identical dowdies nervously aware of being out of their depth” (215). In this seminal biography, an indispensable addition to James studies, Habegger redeems Henry Sr. from such a cruel charge even as he keeps us aware of its partial truth. Magisterial in scope, this “fully investigated” biography, which promises and delivers “hundreds of fresh discoveries” (7), is both encyclopedic and critical, and deserves to take pride of place among other recent accounts of James family members, such as those by Howard Feinstein, R. W. B. Lewis, Jane Maher, and Jean Strouse. Informative, thorough, respectful but also—appropriately—bewildered, incredulous, agog at Henry Sr.’s manic behavior, Habegger inspires confidence that he has exhausted available resources. “Monomaniacal,” “scandalous,” “reckless,” “remarkable,” “genius,” “sinister”—these terms from just the first short chapter suggest the admirable balance Habegger achieves.

Meticulously tracing Henry Sr.’s life chronologically, Habegger provides a richly detailed account of his early life in Albany, his father William’s extensive business dealings, and especially the conditions of the convoluted will that—eventually—enabled Henry Sr. to spend his adult life as a leisured thinker and writer. Habegger’s detective work shows itself in numerous compelling anecdotes. At the age of seven or eight Henry Sr. robbed his father’s dressing table drawer because he owed money for candy. He fell in love with a housemaid whom he observed every Sunday out the window of the Presbyterian church. He performed miserably at Union College in Schenectady because he spent so much time drinking and gambling. Habegger’s stirring narrative of the injury that caused the amputation of James’s right leg (at age 16) serves as a foundational event because of the trauma and guilt the three-year confinement entailed. No obscure hurt, this injury haunted James for years, accounting in Habegger’s estimation for the “barren waste” (101) of the five-year period (1830–35) between his Union College graduation and his enrollment in seminary, as well as for the terrifying “vastation,” or psychic collapse, he suffered at Frogmore Cottage during his family’s first extended visit to England in 1844, and probably for James’s manic and paradoxical efforts to perfect the degraded human self. Drifting around upper New York state in his mid-20s, for example, James felt wracked by “pathological guilt” (113) and became the family “pariah” (115)—albeit a rich one when the heirs broke William James’s will in 1837. James was such a half-hearted student at Princeton Theological Seminary that he took a six-month sabbatical during his second year, vacationing in England and Ireland before returning—just long enough to become a “flaming rebel” (154). The vocational turning point, in Habegger’s view: discovering and republishing Robert Sandeman’s radically anti-authoritarian Letters on Theron and Aspasio. James’s “long and aggressive campaign against established religion had begun” (157); he became an American Ishmael (161).

“Father’s paradoxes, ambiguities, and contradictions were so deep-seated and intricate his children could not really grasp them,” Habegger comments (305), and reading this fascinating biography means sharing this vexed position with Habegger himself. In Notes of a Son and Brother Henry Jr. observes that the “force and truth” of “‘Father’s Ideas’” “pervaded and supported his existence, and very considerably our own” (AU 330), and this biography demonstrates the accuracy of the son’s observation. James’s almost Ahabic efforts (the comparison is Habegger’s) to pursue controversies and to have his day—or weeks—in the court of public opinion tend to eclipse the family life at home, which Henry Jr. aficionados would dearly love more information about. Habegger indulges in some informed speculation about the James family’s life with father, and he certainly honors the importance of “the mother,” Mary Robertson Walsh James, to father...