Henry James's Roderick Hudson: A Convergence of Family Stories

Henry James's Roderick Hudson: A Convergence of Family Stories by Brad S. Born, University of Kansas All biographers of the James family have recognized and emphasized the importance of the relationship between the two oldest sons, William and Henry.1 While this study uncovers no new biographical data, it does address a glaring omission in biographical scholarship: the significance of Roderick Hudson as an account of Henry's relationship with William. The novel explores this powerful emotional connection by reworking several James family stories to create for the emerging writer needed distance from his older brother. Part I discusses James's fascination with and adaptation of Henry Sr.'s stories of Albany youth ending badly; Part II tells the story of William's artistic endeavors ending abruptly, focusing especially on Henry's version of this tale; and Part III looks at the convergence of these stories in Roderick Hudson, which not only repeats the pattern of the paternal story, but also reveals Henry's struggle to assert his artistic independence despite his longing to remain intimately wed to William. I. Story Time with Father In A Small Boy and Others, Henry James recounts how as a youngster he and the other James children heard in their father's stories a recurring theme: a "sense of 'dissipation' as an abounding element in family histories" (SB 47). Henry Sr.'s stories inevitably focused upon a youth who, "in spite of brilliant promise and romantic chann, ended badly, as badly as possible" (SB 47-48). Susceptible to this tragic end were all those "young men who were the least exposed," which meant not being "launched in business of a rigorous sort" (SB 48-49). In this story land "so simply constituted, whatever wasn't business . . . was just simply pleasure"; a young man was either "busy" or "tipsy" (SB 49). Listening to father's gloomy narratives, the children well understood that their generation too could re-enact this fall, for the "grim little generalisation remained ... as still standing" (SB 48). As William and Henry approached the age to launch themselves in a career, they heard a retelling of the old story: moral failure was still the dominant theme, but now to be "exposed" meant choosing a career: now father feared that The Henry James Review 12 (1991): 199-211 © 1991 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 200 The Henry James Review any particular career would be too "narrowing" for his boys (NS 52). In Notes of a Son and Brother, James recalls that when William pursued first art, then chemistry, anatomy, and physiology before earning his medical degree, only to proceed to psychology and finally philosophy, their father's "rich malaise at every turn characteristically betrayed itself, each of these surrenders being, by the measure of them in the parental imagination, so comparatively narrowing" (NS 51-52). Even when Henry began to write, father told him in his "finest bewildering eloquence" that this too was narrowing (NS 52). Henry Jr. apparently listened well to his father's stories of familial failure because his own accounts of Albany cousins' failures repeat the standard tale. The legend of his first cousin Bob Barker provides one version: "He seemed exposed, for his pleasure—if pleasure it was!—and my wonder, to every assault of experience; . . . and it was all in the right key that, a few years later, he should, after 'showing some talent for sculpture,' have gone the hapless way of most of the Albany youth, have become a theme for sad vague headshakes . . . and died prematurely and pointlessly" (SB 188). In James's account of father's stories, and now in his own story, the hero is "exposed" to a corrupting influence called Pleasure. Bob, like "most of the Albany youth" in Henry Sr.'s stories, began brilliantly but ended badly, providing yet another story with the same old "theme for sad headshakes." The life of John James, yet another artistic Albany cousin, piovided a similar story. James recalls that "J.J." too had "succumbfed] to monstrous early trouble after having shown some talent" for music (SB 189).2 While Bob's pitiful tale had "played in the right key," so, too, JJ.'s...