Henry James, The Imagination of Genius: A Biography (review)

Book Reviews Fred Kaplan. Henry James, The Imagination of Genius: A Biography. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1992. Illustrated with Photographs, xiii + 620 pp. $25.00. Fred Kaplan's Henry James, The Imagination of Genius: A Biography is the best account we have yet had of the character and internal economy of the writer. Although Leon Edel's five volumes on James remain a useful source in many ways, his notion that we know James fully by surveying his published work as a whole fails to convey a sense of his identity. Fred Kaplan's book has a distinctly different emphasis: it is wholly devoted to the question of the interconnections between the motives, desires, sense of the world, evasions, disguises, and particular strengths and weaknesses of the man who found it possible to deploy his imaginative resources in such amazingly effective ways. James's "genius," a word James himself used frequently, was a fact nobody can account for, yet it was exercised under conditions set by his emotional endowment and familial and social circumstances. The line Kaplan hews to gives us an unmatched knowledge of James's life as son, brother, social being, and lover as manifest in the letters and as underlying the fictional works Kaplan finds illustrative of James's emotional constitution. Kaplan is incisive and persuasive about the emotional plight of the children of Henry James senior, a beneficent tyrant, whose principled denial of personal claims on the world, including fatherly authority, deprived his children of a defined place within it. Their parent hoped they would flower as the divine spark lodged within each of them prompted. As Kaplan puts it, to Henry Junior "it seemed that the family lived outside society." The children were bathed in affection, offered repeated experiences of European travel, and deprived of any sense as to how the world was ordered for those who had to make a living—the family lived exclusively on the income derived from the Syracuse property inherited from the paternal grandfather. Their schooling was haphazard, and when it came time to go to college William and Henry were told that they could not undertake anything so spiritually confining—a prohibition mysteriously lifted in later years when they were permitted, indeed encouraged, to attend professional schools. The future novelist was his mother's favorite; his first sense of the multifarious world derived from watching his comparatively adventurous brother William, to whom, Kaplan finds, he was and remained more deeply tied than to any other person, despite their differences. The youngster early took to reading and scribbling, was entranced by the theater, and adopted the passive role of observer. He found an escape from the "constant threat of social exclusion and powerlessness" by imagining himself an orphan or an artist. He "wanted to belong to the world of art" in which he would himself be "emperor." This biography offers the best account I have read of the vexed youth of William and Henry, whose neurotic impairment took various psychosomatic forms, notably backaches and constipation. Kaplan remarks at one point, ' 'As always, emotional problems were constantly in search of illnesses." Both these sons consistently pled illness to get away to Europe, often putting a strain on the family finances in doing so. Kaplan's narrative of the younger brother's escape into the world opened by his imaginative powers is continuously absorbing. James's career began with a rush; the biographer notes that in the period 1864-1866 Henry James produced six published stories and twenty-nine reviews. The Civil War service of the two younger brothers, Robertson and Wilkinson, who was brought home seriously wounded, enters into these stories. Kaplan finds a dominant concern in "The Romance of Certain Old Clothes," a story that The Henry James Review 14 (1993): 223-233 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 224 The Henry James Review ' 'dramatizes the puritan's revenge against materialism and eroticism. This was a theme that James was to pursue for his entire career." This is a rather muted and abstract statement about James's treatment of the greedy and lustful impulses that so often energize the movement of his fiction. When Kaplan discusses James...