Alice in Jamesland

84 The Henry James Review his survivors felt they had no choice but to dress him up again for public viewing. The James children faced the strange challenge of somehow coming to grips with a powerful father who abjured the traditional and recognizable forms of authority. For Henry Jr. in particular, this father was a disturbing incarnation of Proteus, the slippery old man one can never seize. The future novelist was embarrassed and confused, and he protected himself from his father's disturbing immodesty by perfecting a certain act of silence. Henry Jr. became Henry James by not speaking out or thinking out, and by writing fiction that is endlessly concerned with the necessity of righüy guarded social behavior and righüy limited points of view. To read this fiction well, we must also read the author's monstrous father. But how to get hold of this figure is a very tricky problem. Gloria Fromm—Alice in Jamesland It has not escaped notice that William's famous remark about Henry seems just as appropriate to the other James children: they were all "natives of the James family, [with] no other country." Yet Jamesland is by no means a place that can be mapped out with precision. One reason is surely that its terrain shifted for each James, almost as though it were a theatrical set, hills changing to mountain peaks (or vice versa), straight roads becoming narrow winding lanes, valleys turning into veritable abysses. And the term for variations such as these will differ from discipline to discipline—the lit. crit. people calling it "textuality," the social scientists "micro-families," each sibling, in other words, creating and experiencing a quite different family/world. Jane Maher has certainly illustrated this point in her recent documentary account of Wilkie and Bob James, whose problem-ridden lives reflect an emotional environment that contrasts rather sharply with the far more expectant nurturing of William and Henry. Wilkie, of course, like Alice, barely made it to middle age, dying at thirty-eight of organic ailments that manifested themselves much more readily—and sooner—than hers. But then he had had a head start, with a grave wound in the Civil War, not to mention an early marriage that seems to have displeased everybody in his family as well as a series of ill-fated financial ventures, supported by Henry James Sr. but also resulting—it would appear—in his father's cutting Wilkie out of his will. Whatever the reason for excluding the hapless Wilkie (and there is at least a suggestion that the ambiguous Aunt Kate played a malevolent role here), two of Wilkie's brothers and his sister were sufficiently pained by the exclusion to take steps to rectify it, though they had to persuade William of the moral lightness of their feeling. On the other hand, possibly to keep the balance, William, for his part, was a good deal more actively sympathetic to Bob's personal problems than either Alice or Henry. Indeed, by the time they were all grown up, Alice seems to have actively disliked the unstable alcoholic Bob, while the kind and patient Henry seems to have tried mainly to steer as clear of him as he could, without being too obvious about it. Depending on the point of view, then, in true Henry Jamesian fashion, Jamesland harbors some quite different self-reflective stories, or narrative paradigms , if you will. William's and Henry's, needless to say, are the ones we have known—and liked—the best, understandably, since they tell of great strength and success after weakness, uncertainty, ill-health: a favorite nineteenth-century story line. That Henry's own stories do not follow this pattern suggests not only Selected Papers on Henry James 85 that in his imaginative life he rejected the nineteenth century but also that he was responding to the more dominant pattern in his own family—of struggle and resignation or failure, some instances more pronounced and dramatic than others. One might certainly argue that two geniuses can make up for three wasted and strangled lives, but lately it has been wasted and strangled lives that are getting attention, especially from cultural...