The Other Brothers

86 The Henry James Review his—he was invariably at her disposal: her nerves were his nerves, she claimed he said; her stomach was his stomach. Certainly no give and take there! How did such a firm belief grow among the Jameses, especially when repeatedly no organic cause was found for Alice's periodic prostrations? And was the belief basically different from the understanding that came to prevail about Wilkie and Bob—that, in spite of their brave soldiering, they would be perennially childlike and not amount to anything? Of course they did not amount to anything (no matter how sympathetically you describe their lives), forced as they were to contend, practically speaking, with hostility within as well as without. Indeed, having learned to expect it, they even sought it. Or so one might infer from their idealistic efforts to grow cotton in Florida, immediately after the war, using black labor, and from their ventures into what was for them the alien territory of the Midwest. So, too, when Alice—primed for a short life—learned from her last doctor that she could expect to die soon from the lump in her breast, she remarked that her "aspirations" had finally been "brillianüy fulfilled": she had a "palpable disease." They were not as "eccentric"—these aspirations—as Alice would have us believe, but rather an integral part of her life-script, thoroughly absorbed by all the Jameses, who were nothing if not dutiful, every one of them, which is why Wilkie was so shocked at his father's will, and why Alice "worked" at dying, which she not only thought was expected of her but which made her feel connected once again with her parents, especially her father, who had died so unresistingly, so willingly. Perhaps, then, the ultimate paradox of the James family is the appearance of looseness and freedom (which both Henry and Alice complained so bitterly about) when in reality the children's destinies were preordained. Just as—in Leon Edel's application of Henry's own shrewd formulation in The Portrait of a Lady—the father was maternal and the mother "inclined to be gubernatorial," so the much-celebrated license to be rather than do had its strangulating effects. Henry James Sr. loved his children to distraction, but he also read them early on (compare his "Wilkums" and "Bobbins" with Willy and Harry) and inscribed their characters on their foreheads even as he embraced them. When maternal love and devotion are combined with the crippling power and authority vested in a father who seems all dependent and pliable, the results can be devastating indeed. Interestingly enough, though they all resisted, what distinguishes Alice, Wilkie, and Bob from William and Henry is that the three youngest, in varying degrees, expended their energies resisting resistance. Thus one finds Bob saying, at the end of his life, that "Father was the only being on earth [he] ever cared for deeply," and Alice recalling her struggles as a teenager and young woman to cease struggling with a benign, silver-locked pater who was telling her in so many words and gestures that the Jamesland he had shaped for her would be the only country to which she could possibly belong. Inhibiting is not the word. Jane Maher—The Other Brothers Because this gathering is being held as much to honor the biographer Leon Edel as it is to honor Henry James, I have decided to discuss the way my biography of Wilkie and Robertson developed. This is not to imply that such an explanation will in any way reflect the way in which Mr. Edel created his biography of Henry. I will stay away from such presumptuous comparisons. As Selected Papers on Henry James 87 Flannery O'Connor said when speaking of William Faulkner, "I keep clear of [him] so my own little boat won't get swamped." I do suspect, however, that you would be interested in some of the circumstances that led me from one clue to another, from one bundle of letters to another, from one descendant to another—two-and-a-half years of research that began at Yale University and that encompassed Arizona, California, Massachusetts...