The James Family

90 The Henry James Review conclusion was about to collapse—and it was entirely because of my presumptuousness . I overnight expressed a copy of my manuscript to Mr. James in Ireland and spent the next three weeks thinking about little else but his response. Finally, Mr. James's response arrived. "Dear Jane Maher," he wrote, "I have just now finished reading your manuscript on Wilky and Robertson, and you certainly do have permission to quote from letters as you requested. . . . Whatever the future, your work stands as a labor of love, and I have learned from it. Will you give me a copy? Sincerely, Alexander Robertson James." I did give him a copy, of course, and an additional one for his son, whose name, incidentally, is Robertson. Since then, I've met many Jamesians, most pleasurably Addy Tintner and, of course, Mr. Edel, and I've heard from some other Jameses. Michael James, William's grandson, wrote to tell me how much he liked my book and how happy he was that his brother Alexander had given me permission to quote from the family letters. I've even begun a correspondence with John Jay Chapman, Robertson's great grandson. In fact, he's invited me to his annual summer party next June—he says he has many questions about his ancestors he'd like to ask me. I've accepted his invitation; it sounds like fun. Leon Edel—The James Family I appreciate your inviting me here today on the occasion of my crossing the octogenarian frontier. The remarks of your president, the thoughtful planning of the program, the presence of a distinguished descendant of Robertson James are corollary to the more intellectual part of the meeting of a learned society. We are gathered in what seems like one of a thousand rooms; there are voices all around us; and you have included this touch of personal sentiment, for which I thank you very much. It is a great pleasure to be among former students and their sons and daughters, to meet old friends, to recapture the liveliness of this kind of gathering. In my imagination, which never bothers about footnotes, I have quaffed the champagne, blown out the candles, listened to the singing voices like Prufrock and the mermaids, even eaten a piece of the birthday cake. Let me assure you of my gratitude; I find the party exhilarating. And the papers I have listened to are exhilarating as well. My mind went back, as it often does now, to sixty years ago, when the best that could be said by the old critics was that Henry James was not very important, and that he was affluent, so that he did not have to write for a living; moreover, he was an expatriate, which meant he was not a real American. Now we have come far along; and the discussion of the James family seems to me highly relevant and of the highest importance. William James's widow and her oldest son Henry III tried dutifully to do the real right thing after the novelist's death, which had been preceded by those of his famous brother and his other siblings. Lubbock edited the James letters at their request and left out the earlier years on the theory that A Small Boy and Notes of a Son and Brother had taken care of them. Then Henry III edited, with considerable care and finesse and understandable omissions at the time, his father's letters. Those autobiographical volumes of his Uncle Henry tell us today much more than Henry III himself saw in them. Large histories are written between the lines. One has simülv to read them in the wav we read noems. There followed, during Selected Papers on Henry James 91 of Henry III: these dealt more with the philosophical ideas of William, but a goodly amount of family history was further revealed. Matthiessen's volume, which came later, drew heavily on Perry, and I have always regarded it as a kind of family scrapbook. The general tone of the time was maintained: the Jameses were a family of minds. The passions, emotions, struggles, disasters and illnesses had to...