The Family Politics of the "Family Book"

98 The Henry James Review their readers, a body of writing that, stiU today, invites our emotional and intellectual participation. WiUiam's unmistakable voice thus speaks to us from across the years with a Jamesian love of experience, risk, and "difficulties braved": "I offer you the chance of taking part in such a world. Its safety, you see, is unwarranted . It is a real adventure, with real danger, yet it may win through. WiU you," he asks us, "join in the procession?" Carol Holly—The Family Politics of the "Family Book" Henry James once claimed that when he began A Small Boy and Others he intended to write a "Famüy Book" or memoir of WiUiam based on a coUection of his brother's early letters. Most of us know what became of that intention. By centering the narrative in his own reminiscing consciousness, and, letting his memory flow—and flow and flow—James reconstructed the past through the imagined vision of his boyhood self. And the memoir of WiUiam or book about the family became "the history of the growth of one's imagination" James envisioned in his preface to The Portrait of a Lady several years before. The text of Λ Small Boy suggests that in the writing the transition from Family Book to autobiography came as easily and smoothly as the process of dictation itself. But once the writing was done, this transition became more difficult. As his correspondence from 1912 reveals, James was engaged for several months in a struggle not only to redefine the nature and shape of his reminiscential project but also to justify to WiUiam's family the decision to do so. And this struggle was not without cost Let me begin with a brief clarification of chronology and—given the time constraint—a necessarily simplistic consideration of motives. WiUiam James died in August, 1910, and, at the encouragement of WiUiam's widow Alice, Henry began shortly thereafter to entertain the idea of writing a book about his family. A year later James returned to England and set to work, ostensibly on the Family Book. But by the spring of 1912 he had dictated no fewer than 100,000 words of personal reminiscence. James was weU aware, of course, that this largely autobiographical narrative traced the development of his imagination and indulged his curiosity about the autobiographical act at the expense of WiUiam and his letters. He even hints at the possibUity that by indulging himself as autobiographer he is compensating for the reminiscential self-denial WiUiam's criticism formerly encouraged in him. My brother "professed amazement, and even occasionaUy impatience, at my reach of reminiscence," he says in A Small Boy; "the ragbag of memory hung on its nail in my closet though I learnt with time to control the habit of bringing it forth. And I say that with a due sense of my doubüess now appearing to empty it into these pages." Consider then how WiUiam's death has benefitted Henry. It has given birth to his long cherished desire to write the history of his imagination, not only by giving him a "pretext for such an attempt," as he suggests in Notes of a Son and Brother, but also by liberating him from his brother's and, I think, the family's sanction against the self-indulgence required by the undisguised autobiographical act. Consider, too, the responsibUity of informing WiUiam's family, nephew Harry in particular, that the book on William is not yet begun. Henry knows that his nephew has a proprietary interest in the project: as executor of WiUiam James's estate, Harry is responsible for seeing that his father's corre- Selected Papers on Henry James 99 spondence be pubüshed—if not by his Uncle, then eventuaUy by himself—and he and his mother Alice have already provided Uncle Henry with numerous packets of WiUiam's letters. James seems relatively unconcerned about Alice's response to the changes in the Family Book: he assumes (correctly, I think) that she wiU play the supportive, nurturing role traditionaUy required of women in the James family. But the nephew, a kind of stand-in for WiUiam, was a...