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The Henry James Review 24.2 (2003) 195-197



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Andrew Taylor. Henry James and the Father Question. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 234 pp. $60.00.

Although Andrew Taylor works in fields already well tilled, Henry James and the Father Question is richly informed by a thorough knowledge of the archival record. Indeed, it is a treat to be reminded of so many well-turned phrases and astute observations by the Jameses and those in their circle and a delight to be introduced to new ones.

Taylor's book is a celebration of both Jameses and in many ways a traditional one. Taylor tips his hand early, noting in his introduction that those who have depicted Henry James Sr. as an eccentric have approached the man and his influence on his son with "preconceived agendas." Taylor believes that he has no "overt ideological axe to grind," and that, while this may make his study seem a "pale imitation of more strident readings," this is no bad thing since James's novels and his father's writings cannot be known through "programmatic interpretation" (23). Taylor gives Alfred Habegger's The Father a good bit of credit for the "resurrection of interest among James scholars in James Senior" (11), but he suggests that Habegger misreads the father-son relationship and the relationship each man had with his milieu. Taylor calls Habegger's work "highly polemical" and ahistorical. In fact, according to Taylor, Habegger reduces the novelist to an impaired social realist and the father to a reactionary man who failed to instill a commitment to masculine, worldly engagement. In short, Taylor offers his book as a corrective to Habegger.

Not surprisingly, there is no queer Henry James in these pages and no exploration of the relationship of James, his novels, or his family to race, class, or other issues that have intrigued recent scholars. The "Other Henry James" that John Carlos Rowe delineated in his 1998 study makes no appearance in Taylor's work. Rather, we meet a familiar and much cherished James—the novelist of expanded consciousness. One might fault Taylor for claiming that he has read James in the context of nineteenth-century American intellectual life when in fact he reads James within the context of very specific discourses—philosophy, religion, and reform—as developed by an elite coterie of highly educated men living in the northeast. But Taylor's project is intellectual history as traditionally understood, and he does it well. [End Page 195]

Taylor begins with autobiographical writings, finding in the father's account of his 1844 spiritual breakdown and the son's record of his life during the Civil War a rejection of rude facts, "an aesthetic of accumulated sensation," and a belief in an "infinitely revisable self" (59). In chapters 2 and 3 Taylor takes up the Jameses' relationship to American innocence and Emersonian transcendentalism. Taylor reviews James's attempts to get Emerson to join a public discussion of the Beecher-Tilton scandal, James's 1872 lecture on Emerson at the home of James T. Fields, and his comments on Emerson in Spiritual Creation, noting that by the end of his life James Senior was adamant about the difference between himself and Emerson. While he knew well the temptations of sin and was by the age of thirty "saturated with a sense of spiritual evil," his friend had probably never felt "a temptation to bear false-witness against his neighbor, to steal, to commit adultery, or to murder" and thus had no "conviction of himself as evil before God" (qtd. in Taylor 82-83).

Like his father, Henry James also rejected American Adamic innocence, and Taylor reads The Portrait of a Lady as James's exploration of his father's "theological doctrine of the beneficial fall" (100). Isabel Archer's fall into history, into the tragedy possible on European soil, and into the evil machinations of Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle, rescues her from naive confidence in her powers of perception and from the fantasy that she can make her own world. For Taylor, the midnight vigil...

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