Recollecting and Reexamining William and Henry

When I first published Henry James and Pragmatistic Thought almost twenty-four years ago, the scholarship and criticism linking the major work of Henry with William was virtually nil. There were some vagrant essays or notes by Joseph Firebaugh, Eliseo Vivas, and one or two others which now seem in retrospect very farsighted; but the “Aes Triplex”—i.e., “triple brass”—figures of Ralph Barton Perry, F. O. Matthiessen, and Leon Edel worked collectively if not intentionally to discourage this line of exploration: Perry, the philosopher, believed that Henry’s letters identifying himself with William’s thought were philosophically uninformed; Matthiessen, the literary Jacobite, thought that William’s pragmatism of “action” opposed Henry’s aesthetic of “contemplation,” and that William’s letters complaining of Henry’s late style confirmed the opposition; Edel, the psychoanalytic biographer, proposed that a sibling rivalry, especially on William’s side, was the psychosomatic equal of Jacob and Esau, so that William’s later criticisms of Henry meshed with various symptoms of backaches, eye trouble, and digestive disorders when around his brother, and erupted, eventually, in his refusal to follow Henry’s earlier admission into the Academy of Arts and Letters.

After a number of preliminary approaches to their respective “major phases,” each of which failed miserably, I decided that perhaps the key was to examine William’s work through Henry’s own eyes, and this approach gradually led me into William’s overlooked epistemology of knowing he designated “ambulation” in The Meaning of Truth. By the time I finished, my argument had grown fairly theoretical with its conceptual dialogue between ambulation and polarity as well as its use of a Barfieldian history of consciousness as its methodology. Interestingly, when Owen Barfield taught as a visiting literature professor from England at several schools in the East—Brandeis, Drew, Hamilton, among them—the philosophy faculties insisted repeatedly that his books and essays revealed him to be “really Martin Heidegger masquerading as an English solicitor” (though conspicuously, and thankfully, minus the Nazism). Perhaps therefore it isn’t surprising that a Barfield-based study of the Jameses like mine turned out in effect to be phenomonological: first, because Henry’s own mentality was proposed—not so much what he thought as how he thought; second, because his Jamesian consciousness showed itself to be, in William’s language, “transitional” and “ambulatory,” i.e., a “function” rather than an “entity” in its fluid relations with human experience; third, because William’s doctrine of radical empiricism, together with its theory of ambulation, anticipates twentieth-century phenomenology itself.

Reexamining William and Henry today means looking at what has since become an extraordinarily rich vein of analysis in the past quarter century, far richer than I had anticipated. In glancing at this literature, however, let me suggest a preliminary distinction in view of this forum. If one takes a philosophical approach to Henry James, that can mean 1) an approach relating James to a major philosopher like his brother William, or to Nietzsche (as Stephen Donadio skillfully did), or, say, Merleau Ponty (as Paul Armstrong and, more recently, Merle Williams have done so well); 2) or it can mean an approach to James through postmodern theory itself, since so much of that is philosophical; 3) or it may mean a judicious combination of both. Let me consider briefly an item or two from the first and third categories, rather than the second, which is altogether vast and centrifugal (including for example, John Carlos Rowe’s Theoretical Dimensions of Henry James, which is not, like Donadio, about James and Nietzsche, yet which applies Nietzschean ideas brilliantly to Henry James).

Armstrong’s Phenomenology of Henry James remains, to my mind, one of the most irresistibly persuasive arguments anywhere aligning James at all major points with a later twentieth-century school of philosophy. Work such as his, and Williams’s, and Susan Griffin’s, and Jacques Barzun’s, and Courtney Johnson’s, and Howard Feinstein’s, and mine—all these have something in common. They are all, at least implicitly, philosophically melioristic; perhaps another way to put it is that they all perceive the Henry...