In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Lessons of the Father: Henry James Sr. on Sexual Difference by Alfred Habegger, University of Kansas When Henry James Jr. wrote his memoirs in his late sixties, he was surprised at the number of times he could recall accompanying his father away from home—he alone without any of the other four children (SB 68). The aging son interpreted this public father-and-son companionship as an odd reflection of midnineteenth -century American manners, but I should like to propose an alternative interpretation: the father wanted his second son, the namesake, to inherit his own sense of social life. Henry Sr. would show the public world to Henry Jr. and explain it to him. The impression Henry Jr. gives of his father in the two volumes of memoirs, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, does not wholly agree with what one can learn about this father from other sources, especially his own writing. The son drew a portrait of a man devoted to a doomed yet heroic intellectual labor. The senior James never succeeded in getting anyone to believe in him, or really listen to him, but he never lost heart. He was a droll Olympian, completely without pomp or public honors, a magnificent man and father. He would not force his cherished ideas on his children, and yet these ideas saturated the home and rendered it all the more sacred. Convert the literal into the symbolic and spiritual, Henry Jr. remembered being taught. Scorn moralistic thought. Don't be selfish. Be social (NS ch. 6). Although Henry Jr. admitted he had really learned next to nothing of his father's vast and original system, he was proud that he had "never . . . been so bête ... as to conceive he might be 'wrong,' wrong as a thinker-out, in his own way, of the great mysteries" (NS 228). Henry's first friend, Thomas Sergeant Perry, remembered how loyal the son had been in his teens: "Harry had heard his father describe the great reformer's [Fourier's] proposal to establish universal happiness, and like a good son he tried to carry the good news further" (Edel 35). Another anecdote, told by F. O. Matthiessen, indicates that James never lost this half-blind loyalty: "When Bernard Shaw indulged his love of trying to shock by declaring to Henry Junior that the most interesting member of his family was neither himself nor his brother but their father, he found that no praise could have been more welcome" (7). The question of the senior James's influence on his second son and his fiction has exercised more than one scholar and biographer, but the subject remains vexed and obscure.1 There is a rich and tantalizing mystery here, involving two powerful minds bonded by filiality. Why did the son want the father to gain recognition, to be vindicated, when the son himself did not understand him? If the father's ideas saturated the home, why didn't the son understand? And just how benevolent was the father if the one sure thing his son learned was that the paternal thinker could not be understood, or doubted, or in any way separated from his investiture of clouds? Volume VIII 1 Number 1 The Henry James Review Fall, 1986 Unlike Henry Jr., William wanted to see through the clouds, and he systematically read Henry Sr.'s books, reporting to Henry Jr. that their father's "ignorance of the way of thinking of other men, and his cool neglect of their difficulties is fabulous in a writer on such subjects" (October 2, 1869, MH). While William dared to read the father in the light of what other men thought, Henry simultaneously protected him from public exposure yet nursed a secret hope that his thought would be admired by all. Most of those who have written about Henry James Sr. in the twentieth century have seen him as an admirably nonconforming, adventurous, and above all liberal and tolerant thinker, but recent biographies of his other children, William, Wilkie, Bob, and Alice, by Howard M. Feinstein, Jane Maher, and Jean Strouse, have shown how misleading this image is. Strouse shows that...

pdf

Share