In Darkest Henry James, Sr.

Selected Papers on Henry James 81 least, the double claim of both tough and tender-mindedness ascribed so often by William James to his philosophy. Alfred Habegger—In Darkest Henry James, Sr. We know that Henry James Sr. was full of paradoxes. He was an ardent religionist who hated morality, a Swedenborgian opposed to the Swedenborgian church. He recklessly defended Fourier's dream of free love, but he also became an apologist for a sacramental view of monogamy. In a certain light he looks like a friend of liberty and toleration, yet he also envisioned "the forcible and permanent subjugation of men's private to their public interests." He believed that the spiritual life can begin only with a Calvinistic act of self-contempt and surrender, and he reiterated this truth with the tirelessness of a man constitutionally unable even to imagine yielding an inch to anybody. Henry James Sr. is a tough nut to crack. He went to incredible lengths to make himself heard in lectures, reviews, essays, and books, and in numerous letters to disciples, antagonists, and weary editors of magazines and newspapers, and he attracted attention and admiration as far away as Tsarist Russia, where Tolstoy once extolled him to an American visitor. The senior James was definitely not the dishonored prophet his sons William and Henry imagined after his death. Yet it is true that he was not well understood during his lifetime and that even for us, the community of James scholars, he remains pretty much a dark continent. So there is this additional paradox about the man, that in spite of the ritual acknowledgment that, yes, he was a profound and original thinker, the attention we lavish on his famous children generally flags on turning to him. In spite of some large claims made by R. W. B. Lewis and others for the senior James, it is fair to say that he basically bores us. That may be one reason why his many papers stored at the Houghton Library have still not been properly catalogued, arranged, and studied. Most of his surviving lecture manuscripts have not been read, judging by the printed commentary , and there are other revealing fragments that have not been discovered, or at least publicized. Among these is a ferocious response to Walt Whitman that denounces "the rise in modern times of what for want of a more delicate term may be called the stercoracious school of literature" (quoted by permission of the Houghton Library and Alexander James). Sterocoracious is a Latinism for shitty. This manuscript fragment establishes as nothing else can the background for Henry Jr.'s hostile and arrogant 1865 review of Drum-Taps. There are also many revealing published works by the senior James that have not yet emerged from the dark. Among these is his first known publication, from 1838—a preface to a book by an eighteenth-century Christian pacifist, Robert Sandeman. (Frederic Harold Young discusses Sandeman but does not quote James's preface.) Other instances are the 1849 essay in praise of William Blake ("William Blake's Poems," Spirit of the Age 1 [August 25, 1849]: 113-14) and a strange 1859 letter to the New York Tribune that claims that Haiti is a primitive free-love utopia ("Marriage—Divorce," April 23, 1859). It seems fair to say that until we exhume the senior James's many fugitive publications, we cannot really understand William and Henry Jr. 's intellectual birthright. One of the reasons why the mysteries of Henry Sr. have not been brought to light is that his survivors tried to cover them up. At his death, Catherine 82 The Henry James Review Walsh sifted and burned his papers, thus instituting a process of highly selective conservation that William and Henry Jr. both carried on. The bibliography in the 1885 memorial volume edited by William omits the touchier items, such as the 1848 introduction to Love in the Phalanstery. As for Henry Jr.'s two volumes of memoirs, I believe that their portrait of the father is not only censored but blinkered. Also, there is evidence in the surviving papers at the Houghton that a selecting hand—probably that of Henry III, William's...