James Biography

BOOK REVIEWS James Biography Sheldon M. Novick. Henry James: The Young Master. New York: Random House, 1996. xvii + 550 pp. $35.00 I HAVE NO DOUBT that Sheldon M. Novick's Henry James: The Young Master was a labor of love, for the book was many years in the making and betrays the biographer's pleasure in co-habiting with James for the duration of his task. In his preface, Novick positions himself at Henry James's elbow, as it were, elaborating the context of James's published and unpublished writings for the general reader (xii). I assume it is the general reader to whom this book is addressed, for Novick's strategy of cobbling together passages from James's autobiographical writings, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, wears on the reader who has firsthand knowledge of these texts. Novick should not have attempted a pastiche of the ouevre of so formidable a stylist. In keeping with his plan of collaborating with James, Novick avoids citing source materials in the body of his text, presumably because this would weigh down his lively narrative. Unfortunately, the system of notation Novick has elected will raise scholars' hackles because it is misleading. A good deal of the time when Novick reports what James was feeling at a significant juncture in his life, the so-called evidence is cribbed from a novel or story. Even if one fully accepts the premise that James's sojourn at Northampton, Massachusetts, informed his depiction of regional color and local manners in the early scenes of Roderick Hudson, it is a good deal harder to authorize Novick's conception that Rowland Mallet's "strange feeling of prospective regret" was Henry James's personal emotion (105). Absent all regard for literary context and the play of imagination, Novick's treatment renders James's fiction as a motley assemblage of people he has known and things he has seen (332), reducing James's work to the roman à clef, a genre James detested. Turning to the matter that has galvanized the media, Novick's disclosure of Henry James's romantic affair with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., is the fruit of much guesswork, but apparently no new evidence. In the absence of corroborating facts, Novick keeps the Holmes thesis in play himself through induction and insinuation, which is easily managed in a biography so given to paraphrase. The intensity of James's longing for Holmes and disappointment in love seems largely a matter of conjecture, 75 ELT 41: 1 1998 as when Novick remarks, "Wendell Holmes did not come to Newport. James wanted to see him, but there was the question of what relation with Wendell he really might expect" ( 120). The sticking point is Novick's presumption that he can read Henry James's thoughts. This presumption extends to other aspects of the biographical enterprise; for instance, Novick's assurance that James was a sexually active homosexual because "in the absence of contrary evidence, it has seemed most reasonable to assume that when he seemed to be having a love affair, he was" (xiii). This prefatorial claim bungles the task of situating James within a well defined cultural milieu, which is now generalized beyond utility. By treating James's sexuality as an "open secret" (xiii), then and now, Novick dismisses one of the key factors in James's personal and artistic development, which is the conflict engendered by the taboo against homosexuality. Henry James's suffering, internalized persecution, should not be summarized by the banality, "he fell in love with the wrong people" (xii). In light of Novick's preoccupations, it is curious that he fails to pay even lip service to Richard Hall's and Howard Feinstein's argument that Henry was in love with his elder brother, William. Novick's insistence on the primacy of Henry James's friendship with Holmes, an emphasis that has much to do with Novick's partiality for Holmes (Novick's Honorable Justice The Life of Oliver Wendell Holmes was published in 1989), skews James's early influences, relegating key figures to the background. For this reason alone, Henry James: The Young Master is a poor introduction to...