The Wonder Years

Peter Collister has given scholars lavishly annotated editions of Henry James's 1913-1914 autobiographies that will make possible future critical studies of the autobiographies, texts that can be considered as the author's crowning achievement. The autobiographies appear in two volumes, both with thoughtful introductions, useful textual apparatuses, and thoroughly researched footnotes. The last annotated edition came in 1955, by Frederick Dupee. His notes, though useful, were very limited, giving readers little contextual or spatial background to the rich mid-nineteenth-century scenes of New York, Paris, London, Newport, etc., that James so imaginatively represents in these volumes. Recently, multiple facsimile versions of first editions have appeared, curiously some appearing monthly with Bibliobazaar and Kessinger Press. One version titled "The Middel Years" by "Henray James" appeared in 2009. Clearly Collister's edition fills a vital need.

Collister's introduction to A Small Boy and Others provides commentary on James's retrospective look at himself as the developing artist, emphasizing his growing consciousness that his role in life would be that of the aesthetic voyeur and creative artist. Throughout the introduction and in the copious footnotes, the editor provides commentary on the fiction as it relates to the life history that James constructs in his autobiography. For instance, on page xx, Maisie Farange becomes the imaginative counterpart for the small boy who is acutely conscious of his role as observant flaneur. Collister offers useful summaries of autobiographical theory. At times I wanted even more on how James's texts relate to genre slippage and fewer speculative biographical remarks (both in the introduction and in the notes) concerning possible truths of James's actual life. Collister painstakingly links James's uncertainty about gender roles to his growing awareness of himself. However, more specific analysis on how James represented himself as an aesthetic subject and on the performative elements in the autobiographies might have added more to Jamesian studies than a synthesis of past biographical studies of James and his family. Collister's biographical commentary emphasizes James family shame and pathology, sometimes to the neglect of the forgiving humor that also marks James's retrospective. Sometimes what Collister views as illustrating the "abject" in James I read rather as indicative of his mordent wit. The opening of Notes of a Son and Brother, for example, can also be seen as humorously absurd: the idea that his parents somehow thought Henry should study math in Switzerland he treats with heavy irony, noting that his only happy impression of those tortured weeks was the view of the Rhône River from the windows of their hotel. Further, Collister's suggestion in the introduction to Notes that Henry James might have been protecting deeply held family secrets seems speculative.

Another possible way of viewing both texts, rather than from a biographical lens, comes from queer theory. Collister discusses the young Harry's ambiguous relationship to gender roles of his day at some length, and his remarks are thoughtfully modulated. Using queer theory, readers can juxtapose James's representation of his early self through the shifting historical constructions of gender. Future approaches for scholars assessing the autobiographies might rely on Christopher Looby's critical approach to "The Beast in the Jungle," as set forth in a paper he delivered at the International Henry James Conference (Rome 2011), titled "John Marcher's Queer Timing." Looby notes the historical shift in how Western culture viewed homosexuality from the time that story begins to its conclusion: Marcher's life occurred during the period when society moved from viewing such homosexuality as a behavior rather than an identity to a period when the homosexual became an aberrant type to be disciplined through the judicial system. Such a genealogy also defines James's life. In 1913 by necessity he repressed his sexuality publicly...