House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family - Hardcover

Fisher, Paul

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805074902 ISBN 13: 9780805074901

Verlag: New York : Henry Holt and Co., 2008

Inhaltsangabe

An American odyssey that reveals the fascinating complexities of one of history's most brilliant, eccentric, and daring families

 

The James family, one of America's most memorable dynasties, gave the world three famous children: a novelist of genius (Henry), an influential philosopher (William), and an invalid (Alice) who became a feminist icon, despite her sheltered life and struggles with mental illness. Although much has been written on them, many truths about the Jameses have long been camouflaged. The conflicts that defined one of American's greatest families-- homosexuality, depression, alcoholism, female oppression--can only now be thoroughly investigated and discussed with candor and understanding.
 
Paul Fisher's grand family saga, House of Wits, rediscovers a family traumatized by the restrictive standards of their times but reaching out for new ideas and ways to live. He follows the five James offspring ("hotel children," Henry called them) and their parents through their privileged travels across the Atlantic; interludes in Newport and Cambridge; the younger boys' engagement in the Civil War; and William and Henry's later adventures in London, Paris, and Italy. He captures the splendor of their era and all the members of the clan--beginning with their mercurial father, who nurtured, inspired, and damaged them, setting the stage for lives of colorful passions, intense rivalries, and extraordinary achievements. House of Wits is a revealing cultural history that revises and completes our understanding of its remarkable protagonists and the changing world where they came of age.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Paul Fisher comes from a family of writers and has taught American literature at Harvard, Yale, Wesleyan, Boston University, and Wellesley. He lives in Boston.

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Biographers return again and again to the Jameses—the great novelist Henry, groundbreaking psychologist and philosopher William, diarist Alice (who became a feminist icon) and their parents and other siblings. Now Fisher, who has taught American literature at Harvard, Yale and other institutions, delivers a solid and crisp narrative of this fascinating American clan. In addition to the three prominent siblings, two other brothers labored to shine from behind the shadows they cast. But as Fisher reveals, much darkness and bitterness—along with a brilliant father who was both a Christian socialist and heir to a fortune—shaped these remarkable people. For all of its successes, the James family harbored its share of trouble: alcoholism, repressed sexuality, heartbreak, jealousy and adultery. Most importantly, in a rigidly prim Victorian world, the expatriate Henry, a resident of London, wrestled with homosexuality. He lived a closeted life of clandestine affairs with younger men—always wary of the dark fate that had befallen Oscar Wilde. Fisher narrates all of this, and more, vividly, cleanly and engagingly. (June 10)
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Chapter One

 

THE VOYAGE OF THE ATLANTIC

Though small, spare, and unbalanced in his gait, Henry James Sr. loved to pit himself against the uncomprehending world. Sometimes he walked with canes, to cope with a childhood injury, but more often this self-appointed prophet of social reform cast away all artificial forms of support and navigated on his own. Such was the case on this steamy and momentous June dayin 1855, when the forty-four-year-old patriarch lowered himself down the steps of his Fourteenth Street brownstone, ready to take on just about everyone.

The James family party was leaving New York: one lame man, Henry himself; three bonneted women; five young children; and a Himalaya of luggage. On this "thoroughly hot" summer morning, as the New York Tribune described it, they were striking out toward a Europe that, thanks to the lithographs and novels that had stoked their imaginations, felt more real to them, in a sense, than the scorching streets of Manhattan. It was as if they were going home, though the places they envisioned were as yet unknown. Defiantly, Henry was preparing to snatch his young family— Alice, his smallest child, was only six—away from the city that had counted as the only genuine home they’d ever known. The Jameses were moving to the lake country of Switzerland, where, Henry insisted, his children would blossom in the experimental hothouses of Swiss schools. He was, after all, a social engineer of sorts. His children, he believed, should be the beneficiaries of the world’s most enlightened thinking.

The "acquisition of the languages" by young patricians was all the vogue—an educational "New York fetish" of the 1850s, as Henry’s novelist son would later claim. But Henry wasn’t only following a trend; he was intoxicated by the idea that these groundbreaking schools could help his children fulfill the ambitious destinies he had marked out for them. Liberated from the bad moral influences of rough-and-tumble New York, their father felt, his sons would soon acquire exquisite manners and impeccable French. To anyone who questioned his decision to transplant them across the ocean, the cane-wielding Henry—often armed, literally and figuratively, with a stick—bristled with justifications.

For years, Henry had waged a single-minded campaign to rid himself and his family of their solid Manhattan address. He’d leveled various crafty arguments at his wary, stiff-collared listeners. He’d persuaded his friend Horace Greeley, the slender and bespectacled editor of the New York Tribune, with his visions of instructive European cities. He’d even defied his idol, the New England philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had testily declared European travel to be a "fool’s paradise" in his influential 1841 essay "Self-Reliance."

Of course, Henry loved to argue as much as he loved to travel. And partly, his insubordination was Emerson’s own fault, as the protégé had adopted his mentor’s own radical American individualism with gusto. Society everywhere is a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members," Emerson had written a decade before in "Self-Reliance"; "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist." But Emerson hadn’t intended for Henry to be as maddeningly, perversely singular as he was currently showing himself. Sitting serene among his flush green New England orchards, remote from the family upheaval now unfolding at Henry’s front door, Emerson may have wondered if he’d created a monster. Others, posed the question, would certainly have responded in the affirmative.

To be sure, Henry’s diatribes explaining the upending of his family rang with the same high principles he had shown in public debates over slavery, utopian socialism, women’s role in society, and "free love." He had spoken out on almost every controversial issue of his time, with a sometimes bewildering mix of radicalism and conservatism. On free love he had been at least a theoretical extremist; on women’s rights, he was a notorious reactionary—and these strong and often contradictory opinions would impact the development of his children. But Henry’s many enthusiasms also concealed a deeper truth behind his present urgency. Henry James Sr. was "different," a jumble of discordant notes. At times he seemed unbalanced.

He had previously suffered from restlessness, nervousness, and melancholia. For years "blue devils" and "black devils" had plagued the man with a phantasmagoria of symptoms as well as depression and anxiety. Such burdens made it difficult for him to concentrate or sustain interest in much of anything. On top of everything else, Henry suffered from visual hallucinations: a decade before, he’d blundered onto a devil crouching on a hearthstone—a dramatic mental thunderclap that had brought on a severe nervous breakdown in 1844.

Henry also had a decades-long history as an alcoholic—a usually unspoken-of feature of his life and his children’s. He had been drinking hard liquor since the age of eight or nine and had been addicted to alcohol since his troubled adolescence. His adult life, too, had been dominated by his addiction. But six years before, he had consulted a doctor friend in England; and four years prior, in 1851, he had made a public declaration, in the New York Tribune, that he had given up drinking. He had done it, he claimed, by sheer force of will. The nineteenth century, to be sure, scarcely understood and rarely discussed such demons. Both alcoholism and mental illness still invited derision and superstition. But sanatoriums for drinking problems had begun to appear, and reformist crusaders such as the Quaker-inspired Dorothea Dix had started to lobby northeastern states to create bonafide mental hospitals in order to ease psychological afflictions. Dix herself—dark-chignoned and straight-backed—was a victim of recurrent depression. She longed to provide refuge for those whom she saw as suffering from a vast, crippling, and invisible epidemic. For generations, the inmates of "charitable" institutions had been poked with sticks, made to froth, rant, and tear at one another for mob amusement.

More fortunate, with his independent income, Henry was in no danger of incarceration. He didn’t even appear "mad." On the contrary, he was capable of charming and disarming many of the New Yorkers he met. Vastly intelligent and tenderhearted, he was the sort of man that women warmed to and even fell in love with; several receptive New York ladies had succumbed, among them Mary Walsh, whom he had married fifteen years before. His children, too, felt his magnetism, and all of them would be shaped by his alcoholism and mental illness, as well as by his charm, his nonconformity, and his radiant intelligence.

AS THEY SPILLED down the steps of their former home, the five James children—William, Henry, Wilkie, Bob, and Alice—must have looked fresh and willing enough, caught up in their father’s enthusiasm and the excitement of the day. By moving to Europe, Henry hoped to provide his offspring with what he called a "sensuous education"—sensuous in this case implying a broad and lively development of faculties, under the tutelage of nature, and not frivolous sensuality. Henry’s interest in his children’s education was an extension of his social theories about the moral improvement of the human race. For this reason, the progressive Henry was also morally and certainly sexually as strict as many a nineteenth-century patriarch. Instead of budding libertines, the young Jameses would become guinea pigs of Henry’s theories about "social consciousness"—Henry’s version of the human progress that the nineteenth century often believed in. Lovingly, Henry treasured his children as "chickens" who sheltered under his paternal wings every night. Yet when he gazed at them—at thirteen-year-old William and twelve-year-old Henry Junior especially—he saw not only overdressed Victorian children kitted out for a sea voyage but also the forerunners of a new and improved "race."

Whatever his eventual plans for his brood, Henry’s first goal was to get the family to their steamship—a journey of several stages, the first a drive from their Fourteenth Street residence to the Hudson River ferry. The family kept no carriage, so they hired conveyances arrived from Mr. Hathorn’s livery stable in nearby University Place. With Henry’s thin sons helping Hathorn’s hired hands—doing their utmost to budge some of the cumbersome baggage—the hacks were soon loaded. Ironrimmed steamer trunks, leather portmanteaus, cylindrical hatboxes, and patterned carpetbags would litter the next six decades of the family’s life, but the disarray of this departure, though outwardly gay and optimistic, also hinted at Henry’s personal desperation as well as the tension underlying this family scene.

Henry held his head high as he struggled to find his seat in the carriage—not a good sign for his steadiness on an ocean passage. For all his protestations about his offspring’s education, Henry had also launched his plan for his own narcissistic reasons: he knew he had to make something of himself, and he hoped Europe could help. He’d kicked off this family hegira not only to soothe his anxiety but also to nudge his own stalled literary career back to life, in order to write philosophical letters for the New York Tribune. Henry was in his mid forties, and he wanted to make more of his life. He wanted to produce a series of articles about his family’s precarious life in transit, about their future careers as "hotel children."

T H E B I G C A R R I A G E S, "lolling and bumping," started off for the ...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: New York : Henry Holt and Co.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2008
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0805074902
• ISBN 13: 9780805074901
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 704
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar