The door of the past

 In an essay on Henry James’s autobiographies, Richard Poirier claimed that the first volume – A small boy and others – which is ostensibly a memoir of William James, who had recently died – deserves a place among the two other great books about the boyhood of artists that appeared in the 1910s: Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann and Joyce’s A portrait of an artist as a young man. Perhaps we should include Freud’s Aus Der Geschichte einer infantilen Neurose from 1918 in this company.

As it happens: I’ve never read James’s autobiographies. But Poirier’s enthusiasm for A small boy – which was not so much about the picture of William James that it intends, in a cultic gesture, to offer, but about Henry James’s own impression of a bringing up that followed the rather inimitable lines of his father’s whims and his sensibility’s grasp, even then, of the opportunity afforded.

Late James is my favorite James, in spite of the verbosity and the his use of catchphrase and cliché – much as Charlie Chaplin or Gene Kelly would use some ordinary commodity as a partner in some gorgeous cinematic dance sequence. I like that. I live for that.

This is H.J. dancing:

“To knock at the door of the past was in a word to see it open to me quite wide – to see the world within begin to “compose” with a grace of its own round the primary figure, see it people itself vividly and insistently. Such then is the circle of my commemoration and so much these free and copious notes a labour of love and loyalty. We were, to my sense, the blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and that in respect to what I speak of myself as possessing I think I shall be ashamed, as of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible.”

The door of memory is thus the door to a wake, and this act of loyalty one long toast; while somehow the copious notes work towards that preservative end. H.J.’s music does not exclude the occasional wheezing, or the tuning of the instrument when it is out of tune, and it is in these moments especially that the fans get their ticket’s worth: the odd combo of raggedness and dignity – O O O that Jamesian rag - elevates the mundane tune.

It is, at least formally, the only James tale of a philosopher – for that is what William James turned out to be. I imagine, though, that to Henry, the mere disciplinary difference was all epiphenomenon, for underneath it all was the solid substratum of the writer.