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Novick maintains that James, shown here in 1905, led an active homosexual life. (Katherine Elizabeth McClellan/Smith College Archives) |
Henry James: The Mature Master
By Sheldon M. Novick
Random House, 616 pp., illustrated, $35
I cannot claim to be a disinterested reviewer of this book. The chronological span of its first half coincides with the main narrative of my novel "Author, Author" (2004), about Henry James's life between 1880 and 1898, so I approached it with more than usual curiosity. In preparing to write my novel, I relied chiefly on Leon Edel's monumental five-volume "Life of Henry James," supplemented by his four-volume edition of James's letters and numerous more specialized studies by other hands. As Sheldon Novick explains - and complains - in a postscript to his biography, Edel kept such a tight grip on the materials for his authorized biography that it was widely assumed he had used or published all the correspondence that was of interest. In fact a huge number of James's letters are still unpublished, and Novick has read a great many of them. In consequence he has been able to fill many small gaps and correct many minor misapprehensions in the received account of James's life, and for that all Jamesians are in his debt.
Novick's two-part biography, of which this is the second volume, is, however, a much more radically revisionist assault on Edel's work, and especially the latter's presentation of James as a repressed homosexual who had a conflicted attitude to women, realized his sexual orientation belatedly, and probably never had sexual intercourse with anyone. Novick's first volume, "Henry James: The Young Master," published in 1996, was notable for its controversial assertion that James was initiated into sex by the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes in the spring of 1875, when he was 22, and that he subsequently led an active homosexual life. It is fair to say that most James scholars were not convinced by the evidence produced for this claim, the crucial item being a highly ambiguous passage in James's "Notebooks" (published in 1947) that, given its context, is more likely to refer to his discovery of his artistic vocation.
In this new volume Novick continues to insist that James had a full and satisfying homosexual life. He has rather more evidence to show than in his first volume, but it is of the same kind, mostly tendentious interpretation of James's letters to a number of male friends. It is indisputable that in his later years James became increasingly demonstrative of his affection for such friends, especially good-looking young men like Arthur Benson, the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, and Jocelyn Persse, the nephew of Lady Gregory, and wrote to them sometimes using the language of romantic love.
He writes to Andersen, for instance, on the death of Andersen's brother: "The sense that I can't help you, see you, talk to you, touch you, hold you close & long, or do anything to make you rest on me, & feel my deep participation - this torments me, dearest boy." On another occasion he urges Andersen to draw on his patience and courage and "press also, I beg you, with no less intensity, on my affectionate friendship - let me feel that it reaches you & that it sustains and penetrates. . . . Lamb House . . . opens, from tonight, to its utmost width to you, & holds itself open till you come." Novick calls this language "half parental and half erotic." He interprets it, and similar passages in James's correspondence, as anticipating or recalling sexual intercourse with various partners. But was it not the quasi-parental or avuncular relationship James had with young men like Andersen that made a fully consummated sexual relationship with them unthinkable and liberated him to express his feelings, his need to love and be loved, in such extravagant terms? James, of course, was always inclined to stylistic extravagance in his correspondence - fancifully extended metaphors, hyperbolic compliments, and apologies abound - and it is a mistake to take him too literally. Late in life James wrote to Walter Berry: "I am crawling but a bit slowly out of my hole, and my chin, I think, would have been by no means even yet quite above ground, had not your letter this morning, produced within me a thrill of satisfaction that jerked it a good inch higher. . . . I . . . feel that you have wondrous newses [sic] for me. . . . I shall have nothing for you but a great gaping mouth at them." Novick describes this as one of several "lascivious invitations . . . speaking in metaphor but with startling vividness of their overnight encounters." But that is pure speculation and unwarranted interpretation. Novick can produce no other kind of evidence that James had sex with Berry or any of the other "overnight" guests who he presumes were his lovers, and given their number, its nonexistence would be surprising if the presumption were correct.
Of course we cannot know for certain that James died a virgin, as Edel and other biographers of the same opinion acknowledge. Equally, you cannot have a central character in fiction who doesn't know whether he has had sex or not, and I based my novel on the premise that James was celibate by choice, while being deeply interested in the operation of sexual attraction in human lives, male and female. This supposition I find much more compatible with the known facts of his life and work (especially the recurrent theme in his fiction of erotic fulfillment that is renounced, sacrificed, or missed) than Novick's portrait of an actively homosexual James.
Novick's idée fixe, and his related hostility to Edel, distort his biography in several respects. He greatly understates the significance of James's relationship with the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson and the traumatic effect on him of her suicide, and seriously misrepresents James's reaction to the disastrous first night of his play "Guy Domville," when he was booed on stage by the gallery - both key episodes in Edel's biography. Describing the sequel to the latter event, Novick repeats the discredited account of Edmund Gosse, written years later, that he found James in good spirits at breakfast the next day, asserts in a footnote that his "behaviour . . . continued to be energetic and optimistic," and dismisses Edel's account of his depression following the play's failure, but omits to quote from James's letters to various correspondents in the days and weeks following the first night in which he said it was "the most horrible experience of my life" or "the most horrible hours of my life" and that he had lived through "the four horridest weeks of my life."
When his pet obsessions are not engaged, Novick is a scrupulous scholar, and he writes lucidly and elegantly. The pages dealing with James's extended tour of America in 1904-1905, and his complex, subtle reactions to the nation's capitalism, imperialism, and mass immigration, are especially fine. There is also some sensitive appreciation of James's late style, though the characterization of it as "moral realism" is unhelpful. As a detailed chronicle of James's life, the places he lived in and visited, the people he met and knew, and his literary business dealings, this biography is a valuable addition to its predecessors. But it is too protective toward its subject. Novick not only awards James a happy sex life; he also plays down the negative aspects of his experience and personality, on which, like all writers, he drew fruitfully in his fiction: despair, envy, loneliness, frustration, failure, and the painful struggles to overcome them. Perhaps Edel overdid the Freudian analysis at times, but he gave a more satisfying account of how Henry James turned life into art.
David Lodge, a novelist and critic, is most recently the author of "The Year of Henry James." His novel "Deaf Sentence" will be published in 2008.
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