If not for these three Jameses, we’d find little “remarkable” about their merchant-prince grandfather William James of Albany (1771-1832), or their father, Henry Sr. (1811-1882), whose earnest, neglected books combined Swedenborgian mysticism with Calvinist self-contempt. Their younger brothers, the bankrupt Wilky and the alcoholic Bob, had their only moments of glory in the Civil War. And Lewis relegates subsequent generations to an appendix: foot soldiers in the march of American high culture (minor artists, friends of Marianne Moore or Malcolm Cowley, the wife of Alexander Calder) but no more four-star generals. “The Jameses,” despite its appreciation for the quirky merits of a Bob or a Wilky, is weighted just as you’d expect: lots of William and Henry, less of Alice, and so on, in descending order of achievement. So after Gay Wilson Allen’s still-definitive 1967 biography of William, Leon Edel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning five-volume biography of Henry and Jean Strouse’s well-received biography of Alice-to all of which Lewis acknowledges deep indebtedness-why bother with “The Jameses”?
Because Lewis, whose 1975 biography of Edith Wharton also won a Pulitzer Prize, shows each of these idiosyncratic individuals as part of the family organism-right down to shared afflictions, both physical (bad backs, heart disease) and spiritual. Variants of Henry Sr.’s life-changing attack of “insane and abject terror” in 1844 assailed Alice in 1868, William in 1870 and Henry in 1910. Lewis finds a kindred sensibility connecting William’s famous notion of the “stream of consciousness,” which, “like a bird’s life … seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings,” and Henry’s method of constructing his novels in scenes and intervals. He sees the imprint of Henry Sr.’s thought in such disparate works as Henry Jr.’s “The Portrait of a Lady” and William’s “Pragmatism,” and less wholesome results of his unworldly doctrine in his children’s difficulties in choosing action over paralytic indecision.
Henry’s choice seemed easiest: he started writing early and was rewarded quickly. But he condemned himself to an observer’s life: social but solitary. “If I were to marry,” he once said, “I should pretend to think just a little better of life than I really do.” He’s the least penetrable of the Jameses; despite Lewis’s research-backed up by Edel’s five volumes-he never comes to life here. (Part of the problem may be Lewis’s almost anachronistic reserve on the subject of Henry’s “homoerotic” impulses.) William, on the other hand, leaps off the page, whether making an ass of himself during his ambivalent courtship of Alice Howe Gibbens, spicing his postmarital letters to her with randy allusions he could never get her to return in kind, or hiking the woods near his New Hampshire farm with ax in hand to cut any tree obstructing his view.
But it’s the wittily, unflinchingly moribund Alice James who steals the show. “Don’t be too much haunted with her,” Henry warned his older brother-advice as useless for us as it must have been for William. Immobilized for years by psychosomatic ailments, she actually welcomed the specificity of the breast cancer that was to kill her at the age of 42. “Of course many of the moral sinews will snap by the way,” she wrote with ironic blandness in her diary, “but we shall gird up our loins and the blessed peace of the end will have no shadow cast upon it.” She was fiercely alert to condescension. “You greatly exaggerate the tragic element in my commonplace little journey,” she wrote to William. “Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself.” Part of Alice’s achievement, paradoxically, was to question the value of achievement. Her brothers, whose works changed intellectual and literary history, seem only conventionally remarkable. She was remarkable in a remarkable way.
