Books: Family of Minds

THE JAMES FAMILY (706 pp.)—F. O. Matthiessen—Knopf ($6.75).

In 1789, 18-year-old Billy James left Ireland with “a very small sum of money” and a Latin grammar. When he died in 1832, the $3,000,000 he left his heirs (from public utilities and real estate) was the second largest fortune *in the State of New York. One of his 13 children, whose name was Henry, decided to use his inheritance to cultivate his passion for “being” instead of “doing.” Wrote he: “I can give ecstatic hours to worship or meditation but moments spent in original deed, such as putting a button upon my coat or cleansing my garden-walk of weeds, weigh very heavily upon my shoulders.” Billy’s grandson, Novelist Henry James Jr., never regretted that “the rupture with my grandfather’s tradition and attitude was complete; we were never in a single case, I think, for two generations, guilty of a stroke of business. . . .”

No other U.S. family ever used its leisure to make so much intellectual and literary hay. In The James Family, Harvard Professor Francis Otto Matthiessen, Novelist James’s ablest critic, has carefully pieced together “the biography . . . of a family of minds.” “Autobiography” would be more accurate; most of the book consists of essays and letters (some never before printed) of Henry James Sr., sons William and Henry and little-known daughter Alice.

“Elegant Billingsgate.” Many a student of U.S. letters knows Henry Sr. only as the father of two brilliant sons. To George Bernard Shaw he seemed the most interesting member of his family. He accepted his father’s fortune but renounced the capitalism that made it possible, and became a parlor-&-platform socialist.

Appalled by his parents’ Scotch-Irish Presbyterianism, he soaked up the religious mysticism of Emanuel Sweden-borg.-Believing that God was within man, he was scornful. of the traditional figure of Jehovah: “Any mother who suckles her babe upon her own breast, any bitch in fact who litters her periodical brood of pups, presents to my imagination a vastly nearer and sweeter Divine charm. . . . Against this lurid power—half-pedagogue, half-policeman, but wholly imbecile in both aspects—I . . . raise my gleeful fist, I lift my scornful foot.” This kind of “elegant Billingsgate,” as his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson called it, found almost no audience.

Nothing interested Henry Sr. so much as his sons’ education. Result: their schooling was highly erratic. Henry Jr. remembered his father as “delighting ever in the truth” but “generously contemptuous of the facts … we wholesomely breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions.”

William and Henry apparently went to school when & where they pleased, mostly in Europe. Henry entered Harvard Law School in 1862 with no intention of becoming a lawyer. William got his M.D. from Harvard Medical School but never practiced. Later, when he had become the nation’s top psychologist, he wrote: “I originally studied medicine in order to be a physiologist, but I drifted into psychology and philosophy from a sort of fatality . . . the first lecture on psychology I ever heard being the first I ever gave.’^

Father Was Grateful. There were always intellectual differences in the James family, but there was even more affection and esteem. Henry Sr., wrote Emerson, loved his family so deeply that “he wished sometimes the lightning would strike his wife and children out of existence, and he should suffer no more from loving them.” Typical is the close of a letter to Henry Jr.: “Goodbye, my lovely Harry. Words can’t tell how dear you are to my heart; how proud I am of your goodness and truth. . . . Truly I am a happy and grateful father at every remembrance of you.”

All the Jameses habitually spoke their minds, but none with so few inhibitions as Henry Sr. Fond as he was of Emerson, he could still write: “. . . Emerson himself was an unsexed woman. … It turned out that any average old dame in a horsecar would have satisfied my intellectual rapacity just as well as Emerson.” And on Carlyle: “Carlyle is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.” Novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne “had the look all the time, to one who didn’t know him, of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of detectives.”

Son William called McKinley and his Vice President, Theodore Roosevelt, “a combination of slime and grit, soap1 and sand, that ought to scour anything away, even the moral sense of the country.” While teaching at Harvard he wrote: “… Although I serve Harvard College to the best of my ability, I have no affection at all for the institution, and would gladly desert it for anything that offered better pay.”

The Author. Perhaps no one has done more to prime the revival of interest in the novels of Henry James than Professor Matthiessen. Nor is The James Family his final boost. To be published next week is

The Notebooks of Henry James, which he has collected and edited with the help of Harvard Professor Kenneth Murdock. Yaleman Matthiessen, 45, a former Rhodes Scholar, has doctor’s degrees from both Oxford and Harvard. “Matthie,” as Harvard intimates know him, is quiet-spoken but often tart, likes to think of himself as a radical (one friend says he’d be a Marxist if he weren’t so religious), was once president of Harvard’s leftish Teachers’ Union. Besides his James books he has written solid critical studies, including The Achievement of T. S. Eliot (reissued three weeks ago) and American Renaissance. He is now on leave to teach U.S. literature at Karlova (Charles) University in Prague.

*An 18th Century Swedish scientist and philosopher who claimed to have received a revelation of the Second Coming of Christ. He believed that God himself was the Divine Man, that through infinite love Man could become the image of his Creator. He never preached, never tried to found a sect. The Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem grew up after his death, still claims 10,000 U.S. members*Larger: John Jacob Astor’s.