by Henry James
1906–8
Writes “The Jolly Corner” and The American Scene (published 1907). Writes eighteen prefaces for the New York Edition (twenty-four volumes published 1907–9). Visits Paris and Edith Wharton in spring 1907 and motors with her in Midi. Travels to Italy for the last time, visiting Hendrik Andersen in Rome, and goes on to Florence and Venice. Engages Theodora Bosanquet as his typist in autumn. Again visits Edith Wharton in Paris, spring 1908. William comes to England to give a series of lectures at Oxford and receives an honorary Doctor of Science degree. James goes to Edinburgh in March to see a tryout by the Forbes-Robertsons of his play The High Bid, a rewrite in three acts of the one-act play originally written for Ellen Terry (revised earlier as the story “Covering End”). Play gets only five special matinees in London. Shocked by slim royalties from sales of the New York Edition.
1909
Growing acquaintance with young writers and artists of Bloomsbury, including Virginia and Vanessa Stephen and others. Meets and befriends young Hugh Walpole in February. Goes to Cambridge in June as guest of admiring dons and undergraduates and meets John Maynard Keynes. Feels unwell and sees doctors about what he believes may be heart trouble. They reassure him. Late in year burns forty years of his letters and papers at Rye. Suffers severe attacks of gout. Italian Hours published.
1910
Very ill in January (“food-loathing”) and spends much time in bed. Nephew Harry comes to be with him in February. In March is examined by Sir William Osler, who finds nothing physically wrong. James begins to realize that he has had “a sort of nervous breakdown.” William, in spite of now severe heart trouble, and his wife, Alice, come to England to give him support. Brothers and Alice go to Bad Nauheim for cure, then travel to Zurich, Lucerne, and Geneva, where they learn Robertson (Bob) James has died in America of heart attack. James’s health begins to improve but William is failing. Sails with William and Alice for America in August. William dies at Chocorua soon after arrival, and James remains with the family for the winter. The Finer Grain published.
1911
Honorary degree from Harvard in spring. Visits with Howells and Grace Norton. Sails for England on July 30. On return to Lamb House, decides he will be too lonely there and starts search for a London flat. Theodora Bosanquet obtains work rooms adjoining her flat in Chelsea and he begins autobiography, A Small Boy and Others. Continues to reside at the Reform Club. The Outcry published.
1912
Delivers “The Novel in The Ring and the Book,” on the 100th anniversary of Browning’s birth, to the Royal Society of Literature. Receives honorary Doctor of Letters from Oxford University on June 26. Spends summer at Lamb House. Sees much of Edith Wharton (“the Firebird”), who spends summer in England. (She secretly arranges to have Scribner’s put $8,000 into James’s account.) Takes 21 Carlyle Mansions, in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, as London quarters. Writes a long admiring letter for William Dean Howells’s seventy-fifth birthday. Meets André Gide. Contracts bad case of shingles and is ill four months, much of the time not able to leave bed.
1913
Moves into Cheyne Walk flat. Two hundred and seventy friends and admirers subscribe for seventieth birthday portrait by Sargent and present also a silver-gilt Charles II porringer and dish (“golden bowl”). Sargent turns over his payment to young sculptor Derwent Wood, who does a bust of James. Autobiography A Small Boy and Others published. Goes with niece Peggy to Lamb House for the summer.
1914
Notes of a Son and Brother published. Works on The Ivory Tower. Returns to Lamb House in July. Niece Peggy joins him. Horrified by the war (“this crash of our civilisation,” “a nightmare from which there is no waking”). In London in September participates in Belgian Relief, visits wounded in St. Bartholomew’s and other hospitals; feels less “finished and useless and doddering” and recalls Walt Whitman and his Civil War hospital visits. Accepts chairmanship of American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps in France. Notes on Novelists (essays on Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola) published.
1915–16
Continues work with the wounded and war relief. Has occasional lunches with Prime Minister Asquith and family, and meets Winston Churchill and other war leaders. Discovers that he is considered an alien and has to report to police before going to coastal Rye. Decides to become a British national and asks Asquith to be one of his sponsors. Receives Certificate of Naturalization on July 26. H. G. Wells satirizes him in Boon (“leviathan retrieving pebbles”) and James, in the correspondence that follows, writes: “Art makes life, makes interest, makes importance.” Burns more papers and photographs at Lamb House in autumn. Has a stroke December 2 in his flat, followed by another two days later. Develops pneumonia and during delirium gives his last confused dictation (dealing with the Napoleonic legend) to Theodora Bosanquet, who types it on the familiar typewriter. Alice, William’s widow, arrives December 13 to care for him. On New Year’s Day, George V confers the Order of Merit. Dies February 28. Funeral services held at the Chelsea Old Church. The body is cremated and the ashes are later buried in Cambridge Cemetery family plot.
Note on the Texts
This volume contains Henry James’s books A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and the unfinished The Middle Years (1917), along with eight essays and selections from James’s notebooks written from 1881 to 1910.
It was relatively late in his career that James began to dwell on, and write about, his own past. He had always been interested in what he calls in the Preface to “The Aspern Papers” the “visitable past,” and prized contact with members of the older generation who had known Byron or Shelley, Dickens or Thackeray, Hawthorne or Thoreau. But as he grew older and more of his friends and intimates died—especially in the decade from 1885, when he lost his friends Clover Hooper, Lizzie Boott, James Russell Lowell, Wolcott Balestier, his sister Alice, Fanny Kemble, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Robert Louis Stevenson—he became ever more aware that his past experiences were a subject of interest, not only to himself but to others. He wrote a succession of memorial essays, and after a delay of some years, the biographical volume William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903), produced at the urging of the family of William Wetmore Story (1819–1895), an expatriate American sculptor in Rome. In that book he cited letters and connected them with reflective commentary, a method he would use in Notes of a Son and Brother.
In 1910 James’s brother William and his wife, Alice Howe Gibbens James, traveled to England because of alarming reports about the medical and psychological state of the novelist in his Sussex home (James was suffering from angina and most probably depression). But William’s own heart condition became a more pressing concern, and in late summer all three sailed back to America—only for William to die on August 26, 1910, at his house in Chocorua, New Hampshire.
James stayed on with his brother’s family, and later told his nephew Henry (Harry) that the idea of a “Family Book” emerged in talk with William’s widow, as he gave voice to memories of the family and of the brothers’ youth. James wrote that Alice declared, “Oh Henry, why don’t you write these things?”—so that “after a bit I found myself wondering vaguely whether I mightn’t do something of the sort” (Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 vols. [1974–84], IV, pp. 801–2; November 15–18, 1913). Given the initial necessity of gathering and transcribing letters, it took some time before a book began to emerge. Back in England, on November 19, 1911, James told Alice that he was in agreement with her son Henry about the treatment of the letters:
I am entirely at one with him about the kind of use to be made by me of all these early things, the kind of setting they must have, the kind of encompassment that the book, as my book, my play of reminiscence & almost of brotherly autobiography, & filial autobiography not less, must enshrine them in. The book I see & feel will be difficult & unprecedented & perilous—but if I bring it off it will be exquisite & unique; bring it off as I inwardly project it & oh so devoutly desire it. (Henry James: A Lif
e in Letters, ed. Philip Horne [1999], pp. 503–4)
But the workings of memory complicated the task. On July 16, 1912, James told his nephew that
in doing this book I am led, by the very process and action of my idiosyncrasy, on and on into more evocation and ramification of old images and connections, more intellectual and moral autobiography (though all closely and, as I feel it, exquisitely associated and involved,) than I shall quite know what to do with—to do with, that is, in this book. (Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock [1920], 2 vols., II, p. 240)
On August 7, 1912, James told his agent James Brand Pinker that he realized he had material for “two books, two distinct ones, taking the place of the one multifarious and comprehensive one that I originally saw.” And on September 9, he wrote Pinker that “in going over more searchingly my work of the past winter I can’t help recognising in it—that is in a mere portion of it, for the moment—the stuff, already highly finished and, as it were, deliverable—of a beautiful little book of about 70000 words, complete in itself, carrying the record concerned in it up to my twelfth year (!!!) and of the most enchanting effect!” (Henry James: A Life in Letters, p. 515). This would become A Small Boy and Others, a title that “exactly describes the volume” (letter to Pinker, September 29, 1912). On October 9 Pinker told Scribner that James now intended to defer using William James’s letters—the book would draw directly on James’s childhood memories, without including correspondence—and sent A Small Boy and Others by the same post, complete but for twenty to twenty-five pages.
A Small Boy and Others was a departure from the original undertaking as agreed with William’s family, and on September 23–24 James told his anxious nephew, who was himself planning to edit his father’s letters in a more conventional way, of the process that had led him to go against their expectations:
This whole record of early childhood simply grew so as one came to write it that one could but let it take its way—and it was a miracle to me (and still is as I go on further) how the memories revived and pressed upon me, and how they keep a-doing of it in the “letters” book. But this earlier thing makes a Book in itself, and I think a very charming and original and unprecedented one of its kind, and which has the merit of giving a whole introductory or initiatory Family picture as an approach to the later stage. (Henry James: Letters, IV, p. 794)
A Small Boy and Others was published in the United States and Britain by James’s usual publishers at the time, who had cooperated in the publication of the New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James in 24 volumes (1907–9). Charles Scribner’s Sons published the book on March 29, 1913, in a print run for the first impression of 2,750 copies in greenish brown sateen, sold at $2.50 (for the second impression in August 1914 another 525 were printed). On April 19, 1913, James wrote to Scribner’s expressing his regret that they had not inserted a notice saying that Notes of a Son and Brother was “In Preparation,” because “this indication would have been in a considerable degree explanatory of the First Instalment character of the Book, accounting for certain omissions, postponements and other provisional matters” (quoted in A Bibliography of Henry James: Third Edition, ed. Leon Edel and Dan H. Laurence, revised with the assistance of James Rambeau [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982], p. 149). Scribner’s at once put a cancel leaf in the remaining copies: “By Henry James | A Small Boy and Others | In preparation | Notes of a Son and Brother.” Macmillan & Co. in London published the book on April 1, 1913, in a print run of 1,000 copies in dark blue, sold at 12 shillings. Although there are mostly incidental variants between the American and English editions, James did not significantly revise the text of A Small Boy and Others. The text printed here is taken from the 1913 Charles Scribner’s Sons edition of A Small Boy and Others.
James had already written much of what became the second volume before he decided on the final division of material, so Notes of a Son and Brother was completed without great delay. Charles Scribner’s Sons published the book on March 7, 1914, in a first and sole print run of 3,000 copies in dull olive-brown smooth sateen, sold at $2.50. Macmillan & Co. in London published the book on March 13, 1914, in a print run of 1,250 copies, sold at 12 shillings. Although there are a few differences between the two editions, James did not significantly revise Notes of a Son and Brother. The 1914 Scribner’s edition contains the text printed here.
Notes of a Son and Brother concluded with the death of James’s cousin Minnie Temple in 1870, which he describes in its closing words as “the end of our youth.” Before its publication James had started work on an additional volume about his early experiences in England. On April 7, 1914, he wrote to his nephew Harry that, conditions permitting,
I probably shall perpetrate a certain number more passages of retrospect & reminiscences—though quite disconnectedly from these 2 recent volumes, which are complete in themselves & of which the original intention is now a performed and discharged thing. (quoted in Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years: A Critical Edition [2011], ed. Peter Collister, p. xxii)
James went on to “confess that something of the appeal of the period from 1869 to the beginning of my life in London [in late 1876] (the rest of that making a history by itself altogether,) does a good deal hang about me.” On June 3 he told his American friend Gaillard T. Lapsley how touched he was by Lapsley’s sister Eleanor’s appreciative letter about his memoirs: “I am trying my hand at another even now, & the most I can do is to assure her that it shall be very slow, very difficult, very delayed” (quoted in Henry James: A Life in Letters, p. 540). Though he dictated some chapters during the autumn of 1914, he laid it aside for other work as the war grew more intense. He was also unable to continue with a novel set in contemporary America, The Ivory Tower. In this final phase he also attempted to complete—probably because as a romance of time travel it seemed so removed from the painful present-day world—a novel of the supernatural he had begun and had to abandon in 1900, The Sense of the Past, though this, too, remained incomplete at his death on February 28, 1916.
Theodora Bosanquet, a young Englishwoman with literary talent and ambition, had been James’s amanuensis from 1907 onward. When James died she helped one of his young friends, his literary executor Percy Lubbock, to salvage and organize his abandoned works—including what remained of the third volume of memoirs. As Lubbock’s headnote to The Middle Years explains, James had given it a title taken from one of his most poignant short stories—itself that of an author who dies leaving much undone. Lubbock took an active editorial role in regard to paragraph and chapter divisions, as is evident from the manuscript in the Houghton Library at Harvard University (bMS Am 1237.9). The text printed here is that of the first English edition, published by Collins on October 18, 1917, in a print run of 1,000 copies, sold at 5 shillings. Scribner’s in New York published the book on November 23, 1917, in a print run of 1,275 copies, sold at $1.25. There are not significant textual revisions between the two editions, though the editions contain different frontispieces. (Two edited extracts of The Middle Years had been published in Scribner’s Magazine in October and November 1917.)
The “Other Autobiographical Writings, 1881–1910” by James chosen for this volume are taken from the following sources.
From the Notebooks, 1881–82; From the Notebooks, 1905: The texts here are drawn, with the kind permission of Cambridge University Press, from a new edition in preparation by Philip Horne, forthcoming as part of the Complete Fiction of Henry James; they are based on manuscripts in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, MS Am 1094 (from volume 2 and volume 7, respectively), and contain emendations of certain inaccuracies in earlier published editions of James’s notebooks.
Wolcott Balestier: Introductory “Biographical Sketch” in Wolcott Balestier, The Average Woman (Leipzig: Heinemann and Balestier, 1892), vii–xxxi. James’s essay was first published in Cosmopolitan Magazine, XIII, May 1892, 43–47.
Dumas the Younger: Notes on Novelists; with Some Other Notes (London: J.
M. Dent & Sons, 1914), pp. 362–84; this collection was also brought out by Charles Scribner’s Sons, not revised by James, one day later than the Dent edition. The essay had been published in the Boston Herald, February 23, 1896, III, 33: 1–4 and the New York Herald of the same date, VI, 5: 1–4; and, under the heading “On the Death of Dumas the Younger,” in the New Review, XIV (March 1896), 288–302.
The Late James Payn: Illustrated London News, April 9, 1898 (v. 112: 500). For passages in the manuscript not included in the published text, see notes 688.20 and 688.38.
An American Art-Scholar: Charles Eliot Norton: Notes on Novelists; with Some Other Notes (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1914), pp. 412–23. First published in Burlington Magazine, January 1909 (v. 14: 201–4).
The Turning Point of My Life: The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 437–38, based on bMS Am 1237.9, Houghton Library, Harvard University. The Edel and Powers edition gives the erroneous date “1900–1901”; the entry was written in late 1909 or early 1910.
Is There a Life After Death?: The anthology In After Days: Thoughts on the Future Life (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910), pp. 199–233. James’s essay was first published in Harper’s Bazaar, January–February 1910 (v. 44: 26, 128–29).
Appendix: “Henry James at Work” by Theodora Bosanquet: The Hogarth Essays, ed. Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Doran & Co., 1928), 243–76. It was first published in London by the Hogarth Press in 1924.