1. Pascal, Roy, Design and Truth in Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), p. 11.Google Scholar

2. “Like all autobiographies,” William Hoffa has commented, “James's is about the early life of its author, but it is just as much about the autobiographer's reaction to the process of telling his story, about the present re-experiencing of his early life.” (“The Final Preface: Henry James's Autobiography,” The Sewanee Review, 77 [1969], 284).Google Scholar

3. Sayre, Robert, The Examined Self: Benjamin Franklin, Henry Adams, Henry James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1964), pp. 144–45.Google Scholar

4. Lubbock, Percy, ed., The Letters of Henry James, 2 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1920), 289.Google Scholar

5. Edel, Leon, Henry James: The Master, 1901–1916 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1972), p. 434.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., pp. 455–56.

7. Edel, Leon, Henry James: The Treacherous Years, 1895–1901 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1969), p. 16.Google Scholar

8. See, for example, Pingaud, Bernard, “L'écriture et la cure,”Google Scholar in Lejeune, Philippe, L'autobiographie en France (Paris: Armand Colin, 1971), pp. 257–62, passim.Google Scholar

9. Dupee, Frederick W., ed., Henry James: Autobiography (New York: Criterion, 1956), pp. 3–4Google Scholar. All subsequent references are to this edition and will appear in parentheses or brackets in the text and notes.

10. Edel, Leon, Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843–1870 (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1953), p. 69.Google Scholar

11. Edel, , The Master, p. 445Google Scholar. Edel has taken various positions on the date of the nightmare. See also his The Untried Years, pp. 68, 75.Google Scholar

12. Except, of course, the debate with William about the value of their wandering education abroad.

13. Our curiosity naturally focuses on the identity of the mysterious “visitant”- intruder (was it William? was it some frightening aspect of Henry's own identity?), so much so that we tend to neglect the rest of James's revelation, that he was in a position (as is the case anyway with dreams) of actually seeing the creative process in action. In this respect there is perhaps an analogy to be drawn between James's nightmare and Wordsworth's apocalyptic vision of the power of imagination in the passage about “Crossing the Alps” in The Prelude. Here the poet wrote, “… to my conscious soul I now can say— / ‘I recognise thy glory’” (VI, 598–99).

14. Lubbock, , 291–92Google Scholar. In the letter James begins by referring specifically to financial troubles, but consideration of these difficulties leads him into a larger complex of problems revolving around his health and his art.

15. James, Henry to James, Henry II, 11 15–18, 1913Google Scholar, in Lubbock, , 2, 345–46.Google Scholar

16. Bosanquet, Theodora, “Henry James at Work,” The Hogarth Essays, ed. Woolf, Leonard S. and Woolf, Virginia S. (London: Hogarth Press, 1928Google Scholar; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), p. 252.

17. Rosenbaum, S. P., “Letters to the Pell-Clarkes from Their ‘Old Cousin and Friend’ Henry James,” American Literature, 31 (1959), 56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Tompkins, Jane, “The Redemption of Time in Notes of a Son and Brother,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 14 (1973), 681.Google Scholar

19. Edel, , The Master, p. 457.Google Scholar

20. Tompkins, , 682Google Scholar

21. Lubbock, , 2, 346, 347, 348Google Scholar. Adeline R. Tintner quotes a more nearly complete version of this letter, with deletions made by Lubbock restored, in her essay “Autobiography as Fiction: ‘The Usurping Consciousness’ as Hero of James's Memoirs,” Twentieth Century Literature, 23 (1977), 242–44Google Scholar. As her title suggests, Tintner regards A Small Boy and Notes as examples of a “new kind of ‘experimental’ novel” (239).

22. Bosanquet, , p. 252.Google Scholar

23. Harry James would perform this office by compiling a two-volume edition of William's letters that would be published in 1920.

24. See Edel, , The Master, p. 457Google Scholar, and Rosenbaum, , p. 53.Google Scholar

25. Nowadays, the typical student of James's novels is apt to satisfy his curiosity about their author by consulting the massive Edel biography, rarely undertaking to read the autobiography. Proceeding the other way around—as Edel himself, of course, was obliged to do—we cannot help but be struck by the extent to which not merely the themes but also the dramatic structure of the first volume of the biography, The Untried Years, are derived from the autobiography. Both conclude with the death of Minny Temple and James's first mature experience of Europe. The biographical insights that reward close study of the autobiography are exemplified in a fine essay by Walsh, William, “A Sense of Identity in a World of Circumstance: The Autobiography of Henry James,” in A Human Idiom: Literature and Humanity (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964), pp. 52–73.Google Scholar

26. Pp. 334–44, which he added to Chapter 6 as the typescript revisions indicate. I wish to record here my thanks to Gordon N. Ray, who allowed me to examine the typescript of Notes in his possession.

27. See also pp. 276 and 282 of the autobiography for further examples of James's sentiments on the war years.

28. Exclusion from “life,” especially from the experience of deep suffering, is one of James's most pervasive themes. John Marcher's overwhelming vision of an unknown mourner's ravaged face at the end of “The Beast in the Jungle” is perhaps the most striking of the countless examples that could be cited. This story offers a tragic view of the sense of personal inadequacy that James records in a different vein in the autobiography. Young Henry's abortive foray into the “larger” studio at Newport would be a characteristic instance of the more balanced if rueful acquiescence of the small boy, son, and brother in his passive nature, an acquiescence sustained, as Marcher's was not, by a compensatory confidence in the value of his own imagination.

29. In The Bostonians (1886)Google Scholar James uses the heroic experience of the war to measure the moral impoverishment of all of American life in the years that followed. John Goode argues that this novel “is controlled by the visit of Ransom and Verena to the Harvard Memorial [for the Union dead], and is dominated therefore by the catastrophe of the Civil War” (“The Art of Fiction: Walter Besant and Henry James,” in Howard, David et al. , eds., Tradition and Tolerance in Nineteenth-Century Fiction [New York: Barnes & Noble, 1967], p. 268)Google Scholar. See also Eakin, Paul John, The New England Girl: Cultural Ideals in Hawthorne, Stowe, Howells and James (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976), p. 211.Google Scholar

30. Edel, , The Untried Years, p. 175Google Scholar. For Edel, 's commentary on the “obscure hurt,” see pp. 175–83Google Scholar. Edel's interpretation, especially his emphasis on Henry's unconscious identification with his father at the moment of the injury, was anticipated by Rosenzweig, Saul in “The Ghost of Henry James: A Study in Thematic Apperception,” Character and Personality, 12 (1943–1944), 79–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31. We must note, however, the presence in the passage of an ambiguously passive alternative: “One's own poor organism … had suffered particular wrong.”

32. Erik Erikson's analysis of the drive that motivates the process of identity formation places James's behavior both as a young man and as an autobiographer in a revealing perspective: “By accepting some definition as to who he is, usually on the basis of a function in an economy, a place in the sequence of generations, and a status in the structure of society, the adult is able to selectively reconstruct his past in such a way that, step for step, it seems to have planned him, or better, he seems to have planned it.” By extension, the autobiographical act would be a special expression of a universal human need to cope with the “ego-chill … which comes from the sudden awareness that our nonexistence … is entirely possible.” (Young Man Luther [1958; rpt, New York: W. W. Norton, 1962], pp. 112, 111.Google Scholar

In my commentary I have avoided saying whether or not I believe that James did in fact sustain some kind of injury while fighting a fire in Newport, because obviously no one—not even Edel—can speak definitively one way or the other. Moreover, what James came to believe about the event is the real issue, and readers of A Small Boy know that from early on James believed that his physical condition somehow set him apart from others.

33. Edel, , The Untried Years, p. 169Google Scholar. Edel's source here, apparently, is the diary of Thomas Sergeant Perry.

34. James, Henry to Perry, Thomas Sergeant, 01 11, 1914Google Scholar, in Harlow, Virginia, Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Biography (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1950), p. 344.Google Scholar

35. James, to Perry, , 09 17, 1913Google Scholar, in Harlow, , p. 341.Google Scholar

36. James, to Perry, , 10 12, 1913Google Scholar, in Harlow, , p. 343Google Scholar. Is “pages” a slip for “ages”? If so, the slip may suggest the extent to which the text and the past became fused and confused in the course of the autobiographical act.

37. It is probably of some significance that at one point James formulates his decision to go to Harvard Law School as “my joining, in a sense, my brother at Cambridge” (p. 412)Google Scholar. The sibling rivalry between Henry and William has been so overplayed in recent criticism that another and equally important facet of their relationship has been obscured. William's stardom may have generated feelings of inferiority in Henry, but it also supplied a kind of cover for Henry's development of his own creativity without the family exposure that he found so inhibiting.

38. William Hoffa has observed that James plays down the earliest evidence of his literary activity; if so, perhaps he did this to make the parallel between personal and national history more striking. (“The Final Preface,” 290.)Google Scholar The testimony of James's brother Wilky and of his friend Thomas Sergeant Perry suggests that Henry was a secret scribbler as early as 1858–60.

39. Rosenbaum, , p. 53.Google Scholar

40. See, for example, James, Henry to James, Alice H., 03 29, 1914Google Scholar, in Lubbock, , 2, 362.Google Scholar

41. James attempted to qualify the impact of Chapter 13 in the opening of The Middle Years by juxtaposing the story of his own year of initiation in Europe in 1869–70 against the tale of Minny's defeat.

42. Erikson, , pp. 14, 43, 102, 100, 101, 41.Google Scholar

43. Manuscript in the James-family collection at the Houghton Library. The quotations from this letter and the three quoted below are by permission of the Houghton Library of Harvard University and Alexander R. James.

44. MS, Houghton Library.

45. MS, Houghton Library.

46. MS, Houghton Library.

47. Lubbock, , 2, 361.Google Scholar

48. James, Henry to Monod, Auguste, 09 7, 1913Google Scholar, in Edel, Leon, ed., The Selected Letters of Henry James (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1955), p. 107.Google Scholar