Henry James

To James, the ideal writer was one for whom "nothing should be known of him but that he had been an impeccable writer ... he kept clear all his life of vulgarity and publicity and newspaperism." James is perhaps thinking of Shakespeare here, a writer about whom we know very little; he left behind no letters, no diaries, no memoirs, only an abundance of impeccable writing. In an attempt to pre-empt any "vulgarity and publicity" on his life, James decided to become his own biographer, and devoted his last years to writing books on himself and his family: A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother, and the unfinished The Middle Years. They are beautifully crafted works, these autobiographies, with lucid descriptions of the important people in his youth, especially of his brother William and of his father, and of the crossings and recrossings of the Atlantic Ocean the family made when James was a child. But James freely revised letters from which he quoted, and retouched many experiences and memories. These autobiographies are then, of necessity, not the full picture of Henry’s life. That would be the task of future biographers.

James didn’t make it easy for these future biographers, however. As he wrote, shortly before his death, in a letter to his nephew, " My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter -- which, I know, is but imperfectly possible. Still, one can do something ... that is to declare my utter and absolute abhorrence of any attempted biography or the giving to the world ... of any part or parts of my private correspondence." He then made a bonfire of some 40 years’ worth of accumulated memorabilia: letters, journals, manuscripts, notebooks. Friends and family had also agreed on their part to destroy all the letters he had sent them, but most didn’t keep their side of the bargain. James was an inveterate gossip and energetic letter writer, and at least ten thousand of his own letters have survived.

For some 40 years the life of Henry James was a cottage industry for the singularly obsessed Leon Edel, writer of the immense, and exquisitely composed, five-volume Life of Henry James published in the 1950s and 1960s. Edel had a python’s hold on James’s private documents, with polite acquiescence from the literary executors of Mr. James and the hallowed librarians at Harvard University where most of the remaining letters and journals are kept. In fact, until just recently wild-eyed historians could still find folders in Harvard’s stacks marked with red warning signs "Reserved for Leon Edel." Har-umph!

After Edel’s multi-volume biography, and the one-volume abbreviated version [for those readers who weren’t all that interested in James], as well as the selected letters, the complete tales, the complete plays, the annotated grocery lists, etc., it seems Edel ran out of things to write about [and the time to write; he is now in his 90s], and loosened his grip on the short hairs of Henry. Those wild-eyed historians rejoiced and several new upstarts have found employment in the James factory. Within the past several years, assorted Jamesiana have appeared on the market, most notably Henry James, The Imagination of a Genius: A Biography by Justin Kaplan, and Sheldon Novick’s Henry James, The Young Master.

Kaplan’s biography, disappointingly, is little more than rehashed and boiled down Edel. Whereas Edel’s Henry James is asexual, shy, and somewhat scatterbrained -- a favorite maiden aunt, let’s say -- Kaplan emphasizes the social climbing James, a Henry James interested in money, in business, in power, and in sex -- well not sex, exactly, just a lot of imagining it. However, reading between the lines of a more polite Edel, writing in more polite times, we could have guessed that already. Novick, on the other hand, obviously looking for a unique and sexy spin to put his biography in the public eye, has decided to repaint the portrait of James entirely, has decided that James was quite actively sexual, indeed that he was quite the gay blade, as it were.

Novick has taken the stance, in his book and in post-publication interviews, of the young Turk beating up on an old fart. He accuses Edel of repressing "independent scholarship with legendary vindictiveness," and of "lashing out" in an "undignified way at every potential rival." Not only does this seem wrong-headed, but somewhat distasteful as well. You long for someone to ring up and say "For Christ’s sake, leave the old guy alone, will you." But Novick gallops on, claiming, by his book, to "overturn half a century of scholarship"--bad scholarship, on can only imagine he means.

O.W. Holmes

Novick seems to take some sort of perverse glee in mucking around in James’s sexual orientation, and "takes it for granted that [James] was a closeted gay man." Novick has even gone so far as to claim that documents which Edel either willfully or mistakenly misinterpreted prove that James had has first affair, his "initiation premiere" to quote James himself ["jacked off" to use Novick’s more colorful parlance] one spring day in 1865 with the dashing Oliver Wendell Holmes -- Civil War vet [James was always a sucker for a man in uniform], and later revered Supreme Court judge. Holmes was drinking heavily at that time, just after the war, and these fun times between he and Henry, if there really were any, appear to have been just one of those things two men do when drunk. Novick remarks that these encounter(s) were not of great importance to Holmes, and even quotes the judge, writing to friends in later years about James, referring to the "difference in the sphere of our dominate interest." Which translates, one imagines, as Holmes liked girls better. Or maybe that Henry gave lousy blow jobs. In other words: rejection.

But perhaps equally as important for our little colloquy here, Holmes was also the future subject of a biography written by one Mr. Sheldon Novick. One suspects Novick’s interest in James’s interest in Holmes is perhaps driven more by the marketplace than by scholarship. Calling James actively queer may bring attention to his new biography, and saying James was actively queer with Holmes may bring attention to his other biography. Now there’s a marketing tie-in to rival anything ever cooked up by Disney.

But Holmes is not the only fuck buddy Novick claims James had. Novick also makes some vague, muddy hints that James was friendly, in a sexual sort of way, with Paul Zuhkovski, a Russian aristocrat and Turgenev groupie that James met while living in Paris in 1876. Novick bases this claim on the fact that James and Zuhkovski kept up a steady friendship for some twenty years, a friendship maintained mainly through the writing of letters. James found the Russian "picturesque" and the two men swore an "eternal fellowship." Edel quickly disposes of this new claim, by saying "one could read sex into this" if one wants to [and Novick certainly wants to], but "it sounds more like the ... swagger and ‘brotherhood’" that "often takes place among young males." Even calling it "swagger" seems to be reading too much into the whole Zuhkovski affair. Unfortunately, Novick doesn’t tell us what Harry and Paul did in bed or which positions they liked best. It’s a pity, but we must remind ourselves that this is only the first volume of Novick’s Life Of James, which he ends in 1880 [with the publication of Portrait]. Maybe we’ll learn more about Mr. Zuhkovski, and all the other lads who had flings with Mr. James, in volume two.

Henry and Oliver?

Novick says that he is "guessing" about James’s sexual escapades, but he’s fine with that. He disingenuously defends himself by adding: "anything one says about history is a guess." James-scholars and observant book reviewers have taken Novick to task for his lack of new evidence -- new confessions or photographs -- or elaborate arguments on this whole sexual question. Novick has an answer to this as well: "I did not think it necessary to make any elaborate argument about James’s sexuality, precisely because the facts are so well known. ... He regularly invited actively gay men to visit him overnight, sometimes in frankly imploring terms ... He wrote remarkably erotic letters to them, before and after their visits." Just because James may have addressed a letter to "Dear, dearest, darlingest Hugh" doesn’t necessarily mean he was gay, actively or otherwise. But Novick continues: "It seems plain that Henry James knew what he was talking about when he so vividly described sexual acts, and that he had this knowledge from his young manhood onward." In the novels and stories that James wrote, Novick describes James as using "vivid, tactile language" to describe the kissing and fondling of men, safely from a woman’s perspective, of course; of what if feels like to hold a man, or to bring another man to climax [as Novick says James wrote about in the early short story "A Light Man"]. These graphic descriptions "never seem to strike a false note"; however, according to Novick, James’s descriptions of a man’s love for a woman are "sometimes ludicrously off-base."

Edel, for his part, seems to quietly assume that Henry was impotent, and thus, celibate. Edel even quotes an British doctor who once examined James and determined that the writer had a "low amatory coefficient." What the heck is that supposed to mean? Assume it means that James was Princess Tiny Meat, and probably not very popular at the Anvil. Thankfully, neither Novick nor Kaplan have seen it necessary to force James to whip it out on the table and measure it with a ruler. Edel blames James’s impotence on the "obscure hurt" James often suffered and wrote about. The "obscure hurt" in question was a strained back James experienced during a stable fire while he was serving as a volunteer fireman during the Civil War. But we all know, from the precedent set by Jack Kennedy, that even a bad back can’t keep a good man down.

Of course, Novick has his opinions on James’s supposed celibacy as well. "James repeatedly described celibacy ... as a perversion when voluntary, and a living death when not." Novick says he has found "no evidence" of James’s supposed celibacy [just as others have found no evidence for Novick’s certain claim of James’s supposed gayness].

Kaplan, feeling left out in the cold, throws in his opinion, and you have to admire his clear-eyed view of the whole damned thing. Kaplan doesn’t think sexual agendas are the kind of thing one should "take for granted" about anybody. He is certain, however, that James "loved" some men, but he doesn’t really know that that means, exactly. Opines Kaplan: "James was a fastidious man with a strong homoerotic sensibility." [Note that word "fastidious." I guess that means James had good grooming habits or a fine fashion sense, which I guess means he was gay.] What Kaplan’s not certain of, however, is how Novick can claim that James did anything, especially wanking off Wendell Holmes. James may have, or he may have wanted to, but Kaplan agrees with Edel that "there isn’t any credible evidence to support a claim that he did." Kaplan rightly realizes that it just is not very likely that we will ever know, that new evidence is not likely to turn up, that there just isn’t a four-page nude photo spread in the North American Review with James and Holmes having it off. What baffles Kaplan, and curious others, is why Novick seems to think that James "would somehow be lesser, even diminished, if hadn’t fucked or sucked or whatever with someone." [Those are Kaplan’s own words, and somewhat overheated words, considering he’s discussing Henry James and not Henry Miller. James would surely be appalled.]

About the best one can do concerning James and his sex life is hope. As Millicent Bell recently wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, "One cannot help hoping, for James’s sake, that his life was not altogether devoid of sensual satisfaction."

Before we make any hasty judgments of our own, let’s take a look at the passage Novick uses as proof of James’s naughty doings with Holmes. Here’s James writing in his journal sometime in 1905, making notes for a book and reminiscing about his glory days in the spring of 1865:

"The point for me (for fatal, for impossible expansion) is that I knew there, had there, in the ghostly old C[ambridge] that I sit and write of here ... l’inititation premiere (the divine, the unique), there and in Ashburton Place ... Ah, the ‘epoch-making’ weeks of the spring of 1865! -- from the 1st days of April or so, to the summer ... Something -- some fine, superfine, supersubtle, mythic breath of that may come in perhaps in the Three Cities, in relation to any reference to the remembered Boston of the ‘prime.’ Ah, that pathetic, heroic little personal prime of my own ... that of the Seven Weeks’ War and of the unforgettable gropings and findings and sufferings and strivings and play of sensibility and of inward passion there. The hours, the moments, the days, come back to me -- on into the early autumn before the move to Cambridge and with the sense, still, after such a lifetime of particular little thrills and throbs and daydreams there. I can’t help, either, just touching with my pen-point (here, here, only here) the recollection of that (probably August) day when I went up to Boston from Swampscott and called in Charles St. for news of O.W.H. [Oliver Wendell Holmes], then on his 1st flushed and charming visit to England and saw his mother in the cold dim matted drawingroom of that house (past, never, since, without the sense), and got the news of all his London, his general English, success and felicity, and vibrated so with the wonder and romance and curiosity and dim weak tender (oh, tender!) envy of it, that my walk up the hill, up Mount Vernon St., and probably to Atheneum was all coloured and gilded, and humming with it, and the emotion, exquisite of its kind, so remained with me that I always think of that occasion, that hour, as a sovereign contribution to the germ of that inward romantic principle which was to determine so much later on (ten years!) my own vision-haunted migration."

Well, obviously something happened around 1865, but what? James doesn’t seem comfortable even letting his journal in on the real news -- note the "for fatal, for impossible expansion." He just isn’t comfortable talking about whatever it was that happened, but he sure seems to like thinking about it. It makes him feel all warm and tingly down there. And Wendell Holmes seems to play some special part in this memory. James also can’t help "just touching" with his pen-point [Dr. Freud call your office] "here, here, only here" the recollection of visiting Mrs. Holmes for news of her son’s virgin trip to Europe. Maybe James did it with the mother while the maid went to market?

Edel seems to think that in this journal entry James is writing "generally about the ‘rite of passage’ that inaugurated his literary career." Edel thinks that this entry had nothing to do with sex whatsoever, but about James’s first book review in the North American Review, whose editors paid him $12, and about the overwhelming emotions James felt when he heard that Hawthorne had died. Edel admits that James does mention Holmes, but only to describe a visit he made to Holmes’ mother to ask how her son’s trip to England was and James’s "own fierce envy of Holmes for traveling abroad while James remained at home." Certainly nothing dirty in any of that.

But even this seems too simple an explanation. Read the entry again. The words James uses are highly charged, intense, almost ardent. Even James, in his most ornate style, would not use such a tone to describe having a manuscript, even his first manuscript, accepted for publication, or the European sojourns of a friend, as a "fine, unique" experience that would be "fatal, impossible" to recall in his journal.