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Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, A Biography
One of the most influential novelists, Henry James led a life that was as rich as his writing. Born into an eccentric and difficult family, he left the United States for Europe, where he quickly became a fixture of the expatriate writing community. Fred Kaplan recreates the world of Henry his friendships with Edith Wharton and Joseph Conrad, his love of all things exquisite—including exquisite writing—and his quest for understanding human nature. As James himself advocated and would have wanted, this is an artful, dramatic biography, placing the chronological narrative of James's life in the historical context of his times. "The twenty-one-year-old Henry James, Jr., preferred to be a writer rather than a soldier. His motives for writing were clear to himself, and they were not he desired fame and fortune. Whatever additional enriching complications that were to make him notorious for the complexity of his style and thought, the initial motivation remained constant. Deeply stubborn and persistently willful, he wanted praise and money, the rewards of recognition of what he believed to be his genius, on terms that he himself wanted to establish. The one battle he thought most worth fighting was that of the imagination for artistic expression. The one empire he most coveted, the land that he wanted for his primary home, was the empire of art."—from Henry The Imagination of Genius
- GenresBiographyNonfiction
672 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
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January 9, 2021
The novels of Henry James may well be an acquired taste, but if you haven’t yet tried them, then reading Fred Kaplan’s hefty but wonderful biography of the author will, I predict, encourage you to do so. Rather than a mere a cradle-to-grave, chronological reporting of events, Kaplan’s research-saturated Henry James: The Imagination of Genius provides extensive context for the world in which Henry James’s life and work unfolded. This includes information on the influence of family and friends, writer and other artist communities, and James’s passion for travel.
The entire James family were avid travelers but Henry, in particular, was indefatigable in flitting from one place to another. No sooner did he find himself in one place by conscious choice, than he would persuade himself of the need to be elsewhere! Even when in the middle of writing a demanding novel, or even through bouts of significant illness, James thought nothing of journeying quickly to another location—taking luggage and half-finished work with him. Some of his books were written on two or more continents.
Kaplan explains that James wasn’t necessarily born with an “imagination of genius” that made him one of the most notable 19th-century American writers—he apprenticed himself carefully for it. For one thing, James taught himself to be a critical observer of people and situations, and then with equal assiduity, to record everything in diaries and personal letters. In addition, he cultivated and socialized with a large network of writers, artists, sculptors, and poets. And again, every snippet of a personal anecdote was noted for potential use in his stories. The final element of his self-constructed apprenticeship was to write—and he did this prolifically: articles, book reviews, travelogues, brief artist biographies, and anything else he could get paid for.
His extraordinary self-awareness informed him when he was ready to display his genius in novels. And though Roderick Hudson and The American are both solid works, only with The Portrait of a Lady did James believe his apprenticeship was complete. Yet despite his prodigious output, for one reason or another—unusual copyright laws of the era, poor royalty negotiations with publishers, lack of an aggressive agent to market his work, and so on—James seemed constantly short of money to support the lifestyle he believed he deserved.
He also learned a hard lesson that his genius wasn’t perfect. A chance suggestion made him think about writing plays for the theater. He felt confident enough to attempt it, first with one or two of his novels, and then with an original play. His efforts brought very modest success in provincial theater circuits, but were disastrous on London stages. Despite repeated advice that theater audiences only favored happy endings, James’s purist literature notions had him defending “correct” endings according to the story. This devotion to his particular view of the connection between life and art was the abiding hallmark of his entire writing life.
As the end of the nineteenth century gave way to the beginning of the twentieth James began what would be the most sustained burst of creativity of his life. Between 1901 and 1904, he produced his last three great novels as the final maturity and manifestation of his art: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. Though American, he lived well over half his 73 years in his beloved England. His crowning act as a thorough Anglophile was to become a British citizen just before he died in 1916.
The entire James family were avid travelers but Henry, in particular, was indefatigable in flitting from one place to another. No sooner did he find himself in one place by conscious choice, than he would persuade himself of the need to be elsewhere! Even when in the middle of writing a demanding novel, or even through bouts of significant illness, James thought nothing of journeying quickly to another location—taking luggage and half-finished work with him. Some of his books were written on two or more continents.
Kaplan explains that James wasn’t necessarily born with an “imagination of genius” that made him one of the most notable 19th-century American writers—he apprenticed himself carefully for it. For one thing, James taught himself to be a critical observer of people and situations, and then with equal assiduity, to record everything in diaries and personal letters. In addition, he cultivated and socialized with a large network of writers, artists, sculptors, and poets. And again, every snippet of a personal anecdote was noted for potential use in his stories. The final element of his self-constructed apprenticeship was to write—and he did this prolifically: articles, book reviews, travelogues, brief artist biographies, and anything else he could get paid for.
His extraordinary self-awareness informed him when he was ready to display his genius in novels. And though Roderick Hudson and The American are both solid works, only with The Portrait of a Lady did James believe his apprenticeship was complete. Yet despite his prodigious output, for one reason or another—unusual copyright laws of the era, poor royalty negotiations with publishers, lack of an aggressive agent to market his work, and so on—James seemed constantly short of money to support the lifestyle he believed he deserved.
He also learned a hard lesson that his genius wasn’t perfect. A chance suggestion made him think about writing plays for the theater. He felt confident enough to attempt it, first with one or two of his novels, and then with an original play. His efforts brought very modest success in provincial theater circuits, but were disastrous on London stages. Despite repeated advice that theater audiences only favored happy endings, James’s purist literature notions had him defending “correct” endings according to the story. This devotion to his particular view of the connection between life and art was the abiding hallmark of his entire writing life.
As the end of the nineteenth century gave way to the beginning of the twentieth James began what would be the most sustained burst of creativity of his life. Between 1901 and 1904, he produced his last three great novels as the final maturity and manifestation of his art: The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. Though American, he lived well over half his 73 years in his beloved England. His crowning act as a thorough Anglophile was to become a British citizen just before he died in 1916.
September 4, 2009
Reading Selections:
Henry James on Compassion
To the young, the early dead, the baffled, the defeated, I don’t think we can be tender enough.
Henry James Observation of Death
Yet I confess I used the only word (extinction) that expresses my own sense of what the great silence means -- and of the impenetrable mystery. That I should have used it of such a spirit as your mother’s, only proves, I fear, how inveterate in me is the habit of that particular vision. But I cherish the knowledge that in others -- any others -- abides the other vision. But its all mere wrath and yearning in the darkness! I saw your mother go -- saw it with the tenderest and most leavetaking eyes: and the reconstruction of the soul is to me the most difficult of all imaginations. Yet -- I must add -- she is a part of the universe to me at this hour! So much, at any rate, in simple explanation of my rather chance expression. I wanted only to express the intensity -- to our eyes -- of cessation.
Henry James on the Transformation of Experience Into Art
Only live and think of living, from hour to hour and day to day: it is perfect wisdom and take us through troubles that no other way can take us through…Art makes life, makes interest.
James’s Sense of His Own Development: What Maisie Knew
..he created What Maisie Knew a brilliant tour de force, one of his most lucid and at he same time aesthetically and morally complicated novels. A sexual maelstrom of coupling and competitiveness swirls around little Maisie. For Mrs. Wix, her governess, the representative of middle class conventionality, the crucial concern is does Maisie have, or will she develop, a moral sense? Throughout the novel, Maisie’s consciousness is the center of experience and perception, aided by the Jamesian narrator’s dexterity in using the indirect narrative to mediate between the young girl’s mind and the external world. The central drama in the story is the gradual growth of Maisie’s consciousness as she struggles against the rejections and the confusions of the adult world. In the end, like the serpent in the garden, Mrs. Wix becomes the instrument of Maisie’s self-awareness. At last poor Maisie develops a moral sense. Heretofore she had consulted only her needs, and created adaptive strategies to get people to love her. Her basic acts of self-preservation had been instinctive, amoral. What did Maisie know? She knew a great deal. Little by little she knew everything about the sexual relationships and activities swirling around her. But she did not know that they were immoral. She knew them and judged them only insofar as they affected her primary needs. Finally she returns to England with Mrs. Wix, having done the best, and about to do the best, she can with freedom, a freedom based on knowledge. She has grown up, into a world of moral complexity, self-consciousness, limitation, and restraint but also a world of choice, and possibly of sufficient freedom from fear to act on impulses of love and on changing self-definitions. The novel is a telling fictional embodiment of James’s own sense of his own development. Like Maisie, he knew, gradually, everything in his depiction, though Maisie of the stages and the mysteries of growing up and the pain of the final conflict between deep, intuitive needs and the challenge of socialization. James dramatized his own lifelong problems of growth, choice, and personal freedom.
The Beast In The Jungle
James wrote his most powerful short story on the subject of sexual and marital inaction, confused by sexual identity, and evasive personal deception -- “The Beast In The Jungle.”…Whatever James understood about his own desires, he expressed them indirectly with dramatic power in the story of “a man haunted…by the fear, more and more, throughout his life, that something will happen to him.” The sense of special destiny that determines much of John Marcher’s life turns out in the end to be his emotional inability to love, which suggests sexual impotence. Deeply repressed feelings lie in wait to take revenge against him, to spring out as a hallucinatory embodiment of his inner emptiness, dismissive unfeeling egotism, and his lifelong repression of his sown sexuality. It springs out into consciousness and takes its revenge when he knows that it is he has done, what he has missed, what he has been incapable of…For Marcher there is not second chance , no renewal -- an embodiment of James’s nightmare vision of never having lived, of having missed the depths and the passions of life, of having denied love and sexuality.
Henry James on the Future of English
He strained to hear the “accent of the future.” The language of America “may be destined to become the most beautiful on the globe and the very music of humanity ..but whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for English -- in any sense for which there is an existing literary measure.” What he most feared was that his new society would have no place for him. He had spent a lifetime creating works of literary art in a language that might be as irrelevant, impenetrable, and foreign in the American future as he felt himself to be on the Lower East Side.
Henry James on Journalism and Art
What he did imply, though, is that what he most feared, as he had all his life, was the victory of journalism over art, of Wells (H. G. Wells) over James. For “it is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance… and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”
Henry James on Compassion
To the young, the early dead, the baffled, the defeated, I don’t think we can be tender enough.
Henry James Observation of Death
Yet I confess I used the only word (extinction) that expresses my own sense of what the great silence means -- and of the impenetrable mystery. That I should have used it of such a spirit as your mother’s, only proves, I fear, how inveterate in me is the habit of that particular vision. But I cherish the knowledge that in others -- any others -- abides the other vision. But its all mere wrath and yearning in the darkness! I saw your mother go -- saw it with the tenderest and most leavetaking eyes: and the reconstruction of the soul is to me the most difficult of all imaginations. Yet -- I must add -- she is a part of the universe to me at this hour! So much, at any rate, in simple explanation of my rather chance expression. I wanted only to express the intensity -- to our eyes -- of cessation.
Henry James on the Transformation of Experience Into Art
Only live and think of living, from hour to hour and day to day: it is perfect wisdom and take us through troubles that no other way can take us through…Art makes life, makes interest.
James’s Sense of His Own Development: What Maisie Knew
..he created What Maisie Knew a brilliant tour de force, one of his most lucid and at he same time aesthetically and morally complicated novels. A sexual maelstrom of coupling and competitiveness swirls around little Maisie. For Mrs. Wix, her governess, the representative of middle class conventionality, the crucial concern is does Maisie have, or will she develop, a moral sense? Throughout the novel, Maisie’s consciousness is the center of experience and perception, aided by the Jamesian narrator’s dexterity in using the indirect narrative to mediate between the young girl’s mind and the external world. The central drama in the story is the gradual growth of Maisie’s consciousness as she struggles against the rejections and the confusions of the adult world. In the end, like the serpent in the garden, Mrs. Wix becomes the instrument of Maisie’s self-awareness. At last poor Maisie develops a moral sense. Heretofore she had consulted only her needs, and created adaptive strategies to get people to love her. Her basic acts of self-preservation had been instinctive, amoral. What did Maisie know? She knew a great deal. Little by little she knew everything about the sexual relationships and activities swirling around her. But she did not know that they were immoral. She knew them and judged them only insofar as they affected her primary needs. Finally she returns to England with Mrs. Wix, having done the best, and about to do the best, she can with freedom, a freedom based on knowledge. She has grown up, into a world of moral complexity, self-consciousness, limitation, and restraint but also a world of choice, and possibly of sufficient freedom from fear to act on impulses of love and on changing self-definitions. The novel is a telling fictional embodiment of James’s own sense of his own development. Like Maisie, he knew, gradually, everything in his depiction, though Maisie of the stages and the mysteries of growing up and the pain of the final conflict between deep, intuitive needs and the challenge of socialization. James dramatized his own lifelong problems of growth, choice, and personal freedom.
The Beast In The Jungle
James wrote his most powerful short story on the subject of sexual and marital inaction, confused by sexual identity, and evasive personal deception -- “The Beast In The Jungle.”…Whatever James understood about his own desires, he expressed them indirectly with dramatic power in the story of “a man haunted…by the fear, more and more, throughout his life, that something will happen to him.” The sense of special destiny that determines much of John Marcher’s life turns out in the end to be his emotional inability to love, which suggests sexual impotence. Deeply repressed feelings lie in wait to take revenge against him, to spring out as a hallucinatory embodiment of his inner emptiness, dismissive unfeeling egotism, and his lifelong repression of his sown sexuality. It springs out into consciousness and takes its revenge when he knows that it is he has done, what he has missed, what he has been incapable of…For Marcher there is not second chance , no renewal -- an embodiment of James’s nightmare vision of never having lived, of having missed the depths and the passions of life, of having denied love and sexuality.
Henry James on the Future of English
He strained to hear the “accent of the future.” The language of America “may be destined to become the most beautiful on the globe and the very music of humanity ..but whatever we shall know it for, certainly, we shall not know it for English -- in any sense for which there is an existing literary measure.” What he most feared was that his new society would have no place for him. He had spent a lifetime creating works of literary art in a language that might be as irrelevant, impenetrable, and foreign in the American future as he felt himself to be on the Lower East Side.
Henry James on Journalism and Art
What he did imply, though, is that what he most feared, as he had all his life, was the victory of journalism over art, of Wells (H. G. Wells) over James. For “it is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance… and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”
May 31, 2013
It could have been an interesting book, but in the end resulted too long, sometimes indigestible and very centered on the alleged repressed homosexuality of the author (H.J.). It has served to uncover information that I had not about his books and I become aware of the fact that Henry James has known practically all my favorite writers of the time, but other than that I've read several pieces jumping because I was very bored.
Poteva essere un libro interessante, ma alla fine é risultato troppo troppo lungo, a tratti indigesto e molto centrato sulla presunta omosessualitá repressa dello scrittore. Mi é servito per scoprire informazioni che non avevo sui suoi libri e venire a conoscenza del fatto che Henry James ha conosciuto praticamente tutti i miei scrittori preferiti dell'epoca, ma a parte questo l'ho letto saltando parecchi pezzi perché ero decisamente annoiata.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA FOR THE PREVIEW!
Poteva essere un libro interessante, ma alla fine é risultato troppo troppo lungo, a tratti indigesto e molto centrato sulla presunta omosessualitá repressa dello scrittore. Mi é servito per scoprire informazioni che non avevo sui suoi libri e venire a conoscenza del fatto che Henry James ha conosciuto praticamente tutti i miei scrittori preferiti dell'epoca, ma a parte questo l'ho letto saltando parecchi pezzi perché ero decisamente annoiata.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA FOR THE PREVIEW!
May 20, 2013
I just had two criticisms of this book. The first is that Kaplan reads James' life into every book or character he discusses. While I'm sure James used his life as inspiration, I do think he should be given more credit for inventiveness. The second is that James' long decline at the end of his life is just too drawn out. We don't have to suffer quite as much as he did. I think this could have been abbreviated without the reader losing the sense of James' suffering. Otherwise it is an excellent biography.
June 22, 2021
This is close to a 'what-the-subject-did-every-style' compendium or chronicle-style biography, almost in the manner of Edel, that the reader may be left wanting more detail. It is less tendentious than Edel; and Kaplan pointedly thanks Edel in Edel's capacity as an editor of James's short stories.
Kaplan is good on the financial side of James's dealings with publishers, on his sense that he was always poor, earning less than his friend Edith Wharton, or his theatrical rival Oscar Wilde (who he found at once shallow and fascinating), and convincingly explains James's attraction to the theatre in terms of a hankering after wealth and comfort. He is also insightful about the psychic material, the anxieties, the self-doubts, the grandiosity and the resistance to heteronormative expectations, that dictated James's early subjects and the form of his first plots--detecting a psychosexual rivalry with William, as well as the more familial sublimated admiration for Minny Temple.
Kaplan is good on the financial side of James's dealings with publishers, on his sense that he was always poor, earning less than his friend Edith Wharton, or his theatrical rival Oscar Wilde (who he found at once shallow and fascinating), and convincingly explains James's attraction to the theatre in terms of a hankering after wealth and comfort. He is also insightful about the psychic material, the anxieties, the self-doubts, the grandiosity and the resistance to heteronormative expectations, that dictated James's early subjects and the form of his first plots--detecting a psychosexual rivalry with William, as well as the more familial sublimated admiration for Minny Temple.
July 9, 2022
A solid book with good information about Henry James’s life.
July 13, 2009
Henry James is one of those writers who fashion books I should truly enjoy and sometimes do but more often don't. His life was a rich exercise in the development and extension of a literary imagination and even if you aren't a superfan you need to understand him. This one volume exploration of his life is worth the shot.
March 3, 2014
Thorough and thoughtful study of the life and work.
April 22, 2017
A bit puzzled by people who think this book is too dense and too long, only because it makes me wonder why they're reading a biography of Henry James?
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews