Henry James began writing the first of his two completed books of autobiography, A Small Boy and Others, in 1911, and it was published two years later, in 1913, the same year as that other great memory book, Du côté de chez Swann. I can’t help wonder about the timing, on the eve of a catastrophic war that, as Walter Benjamin later observed, would render experience itself incommunicable. The little-known Marcel Proust, rejected by André Gide at NRF, had to subsidize his book’s publication by Grasset; the elderly James, honored by his peers, was nonetheless, without his knowledge, being subsidized by Edith Wharton, who was secretly transferring funds into his account at Scribner’s. Consumed with time, both books were untimely, but James’s still hasn’t found its time. A Small Boy—part of the Library of America volume of James’s autobiographies—may be the quintessential late James, and all the more fully possessed of its lateness by its having been disembarrassed of all the conventions of fiction, the better to luxuriate in the fictiveness of reconstructed fact, a fictiveness embodied, in this case, by the gap between the intensity with which memory can conjure scenes of the past and the partial and dubious nature of its vivid appearances on the other. James, in the eddies of his recollections of a childhood spent moving among mid-nineteenth-century Albany, New York, London, Paris, writes himself remembering and then remembering that he is inventing his memories—a dizzying recursive loop, since the self that makes the memories is the self the memories made. The “small boy” of the book’s title seems to be named in its first sentence, not as the author, but as his older brother: this will be, we are given to understand, “the attempt to place together some particulars of the early life of William James and present him in his setting, his immediate native and domestic air,” but as it becomes clear, the brother, “occupying a place in the world to which I couldn’t at all aspire,” will have only a rather shadowy presence in its pages:
I never for all the time of childhood and youth in the least caught up with him or overtook him. He was always round the corner and out of sight, coming back into view but at his hours of extremest ease. We were never in the same schoolroom, in the same game, scarce even in step together or in the same phase at the same time; when our phases overlapped, that is, it was only for a moment—he was clean out before I had got well in.
The small boy who is the younger brother, the always too-late one, becomes “a convenient little image or warning of all that was to be for him.” The notoriously elaborate prose that is the late James hallmark here grows winkingly overelaborate: the instrument of a fine irony that is always self-irony, an amusement not only at the boy the narrator once was (he knows so much more now!) yet equally—but from what undefined third position?—at the narrator continually stumped by the insoluble problems he has set himself and always reminding himself that his attempt to reconstruct his childhood are vain. In this effort, “aspects began to multiply and images to swarm,” which sounds like manna to the autobiographer, but how to lend a book’s linear structure to a swarm? “These images are subject, I confess, to a soft confusion—which is somehow consecrated, none the less, and out of which, with its shade of contributory truth, some sort of scene insists on glancing.” Like the elusive elder brother, the reality of life is always just being glimpsed, never quite grasped, by the observant eye of the writer-to-be. But still:
Of a wondrous mixed sweetness and sharpness and queerness of uneffaced reminiscence is all that aspect of the cousins and the rambles and the overlapping nights melting along the odorously bedamped and retouched streets and arcades; bright in the ineffable morning light, above all, of our peculiar young culture and candour!
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Henry James, Autobiographies, edited by Philip Horne, is published by the Library of America, New York, 2016.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.