Distinctions and likenesses

The last time all five James children were in the same room was at their mother’s funeral, in 1882. It must have been a strange gathering. Even by then, their lives had followed such extraordinarily different paths that, to the reader of their collective biography, they seem to have become randomly assembled strangers. Henry James, the novelist, is always going to be the one with the greatest interest and appeal, but his cosmopolitan elegance sits oddly next to William, the solid thinker and analyst of mysticism, Alice, the wry solipsistic invalid, or, especially, the rackety and sad lives of Wilkie and Bob. The story’s been told before, of course; but that’s because it’s a tantalisingly odd story. Collectively and individually, the five James children have been ‘done’ by biographers, and the extraordinary range of their lives continues to amaze.

They emerged from a peculiar upbringing, and their characters were forged in a weird conflation of Emersonian mysticism, obsessions with money and legacies, European travel and the more raucous traditions of American life. Though Henry James senior came from a very wealthy background, his social refinement was paper-thin; he lost his leg in a childhood accident of terrible recklessness and forever afterwards there was something of the frontier about him. Hard drinking runs like a theme through the lives of the James family, and a certain degree of sexual casualness. If Wilkie and Bob, the chancers and no-hopers of the family, seem the ones to have inherited Henry senior’s bolder style, there are a surprising number of indelicate passions, satisfied or hopeless, in the lives of both Henry and William.

The James parents were clearly very unusual, and among their odder enthusiasms were mystical philosophies. Henry senior was a devotee of Swedenborg, of all people, and subsequently of Emerson — their lives were transformed by the lectures Emerson gave in New York in 1842.