Book Review

Three entwined siblings

House of Wits: an intimate portrait of the James family

In 1878, shortly before her thirtieth birthday, Alice James, "career invalid" - perhaps at the time the only career open to an intellectual woman in a male-dominated household - went to her father, Henry James senior, and asked his permission to kill herself. "With his odd and inconsistent broad-mindedness - he had no philosophical objections to suicide - Henry gave her his permission. However, she clung on." One theme of this book is Alice's rightful place among the troubled brilliance of the James family.

Henry senior had himself "clung on"; had known mental breakdown, clinical depression, alcoholism. He was by this time a known but amateur philosopher, Transcendentalist, a disaffected follower of Emerson (although the two men remained friends), and for the latter part of his life a devout Swedenborgian. As represented here, his views seem to make no coherent sense; for example, he was an advocate of free love, also of chastity, a radical who disapproved of the education of women. However, people listened to him, especially his family - who may have had little choice - and his children loved and respected him. He was clearly a man of charm, a quality all his five children inherited.

Henry senior's father, "a flinty Presbyterian", emigrated from County Cavan some time between 1789 and 1794, and by land speculation, shares in the Erie canal, and - significantly - by dealings in the liquor trade, built himself a huge fortune. Split between his 11 children, this still left his son Henry senior comfortably off.

However, the liquor trade also left his family's house awash with the stuff. Henry described himself at the age of 10 "taking a drink of raw gin or brandy on my way to school morning and afternoon".

Then, at 13, he burnt his leg so badly trying to put out a fire that it had to be amputated twice, first below the knee and then later above it. The only anaesthetic was whisky. Henry entered adult life an alcoholic with a cork leg, a restless depressive who believed in "manliness".

He was forever escaping, bundling himself and his young family into luxurious steamers bound for Europe. In the words of his son Henry, the siblings became "hotel children"; they had to rely on one another's company to such an extent that they became bound together for life, as well as becoming cultivated and travelled beyond the norm for Americans of their time and class, which of course isolated them even further.

Paul Fisher, in this enormous book, piles detail upon detail describing these travels: sailing, we learn about the furniture of their cabins, the menus of the dining saloons; the hotels are described, the rented houses, and what happens in the street, until a picture of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, and of the United States too, becomes as detailed as a painting by Frith.

The eldest son, William, and the slightly younger Henry (called here throughout "Harry" to distinguish him from his father) became particularly dependent upon each other, devoted yet competitive, a pattern which continued throughout their lives. William, with elder-brother status, longed for novelist Henry "to sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mistiness in the plot ... and absolute straightness in the style". To which Harry wearily replied, "I am always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of mine, and always hope you won't - you seem to me so constitutionally unable to ‘enjoy' it." (One can almost hear William's snort at the finicking inverted commas round the word "enjoy".)

Later in life, they were elected to the American equivalent of the Académie Française. Henry, famous novelist, was admitted on the second ballot; William, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, a book quite without "twilight or mistiness", as fresh and useful to read today as it was in 1902, only on the fourth.

This did not go down well with the elder brother, but their lives remained entwined. Alice cast off her "neurasthenia" by contracting a "Boston marriage" with Katharine Freebody Loring. Harry avoided conscription during the Civil War by suffering a mysterious internal injury while, like his father before him, fighting a fire. William escaped it because of his eyesight. Both younger brothers fought, one of them so wounded in the foot that, like his father before him, he went the rest of his life with a limp. Wilkie and Bob went on to lead unsatisfactory lives as clerk and alcoholic, under-reported here by Fisher and unsupported in their failings by their father.

Fisher worries about Harry's sexuality - was that never-defined injury genital? - but then he also worries about Harry's drinking: when he "takes refreshment" was he following his father into alcoholism? There is no doubt about William's heterosexuality, but he wooed his future wife in the most perverse manner, glooming to her about the difficulties of his own nature, never the beauties of hers.

Fisher has useful notes, listed by page not chapter. The chapters are broken up by cliff-hangers, such as "Harry's euphoric touring plans were about to suffer a shock", which make you read on: so troubled and complex were the James brilliancies, that for once after finishing such a long book one could not wish it a line shorter.

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