The Ghost of Henry James*
SAUL ROSENZWEIG
AMONG
THE TALES
of Henry James is a supernatural series com–
posed during the final third of
his
life ·and peopled by ghosts of a
character utterly Jamesian. It is the pec1.3,liarity of these wraiths
which merits special attention at this centenary of the author's birth;
for, unlike the ordinary creatures of their kind, they fail to· represent
the remnants of once-lived lives but point instead to the irrepressible
unlived life. To consider these ghosts in their significance for him is
a fitting expression of interest in James's immortality.
Weirdly enough, these apparitions lead back to their point of
origin in James's first published talc, "The Story of a Year," which
appeared in the pages of the
Atlantic Monthly
for March,
1865.
Here
at the very outset was announced that "death" which spoke more
elusively in his earlier writings, and more explicitly provided toward
the end the basis for his literary specters. It was, in short, the story
ot his own life-written prophetically, and published at the early age
of twenty-two; complemented in too perfect a fashion for other inter–
pretation by the tales of his later years; and clarified autobiographical–
ly in the last ·full book he lived to complete. Singularly this tale has
never been reprinted, though, as every reader of James is aware, most
of his other short stories have appeared in collected form once at least;
many of them more than once.
The story may be more significantly reviewed after some facts
of James's early life have been recalled. The second child of Henry
James, the theological and semiphilosophical writer (William J ames,
the famous psychologist, having been by but a little over a year the
fi1st), Henry James, the novelist, spent his earliest days in a house–
hold richly gifted with intellectual fare and gracious cheer. The father
(cf.
17)
was a strongly individual student of cosmic problems which
for a period brought him into close association with the transcenden–
talist group of Concord and Boston. Emerson was a close friend, as
were also many other literary and scholarly figures of the time. His
*
This psychoanalytic study of Henry
Jam~s,
reprinted here by courtesy
of the Duke University Press, originally appeared in the December 1943 issue of
Character and Personality.
