440
PARTISAN REVIEW
experience of the son at eighteen was in some sense a repetition-that
by one of those devious paths of identification which creates strange
needs in sensitive personalities, Henry James, the son, while likewise
engaged in extinguishing a fire may, if only for a moment, have suf–
fered a lapse of attention or alertness, due possibly to some glimmering
association about his father's accident on a so similar occasion; and
that thus favored, the accident took effect.
1
It
seems not unlikely that
But the physical aspect which has on occasion been stressed is of purely
where as a sprain-would not have been sustained. Such a psychologi–
cal moment can surely not be underestimated by any sympathetic
reader of James since he himself made of just such minutiae the es–
sence of his art. How much the proximity of the rhythmically moving
men may have contributed to the mental association with the father
and the "lapse" must remain like the lapse itself a matter of conjec–
ture. But the presumed relationship to the father's accident seems to
explain the son's avowed receptivity for the event and his certainty
as to its consequences.
These considerations also shed some light upon the nature of the
injury, especially in its psychological significance. James himself
describes it as "the most entirely personal" and as "a horrid even if an
obscure hurt." It
is
known also that it in some way affected his back.
But the physical aspect which has on occasion been stressed is of purely
secondary importance. Paramount
is
the subjective depth of the in–
jury as James experienced it. Occurring at the very outbreak of the
war, the event may well have caused him to suspect himself as an un–
conscious malingerer. A complex of guilt could thus have remained.
Coming as it did at a time when
men
were needed by the country and
were, like his own brothers Wilky and Robertson, answering the call,
the injury even more surely constituted a proof of his powerlessness and
crystallized a sense of impotence from which he never fully recovered.
The avoidance of passion and the overqualification in his later writ–
ings are largely traceable to such an implicit attitude of combined
guilt and inferiority; as are also some of his subsequent actions includ–
ing, as will be pointed out presently, his participation in World War
I.
1
The coincidence between the accidents of Henry James, Sr., and his son
Henry is amazingly paralleled by a similar duplication of experience between
the father and the son William. In this latter case a psychological catastrophe
rather than a physical injury is involved, but the powerful relationship between
father and son is again inescapable. For a description of the experiences, compare
William James, Varieties of Religious Experience, New York, 1902, pp. 160-
161, with the footnote reference to the work, of Henry James, Sr. (Society: the
redeemed form of man, Boston, 1879, pp. 43
ff.),
where the father's case of
equally sudden terror is recounted.
