HENRY JAMES
453
It seems not improbable that this excessive expenditure of en–
ergy in a man over seventy brought on a death premature by some
months or even years. But he must surely have felt that the reward
had been worth the cost. And regarding these final events in the terms
not of what they may have been surmounting in his past, but, as from
the vantage point of the present, they appear progressively to mean,
011e can respond in full accord; since James by the active a.'i.Sertion of
that period re-established vital contact with contemporary social
realities.
So at last the pattern of the genius which was Henry James
emerges. Suffering from childhood with a keen sense of inadequacy,
he experienced in his eighteenth year an injury that sharply crystal–
lized this attitude into a passional death. The ghost which as an apo–
theosis of his unlived life appears repeatedly in his later tales was lib–
erated from this "death." Many aspects of
his
experience and work up
to the. very time of his actual death were oriented as movements back
to and forward from this nucleus.
The broader application of the inherent pattern is familiar to
readers of Edmund Wilson's recent volume,
The Wound and the Bow
( 18). This title' paraphrases the
Philoctetes
of Sophocles in which the
hero's rare skill with the bow is portrayed as having a mysterious, if
not supernatural, relationship to his stubbornly persistent wound-a
snake bite to the foot. Abandoned in his illness for years
Oil!
the island
of Lemnos, Philoctetes is finally conducted to Troy, where he fights
and kills Paris in single combat, thus becoming one of the great heroes
of the Trojan War. Reviewing the experience and works of several
well-known literary masters, Wilson discloses the sacrificial roots of
their power on the model of the Greek legend. In the case of Henry
James the present account not only provides a similar insight into the
unhappy sources of his genius but reveals the aptness of the Philoctetes
pattern even to the point where the bow of the wounded and exiled
archer is at the last enlisted literally in a crucial military cause.
PSYCHOANALYTIC EPICRISIS
In the jargon of psychoanalysis the story just sketched could be
retold as follows. The Oedipus situation of Henry James included a
h1ghly individualistic father- a cripple- and a gifted sibling rival
(William ) who together dwarfed the boy in his own eyes beyond hope
of ever attaining their stature. A severe inferiority complex resulted.
The problematic relationship to father and brother was solved sub–
missively by a profound repression of aggressiveness.
