364
PARTISAN REVIEW
There are, 1 believe, two things missing in this book, one perhaps the
general editors' fault, one perhaps no one's. We ought to be given
something-a bibliography, notes, or selected readings-to help us fol–
low the James story further (I know this kind of thing dates, but surely
it could be changed at small cost in later editions). And you do miss
in Mr. Dupee's book the flavor of direct quotation, the quality of that
family passion which Mr. Dupee well describes by saying the elder
Henry James "simply taught that the unexamined life is not worth
living." The Jameses were always full, aJl1d Henry the fullest of them
all; it was perhaps impossible for Mr. Dupee to quote more than he
does without expanding the book intolerably. Yet there is a complexity
in the family feeling, a balance of wit and sentiment and irony, which
can really
be
felt only in their actual words. Take them on the delicate
question of the English. "In pursuit of knowledge," says Alice in her
Journal,
"I asked Nurse one day whether K. and I were different from
English ladies in any way. 'Entirely different, Miss.' 'Why how are we
different?' 'Not so 'aughty, Miss.' Truly discouraging." The faintly
ironic exaggeration about something that yet seemed serious to her is
very typical of the James family style; this habit of comically inflated
diction, so characteristic of American humor, is one of the major devices
of Henry's irony; you can feel it, for example, in the final phrase of his
remark to William that "I am getting . . . to understand the English
character, or at least the mind, as well as if 1 had invented it-which
indeed, I think I could have done without any very extraordinary
expenditure of ingenuity." This is only less obviously an ironic indica–
tion of his awareness, his partial acceptance, of what others felt about
him than the famous story of his having remarked, after taking a walk
during a visit at William's place in New Hampshire, that he had seen
"a peasant gathering faggots." Truly, as William once remarked, "[Har–
ry's] anglicisms are but 'protective resemblances,'-he's really, 1 won't
say a Yankee, but a native of the James family, and has no other coun–
try."
And just what it meant to be a native of the James family we
can feel completely only in those "idiosyncrasies of diction and tricks
of language," as Peirce once called them, "such as usually spring up
in households of great talent."
But perhaps
OW"
loss of these things is the price Mr. Dupee must
pay for getting all the necessary general truths about Henry James's
long life and full career into 290 pages; and that he has done with
fine modesty and good sense.
Arthur Mizener
