Henry James's Civil War

Abstract

Henry James’s Civil War John Halperin Experience, for Henry James, came to be seen as something cerebral rather than physical, passive rather than active. In “The Art of Fiction” (1884) he was to call experience “an immense sensibility” (13), emphasizing its mental rather than its physical components. It was something you acquired through reflection rather than action, through observation of others rather than knowledge obtained yourself. The usual narrative angle in James’s mature fiction may be characterized as the author’s account of somebody else’s impression of others; this is the “point of view” he made famous, and its origin lies at least in part in the fact that from an early age he saw and felt and learned through indirection, through observation of others. Seen through others’ eyes, life becomes something observed indirectly, at several removes from oneself. For the spectator, experience is concentrated, squeezed into images rather than photographs. Thus James’s literary impressionism, explained and defended clearly enough in one of his most brilliant stories, “The Real Thing” (1893). In Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), he describes himself (in the third person) as going “without many things, ever so many—as all persons do in whom contemplation takes so much the place of action; but . . . he was really . . . much to profit by it” (AU 350). James’s passivity was by time and degree refined into a mode of artistic vision. In 1854, when he was eleven, one of those moments of what he would later call “apprehension” vividly occurred. It may help to document James’s passivity, his tendency to turn observation into image—as well as his susceptibility to largely male stimuli. Several years older than Henry James, Gus Barker was one of his Albany cousins. One day the future novelist burst into a room to find his brother William sketching Gus, who had discarded the uniform of the military school he was attending and was posing naked. Gus Barker, James wrote later, [End Page 22] was someone he had always liked: “ingenuous and responsive, of a social disposition, a candour of gaiety, that matched his physical activity” (AU 99–100). Seen thus unclothed, cousin Gus, James would recall, was “the most beautifully made athletic little person,” appealing and engaging in every way. “Perched on a pedestal and divested of every garment” (293), Gus Barker remained for the gaping James the very image of innocence, youth, strength, beauty, and action, and that image became even more sacred and powerful when, at the age of twenty-one, Gus’s life was snuffed out by a sniper’s bullet during the Civil War. James kept William’s sketch of the boy athlete; it was all that remained of him (Edel, Untried 106). As his later memoir of Gus Barker makes clear, the healthy cousin, full of life and glowing with power, reinforced James’s sense, at an early age, of his own hopeless weakness, the inevitability of his own inaction. In 1858 the James family returned to America from its European wanderings and spent most of the year in Newport. James was now fifteen. President Buchanan was struggling unsuccessfully with the slavery question; Lincoln and Douglas, running for the Senate in Illinois, were about to debate the issue in public. A great and bloody civil war was about to overtake them all—but not yet. For the next several years, until the spring of 1862, with only a few interruptions for travel, the family lived in Newport. During this period James was sent desultorily to tutors, studied a little painting, read novels (mostly Balzac’s), and discovered Browning, whose work was to hold a lifelong fascination for him. He renewed his friendship with Thomas Sergeant Perry. And in January 1861 he was introduced to his first cousin Minny Temple, a daughter of his father’s widowed sister. Minny was considered by her Newport circle of friends and relations a rare free spirit and generally admired. James enjoyed her company. Despite some speculation to the contrary, he was never in love with her, as the letters he wrote after her death vividly demonstrate. She died in 1870, at twenty-four, of a lingering consumption...