THE JAMESES, A FAMILY NARRATIVE
R.W.B. Lewis
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
696 pp., $35
When William James was nineteen years old and studying at Harvard, he illustrated a letter to his family with a portrait sketch of six of its most prominent members. At the center of the group was his father, Henry James, Sr., wearing his customary top hat and, since he had lost a leg when he was thirteen, leaning on a cane. Bewhiskered and bespectacled, the patriarch of the family links arms with Henry, Jr., his second child, a handsome young man of eighteen. Next to Henry, Jr., holding his hand, stands Mary Walsh James, his mother, wearing a bonnet, shawl, and hoopskirt; and beside her, his hands jauntily in his pockets, wearing a scrappy-looking cap, stands Robertson (Bob) James, fifteen.
To the left of Henry James, Sr., stands Mary's sister, Catherine Walsh, known by the family as Aunt Kate, who often made her home with the Jameses. As William portrays her, Aunt Kate is nearly indistinguishable from her sister; indeed, family letters suggest that Aunt Kate often took over the role of mother for the James children. And at the far left, slightly apart from the group, holding no one's hand, is Alice, age thirteen. William, the artist, is missing; and so is Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) James, his sixteen-year-old brother, who at the time was visiting with him in Cambridge.
William alludes to "this heavenly group" in a passage in which he proclaims how much he misses them. But there is something odd about the cartoon-like sketch: Except for Henry, Sr., whose mouth is hidden behind his beard, and Henry, Jr., who remains expressionless, all of the James are frowning most emphatically. They look unhappy, even angry. And there is something odd, too, about a parenthetical phrase that William inserts to describe the "heavenly" group: "all being more or less failures, especially the two outside ones."
R.W.B. Lewis, prizewinning biographer of Edith Wharton, makes this mysterious portrait the frontispiece for his new study of the James family, and it is an apt choice. Unhappiness and anger often surfaced among the members of the James family. And although William and his brother Henry became brilliant successes in philosophy and literature respectively, the other James children saw themselves as unmitigated failures. As Lewis traverses the fascinating terrain of James country, he helps us understand the anguish
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