James - Memories of my Brother

He attributes his delay to. Then I was lost in the wonder of the extent to which all my life I have unconsciously pragmatised. These sentences might themselves be taken as a response to William's letter from four months earlier in which he so forthrightly distinguishes his own style of writing from the later style of his brother.

This little human drama aside, Henry has every reason to recognise himself as having always been a pragmatist - even before his brother published his codification of the word. And it is this same contrast or interplay between fixity and freedom that Henry, from his early novels onward, had developed into a dramatic contrast among his characters. Thus, in his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, he writes:. The fools are interesting by the contrast, by the salience they acquire, and by a hundred other of their advantages; and the free spirit, always much tormented, and by no means always triumphant, is heroic, ironic, pathetic or whatever and 'successful' only through having remained free.

The claim in the letter to William that he had pragmatised all his life is inferentially an assertion that William's pragmatism is essentially a theory of language congenial to practices Henry made his own from the very outset of his career. It is a theory, that is, of 'turning' or troping. William uses the word 'turning' repeatedly in Pragmatism to describe the ways ideally to make use of inherited vocabularies, carrying as these do the burden of what he calls "previous truths".

It is necessary, he proposes, to "convert" them, "convert" but not displace. The Jamesian conversion process takes full cognisance and grateful possession of the inherited values of which words are the carriers. But in the process it transforms and revivifies them. Thus, new realities emerging on a page will extend the life of old ones, though under a different name.

We add both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human violence willingly. Man engenders truths upon it. But whatever the similarities between William's conception of 'turning' and Henry's little disquisition on 'conversion', the disquisition itself runs disruptively counter to the book's central claim.

Which, simply, is that Henry's capacity to recognise the transformative portents vividly at work in the world around him, especially in Europe, were in evidence long before they could have received any theoretical or educational formulation, much less prompting.

His genius involved nothing learned or even self-conscious; it oughtn't to be confused with any acquired skill, with mere talent, schooling, even with family nurturing. The small boy's powers of 'conversion' or 'turning' or troping were instinctive even before he could speak. As far back as he can now remember, whatever the child looked at might look back, with 'gleams', as he likes to call them, or 'glimmers', shadowed intimations, all of them asking for recognition and translation.

Objects appeared on the spot to be funded with meanings attributable to their past existence. Things were in themselves hieroglyphic. The book is marvellously full of what James calls "imaginative traffic", as in the scene in which the boy is filled with wonder while passing through the immediate neighbourhood of one of his Parisian schools, the charmingly and eccentrically staffed Institution Fezandie on rue Balzac:.

I positively cherish at the present hour the fond fancy that we all soaked in some such sublime element as might still have hung about there - I mean on the very spot - from the vital presence, so lately extinct, of the prodigious Balzac; which had involved, as by its mere respiration, so dense a cloud of other presences, so arrayed an army of interrelated shades, that the air was still thick as with the fumes of witchcraft, with infinite seeing and supposing and creating, with a whole imaginative traffic. Even as James rather excitedly allows these visionary and potentially literary powers to be ascribed to this small boy, he also prompts the reader to be sceptical of them.

Not an unfamiliar practice of his, designed as it is to stimulate conjecture, uncertainty and, ultimately, a will to believe in one or another alternative, even though that, too, will surely turn out to be inadequate to the situation. Finally, the inference to be drawn is that there can be no explanation for the emergence of his literary genius; it is a mystery that can't possibly be explained as a consequence of some acquired facility, like 'conversion'.

He wants not to allay but by his writing to stimulate uncertainty, along with the allowance that there must surely have been in the boy some very early evidence of the author's literary prowess. And the fact that this evidence at its first emergence, and in its much later rendition in this book, is at times inexplicable only means that literary genius is and always will be something to be wondered at. To reach back to his earliest years, as James here sets out to do, is for him and the reader to discover that looming on the horizon, sustaining the narrative, is one question only, to which he can bring his by now accumulated and proven powers as a writer - a writer with a particular talent for generating the vocabulary of bedazzlement.

And that question, put simply, is this: James is anxious to suggest nearly everywhere in his book, as Wordsworth was in his, that there was nothing systematic or calculated or predictable about that growth. It cannot even be attributed to an individual will. Thus, the significances divined by Wordsworth in, say, a ruined cottage or the white doe of Rylstone or by the infant James in a Paris street scene are not merely ascribed to things or places.

Rather, they are discovered also to be there already, already existent, a sort of afterglow or mark left behind by one's ancestors. It is as if, to paraphrase a formula of Kenneth Burke's, words are not simply the signs of things but rather, and to a crucial degree, things are themselves the signs of words.

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A densely suggestive passage early in the book is meant to hint at these possibilities, and particularly at the child's delighted bewilderment at his participation in them. It brings into conjunction three 'conversion' scenes in which the boy cannot himself be sure whether what he is seeing is actually going on or if, instead, he is inventing most of it. One scene, at place Vendome, occurs in when he was between one and two years old; a second, between the ages of three and four, in the home of relatives in New York city during the initial stages of the war with Mexico ; and a third when, at the age of five, he heard it announced, again at the home of New York relatives, that the revolution of in France had forced Louis Philippe to escape from Paris to London.

These scenes are not, however, presented in chronological order: Evidently he wants to avoid any inference that an easily measured chronological or causal effect is at work among scenes of a potentially historical resonance. Instead, he creates the suspenseful impression that even now, in the writing of this memoir, he remains curious and speculative about the working of the boy's and, indeed, of his own mind in its acts of recollection. There are traces here of the prodigiously suspenseful The Turn of the Screw, where no one telling the story, listening to it or now reading it can be sure of what is actually going on, or of how to find out.

Smashwords – James - Memories of my Brother – a book by Frazer Hart

A Small Boy takes full dramatological advantage of the possibility that even as he is dictating his recollections of these earlier moments, he is himself being visited by some of the same ghostly, haunting presences that the boy seems at the time to have encountered and wondered at.

I see him as a person half asleep sees some large object across the room and against the window-light - even if to the effect of my now asking myself why, so far from the scene of action, he was in panoply of war. I seem to see him cock-hatted and feathered too - an odd vision of dancing superior plumes which doesn't fit if he was only a captain. However, I cultivate the wavering shade merely for its value as my earliest glimpse of any circumstance of the public order - unless indeed another, the reminiscence to which I owe today my sharpest sense of personal antiquity, had already given me the historic thrill.

The scene of this latter stir of consciousness is, for memory, an apartment in one of the three Fifth Avenue houses that were not long afterward swallowed up in the present Brevoort Hotel, and consists of the admired appearance of my uncles 'Gus' and John James to announce to my father that the Revolution had triumphed in Paris and Louis Philippe had fled to England. These last words, the flight of the King, linger on my ear at this hour even as they fell there; we had somehow waked early to a perception of Paris, and a vibration of my very most infantine sensibility under its sky had by the same stroke itself preserved for subsequent wondering reference.

I had been there for a short time in the second year of my life, and I was to communicate to my parents later on that as a baby in long clothes, seated opposite to them in a carriage and on the lap of another person, I had been impressed with the view, framed by the clear window of the vehicle as we passed, of a great stately square surrounded with high-roofed houses and having in its centre a tall and glorious column.

I had naturally caused them to marvel, but I had also, under cross-questioning, forced them to compare notes, as it were, and reconstitute the miracle. They knew what my observation of monumental squares had been - and alas hadn't; neither New York nor Albany could have offered me the splendid perspective, and, for that matter, neither could London, which moreover I had known at a younger age still. Conveyed along the rue St-Honore while I waggled my small feet, as I definitely remember doing, under my flowing robe, I had crossed the rue de Castiglione and taken in, for all my time, the admirable aspect of the place and the colonne Vendome.

I don't now pretend to measure the extent to which my interest in the events of - I was five years old - was quickened by that souvenir, a tradition further reinforced, I should add, by the fact that some relative or other, some member of our circle, was always either 'there' 'there' being of course generally Europe, but particularly and pointedly Paris or going there or coming back from there: I at any rate revert to the sound of the rich words on my uncles' lips as to my positive initiation into History.

At most points in this passage, James makes it hard to know which of the two memories at work - the child's or the elderly novelist's - is the more active. They are complexly and delicately conjoined, though by a process, he likes to remind us, long since mastered by the novelist, fully in possession of his artistic prowess. At a later point in the book he will refer to "my instinct to grope for my earliest aesthetic seed", and we see here what he means by "groping". Even as a very young boy he seems to have been actively though not consciously engaged in the effort.

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Somewhere between three and four years old, during the war with Mexico, his glimpse of his uncle in dress uniform is described as having been, even as it will seem to the novelist, "an odd vision of dancing superior plumes which doesn't fit" - and here the voice of the older James is particularly audible - "if he was only a captain". A cautionary note, but not meant to suggest that the older James is disowning either the vision or its oddity.

The boy turns out to be a rather demanding shade, and now seems to remind his older self, the reminiscing author, that there had been an earlier such 'glimpse', the most historically bedazzled of them all. But first there is a hint, for the reader who may choose to take note of it, that perhaps the questionable plumage sported, or so he imagined, by his military uncle, was in the nature of costuming transposed - it could be - from some still earlier imperial vision, involving a military officer of the most exalted rank: Meanwhile, again in the New York apartment of relatives, he had overheard news of still another French sovereign, the announcement that, in the Revolutions of , Louis Philippe had been forced to flee Paris for a life of exile in London.

This will remind the novelist of how even in infancy he had become accustomed to the fact that some family relative or other was always just returning from Paris or going to Paris or about to embark in the one direction or the other. Indeed, he now remembers that even as a babe in arms he had himself been taken on that pilgrimage, before either the revolution of or the war with Mexico. It seems to have been then, when he was barely two years old, that he experienced his first vision of 'public' or historical moments and monumentalities, his "positive initiation into History".

He hadn't, at the time, even acquired the power of speech. But when, not long afterwards, he was able to tell his parents about his presentiments, he reports their being stunned and amazed by the clarity and fullness of his recollections. These included his wonder at the "tall and glorious column" that occupies the centre of the place Vendome.

And here the reader may himself want to intrude with mention of an episode neither the elder nor the infant James would ever be able to recollect. It is of a final moment in James's life some three years after the book was published. In , James, having just been granted British citizenship, which he had requested out of sympathy with England's suffering in the war, is on his deathbed. Even in this plight, he begins once again to dictate to his secretary.

Perhaps the letters he dictated were to be part of a new story, perhaps in his delirium he meant that they should be sent out. In any case he signed the letters with the name "Napoleone", adopting the old Corsican spelling, and addressed them to "Dear and most esteemed Brother and Sister". In one letter he ordered them to oversee the decoration of certain apartments in the Louvre and the Tuileries, and in another suggests that they are destined to assume ruling positions in "our young but so highly considered Republic". His "earliest aesthetic seed" was, it appears, to be found not in the young republic but in Europe, a Europe haunted by the pursuit of imperial glory and conquest.

It is brilliantly to the point that in A Small Boy, when he recalls his infant vision of the place Vendome and its Napoleonic column, he quite insistently reminds himself and us that, unlike his other visions in this sequence, this one is without any bewilderment or doubt or shading. The baby seems to know where he is, happily in his element.

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About this vision there is nothing hazy or uncertain or bewildering. Both as infant speaking to his parents and as revered master near the end of his life, his recollection is of "the clear windows of the carriage" and now, as then, he "definitely remembers' that "I waggled my small feet under my flowing robe. His most recent book is Trying It Out in America. The extensive online archive of essays from past includes Alan Bennett's Diary and much more.

To which Henry, with a half-century to think about it, now offers the seasoned reply: In any case, it all seems to have worked so well, he proposes, because of the inculcation in the two boys of an "inveterate process of conversion": Thus, in his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, he writes: Wow, do I regret that. It is so quiet now. You were really talented; it was a gift. I just feel really bad for not telling you how awesome you are, how much I respect your skills and dedication. I regret not listening to every note with open ears, not going to more concerts.

But I would tell you now if I could, I really miss the noise! Anyway, I was browsing at the newsstand and I saw you. This time you were staring back at me from the cover of People.

How am I supposed to respond to seeing you on People , though? It is surreal and meaningless to see you as a mere story on The New York Times , a brief glimpse at a life with none of the detail. You were a typical college freshman, trying to adjust to a dorm room, make some friends, meet a cute guy, and enjoy your independence, and no one noticed.

Letters to My Brother

The headlines tell of how you were violated and ridiculed; your last moments are a cautionary tale, a scandal, something to sell and entertain. You were never alone; it just felt like it. When you were here with me, you had no idea how important you were, and it took your death to make that point. Now you are gone. How will you know how much I love you, how much we all do? Little Peanut, I always thought that, between you and I, you were the stronger one.

I saw the best parts of myself in you. Of course, we looked like twins, albeit six years and a foot and a half apart. Where I dabbled pretty pitifully in painting, you devoted hours of every day to the violin since you were eight, then picked up the piano, and even taught yourself the freaking harmonica.

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Never one to be outdone, when I was biking a mile, you were unicycling two. Where I was shy, you were fearless. When I tiptoed out of the closet at 22, you were out and proud at I remember asking if you had a boyfriend, or if you wanted one, and you scoffed at me.

Sometimes I wonder who that guy was, the one in your dorm room. You were so young, and there were going to be others.

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But in that moment, what did it mean for you? Were you bored, scared, over it, into it, what? Everyone knows their first, but who ever thinks of their last? Did he make you happy? You had a lot of growing up to do and a lot of baggage to work through before you could really feel comfortable with who you were. Sure, sex is amazing, but love is the best part. It was there within your grasp.

We came from the same gene pool, the same family, the same town, the same schools, the same church, everything the same. Where did you get that? When I thought about where I was going to be in five or 10 years, I could never picture it -- my mind would be blank. But when I imagined your future, I saw the world at your feet. You were supposed to show me up, do it better than I could. I wanted that for you. I saw amazing professional accomplishments for you, but also personal ones.

I know now that you felt so alone, but Jesus Christ -- you are so, so easy to love, with your kind eyes and gentle heart. I know so many people you had yet to meet that would one day love you almost as much as I do.