Colm Tóibín: how Henry James's family tried to keep him in the closet
After Henry James's death 100 years ago, his relatives were at pains to remove any hints of his sexuality from his letters and biography
owards the end of 1915, as he became increasingly unwell, Henry James revised his will. He left Singer Sargent's portrait of him, made two years earlier for his 70th birthday, to the National Portrait Gallery. He cut one nephew out of his will – the son of his brother Bob had published an anti-war pamphlet of which he disapproved. Although he had become a British citizen, he directed that his ashes should be buried in the family grave in Cambridge in Massachusetts. He left most of his estate to the family of his brother William. William had died in 1910.
On 4 December 1915 Singer Sargent wrote to Edmund Gosse: "Henry James has had two slight strokes within the past 48 hours. He is paralysed on the left side – his brain is clear and his speech. A nephew has been called for from America."
The news of his illness was broken to friends, including Edith Wharton, by James's devoted amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, who spent each day with James at his flat in Chelsea. Years later, Wharton reported that James's friend Howard Sturgis had been told by the novelist that his first thought on falling was: "So it has come at last – the Distinguished Thing." Another friend reported that she heard James say: "It's the beast in the jungle, and it's sprung."
As his temperature went up and down, James asked Bosanquet to bring the typewriter into the bedroom. He began to dictate sentences about Napoleon Bonaparte, soon imagining that he himself was Napoleon as he grew delirious.
On 13 December, the formidable Alice James, the widow of William, arrived in London, having braved the Atlantic. Mrs James had years before promised her husband that she would "see Henry through when he comes to the end". She dismissed Bosanquet and took over the management of the household. She disapproved of Miss Bosanquet's writing to Wharton with news of James's condition. Being a good Boston matron, she harboured an intense dislike of Wharton. Burgess Noakes, James's servant from Rye, remained with him, having returned from the war. "It is a touching sight," Alice wrote, "to see little Burgess holding his hand and half kneeling in the chair beside him, his face very near to Henry, trying to understand the confused words Henry murmurs to him."
James was still raving, believing that he that he was in Cork in Ireland or in California or at Lamb House in Rye. At times, his hand would move, mimicking a hand in the act of writing.
In the New Year, James's name was included in the honours list, being offered the Order of Merit. As his condition worsened, his nephew Harry, son of William and Alice, arrived in London and prepared himself to be his uncle's executor. Peggy, Harry's sister, was also there.
Henry James died on 28 February 1916. The memorial service was held in Chelsea Old Church; the body was cremated at Golders Green and then the ashes smuggled into the US by Alice.
At one moment, as he lay dying, James discussed her sons – his nephews – with his sister-in-law and then said: "Tell them to follow, to be faithful, to take me seriously." This would become more important than he imagined in the years after his death as the family of his brother took control of his estate. In his book Monopolizing the Master, published in 2012, Michael Anesko sought to outline the struggle that went on to control James's posthumous reputation.
It began some years before James's death as the novelist worked on the volume of his autobiography called Notes of a Son and Brother. As he began to use letters written by his brother William in this book, letters that had been given to him by his sister-in-law, he felt free to make amendments to suit his own purposes. Harry wrote to his uncle sharply when news of this leaked out. When Henry replied: "the sad thing is I think you're right in being offended", Harry wrote an exclamation mark in the margin. He wished to control publication of his father's letters himself.
Both Harry and his sister Peggy were also concerned about the literary legacy of their aunt Alice (not to be confused with their mother, also called Alice). Both of them had all of the James entitlement without any of the talent of the older generation. They were dull people and they craved respectability. Wharton called Harry, who was a graduate of Harvard Law School and later was involved in the governance of Harvard, "the great & grim brother". Bosanquet noted: "He has a tremendous chin – the most obstinate-looking jaw."
Henry's friends were alert to how little his family knew about him, and how uneasy they might become about his letters
There had been four copies made of Alice James's diaries. William kept his under lock and key; Henry burned his, as he burned manuscripts and most letters he received. When Katherine Loring, Alice's companion, finally gave a copy to an editor, the diary, which displays Alice's brilliant mind, her obsession with illness and her caustic wit, was published in 1934. Harry wrote to his sister: "The whole thing would make me weep, if anything of that kind were worth weeping about." The book made Peggy "shrink and shudder". She deplored the parading of "failures, neurasthenias, and depressions". "Instead of an enhancement of the family," she wrote, "the book is an exposure, in the worst possible taste."
Within two days of the cremation of Henry, his sister-in-law was meeting in London with his literary agent to discuss how his estate should be managed. Soon, it was decided to publish a volume of his letters. The task of editing the letters was given by the James family to Percy Lubbock. They had admired his demeanour at the time of James's death and liked some of the pieces he had written. They decided to ignore the fact that he had the full support of Wharton; they perhaps did not know that he was also favoured by Bosanquet. They asked Gosse to keep a watchful eye on Lubbock as he worked.
Lubbock wanted to edit the book, but was aware, as he told Bosanquet, that even talking to the James family involved moving "in such a cloud of fine discretions and hesitations and precautions that it is difficult altogether to know where one is". James's friends in London also became alert to how little his family actually knew about him, and how uneasy they might become at discovering in his letters what Anesko calls "his most distinctive qualities: his devastating sharpness of wit, his extravagant inventions of intimacy, his Rabelasian powers of innuendo".
As Lubbock worked on what would become the standard edition of James's letters for 50 years, it was agreed that he would excise unpleasant remarks about the living, and take out evidence of James's obsession about his health and about money. It was also agreed with Harry that Lubbock would, as far as possible, omit Henry's effusive ways of beginning and ending letters, especially missives to younger men, in case the tone might be misconstrued. As the edition in two volumes was going to press, four members of the James family – Harry, his siblings Billy and Peggy, and their mother – pored over the letters, demanding further cuts. "In almost every instance," Anesko writes, "Lubbock finally yielded to the family's wishes."
Even though they worked hard at sanitising the letters, the family still worried that too much had been revealed. A year after the edition appeared Alice wrote to her son Harry: "People are putting a vile interpretation on his silly letters to young men. Poor dear Uncle Henry." Later, Harry regretted giving permission to EF Benson to publish a volume of James's letters to him. They included passages such as "Why aren't you here to take a good Devonshire walk with me? I hang over a green garden and a blue sea from a big balcony… There would be room on the balcony even for your inches or cigarettes, even for Apollo's lips" or "I am divided between 2 sensations – panting for to-morrow pm and blushing for all the hours of the past days."
Soon afterwards, when Harry was approached by Hendrik Andersen, the young sculptor who had known James in Rome, seeking permission to publish the 78 letters from James he had received, some of them quite ardent, Harry refused.
Between James's death and the early 1940s, a debate raged about his value as a novelist, with figures such as Ezra Pound, Ford Madox Ford and TS Eliot on one side (James, Eliot wrote, "had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it") and Rebecca West and EM Forster on the other ("They can land in Europe," Forster wrote of James's characters, "and look at works of art and at each other, but that is all. Maimed creatures can alone breathe in Henry James's pages – maimed yet specialised."). Many of James's books went out of print in this period. The revival of interest began among ordinary readers in the 1940s. In the US, 30 of his titles would reappear in print between 1942 and 1949.
But in these years most readers would not have been comfortable with news of James's complex sexuality. The large collection of James papers housed eventually in the Houghton Library at Harvard was guarded with fierce anxiety by Harry. In 1930 he wrote to one of the few who had been allowed look at this material: "I have decided to make it a rule not to consider applications from students who are trying to write theses – including PhD theses." Harry created strict stipulations for anyone who wished to see or quote from the family papers.
As the centenary of Henry's birth approached, Harry wrote to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's about a young scholar: "Leon Edel by name, Jew, born in Canada … He is a great HJ admirer, very discriminating … He is quite unknown, very meticulous." Over the next few years Edel would do battle with other scholars for exclusive access to the James archive in Harvard. Once he began to work on his biography of James, Edel won the trust of the James family, even after the death of Harry in 1947. The following year Billy James wrote to Edel saying that he wished "that no one but you were allowed to write about Uncle Henry".
It was agreed they would omit Henry's effusive ways of beginning and ending letters, especially those to younger men
When the Anderson letters were eventually sold to the University of Virginia, Edel successfully sought to have access restricted, as he did with other caches of James letters. When sections of the Anderson letters were published in an American magazine, Billy threatened the law. Slowly, Edel became a trusted servant of the James estate as well as James's biographer. He informed the family when a scholar he met at a conference expressed an interest in James's homoerotic correspondence. He was assured by the Houghton Library that "she is certainly not going to see anything she's not supposed to see".
Edel's job was to keep all insinuations about James's sexuality at bay. He also wished to keep interesting information for his own exclusive use; he made desperate efforts, for example, to stop any account of James's deathbed ravings about Napoleon being printed until the final pages of the fifth volume of his biography, The Master, which appeared in 1972. By this time, Billy James had died, but members of the next generation were equally vigilant about the James's reputation.
Since Edel knew he would have to deal with James's sexuality in his later volumes, he hoped that some other writer would spill the beans first so that it would, as he wrote, "relieve me of the onus of "breaking" the story."
A year after the final volume of Edel's biography appeared, the restrictions at Harvard were lifted. But it was not until the year 2000 that James's letters to Anderson appeared in a bilingual edition with a small Italian publisher. And soon afterwards "Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James's Letters to Younger Men" was published. And indeed in the new biographers of James by Fred Kaplan and Sheldon Novick, and especially by Lyndall Gordon, a new James began to emerge, free of the control exerted by members of his family.
But the book that made all the difference was published in 1990. Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick became the bible for gay studies and queer theory in universities. It proposed an entire new way of reading James as a gay writer whose efforts to remain in the closet gave him his style and may, in fact, have been his real subject, all the more present for being secret and submerged.
Kosofsky Segdwick's argument is dense and brilliant, and, at times, far-fetched and unconvincing. But it removed James from the realm of dead white males who wrote about posh people. He became our contemporary. Thus James's artistry, his skill at creating scenes and drama, his sly sexuality, his wonderful prose style, his genius with form and tone and structure, make him a subject of fascination not only for ordinary readers but also for students and teachers of literature, and indeed for many, if not all, of the novelists who have come after him. James's dying words – "Tell them to follow, to be faithful, to take me seriously" – continue to resonate a hundred years after his death.
Colm Tóibín's novel about Henry James, The Master, was published in 2004. His book of essays on James, All a Novelist Needs, came out in 2010.
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