Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1995 Henry James and the Process of Autobiography. Paul S. Nielsen Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Nielsen, Paul S., "Henry James and the Process of Autobiography." (1995). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 5972. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/5972 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. Hie quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margin*, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the bade of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6” x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106*1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 HENRY JAMES AND THE PROCESS OP AUTOBIOGRAPHY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Paul S. Nielsen B.A., Duke University, 1962 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1993 May 1995 UMI Number: 9538752 Copyright 1995 by Nielsen, Paul S. All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9538752 Copyright 1995, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 (c) Copyright 1995 Paul S. Nielsen All rights reserved In Memory of Walter M. Nielsen and Katherine T. Nielsen In Memory of Charles A. Fenton For Charles Fenton Nielsen and Penelope Ross Nielsen lii Acknowledgments I am grateful for kindness and assistance received in the progress of this project. Among Jamesians my benefactors have included Alfred Habegger, Suzi Naiburg, Julie Rivkin, Cheryl Torsney, and William Veeder. Among autobiography specialists, Paul John Eakin. I thank the members of my committee for their patience, wisdom, and assistance— James Olney, Daniel Mark Fogel, J. Gerald Kennedy, Dana Nelson, and Richard Moreland. In particular, I owe to Gale Carrithers, who influenced my decision to come to Baton Rouge more than anyone else, my deepest gratitude for help thoughtfully and faithfully given, and always with good cheer. Preface In a certain sense, autobiography and poetry are both definitions of a self at a moment and in a place: and I do not mean, for autobiography, that it is a definition of the writer's self in the past, at the time of action, but in the present, in the time of writing. James Olney, Metaphors of Self (44) Henry James is the great autobiographer. Few left so varied and rich an autobiographical trove. Few have so dedicated their late years to the project of life- recapitulation. Although the autobiographical nature of his late production has often been remarked, it has usually been students and theoreticians of autobiography vho have done so. The sponsors of fiction have appropriated his last decade and a half by naming it his "Major Phase," a phrase that means to honor the novels of those years and to ignore the fact that the majority of James's work in his "major phase" vas autobiographical. It is still not the conventional or dominant view that James's major phase vas nothing if not recapitulative, self-referential, and self­ fascinated. Nor has it been suggested that this enterprise of astonishing variety, creativity, and duration extends from earliest 1900 until his death in 1916. The explanation of vhy James's pre-eminence as an autobiographer has been neglected may have to do with the cultural or critical hegemony of fiction, or even vith his ovn notion that he vas first of all a novelist. But judges of cultural vorth are often vrong, and James vas partly v correct (he did write fiction before he wrote autobiography) and would, like the rest of us, be a poor judge of the significance of his own work. The precise explanation for the neglect of his autobiographical achievement does not concern me; it is more to the point that James's career is, in its structure and architecture, perfectly autobiographical. That is, it gives geographical expression to the autobiographical process. James's departure from homeland and late-life return are a bodily re-enactment of the inward shifts all autobiographers experience. Emotional separation and memorial return precede all autobiography; in James's case, those acts took on the grandest of temporal and spatial dimensions, and they filled his career and his life. James left homeland and familial domination to find his artistic destiny and achieve his professional self. After long absence he returned to the ground of origin and personal meaning to find himself alienated and cut off from so much that had shaped him. His willful autobiographical project reasserts and re-establishes his past and his relationship with it. It exhibits anxiety about the past, both the incidents and the feelings that attach to them. Indeed, he revises the past quite literally by revising the texts that fill it-- texts that, in a family of writers, are the analogue of memory. vi Throughout his autobiographical phase, James worked with a variety of genres that he turned to his own proto- autobiographical needs. Before writing the three volumes of conventional autobiography that crown his career— A Small Bov and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and The Middle Years (1917)— he took early and sometimes agonized steps toward autobiography in essay, travel, history, fiction, and even a sort of cultural biography. The proto-autobiographies enabled him to put into play the methods of self-referentiality and even to consider the motives for autobiography. His great themes are self and family, his place within family, the family's place within culture, and the production and empire of art. He surveys his past from the classic (but by no means universal) autobiographical position: late life. 1 James Olney and Paul John Eakin have helped focus study on the autobiographer's present moment of composition. It is now clear that autobiography should not be considered a simple account of a verifiable past but rather a complex narrative act executed in the present as a way of interpreting that past. I would suggest that autobiography may be first of all— not secondarily but primarily— of reference to the present moment, to the act of writing in the present. Henry James, the most neglected of autobiographers, is significantly useful for the study of this process of autobiography; to an extent unmatched by vii most autobiographers, he dramatizes the present struggle of recollection. His triumphal and distinctive exclamations of recollective mastery--"! recover the place itself" (SB 53), "I abundantly grasp" (SB 54), "I distinguish in the earlier twilight" (SB 31), "I rescue from the same limbo" (SB 31)— are both exultations in the endurance of the creative faculty of memory as well as the chief act by which he gives life to his recollective self. The result is that in addition to the I-who-reside-in-history that all autobiographers create, James gives life to an I-who- remember. He creates what we may call a present recollective moment of unusual extent and provides unusually rich documentation of the present consciousness acted upon by all the anxieties and ambitions of the elder writer. I suggest that the Jamesian autobiographical text, which readers have so often thought to lack coherence, becomes significantly orderly when we recognize that it is the unacknowledged needs of the recollective consciousness that often determine the sequence and relationship of memories of past events. Memories are quite often summoned not in accord with chronology but affective content.2 By and large, autobiography is an unstable witness to history and, if properly read, has little more referential value than fiction. We may be most interested in it for its reference to a material world, but what can only be judged viii vith certainty is the autobiographical process itself, not the claims that are advanced from that process. The proto­ autobiographies make this point even more clearly than the autobiographies. Since they attempt no completed and polished narrative of James's self, they let us stand closer to the moment of composition. The question of reference can never really be settled in autobiography studies; the dark secret of the field may be that autobiography means little as a matter of reference and much as a matter of process.