Volume 42, Number 11 · June 22, 1995
The Wild Man
By Rosemary Dinnage
The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr.
by Alfred Habegger
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 578 pp., $30.00
Seen in isolation, the author of The Father says, the life of Henry James Senior 'moves like a vessel guided by its own internal gyroscopes'; in the context of other lives, he seems 'one of a million corks companionably bobbing on immense swells.' This is the joy of good biography: it shows, as far as it ever can, how a unique person lived, but also that even the most unconventional life is conditioned, unaware, by those immense swells of contemporary thought. And good biography balances the two: The Father is as much a study of nineteenth-century religious aspirations as the life of an eccentric and interesting man. And of course its title tells what else it is: a close examination of the back-ground of two extraordinary sons. As well as throwing a flood of light on their development, it is a rare case study of something we ought to know more about: how families work. (Except, of course, that, in nineteenth-century fashion, the central family figure here is a blank: the mother.)
Review, 3139 words
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