'Love and loyalty': The autobiography of Henry James

A memoir represents a statement of one's self-importance, but for Henry James the autobiographical act was especially assertive. Not only did he justify his life as a novelist and critic, but he also wrested pre-eminence from his famous brother William. James had promised William's widow that he would chronicle the boys' shared childhood in a preface to William's youthful letters, tacitly endorsing the older brother's dominance. Yet he wrote autobiography instead. In the letters James wrote to William's family while composing A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, James disguised the autobiographical nature of his project, postponing the inevitable family conflict.;Because an autobiography is closely intertwined with the life being lived at the time of writing, it is not surprising that the conflict James experienced with William's family is also reflected in the text of his story. Ironically, James displaces William from the narrative by emphasizing his brother's pre-eminence, continually placing the older sibling in a separate but invisible sphere, "better" and "higher" than his own. When reproducing William's youthful letters in Notes, Henry again eclipsed his brother by editing the letters so extensively that William's voice is nearly obscured.;The conflict between James and William's family did not, however, prevent James from employing his talents to create, in his words, "intensely a work of art." He shaped his autobiography like Goethe's Dichtung und Wahrheit and Sand's L'histoire de ma vie, which employ an associative structure, in which the chronological life story is continually interrupted by thematically related elements. Any apparent randomness or digressiveness in James's text is part of its artistic design.;A review of the autobiographies James mentioned in his public and private writings reveals a fascination with the memoirs of military men. Writing autobiography at the age of 70, James knew that his own life had been far different from that of the soldiers he admired. Small Boy and Notes can be read as James's justification for his choice to live his life as observer and artist. He continually asserts that a life of the imagination is as adventurous as a life of action. Thus the autobiography represents a triumph of self-assertion for James, in terms of long-standing sibling dynamics and in terms of personal and artistic accomplishment.