Biography and the Personal Name: William Wetmore Story and His Friends
Oliver Herford,
I
start with the proposal that we may usefully speak of a biography, as well as a
novel or story, as having in Jamesian terms its donnée; but we shall have to think a little about what we would
mean by this. What does the word itself signify? James’s borrowing from the
French is a past participle working as a substantive: ‘the given’. The donnée of a literary work is what the reader accepts ‘as a given’, its set-up
or proposition; but it is also what the author found or was given, an origin in
fact or anecdote. This second aspect appears more plainly in non-fictional
writing, where what is given persists more or less visibly and immitigably in
the completed text. The fictional donnée,
as we meet it in James’s notebooks and in his Prefaces to the New York Edition,
is most often the brief record of a human situation suggesting possible actions
and developments. Works of non-fiction begin like this too, with situations and
assumptions; but whereas James’s fictional données
come to him essentially as ideas, their non-fictional counterparts come also as
words and forms of words. We might ask, what is the biographer given that he
cannot get rid of or get away from? One answer – especially for the writer of a
Life-and-Letters biography – would be, documents. We may think here of the
distinction James draws in the Preface to The
Aspern Papers between the ‘historian’ and the ‘dramatist’ (or, the
non-fictional and fictional temperaments); the first wanting ‘more documents
than he can really use’, and the second ‘only […] more liberties than he can
really take’ (LCFW 1175). But
another, more compact answer to my question would be, names, above all personal
names. The name of the subject is the unavoidable ‘given’ of biography; it is
the word that most dominates the biographical text, conventionally supplying at
least a part of its title and appearing on many, even on most of its pages.
Although it is thus constantly before the reader’s eyes, still in the usual
course of things it is hardly noticed as
a word, only as the index of a person. What I want to begin to consider
here is the opportunity that arises for a writer when the name of the
biographical subject is a word – as
in the case of the American lawyer-turned-sculptor William Wetmore Story, whose
biography James published in 1903.
If I state that William Wetmore Story and His Friends is
organised structurally and rhetorically about a deliberate play with the word story, it may seem that it is I who am
taking a liberty. James’s ways with story
have not been noted by any critic I have read, though a few have made free with
the word themselves, and entitled their articles on this work ‘A Story of
Reading’, or ‘Telling His Own Story’, or ‘Keeping Story Out of History’.[1]
Better, perhaps, to hypothesise that the pertinent liberty is James’s own (one
of the liberties the Jamesian dramatist only wants to take), and to show
something of how it inflects his writing of biography.
Several coincidences put
this word unavoidably in James’s path in writing the life of William Story.
There is, to start with, the too-manifest appropriateness of the name Story to
this person whose name it was: a narrative sculptor and author in verse and
prose, an expatriate American in
Just this fact of a
relation between the particular and the general provides James with a way
around the problems of his biographical subject. James first uses the word story in William Wetmore Story not as a name but as a common noun; he does
this early in his first chapter, in reference to ‘The Precursors’ – those early
American travellers and sojourners in Europe ‘without whose initiation we
settled partakers of the greater extension should still be waiting for our
own’: ‘We must not of course overdo it,’ James writes, ‘but as they got theirs
[their initiation], often, in ways that were hard, I like to miss, in order to
do them justice, not a step in the general story’ (WWS i 7-8). It has been remarked – albeit not quite in these terms
– that James attends more happily to this general story of transatlantic
relations than to the life of the particular and eponymous William Wetmore
Story. When this individual is named for the first time four pages later, it is
as a representative of his pre-Civil War, New England generation, and its
relation to Europe: in beginning to write Story’s life, James is moved to
consider ‘the rather markedly typical case associated with his name’ (WWS i 12). The phrasing here invites the
observation that, more than most other names, Story is general as well as
particular, denotes a case as well as an individual; since it is not only the
name of all other people called Story but also the noun story. The personal name thus becomes for James, by a turn of the
hand if not by sleight of hand, a means of effecting a shift from biography
proper to biographically inflected cultural history.
It continues to offer him
ways of addressing other subjects than the biographical one. The word story was established in James’s
critical vocabulary long before the question of the biography arose, and at
least as early as ‘The Art of Fiction’ (1884), but it receives a new access of
thought from the enforced self-consciousness of this exercise. In the first of
two important passages in William Wetmore
Story, catching on to a name in a memorandum written by Story’s wife, James
recalls his own dissatisfaction with the table-talk of Abraham Hayward, heard
in
The ‘story,’ in fine, in
this other order – and surely so more worthy of the name – would have been the
intellectual reaction from the circumstance presented, an exhibition
interesting, amusing, vivid, dramatic, in proportion to the agility, or to the
sincerity, of the intellect engaged.
(WWS ii 205)
There is a splendid audacity in that
‘more worthy of the name’, for the ‘name’ in this case is also the name of the
biographical subject. James has already isolated ‘“stories”’ and ‘“story”’
within inverted commas; and he will sound the word as a name, with deliberated casualness, in the sentence immediately
following this passage, the first of a new paragraph: ‘Aids of the causal [sic][3]
sort I have just gathered from Mrs Story project, at all events, but faint
shadows over the field of the pleasant Roman years’ (ii 205). We should note by
the way that William Story and his contemporaries use the word story uncritically, to mean a simple
anecdote or tale, and with a touching blankness about its being also his name:
the pun is never made in the documents James reproduces. James’s preparedness
to make use of the word stands by contrast as an enactment of the play of
thought he recommends here; it is his ‘intellectual reaction to the
circumstance presented’, and a development of his biographical donnée.
A second ‘theoretical’
passage likewise anticipates the Prefaces, and proposes a further
discrimination. The occasion is James’s recollection of his acquaintance with
General Sir Edward Bruce Hamley, the British author of Lady Lee’s Widowhood (1853); in particular a memory of Newport,
Rhode Island in 1865, of James listening to a young friend of his Temple
cousins relate how she had met the then Colonel Hamley in England and argued
with him about the Civil War. The scene that passed between Hamley and the girl
plainly interested James on this occasion. He does not reproduce it now in detail,
just sketches it in with a military metaphor (saying he ‘liked to think’ of
Hamley ‘as perhaps retreating before his brisk adversary in no too good order’
(WWS ii 230)); but we may guess at
its dynamic by analogy with the fictional scenes James was subsequently to
write between bright patriotic American girls and gallant, amused, but stiff
and disconcertable English or Europeanised American men – international
episodes of which this is offered as a type. He remarks of his fictional
imagination, early and late: ‘Such were to remain the consequences of the
imaginative habit – that trifles light as air (I leave my impression for that)
only had to offer an appearance of interest to become absurdly concrete, in
which form they constituted figures, pictures, stories’ (WWS ii 230).[4]
We are not now reading one of those
‘stories’; but what we are reading is certainly a story, as James at once
acknowledges, attempting to curtail his digression: ‘I prolong more than I had
meant my very small story’ (WWS ii
230). This ‘very small story’ is a personal recollection, an episode in what
James calls ‘the history of our impressions’ (WWS ii 230); but since he remembers his Newport impression as
subject to an instant imaginative development that constituted it as a figure or
picture or story, his recollection of its history may be justly spoken of as
the story of that story. The formula
adumbrated here turns up in James’s Preface to The Ambassadors as ‘the story of one’s story itself’ (LCFW 1309); the Prefaces’ autobiographical
stories of James’s stories make up a composite history of his imagination.[5]
And we may look forward again from this passage to James’s memoirs, whose
narrative method unfolds from the retrospective digressions in William Wetmore Story and in a manner confounds
biography and autobiography.
For all these
appropriations of the word to his own uses, James’s relation to story does have a directly biographical
aspect – one that concerns his writing in the Life-and-Letters genre, with the
possibilities that form uniquely affords (as Christopher Ricks has shown)[6]
of juxtaposing given words. We see James here achieving for biography the
status of ‘poetry’, as poetry is generously and exactingly defined in the
Preface to The Golden Bowl. James
argues in this Preface that ‘any literary form conceived in the light of
“poetry”’ must be read aloud to be adequately appreciated.
The essential property of
such a form as that is to give out its finest and most numerous secrets, and to
give them out most gratefully, under the closest pressure – which is of course
the pressure of the attention articulately sounded.
(LCFW 1339)
We should remember that James dictated William Wetmore Story and His Friends to
his second typist, Mary Weld – an origin in audible speech that may be imagined
as favouring attention to this ‘sounded’
dimension of the text, indeed as making certain coincidences unignorable. I
would suggest accordingly that the finest secrets of this literary form are the effects of rhyme and assonance
James manages around the word story.
The emotional range James
achieves by these means best appears from what he does with the fact that the
Storys’ first years in
This happy cluster of echoes
prepares for a simpler, sadder one 150 pages later, which makes less of the pun
but achieves more with it: ‘the Storys were restored to 93 Piazza di Spagna’ (WWS i 285). Again one blinks at this
rather; but in context it is the reverse of a provocation. The Storys had been
away from
Concerning the early part
of that winter in Rome and the remainder of it, after the dark cloud had
discharged itself and the Storys were restored to 93 Piazza di Spagna, where
they were then living, a pleasant legend of kind, distinguished visitors still
survives, one of them incomparably benevolent to a languid little girl who needed
amusement and who was to be for ever grateful. (WWS i 285)
The benevolent visitor is Hans Christian Andersen and
the little girl the surviving child, Edith Story; that ‘pleasant legend’ is of
course itself a story. On the next
page James reports a children’s party at which Andersen read ‘The Ugly
Duckling’ and Robert Browning ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’: ‘which led to the
formation of a grand march through the spacious Barberini apartment, with Story
doing his best on a flute in default of bagpipes’ (WWS i 286). These improvised domestic theatricals are a homely
revival of Ristori’s performances four years earlier. Further, we may imagine
that the ending of Browning’s poem – the disappearance of Hamlin’s children;
and the one remaining boy, whose loneliness is the mirror image of a
bereavement – might have acted on that occasion as it does now in James’s
allusion, as a chance re-enactment of loss and a commemoration of what could
not be restored. The Storys’ son was at the time of his death, James writes,
‘the most precious of their possessions and ever afterwards to be remembered as
such. No person or thing, in their life, was again to have an equal value’ (WWS i 284). James’s arrangement of
echoes acknowledges this human value, and with great subtlety and sympathy
returns to the simplest biographical sense of the word he elsewhere so refines
upon; tells a story about other people.
Abbreviations – works by Henry James
CHJHA – The
Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, 1877-1914, ed. George Monteiro
(Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1992)
LCFW – Literary
Criticism: French Writers, Other European Writers, The Prefaces to the
N – The Notebooks of
Henry James, ed. F. O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdoch (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955)
SLHJEG – Selected
Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse 1882-1915: A Literary Friendship,
ed. Rayburn
WWS – William Wetmore Story
and His Friends, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1903)
Other works cited
Jones, Marnie,
‘Telling
His Own Story: Henry James’s William
Wetmore Story’, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 10
(1987), 241-56
Ricks,
Christopher, Essays in Appreciation (
Shakespeare,
William, Othello, The Arden Shakespeare (third
series), ed. E. A. J. Honigmann, (Walton-on Thames: Thomas Nelson & Sons,
1997, repr. 1998)
Teahan,
Sheila, ‘My Sculptor / My Self: A Story of
[1] Sheila Teahan, ‘My Sculptor / My Self: A Story of
[2] I borrow the phrasing ‘had ¼ no story’ from James’s notes of 15 February 1899 for the short
story published in 1902 as ‘The Story In It’. In his notebook James refers to
this fiction with a French formula (the story contains a debate about adultery
in the modern French novel): ‘L’honnête
femme – n’a pas de roman story’ (N
275); which comes out in English (with an instructive awkwardness of
repetition) as the ‘A decent woman has no
story’ story. The period of the tale’s gestation and composition (May
1898-February 1900) overlapped with James’s early researches for William Wetmore Story and His Friends and
his visit to
[3] The typographical error is noted by James, with distress, in a letter of 2 October 1903 to Edmund Gosse: ‘My principal “last 6 weeks’ news” is that my Story vols. (which I am glad you received) contain a horrid misprint somewhere, which I couldn’t correct in your copy – a dreadful “causal” for “casual”; also that, through an accident, I had to send you a vol. 1st that I had cut (one I had kept for myself,) instead of a fresh one. But these are details – as well as the fact that there are 2 or 3 provoking little misplacements & omissions of punctuation – perpetrated after my last proof had gone back right. Find & correct the beastly “causal” – I only spied it & shuddered & closed the vol. in terror lest I shld. find another, & didn’t dare to look at it again – so didn’t heed where it is. Basta’ (SLHJEG 205).
[4] It is characteristic of James’s reverberant late manner that in professing to drop a possible development – ‘trifles light as air (I leave my impression for that)’ – he should be holding it out to the reader still in the form of an allusion, in this case to Othello: ‘Trifles light as air / Are to the jealous confirmations strong / As proofs of holy writ’ (Othello, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (Walton-on Thames: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1997, repr. 1998), III iii 325-27). To follow this one up properly would take us beyond the limits of the present paper, though the concerns activated here in the interplay between source-text and allusion are pertinent to all of James’s late non-fiction – the imaginative appropriation of material (so to say, the handkerchief as donnée), the definition of jealousy, the value of the apparently trifling.
[5] This phrase comes in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady: ‘if one could do so subtle, if not so monstrous, a thing as to write the history of the growth of one’s imagination’ (LCFW 1076).
[6] See Ricks’s 1991 Clark Lectures on ‘Victorian Lives’ (‘E. C.
Gaskell’s Charlotte Brontë’, ‘Froude’s Carlyle’, ‘Tennyson’s Tennyson’), as
reprinted in Essays in Appreciation
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996; repr.