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Keeping Up With the Jameses : THE JAMESES: A Family Narrative, <i> By R. W. B. Lewis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $35; 696 pp.)</i>

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We think of the larger-than-life members of the James clan as so many individual continents or fortified islands:

William, who left an Irish tenant farm in 1789 and became one of the two or three richest men in America. Henry Sr., his teeming, unfocused son, who pursued universal transcendence and whom his friend Emerson patronized for overdoing it, for being “a man without a handle.” Henry’s sons, William the philosopher and Henry Jr. the novelist; and their sister, Alice, who fashioned her invalid state into a pungent and unmistakable claim on life.

The continents and some of the islands have been widely explored by biographers and critics. What R. W. B. Lewis does is to write of the waters in between, the connecting tides that alternately ebb from one and flood the other, and nourish and leach each other’s wetlands. Here he cites a visitor’s account of the Jameses at dinner: Henry Sr., his wife, Mary, and their near-grown or part-grown youngsters: William, Henry, Alice and the lesser-known Wilky and Bob.

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“ ‘The adipose and affectionate Wilky,’ as his father called him, would say something and be instantly corrected by the little cock-sparrow Bob . . . but good-naturedly defend his statement, and then Henry (Jr.) would emerge from his silence in defense of Wilky. Then Bob would be more impertinently insistent, and Mr. James would advance as Moderator, and William, the eldest, join in. The voice of the Moderator presently would be drowned by the combatants and he soon came down vigorously into the arena and when, in the excited argument, the dinner knives might not be absent from eagerly gesticulating hands dear Mrs. James . . . would look at me laughingly, reassuring, saying, ‘Don’t be disturbed, Edward; they won’t stab each other. . . . And the quiet little sister ate her dinner, smiling close to the combatants.”

The passage is often quoted, Lewis tells us, but surely this is a scholar’s scruple. It is worth quoting again because it allows a point to be made about the character of this rich and highly particular book. It is not so much a biography of a remarkable family as a conversation with it. It resembles the dinner-table tumult reported by Edward Emerson, Ralph Waldo’s son. Lewis brandishes a spoon if not a knife; arguing, interrogating, acute and affectionate. “The Jameses” draws from the wellspring of all biography--though it has rather gone dry nowadays--which is the need to say: “Don’t die.”

Lewis ranges back to the Jameses’ Irish forebears, and he gives brief accounts of present-day Jameses in their ‘40s and ‘50s. The book’s heart and brains--and one might say, in view of the exalted temperaments, its nervous system--focus upon Henry Sr. and his wife, and their five children and their families. It is essentially these two generations the author has in mind when he writes that it was, “as regards its literary and intellectual accomplishments, perhaps the most remarkable family this country has ever known.”

It sprang from a prodigious material accomplishment. William, the Irish farm boy, ended up with vast interests in real estate, commerce and banking, radiating from his home in Albany. He was not particularly expressive but he was capable of “a certain strangled eloquence,” we are told, when scolding Henry Sr. for aimlessness and extravagance.

But the money spoke. Henry Sr., on an inherited income equivalent to some $300,000 a year, floated among intellectual and theological pursuits, and none of his children took any practical interest in business. And yet, Lewis remarks shrewdly, this is misleading.

“The phenomena of money and business agitated the Jamesian mind, in the generations after the Albany grandfather, to a degree which it is difficult, or even impossible, to match elsewhere in our literary and intellectual history,” he writes. “What these Jameses did was to displace the language and the motifs of the money world into other realms of discourse: into theology, philosophy, psychology, literature. . . .”

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Thus, William’s pragmatism “advanced the concept of ‘the cash value of ideas’ in a way that seemed to value the cash as well as the ideas.” William’s oldest son ran the Rockefeller Foundation. And Henry’s social and psychological spider webs have a cash spider squatted in their midst. For his characters, money “rises to a metaphysical force.”

It is the kind of lassoing thought that Lewis uses to hold together so remarkably so much rich material about so many different extraordinary characters. The organization is complex but never labored; the author finds a note struck in one generation resonating two or three generations down. The musical comparison is right; scholarly as he is, Lewis--who wrote the highly prized (Pulitzer and Bancroft) “Edith Wharton”--stresses that this is a narrative. I would call it a five-part fugue.

The heart of the book is not the portraits of individuals, good as they are, but the relationships among them. Family feeling was immense--the Jameses were always taking trains and ships to attend to any of the family who was in trouble--but there was a constant tug-of-war within these redolent characters between overbearing each other and keeping a distance. Henry Jr., with a younger brother’s self-protective canniness, stayed in England--though coming back when needed--and Alice largely stayed in bed.

Henry Sr., with his philosophical and theological churning--he tried being a Presbyterian, hated it, and took up Swedenborg--was a wonderfully baffling mix of intensity and diffuseness. Or to put it differently, he was intense about everything, and about nothing in particular. He was in full flight from the concrete, achieving temperament of old William; he abhorred the thought of individual success and individual salvation. He admired art but thought it was a second-rate thing to be an artist, since that wasto particularize and even cheapen a universal. He was the kindest of men, but he was, in principle, against the conscious practice of virtue. He found it isolating. Or, as Henry Jr. put it: “He only cared for virtue that was more or less ashamed of itself.”

He was a great feathered shadow over the eldest son. Talk about repressive tolerance. Poor William wandered in gloomy aimlessness for years--he’d wanted to be a painter--before finally making a particular success of his most generalizing and inclusive brand of philosophy. The inclusiveness--and his early breakdowns, no doubt--were a heritage from his father. But pragmatism’s emphasis on lifting yourself by your own metaphysical bootstraps recalls his grandfather.

Young Henry, whom we think of as the least material and most etiolated of writers, was, in an odd way, a variation on the entrepreneuring old merchant of Albany. He fled the rambling and vaguely intrusive enthusiasms of his father and older brother, and from the start, dug himself into the practice of his trade. Henry Sr. may have thought it narrowing, but Henry Jr. was a success and earned his way almost from the start.

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This is only a sample of Lewis’ teeming family counterpoint. If Henry took to England and to a style that was a maze-like refuge from the uplift of father and brother, Alice protected her acrid, particular voice with a different withdrawal: to bed in Cambridge, and later in England. And yet they all thirsted for each other and for each other’s news.

Wilky--that gentle presence at the dinner table--found a different way. In the Civil War, he was a top officer in Col. Robert Shaw’s black Massachusetts regimen, fought gallantly and was wounded grievously. Visiting him, Henry Jr. was stunned by this un-Jamesian style of prowess. Wilky’s younger-brother subordination had given way, he wrote, “to immensities of superior differences, immensities that were at the same time intensities, varieties, supremacies.” Thus, Henry in a panic.

Wilky became a zealous abolitionist. After the war, he joined a utopian scheme to grow cotton in Georgia, using free black farmers financed by white investors. It was not mean enough to succeed. Wilky died young, after other unsuccessful ventures. As for Bob, after trying to emulate his father (he took up Swedenborg) and Wilky (he joined the Army but had a less conspicuous Civil War), he drank and failed at various businesses. On the other hand, he had married well, and towards the end of his life, he floated up into a kind of irascible serenity.

Of all the family members, it is William, Alice the two Henrys who emerge most memorably, and who provide most of the complex ravishment and dissonance in the family concert. There is another memorable voice which we hear too little: William’s spirited, devoted and elusive wife, Alice Howe James. I hope someone writes her biography.

In writing this book, Lewis has had available to him some powerful secondary material: Jean Strouse’s biography of Alice, Gay Wilson Allen on William, and, of course, Leon Edel’s lifelong work on Henry. His acknowledgments are unstinted and, in the case of Edel, something more. He read and re-read Edel’s five-volume biography so persistently that “I would not be surprised if some of my formulations are unintended echoes of his own; there are points at which professor Edel’s narrative is simply the way I have come to understand the matter in question.” It strikes me as a remarkable phrase, characteristic of the openness, the gaiety and the wit of Lewis’ multigenerational dinner at the Jameses.

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