In Art as in Life : HENRY JAMES: The Imagination of Genius, By Fred Kaplan ; (Morrow: $25; 598 pp.)

Henry James wrote 20 novels of high intelligence, moral discrimination and intricate complexity. He composed more than 100 elegant short stories, many the length of novelettes, using techniques of symbolism that foreshadowed 20th-Century modernists. He dashed off biographies and innumerable essays, reviews and travel pieces. He was the progenitor and master of the “international novel,” a precursor of the multicultural world literature that emerged in the post-World War II era. An expatriate for most of his writing life, he was a finely tuned register of the American character.

Yet for all this achievement and the prolixity of his later style (causing the witty Clover Adams, Henry’s wife, to comment famously that James didn’t bite off more than he could chew; he chewed more than he bit off), there is an effect of reticence in his work that is not entirely explained by the conventions of the Genteel Age, which in any event he transcended; or by his devotion to the religion of Art, for he was a realist, a worldly, sympathetic man who believed that “the main object of the novel is to represent life” and that “the province of art is . . . all experience.”

H. G. Wells once compared the typical James novel to “a church lit but with no congregation to distract you, with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there is a dead kitten, an egg shell, a piece of string.” E. M. Forster grumbled that James’ characters are “incapable of fun, of rapid motion, of carnality. . . . Their clothes will not take off, the diseases that ravage them are anonymous, like the sources of their income . . . no social explanation of the world we know is possible for them, for there are no stupid people in their world, no barriers of language, and no poor.”

In his fine new biography of James, Fred Kaplan, Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College and author of works on Dickens and Thomas Carlyle, notes that at the beginning of his career as a novelist, James was more open to the language of the more popular, vulgar novels of the day, and used language charged with sexual symbolism. But as he mastered his craft, he perfected a high style, appropriate to people who converse civilly in mannered phrases in villas and drawing-rooms.

Although James, who had a Catholic taste in literature, admired the French Naturalists like Zola and De Maupassant, he deplored their crude subject matter, as well as their Bohemian manners (Once De Maupassant mortified him by asking him to proposition women in a restaurant where they were lunching). His method seemed to demand that he limit his subject matter to sensitive, idealistic if naive heroines like Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, or cultivated gentlemen moving among British and European aristocrats and American expatriates.

James’ compelling modernity, though, still claims our attention, and his psychological acuity goes far to make up for the limited social sphere of his novels. But a penumbra attaches to the brilliant face of his novels, obscuring vital areas of human experience.

Now Kaplan penetrates those shadows. His biography explores more fully than any previous study a crucial dimension of James’ character--his repressed homosexuality. This aspect of James has been well known, but Kaplan brings it fully out of the closet, as it were, and assesses the tensions it created in his life and in his novels.

Kaplan traces the origins of James’ arrested sexual development to the family matrix. He grew up in the kind of “advanced” household that seems destined to produce either geniuses or neurotics. In the case of the Jameses, it did both. William and Henry were the geniuses; the daughter, Alice, was brilliant but plagued by severe nervous breakdowns. She was an invalid and formed a close, possibly lesbian relationship with another woman. The other sons, Bob and Wilky, went off to fight in the Civil War--unlike Henry, who developed mysterious back trouble--and seemed unable to settle down to civilian life.

Henry James Sr. was both an intrusive and liberal-minded parent. He had inherited a comfortable income and devoted himself largely to writing unread tracts on Swedenborg and raising his children to be freethinkers. The mother, Mary James, was in her sphere a strong figure too.

Father James held eccentric ideas on child-raising and a contempt for American schools. He packed the children off to Europe for their educations, and Henry’s formative years were spent shutting back and forth across the Atlantic, with interim sojourns in New York (where he was born in 1843), Newport and Boston. He never stayed in any of those cities long enough to be strongly influenced by their peculiar upper-class milieux. Accordingly, he developed a sense of “otherness,” which, Kaplan writes, “would become a crucial element in his art.”

Henry was a passive child who preferred to withdraw into his imagination or books. But this was in part an accommodation to the overpowering presence of his older brother, William, who “played the active, masculine role to Henry’s passive, feminine role--the devil of the house in comparison to the angel of the house,” Kaplan contends. In his novels he would tend to identify with the problems of his independent-minded heroines, while his male protagonists tended to be sensitive aesthetes.

His unresolved sexuality left him terrified of an intimate relationship with a woman and precluded him from marriage. Similarly, in his middle years, when he developed “crushes” on handsome young men, he remained fastidiously celibate. This burdened him with a crushing loneliness even as he compulsively fluttered about London society, and contributed to Lambert Strether’s famous cri de coeur in “The Ambassador”: “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.”

Kaplan concludes that James’ fears of his homoerotic desires blighted the possibility of heterosexual relationships for him: “His most effective defense against the potentially frightening, perhaps disabling, confrontation with homoerotic desire (was) the renunciation of physical sexual relationships entirely.”

James “projected into fictional characters the conflicts and tenuous resolutions that had been his since childhood.” In “The Beast in the Jungle,” a man lives in overpowering dread of some nameless menace, and one day realizes that his fear prevented him from marrying the woman who loved him--and from having lived.

Kaplan’s discussion of James’ homoerotic life is convincingly handled and woven like a prominent thread into this full, yet concise and shapely biography. Inevitably, however, Kaplan skirts reductionism, especially in relating the life to the books. For example, he can infer that Isabel Archer turns down the marriage proposals of the aggressively masculine Caspar Goodwood and the rich, gentlemanly Lord Ashburton because of her sexual fears, fleeing into a bad match with the dilettantish, supremely egotistical Gilbert Osmond. But to me, Isabel’s love for Osmond does include sexual attraction--as much as James can hint of it in portraying a heroine in the Genteel Age. Her innocence and idealism blind her to Osmond’s true nature. It is that blindness, coupled with romantic desire, that impels her to choose him over the two seemingly more attractive men.

Still, Kaplan has tapped hidden springs of James’ art--and the source of the great loneliness that was his persistent plaint in latter years. Yet, for all his reticences, James placed on the altar of art far more of himself than a piece of string, or a kitten. “I am getting close--for immortality,” he once wrote. “One has to buy that with the blood of one’s heart.” He did.