Henry James [antikvár]

We are indeed fortunate in having James's imaginative reconstruction of the first thirty years or so of his life in A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and a Brother (1914) and the fragment published posthumously as The Middle Years (1917). In spite of much ill-health during the time of their composition, these books are among his best works. All writers on his early period are obliged to draw heavily upon them, with the sober realisation that their many fine passages will be somewhat less effective in quotation than in the full amplitude of their context. Perhaps the most useful way to begin this brief sketch of his career is with a passage long enough to give a sustained impression of the quality of these childhood memories. Passing over for the moment those facts about his family and background which James himself reserves for more effective use at a later stage in his narrative, we start with the "small boy" himself in the New York where he was born in 1843. It is characteristic of these writings that they should be richly evocative of the places in which his impressionable years were spent. In one of the more piquant of the early descriptions he recalls "the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters" with which, as a "safely-prowling infant," he was familiar, "where groceries . . . largely of the 'green5 order, so far as greenness could persist in the torrid air," together with "carts and barrows and boxes and baskets," lay scattered about in splendid disorder: