A Small Boy and Others by Henry James - Delphi Classics (Illustrated) (Delphi Parts Edition

by Henry James, Delphi Classics (Editor)

Written when James was 70, "A Small Boy and Others", long out of print, is an exquisitely artful dramatic monologue on a young boy's search for "the aesthetic clue." James finds his evidence in the refined reconstructions of his family life, his imagination, his travel, and his memories of the streets and neighborhoods of 19th-century New York. "A Small Boy and Others" is a very personal study of fate, memory, and the wonder of youthful conciousness and curiousity. It is also a love letter of sorts to New York City in the third quarter of the 19th century. With wit and curiosity evident on every page, "A Small Boy and Others" transformed the art of autobiography.

"Henry James looked back at his past with the same search for the truths of the emotions which Proust was to show in his novel "A la Recherche du Temps Perdu."" Leon Edel

5.5 x 8.5 in.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

211 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1913

About the author

Henry James was an American-British author. He is regarded as a key transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism, and is considered by many to be among the greatest novelists in the English language. He was the son of Henry James Sr. and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James.
He is best known for his novels dealing with the social and marital interplay between émigré Americans, the English, and continental Europeans, such as The Portrait of a Lady. His later works, such as The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl were increasingly experimental. In describing the internal states of mind and social dynamics of his characters, James often wrote in a style in which ambiguous or contradictory motives and impressions were overlaid or juxtaposed in the discussion of a character's psyche. For their unique ambiguity, as well as for other aspects of their composition, his late works have been compared to Impressionist painting.
His novella The Turn of the Screw has garnered a reputation as the most analysed and ambiguous ghost story in the English language and remains his most widely adapted work in other media. He wrote other highly regarded ghost stories, such as "The Jolly Corner".
James published articles and books of criticism, travel, biography, autobiography, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, a year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916. Jorge Luis Borges said "I have visited some literatures of East and West; I have compiled an encyclopedic compendium of fantastic literature; I have translated Kafka, Melville, and Bloy; I know of no stranger work than that of Henry James."

Reviews

[Axl Oswaldo · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a journey! What a beautiful, unforgettable journey this book was, my friends!

… the question, in my breast, of why, if it [a book] was to be so right for others, it was only to be wrong for me. I remember the soreness of the thought that it was I rather who was wrong for the book—which was somehow humiliating: in that amount of discredit one couldn't but be involved.

I can't find the right words to say how I feel after finishing A Small Boy and Others. An incredible memoir written by one of my favorite authors, Henry James, who says, at the very beginning of the book, that he meant to write this memoir in honor of his elder brother, William James, who is consider the "Father of American psychology". Spoiler alert: H.J. scarcely mentions his brother in the book, focusing more on his own life when he was a small boy, just as the title says. Obviously, as a huge fan of the author, I couldn't have been happier with this change, which turned into a great surprise.

These memories of the author, when he was 8-12 years old, are about nothing but the way he saw his life and people whom he met during those years. Simple events such as H.J. living with his family in New York, some days when he used to go to the theater with his father, his education, his relationship with his brothers and sister, the family he had in Albany and how meaningful they were in his life, his first trips to Europe, and so on and so on.
Perhaps 'simple' is not the best way to describe such things when it comes to be a telling of your favorite author's life, and since I felt a really strong, beautiful connection, not only with the prose—a style which is incredibly ambiguous, like a Russian-doll style, yet enjoyable—but also with the content, those experiences of a boy who perhaps didn't know he would become a great writer afterwards, this book ended up giving me a deep meaning to my life as a reader.
H.J. is also giving his opinion on some topics which—as a 70-year-old man who would die three years after publishing this memoir, and having written a decent amount of novels—were quite meaningful for him as a kid and would be quite important for him as an adult, being a writer 20 or so years later. Literature is of course one of those topics as well as Europe, being both of them mentioned almost at the end of the book. And for the record, If you are interested in knowing why (almost) all his novels depict this contrast between American society and European society, this book might give you that answer you are looking for.

In short, I truly loved reading this book, and besides I am really impressed by the ability of H.J. to remember such feelings, memories, relationships and stuff, almost 60 years after having lived them.
That being said, I don't think this is a 5-star book, objectively speaking. There are moments at which the author is rambling on things that have nothing to do with what he was already saying. In addition, if you are not interested in James' life, sometimes just trivial facts, this book definitely won't be for you. In a nutshell, I would only recommend this memoir to someone who has read a decent amount of his novels, novellas or short stories, and who besides has enjoyed most of them, yet I couldn't put my finger on the fact that that person will enjoy this book. So, I suppose this is not a recommendation, but what this reading experience meant to me.

Lastly, I would like to share with you guys this short paragraph where H.J. felt, for the very first time, that singular connection with Europe, which might have been crucial for the years to come as a writer:

Supremely, in that ecstatic vision, was "Europe," sublime synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me—as if by a mystic gage, which spread all through the summer air, that I should now, only now, never lose it, hold the whole consistency of it: up to that time it might have been but mockingly whisked before me. Europe mightn't have been flattered, it was true, at my finding her thus most signified and summarised in a sordid old woman scraping a mean living and an uninhabitable tower abandoned to the owls; that was but the momentary measure of a small sick boy, however, and the virtue of the impression was proportioned to my capacity. It made a bridge over to more things than I then knew.

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beset as one avowedly is by vernal distractions—I speak of those amplitudes of exposed bosom, those beguiling expanses of derrière sheathed in lycra, whose appearance heralds, more surely than the robin, the advent of spring—thus beset, I say, it is doubtful whether a mere book review, however eagerly undertaken, could represent the ideal disposal of one’s lamentably scant provision of time and energy.

Yeah, I’ll stop now, cuz man, writing like Henry James is almost as exhausting as reading Henry James.

Depending on your mood and tolerance level, James’ hyper-mandarin late style can either be pure bliss or pure torture. Or, as in my case, some masochistic combination of the two. Reading A Small Boy and Others, I kept thinking, “Jesus, Hank, this is lovely. Just exquisite. But what the hell are you talking about?” Too often, his fussy little revelations get lost in the syntactical finery of the prose. It’s like opening an elaborately made-up parcel—ribbons, Styrofoam chips, tissue paper—only to find a ten-dollar gift card from Wendy’s. Gee, thanks, grandma.

Here’s what I mean (and this is a fairly straightforward sentence by his standards):

Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred circle of the tipsy.

Translation: there were a lot of drunks in the family. Sure, it’s kind of funny the way he puts it—or not funny, exactly, but ‘droll’, very droll (you can almost hear James’ effeminate titter at his own cleverness). But, come on, dude, a little brevity with your wit.

So by now you might be asking yourself: is this Henry James guy really worth the pain in the ass, because I’ve got four hungry children and a crop in the field, you know? Yes, yes, he is. Mos def (I only speak for A Small Boy: my thoughts on the big, dense novels of his last period are between me and God). There are solid compensations here for all the artsy-fartsy mannerisms he subjects you to.

Ostensibly a memoir, A Small Boy dispenses with most of the usual genre markers—like, you know, facts and dates and stuff—in order to reconstruct the moral ambience of James’ childhood. He tell us on the first page that he wants to write about his brother William (then recently dead) but soon forgets about this pious little project, leaving poor William a vague, otherworldly presence for most of the book. Instead, he gives us a series of highly-subjective impressions, both of places (New York, Paris) and of the curious ‘types’ that peopled them. And somewhere at the back of everything there’s this neat little submerged künstlerroman unfolding, too (What? Künstlerroman? It’s a perfectly cromulent word.)

James was an old man when he came to write A Small Boy, and there’s something avaricious about the way he fondles his glittering hoard of memories. Sixty years on, he’s still savouring ‘the orgy of the senses and riot of the mind’ that was his childhood. The strongest passages in the book—passages where he loses himself in a sort of delirium of recollection—are those that evoke the ‘lost paradise’ of old New York, as seen through the eyes of a strange, observant little boy who can only marvel at the bewildering profusion of the city:

I have still in my nostril the sense of the abords of the hot town, the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters, where big loose cobbles, for the least of all the base items, lay wrenched from their sockets of pungent black mud and where the dependent streets managed by a law of their own to be all corners and the corners all groceries; and the groceries indeed largely of the “green” order, so far as greenness could persist in the torrid air, and that bristled, in glorious defiance of traffic, with the overflow of their wares and implements…Why the throb of romance should have beat time for me to such visions I can scarce explain, or can explain only by the fact that the squalor was a squalor wonderfully mixed and seasoned…

James’ New York is still half-wild and only fitfully cosmopolitan; if a nascent theatre industry has already plastered Broadway with garish playbills, there are still goats grazing in vacant lots and coaches getting bogged down in unpaved streets. In this semi-urbanized Arcadia of ice-cream parlours and waffle stands, the young James ‘dawdles’ and ‘gapes’ (two of his favourite verbs) like some precocious flâneur, a Yankee Baudelaire in a sailor suit.

My quarrel with the book is part of the larger, class-based quarrel I’ve always had with James. His attitude is very much that of the rentier, someone who can afford to remain vague about certain large facts—sex and politics come to mind—while taking a dilettantish pleasure in the free play of his own capacious consciousness. In the Jamesian economy, consciousness is the ultimate consumer good, a luxury item only available to those with expensively-formed tastes and high-powered perceptions. I genuinely admire the man’s writing, but in the same way that I admire the sleek design of a Jaguar: a little resentfully, from a distance, and with the suppressed desire to smash its owner’s smug, stupid face.

But whatevs. A great book is its own justification, isn’t it? And scruples are for lightweights. I really did love A Small Boy, and if that makes me a traitor to my principles—well, that’s cool. I can get new ones.

[John Ferreira · Rating 4 out of 5]

As usual, with late career Henry James, he does go on. I found the book mostly involving. Some passage were probably lost to me. I plan to read the other biographies by him. After I read the rest of his fiction, and other non-fiction writings by him.

I do have to give it to James though. If I were to sit down and write about my childhood, it would only be fragments. No details. And I'd be hard pressed to recall names of people. And I remember a lot in my life.

[Lucy · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading all (yes, all!) his novels, I've concluded that with late Henry James, there is no point trying to analyse and understand every sentence. It's like listening to late Beethoven Quartets - enjoy the sound and don't worry overmuch about how it's made. I thoroughly enjoyed this memoir of Henry's childhood, replete as it is with eccentric family members, the joy of theatre and art, and the obvious happiness of his growing up.

[Liza]

oh, this is nice. and also a little embarrassing to read.