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Henry James (1843-1916) Henry
James is best known for his literary and philosophical contributions to the
realism movement. Realism in fiction, as defined by James, must derive from
intimate personal experience. He argues that without experience there cannot be
truth, and without truth there cannot be realism. Thus, in order to examine the
effect of the war on James’s fiction, we must examine his experience with it.
Like Howells, James did not participate in the Civil War. But rather than a retreat to Europe, James confined himself to “the almost ignobly safe stillness”1 of libraries in Cambridge. James justified his evasion of the war with the pretense of a “physical mishap”2 that opportunely surfaced at the outbreak of war. Jamesian biographers speculate the wound (a strained back) to have been more psychic than physical. But the lingering effects of James’s cowardice did not quickly subside and he could not escape feelings of shame and guilt. Daniel Aaron notes that “it almost comforted (James) when the back pain (which might have been diagnosed as the organic manifestation of an unconscious wound or wounded conscious) persisted3. To make matters worse, James had two younger brothers who fought for the Union, which only amplified his guilt. The War was therefore a slightly more intimate reality for James than for Howells, but was the experience enough to engender realistic fiction? Unlike Crane, James did not attempt to write a novel of any considerable length about the War. He did write a few short stories that ambiguously depicted the struggle, but they lacked any real substance of the War or its causes and consequences and conversely chronicled civilian life on the home front. Moreover, James “held a low opinion of historical fiction as a genre,”4 and possessed little desire to expound on the War (in terms of its battles and violence) with any enthusiasm. Edmund Wilson, a renowned literary critic, dismisses James’s allusion to the Civil War after 1868 by saying, “James does not, I think, revert to the war in any serious way in his fiction…” Daniel Aaron expounds on this notion: “Between the beginning of his long European sojourn in 1875 and a ten-month stay in the United States a decade later, James gave little thought to the War and its meaning.” The problem is that James was torn between paying homage through literature to war veterans, particularly his two brother and two cousins (who died), and following his own tenets of literary realism. James’s guilt initially stimulated the creation of his fictional War stories, but his lack of in-depth War experience and mounting realistic beliefs ultimately tapered his reference to his nation’s titanic struggle.
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