A Small Boy and Others

A Small Boy and Others is the first volume of Henry James’s autobiography, published in 1913 when he was seventy. It was followed by Notes of a Son and Brother in 1914 and by the unfinished The Middle Years, published after his death. Together the three volumes form his memoir of childhood, education, and the long road to becoming a writer, and A Small Boy is the most personal of them.

The book covers James’s early childhood in New York City in the 1840s and 1850s, his education in various private schools and tutors arranged by his unusual father, the trips to Europe that began when he was very young, and the New York and Albany families he grew up around. He writes about his older brother William, who would become the philosopher, with great affection and slight envy. He writes about his cousins and uncles and aunts, about street scenes in lower Manhattan, about theaters and pictures and what it felt like to be a watchful child in a busy household.

The style is the late James style at full strength. Sentences open out and qualify themselves and circle back. Some readers find this exhausting in a memoir. Others find it perfect for the subject, since what James is really doing is reconstructing the way memory itself works, with one image leading to another by association rather than chronology. There is no diary or sequence of events being checked. The whole book is a slow attempt to recover the texture of a vanished American childhood from a man writing in England at the end of his life.

The book is best read in small sections rather than at one stretch. For James readers it is essential, because it shows the materials his fiction was made from. It pairs naturally with William James’s letters from the same period and with Henry James senior’s books on religious philosophy, which together give the strange family weather that produced two of the most original minds of nineteenth century America.