Bros

Tony Tanner

• The Correspondence of William James. Vol. I: William and Henry 1861-1884 edited by Ignas Skrupskelis and Elizabeth Berkeley
  University of Virginia Press, 477 pp, £39.95, January 1993, ISBN 0 8139 1338 1
• Henry James: The Imagination of Genius by Fred Kaplan
  Hodder, 620 pp, £25.00, November 1992, ISBN 0 340 55553 X

‘I take up my pen once more after this long interval to converse with my in many ways twin bro.’ Thus William James to Henry in 1873. We might put against this comments from earlier letters. ‘Our ways are so far apart that I doubt if we ever really get intimate’ (1867). But then again, a year later: ‘I feel as if you were one of the 2 or 3 sole intellectual & moral companions I have.’ Leon Edel, in his majestic biography of Henry James, stressed what he saw as a deep unconscious rivalry between the brothers, which pulled against their more consciously maintained fraternal affection. If there is a fault in that magisterial biography it is that Edel rides that particular Freudian horse too hard.