Introduction: A Contemporary Portrait of the Jameses Late in his life, the American expatriate novelist Henry James longed to memorialize his entire remarkable family, all of whom remained poignantly alive in his imagination. "We were, to my sense, the blest group of us," he wrote in his autobiography in 1913, "such a company of characters and such a picture of differences . so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us . pleads for preservation." But although there have been admirable James biographies, it has been difficult to break through the decorum of the family and even their finest chroniclers to truly capture this iconoclastic group, whose oversized collective achievements-as great as those of any other family in American history-grew out of a very troubled, impassioned, and often dysfunctional home life. Some of the Jameses-a close-knit New York dynasty-ended their lives as depressed and disappointed bankrupts; others became eminent writers whose wit and invention helped lay the foundations for what we now think of as modern America. The family is best known for its two eldest sons, Henry James Jr. and William James, the philosopher and psychologist.

The former''s sumptuous fictions about Americans in Europe-The American (1877), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and The Wings of the Dove (1902), among many others-captured the glittering international world of the so-called Belle Epoque, the "beautiful epoch" between the Civil War and World War I. Henry James epitomized high literary achievement, and his works, known for their psychological depth, have been seen as groundbreaking "modern" classics. Only a shade less well known than his brother, William James established a considerable reputation as a pioneer of modern psychology and as a proponent of "pragmatism"-a characteristically American philosophy that empowered each individual to determine his or her own truths. History has immortalized these brothers in isolation and has only secondarily considered them in the light of their less prominent relatives and the struggles those relatives embodied. Critics have sometimes regarded William and Henry as grand self-generated "geniuses" in their respective realms, as figures who stood above their family circumstances. But Nietzsche''s warning about success obscuring the real complexity of famous lives applies well to these two American icons. Suffering and deep human complexity fueled their work, and for six decades the two men remained remarkably close, engaged, and competitive blood brothers. They were locked in a lifelong relationship that weirdly echoed their parents'' marriage and whose turbulent and complex dynamics crucially shaped their most famous books.

Besides Henry and William, the James clan contained other figures who have also fascinated many: Henry James Sr., their father, was a rebellious prophet of American social reform; their sister, Alice James, was a career invalid and clandestine diarist who documented her own struggles in an extremely male-oriented family and society. But these two additional Jameses, reclaimed and recovered only in the last few decades, are just the beginning of the family story. I believe that all seven of the Jameses-the parents and their five extraordinary children-were in fact so "fused and united and interlocked" that it is impossible fully to understand any one of them without the rest, without investigating the moving drama of their complex family life that unfolded in some of the most interesting cities of the era-New York, Newport, Boston, London, Paris, and Rome-between the social upheavals of the 1840s and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. For years, the Jameses lavished on one another a rich moveable feast of family life. Their father''s intellectual ambitions and shifting moods swept them capriciously from city to city, continent to continent. When the five children were still young, before constant mobility had become the American norm, the family moved through Europe and America like vagabonds, surviving years of shifting houses, hotels, and boarding schools knitted together by long rail journeys and Atlantic steamship crossings. Traveling continually, with only the family for stability and continuity, they alternately adored, defended, and excoriated one another with an intensity that only people who passionately love each other can generate.

They became the only real "country," as William James later put it, to which any of them ever belonged. Driven to leave his mark on the world as well as to travel, Henry Senior passed on many of his obsessions to his children; with high expectations and elusive approval, he helped spur them all toward the anxieties of overachievement. Henry Junior and William James were especially caught up, but their less famous siblings were not immune to it. Their superhuman efforts to be seen, acknowledged, and understood dominated their private and professional lives, spawning grandiose plans, remarkable accomplishments, and deep, long-lasting depressions. Somewhere between the Alcotts and the Royal Tenenbaums, the Jameses come into the American story and add much to our perception of it. In their ambitions, ambiguities, and affectations, the Jameses can strike us as curiously contemporary-the forerunners of today''s Prozacloving, depressed or bipolar, self-conscious, narcissistic, fame-seeking, self-dramatized, hard-to-mate-or-to-marry Americans. This side of the Jameses has often been downplayed, and much of the story has remained untold, buried under generations of propriety, convention, and veneration. But the Jameses'' dysfunction sheds crucial light on the origins and full range of their influential achievements.

Henry Senior''s bold social experiments, Henry Junior''s exquisite fiction, Alice''s exploration of women''s hidden lives, and William''s seminal contributions to American psychology-all grow directly from this sometimes unseemly experience. Accordingly, this book is an effort to interpret these people by way of their interior family and household experience, as Henry James himself longed to do, and to understand their hidden passions and vulnerabilities both as deeply moving and highly relevant to our own present-day lives. IN NEW YORK''S Washington Square, you can still see scraps of the Jameses'' family world: cast-iron railings, steep steps, porticoes, and fanlights. Back when I was an undergraduate, I roamed expectantly with an old address, hoping to look them up, hoping to establish a personal link. For years, I''ve "collected" James houses: on Beacon Hill, on the rue St.- Honoré, in St. John''s Wood, at Newport, at Chocorua, in New Hampshire. With Henry Senior''s determination to give his family a "sensuous education," each house represented a slice of his experiment in unconventional living, each a new phase of the family''s remarkable development.

Most of the numerous James residences are ghostly now, thanks to the American mania for tearing down and rebuilding that Henry James so deplored in The American Scene. (I was almost as shocked as he was to discover that both his mother''s house in Washington Square and his birth house in nearby Washington Place no longer exist.) Of some of these houses, not even a photograph remains; they were ordinary domestic properties, part of the family life of the nineteenth century that almost nobody bothered to document. The half-effaced domestic story of the James family has fascinated me for many years, and I found one unexpected living link in Edinburgh in 1988, when I met H. S. ("Jim") Ede (1895-1990), a distinguished art critic, then in his nineties, who as a young art student in London had met the elderly Henry James at the house of the actress Ellen Terry and had walked with the grandfatherly novelist through the streets of Kensington. Here was someone who had shaken Henry James''s hand and who remembered the man as having a "melodious voice" and once remarking, when a child walked into the room, "Oh, you angel from an antique age." Did I like Henry James? Did people still read him? Jim Ede asked me; he was passionately interested in the novelist''s legacy, as well as, more generally, in the living relevance of art.

Vital links to the past come in many forms, and many generations of readers have felt, as I did when I first read these books, an almost disquieting connection with the authors of The Turn ofthe Screw (Henry Junior''s gripping ghost story) or The Varieties of Religious Experience (William''s heartfelt exploration of human spirituality), and have wondered what might be behind the unexpected immediacy of these works. I have spent many tantalizing days at Harvard''s Houghton Library, that great storehouse of Jamesian artifacts, looking for those surprising details that bring people of the past alive for us and make them relevant. There and elsewhere, I have found, among more "distinguished" papers, scrawled love letters and confessions, cartoons and shopping lists, and blurred photographs of loved ones that the Jameses carried with them on their travels. Though superlative biographical work has been done on almost all the Jameses-and collectively on the family by F. O. Matthiessen in 1947 and R. W. B.

Lewis in 1991-a more complete and modern portrait of this family has simply not been possible until recently. The Jameses'' papers were thoroughly combed through by an earlier generation of scholars, but few have looked at these documents with an up-to-date critical perspective. Whole new theoretical structures about gender and sexuality have emerged since most of the James biographies were written, and incisive research has bared the contradictions of their personal lives and their historical era. Before the last decade or two, few people talked or wrote about the most intimate issues in the Jameses'' lives: mental ill.