Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence

Abstract

One evening around the turn of the century in the garden of his home, Lamb House, Henry James revealed to one of his closest friends, Edmund Gosse, what the latter assumed to be one of the novelist’s most intimate secrets. ‘As twilight deepened and we walked together,’ Gosse was later to recall,

I suddenly found that in profuse and enigmatic language [James] was recounting for me an experience, something that had happened, not something repeated or imagined. He spoke of standing on a pavement of a city, in the dusk, and of gazing upwards across the misty street, watching, watching for the lighting of a lamp in the window on the third storey. And the lamp blazed out, and through bursting tears he strained to see what was behind it, the unapproachable face. And for hours he stood there, wet with the rain, brushed by the phantom hurry?ing figures of the scene, and never from behind the lamp for one moment was visible the face. The mysterious and poignant revelation closed, and one could make no comment, ask no question, being throttled oneself by an overpowering emotion. And for a long time Henry shuffled beside me in the darkness, shaking the dew off the laurels, and still there was no sound at all in the garden but what our heels made crunching the gravel, nor was the silence broken when suddenly we entered the house and he disappeared for an hour.¹