Remembering the Great Gay American Writer, Henry James, on His 180th Birthday

Henry James:

“We work in the dark. We do what we can; we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

He was born in New York City to an eminent, intellectual, important American family. He grew up and went to school in Europe and New England.

James’s writing career was long and prolific. In five decades, he wrote 30 novels, hundreds of short stories, plus articles and essays. His role was significant in the development of the modern American novel and the innovative use of the interior monologue as narrative.

James published articles and books of criticism, biography, autobiography, travel, and plays. Born in the United States, James largely relocated to Europe as a young man, and eventually settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1915, the year before his death. James was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1911, 1912, and 1916.

His work was extremely popular with the public. James continued, in old age, to produce world-class work: The Wings Of The Dove (1902), The Europeans (1903), The Golden Bowl (1904), Washington Square (1880), and The Turn Of The Screw (1898) are all considered masterpieces. They have all been adapted into particularly good films several times.

James stories and novels have been adapted to film, television, and music video over 150 times from 1933 to 2022. Besides the adaptations mentioned earlier, there are: The Aspern Papers (17 times); Washington Square (eight times), as The Heiress (six times); The Wings Of The Dove (nine times); The Bostonians (four times); Daisy Miller (four times); The Sense Of The Past (four times, as Berkeley Square); The Ambassadors (3 times; The Portrait Of A Lady (three times); The American (three times); What Maisie Knew (three times); The Golden Bowl (twice).

James’s sexuality remained a subject of debate for decades because of his famous friendships with females; because many critics were unable to read his gayness into his work, and because in literary circles, while he was acknowledged to be homosexual in his interests, the common opinion was that he was basically asexual or celibate.

From his journals and letters, it seems that James enjoyed close relationships of a romantic, even erotic, nature with several young men of his acquaintance. He may have remained in the closet due to that pesky Oscar Wilde, whose flamboyancy he abhorred, and whose scandalous trial drove most of gay society back to hiding their loves and lives.

James on Wilde:

”Hideously, atrociously dramatic and rarely interesting. It is the squalid gratuitousness of it all; of the mere exposure that blurs the spectacle. But the fall, to that sordid prison-cell and this gulf of obscenity over which the ghoulish public hangs and gloats, it is beyond any utterance of irony or any pang of compassion! He was never in the smallest degree interesting to me, but this hideous human history has made him so in a manner.”

In 1876, James met and fell in love with Paul Joukowsky, a young, handsome Russian painter. Although his time with Joukowsky was short-lived, the special friendships he enjoyed with other men would endure for many years.

Gay novelist Hugh Walpole wrote to James confessing of his indulging in “certain high jinks”, and James wrote a reply:

“We must know, as much as possible, in our beautiful art, yours and mine, what we are talking about — the only way to know it is to have lived and loved and cursed and floundered and enjoyed and suffered — I don’t think I regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth.”

James wrote many expressive letters to expatriate American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen. James met the 27-year-old Andersen in Rome in 1899, when James was 56 years old. His letters to Andersen that are intensely emotional:

“I hold you, dearest boy, in my innermost love, and count on your feeling me—in every throb of your soul. I put, my dear boy, my arm around you, and feel the pulsation, thereby, as it were, of our excellent future and your admirable endowment.”

His many letters to the many young gay gentlemen among his close male friends are more forthcoming. To his gay friend, Howard Sturgis, an American novelist who wrote openly about same-sex love, James wrote:

“I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you. Meanwhile, I can only try to live without you.”

Poor James, all caught up in crazy conflicting cultural considerations: an American living in Europe, a gay man living in a straight world, a closeted gay man; he was able to transform his personal difficulties into novels that give the essence of an important time of change in society and literature in a most challenging way.