Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society: A Quarterly Journal in American Philosophy

Biography, wrote Hermione Lee, whose subjects include Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton, is "a relativist process of conjecture, invention, intuition, and manipulation of the evidence."¹ Any biography, therefore, urges its readers to ask about the enterprise of the work itself and the position of the biographer in relation to the evidence that must be selected, ordered, and, inevitably, manipulated. What is the biographer's aim, what evidence is available and presented, what is the relationship of the resulting book to the life lived?

Robert D. Richardson writes what he calls "intellectual biography," by which he means something different from merely writing the biography [End Page 578] of an intellectual. In his preface to Emerson: The Mind on Fire (1995), Richardson wrote that his study of Emerson was to be "a companion piece of Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (1986). My approach to both Thoreau and Emerson has been to read what they read and then to relate their reading to their writing."² Richardson takes the same approach to William James—to read what James read and show how these books made their way into James's writing; his aim, he says, is "to understand his life through his work, not the other way around. It is primarily narrative, aiming more to present his life than to analyze or explain it" (xiii). The book's subtitle, "In the Maelstrom of American Modernism," however, suggests that there will be analysis: a definition of American modernism and an argument about how and where James stands in the eddy of ideas that modernism encompasses.

Despite his claims and disclaimer, Richardson gives us a book essentially like any standard narrative biography aimed at non-specialist readers seeking an overview of James's life and achievements: well-paced, well-researched, and driven by chronology. As an intellectual biography, it is nothing like Gerald Myers's William James: His Life and Thought (1986), for example; and Richardson never does make an argument helping readers see James as proto-modernist.

Understanding someone's life through his work necessarily means looking at the individual's public self, since work that is set out for readers is not private disclosure, but wrought, edited, and honed for public consumption. In defining this focus, Richardson gives himself permission to ignore or treat cursorily some other aspects of his subject's life; although he does document James's various breakdowns and recoveries, for example, he does not offer new insights as to their cause or effect. He is strongest in portraying James's intellectual friends, offering vivid cameos of some of the most important: Charles Peirce, Chauncey Wright, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Josiah Royce, to name a few.

Nevertheless, as Richardson admits, it is impossible to tell the story of William James without locating him in the context of his family. Richardson looks upon family members benignly, much in the manner of R. W. B. Lewis (The Jameses, 1991): Mary James, the mother, is angelic, as her son Henry portrayed her in his idealized autobiography; Henry James, Sr. is largely benevolent; any negative aspersions (such as Henry James's remark that the atmosphere in the family home was as lively as an inner sepulcher) are not examined; Alice is the same woman so sensitively presented by Jean Strouse. He does not linger over family matters as he moves quickly to summaries of and quotations from James's work. Sometimes the chronological organization seems jarring: when James's youngest brother Wilky died, for example, James wanted his widow to sign papers relinquishing her share of money from Wilky's family inheritance if none of her children survived her. "This may look as though James were acting out of bad feeling," Richardson writes, [End Page 579] "but he would claim it was quite a different matter. In December 1883 he sent off to Mind for publication a short but revolutionary piece called 'What Is an Emotion?'" (242). Richardson does not claim that this piece helps us to understand...