Unfortunately, the style that is fitting to a slow unfolding of a psychological situation does not lend itself well to biography. The direct way is the only possible way there, if the reader is to keep an unflagging interest, and the direct way is simply not possible for Henry James. And one asks nothing more than to be told simply of the student days at Switzerland and Germany, and the life afterward at Newport, just as the Civil War was beginning or best of all throughout the story of a united family--the four boys, little sister, father, mother, and aunt, quite unlike, I imagine, any other family in the world. The quality of the genius of the brothers seems to have sprung from the association with a father as unlike as possible to the American father of today. He did not influence them, we are told, by any power of verbal persuasion to his own ideas. It was quite simply himself, his personality and character, the way he lived life, that took hold upon his sons' imagination. Of course that is the only way anyone ever is influenced, but I think most parents do try the verbal persuasion as well. Henry James says of his father: I am not sure, indeed, that the kind of personal history most appealing to my father would not have been some kind that should fairly proceed by mistakes, mistakes more human, more associational, less angular, less hard for others, that is less exemplary for them (since righteousness, as mostly understood, was in our parents' view, I think, the cruellest thing in the world) than straight and smug and declared felicities. The qualification here, I allow, would be his scant measure of the difference, after all, for the life of the soul, between the marked achievement and the marked shortcoming. He had a manner of his own of appreciating failure or of not, at least, piously rejoicing in displayed moral, intellectual, or even material economies, which, had it not been that his humanity, his generosity, and, for the most part, his gaiety were always, at the worst, consistent, might sometimes have left us with our small saving, our little exhibitions and complacencies, rather on our hands. Speaking of the "detached" feeling they had after returning from Europe to settle in Newport, he says: I remember well how, when we were all young together, we had, under pressure of the American ideal in that matter, then so rigid, felt it tasteless and even humiliating that the head of our little family was not in business....