In his preface to Portrait of a Lady (New York Edition) James commends Turgenev's method of first inventing a character which subsequently offered that character's fate (4). It can be said that James applied this procedure to his own autobiography. Having completed every novel he would ever write, he was, theoretically at least, in full possession of his character as a great novelist and therefore able to impose the pattern of this fate on his personal history as a small boy. As he reviewed his past writing A Small Boy and Others, James consciously "read into it" certain recurring motifs, aided by the power of retrospect to see what was formerly not observable, if even extant at all.

Although James's definite interest in writing does not emerge until much later, in the second volume of his autobiography The Middle Years, James as a small boy is presented as a writer, albeit yet unformed, a writer in the embryonic stage. It is only because the mature autobiographer is provided with hindsight that he is able to cast the small boy in this light, the small boy whose existence while limited to a meaningless present was not, apparently, directed. James contrives to demonstrate that his early life was not spent idly, however much it might have seemed so to the "others." He offers an apology for the fact that at the time of his boyhood his fate was not at all obvious and he had nothing "to show" but appeared like "some commercial traveler who has lost the key to his packed case of samples and can but pass for a fool while other exhibitions go forward." James's family and friends, it seems, observed him from perspective of readers of a novel whose point of view is limited first or third person and whose solution is kept till the end.

The autobiographer's conceit is to indicate the clues which might have revealed his character even then if only one had been an imaginative enough "reader" to see these clues, clues such as his preference for observation and his interest in art. James supports the conceit that he was always a writer by sometimes referring to "Fate" which seems, at first, to be at odds with James's acknowledgement that during the process of writing it was his hindsight that imposed the pattern.

In any autobiography there is tension involved in the desire to depict life in all it realistic messiness while giving that representation artistic shape. James's touching up of his autobiography, his "illumination" of certain details that make him appear to have always been a writer, is part of what makes A Small Boy a work of art. But who supplied the artistic pattern? was the mark of his fate always there, though hidden? Is Fate reducible to genetic determinism in James? Since the well-shaped version of his life is the one that satisfied James, the one that seemed to him in his maturer years to be the appropriate way of looking back upon his life, he must have believed in the validity of artistic vision to find shape rather than merely give it, to see what others could not.

Whether or not the design of life one finds is actually inherent or subjective is a question to which we shall probably never find an answer, nonetheless it is interesting to consider how James might have conceived of his approach to the meaning-making, design-imposing process of constructing a narrative. He was clearly conscious of the form that he lent his life, however, he defers to the validity of artistic vision to discover pattern, to discover a more profound truth than an unfertilized collection of facts could deliver.

In his essay on "The Art of Fiction" James objected to Anthony Trollope's intruding narrator who informs the reader that the plot might as easily go one way as another. James argued that the novelist should be as occupied in looking for the truth--"the truth . . . that he assumes . . . what ever that may be"--as the historian is (189). James seems unimpressed by what he must have thought was Trollope's too-obvious, if not naive, suggestion that the structure in a story is, generally speaking, artificial or not strictly "true." Self-conscious writers like Trollope are generally given to such explicit acknowledgements of the artificiality of their constructions because they are beset with the problem of subjectivity and question the ethics of creating and promoting illusions. Although James usually demonstrated supreme self-awareness in regard to his art, he does suppress the fact of his illusion in A Small Boy when he calls his pattern "Fate."

A belief in fate, in a broad sense, is a belief in a force presiding over the universe controlling his creation--much in the way an author controls his creation. Although "fate" can also refer to various kinds of material determinisms that are not necessarily inevitable, it seems pretty clear to me that James was toying with the idea of end-directed determinism. There are about ten explicit occurrences of the word "fate" in the autobiography and more than twice as many references to destiny, predetermination or providential optimism. In the first few pages James refers to himself as a young boy as "foredoomed" to wonder, dawdle and gape, his only function being to receive impressions that could later be appropriated by his artist self. He declares it was "preordained" that "nature and fortune" dealt him only an imagination and sensibility as his only faculty of application (10). At a tender age he was "fatalistically aware" of his character and "resigned" to it (25).

Because "fate" is sometimes used to refer to final circumstance without implying that that end was inevitable, one might easily suppose that James's evocation of fate is a purely convenient device used to make the structure of his narrative more poetic. It seems to me an easy and natural thing for a novelist to fall back on without being entirely committed to a teleological sense of the word. However, I believe James's use suggests a fairly complicated attachment to the conception. Even as a young boy he held the conviction that life represented "something more than what immediately and all too blankly met the eye" (411). He notes the presence of shaping force that could not be explained by most reductive accounts. Later, he would try to bring out life's significance in his writing. Often art, like religion, furthers the conviction that there is more to life that what we can know and encourages the hope that human beings have an important place in an ordered universe, a fate. James's indirect references to his belief in a God, who would decide one's fate, may be, like art, seen as a metaphor for his belief in his own importance.

In A Small Boy and Others James perceives the handiwork of fate in situations in life that seems wonderfully author-contrived, that seem to exhibit artistic design, that seem well-staged and perfectly dramatized. But most significantly "the fine artistry of fate" is detected in these crucial events in life that finally uncover one's "true" nature. When James recalls the story of his allegedly irresponsible uncle Henry who lived to take competent control of his kinsmen's wealth, he sees a "rich a rounded picture" where before he had only seen "wild possibilities." By applying the hand of fate to his own history, James mimics the uncle Henry story; he shows how, unbeknownst to those who shared his early days, he had always been a writer, just as Henry had always been worthy of his family's trust. James does this by touching up certain details which "reveal" hidden character.

James praises the uncle Henry drama as being "so much more of 'character' than of 'incident,'" a preference which would define his own aesthetic model. In many of James's novels it can be argued that the plot (or the fate) is hinged upon character not on incident. The exciting discovery, the drama is not based on a question of what a character will do in a given situation; the question is of character itself. Is Catherine Sloper really as dull, loyal and stubborn as the doctor suggests she is? Is Vereena Tarrant really "made for love" not for action in the public sphere? What is it about Isabel Archer's character that informs her idea of happiness? In the novels the answers to these questions of character are not obvious until we have read to the end. In these cases the author's artistic hindsight is not shared with the reader along the way as it is in A Small Boy in which James attempts to answer the question of his character at the outset. In the autobiography we share the author's perspective, being fully aware of the resolution even as the story begins. It is this shared perspective between reader and author that enables young James's character to be figured as predetermined.

In Portrait of a Lady we are in Isabel's consciousness; the omniscient author remains silent. This point of view mimics the natural state of present consciousness in which one is not yet aware of the final outcome. Only retrospectively can we, the readers, begin to imagine Isabel's life as having run a tragic predetermined course. Indeed her life seems one of "wild possibilities" right up until the time that it is concluded. At that point we might go back into the story to search for clues that would explain why she chose the life she did. Various details might answer: her fear of sex and rejection of the procreative urge, perhaps her fatherlessness. But whatever phenomenal patterns we find, they are only made meaningful by her ultimate "fate" and our power of hindsight, or, as Frank Kermode would say, our sense of the ending.

James's protagonists may be "fated" or controlled by the author but they are not bereft of freedom as far as the reader is concerned. To say they are would be to misconstrue the way we "know" fate. Since fate can only be inferred retrospectively, in all practicality the loss of freewill is meaningless.

And in the case of autobiography its loss is more than compensated for with the assurance of the importance of self that an evocation of fate conveniently provides. One who is controlled by fate has a place in the ordered universe; his life is not random, not meaningless. Although it is fairly clear that James was conscious of the artistic form he lent his history, I dare say James would not have dreamt of intruding like Trollope upon his narrative to announce that it might have been invented a scene in any of several different ways. He seems quite committed to the truth of the rich rounded picture of his life, to its meaningfulness. His self-conception and his sense self-importance depended upon it. After all, what is the autobiographical act's prime concern but, as James Olney writes, "the fascination with the self and its profound, its endless mysteries and, accompanying that fascination, an anxiety about the self, an anxiety about the dimness and vulnerability of that entity that no one has ever seen or touched or tasted"? (23) Autobiography's ultimate purpose is to fix the self for all time, to put forth the idea the that autobiographer matters and that his life is significant in the supposed order of things. It is not important whether or not James's references to fate are a declaration, metaphorical or otherwise, of a faith in a God; they are more significantly a declaration of a faith in himself as a person as well as a writer. If a belief in an interested deity is actually a belief in one's own importance, it would be particularly apt, then, that in autobiography fate should be evoked since both serve the purpose of validating the self.

In committing himself to the autobiographical act, James exhibited both confidence in and anxiety about his knowledge of self. He demonstrates strict control over his material, limiting the small boy to a single activity, a single purpose, but such control may be necessitated by hidden insecurities and deep anxieties about the self, hence there is a need to justify, in some way or other, his version of the truth about his life. Clearly, James's use of the word "fate," even if it is a casual use, is designed to lend the sense that his knowledge of essential self was discovered through his artistic vision not merely imposed by it. Is this a way of avoiding the issue of subjectivity or a way of refining it? The answer to this question is also the answer to the question of whether or not there is any truth to art.

James, Henry. A Small Boy and Others. New York: Charles Scribner's and Sons, 1913.

---, "The Art of Fiction." In The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism.

Ed. Roger Gard. New York: Penguin, 1987. 186-206.

---, A Portrait of a Lady. 1908. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.

Olney, James. "Autobiography and the Cultural Moment: A Thematic, Historical, and

Bibliographical Introduction." In Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.

See Narrative Telos: The Ordering Tendencies of Chance by Victoria N. Alexander, which addresses the questions posed in "Determining One's Fate." See Chapter Three for a definition of a "phenomenal pattern." See Chapter Six for an analysis of James "pragmatic teleology."

Citation Information:

Alexander, Victoria N. "Determining One's Fate: Henry James's Autobiography." Available at

http://www.dactyl.org/james.html, 1997. (Cited: Today's Date.)

The Henry James Scholar's Guide to Web Sites. Maintained by Richard D. Hathaway.