The Best of Nothing Book

Each night I have been curling up in my bed with Paul Fisher's House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2008). It has been a pleasure to slip into their cosmopolitan gilded-age world and to travel back and forth between Europe and the United States with Henry James, Alice James and William James. Although Fisher's writing is often trite (he uses similes and metaphors used by the James children in their letters in his ensuing descriptions) and slips often into the psycho-babble so popular with biographers, the book has allowed me to differentiate all the James personalities. Reading a biography of the family allows me to arrange all the characters and events in my head and to place them in a more structured manner allowing me to understand better their fascinating world. It is also enjoyable discovering so many luminaries of the second half of the 19th-century turning up even if often too briefly in Fisher's family biography (Henry James' meeting with Isabella Stewart Gardener is surprisingly left out and his interactions with the Curtis family remain at the sidelines). At times it is like being at a party and wondering about someone fascinating who strolls behind the person you are in conversation with. One can't help but be curious about that other person while still striving to pay attention to your host. I find myself wanting to follow these often brief introductions and to see how all their stories interconnect. Thinking also about how to connect them together myself in the manner of Christopher Benfey's cultural studies of intersecting lifes (A Summer of Hummingbirds and The Great Wave) and Irene Gammel's biography Baroness Elsa. The group that Fisher follows is after all an important American family that moved in fascinating circles and includes characters that have continually appeared in my own set of readings and interests over the years (Henry James sat for a portrait by one of my favourite artists John Singer Sargent in 1913).