In the memoirs, years disappear unremarked, but one good day at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum can take up pages. Illustration by John Gall

Stephen Potter, the English satirist and the inventor of “Lifemanship,” pointed out once that the essence of “reviewmanship,” being one up in book reviews, is perverse praise: giving writers credit for qualities they are supposed to lack, or criticizing them for not having ones that they clearly possess—i.e., extolling the open sadism of Jane Austen or lamenting the sexual timidity of D. H. Lawrence. It may then seem Potterian to say that the later Henry James obviously looks more appealing in his nonfiction than in his novels, but something close to that conclusion may present itself to the reader happily making his way through the two books of Jamesian autobiography, “A Small Boy and Others” (1913) and “Notes of a Son and Brother” (1914), just reissued in a single volume, together with some other first-person stuff, by the Library of America. For freshness of voice, firmness of purpose (if a firmness always subject to scruples and second thoughts), and general delight on the page, the memoirs are fully alive to the contemporary reader in a way that James’s late novels may no longer be. Although the sentences are always labyrinthine and sometimes exhausting, the feeling at the end of each chapter is one of clarity rather than of murk: a little piece of memory has been polished bright.

Certainly, the great cult of the later James, which arose in the propaganda-fearing nineteen-forties and fifties, when he and T. S. Eliot stood above all other writers for sighs and scruples, could use a new infusion of objects. James remains a classic, of course, but a classic is not necessarily a presence. David Foster Wallace, the saint of under-thirty readers, mentions James not at all in his critical writings, and though one might take his qualifications and circlings back as Jamesian, they are employed to discriminate not more finely but to discriminate not at all—to get it in, rather than to pare it down. In a time of linguistic overkill, like the nineteen-forties, we look to literature for a language of emotional caution; in an age of irony, we look for emotional authenticity. Feeling ourselves in a desert of true feeling, we look for a feeling of truth.

James’s memoirs have a shimmer, a charm, and an openhearted immediacy that cuts the fussiness. The first book is set mostly in New York and Albany, where the James family was based, with side trips to France and England. The second mostly relates what happened to the James brothers during the Civil War—when the two older boys stayed home, and Henry made a brief, doomed effort to go to Harvard Law School—and so is set largely in Boston and Cambridge. To say as much, though, gives the books a chronicler’s purposefulness that their sentences belie. We are always in one place, Henry’s head, as he peers back from his early-twentieth-century home in England, seeking out extremely specific sensations lost. Years disappear unremarked, but one good day at P. T. Barnum’s American Museum can take up pages.

The autobiographical project began, as Philip Horne explains in an afterword to the reissues, as a plan to collect William James’s letters, after his death, in 1910, with commentaries provided by his one-year-younger brother. But it soon became a free-form memoir—free-form because almost none of the normal duties of the memoir writer are met. We learn little about who the Jameses were; how, in the generation of Henry’s Irish-immigrant grandfather, they got the money that bought them freedom from obligation; why they went back and forth so often between Europe and America—we learn that Henry and his siblings were “hotel children” but not what got them to the hotels. (The answer, briefly, is their father’s strange, restless nature and his eventual conversion to the mystical circles of Swedenborgianism, which sent him travelling in pursuit of spiritual illumination.) There is much family detail but very little comprehensible family history.

Not surprisingly, Henry misrepresented a lot of what had happened. His fan the essayist Max Beerbohm made a sour list of twenty instances in which he thought that James had falsified documents. Certainly, Henry fabulated and shaped various details and incidents. He cleaned up muddy incidents, placed events in the wrong time—all the usual things that writers do. He did this, as writers will, in pursuit of the story he wanted to tell: how his brother’s ascent to intellectual dominance forced him into a lesser role as attendant observer, but how, in that lesser, watching role, he eventually found his vocation in life, a vocation defined by its disabilities.

These are books, as nineteenth-century reviewers might have said, to be savored rather than swallowed, with long, unparagraphed pages presenting long, snaking sentences. A typical one, in its mixture of metaphoric extravagance and lexical exactness, describes a literary-minded neighbor: “He had let himself loose in the world of books, pressed and roamed through the most various literatures and the most voluminous authors, with a stride that, as it carried him beyond all view, left me dismayed and helpless at the edge of the forest, where I listened wistfully but unemulously to the far off crash from within of his felled timber, the clearing of whole spaces or periods shelf by shelf or great tree by tree.”

The charm of the whole relies, in part, on Henry’s decision to present himself as the narrator not of his own life but of William’s, telling—in a tone very much like that of the younger Buddy Glass writing of the sainted Seymour Glass—of his brother’s rise from wandering childhood to become America’s leading intellectual. The elder’s greatness is taken for granted, while the younger trips along behind, in awe and wonder. His earliest intimation, Henry tells us, was “of my brother’s occupying a place in the world to which I couldn’t at all aspire—to any approach to which in truth I seem to myself ever conscious of having signally forfeited a title. It glimmers back to me that I quite definitely and resignedly thought of him as in the most exemplary manner already beforehand with me, already seated at his task, when the attempt to drag me crying and kicking to the first hour of my education failed on the threshold of the Dutch House in Albany,” the school where the James boys were sent.

In 1912, as Henry was writing, with William having died two years earlier, the imbalance between the reputations of the two brothers was too obvious to miss. William had been America’s favorite public intellectual, and perhaps the first to have that role rooted in a professorship rather than in a pulpit. Pragmatic philosopher and pioneering psychologist—he had taught both at Harvard—he seemed, in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” to have reconciled religious faith with the facts of mind. He insisted that, in the absence of actual supernatural experience, the conviction of having had it was quite enough for an American. We don’t need a foundation to have faith; the workings of the faith are all the foundation we need. As Paul Stob showed in his recent “William James and the Art of Popular Statement,” William, making speeches and giving lectures from one end of the country to the other, really was a major public figure. Henry, by contrast, was seen—not least, at moments, by William—as an arty expatriate, and often as a failure, who had lost his fine original talent in a wilderness of parentheses. Henry’s most notorious later public appearance was his doomed curtain call, in 1895, after the première of his play “Guy Domville,” when he was cruelly led onstage by an exasperated actor-manager to be hooted by the London audience.