Life Sentences (20 page)

Full of envy for his sibling’s success, William James does not
come off very well in Novick’s account. He is often in Europe for extended periods, alone; he issues invitations and then is absent when the guest arrives; he offers advice that is most always bad; he complains about the stipulations in his relatives’ wills. William especially had to envy Henry’s freedom from family routines, emotional demands, and daily tasks. At the same time he disapproves of his brother’s swirling social rounds, since they cut into the time set aside for work. The family’s complex relationships are handled deftly, and Novick uses amusing little details to enliven his account, which is often fuller than Edel’s earlier, five-volume, businesslike approach.

As William begins to enjoy his own success and the brothers begin to share ailments like two old soldiers their war stories, they grow easy in each other’s company and more confident about their responses. The pair share an intense trust in the senses; they are fascinated by the phenomenon of consciousness; both value the individual above all else and bring a moral passion to all they do; but how other and inherently at odds they also are: William the Scientist and a seeker of acceptable means, and Henry the Aesthete, who values the intrinsic and the solemn worth of things in themselves: the Doer and the Viewer, one always going somewhere, the other always already there.

Writing was once a genteel occupation, which meant it was meanly paid, and casually esteemed. England, in particular, was a nation that cherished its amateurs. Philosophers did their thinking on their days off; writers wrote through the stillness of the night as their genius required and their obsessions demanded. Poets alertly awaited the call of their muse because she never rang twice. On the continent, where rationalism flourished, scholars and philosophers had become professors, and what they professed was a discipline. They policed themselves, and standards were watchfully upheld.
Professors formed organizations like guilds and enjoyed positions in universities and status in society. Professors were trained and professors were paid. Naturally they were rationalists, because it was important that their subject seem serious and appropriately strenuous. Empiricism was more easily espoused, and the English took to it as if the strain of thinking deep thoughts was simply bad manners. In America Emerson, and later Josiah Royce, tried to elevate the level of thinking to German standards, but with little lasting success. Finally, the First World War destroyed most influence that remained. Who needed
Wahrheit
when impressions would serve?

Nevertheless, because the novel was such a popular form of entertainment, at no definite time but gradually as twilight, it became a profession too, even though it was not taught in academies like painting or music. James becomes a hired scribe. So he writes what he needs to write to make a living, to get ahead, to please and increase his audience, and therefore to respond to demands of taste and form and subject. James is aware of the sort of compromises he is obliged to make if he wants to write for the lady mags and for the stage. “Oh, how it must not be too good & how very bad it must be.” James knew his audience, and had his order of battle, because a piece could appear first as a serial in a magazine ($), then in a nicely printed three-volume set as a novel of substance ($$), and finally in a cheap one-volume reprint for the arbor, the bedroom, or the train ($$$). If you are a realist, as James preferred to think of himself, he must research his books, and research always rolls the author toward the edge of journalism. To save time and increase income, a story may be puffed to the size of a novella, or modified to become a play, or taken apart to appear as vignettes. Travel has its pleasures but not their descriptions. Nonetheless, they pay the way. The loquacious master tries but he can’t write concisely (be, like Wilde, cynically witty) or baldly enough to achieve success in the theater.

James suffers the pains of haste, laboring to realize a deadline,
canceling all the other occupations of life but for this one, a load of obligation that grows heavier as he waits for the moment when he can coldly push the installment out of the house ahead of its perfecting, onto a public whose indifference to perfection is not consoling. His wrist, hand, and arm begin to rebel against their years of labor. Eventually he will have to resort to dictation. It will be difficult for him to grant works like
The Spoils of Poynton
their due, because they underwent too many metamorphoses and would seem cobbled together, or because they were written in a rush only to light the flame under his dinner pot. Some of the disdain he felt for his readers was his shame at having written to their level. “If that’s what the idiots want, I can give them their bellyful.” More and more he resents the “monetary world” of the professional writer. Still, as he enters his major phase, he is sending out a prospectus for
The Ambassadors
, arranging for the publication of a volume of stories, setting aside
The Wings of the Dove
, whose plot had not impressed the publishers—in business up to the gaze of his great gray eyes.

James did not sum up the year’s work each December 31 the way another pro, Arnold Bennett did, noting in his journal that “This year (1928) I have written 304,000 words; 1 play, 2 films, 1 small book on religion, and about 80 or 82 articles”; but his year’s receipts enabled him to lease his house in Rye. Bennett settled for a steam yacht. Neither of these wordmillers could complain about their output. As Novick says of James at the end of his late period: “In five years he had written a massive biography, a volume of short stories, and three of the greatest novels in the English language, all the while maintaining a busy social life, managing his own business affairs and a complex household.”

In his own notebooks, James often talks to himself, tries to buck up his sagging spirits, encourage his muse to greater exertions,
and remind himself of his duties to perfection. He is also not above threats. “I must make some great efforts during the next few years … if I wish not to have been on the whole a failure. I shall be a failure unless I do something
great!
” He gave public utterance to these standards in a lecture prepared for presentation during his travels in America, “The Lesson of Balzac.” “… the lesson [is] that there is no convincing art that is not ruinously expensive.… Nothing counts but the excellent; nothing exists … but the superlative.” Of course, this is the lesson of Flaubert, not of Balzac, who bit off more than he could Fletcherize.

Overweight and feeling ill from the burdens of work, James resorted to the dietary methods of Horace Fletcher, the so-called “Great Masticator,” whose food fads were widely followed during the Victorian period. To recover his health, he begins to eat as he writes, cutting his food into very small bites, and then chewing those thoroughly (thirty-two times was recommended)—ruminatively, as the cow the cud—biting even liquids (good wines
are
chewable), swallowing slowly, savoring every flavor. You will write, read, eat less if this method is your model, and your bowel movements will be “no more offensive than moist clay, and have no more odor than a hot biscuit.” A diet low in protein is also recommended. James’s health does improve and he becomes a partisan of the procedure, even visiting Fletcher’s palazzo in Venice. But James so ardently ground his food into gruel during his last years that he began to loathe food, if not his late style, and his doctors ordered him to cease.

James’s novels were, after all, spoken into the ear and hence to the consciousness of a stenographer, who then repeated their character like orders to a set of ready fingers, fingers that spelled out what James had mulled over in order that they might be formed into an utterance in the first place; it was a slow process, like rekneading risen bread; so that now, as these words appeared on the typewriter’s paper, they did so to their own reassuring music—the metronomic clack of the keys—and James’s deliberate, clear, and careful dictation.

All fine writing should be speakable even if it is not actually spoken; it must be mouthed, for that is how we first learn language, how we make in the world our earliest contacts. Although the childish hug that James often promised his friends is more intimate, it has a compressed range of meanings, whereas we learn to say
love
as we learn to feel it, even if we later spell it
luv
. To our earliest sounds cling our most ancient memories, and a word that is never said—
hendecasyllabic
—is dead. As James argued in his last American lecture at Bryn Mawr, it is “the medium through which we communicate with each other. These relations are made possible, are registered, are verily constituted by our speech, and are successful … in proportion as our speech is worthy of its great human and social function: is developed, delicate, flexible, rich—an adequate accomplished fact. The more it suggests and expresses the more we live by it—the more it promotes and enhances life.” James could not have envisioned the avid text messaging that now holds so many lines of vapidity open, as a window to a foul smell, or the thumb punching that has replaced the typist’s skills, or the intoxicating space of ignorance and indifference that it promises to provide through its absence of voice, its lack of face to face, its refusal of touch.

His style is a kind of Fletcherizing, too, the cutting of his chosen experience into very small parts and the mashing of that until the original shape of the thought or feeling disappears and is replaced by a kind of cogitation that moves like a molten liquid through one thing then another until it finds its own form. Others may think that his stammer is a better metaphor, but
stammer
implies inability, whereas, when we properly digest our encounters, they dissolve into new uses and join the body of our being. The following example, that Novick more fully quotes (except that he ends the sentence early, with a period after
carriages
), may help to illustrate what James is doing. When Strether, in
The Ambassadors
, is standing on the balcony of his Paris apartment, inhaling the night air, and sensing the palpable presence of his lost youth, the passage concludes (I have
lightly diagrammed the sentence to show its rhetorical structure and phrasing):

Mastication, as a metaphor, will perhaps serve the analytic side of James’s style, but it leaves out the corresponding synthesis: how this sense of past possibilities left unfulfilled, and now beyond recovery, returns to Strether, as, so differently reconstructed, James returns it to us—through a waft of warm air, a few moving lights, and the sudden commonplace sound of a turning wheel on the carriages that will carry so many alternative lives away. Here, as always in his
work, not only is every word naturally a sign (“soft quick rumble”), but everything referred to by these signs is a part of the language of the world (carriage wheel) and the consequential understanding of the self (gambling tables). In this exquisite form, this perfect pace, in this small music, this crowd of meaning—here is our Henry; this is our man.

It was late in the day on September 14, 1982. The voice at the other end of the line identified itself as representing the
Los Angeles Times
. Its quality resembled the self-important sort that does documentaries. The voice wondered whether I would be interested, since I had been John Gardner’s most vocal opponent during his life, in writing his obituary—they might call it a closing debate—for the paper. Close what? John is dead? Why is that? I foolishly stammered. He had been killed in a motorcycle accident. The voice confessed to knowing little more. They would naturally need the obit promptly. The notice needn’t be long. Its length would be left to my discretion.

The shock of this news, so callously conveyed, had addled my wits; otherwise I would have been angry immediately instead of angry later. Isn’t it a bit odd, I finally managed, to ask an alleged adversary to perform such a function? The voice said that odd was the interest. It would be (the word used wasn’t
edgy
) edgy. Well, I am a friend of John Gardner’s, I said, replacing my
odd
with outrage, and I wouldn’t be edgy. Then I was edgy, and hung up.

I don’t believe I was ever more than John’s rhetorical opponent, stationed at one side of the platform at a public debate or standing at the other end of a kitchen table, late at night, full of Scotch and happy disagreement; still, he might think it strange to find me holding the door for readers as they enter this early novel of his, a novel
that came into view only gradually and much later than its composition, as
The Sunlight Dialogues
also had, and a novel that probably had its origin in an assignment for Jarvis Thurston’s writing class at Washington University in St. Louis, whose philosophy faculty I later joined, a city John’s first wife, Joan, grew up in, and where her family still resided.

In one sense I shouldn’t have been surprised that John had died in a motorcycle accident. It was a wonder that he hadn’t provoked such a calamity earlier. He was inclined to drive very fast while drunk. He tended to get drunk rather regularly. In various vehicles he had hit things before and had passed out at the scene as if composing the first draft of his demise. He mostly whacked his own head and broke his own bones, either skiing (he told me) or galloping on horseback through a woods, by falling down in driveways, or while attempting to reach his hotel room by climbing the façade of the building. He was reckless with everything: his life, his love affairs, the fidelity of his friends, his family, his academic career, his debts, his views, his writing. I was the careful one. You are like a lady who has seen a mouse, he would tell me; you climb no more than a chair.