Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James

Wm & H’ry

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Muse

Books

The Iowa Series

in Creativity &

Writing

Ro

r ber

obert D

t d.

Richardson

richardso ,

n

series editor

series editor

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Wm & H’ry

Literature, Love, and the Letters between

william and henry james

by

j. c. hallman

un i ve r si ty of iowa press

iowa ci ty

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University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242

Copyright © 2013 by J. C. Hallman

www.uiowapress.org

Printed in the United States of America

Design by Sara T. Sauers

No part of this book may be reproduced or used

in any form or by any means without permission

in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps

have been taken to contact copyright holders of

material used in this book. The publisher would

be pleased to make suitable arrangements with

any whom it has not been possible to reach.

The University of Iowa Press is a member of

Green Press Initiative and is committed to

preserving natural resources.

Printed on acid-free paper

CIP data to come

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It would seem just to say, then, that the bequests of

Henry and William James have become so intricately

woven into the pattern of contemporary literature

that only an eagle and argus-eyed critic can hope to

tease them out.—C. Hartley Grattan,
The Three James

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TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN,

For a short time a few years ago
,
funded almost exclusively by a modest advance for a book about Wm James
,
I
lived a meager life in West Philadelphia. I rather enjoyed
this. My dog and I walked daily to the outdoor tables of
a Vietnamese restaurant for cheap lunches
,
and I happily
sacrificed the comforts of a steady income to dedicate myself to work. There is a degree of irony to a man enduring
poverty so he can study the thought of another whose life
was mostly affluent—one who has even been accused of

stinginess
,
though I don’t agree with the charge—but I
didn’t think much about it then
,
and don’t wish to make
hay of it now. For whatever reason
,
the same trying days
one strives to avoid tend to be
,
in retrospect
,
the happiest
of days. I was happy then.

Part of this happiness
,
surely
,
owes to the fact that I
had managed to convince the Free Library of Philadelphia
to lend out its noncirculating copies of the then–newly published correspondence of Wm James. Even though many of
the James family letters had been burned to preserve family
vii

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secrets (the original plan called for the
unburned
correspondence to be withheld from the public eye until the year

)
,
Wm’s collected letters came in at a shelf-bending
twelve volumes. During my time in Philadelphia eleven
of these volumes had been published; the first three were
dedicated to Wm and H’ry’s lifelong exchange. I knew

at once that these particular books were remarkable—I
believe there exists no other epistolary commingling of
minds as complete between figures that have each proven
so influential—but I actually skipped them the first time
around. I started reading with Volume Four
,
the earli-est of Wm’s letters. For the better part of a year
,
I carried
those cinder-block books around in my satchel
,
their stiff
library binding gouging my lower back as I biked around
town. I humped them everywhere
,
like a penance. At first
,
I read them at odd moments: before sleep
,
at bars
,
waiting
for subways, etc. Before long
,
however
,
the letters began
to feel intended for me
, addressed
to me
,
and soon I read
them not just at odd moments
,
but at completely normal
moments as well. I paced myself—I did not want to gobble
them—but of course I read them much more quickly than
had their original recipients. This has its advantages
,
and
it may be that the bare intimacy and raw wisdom of letters
stand out in greater relief at fast-forward.

viii

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A few years before Wm and H’ry were born
,
Ralph
Waldo Emerson weighed these very things—letters
,
bare-ness and rawness
,
intimacy and wisdom—in a rare meditation on his own writing. Emerson criticized his essays;
he feared that they had been pulled along with a culture-wide lurch toward staid
,
scholarly prose. Better was his
correspondence
,
he thought. He was most fond of letters
addressed “to anyone whom I love.”

Emerson’s longing for intimate letters offers a clear
contrast to modern “correspondence,” such that it is. The
infection of monotone prose appears to have grown only
more virulent
,
more gangrenous
,
and whatever we write
these days
,
be it letters
,
or memos
,
or blogs
,
either elec-tronic or “hard,” is not addressed to those whom we love—

rather
,
it is “released” to whomever it may concern.

I think that’s why I began to feel as though Wm’s letters
were addressed to me: because no other letters
were
addressed to me.

As I neared the end of writing my book
,
a crisis loomed.

Volume Twelve had just been released
,
but the library had
not yet processed its copy. The librarians couldn’t give it
to me. I absolutely needed to read the last of Wm’s letters
,
but Volume Twelve alone would cost $. I was poor
,
if
you’ll recall, but I considered making the purchase. A little
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tinkering revealed an even more tantalizing investment
opportunity: the
entire set
could be got for $
,
which
was then about half my net worth. I debated for a while
,
and put in the order. I anxiously awaited the books’ arrival. I paced at home each day
,
tried to anticipate the
mailman’s routine. This was ridiculous
,
since I’d already
read most of the letters
,
and I was
,
in a sense
,
awaiting
their arrival a second time. When the box finally came
,
I
experienced the thrill of anticipated packages—a joy that
is the timelessness of wonder
,
a tracing back to the source
of imagination.

I tore through Volume Twelve
,
but oddly only ever dabbled in the three books of Wm and H’ry’s letters. I finished
my project
,
and since then the correspondence has been
prominently displayed in whatever I’ve had that passes for
a living room.

Wm & H’ry
assumes at least a little preexisting knowledge. Generally
,
readers know the work of one brother
much better than they know the work of the other
,
and
often—even for quite savvy readers—the fact that they
were brothers at all is the new part of the equation. The
following may suffice as introduction for each:

x

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Henry James is the most pivotal author of the last

 years. Working freelance with a monk’s dedica-

tion
,
he produced a virtually endless set of stories
,
novels
,
and criticism. A great deal of what we now
think of as artful fiction traces back to his most

ambitious work.

William James is the father of modern psychology
,
the founder of pragmatism
,
and the author of a
seminal book on comparative religion. An artist

turned scientist and philosopher
,
he taught at Harvard for forty years. His work echoes across a vast

range of disciplines.

In biographies
,
Wm and H’ry’s relationship tends to
be treated for only its oxymoronic extremes: it is a loving
rivalry. The letters are not newly published or explored
,
but exclusive focus on the brothers’ differences overlooks
common wombs both literal and intellectual
,
and forgets
a lifetime of mutual influence. To date
,
the letters have not
been mined for what the James family pyromaniac correspondence editors certainly felt to be the case: given the
brothers’ influence on philosophy
,
religion
,
science
,
art
,
and literature
,
the letters are a raw and intimate presaging
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of much of thinking of the twentieth century. Just as in
my living room
,
the three cinder-block volumes of Wm and
H’ry’s letters have been admired and exalted
,
but not yet
fully read for the story and the message that was the intent
of their preservation.

xii

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Wm & H’ry

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on september , 11, having lately abandoned a

dream of life as an artist and enrolled in Harvard’s

Lawrence Scientific School, Wm set out from his new,

strange, rented room in Cambridge and walked me-

chanically to the P.O., hoping against all hope to find a letter from his brother. His box was empty. Wm turned

heavily away. Before he could leave, he felt a modest

touch. It was his landlord’s young son, offering an en-

velope inscribed with familiar characters.

“Mr. James! This was in our box!”

Wm tore open H’ry’s letter, read it right there in the

post office. That evening, homesick and alone on a Sat-

urday night, he began a reply: “Sweet was your letter

& grateful to my eyes.” The first letter of the surviving correspondence contains snippets in French, Latin,

and Portuguese, alludes to Shakespeare, reports on

a visit to a collection of sculptural casts at the Boston Atheneum, and attests to an absence of “equanimity”

(the presence of which, many years later, Wm would

count among the defining traits of mysticism). He was

nineteen years old.

1

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They wrote often. They wrote letters about reading

letters, letters about how much time had passed since

they had received a letter, letters that depicted the mo-

ment of their composition. Wm’s first letter describes

the table on which he writes (round, with a red and

black cloth), specifies the number of windows in his

room (five), inventories his bookcase (“my little array

of printed wisdom covering nearly
one
of the shelves”), and lists “Drear and Chill Abode” as its return address.

The early letters often express frustration with the

inability of words to truly convey experience. Cor-

respondence paled beside conversation. Over the

next few years, as Wm and H’ry each completed an

initial solo Grand Tour, they cried out for each other’s

company.

H’ry, from Lucerne: “I’d give my right hand for an

hour’s talk with you.”

H’ry, from Venice, six weeks later: “Among the

letters which I found here on my arrival was a most