Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James (10 page)

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wrote, “[she] has made her living mostly by standing

as model in wholesale ‘Cloak stores’ to show styles to

‘buyers’—a deplorable pursuit.” Was it not their duty

to protect her from gossip and “lift her up”? Could

H’ry contribute $100 for instruction in stenography?

“It’s impossible
not
to,” H’ry replied, enclosing a check.

They were too late; the money went unspent. The

young woman had married.

H’ry’s preface to 1’s
The Reverberator
(Wm: “Masterly and exquisite. . . . I quite squealed through it”) tells a story of H’ry’s having once wintered in Venice with

a group of twenty friends whose primary occupation

was “infinite talk, talk mainly, inexhaustibly, about

persons and the ‘personal equation’ and the personal

mystery.” The Old World salon feel of the circle was

challenged that season by the introduction of a young

woman whose presence was welcomed both because

she came well introduced and because they all knew

that Old World salons had never made much room for

“acclaimed and confident pretty girl[s].” The young

woman acquitted herself admirably; the group took

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her into each of their “twenty social bosoms.” It wasn’t

until H’ry returned from a short trip to Florence and

Rome that he learned that the young woman’s true

purpose had been to amass a “treasure of impressions.”

She had published a letter in a “vulgar newspaper”

revealing the group’s “penetralia.” She had been un-

dercover! The gossiping crowd had itself become the

subject of gossip! H’ry put the anecdote to use in
The
Reverberator
’s
tale of a marriage nearly derailed by carelessly slipped, and unscrupulously repeated, personal

information.

It’s difficult to imagine anyone more unsettled by

gossip than H’ry. Whether it was over his bowels, his

finances, or his love life (or lack of one), H’ry was forever pleading with Wm to not share information. Yet

the letters—full of itineraries and rumors, caricatures

and rants—reveal both Wm and H’ry as shameless gos-

sipers themselves.

Wm, in 1: “That’s all the gossip I can think of.”

Wm, in 12: “I take up my long unwonted pen to

make you a report of progress at home ensheathed in

other gossip.”

H’ry, in 1: “Do in writing give more details gos-

sip &c.”

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H’ry, in 1: “Behold all the base gossip I can invent.”

H’ry, in 110, in the very last line of the very last

letter of the correspondence, apologizing for his
need
to gossip: “Doing these things helps me, I find, most

blessedly on.”

H’ry took his lead on gossip from George Sand. In

1, he recalled the preface to “André” in which Sand

revealed that she had eavesdropped on her servants

during a stay in Venice, ostensibly to acquaint herself

with the local dialect, but in doing so coming into pos-

session “of a large amount of local gossip.” What this

revealed to Sand was that men and women from all

places tended to concern themselves with the same

kinds of things. H’ry absorbed the motto: we were all

alike in gossip.

And what do people tend to gossip about? We gossip

over suggested facts of lives, over assertions that, cor-

rect or not,
seem
truer than what people will publicly attest to. Gossip is the excitement of ambiguity, of

incomplete knowledge, of the tension between what

you’ve heard and what you know. Drama results when

the two don’t jibe. We are alternately thrilled and ter-

rified that the truth may come out. The reading of

others’ letters stems from the same basic impulse: in

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letters, we are more honest than when we craft an

argument or tell a story addressed to a broader audi-

ence. Literature rides the horse; letters peer into its

mouth. H’ry believed this. A great deal of his early critical work is dedicated to the collected correspondence

of other writers—Flaubert, Eliot, Balzac, St. Beuve,

Lowell, Arnold, this a list of only the pieces that mer-

ited discussion in Wm and H’ry’s own private exchange.

(Wm’s recommendation to H’ry of Eckermann and

Schiller’s correspondence accidentally anticipates the

effect of the brothers’ letters: “The spectacle of two

such earnestly living & working men is refreshing to

the soul of any one, but in their aesthetic discussions

you will find a particular profit I fancy.”) Letters play an important role in H’ry’s fiction as well. The tension

is almost always the same: a letter has been written,

what does the letter writer truly think, and who might

come to know its contents? Again and again, characters

confront the overwhelming impulse to interrupt the

social contract and snatch up the delectable missive

sitting in the crystal tray on the sideboard. There is no greater betrayal or drama than a stolen letter.

H’ry learned the hard way that a diary can be just

as dramatic.

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The problem with Wm and H’ry’s “bottled-lightning”

sister, Alice, seems to have been an inability to unstop-

per herself. Alice had the same mind as her favored

brothers, and the great biographical question of her

life is whether her intellectual talents went overlooked

in the James family dynamic because she was sickly,

or if she fell sick because her talents went overlooked.

Alice started out life closer to her elder brother, but

gravitated toward H’ry after Wm married. She followed

H’ry to London, where he cared for her until she died

of breast cancer in 12. Though, like Proust, Alice is

famous for having rarely left her bed, an active life in

London came to her. She could go weeks without see-

ing H’ry, and her “Boston marriage” to Katherine Lor-

ing—like the lure of H’ry’s sexuality—has cracked the

wax seal of so many critical inkwells that one wishes

that if Alice had been too-little unstoppered then critics might have remained more so. In any event, her own

modest trickle of ink was how Alice ensured that even

if she went overlooked she would not be forgotten.

For the last several years of her life, she kept a copious diary, a soaring account of her mind and her suffering

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that included a range of juicy tidbits about those in

the London social circle—gossip. Two years after she

died, Katherine Loring had the manuscript typeset and

bound in a tiny, four-copy edition.

“Oh yes,
please
send it to him!” H’ry said, when he first learned of the diary’s existence. Katherine Loring

had written to ask whether a copy could be forwarded

to unfavored brother Bob. H’ry hadn’t yet read the di-

ary, and he regretted having given his assent as soon as

he got his hands on it; it was filled, he told Wm, with everything he had “gossiped to the sister.” H’ry
liked
the diary—it was “heroic in its individuality, its independence”—and he was grateful to have it as he had never

had many letters from Alice. But he worried because in

relating details that he now saw repeated, he was forced

to admit that he had, on occasion, “‘coloured’ [things]

to divert Alice!” He didn’t know what Bob intended to

do with the book. “I am troubled about it in every way,”

he wrote. What he hoped, he said, was that they could

edit the diary ever so slightly “& then carefully burn with fire” the four extant copies. (H’ry failed in this,

but the diary was not printed again in full until 14.)

Wm thought H’ry was overreacting. “I don’t see the

slightest
danger of any extracts from it floating about.”

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Wm had a wholly different attitude toward gossip. By

the mid-10s, he was active in the Society for Psychical Research—the investigation of supernatural phenomena—and on this front gossip was both a danger and

a boon: on the one hand, gossip could explain how a

false medium, intentionally or unwittingly, could give

the impression of having come into possession of pri-

vate knowledge; on the other, gossip was a tool that

could and should be used, Wm suggested, to expand

the reach of psychical research. Either way, he was

far more dispassionate on the subject, which helps to

explain why he often thought the “matter” of H’ry’s

fiction “too slight.” Exactly those same societal pres-

sures from which Wm seemed insulated—propriety,

social status, reputation—shined bright in the back-

grounds of H’ry’s stories. In 1, H’ry admitted that

he was perplexed as to why Wm had remained cold to

a particular tale. “I have got (heaven knows!) plenty of

gravity within me,” he wrote, “& I don’t know why I

can’t put it more into the things I write.”

On occasion, however, the concern ran the other

way—and emotions flared. In January 15,
The Bosto-

nians
stirred anger among Wm’s neighbors. A character in the story, “Miss Birdseye,” seemed to local read-85

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ers too close an analog to a certain “Miss Peabody,”

whom everyone knew to resemble the character and

who even had the same identifying habit of misplacing

her eyeglasses. Wm hadn’t yet read the book when he

first complained of it, but he could recognize that it

was “a really pretty bad business.” H’ry fumed at this.

He’d meant no such association at all. He had known,

of course, that titling the book
The Bostonians
would cause him to be “much abused,” but the thing that really seemed to hurt was Wm’s thoughtlessness on the

matter. “I have done nothing to deserve it,” H’ry wrote,

“& think your tone on the subject singularly harsh & unfair.” Of course, a vague resemblance between Miss

Birdseye and Miss Peabody had occurred to him as he

wrote—but there had been no
intentional
attempt to render her. (The editors of the James correspondence

note that “bird’s eye” and “pea-body” mean the same

thing.) And even if there had been, the image portrayed

was “tenderly & sympathetically expressed.” Indeed,

the story would last “longer than poor Miss P.’s name

or fame,” and if anything she should have been grateful

for the allusion. But the real problem was Wm. “The

story is, I think, the best fiction I have written,” H’ry wrote, “& I expected you, if you said any thing about 86

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it, would intimate that you thought as much—so that

I find this charge on the subject of Miss P. a very cold

douche indeed.”

It took H’ry’s angry letter nearly six weeks to arrive.

Wm replied only briefly: “I trust your troubled soul is

at rest.”
The Bostonians
is the only major novel H’ry left out of the New York edition.

A decade later, as renowned as he would ever become,

but still smarting from the theater, H’ry began to feel

the pressures of a too-active social life. Fame and fam-

ily had produced a near endless string of visitors and

dining obligations. His work was suffering as a result.

In early February 1, he attended a meeting of the

Society for Psychical Research—an address of Wm’s

was presented by the organization’s champion, Fred-

eric Myers. “It had great success,” H’ry wrote of the

reading of Wm’s address. “How worked & strained & overladen you must feel & how pitiful must seem to

you my slow, small dribble of production.”

H’ry was accompanied that evening by an unusual

guest. Mrs. Mahlon Sands was a figure as tragic and

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prodigious as any of the women in H’ry’s fiction. A

transport from Newport, Rhode Island, Mrs. Sands and

her husband had years earlier eased their way into the

Marlborough House set, where she had become re-

nowned for her beauty and wit (“The loveliest Ameri-

can that has yet dawned upon the world of London,”

claims a diplomat’s memoir). She remained a fixture

in society even after her husband died in a riding ac-

cident in 1. It’s not clear how she first met H’ry,

but they seem to have formed something of a bond

over the vexation of social obligation. In 14, H’ry

advised Mrs. Sands as to how she should approach sit-

ting for John Singer Sargent. “You can’t collaborate or

co-operate, except by sitting still and looking beautiful,”

H’ry wrote. “Cultivate indifference, cultivate not look-

ing at it or thinking about it.” At Christmas, 15, Mrs.

Sands gifted H’ry a canary, a charming animal whose

quiet comfort H’ry described to Wm after a season of

endless visitors.

Mrs. Sands was a “great Psychist & devotee of