Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James (11 page)

yours,” H’ry wrote in the same letter in which he re-

ported on Wm’s speech. He described Mrs. Sands in

terms that reflected the tolls levied by social pressures:

“She was a pathetic,
ballottée
creature—with nothing 88

Hallman_firstpages5x.indd 88

9/4/12 6:26 PM

small or mean & with a beauty that had once been

the greatest.”

Wm sent Mrs. Sands a copy of his essay “Is Life

Worth Living?,” which was published as a small book

in 1. The essay would have affirmed Mrs. Sands’s

spiritualist interest. “Is Life Worth Living?” articulated the “will to believe” doctrine Wm had been working

out through the 10s and early 10s, and amounted

to a critical step on the path to pragmatism: we each

have the right to supplement observable reality with an

unseen spiritual order if only to thereby make life seem

89

Hallman_firstpages5x.indd 89

9/4/12 6:26 PM

worth living. It’s often argued that Wm was reflecting

on his dark mood here, now a quarter-century past, but

he was hardly alone: “That life is
not
worth living the whole army of suicides declare. . . . As we sit here in

our comfort, [we] must ‘ponder these things’ also, for

we are of one substance with these suicides, and their

life is the life we share.” Wm quoted Ruskin to contrast

“the lightness of heart of a London dinner party” with

those outside its walls, and then he tightened his focus

onto what for Mrs. Sands must have seemed a familiar

ennui: “My task, let me say now, is practically narrow,

and my words are to deal only with that metaphysical

tedium vitæ
which is peculiar to reflecting men.”

On July 24, 1, H’ry passed along Mrs. Sands’s

gratitude for Wm’s little book. Her note, H’ry said, ar-

rived just at the climax of the London rush. He later

recalled that she had implored him to visit her. “Are

you not coming up at all?” she pleaded. “I am sick of

the whole thing.” Mrs. Sands died three days later. Her

maid left the room for just a moment while dressing

her for a dinner party. She had collapsed to the floor.

“She had a weakness of heart,” H’ry wrote. “That’s

all that’s known.”

Mrs. Sands was forty-one years old.

90

Hallman_firstpages5x.indd 90

9/4/12 6:26 PM

The death of Mrs. Sands illustrates what H’ry never

stated: even if the “matter” of his fiction was light, the minds behind it lived and died as though it was very

heavy indeed. He seemed to best understand this him-

self only after Wm fully fleshed out his system. “I can’t now explain save by the very fact of the spell itself . . .

that [
Pragmatism
] cast upon me,” H’ry wrote in 10.

“All my life I have . . . unconsciously pragmatised.”

And in 10, “As an artist & a ‘creator’ I can catch on, hold on, to pragmatism, & can work in the light of it

& apply it.” H’ry’s fiction demonstrated Wm’s “method of truth.”

Wm was never able to be quite so gracious in return.

Tempered by occasional praise, his criticisms of his

brother’s work started early, and never truly abated. In

1, he lashed out at the “every day” elements of two

of H’ry’s early stories, and then explained his purpose:

“I have uttered this long rigmarole in a dogmatic man-

ner, as one speaks, to himself, but of course you will

use it merely as a mass to react against in your own

way, so that it may serve you some good purpose.”

He believed he was doing H’ry a service as he criti-

91

Hallman_firstpages5x.indd 91

9/4/12 6:26 PM

cized a growing tendency toward “over-refinement”

or “
curliness
” of style. “I think it ought to be of use to you,” he wrote in 12, “to have any detailed criticism

fm even a wrong judge, and you don’t get much fm.

any one else.” For the most part, H’ry agreed. “I hope

you will continue to give me, when you can, your free

impression of my performance. It is a great thing to

have some one write to one of one’s things as if one

were a 3d person & you are the only individual who

will do this.”

H’ry did not agree with all of Wm’s “strictures.”

Some were clearly born of an overprotective spirit.

Whenever Wm advised that H’ry bend toward the

“newspaporial,” or concentrate on writing of a “popu-

lar kind,” H’ry kicked back. “The multitude, I am more

& more convinced, have absolutely no taste—none at

least that a thinking man is bound to defer to. To write

for the few who have is doubtless to lose money—but

I am not afraid of starving.”

Long after H’ry had established a successful career,

Wm worried that he would have to care for his brother

in his old age. H’ry’s bravado, however, and what he

produced did not always jibe. He
was
afraid of starving. Even apart from his speculative sortie into the the-

92

Hallman_firstpages5x.indd 92

9/4/12 6:26 PM

ater, his stories are often repetitive—he mined themes

again and again, reselling the same idea to a range of

venues—and he was well aware that some of his work

was inferior. Ironically, this was the work that tended

to please Wm most. When Wm praised “Longstaff ’s

Marriage” and wondered why H’ry had left it out of a

collection, H’ry dismissed the story as a “poor affair.”

And just a few months after the death of Mrs. Sands

he disavowed an entire novel,
The Other House
, that Wm had enjoyed. “If
that’s
what the idiots want,” H’ry wrote, “I can give them their bellyfull.”

Wm only grudgingly accepted H’ry’s most ambi-

tious methods. “It is superlatively well done,” he wrote

of
The Bostonians
,
when he finally read it, “provided one admit that method of doing such a thing at all.”

The earnest criticism of the early letters gave way to

banter as Wm struggled to comprehend whatever it

was H’ry was trying to achieve. In 105, flustered by

The Golden Bowl
,
Wm called for something wholly new: But why won’t you, just to please Brother, sit

down and write a new book, with no twilight

or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and

decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the

93

Hallman_firstpages5x.indd 93

9/4/12 6:26 PM

dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and

absolute straightness in the style?

H’ry replied with a wry broadside:

I mean . . . to try to produce some uncanny

form of thing, in fiction, that will gratify you,

as Brother—but let me say, dear William, that

I shall greatly be humiliated if you
do
like it, & thereby lump it, in your affection, with things,

of the current age, that I have heard you express

admiration for & that I would sooner descend

to a dishonoured grave than have written.

More often, however, H’ry remained silent in re-

sponse to Wm’s frustration as they grew older. What

bothered Wm most was that now
everything
in H’ry’s fiction remained ambiguous. He couldn’t imagine why

anyone would want to write in such a way (“[it] goes

agin the grain of all my own impulses in writing”), and

he couldn’t leave it alone either. In 10, he was still

trying to understand the difference in their methods:

Mine being to say a thing in one sentence as

straight and explicit as it can be made, and then

94

Hallman_firstpages5x.indd 94

9/4/12 6:26 PM

to drop it forever; yours being to avoid naming it

straight, but by dint of breathing and sighing all

round and round it, to arouse in the reader who

may have had a similar perception already . . . the

illusion of a solid object.

H’ry would never confirm whether Wm was on the

right track in coming to understand his work, but he

expressed disappointment that their mutual influence

did not result in mutual appreciation:

I’m always sorry when I hear of your reading

anything of mine, & always hope you won’t—you

seem to me so constitutionally unable to “enjoy”

it, & so condemned to look at it from a point of

view remotely alien to mine in writing it. . . . It

shows how far apart & to what different ends we

have had to work out . . . our respective intellectual

lives. And yet I can read
you
with rapture.

H’ry must have been even more resigned than he

was willing to admit. Was it not Wm who had once said

that only works of imagination could lay effective siege

to the philosophical battlements most worth attacking?

Why did Wm fail to recognize that H’ry had volun-

95

Hallman_firstpages5x.indd 95

9/4/12 6:26 PM

teered for his army, and that in the war Wm waged H’ry

was his fiercest champion and most decorated soldier?

On August , 100, Wm related an embarrassing story.

Throughout the summer, while traveling through Eu-

rope with his wife—named Alice, like the sister—he

suffered from a range of symptoms: nervousness, heart

trouble. He needed help, but didn’t know where to

turn. As it happened, he’d been receiving letters prais-

ing the work of a magnetic healer, a “Mrs. Melton”

of Paris. Wm scoffed at Mrs. Melton, which had led

to terrible fights with Alice. Even though Wm had

long acted as a spiritualist leader, it was Alice who was more deeply beguiled by occult fads. Over the next

few weeks, a variety of factors conspired to make Paris

attractive: Wm got it in mind to seek an appointment

with the city’s great heart man, Pierre Potain, and an

invitation to stay in a private Parisian home offered

relief from an endless string of hotels. Perhaps most

important, Wm told H’ry, a visit to the magnetic healer

would convince Alice that “the powers of the occult

world were not being neglected.”

96

Hallman_firstpages5x.indd 96

9/4/12 6:26 PM

It was a mistake. Rather than relieving him of his

ailments, the “nasty job” of Mrs. Melton’s treatment

succeeded only in producing boils. “I made an ass of

myself letting that spider of hell the ‘healer’ touch

me,” Wm wrote.

His next few letters express the usual pleasure the

brothers took in relating the history of awkward ail-

ments. “The chief remaining furuncle broke this a.m.”

“The last boil is now disgorging its venomous heart.”

The peculiar fun of boil-breaking is corroborated by an

account of Swami Vivekananda, who hosted a conclave

of healers and modern mystics while Wm was in Paris.

Vivekananda was honored by Wm’s attendance at the

meeting, but he noted that the celebrated philosopher

seemed distracted by careful self-ministrations from

the opening gavel. Wm’s only memorable contribution

to the proceedings came when one of the attendees

proposed proving the existence of the “Fire God” by

lighting a blaze in the parlor: Wm lifted his head from

his pustule-worrying and announced that he might

well have had something to say upon the Fire God if

only he were not entirely occupied with the evolution

of Meltonian blisters.

Wm’s attitude toward the magnetic healer challenges

97

Hallman_firstpages5x.indd 97

9/4/12 6:26 PM

a long-standing scholarly assumption that his interest

in psychical research depended on a suspension of a

critical faculty that would have better off left intact.

Like the sciences whose methodology they imitate,

history and biography crave contrast and absolutes

and are therefore ill-prepared to survey enthusiasm

tempered by skepticism. Wm was a believer (To H’ry,

10: “There is
something
back there that shows that minds communicate, even those of the dead with those

of the living”), but he was also a scientist who knew

that he’d never proven a damn thing when it came to

ghosts, prayer, or magical healing. That hardly mat-

tered. His entire career was an attempt to form a practi-

cal response, rooted in the measurable and observable,

to the fact that reality was ambiguous and appeared