Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James (2 page)

valuable one from you . . . which made me ache to my

spirit’s core for half an hour’s talk with you.”

Wm, from Berlin: “What would n’t I give to have a

good long talk with you all at home.”

Wm, from Dresden, after visiting the Gallery: “I’d

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give a good deal to import you and hear how some of

the things strike you.”

In 1, Wm advised H’ry, then in Geneva, not to

yield to homesickness. “I wish I heard from you of-

tener,” H’ry had written. Wm told him to pay no mind

to ennui, noting that his own “heaviest days were full

of instruction.” The same letter opened with a bor-

rowed stanza:

O call my brother back to me,

I cannot play alone

The summer comes with flower & bee

Where is my brother gone?

A few years later, Wm described H’ry as “my in many

respects twin bro,” which serves as a fair description

of the image he once sketched in the margin of a letter

illustrating the proposed sleeping arrangements for

H’ry’s then-impending visit to Cambridge.

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The pleas for companionship persisted as Wm and

H’ry grew older, taking up permanent residence on

opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, and establishing

very different social lives and almost completely incom-

patible aesthetics.

1: “Your letter . . . quickened my frequent desire

to converse with you.”

13: “I would give any thing to see you.”

1: “Would to God I could get over to see

you . . . for about 24 hours.”

1: “I long to talk with you—of, as you say, a 100

things.”

1: “How I wish I could sit in your midst!”

1: “Within the last couple of days I have wished

you were nearer to me, that I might consult

with you.”

In 13, both brothers having recently passed fifty

years of age, Wm reflected on the James family’s thin-

ning ranks (mother, father, and two younger siblings

having died in recent years), claiming that he now felt,

more than ever before, that he and H’ry “formed part

of a unity.” He was moved to quote from Matthew Ar-

nold’s “The Future,” which had been formative in other

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ways. (“Where the river in gleaming rings / sluggishly

winds through the plain / . . . So is the mind of man”

anticipates the “stream of consciousness” that Wm artic-

ulated and H’ry employed.) Moved at impending mor-

tality, Wm lifted snippets from the poem’s conclusion.

And the width of the waters, the hush . . .

. . . may strike peace to the soul of man on its breast,

As the pale waste widens around him,

As the stars come out and the night-wind

Brings up the stream

Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.

They were closer to death, but not close. The ex-

change continued for another seventeen years. The

letters contain spats, disagreements, and plenty of

evidence of diverging intellects, but chart, too, a love

growing ever fonder. In 110, several months before Wm

died, H’ry fell into a sour mood. He had been dabbling

with a nutritional chewing cure fad that his brother

had recommended, but now the cure had backfired,

and he had been left with a stomach that had forgotten

how to digest food. His letters took on a frantic tone;

he streamed fear and loneliness. “Oh for a letter!” he

cried. Wm made plans to visit. “An immense change

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for the better will come, I feel, with your advent,” H’ry rejoiced. “
That
will be my cure.”

Wm arrived to comfort his brother in May. He was

dead by August. H’ry lived another six years.

They wrote frequently, with zeal, of illness, of intes-

tines, of parasites, of orthopedic mystery. In 1, when Wm made passage to France on the
Great Eastern
,
H’ry couldn’t wait for the first letter to arrive from Paris before writing himself. He was uninterested in impres-

sions of the city. “I am more anxious than I can say to

hear how you endured your journey . . . your back,
that
is what I want to hear about.”

The trip interrupted Wm’s medical training, which

had begun in 14. He graduated five years later, after

tagging along on a South American expedition with

Louis Agassiz and then spending a mostly idle year and

a half in Europe. His medical training was incomplete—

in later years, he distrusted doctors himself, and sampled a variety of unusual cures—but he happily dispensed

advice to H’ry. Only fifteen months separated the broth-

ers, but Wm’s letters often strike a parental tone.

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Once, in 1, after H’ry had established himself in

England and begun his dizzying churn of novels and

criticism, Wm offered to send along a weight-lifting

machine.

“[It] would be very welcome to me here,” H’ry re-

plied, “as I don’t get exercise enough.”

Wm sent the apparatus and a set of heavily annotated

directions. A long accompanying letter explained how

the device should be installed and employed. “There is

no
muscular combination which cannot be exercised on those weights,” Wm opined, “and a quarter of an hour

. . . of from 10 to 20 different movements will
wake one
up
all through one’s cubic contents.” As to the care of the machine, Wm drew a small oil can in the

margin—in case H’ry didn’t know what an

oil can looked like.

The “lifting cure” cut both ways, however.

It served just as well as a metaphor for the

toil of literary study. In 101, Wm complained

that work on
The Varieties of Religious Experi-

ence
had left him “tired as a man might tire of

holding out a weight forever.” Long before, H’ry had

drawn a similar parallel in a long letter detailing a three-stage process he had devised to cure his ailing back:

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1. A stage in which exercise must go on increasing

until it entirely predominates & attains its

maximum—even to not sleeping, if necessary.

2. A stage in which sitting, reading, writing &c.

may be gradually introduced & allowed to

share its empire.

3. A stage in which they will hold their own

against it & subsist on an equal & finally a

superior footing.

In other words, the real problem was the mysterious

toll taken by language. Words and the body were in-

compatible, and the body had to be tricked into per-

mitting prolonged literary work. H’ry once wrote of

the “damnable nausea (as I call it for want of a better

word) that continuous reading & writing bring on.” A

doctor advised him to diet, exercise, and “not read.” In

13, Wm noted that an absence of “head work” left him

“consequently in excellent physical condition,” and

H’ry lauded mountain climbing because “you sweat

the rhapsodical faculty out of you.” Letters themselves,

though often a kind of cure (“my spirits were revived

by the arrival of a most blessedly brotherly letter”),

were made from language and could therefore become

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their own illness. Both brothers complained of time

lost to correspondence (Wm: “Have just written 15 let-

ters”; H’ry: “[This] is the 11th letter . . . I have written this morning”), but for H’ry in particular they became

a symptom, “the very blight and leak, as it were, of my

existence.” Wm always praised H’ry’s letters, but re-

minded him often that he needn’t feel obliged to write

because there was plenty of him to take in through his

regularly appearing stories and essays.

It wasn’t always dire. Wm took a particular glee in

revealing the most intimate details of whatever he suf-

fered. Ringworms acquired en route to Rio de Janeiro

“waved” across his face and neck with “undiminished

fire.” A six-week growing itch on his “pubes, etc.” (the

most subtle “etc.” in letters) proved on inspection to

be “a plague of
Lice
!!” “Painful boils on [his] loins”

were a terrible bother—“Christian doctrine is noth-

ing to them”—but the endless attention they inspired,

observing and reobserving, poking and pressing, could

“fill a day with quivering interest.” (In 10, H’ry con-

gratulated Wm on the end of twelve years’ work on

The Principles of Psychology:
“It must seem as good as the breaking of a boil.”) Special, and playful, attention was reserved for all manner of digestive failure.

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The malfunction could fall on the side of too much,

as when Wm described a disagreeable mountaintop

lunch followed by a three-hour descent “in state of

active nausea & diarrhea,” or too little, as when Wm

recommended galvanic treatments with an intimate,

possibly firsthand, description of an electrified pole

“put inside the rectum.”

Wm’s work as a psychologist, philosopher, and reli-

gious scholar can be broadly understood as an attempt

to document, and cure, the human condition. He em-

ployed H’ry as proto-patient throughout their lives,

and was possibly even more interested in his brother’s

condition than the reverse. “I blush to say,” he wrote

(at age twenty-seven!), “that detailed bulletins of your

bowels, stomach &c . . . are of the most enthralling

interest to me.” H’ry obliged, happily. In reply to the

admonition “
Never resist a motion to stool
,” H’ry admitted, “I may actually say I
can’t get a passage.
My ‘little squirt’ has ceased to have more than a nominal use.”

H’ry used the exchange for more than advice as to

which parts of his body to submit to electroshock.

Writing about illness became the laboratory in which

he tested writerly theories. His later plots often hinge

on whether characters are truly sick, and ailments, ei-

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ther mental or physical, were precisely the kind of cita-

del that language found it a challenge to breach (Wm:

“Sighs are hard to express in words”). H’ry’s bowels

were a perfect training ground for practicing elegant

prose that described inelegant events.

A prolonged “crisis” of 1 improved H’ry’s pen if

not his gut. He had suffered terribly through the first

few months of his European tour. “Anti-bilious” pills

had produced a “violent inclination to stool,” but he

only bled a little when he tried. A doctor assured him

there was no obstruction (“by the insertion of his fin-

ger (horrid tale!)”), and he was left finally, in Florence, with the awareness that while he absolutely needed

a movement he had no idea how to get one. More

important than the cures he tried, however, was his

meditation on the incident as a whole. His pages-long

telling culminates in a climax of characteristic early-

Jamesian prose:

These reflections fill me with a perfectly