Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James (4 page)

thinking on consciousness. This can be measured in a

number of ways. First, just as Wm entertained “train”

and “chain” before settling on “stream” as the best

metaphor for thought, so do H’ry’s descriptions of

consciousness toy with trains and chains before fixing

on a wide range of hyperextended water metaphors.

(In
The Wings of the Dove
, for instance, thought is portrayed alternately as a “mixture,” a “current,” a “buoy-

ant medium,” etc.) Next, Wm’s claim that the frontier

of establishing the true nature of human thought

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belonged to those who in the future would be will-

ing “to adumbrate by at least some possible guess”

seems to be met with H’ry’s preface to
The Turn of the
Screw
, which describes the book’s inspiration as “the lively interest of a possible suggestion and process of

adumbration.
” H’ry borrowed introspection as well.

Wm once wrote that the simple experience of trying to

recall a forgotten name revealed the mind’s capacity for

dual personalities; a few years later,
The Tragic Muse
’s Nick Dormer experiences that very sensation: “He was

conscious of a double nature; there were two men in

him, quite separate . . . each of whom insisted on hav-

ing an independent turn at life.” And most important,

H’ry used Wm’s work to understand the creative pro-

cess. In 104, H’ry took careful note of a piece that Wm

produced on a case of automatic drawing for
Popular

Science Monthly
. Wm quoted the drawer at length: “I still think the drawings come from involuntary suggestion, that is, suggestion from the inner mind.” Barely

seven months later, H’ry produced “The Lesson of

Balzac,” in which he claimed that the most important

thing in fiction, an author’s particular “color of air,” is

“unconsciously suffused” into the work. It “proceeds

from the contemplative mind itself.”

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“The Lesson of Balzac” is perhaps the best example

of how H’ry also received lessons from his brother. Just

three years earlier, Wm’s treatise on religion (H’ry: “I

am reading
Varieties of R.E.
with . . . rapturous delibera-tion”) had divvied humanity into two categories of re-

ligious potential: the more numerous “healthy-minded

folk,” who tended to take life uncritically and see good

in all things, and the rarer and more mystically minded

“sick souls,” who struggled to reconcile themselves

to a complex world. H’ry retrofitted the bifurcation

to a literary community propelled by only “the stiff

breeze of the commercial.” Just as
The Varieties of Religious Experience
was more interested in unique mystical personalities than common, unblighted folk, so was

H’ry less moved by the great morass of popular writers

than by the “mystic process” of the more “monkish”

Balzac. Even writers of Wm’s French debauch received

H’ry’s cool dismissal. George Sand was “the pride of

a sweet-shop.” Jane Austen left us “hardly . . . curious

of her process.” And it was hard “to say where Zola is

fine” precisely to the same extent that it was “hard to

say where Balzac is . . . not.” The problem was that the

more popular category of writer, when not crippled

by “figures representing . . . ideas,” was limited to but a 23

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single color of air. Dickens, for example, could give us

only the feel of late morning through unwashed win-

dows. George Eliot only the yellowing day as the sun

sinks. Balzac, by comparison, had a “greater quantity

of ‘atmosphere.’” H’ry’s measure of Balzac’s greatness

harkens back to Wm’s discrete brains, sadly incapable

of knowing each other. The only way we could “know

given persons,” H’ry wrote, was to see them “from

their point of vision, that is from their point of press-

ing consciousness.” Balzac sought not to provide “the

image
of life” but to give life itself, to show “
how
we all are.” He achieved this by getting “into the constituted

consciousness, into . . . the very skin and bones, of

the habited, featured, colored, articulated form of life

that he desired to present.” And this, in turn, gave us

access to Balzac himself. H’ry’s description of com-

municating with Balzac’s mind, his consciousness,

elaborates on Stevenson’s “phantasmagoric chamber

of [the] brain”:

We thus walk with him in the great glazed gallery

of his thought; the long lighted and pictured

ambulatory where the endless series of windows,

on one side, hangs over his . . . reinstated garden

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of France, and where, on the other, the figures

and the portraits . . . take up position and

expression as he desired.

A chair in Stevenson’s house became known as the

“Henry James chair” in honor of H’ry’s frequent vis-

its—which maybe explains why Stevenson escaped

criticism in “The Lesson of Balzac.” Or perhaps there

was genuine admiration. In 1, H’ry claimed that

what was most delightful about Stevenson, like Balzac,

was his “constant variety of experiment.” H’ry never

responded to Wm’s commentary on “The Lantern

Bearers,” but he would have agreed with Stevenson’s

claim that the very best storytelling attempted to do

what poetry had always done: sink down into “the

mysterious inwards of psychology” so as to arrive at

the “true realism.”

H’ry likened both Balzac and Stevenson to paint-

ers—which is telling, in light of the fact that Wm actu-

ally
was
a painter. Wm, too, counted writing and painting in the same breath, but he did so in reverse order.

“Your article on Historical novels was very good,”

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Wm wrote on September 2, 1, in the same letter

in which he attested to his French debauch. He was

twenty-five years old, bored in Berlin. He was eating

out a lot (he complained that waiters “dressed in cast

off wedding suits” were the plague of his life), and he

begged H’ry to list his recent reading and to explain

a stray comment he’d made about having found no

good books of late. H’ry’s short piece in the
Nation

had surveyed the territory between history and lit-

erature, and discussed works that fell in between. He

argued that artistically poor books can nevertheless

have instructive historical value and that, by contrast,

good books can prove themselves worthless by failing

to comport with recognizable truth. The latter was

more lamentable. “It is, of course, not well for people

of imagination to have the divine faculty constantly

snubbed and cross-questioned and held to account . . .

but it is very well that it should hold itself responsible to certain uncompromising realities.” What realities?

Wm may have had an idea, as scarcely a month later

it struck him that he might try his hand at reviewing

Herman Grimm’s latest novel. He had nothing else

to do—why not try? He related to H’ry how the work

went—“sweating fearfully for three days, erasing, tear-

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ing my hair, copying, recopying &c, &c. . . . Style is not my forte”—and he enclosed the finished product

such that H’ry might correct it and see it through to

publication (which he did). Wm’s letter was harder on

Grimm than the review had been: “[He has] an extreme

belief in the existence and worth of truth . . . [but] a

want of careless animal spirits—wh. by the bye seem

to be rather characteristics of the rising generation.” In other words, Grimm and many others sacrificed vivid

depictions of their passionate minds, so like sanctuar-

ies or museums, so as to aspire to the salts and acids,

to a rigid objectivity that was both unattainable and

unrealistic.

For Wm, the problem harked back to a drama that

had played out in art hundreds of years earlier. Six

months later—in a letter from Dresden reflecting

on Italian painting, a missive at one moment inter-

rupted by a dinner of Kalbsbraten, a performance of

Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony
, and a bowl of choco-

late—he began to rethink his French debauch. He’d

seen quite a bit of art in the meantime, and he was

now weighing the damage that tended to result from

battling artistic schools. Old masters like José Ribera

and Guido Reni surely had talent, he claimed, but to

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anyone standing “outside of the race course of school-

competition” they appeared cold and heartless. Lit-

erature had a similar problem. “I’ve no doubt that the

present school of novel-writing, I mean the french

realistic school,” he wrote H’ry, “will strike people

hereafter just as the later Roman & Bolognese pic-

tures strike us.” Though earnest, both painters and

novelists missed “the one thing needful.” They strove

after “mere fact, truth of detail,” and thereby passed

over the “higher and more intellectual harmony” that

was evident in the work of the schools’ founders, if

not their students. Wm would later import this basic

dynamic to religion—something essential was lost in

the attempt to transmit the experience of religious

mystics to their followers—but for now he ended his

treatise with a request that he be excused for his “vague tirade of unripe . . . impressions.”

If Wm was unripe, H’ry was fresh from the vine. No

letter from H’ry survives for a year after Wm’s tirade,

but he likely would have seen the current crop of real-

ists as secondhand, second-rate inheritors of Balzac,

the mystic of French literature and “the father of us

all.” The brothers’ theories on realism would continue

to evolve in exhaustive exchanges about George El-

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iot and George Sand. Wm had mixed feelings about

Eliot, considering
Middlemarch
a “blasted artistic failure” but also a “well of wisdom.” To his mind, Eliot

had the problem of many female writers: they were

so surprised to discover that they had
any
faculty to philosophize that they did it until it became tedious.

This was so apparent in
Daniel Deronda
that
Wm confessed to “a sort of tender pity for the . . . authoress.”

H’ry liked
Middlemarch
more, though he praised Wm’s criticism of it, and he called
Daniel Deronda
“a dead, though amiable failure.” He elaborated in the
Atlantic
Monthly
, claiming that
Daniel Deronda
lacked “current,”

and
Romola
“absolutely stagnat[ed].” This captured, to his mind, a basic difference between Eliot and Sand:

“George Eliot is solid and George Sand is liquid.” If this seemed to aim at streams of consciousness, Wm wasn’t

buying it. “G.S. babbles her improvisations on,” he

wrote H’ry, “so that I never begin to believe a word of

what she says.” He called for demonstrative extracts in

whatever H’ry planned to write of Sand, which proved

difficult because H’ry found “it impossible to re-read

her.” He, too, had a hard time believing her, and even-

tually claimed that she lacked a “method of truth.” Her

real problem was that she was an “optimist,” which,

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while admirable, put her at odds with the world as it

actually stood. “Something even better in a novelist,”

H’ry wrote, “is that tender appreciation of actuality

which makes even the application of a single coat of

rose color seem an act of violence.”

For H’ry, the search for a better kind of realism had

begun long before Wm sat down to Kalbsbraten in Ber-

lin. The problem must have loomed for him: how could

one follow in Balzac’s footsteps without merely dilut-

ing him? How could one absorb his lessons without

becoming a mere disciple? His solution was to aim for

a realism that remained loyal to more than mere facts

and truths of detail, a realism that held true to what

was both apparent and poignant: we were all stuck

in our skulls, and the world was in nowise better de-

scribed than as frustrating, confusing, and ambiguous.

Just a week and a half after his tirade, Wm seemed

to glimpse that this was what H’ry was up to. Reacting

to “An Extraordinary Life,” he offered an admission:

[I] think I may have partly misunderstood your

aim heretofore, and that one of the objects you

have in view has been to give an impression like

that we often get of people in life. Their orbits

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come out of space and lay themselves for a short