Mon semblable, ma soeur … The world now is full of sisters, who have persuasively argued the case against looks, seeing them largely as a matter of men’s vanity and women’s collusion: but it may be that they do women an injustice in overlooking the question of women’s vanity and men’s collusion. Nor would everyone necessarily be happier if the sense of good looks were eradicated, as some radical feminists would have them be, in the cause of sexual equality. Even narcissism has its rewards, as well as its discontents. Most of Liane de Pougy’s and Gladys Deacon’s friends were artists (‘she implored Epstein to come and talk about art’), with whom they shared their contempt for the bourgeois world and their unusual commitment to appearances. It’s possible there is some connection between a sense of looks and an idea of art. Jean Rhys is not rightly praised, as Staley praises her, for a ‘comprehensive’ understanding ‘of what it is to have been a woman in this century’: her understanding is maddeningly limited to what it is to have been Jean Rhys. She was a narcissist who described herself beautifully.
Books reviewed:
Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography by Jean Rhys
Jean Rhys: A Critical Study by Thomas Staley
My Blue Notebooks by Liane de Pougy, translated by Diana Athill
The Maimie Papers edited by Ruth Rosen and Sue Davidson
Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough by Hugo Vickers
Death and the Maiden
Alice James died in London at the age of 43, regretting only that she would not have the pleasure of knowing and reporting herself dead. The reporting was done instead by her favourite brother: ‘I went to the window to let in a little more of the afternoon light, and when I went back to the bed she had drawn the breath that was not succeeded by another,’ Henry James wrote to their eldest brother, William, in America, as if, in the now fashionable way, defining death to a Martian. Eager to do what justice she could to the occasion, Alice had sent William a farewell telegram the day before, which Henry later confirmed. William, nonetheless, feared that her death might simply be an illusion: ‘her neurotic temperament & chronically reduced vitality are just the field for trance-tricks to play themselves upon.’ It was very like William – or her idea of William – to try to rob her of her greatest, her only achievement.
She died in March 1892. Looking back on the previous year, she made a note in her diary of the books her brothers had written or published and added: ‘not a bad show for one family. Especially if I get myself dead.’ The James family was exhilarated by the thought, and the proximity, of death. ‘When that which is you passes out of the body, I am sure that there will be an explosion of liberated force and life, till then eclipsed and kept down,’ William wrote to Alice when he learned that she was dying. It was the lesson their father had taught. ‘We have all been educated by Father to feel that death was the only reality and that life was simply an experimental thing,’ Robertson James, the youngest son, said after their mother’s death. ‘We feel that we are more near to her now than ever before, simply because she is already at the goal for which we all cheerfully bend our steps … The last two weeks … have been the happiest I have known.’ So exalted was the James idea of death that it sometimes seems as if they thought ‘the distinguished thing’ was too distinguished for anyone who wasn’t a member of their family.
Being a James was a complicated business, and the five children all too obviously divide into the two who succeeded, William and Henry, the two who did not, Wilkie and Robertson (who once said he thought he was a foundling), and Alice, the youngest and the only girl, who both did and didn’t. It was complicated principally because their father made it so. Henry James père had spent his own childhood and youth haunted by his father’s stern Irish Calvinism, which he both flouted and feared; and the kind of father he eventually became was a direct repudiation of the father he had had. Where his father had exacted discipline he exacted freedom, where his father had been remote and authoritarian he was loving and indulgent. It’s been said that the only right the James children didn’t have was the right to be unhappy, but they weren’t allowed to think badly of themselves either: to have done so would have been to admit what their father’s philosophy proscribed – the presence of evil in the James household. Jean Strouse, in her excellent biography of Alice, points out the difficulty that all this positive thinking caused James’s children: ‘To be innocent and good meant not to know the darker sides of one’s own nature. To love and be loved … required the renunciation of certain kinds of knowledge and feeling.’ It was a renunciation that Alice couldn’t in the end manage without renouncing practically everything else.
James Sr’s idiosyncratic philosophy derived by an eccentric route from Swedenborg: in 1844, on a visit to England, he had what he came to see as a Swedenborgian ‘vastation’, an experience of ‘perfectly insane and abject terror’, from which he emerged with a new faith in God’s benevolence and man’s spiritual capacities. From then on his faith was his occupation. Henry, troubled by the fact that his father had no recognisable job, asked him how he could describe what he did to the children at school. ‘Say I’m a philosopher,’ his father replied, ‘say I’m a seeker for truth, say I’m a lover of my kind.’ Henry continued to look with envy on the friend who told him ‘crushingly … that the author of his being was in the business of a stevedore’. Their father’s philosophy didn’t make much impression on the world at large (William Dean Howells said of his book The Secret of Swedenborg that James had ‘kept it’), but it dominated his children’s lives as his own father’s Calvinism had dominated his. None of them ever altogether rejected it.
He was ambitious in his expectations of his children, but what he required of them was intangible: neither achievement nor success but ‘just’ that they should ‘be something’ – something unspecifiably general, which could loosely be translated as ‘interesting’. Their education was eclectic – ‘sensuous’ was the word their father used – designed to develop their sensibilities rather than train their minds; and both Alice and William later wondered whether they had any. Alice, typically, consoled herself with the thought that to have had one would, as she put it, ‘have deprived me … of those exquisite moments of mental flatulence which every now and then inflate the cerebral vacuum with a delicious sense of latent possibilities’.
‘A delicious sense of latent possibilities’ was precisely what their father wished for in his children, and as they grew up he went out of his way to discourage them from settling down to any one activity. The fact that the family had money, and that their father had never had to do anything, made choice more difficult. In ‘Notes of a Son and Brother’, Henry summed up their father’s expectations, and in doing so incidentally revealed how closely the cast of his sentences mirrored the cast of his father’s mind – the claim that James’s fiction elaborately borrowed from his father’s Swedenborgianism is something else again. What James Sr wanted, Henry said, was ‘something unconnected with specific doing, something free and uncommitted, something finer in short than being that, whatever it was, might consist of’. That, on the other hand, might have been a good deal less strenuous.
What place Alice had in her father’s grand design was unclear. She was much closer to him than she was to her mother, celebrated by Alice as the ‘essence of wife-and-motherhood’, but seeming to lack any more colourful qualities. Henry was Mary James’s ‘angel’, and there is no evidence to suggest she had a special interest in her daughter. Alice, unlike her mother, was imaginative and quick, and her father found the company of this ‘heir to the paternal wit’, as he called her, enchanting. ‘Her presence is a perfect sunbeam to Father,’ her mother remarked. Yet while her father took the family first to Europe, then from country to country, in search of the right atmosphere and the right school for her brothers, Alice merely sat at home, learning a bit of this and that, partaking of the atmosphere. Her father took pleasure in her intelligence but did little to encourage it, and for most of her life she had a fierce sens
e of her capacities and an equally fierce sense of their not being wanted.
James Sr’s ideas about what women should do with their lives differed from conventional ideas only in that he thought they were too good to do anything. ‘The very virtue of woman,’ he wrote, ‘disqualifies her for all didactic dignity. Learning and wisdom do not become her.’ Alice, his clever daughter, was – unlike her brothers – to make nothing of her cleverness. Was she then to be like her mother and her mother’s sister who lived with them? ‘Large florid stupid seeming ladies’ was how the pert Lilla Cabot described them: ‘the very incarnation of banality’. ‘Oh, Alice, how hard you are,’ her father once said to her and many years later she was still worrying about the remark: it was a fault in her – a lack of womanliness – not to have a gentler nature. She was, her family said, highly moral, the implication being that she was too highly moral, a Calvinist at heart. The sad fact is, as Ruth Yeazell says in the subtle and sophisticated biographical essay with which she introduces her selection of Alice James’s letters, that Alice, who wasn’t what her father said ‘woman’ ought to be, a ‘form of personal affection’, a lover and blesser of men, who never did anything, indeed who spent most of her life wanting it to end, came closest to fulfilling her father’s wish that his children should just be something.
Alice started to think about dying before she reached adolescence. ‘I had to peg away pretty hard between 12 and 24, “killing myself”, as someone calls it – absorbing into the bone that the better part is to clothe oneself in neutral tints, walk by still waters, and possess one’s soul in silence.’ She wrote this in the diary she began when she was forty, so it may be that her memory was coloured by the experiences of adult life. But when she was 17, William, on an expedition in Brazil, sent his love to Henry and Alice and asked: ‘Does the latter continue to wish she was dead?’ It may simply be that she saw no way forward for herself. Her father – who had taken on himself the task of defining reality for the rest of the family – had not offered her one; and her mother’s example was inappropriate: she wasn’t like her mother. Leon Edel, in his Life of Henry James, sees Alice as a casualty not so much of the family as of the age: ‘In our time,’ he says, ‘she might have learned to play tennis, to swim, to row, to ski, to drive a car.’ It’s hard to think of Henry in any age skiing his way out of his difficulties: but certainly, as Edel goes on to suggest, if Alice had been able to conceive of a life away from her family and an occupation other than wife-and-motherhood, she might not have spent so many years ‘chained’, as she said, ‘to a sofa’. ‘When I am gone,’ she wrote to William as she was dying, ‘pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born.’ The remark is characteristically proud as well as far-sighted: there is no sense in dwelling on what her life could have been in an age of psycho analysis or Valium.
The family returned from Europe in 1860 and settled down to a New England life, first in Newport, then in Boston, finally in Cambridge. Alice went to school, made friends, took up riding, swimming and sailing – the very activities Edel prescribes. Yet it was ‘under the low grey Newport sky’ that she took the decision to clothe herself in neutral tints. A ‘palpitating’ Alice, subject to mysterious pains and prostrations, now began to appear in family letters, and within a few years almost every reference to her was a reference to her health. Invited to spend a few days with the Emerson girls, she had to refuse because the excitement was too much: like other famous 19th-century invalids, and no doubt many who weren’t famous, she had started to limit her choices by being ill; and when Henry said of her in 1889, ‘she only gets on so long as nothing happens,’ he might have been speaking of the whole of her life.
‘Nerves’ were current in the family in the 1860s, as her brothers faced up to the necessity of leaving home and deciding what to do. The two younger boys went off to the Civil War and to their lives of un-Jamesian obscurity and failure, though they too sent back reports of illness and despair. Neither William nor Henry was fit to go: William indeed was in a state of hypochondriacal depression that was to last for something like 17 years – in effect, until his marriage. Their father loved his children even more when they were ill or in difficulty (‘there is nothing … so full of hope and joy to me as to see my children giving way to humiliation’), so as the claims of Alice’s ill-health grew more pressing her share of parental attention steadily increased. ‘To be menaced with death or danger [has] been from time immemorial … the very shortest of all cuts to the interesting state,’ James wrote in the preface to The Wings of the Dove. Alice’s body, however much she was to revile it, had done for her what her mind had been unable to do: it made her ‘interesting’.
In 1866, when she was 18, she spent six months in New York receiving a form of treatment for her nerves that was described as ‘motorpathic’ – it consisted largely of physical exercises to stimulate the muscles and bracing homilies to depress (in the old sense) the mind. A year and a half later she had her first breakdown. It lasted several months and her family praised her for enduring it so virtuously. While each of her unhappy brothers was blamed in turn by their mother for being ‘morbidly hopeless’, Alice was praised for her valour: ‘The fortitude with which our daughter carries the load which has been given her to bear is truly beautiful,’ Mary James wrote to the unlucky Robertson. Alice’s highly moral nature had at last found an area in which it was allowed to operate.
Twenty years later, after reading an account that William, by now a professor of philosophy at Harvard, had written of the work the French physician Janet had done with hysterics, Alice gave a memorable description in her diary of the ‘violent turns of hysteria’, as she rightly called them, which she had suffered in her late teens.
As I used to sit immovable reading in the library with waves of violent inclination suddenly … taking some one of their myriad forms, such as throwing myself out of the window, or knocking off the head of the benignant pater as he sat with his silver locks, writing at his table, it used to seem to me that the only difference between me and the insane was that I had not only all the horrors and suffering of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse and straitjacket imposed upon me too.
While the pit of her stomach, the palms of her hands, the soles of her feet suffered their discrete insanities, her mind remained ‘luminous and active’, unaffected by what was happening to her but quite incapable of stopping it. ‘Her mind does not seem at all involved in it,’ her mother observed. Jean Strouse alludes to what Charcot called the belle indifférence of the hysteric, but it could equally have been the healthy indifference of the stoic. It’s tempting, given her later history, to settle for stoicism.
‘Alice is busy trying to idle,’ Mary James wrote to Henry as Alice recovered. For the next ten years her life alternated between getting better and getting worse: these were her two chief occupations. When she was better, she cycled and gossiped and picnicked with other sisters and daughters of Cambridge intellectuals, wrote them letters that were often heated and sentimental when they were away in Europe, which they frequently were, took part in sewing bees and amateur theatricals. Occasionally she was fit enough for short holidays away from home and her parents; and in 1872 she spent a triumphant summer in Europe with Henry and her Aunt Kate. Although she was sometimes ill, and although Edel suggests that anxiety on her behalf undermined Henry’s pleasure, it was the only period in her life of which one can say that she enjoyed herself. Five years afterwards, she wrote to a friend: ‘I am frightened sometimes when I suddenly become conscious of how constantly I dwell on that summer I spent abroad.’ Part of the enjoyment derived from the realisation that her sensibilities weren’t after all inferior to her brothers’: ‘Imagine the bliss of finding that I too was a “sensitive”.’ When she returned to Cambridge, her family, impressed by her enthusiasm and vigour (William said she was in all respects more ‘elastic’), concluded that the ‘journey was a great thing for her in every way’. Yet there
was no question of repeating the experience. ‘Her greatest delight would be to go again and stay longer,’ Mary James wrote to Henry, adding that this would not, of course, ‘be possible during Father’s lifetime’. He ‘would not’, Jean Strouse comments, ‘sacrifice his pleasure in her company to her pleasure at independence.’
Strouse’s dim view of Henry James Sr and his accomplice wife is catching; and after a while it becomes difficult to resist the thought that James’s oppressively (Strouse would say selfishly) loving personality and eccentric (equally selfish) ideas were in many ways to blame for Alice’s fate. One might call this the Laingian version, and it’s reinforced here by the fact that her history up to the death of her parents is largely presented through her parents’ eyes: not what she was but what they said she was – i.e. what they made her into. To some extent, this is a consequence of the material that is available, but it also accords with some – very persuasive – comments that Strouse herself makes about the effect on Alice of having such a father. (Looking at what Edel has to say about Alice, one may feel that the two writers are describing different sets of parents.) The Laingian view isn’t, of course, the only possible view of Alice’s troubles – nor the only one Strouse takes. She writes very well about her relation to her times, and particularly about her health and its relation to the times. It is, however, the case that the Alice who is the subject of her book is a victim whereas the Alice in Yeazell’s essay is her own worst enemy.
Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 8