A great many of the young Bostonians leave town, often taking off with a sullen demand for a freer, more energetic air. And yet many of them return later, if not to the city itself, to the beautiful sea towns and old villages around it. For the city itself, who will live in it after the present human landmarks are gone? No doubt, some of the young people there at the moment will persevere, and as a reward for their fidelity and endurance will themselves later become monuments, old types interesting to students of what our colleges call American Civilization. Boston is defective, out-of-date, vain, and lazy, but if you’re not in a hurry it has a deep, secret appeal. Or, more accurately, those who like it may make of its appeal a secret. The weight of the Boston legend, the tedium of its largely fraudulent posture of traditionalism, the disillusionment of the Boston present as a cultural force make quick minds hesitate to embrace a region too deeply compromised. They are on their guard against falling for it, but meanwhile they can enjoy its very defects, its backwardness, its slowness, its position as one of the large, possible cities on the Eastern seacoast, its private, residential charm. They speak of going to New York and yet another season finds them holding back, positively enjoying the Boston life. . . .
. . . Outside it is winter, dark. The curtains are drawn, the wood is on the fire, the table has been checked, and in the stillness one waits for the guests who come stamping in out of the snow. There are lectures in Cambridge, excellent concerts in Symphony Hall, bad plays being tried out for the hungry sheep of Boston before going to the hungry sheep of New York. Arnold Toynbee or T. S. Eliot or Robert Frost or Robert Oppenheimer or Barbara Ward is in town again. The cars are double-parked so thickly along the narrow streets that a moving vehicle can scarcely maneuver; the pedestrians stumble over the cobbles; in the back alleys a cat cries and the rats, enormously fat, run in front of the car lights creeping into the parking spots. Inside it is cosy, Victorian, and gossipy. Someone else has not been kept on at Harvard. The old Irish “accommodator” puffs up stairs she had never seen before a few hours previously and announces that dinner is ready. A Swedish journalist is just getting off the train at the Back Bay Station. He has been exhausted by cocktails, reality, life, taxis, telephones, bad connections in New York and Chicago, pulverized by a “good time.” Sighing, he alights, seeking old Boston, a culture that hasn’t been alive for a long time . . . and rest.
1959
WILLIAM JAMES
An American Hero
THE JAMESES were, as Henry phrases it, almost “hotel children.” They were packed and unpacked, settled and unsettled, like a band of high livers fleeing creditors—except, of course, they were seeking not fleeing. The children knew a life of sudden change, unexpected challenge, residential insecurity and educational heresy that would nowadays be thought negligent and promising to delinquency. They went from Albany to New York, from America to Europe, from New York to Boston, back and forth, without thought of continuity, without regional roots. Their father was seeking a higher continuity for his children: the old man’s restlessness was cosmic and just a bit comic, with his gentle, sweet and outrageous purity of mind and spirit. Yet Henry James says that he would not have exchanged his life at “our hotel” for that of “any small person more privately bred.”
It was, no doubt, the very purity of the elder Henry James that gave the family its special nature. The Jameses had tremendous natural gifts for friendship; they were talented, popular, respected always and everywhere; they were courteous and eccentric. The father was passionately devoted to his family; he adored being at home and he was at home, where he could make out on his considerable inheritance and be privately employed as a writer and thinker. He loved, he doted, he was completely unself-conscious and completely original. Yet the James family was shot through, too, like a piece of Irish tweed, with neurasthenia. Some of it was useful, as perhaps Henry’s failure to marry was useful to his prodigious career as a creative writer; some of it was deadly, like Robertson’s drinking and Alice’s long, baffling invalidism which finally became cancer, providing, as William’s letters interestingly reveal, a sort of relief to them all—the relief of an incapacity identified at last.
They were a gregarious family, too. Henry’s dinings-out were not more plentiful than William’s appearances, lecture dates, travels; Alice had her “circle.” The elder Henry James knew everyone in the intellectual world. When William was born, Emerson was taken up to the nursery to bestow a nonsectarian blessing; Thackeray, popping out of the James library, asked, in the way of visitors spying a child of a friend, to see young Henry’s “extraordinary jacket.”
The James family life, their interior and material circumstances, their common experience have a sort of lost beauty. Their existence is a successful enterprise not easily matched. It is less difficult to understand the painful—Gosse’s bleakly evangelical family, Mill’s exorbitantly demanding father, or Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, who seems to have been nervously exhausting to his daughter—than the special inheritance of the unusually loving. The memorably bitter Victorian family scenes, rich in their merciless peculiarity, are more dramatic and more quickly recoverable than the life Henry and Mary James gave to their children. Henry James writes of his father that “it was a luxury . . . to have all the benefit of his intellectual and spiritual, his religious, his philosophic and his social passion, without ever feeling the pressure of it to our direct irritation and discomfort.” Compare this with Charles Francis Adams, in his Autobiography, and the list of his father’s mistakes which he, the son, had never been able “sufficiently to deplore.” Adams deplores, and sufficiently too, his father’s lack of interest in exercise or sport, he deplores the fact that he wasn’t sent to a boarding school, he deplores his parents’ failure to think of definite amusements for their children; he ends by announcing, “I do not hesitate to say these mistakes of childhood have gravely prejudiced my entire life.”
The Jameses are very much of the nineteenth century in the abundance of their natures, their eccentricity, the long, odd, impractical labors of the father and the steady Victorian application of at least two of the sons. And yet this family group is American, too, and of an unusually contemporary accent: the life at home is relaxed, the education “progressive,” the parents, permissive. The elder Henry James was a man of religion, enthusiastically so, but his family did not go to church on a Sunday. They had private means and yet they were utterly unlike “society” people. They might go from New York to Newport to London and back with great, leisurely, upper-class frequency, but they must have done so with a good deal of simplicity and restless shabbiness—they were after all intellectual and magically indifferent to bourgeois considerations. Their style as a family was manly, bookish, absent-minded and odd, rather than correct or tasteful or elegant. They were high-minded but “bred in horror of conscious propriety.” Henry certainly later struck many observers as snobbish and outlandishly refined, but at the same time there is his literally mysterious energy and grinding ambition, his devilish application like that of an obsessed prospector during the gold rush. There is a long, flowing cadence in the family tone and an elaborate, fluent expressiveness. Even when Alice and Robertson write, they have an opulent, easy command of style that seems to be a family trait. William sometimes needs to put aside this legacy, as if he felt the Jamesian manner too unpragmatic for this work; but his highest moments are drawn from it rather than from his more robust, lecturing, condensed style.
They were not the “Great James family” until the revival of interest in the novels and personality of Henry James, a revival of the last few decades. Of course, William was immensely celebrated and important, but the half-ironical interest in the elder James, the publication of Alice James’s Journal in 1934, forty-two years after her death, seem hardly possible without the interest in Henry James. In the effort to understand the novelist, the greatness of the family as a whole somehow took shape. Even the father’s Swedenborgianism has been exhaustively examined as a clu
e to the novelist son. The family mystery, the beasts in the jungle, the “vastations,” the obscure hurts have come to have an almost mythical and allegorical meaning. The James family stands now with the Adams family as the loftiest of our native productions.
•
The life of William James, the eldest child, was filled with energy and accomplishment, but it was not visited by scores of dramatic happenings or by those fateful, tragic events that make some lives seem to go from year to year, from decade to decade, as if they were providing material for a lively biography to be written long after. Actually, an extraordinary biography was written: Henry James’s A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, undertaken as a memorial after William died. Nevertheless, in these surpassingly fascinating works it is always noted that William, the original protagonist, keeps vanishing from the center stage. John Jay Chapman, a friend of William’s, says, “And yet it is hard to state what it was in him that gave him either his charm or his power, what it was penetrated and influenced us, what it is that we lack and feel the need of, now that he has so unexpectedly and incredibly died.” Ralph Barton Perry in The Life and Thought of William James gathered together, with extraordinary industry and power of organization, all the James material in order to write a personal and intellectual biography. Perry uses James’s letters, many for the first time, his diaries, his philosophical and psychological writings—everything known about him—and even then James does not quite come through as a character. An equable, successful man is not the ideal subject for portraiture, perhaps, but in the case of William James there is something more: a certain unwillingness to take form, a nature remaining open to suggestion and revision, a temperament of the greatest friendliness and yet finally elusive because of his distaste for dogmatism.
He was born in 1842 and died in 1910. He married and had four children who lived to adulthood and another who died in infancy. “William, perhaps, did not take quite so enthusiastically to parenthood as his own father,” says Margaret Knight in her introduction to a Penguin selection of James’s writings. No one was quite so at ease paternally as the elder Henry James, and yet William’s endurance in this respect is notable when compared with that of the usual father. He began, caught up in those repetitions that persist throughout the generations, to cart his children abroad, back and forth, sending them to this school and that, and although there are a good many groans and alarms, the burden didn’t seem to waste his energies or thin out his intellectual interests. When he was abroad, he missed the good, old plain America, and when he was at home, he soon got enough of the plainness and wanted the beauty of Europe once more. His family, his writing, his teaching, his lecturing, his traveling—those are about all you have to build with, biographical twigs and straw of a very commonplace kind. But no one was less commonplace than William James; his mind and sensibility were of the greatest charm, vigor and originality. He was not in the least bland or academic as the list of the pleasant little wrinkles of his nature would seem to indicate. He is usually thought to be the most significant thinker America has produced, and everyone who knew him liked him, and since his death everyone has liked him, too, because our history has not left a single man, except perhaps Jefferson, with so much wisdom and so much sheer delight, such tolerance of the embarrassments of mankind, such a high degree of personal attractiveness and spiritual generosity.
Santayana’s superb description of James in Character and Opinion in the United States says, “He showed an almost physical horror of club sentiment and of the stifling atmosphere of all officialdom.” And of course we admire him more and more for that. We commend him with our most intense feelings for not becoming a mere “professor”; we note that he did not seem interested in playing the gentleman and that he lived in Boston and Cambridge without its ever occurring to him that this meant some sort of special residential gift from the gods. Santayana adds that James was a “sort of Irishman among the Brahmins, and seemed hardly imposing enough for a great man.” And for that we thank him, for his escape from dryness and thinness. He is truly a hero: courteous, reasonable, liberal, witty, expressive, a first-rate writer, a profoundly original expression of the American spirit as a thinker, inconceivable in any other country, and yet at home in other countries and cultures as few of us have been.
But James had, as we say now, “his problems.” Ralph Barton Perry speaks of the “morbid traits” and the very phrase has an old-fashioned sound of something gangrenous, liverish, perforated with disease. James’s “morbidity” is of a reassuring mildness and would not be remarkable at all in the dark lives of some other philosophers. In James, like a speck on the bright, polished surface of a New York State apple, it has considerable fascination, and everyone who writes about the man considers the “depression.” It began in his youth, around 1867, and hung on for five or six years. James felt discouraged about the future, he experienced a kind of hopelessness and did not believe that time and change would alter the painful present—sentiments typical of the fixed convictions of a man suffering from a depressive attack. At this time he wrote of his sufferings, “Pain, however intense, is light and life, compared to a condition where hibernation would be the ideal of conduct, and where your ‘conscience,’ in the form of an aspiration towards recovery, rebukes every tendency towards motion, excitement or life as a culpable excess. The deadness of spirit thereby produced ‘must be felt to be appreciated.’ ”
He had somatic symptoms, also—the most striking was the “dorsal insanity,” as he named it, the same obscure back pains which had “long made Harry so interesting.” He tells a correspondent, “on account of my back I will write but one sheet.” The back, for which he went from spa to spa, is an interesting instance of a sort of family affliction in which suggestion seems to play a large part. After James’s recovery, the back that had been so much cared for and bathed and warmed and rested was not heard from again. His other symptoms were insomnia, weakness, digestive disorders, and eyestrain—the latter the only one usually considered to have had a physical basis.
During the two years in Germany William James felt quite lonely, homesick, and much thrown back upon himself. He wrote his beautifully expressive early letters to his friends and family, letters of considerable length and great energy of feeling and observation. He speaks, in suitably stoical, manly terms of his own illness, but he also speaks of other people, shows a much truer interest in the world about him than one would expect from a man in a deep depression. His suffering is genuine, but it does not override the claims of the impersonal. A common-sense melody sings through the saddest part of the story, although some of this may be bravado or pride. It is hard to know how to estimate the depth of this early collapse.
There is no doubt that occupational uncertainty was the cause of James’s low spirits. It is the usual thing of a young man in medicine or law who does not want to be in medicine or law. (Those innumerable poets who found themselves enrolled for the clergy!) Listlessness came on like a weakening fever as the absence of genuine interest became more and more obvious. “It is totally impossible for me to study now in any way, and I have at last succeeded in genuinely giving up the attempt to.” James puts every obstacle in the way of the successful practice of medicine; there are even moral objections and he does not fail to notice the toadying young medical students must go in for with their professors, the kind of anxious flattery and unctuous activity necessary to advance professional interests. James did not want to be a doctor and yet it would have been difficult for a young man in his twenties to decide that he was going to be a “psychologist” or a “philosopher.” One became a philosopher as a culmination, as one became wise or great or full of special insight. In youth it was different, and even the novelist, Henry James, somehow incredibly found himself briefly enrolled at the Harvard Law School.
Moderate and finally benign the depression proved to be, but James did have it and other similar emotional disturbances, nightmarish times, and sensations approaching a stat
e of hallucination. His special awareness of merging states of mind, of the blurred flow of consciousness, the involuntary, subconscious mental life was probably sired by the odd helplessness he experienced during his youthful struggles. The case of “The Sick Soul” in The Varieties of Religious Experience, an extraordinarily vivid piece of composition, has been widely called upon to give testimony to James’s profound experience of the darkest corners of horror. In this dreadful vignette, attributed in the book to a Frenchman but later acknowledged by James to have come from his own experience, he tells of sitting alone in a “state of philosophic pessimism,” and of then going suddenly into his dark dressing room and finding his mind involuntarily assaulted by the memory of a poor epileptic he had seen in an asylum. The remembered person was a “black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic. . . . He sat there like a sort of sculptured Egyptian cat or Peruvian mummy, moving nothing but his black eyes and looking absolutely non-human. This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other. That shape am I, I felt, potentially. Nothing that I possess can defend me from that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him.” This classical experience of abysmal fear, of the dreaded double, of the annihilation of the self is written with a touch of Poe and even of Henry James. The “pit of insecurity” remained long afterward, and James said the whole thing “made me sympathetic with the morbid feelings of others.”
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick Page 11