Alice in Bed

by Judith Hooper

  those ghastly days when I longed to flee to the firemen next door and to escape from the ‘Alone, Alone’ that echoed through the house, rustled down the stairs, whispered through the walls, and confronted me, like a material presence, as I sat waiting, counting the moments as they turned themselves from today into tomorrow.

  He and Alice should have reached out to her! Why hadn’t they? She could have moved in with them for a while. At the time he thought that Katherine Loring was the only person she wanted near her. Aunt Kate had assumed that she and Alice would form a household together, but Alice would have none of it. In tears, Aunt Kate complained to him that Katherine was poisoning Alice’s mind, that she had a “Svengali-like effect” on her.

  Now that he considers it, Sister Alice probably would not have felt comfortable living in a nest of Gibbenses.

  He takes in, deeply now, how it was to be the youngest in the James family and the only girl—alternately doted on, overlooked, petted, taken for granted, stifled, sacrificed to others. At the mercy of four teasing older brothers, subject to the iron rule of Mother and Aunt Kate, on the one hand, and the impenetrable conundrums of Father’s Ideas on the other. To possess her gifts and be told that the only way to be a successful female was to be sunny, self-denying, and receptive. (He, too, once believed that females were intended to be lovely, selfless angels devoted to the happiness of men, but he has been capable of change, thank heavens.)

  He comes to the terrible summer of 1878, which Alice refers to as the time when I went down to the dark sea, its dark waters closed over me, and I knew neither hope nor peace. The summer of his wedding. Alice’s rudeness toward his fiancée made him want to wring her neck but at times, catching sight of her pale, haunted face, he would feel overwhelmingly sorry for her. He had an obscure sense of having wronged her. As if he’d abandoned her somehow. Deep waters there. Screams in the night. Mother, Father, and Aunt Kate taking turns sitting up with her. The way she looked at him as if she would reel him in with her drowning eyes. It was, as their mother put it, “a genuine case of hysteria.” Was it? And what is hysteria au fond?

  So many things he does not understand. Why did she decide in early adolescence to clothe myself in neutral tints and walk beside still waters? What prompted her urge to knock off the head of the benignant pater? What did she mean when she wrote, How thankful I am that I never struggled to be one of those ‘who are not as other ones are,’ but that I discovered at the earliest moment that my talent lay in being more so?

  He cannot ask her now.

  She wrote: I am not rebellious by nature, having learned early in life that surrender, smiling, if possible, is the only attainable surface which gives no hold to scurvy tricks of fortune. How he wishes he had her here to argue with. He would tell her, “You were rebellious, Alice, but your attempts were stifled. What a loss!” A year or two before she died, he recalls, she wrote to tell him of finding an old letter in which Father confided to a friend of the family that he, William, was the only one of his children with any intellectual gifts. She wrote: And me among the group who, all unconscious, constantly gave birth to the profoundest subtleties, and am ‘so very clever.’ Arm yourself against my dawn, which may at any moment cast you and Harry into obscurity. He savors the droll Aliceness of the last sentence.

  He reads of her long struggles with her body, her mind and, above, all, her subliminal. When she spoke of parts of her body being “insane,” or of harboring violent inclinations, it was the subliminal she meant, though she probably was unaware of this.

  Although bedridden so long, her mental atmosphere was altogether that of the grand monde, and the information about people and public affairs she absorbed through the air was extraordinary. Henry, bereft without her, insists that if she had not been ill she would have presided over a great salon. Or that if she’d been born into different circumstances (Ireland, for example), she might have been a heroine of her people. But these are but the fancies of grief-stricken brothers. Her life was as it was. It was as if fate had contrived to present the greatest possible contrast between her contracted life and the breadth and subtlety of her mind and heart. In its peculiar way her life was a triumph.

  He finishes the diary at 5:45 am. His mind wanders to his last conversation with his sister. He was to leave in two hours, to catch the train to Liverpool. She fell asleep and he sat beside her, studying her face. She was not quite skeletal, but getting there. He was struck by how many different little bones and pieces of cartilage made up her nose, her cheekbones. It seemed a work of art, part of the unique human masterpiece that was Alice. She had finally gotten her wish and he tried to feel happy.

  She moaned in her sleep from time to time, and tossed and turned. When she woke up and caught sight of him, she smiled beatifically. “Oh, William, I forgot you were here!”

  He helped her sit up against the bolster and tried to feed her some of the broth that her nurse brought up from the kitchen while she slept. She licked a minute amount off the spoon with a flick of her tongue—it was like feeding a tiny kitten with a dropper—and, grimacing, waved the spoon away.

  “Now I understand how Father felt. This is not the food I need now. It only feeds the cancer, anyhow.”

  “Shouldn’t you eat something, Alice?”

  “Why, William? I won’t be wearing this costume much longer.” Gesturing toward her body. She laughed, triggering another fit of coughing that lasted about three minutes and alarmed him, though he tried not to show it. When it subsided, she scanned the room and then whispered conspiratorially, “I am ready to go, William. My trunks are all packed. I can’t wait to see what’s behind the curtain!”

  After a pause she added, with a playful smile, “Don’t worry; I shan’t haunt you.”

  “It might be nice if you did! Wouldn’t you like to be published in The Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research?”

  She smiled and closed her eyes. After a moment, she said, in a barely audible voice, “I hope that due to Father’s Ideas, we aren’t doomed to wander in a, in a—” she paused for so long he wondered if she’d fallen asleep—“Swedenborgian fog for all eternity. I should dislike that very much.” Her voice was so faint he had to bring his ear close to her mouth.

  “Yes, but your traditional harp-playing angels don’t appeal much either.”

  She laughed until her face turned mottled and she began to cough into her handkerchief. Then she said, “Ah, the harp. Such a heavy instrument. It hardly seems . . . worth it.”

  After finishing the diary, William sits at his desk in a state of meditation, not wanting to break the spell. As the birds begin to warble and the rim of the sky turns pale pink he stares out his window at Kirkland Street. Who is that waddling away from Grace Norton’s house? As the man gets closer, he recognizes the studious figure of Professor Blocher. So old Grace has taken a lover! He is reminded of Sister Alice’s references to Grace Norton’s “dissolute pruderies.” Last month, at dawn, from this same window, he caught a glimpse of Theodora Sedgwick, heavy and large-hipped now, making her way home from Shady Hill and Charles. The aged voluptuaries of Kirkland Street! How he wishes he could write to Sister Alice about this; there is no one else who could appreciate it so well.

  He dashes off a note to Henry saying that the diary “sank into me with some strange compunctions and solemnity. It produces a unique and tragic impression of personal power venting itself on no opportunity. And such very deep humor.” One day it should be published; “it will be a new leaf in the family laurel crown.”

  He glances at the clock. Just past six, thirty minutes before he can reasonably expect coffee or hot water for a shave. He hopes he heard the oven being lit a half hour ago. To while away the time, he picks up the article by Freud and Breuer and reads it again. He reads that “external events determine the pathology of hysteria to an extent far greater than is known and recognized.” The precipitating event could be an accident or merely a painful emotion, but the symptoms of hysteria are al
ways related to what happened back then. Interesting. He wonders what Sister Alice’s atrophied legs signified. Was this hysterical symptom related to Father’s missing leg, that overwhelming fact of their childhood? He will never know.

  Hysterics, Freud and Breuer claim, include “people of the clearest intellect, strongest will, greatest character and highest critical power . . . but in their hypnoid states they are insane, as we all are in dreams.” Sister Alice was anything but weak-minded, yet she suffered (apparently) from hysteria. But whereas William sees the “subliminal” as a vast starry vault opening onto infinity, Freud’s “unconscious” seems somehow hot and wet and seething with primitive desires. He is a little afraid of it.

  He decides to write a triple review of Janet’s new book, L’État Mental des Hystériques, Fred Myers’s latest tome, and the Freud–Breuer material. The field of the subliminal is heating up grandly! And tomorrow he’ll give his wife Alice’s diary to read.

  As he shaves at his basin, squinting into the little beveled mirror, he notes the fine webbing around his eyes, the horizontal lines in his forehead (crisscrossed now with vertical lines as well), the droop of his eyelids, the white bristles in his eyebrows. Good God, how has he become so antique? Age creeps up on us gradually but we notice it all at once. Not such a great leap from his present age, fifty-two, to the hallowed ground of the Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

  He recalls Sister Alice’s words when she wrote to tell him she was dying:

  When I am gone, pray don’t think of me as simply a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born. Notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience, I have always had a significance for myself—every chance to stumble along my straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul hope for?

  EPILOGUE

  ALICE JAMES’S DIARY LAY UNPUBLISHED FOR NEARLY FORTY years. William James and his brother Robertson (Bob) died in 1910, Henry James in 1916, after destroying his copy of the diary. (Garth Wilkinson James, known as Wilky, had died in 1883.) To the world beyond the family and a few friends, the diary’s existence remained a secret. In 1923 Katherine P. Loring gave one of the remaining copies to William James’s eldest son, Henry James III, and this copy ended up at the Bancroft Library of the University of California. Katherine’s own copy was purchased and donated to the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library.

  Katherine Loring kept the two notebooks containing the original, handwritten diary.

  In 1933 Bob James’s daughter, Mary James Vaux, wrote to Miss Loring to say she’d like to publish the diary in a book devoted to the younger and less famous members of the James family. Miss Loring gave her permission to use the diary, which she said Alice had wanted published. Mary Vaux hired a writer, Anna Robeson Burr, to put together a volume about the family.

  This news sent shock waves through the other Jameses. All of William James’s four children violently opposed publication. Henry James III informed his sister, Margaret James Potter (Peggy), that he was trying to persuade Edward (Ned) James, son of Bob, to “restrain” his sister. Ned, however, considered his aunt’s diary “one of the most important pieces of literature that have been produced by any James.” The diary, edited and cut, with proper names indicated by initials, was incorporated into a volume called Alice James: Her Brothers—Her Journal, published in 1934. It was published again thirty years later in an edition by James family biographer Leon Edel called simply The Diary of Alice James.

  Appalled by the specter of publication of a diary of “neurasthenic and unadmirable character,” Peggy James Potter wrote that Henry James’s autobiographical work

  gives all the family biography that should be for public consumption. Why parade the failures, neurasthenias, and depressions of its younger members, as does Mrs. Burr? The book is an exposure, in the worst possible taste. Though I never knew Aunt Alice, I did know and adore Uncle Henry and that is probably why I shrink and shudder so over this publication.

  Katherine Loring wrote to Mrs. Potter, explaining that, originally, she’d had four copies printed.

  I gave one to your Uncle Henry, which he tore up and said was not worth while for anyone to read; I gave one copy to your father, which I believe you have and which I understand you have shown to many friends. When your brother gave the James papers to the Harvard library, I sent him the third copy to deposit with the other papers. . . . As far as I can remember, your father never thanked me for his copy—simply acknowledged the receipt of it and certainly never made any suggestion as to its being read or not. I respected your Uncle Henry’s wish not to have it published; knowing him . . . I appreciated his horror of having any responsibility about himself or his friends.

  Mary Vaux and her brother Edward [the children of Robertson—“Bob”—James] and his wife are the only grandchildren who have ever taken any interest in me . . . and asked me about my relations with the James family. Mary Vaux and her mother have been my intimate and valued friends and when Mary asked me to tell her about her Aunt Alice I gave her the journal, which, you will understand, belonged absolutely to me . . . and told her to do what she liked with it, all of the persons mentioned having died.

  Alice had asked her to have it typewritten before her death, according to Miss Loring, and while she never said so, “I understood that she would like to have the diary published.”

  To Mrs. Potter, she added, “I think your criticism of the impression that the diary would make is unjust, absurd and altogether unwarranted.”

  The wider world agreed. Alice James’s diary was a literary sensation, earning rave reviews in the New York Herald Tribune, the (London) Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the Nation, and The New York Times, among other publications. The Sunday Times noted that “in character and intellect she was the equal of her distinguished brothers and a daughter, beyond all question, of her pungent and iconoclastic father,” while the New Republic cheered: “In some of her insights, some of her assessments of nineteenth-century humbug, Alice James went beyond either of her eminent brothers.”

  In a thoughtful appreciation in 1943, Diana Trilling wrote, “There is a common [James] family store of perception, imagination, and, above all, gifts of style. Alice, too, can write that wonderful educated James prose with its incandescent accuracy and then its sudden flights of homeliness.” She compared Alice James to Emily Dickinson. In his group portrait The James Family, the biographer F.O. Matthiessen treated Alice James as an intellectual and a writer in her own right, observing that “Alice James, contemplating the world from her sanatorium, had come to a more incisive understanding of some of the forces in modern society than either of her brothers.”

  AFTERWORD

  What was wrong with Alice James?

  LET’S START WITH WHY ALICE COULDN’T WALK.

  A year ago a friend of mine developed a condition with the somewhat Victorian-sounding name of Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo (BPPV), a benign and ultimately self-correcting inner ear condition. Suddenly, she literally could not sit up or raise her head from the horizontal without being hit with waves of nausea and vertigo. It was like being seasick on dry land. This struck a chord and I wondered if BPPV might explain what happened to Alice James on her voyage to England in 1885, unraveling the mystery of her baffling inability to walk (when, just days before, she walked perfectly well).

  Even today, when the mechanism is understood and exercises have been devised to correct it, BPPV can last for weeks or months. (After doing the exercises, my friend’s vertigo disappeared after four weeks.) In 1885, it might have lasted forever. If Alice stopped walking long enough, her muscles would atrophy—and her brothers’ descriptions of her “pitiful, shriveled” legs suggest this was the case—and she would be bedridden for the rest of her life. As Alice was.

  THE INNER EAR OF WILLIAM JAMES

  The sense of balance and equilibrium is primarily controlled by a maze-like structure in the inner ear called the labyrinth
, at one end of which sit the semicircular canals. These fluid-filled loops allow the brain to read our position in space. One of the first physicians (if not the first) to describe the role of the semicircular canals was William James. It would be fair to say he was obsessed, writing two articles on the subject for the New England Journal of Medicine. When his sister and Katherine and Louisa Loring sailed to England in 1885, William saw them off with a special going-away present: “blistering patches” to wear behind their ears to prevent seasickness.

  Katherine used the patches and did not get seasick. Alice very likely did not (she had a skeptical attitude toward the fads her brother took up), and was massively seasick. By the time she reached Liverpool she could not walk at all. We don’t know about Louisa.

  William James understood that the ear’s semicircular canals played a vital role in providing feedback about one’s position in space and that a disturbance of this part of the vestibular system could play a role in seasickness. In letters to friends about to sail to Europe he’d discourse at length about these canals and the calcium carbonate grains floating in gel that act like a carpenter’s level to inform the brain which way is up. He was fascinated in part because he was a martyr to seasickness.

  Thus perhaps part of Alice’s bedridden condition might be explained. But what about the rest?

  WHAT WAS “GOING OFF” ALL ABOUT?

  Since adolescence at least, Alice James had been “going off,” i.e., suffering spells of fainting or loss of consciousness. A remark of Katherine’s (reported in Alice’s journal) tells us that during her years in England Alice “went off” every day before noon. There are sometimes hints of “fits,” and her episodes of “going off” were often linked to the hyperemotional states to which she was susceptible and which any jarring piece of news could set off.