Read an Excerpt

Wm & H'ry

Literature, Love, and the Letters between WILLIAM & HENRY JAMES

---

By J. C. HALLMAN

UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS

Copyright © 2013 J. C. Hallman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60938-151-6

---

Chapter One

ON SEPTEMBER 7, 1861, having lately abandoned a dream of life as an artist and enrolled in Harvard's Lawrence Scientific School, Wm set out from his new, strange, rented room in Cambridge and walked mechanically to the P.O., hoping against all hope to find a letter from his brother. His box was empty. Wm turned heavily away. Before he could leave, he felt a modest touch. It was his landlord's young son, offering an envelope inscribed with familiar characters.

"Mr. James! This was in our box!"

Wm tore open H'ry's letter, read it right there in the post office. That evening, homesick and alone on a Saturday night, he began a reply: "Sweet was your letter & grateful to my eyes." The first letter of the surviving correspondence contains snippets in French, Latin, and Portuguese, alludes to Shakespeare, reports on a visit to a collection of sculptural casts at the Boston Atheneum, and attests to an absence of "equanimity" (the presence of which, many years later, Wm would count among the defining traits of mysticism). He was nineteen years old.

They wrote often. They wrote letters about reading letters, letters about how much time had passed since they had received a letter, letters that depicted the moment of their composition. Wm's first letter describes the table on which he writes (round, with a red and black cloth), specifies the number of windows in his room (five), inventories his bookcase ("my little array of printed wisdom covering nearly one of the shelves"), and lists "Drear and Chill Abode" as its return address.

The early letters often express frustration with the inability of words to truly convey experience. Correspondence pales beside conversation. Over the next few years, as Wm and H'ry each completed an initial solo Grand Tour, they cried out for each other's company.

H'ry, from Lucerne: "I'd give my right hand for an hour's talk with you."

H'ry, from Venice, six weeks later: "Among the letters which I found here on my arrival was a most 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 give a good deal to import you and hear how some of the things strike you."

In 1869, Wm advised H'ry, then in Geneva, not to yield to homesickness. "I wish I heard from you oftener," 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 borrowed 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:

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 incompatible aesthetics.

1876: "Your letter ... quickened my frequent desire to converse with you."

1883: "I would give any thing to see you."

1886: "Would to God I could get over to see you ... for about 24 hours."

1889: "I long to talk with you—of, as you say, a 100 things."

1896: "How I wish I could sit in your midst!"

1899: "Within the last couple of days I have wished you were nearer to me, that I might consult with you."

In 1893, both brothers having recently passed fifty years of age, Wm reflected on the James family's thinning 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 Arnold's "The Future," which had been formative in other 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 articulated and H'ry employed.) Moved at impending mortality, 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 exchange 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 1910, 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 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.

·2·

They wrote frequently, with zeal, of illness, of intestines, of parasites, of orthopedic mystery. In 1867, 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 impressions 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 1864. 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 brothers, but Wm's letters often strike a parental tone.

Once, in 1886, 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 replied, "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 1901, Wm complained that work on The Varieties of Religious Experience 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:

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 incompatible, and the body had to be tricked into permitting 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 1883, 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 their own illness. Both brothers complained of time lost to correspondence (Wm: "Have just written 15 letters"; 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 reminded 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 suffered. 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 nothing to them"—but the endless attention they inspired, observing and reobserving, poking and pressing, could "fill a day with quivering interest." (In 1890, H'ry congratulated 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. 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 religious scholar can be broadly understood as an attempt to document, and cure, the human condition. He employed 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, either mental or physical, were precisely the kind of citadel 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 1869 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 finger (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 passionate desire for a reformation in my bowels. I see in it not only the question of a special localized affection, but a large general change in my condition & a blissful renovation of my life—the reappearance above the horizon of pleasures which had well-nigh sunk forever behind that great murky pile of undiminishing contingencies to which my gaze has so long been accustomed. It would result in the course of a comparatively short time, a return to repose—reading—hopes & ideas—an escape from this weary world of idleness.

Wm was not oblivious to the sly pun, and offered his own in return. He called the story a "moving intestinal drama," a characterization H'ry judged happily termed.

Even after the comic annoyance of youthful constipation, the correspondence maps the trajectory of the brothers' work. They each settled into philosophies and aesthetics, and each made consciousness a feature of their investigations. Wm wanted to pinpoint consciousness or at least find a way to describe it. H'ry sought to depict it, even in his letters. His epistolary output exploded with illness—he wrote more when he was sick. In 1910, the frenzied letters describing his latest digestive episode (a problem with his "physical consciousness"), the same letters that brought Wm charging across the Atlantic to his doom, now depicted H'ry's raging interiority, the "constituted consciousness" that he had only recently described as the true novelist's "immense adventure":

But my diagnosis is, to myself, crystal clear—& would be in the last degree demonstrable if I could linger more. What happened was that I found myself at a given moment more & more beginning to fail of power to eat through the daily more marked increase of a strange & most persistent & depressing stomachic crisis: the condition of more & more sickishly loathing food. This weakened & undermined & "lowered" me, naturally, more & more—& finally scared me through rapid & extreme loss of flesh & increase of weakness & emptiness—failure of nourishment. I struggled in the wilderness, with occasional & delusive flickers of improvement ... & then 18 days ago I collapsed and went to bed.

·3·

On October 13, 1876, H'ry scribbled out a quick reply to Wm's previous two letters. The first of these had described a battle with dysentery that Wm had waged after a country rest, and the second made a peculiar request: could H'ry please obtain a perfect sphenoid bone and send it at once to Cambridge? Wm had recently become assistant professor of physiology at Harvard, and he was attempting to take advantage of H'ry's yearlong stay in Paris to obtain a particularly difficult-to-procure item. H'ry did not ask why a pristine specimen of the butterfly-shaped skull bone was required. He simply made inquiries and set off the next morning for Maison Vasseur, the very best place in Paris for such things. M. Vasseur refused the order. A perfect sphenoid detached from the head was simply impossible to get, he claimed. Of course, a badly damaged sphenoid might be found at a bric-a-brac shop, but no perfect sphenoid could ever be purchased separate from its head. As it happened, M. Vasseur had whole heads for sale, and he offered H'ry a "très-belle tête" for thirty-five or forty francs. H'ry hesitated, as Wm had specified the sphenoid only. He decided to report back and request further instruction. His letter of October 13 drily related his visit to Maison Vasseur, and he apologized for having come up empty-handed. "If you wish it I will instantly purchase & send one," H'ry wrote, meaning an entire head, sphenoid and all.

Wm sent him shopping. H'ry tried again at the establishment of Jules Talrich, but the trip proved a disappointment. "The wretched Talrich" attempted to obtain an independent sphenoid, but discovered in the end that M. Vasseur had been correct. Independent sphenoids could simply not be had. Talrich, too, offered H'ry an entire head, but pointed out that a French head sent across the ocean in a parcel as large as a hat would probably wind up costing more than an American cranium.

Wm's fascination with heads was long-standing. Early in life he had become preoccupied with a photo of a purported death mask of Shakespeare. "It is a superb head," he told H'ry, and he followed up several months later—when H'ry failed to reply—with the insistence that "the mask is extremely interesting." Around the same time, Wm sketched the head of a cadaver in Germany, an image that seemed to project a dark mood he famously suffered in the late 1860s: And after Wm turned to psychology, he claimed that our sense of self, our "Self of selves," is perceived to consist of motions "in the head or between the head and throat."

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Wm & H'ry by J. C. HALLMAN Copyright © 2013 by J. C. Hallman . Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---