Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James (13 page)

an impression that triggered a stream of additional

impressions, and that plurality of impressions made

it a portrait not of the lake, but of the mind that was

perceiving it, which was the more important subject

anyway.

And that’s a fair description of the inner workings

of
The Wings of the Dove
,
composed almost entirely of streaming minds depicted in the process of anticipating

events, and then—after a jump—reflecting on those

same events having already happened. Actual events are

snipped away as neatly as “gig” from “whirligig.” The

theater lights on the foreground action have dimmed,

and a bright spotlight searches and darts among the

shadows of consciousness in the background.

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But what of the larger matter that Wm had called for,

and had kept on calling for? As early as 1, reacting

to Wm’s pleas for a real story, H’ry admitted to being

intimidated by overly dramatic plots:

It comes from modesty & delicacy . . . or at least

from the high state of development of my artistic

conscience, which is so greatly attached to
form

that it shrinks from believing that it can supply

it properly for
big
subjects, & yet it is constantly studying the way to do so; so that at least, I am

sure, it will arrive.

He seems to have been thinking of this exchange thirty

years later when he began his preface to
The Wings of
the Dove
with the claim that the story stemmed from a

“very old—if I shouldn’t perhaps say a very young—

motive.” He worried that the story of a dying girl

would seem like a shortcut to drama, but he reminded

his readers that Milly Theale’s tragic state was “but half the case, the correlative half being the state of others

as affected by her.” How exactly this worked was the

entire point, and he advised his readers to take careful

note of his “positively close and felicitous application

of method.” What method? Even in the preface this

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is described with extended water metaphors. Charac-

ters’ consciousnesses will be “decanted” for us. We will

find ourselves “saturated” with sensibilities. The plot

“comes to a head.” Compared to a simple travelogue,

this particular experience of Venice is a “deeper draught out of a larger cup.” Milly Theale’s terminal fate creates all around her “very much that whirlpool of movement

of the waters produced by the sinking of a big vessel.”

The book takes it even further. A profession of love

is likened to “a tide breaking through,” and language

itself feels like “plashes of a slow, thick tide.” Imagi-

nation has a “high-water” mark, and confusion feels

like butting up “against a firm object in the stream.” A

desire to confess is likened to an impulse to “overflow”

from a “deeper reserve,” and even Merton Densher

muses that a moment of anxiety would be best “lik-

ened to the rapids of Niagara.” It’s Densher, too, who

recognizes that each of the characters’ various streams

of thought stem from a single source and flow toward

a common reservoir:

All of which . . . sharpened his sense of

immersion in an element more strangely than

agreeably warm—a sense that was moreover,

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during the next two or three hours, to be fed

to satiety by several other impressions. . . .

There was a deeper depth of it, doubtless, for

some than for others; what he, at any rate, in

particular knew of it was that he seemed to

stand in it up to his neck. He moved about in it,

and it made no plash; he floated, he noiselessly

swam in it; and they were all together, for that

matter, like fishes in a crystal pool.

Wm recognized none of this when he read
The Wings

of the Dove.
He was left befuddled, crying out over why H’ry would want to tell stories that told, actually, nothing. “My stuff, such as it is,” H’ry replied, “is inevitable—for
me.
” A few months later, a short time before Wm left for a scheduled meeting with unfavored

brother Bob, H’ry gave Wm a hint veiled as a goodwill

wish:

May you be floated grandly over your cataract—

by which I don’t mean have any manner of
fall
,

but only be a Niagara of eloquence, all continu-

ously, whether above or below the rapids.

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Wm may have preferred that H’ry write only of the

literal, but that didn’t mean he was incapable of met-

aphoric or figurative language himself, particularly

when it came to water imagery. In 1, reacting to

the warmongering of Governor Teddy Roosevelt, Wm

leveled a charge of abstractness in the
Boston Evening
Transcript
. “[Roosevelt] gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society,” Wm wrote. “He swamps

everything together in one flood of abstract bellicose

emotion.”

If H’ry thought that the charge of abstractness

might apply to him as well, he buried it beneath a

general malaise. “You have an admirable eloquence,”

he wrote of Wm’s argument. “But the age is
all
to the vulgar.”

By the late 10s, Wm was a well-known public intel-

lectual. He had begun lending his name to campaigns

against wrongs ranging from vivisection, which he

had promoted as a younger man, to an imperialist

spirit grown rampant in the country. He may have felt

even more responsible for the latter. In “Is Life Worth

Living?” and “What Makes a Life Significant?” he had

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argued that cultivating a certain “strenuousness” gave

life its finest interest. This had been warped into Roos-

evelt’s “The Strenuous Life” (Roosevelt had been Wm’s

student at Harvard), which employed a latent militant

spirit as a fulcrum for utopian idealism. Wm tried to

countermand this in
The Varieties of Religious Experience
,
which argued that the “real strenuous life” was the one that was lived
as if
God existed—that is, a life in which decisions and actions were made to chime with a

good one could sense afoot in the universe.
The Varieties of Religious Experience
was a wild success, but it did nothing to prevent the country’s descent into imperial

aggression, and soon the United States was occupying

the Philippines, where in Wm’s view his country was

merely acting as pirate. H’ry agreed. The only thing

that had so far offered balance to his country’s “crudi-

ties” was the fact that until then it had no record of

overseas murder and theft. “
Terminato—terminato!
” he wrote Wm. “One would like to be a Swiss or a Monte-negrian now.”

In the years following
The Varieties of Religious Experience
and
The Wings of the Dove
,
Wm and H’ry remained productive, but the rest of the decade proved

disappointing for both of them. In 10, Wm told H’ry

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that he wouldn’t be surprised if
Pragmatism
triggered in philosophy something like “the protestant reformation.” It didn’t, and soon enough he was handing off

the reins of even psychology to Sigmund Freud. That

same year, publication began of the twenty-four vol-

umes of H’ry’s New York edition, each furnished with

a ,000-word preface. H’ry hoped for remuneration,

but the books sold poorly.

If the brothers had gestated together in the womb

of art, then their crib was a utopian spirit heady in

the 140s, the time of their extreme youth. Henry

Sr. was an ardent follower of Emanuel Swedenborg

and Charles Fourier, and at least one biographer has

likened the James family household to a “stale pha-

lanstery,” after Fourier’s vision of the perfect living

arrangement. Utopian imagery recurs throughout the

letters. A note from Wm during his time in Brazil is ad-

dressed from the “Original Seat of Garden of Eden,”

and in 1 H’ry anticipated that his letter to Wm in

Newport would find him “wrapped up in the enchant-

ments of Paradise”—that is, reclining under a cedar in

the same landscape John La Farge had painted.

Utopian enthusiasm faded in the 150s with the fail-

ure of the social experiments of Fourier and Robert

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Owen, but it surged again in the 10s in the wake of

successful, idealistic novels by Samuel Butler, William

Morris, Edward Bellamy, and many others. Wm must

have felt pounded by opposing tides. On the one hand,

his argument for a strenuous life had backfired horrifi-

cally, and on the other, he had always been suspicious of schemes based on too-generous assessments of human

nature. He had once written that the instinct toward

ownership “discredit[ed] in advance all radical forms

of communistic utopia,” and, even if it hadn’t, could

the race truly be said to have outgrown the bloodlust

that penetrated every nook of history? “The old hu-

man instincts of war-making and conquest,” Wm wrote

H’ry in 1, “sweep all principles away before them.”

Still, Wm had tried. In an age of failed systems, he had

proposed a system of his own, pragmatism, rooted in

history and designed to avoid the hubris that doomed

its predecessors. But it failed, too. Wholly commit-

ted to measuring the value of ideas with observable

results, Wm must have wondered what it was that his

own work bequeathed.

H’ry made himself useful in this regard. He had

watched and read as Wm had waged a campaign against

utopian visions, lashing out at stale philosophies and

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highly regarded communities like Chautauqua, New

York. Just as he had gently nudged Wm along during his

development as a psychologist, H’ry now made quiet

overtures on behalf of a better world. In 105, he made

particular note of an essay of Wm’s celebrating a Scot-

tish philosopher who had advocated a kind of com-

munal living, and a few months later H’ry suggested

that Wm read Wells’s
A Modern Utopia
(“Remarkable for other things than for his characteristic cheek”). About

a month after that Wm swooned over the beauty of

Stanford, where he had arrived to teach a course: “It

is utopian.”

In the interim he’d produced one of his most fa-

mous essays, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” which

he delivered as a speech at Stanford on February 25,

10. The essay weaves several concepts that Wm had

tried out on H’ry over the years. “Our ancestors have

bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thou-

sands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us,” he

wrote, expanding on his Philippines letter from just a

few years earlier. The essay’s argument that calamity

breeds community seems drawn from Wm’s descrip-

tion to H’ry of the Boston fire of 12: “Rich men suf-

fered but upon the community at large I shd. say its

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effect had been rather exhilarating than otherwise.”

Finally, “The Moral Equivalent of War” taps the letters’

current of utopian preoccupation: its first utopian note

describes an ongoing ideological battle in the public

sphere—warhawks versus peaceniks—as “but one uto-

pia against another.” In reply, Wm confessed to his own

“utopian hypothesis,” an unlikely twining together of

man’s worst impulse with his best: the establishment

of a “corps” of youth that would rally against natural

disasters whenever and wherever they occurred. The

benefits would be legion:

The military ideals of hardihood and discipline

would be wrought into the glowing fibre of

the people; no one would remain blind as the

luxurious classes now are blind, to man’s real

relations to the globe he lives on.

Wm didn’t live to see it, but “The Moral Equivalent of

War” laid the foundation for the most measurable and

observable results of his work: the Civilian Conserva-

tion Corps, the Peace Corps, and Americorps.

He didn’t have to wait long at all, however, for first-

hand proof of his basic thesis. Six weeks later, at 5:30

on the morning of April 1, 10, he and Alice were

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woken by the great San Francisco earthquake. Wm

published an essay about the experience in
Youth’s Companion
,
though its rough draft was a letter he wrote to H’ry four days after the quake struck. The experience

thrilled him, he wrote. When he first woke, he glee-

fully climbed to his hands and knees on the bed. The

tremors—it would have been easy to mistake it for an