Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James (8 page)

In general, the group of readers was left with “a curi-

ous unsympathetic and uncanny impression.” H’ry’s

only reply was to suggest that he’d done his best to

make his works “artful & very human.”

In January 15, Wm reported that he and his wife,

Alice, in Boston, “prayed on the bended knees of [their]

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souls” all day long for the telegram that would herald

the success of
Guy Domville
’s
opening night
in London. It never arrived. Two days later, Wm wrote to say

that while he could not imagine the play having failed

completely, he could “conceive of a lack of flagrant

success.” H’ry had been licking his wounds. The play

had done more than flop. After the curtain had fallen,

a raucous display of malice had erupted from the gal-

lery, and the ensuing scene, a quarter of an hour in

which H’ry’s friends close to the stage attempted to

applaud over the hoots and jeers of callous roughs in

the shadows—a spectacle that culminated with the

play’s nervous director appearing on stage to quickly

apologize for the production—is one of the better doc-

umented episodes in the many biographies of H’ry’s

life. What’s worth revisiting is the way he described it

once he mustered the courage to put it all in a letter.

The play had never really had a chance, he wrote.

His “extremely human” effort was met by a mob that

responded with “
roars
(like those of a cage of beasts at some infernal ‘Zoo’).” The problem was really twofold.

First, the play, which he had striven to make as clear and transparent as possible, simply flew “over the heads of

the
usual
vulgar theatre going London public.” They 60

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did not want plays of “different
kinds
,” H’ry wrote, only productions that their clumsy vision recognized

as similar to what they’d seen before. Second, the crit-

ics had been “ill-natured & densely stupid & vulgar.”

Together they amounted to a “squalid crew,” but one

in particular was “awfully vulgar & Philistine.” The

second night had gone better than the first, but H’ry

feared the play would be withdrawn. He was right.

Guy Domville
closed after thirty-two nights, and was re-placed by Oscar Wilde’s
The Importance of Being Earnest.

In the end, H’ry was left with “horror for the abysmal

vulgarity & brutality of the theatre.”

What Wm would have recognized from this was that

H’ry’s reaction to his vulgar audience was in itself a

vulgar act—or would have been had he shared his im-

pressions with anyone else. More important, H’ry’s

precise problem was that the vulgar taste of his audi-

ence matched perfectly the vulgar aesthetic that Wm

attempted to prescribe for La Farge’s
Paradise Valley
.

The unavoidable suggestion would have been that Wm

himself was vulgar.

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In reply, Wm showed restraint. By that time, the

brothers’ home lives had diverged even more than

their philosophies: Wm now had four children; H’ry

had never married. As Wm had labored to establish a

family and inched his way into an academic career, he

had watched as his younger brother jetted straight into

the heart of the world’s literary elite. (Whenever Wm

suggested that home life and teaching kept him from

his true labor, H’ry noted that it must be nice to have

a wife to handle household duties, and claimed that he

longed for a steady position that would leave him free

to produce only “a small amount of 1st class work.”)

As late as 1, Wm confessed to anxiety over the

pace of his own progress: “A strange coldness has come

over me with reference to all my deeds and produc-

tions. . . . [E]verything I’ve done and shall do seems

so
small.
” H’ry offered assurances (“You will live to do great things yet”), but they must have rung hollow. In

15, Wm noted that H’ry’s work was already so popular

that Harvard students had overemployed it as subject

matter for an annual essay test; H’ry had been placed

on a list of forbidden topics. By 15, Wm did have a

successful book of his own, but the twelve years it had

taken to write paled by comparison to H’ry’s heavy,

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steady output. In one month alone—June 13—H’ry

published a novel and two volumes of essays.

A lack of tangible reward is probably what Wm was

missing when, in 11, he wrote to H’ry, “All intellectual work is the same—the artist feeds the public on his

own bleeding insides.” He went on to describe a read-

ing he had recently given, the initial delivery of “The

Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,” presented to

100 members of the Yale Philosophy Club. The room

remained mute throughout the address, and his host

mentioned the talk not at all on their walk home. “Ap-

parently, it was unmentionable,” Wm wrote. But Wm

had a better sense of humor about such things than

H’ry. “Speaking of the unmentionable,” he continued,

and went on to joyfully gossip about an obscenity trial

then under way in Boston.

Wm both doted on and teased H’ry. In 102,
The

Wings of the Dove
set the stage for the latter. Near the start of the book, the novel’s principal couple is introduced at a party. Kate Croy’s vivid memory of the

portentous meeting is shot through with the quiet,

thrilling impropriety of breeched boundaries:

Kate afterwards imaged to herself . . . a ladder

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against a garden wall, and had trusted herself

so to climb it as to be able to see over into the

probable garden on the other side. On reaching

the top she had found herself face to face with

a gentleman engaged in a like calculation at

the same moment, and the two inquirers had

remained confronted on their ladders. The great

point was that for the rest of the evening they had

been perched—they had not climbed down.

Wm was just as befuddled by
The Wings of the Dove

as he had been by
Paradise Valley
. When the book first appeared, he claimed that H’ry had “reversed every

traditional canon of story-telling (especially the fun-

damental one of
telling
the story).” It was now seven years later, but he must have feared the theatrical de-bacle all over again, and he wondered whether the

difficulty of H’ry’s writing was “fatal and inevitable”

or “deliberate.” The book got under his skin—“I went

fizzling about concerning it”—and he was still striving

to understand it as late as 10. Before then, however,

he found a way to illustrate an essential point about

both the book and his brother’s life.

Back in 1, Wm called H’ry’s attention to “The

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Gospel of Relaxation,” one of three essays Wm had

decided to include at the end of
Talks to Teachers.
Here, Wm quoted a Scottish doctor who claimed that Americans wore “too much expression on [their] faces”; he

suggested they “tone [them]selves down.” Wm dis-

agreed, of course, and lashed out in turn at the codfish

eyes and the “slow, inanimate demeanor” of all from

the British Isles. What he surely wanted H’ry to note,

however, was his claim that “Americans who stay in

Europe long enough” wind up thinking and acting

more like the Scottish doctor than they do their breth-

ren. H’ry had been living in England for two decades

by then.

Eight years later, having more or less continuously

fretted over
The Wings of the Dove
, Wm was invited to England to deliver the lectures that would become
A

Pluralistic Universe.
He had gone a long way toward catching up to his brother by then. He had not published his first book until he was forty-eight, but his

reputation had grown steadily thereafter, and in recent

years he had become a very popular traveling speaker.

In 101–102, he delivered Scotland’s Gifford lectures,

which published in book form became
The Varieties

of Religious Experience
, a best seller.
The new appoint-65

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ment enabled him to again visit H’ry in Rye. As it hap-

pened, Lamb House had a garden, and the garden’s

stone wall separated H’ry’s property from the grounds

of a famous inn. Wm had heard a rumor that G. K.

Chesterton, whom he had never met but suspected as

a sympathizer to Wm’s even more recent
Pragmatism
, was then a guest. One day in H’ry’s garden, Wm struck

on an idea: just as Kate Croy had deliciously imagined

the initial meeting of her love, he seized a handy ladder and placed it against the stone wall so as to climb to the top and peer over in an attempt to spot Chesterton. But

for H’ry, what was permissible for a fictional character’s inner life was vulgar in reality. It was simply not done

in England, he objected. The brothers argued, and

when H. G. Wells happened to drive up a short time

later he found H’ry in such an agitated state that he

separated the two. Wm went off with Wells willingly;

his point had been made. H’ry forbade for himself in

real life—indeed, counted them as vulgar—precisely

those things that gave it zest.

A similar issue had cropped up a few years earlier,

as the brothers planned the trip together through the

United States that H’ry would use to produce
The American Scene
. The journey’s initial outline triggered Wm’s 66

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protective reflex. He worried over the “désagréments”

that the trip would subject H’ry to, the “physical loath-

ing” that certain American manners would inspire. Of

particular concern was a practice that made even Wm

contemplate expatriation. Whether in hotels or on

trains, whenever Wm traveled he found himself con-

fronted with the sight of his fellow Americans happily

slurping butter-drenched boiled eggs from cups! He

admitted that his reaction to this might be irrational,

but the only thing worse to imagine than his own intes-

tinal disgust at such a scene was the sickening tectonic

quakes that would surely split H’ry’s fragile gut.

Nonsense! H’ry replied. Wm completely misunder-

stood his motives. Impressions, even of the vulgar,

were precisely what he hoped to absorb and digest. To

gobble up whatever impressions there were to be had

was precisely the point of the entire excursion. Should

he shrink from “the one chance that remains . . . in life of anything that can be called a
movement
?” No. He must seek to convert, through observation, imagination, and reflection, even shocking experiences “into

vivid and solid
material
.”

What you say of the Eggs(!!!) . . . is utterly beside

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the mark—it being absolutely
for
all that class of phenomena, and every other class, that I nurse

my infatuation. I want to see them, I want to see

everything.

Wm duly apologized. “I thought I ought to proffer the

thought of ‘eggs’ and other shocks,” he explained, “so

that when they came I might be able to say that you

went not unwarned.”

The American Scene
is a peculiar book. In keeping with H’ry’s aversion to straightforward travelogue, the

account of the journey is less an attempt to chronicle

the place through impressions of mountains and rail-

roads and churches and farms than a contemplative

survey of the American spirit. In addition to the book,

H’ry used the trip with Wm to produce a series of long

articles for
Harper’s Bazaar.
Here he revealed that, for him, the consumption of American eggs was far less

shocking than the speech of American girls.

“It was a scant impression, no doubt, yet a prompt

and a suggestive,” the series began, “that I gathered,

of a bright fresh afternoon early in October, in the

course of a run from Boston down to the further South

Shore.” Not long into the journey, H’ry reported, the

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train stopped for a “bevy” of young girls who climbed

aboard and took “vociferous possession” of the car.

Ranging in age from fourteen to sixteen, the girls

called, giggled, shouted, and romped up and down the

aisle, behaving as if they were on a playground. H’ry

was scandalized. The first
surprising thing was that the girls were all well dressed. There was “nothing of

the vulgar in their facial type or their equipment.” So

how could they behave such? he wondered. Even more

surprising, how could it be that the others in the car