Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James (9 page)

remained, as they did, wholly indifferent to the scene?

Wm sometimes appears as a “friend” in the
Harper’s

Bazaar
pieces, offering commentary on American eti-quette. But if he was on the train ride he was among

those who found the scene unremarkable and, appar-

ently, not vulgar. H’ry, by contrast, was awestruck, for

it was “in the manners of the women that the social

record writes itself . . . finest.” In other words, the scene was a barometer. The manners of American women

measured both the ongoing disintegration of polite

society and the schism that now separated him from

his brother.

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H’ry had better relationships with women in his fiction

than in real life. The letters, however, offer no refuge to the cauldrons of ink that have been spilled by critical

covens endlessly toiling over the brew of H’ry’s sexual

orientation. Even on the subject of Wilde’s imprison-

ment, H’ry lets slip nothing to Wm—the audience to

whom he slipped
everything
else. The letters, in fact, upend the usual thought on
both
brothers’ attitudes toward girls and women.

It’s generally held that Wm and H’ry’s young cousin

Minny Temple, a vivacious girl who moved with her

family onto the same street as the Jameses in 11,

was an early romantic interest of Wm’s and served as

a model for many of H’ry’s heroines. Both brothers

have been said to have been in love with Minny, and

the girl’s death from tuberculosis in 10 has served as

a convenient biographical marker denoting the broth-

ers’ passage into adulthood—convenient even for H’ry,

who said as much in a memoir in 113. The letters,

however, confound too simplistic a take on Minny’s

role in the brothers’ lives.

On December 5, 1, just a few months before

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Minny died, Wm wrote to say that even though he en-

joyed her company now, he was conscious of having

nourished “unsympathetic hostility” to Minny. He re-

called “abusing her” to H’ry the winter before. H’ry

noted this only casually, refraining from comment until

Minny died. On March 2, 10, he claimed that it took

him only a few hours to reconcile himself to the news.

His letter indulges in playful, idiomatic glee in charac-

terizing her—Minny was “a mere subject without an

object”; “she has ‘gone abroad’ in another sense!”—

even as it claims that it is too soon to pretend to feel her death. Wm wrote back a few weeks later. The period

corresponds with his dark mood, but Minny is not his

reply’s first order of business, nor does it attribute his

“slough” to her death. Wm offers quick thanks for H’ry’s

letters about Minny—some were not preserved—and

then he writes several pages about a water cure that

H’ry might pursue in London.

In other words, Minny is less interesting as a nug-

get of biography than as a literary symbol. Even H’ry

recognized this. “She seems a sort of experiment of na-

ture,” he wrote. “An attempt, a specimen or example.”

Too exclusive a biographical focus on Minny under-

mines the impact other women had on Wm and H’ry:

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their sister, Alice; George Eliot and George Sand; and

much later, a range of younger friends and cousins.

The subject of women is the best possible lens to use

so as to refract the brothers’ mutual influence. H’ry’s

The Bostonians
, about a mystic of the women’s suffrage movement, was written in the wake of a pair of reviews

Wm produced of women’s suffrage books. “
Cut out

and send me your articles in the N[orth]. A[merican].

R[eview].,” H’ry had demanded. “Brute and Human

Intellect,” published just before H’ry wrote
Washington
Square
and
The Portrait of a Lady
,
ends with a description of the minds of “young wom[e]n of twenty,” the classic

age of H’ry’s heroines. It ran the other way as well. A

piece H’ry published on George Sand in 1—which

Wm had suggested he write—contains the basic thesis

of
Pragmatism
: “Women, we are told, do not value the truth for its own sake, but only for some personal

use they make of it.” And H’ry’s “The Altar of the

Dead” (Wm: “
Exquisite
in tone and texture”) claimed that “women have more of the spirit of religion than

men” just at that moment when Wm was lecturing to

large audiences of teachers—mostly women—and had

turned his attention toward
The Varieties of Religious
Experience.

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H’ry’s experimentation with female characters was

one of the few aspects of his work that Wm praised

from the start. In 1, in an otherwise quite critical

letter, Wm wrote, “Your young women seem to me all

along to have been done in a very clean manner—they

feel like women to me, and have always that atmo-

sphere of loveliness and unapproachability, which the

civilized woman wears into the world.” H’ry agreed.

Nothing drew the imagination like a mysterious young

woman.
The Bostonians
focused on precisely those actions of Verena Tarrant that “deepened the ambigu-

ity of her position.” Julia Dallow in
The Tragic Muse
exhibited a “perfect uncertainty.” In 10, H’ry even

shrugged off some of Wm’s praise: “The young man

in
Washington Square
is not a portrait—he is sketched from the outside merely. . . . The only good thing in

the story is the girl.”

Yet what worked in his fiction plagued him in life.

That same year, H’ry was approached in Venice (he

often served as host to traveling New Englanders) by

the family of poet and transcendentalist Christopher

Cranch. H’ry worried over the Cranches’ daughter,

Carrie, who seemed not inclined to go out much. He

saw her on four or five occasions, taking her to mu-

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seums two or three times. Several years later, Carrie

Cranch approached Wm in America. H’ry was forced

to explain. The young woman had gone insane, H’ry

said, and the suggestion he seemed to want to refute

was that it was all a result of her love for him. “Her

insanity connecting itself with me must be pure ac-

cident,” he wrote. He offered no sympathy. “I hope

she may die—it will be the best thing for her. But she

probably won’t.” A year later, he was nonplussed at the

news that Carrie Cranch was now in an asylum. She

had written again to Wm, to retrieve “little things” of

hers that she claimed H’ry had kept in his possession.

“Pure hallucination,” H’ry wrote.

Carrie Cranch was an extreme case, but after he

achieved fame H’ry was stricken with an outbreak of

women who wanted to be thought of as the model

for his archetypal American girl. In 104, he fended off

rumors that he was engaged to a woman from Ken-

tucky who was both a millionaire and the original Milly

Theale. In 105, there was a stir at the suggestion that

the real Daisy Miller had attended one of his lectures.

H’ry insisted there was no real Daisy Miller, and the

incidents may explain why he wound up attributing so

much to Minny Temple. On more than one occasion,

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either to layer in ironic nuance or to avoid any sense of slander or scandal, H’ry attributed stories or characters to persons already dead.

“Nothing in America,” H’ry wrote in his
Harper’s

Bazaar
series, “more frequently conduces to interest, for the taker of social notes, than the question of the

presumable ‘social standing’ of the flourishing female

young.” In other words, girls were perfect for stories.

Girls moved from the background of society to its fore-

ground on becoming women, and while yet in the

shadows, lurking and unclear, they drew the imagina-

tion. They certainly drew Wm’s, and his biographers

have tended to saddle him with a borderline pernicious

preoccupation with young women. But his interest is

better understood as kin to his disagreement with H’ry

over manners. He
liked
American girls who exhibited a kind of “bottled-lightning,” he wrote in “The Gospel

of Relaxation.” It was a phrase he’d once applied to

his sister; now, he labeled it an “American ideal.” The

whole problem with Europe, he claimed, was that Eu-

ropeans were so wrapped up in stodginess there were

“no bottled-lightning girls [to be] found.”

The letters document Wm’s efforts to get as close

as possible to America’s dense population of bottled-

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lightning girls. “Pauline is the best girl I know in this low world,” Wm wrote in 1, at age fifty-seven. He

had met Pauline Goldmark and her four sisters while

lecturing at Bryn Mawr, and on a camping trip in the

Keene valley the previous summer, “racing with those

greyhounds of Goldmarks,” he had strained his heart.

(The damage never healed, but that didn’t stop him

from advising H’ry to “make up” to the girls if he had a

chance during their European tour.) Even more telling

was Wm and H’ry’s prolonged interest in two young

cousins, Rosina and Bay Emmet. In 15, Wm described

Rosina as “much the type of Minny,” but with literary

ambitions. H’ry’s interest was piqued, but he found

himself more drawn to Bay, a painter. It wasn’t the

girls’ youth that made them interesting—it was that

they were different from most people. Rosina, Wm

wrote, had a great capacity for seeing truth. Bay, H’ry

thought, was a “pure” painter, and would continue

to improve, but only if she didn’t marry. Through to

the end of Wm’s life, the brothers kept careful tabs on

Rosina and Bay, housing them when they could, cheer-

ing their initial employment, and becoming distressed

when news of the girls was hard to come by. They

showed more interest in Rosina and Bay than they did

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in Wm’s children—or anyone else. There were two

reasons for this. On the one hand, Wm and H’ry knew

that the pressures of society—gossip—could chase

young women into unhappy marriages. On the other,

they saw likenesses of themselves in the young aspiring

writer and the young aspiring painter.

“No one we meet nowadays,” Wm wrote in 1,

when Rosina and Bay finally paid H’ry a visit, “can re-

mind us of
our
youth and its artistic fermentations so much as the clatter of those tongues.” For Wm, the girls

perhaps recalled the path in life he didn’t, or couldn’t, choose. Rosina, he wrote in 10, was a “healthy-minded type”; he had long since described himself

as a sick soul. H’ry certainly saw himself in Bay—he

noted that her portraits of men were better than her

women, just as his own female characters were more

convincing than his men. It’s tempting to substitute

Rosina and Bay for Minny Temple as H’ry’s primary

model—the girls, after all, came to Europe not long

before he embarked on
The Wings of the Dove.
But even that’s a simplification, as the very start of the novel

sounds less like Minny or Rosina or Bay than like the

James childhood home with Wm and H’ry in gender

reversal: “Her father’s life, her sister’s, her own, that 77

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of her two lost brothers—the whole history of their

house had the effect of some fine florid, voluminous

phrase.”

“Our relatives don’t seem to like us,” Wm wrote to

H’ry in 15, in a letter with an attached request for

money from one of their male siblings. Wilky and Bob

were the family’s “lost brothers,” and the advantages

Wm and H’ry had received (they were kept from the

Civil War, by either illness or paternal decree, while

Wilky and Bob served), and the success that resulted

from those advantages, strained filial relations. Wilky

died young, having been expunged from Henry Sr.’s

will; Bob sank into alcoholism and was eventually re-

garded as an annoyance. What Wm really meant
was that
male
relatives didn’t seem to like them.

In 10, just two weeks after Wm read H’ry’s
Harper’s
Bazaar
series, he wrote concerning a “matter of char-ity.” Mary James, the daughter of a cousin, Howard—a

rakish man who had once descended drunk on H’ry’s

London apartment while H’ry was away and raised

such a fuss that one of the servants had an epileptic

fit—was in need of assistance. Mary was “difft in dispo-

sition” from her father and siblings, Wm claimed. Plus,

she was a widow with child. “For some years past,” Wm

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