Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James (12 page)

intent on staying that way. The study of séances and

spirits might never yield proof of anything, yet it had

the value of exploration: “occult” was a name for that

which accepted psychological knowledge could only

glimpse in the shadows of the not yet known and

perhaps immeasurable. H’ry’s reaction to all this was

equally complicated. As the years had passed, he had

grown quite close to Wm’s wife, Alice (they would live

together, after Wm died), and her letters to him speak

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of her “sittings” as though he is a confederate in belief.

On at least one occasion H’ry asked that Wm phone

a medium to arrange a series of séances for him. Yet

even more than Wm, H’ry seemed to recognize that

Wm’s interest in the occult was an attempt to combine

his psychology and his philosophy, his willingness to

believe with his sickly soulfulness, and that all of it was an expression of a society so bored and weary of itself

it was actually ill and needed to be reminded that life

was worth living.

In August 1—a dozen years before the plague of

Meltonian blisters—Wm returned to Boston after a

long, lone trip to Europe. It was just at that moment

when his life had begun to settle in.
The Principles of
Psychology
was almost complete, and teaching offered financial security and a comfortable routine. Alice

and the children were staying at the summerhouse

in New Hampshire he’d bought not long before, and

Wm himself was lodging with friends in Cambridge

while builders completed a new family home on Irving

Street. He could see the almost-finished house from

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his temporary bedroom window. Early one morning,

still in his nightshirt, he rose and peered out at a dim, uncanny world. Past and future seemed to collide: the

little town accounted for the majority of his history,

and he would live there for the rest of his life. He wrote to his brother of the peculiar feeling of the moment.

The letter is lost, but H’ry took careful note of it: “Gazing at your house in the August dawn—it must have

seemed queer indeed, with all the dead past putting in

such an appearance at the same time.”

A return from Europe, a suspension between past

and future, and queer sensations experienced at odd

hours are all elements of “The Jolly Corner,” one of

H’ry’s most famous ghost stories, published in 10.

Ghosts, for H’ry—Virginia Woolf claimed several

years after he died that his handful of ghost stories

were the best of his work—spoke far less to what might

be true of the natural world than to memory and the

past. In 1, when Wm sent him a short note preserved

from Henry Sr.’s youth, H’ry offered thanks for the

“beautiful, innocent ghostly [letter] from Father’s 1th

year.” Ghosts were a much-trodden route to psycho-

logical projection even before H’ry’s preface to “Sir Ed-

mund Orme” (Wm: “Perfect [thing] . . . which I enjoyed

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extremely
”) claimed that “hauntedness” was romantic parlance for “unconscious obsession.” H’ry could be either light-hearted about psychical research, as when he

called on Wm to exert psychical pressure to ensure his

success in the theater—“This is really the time to show

your stuff ”—or quietly critical, as in “Maud Evelyn,” a

story in which a psychically inclined couple arrange a

suitor for their dead daughter: the couple is portrayed

as foolishly aggrieved, but their willingness to believe

leads them to pragmatic contentedness, so who could

argue with them? (Wm, apparently: when Alice read it

aloud to him, he judged it “very exquisite but hardly

realistic.”) H’ry’s real problem with psychical research

was that, as ghost stories went, the scientific study of

psychical phenomena didn’t yield particularly effective

tales. In his preface to
The Turn of the Screw
, he argued that “correct” ghosts—ghosts that adhered to the kind

of blasé, inexpressive incident clogging the psychical

record—would make but “poor subjects” in stories that

must absolutely aspire to action and drama. Indeed, the

apparitions of
The Turn of the Screw
, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, were “not ‘ghosts’ at all” in the traditional sense. Rather, they worked by helping H’ry express his

“subject all directly and intensely.” In other words, his 101

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ghosts were like his girls: they were symbols, figures,

figments of the humanity that they spookily and por-

tentously reflected.

All this seems to have been lost on Wm, who, like

those female readers prone to projecting themselves

onto Daisy Miller or Milly Theale, was apt to think-

ing of literal inspiration. Throughout the letters Wm

attempts to feed H’ry names and plots. He believed

he recognized himself in
The American
’s “morbid little clergyman,” and he once offered up his wife as a possible character. No experience Wm ever had, however,

was richer in potential material, he thought, than a

particular night involving his psychical confrere Fred-

eric Myers.

About six months before Wm subjected himself to

magnetic tortures, he and Alice stayed for a time in

Carquerieanne, a resort town on the southern tip of

France. They were accompanied by Myers; his wife,

Silvia; and a “Mrs. Thompson,” a medium whom My-

ers held forth as proof of a world beyond the knowable

universe. Myers’s relationship with Mrs. Thompson

was mysterious, even to his wife, and late one night

the heated threesome burst in on Wm and Alice’s late-

burning fire. Could they arbitrate a dispute? Wm and

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Alice cowrote an account of the incident for H’ry—the

ensuing scene was ripe with lies, suggestions, and ad-

umbrations—and the great tragedy of it, once every-

one had returned to their rooms, was that H’ry had not

been there to be impressed by it. It was just up H’ry’s

line of “grotesque humors,” Wm fretted, strutting up

and down the room, both for its three main players,

and for Frederic and Silvia Myers’s two young children.

“A queer pair,” Wm noted, “reminding me irresistibly

of the two in the turn of the screw.”

H’ry was interested in the story for its gossip value—

“You must give me details when we meet—they will

be very interesting”—but did he think the scene might

make for a good tale? Probably not. H’ry would have

disagreed with Woolf that his ghost stories were his

best work (he derided even
The Turn of the Screw
as a

“potboiler”), and the moments from Wm’s letters that

inspired him most were not the suggestions of drama-

laden plots, but the quiet intervals that Wm sometimes

took care to describe, moments full of atmosphere

and details that communicated mood and sensibility.

As well, H’ry’s imagination by then must have already

been burbling on
The Wings of the Dove
, even though he wouldn’t sign a contract for the book for another

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few months. Written notably in the same time period

when Wm was completing
The Varieties of Religious

Experience
,
The Wings of the Dove
combines H’ry’s most ambitious impulses as a writer with an attempt to take

on a story with a matter large enough for Wm’s taste.

He completed it in the light of one final glimpse into

the rift that separated him from his brother.

In Carquerianne, at a quieter moment, Wm and Fred-

eric Myers sat together with Mrs. Thompson and asked

her what the future held. She predicted that Wm would

soon recover from his various illnesses, and that Myers

would be dead within two years. The men laughed, as

the reverse seemed much more likely. Mrs. Thompson

was wrong, but only in that her view of Myers’s demise

was shortsighted. He was dead in ten months.

On January 1, 101, Wm dictated a letter describing

Myers’s death vigil in Rome. Myers had been struck by

double pneumonia, and Wm had prescribed morphia

when it became clear how far the disease had advanced.

The death rattle had begun that morning. Myers had

asked to be read to, and was read to. Now, it was :45

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p.m. and Wm sat before an open stove, speaking aloud a

letter to H’ry, which Alice recorded under the light of

an electric table-lamp. Myers died forty-five minutes

later.

For Wm, the scene was particularly painful because

Myers was a symbol of why the work of the Society

for Psychical Research was important. “The official

psychologists affect to look down on him,” Wm wrote,

“but he has perhaps done more for psychology than

any of the lot.” This was even truer of Wm than it was

of Myers.

What’s notable about the scene now is what they

chose to read to Myers on his deathbed. Both Alice

and Wm were particularly fond of H’ry’s early travel

sketches, and Wm in particular liked to have certain

descriptive passages read to him before he went to

sleep. Alice would read a paragraph, and Wm would

say, “Read it again.” When Myers asked to be read to,

H’ry’s
Transatlantic Sketches
,
published twenty-five years earlier, was close at hand. The letters specify that Myers responded thoughtfully to “Roman Neighborhoods,” which features “the picturesque amid pictur-

esqueness,” a description of Lake Albano, a few miles

southeast of Rome:

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This beautiful pool—it is hardly more—occupies

the crater of a prehistoric volcano—a perfect

cup, moulded and smelted by furnace-fires. The

rim of the cup rises high and densely wooded

around the placid, stone-blue water, with a sort

of natural artificiality. The sweep and contour of

the long circle are admirable; never was a lake so

charmingly lodged. It is said to be of extraordinary

depth; and though stone-blue water seems at

first a very innocent substitute for boiling lava,

it has a sinister look which betrays its dangerous

antecedents. The winds never reach it, and its

surface is never ruffled; but its deep-bosomed

placidity seems to cover guilty secrets, and you

fancy it in communication with the capricious

and treacherous forces of nature. Its very color

has a kind of joyless beauty—a blue as cold and

opaque as a solidified sheet of lava. Streaked and

wrinkled by a mysterious motion of its own, it

seemed the very type of a legendary pool, and

I could easily have believed that I had only to sit

long enough into the evening to see the ghosts of

classic nymphs and naiads cleave its sullen flood

and beckon to me with irresistible arms.

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If H’ry ever replied to “Roman Neighborhoods”

being read at Myers’s deathbed, the letter is lost. But it would not have been lost on him that the scene demonstrated that everything he’d written in a quarter-

century of letters about his growing distaste for the

picturesque had gone ignored. The very same letter

that described Myers’s final expiration noted that Wm

and Alice had that same evening read H’ry’s essay on

Thackeray and Rye—the piece in which he had dis-

missed the usefulness of description. Wm claimed

they had read the essay “with much pleasure,” but the

truth was that the point of it had been either missed

or dismissed.

H’ry drew a distinction between a popular audi-

ence’s reaction to art and the reaction one received

from a “finer interest”—a coy way, really, of referring

to his own interest in literature, and to the interest

he hoped to inspire in others. What he meant was

technique, a reader not
passively
reading a story, but coming to recognize that part of the intended pleasure of some books was the reader becoming keenly

aware of the conscription of his or her intellect into

the service of the story’s
process. All stories relied on readers’ imaginations, surely, but the stories that were

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most worthwhile were the ones that set out to satisfy

the finer interest’s craving for
how
the story produced its satisfaction. H’ry’s own finer interest in his description of Lake Albano—one Wm certainly should have

sensed—would have been that it was a metaphorically

fluid treatment of a literally fluid subject: his brother’s stream of consciousness applied to
a body of water.

Rather than taking a variety of angles on a particu-

lar object in a futile attempt to render it factually, the description started with the impression of the lake,