"Absolutely Acclaimed": The Cure for Depression in James's Final Phase

"Absolutely Acclaimed": The Cure for Depression in James's Final Phase by Carol Holly, St. Olaf College "The long years have betrayed me," wrote Henry James to William Dean HoweUs on New Year's Eve, 1908. The novelist was lamenting the fact that his recently published New York Edition had failed financially, and he was bitter about the effect of this failure on both his bank account and his career. "It wiU have landed me in Bankruptcy-unless it picks up; for it has prevented my doing any other work whatever; which indeed must now begin" (LHJ II, 119-20). But the sales of the Edition did not pick up, and almost three years passed before James was able to work again in earnest. Soon after writing to HoweUs, James experienced the first symptoms of what was to be a prolonged and debilitating illness. InitiaUy he maintained that he suffered from heart disease, like his brother, William, or from some digestive disorder brought on by his Fletcherizing. After developing in 1910 what he called "nervous conditions" of the most "formidable and distressing kind," James finally agreed with WiUiam's diagnosis that he had experienced a '"nervous breakdown'" (LHJ II, 161; Master 441). Leon Edel believes this breakdown was a delayed reaction to the failure of the Edition, but other factors—James's disappointment over a diminished market for his short fiction and his anxieties over his renewed efforts in the theater— undoubtedly contributed to the breakdown as well (Master 434). "I only feel stricken & old & ended," he reported to Edmund Gosse in September, 1910 (SR 587). His brother, William, had died in August, his work was unwanted, and he had felt emotionally and physically debilitated for the good part of a year. By autumn, 1911, James had recovered sufficient emotional equilibrium to begin his autobiographies, A Small Boy and Others and Notes of a Son and Brother, the first major writing project he had undertaken in several years. Because "all vestiges of his old depression seemed to have left him" by the time the second of these volumes was published in March, 1914, biographers and critics have long believed that by writing his autobiographies James cured himself of the despondency that had intermittently afflicted him since 1909 (Master 500). Some critics have stressed the benefits to James of "the successful effort to work" and the affirmation of artistic power this effort made possible (LHJ H, 240). Others have emphasized the therapeutic powers of the autobiographical act.1 But whatever their emphases, Jamesians have invariably propounded a psychology of self-healing similar to that which James adopted in dealing with professional setbacks during the late 1880's and after: to turn his back on his public and to work off his pain through the process of art. And they have invariably quoted as evidence of the success of this process in 1914 James's 21 March letter to Henry Adams, written shortly after Notes of a Son and Brother was published: You see I still, in presence of life . . . have reactions—as many as possible —and the book I sent you is proof of them. It's, I suppose, because I am that Volume 8 126 Number 2 The Henry James Review Winter, 1987 queer monster the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility. Hence the reactions—appearances, memories, many things go on playing upon it with consequences that I note and "enjoy" (grim word!) noting. It all takes doing—and I do. I believe I shall do yet again—it is still an act of Ufe. (HJL IV, 706) The following essay offers a revised interpretation of this important phase of James's Ufe. On the evidence of a largely unpublished correspondence with his family, I argue that the confidence in artistic power James enjoyed in the spring of 1914 was due not only to the salutary effects of work or the therapeutic benefits of the autobiographical act. It was also due to the favorable reception that both volumes, Notes of a Son and Brother in particular, received from the British press. Just as public indifference to his work was the cause of depression in 1909, in other words, so was...