Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters between Wiliam and Henry James

Chapter 10

61 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 critics 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 The second night had gone better than the first, but H’ry feared the play would be withdrawn.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. GuyDomville closed after thirty-two nights, and was replacedbyOscarWilde ’sTheImportanceof BeingEarnest. In the end, H’ry was left with “horror for the abysmal vulgarity & brutality of the theatre.” .10. 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 impressions with anyone else. More important, H’ry’s precise problem was that the vulgar taste of his audience 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. 62 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 inch his way into an academic career, he 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 1887, Wm confessed to anxiety over the paceof hisownprogress:“Astrangecoldnesshascome over me with reference to all my deeds and productions . . . . [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 1885,Wm notedthatH’ry’sworkwasalreadysopopular 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 1895, 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, 63 steady output. In one month alone—June 1893—H’ry published a novel and two volumes of essays. A lack of tangible reward is probably what Wm was missingwhen,in1891,hewrotetoH’ry,“Allintellectual work is the same—the artist feeds the public on his own bleeding insides.” He went on to describe a reading 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. “Apparently , 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 1902, 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: 64 Kate afterwards imaged to herself . . . a ladder 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 fundamental one of telling the story).” It was now...