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

Chapter 12

79 wrote, “[she] has made her living mostly by standing as model in wholesale ‘Cloak stores’ to show styles to ‘buyers’—a deplorable pursuit.” Was it not their duty to protect her from gossip and “lift her up”? Could H’ry contribute $100 for instruction in stenography? “It’simpossiblenotto,”H’ryreplied,enclosingacheck. They were too late; the money went unspent. The young woman had married. .12. H’ry’sprefaceto1888’sTheReverberator(Wm :“Masterly and exquisite. . . . I quite squealed through it”) tells a story of H’ry’s having once wintered in Venice with a group of twenty friends whose primary occupation was “infinite talk, talk mainly, inexhaustibly, about persons and the ‘personal equation’ and the personal mystery.” The Old World salon feel of the circle was challenged that season by the introduction of a young woman whose presence was welcomed both because she came well introduced and because they all knew that Old World salons had never made much room for “acclaimed and confident pretty girl[s].” The young woman acquitted herself admirably; the group took 80 herintoeachof their“twentysocialbosoms.”Itwasn’t until H’ry returned from a short trip to Florence and Rome that he learned that the young woman’s true purposehadbeentoamassa“treasureof impressions.” She had published a letter in a “vulgar newspaper” revealing the group’s “penetralia.” She had been undercover ! The gossiping crowd had itself become the subject of gossip! H’ry put the anecdote to use in The Reverberator’staleof amarriagenearlyderailedbycarelessly slipped, and unscrupulously repeated, personal information. It’s difficult to imagine anyone more unsettled by gossip than H’ry. Whether it was over his bowels, his finances, or his love life (or lack of one), H’ry forever pleaded with Wm to not share information. Yet the letters—full of itineraries and rumors, caricatures and rants—reveal both Wm and H’ry as shameless gossipers themselves. Wm , in 1869: “That’s all the gossip I can think of.” Wm , in 1872: “I take up my long unwonted pen to make you a report of progress at home ensheathed in other gossip.” H’ry, in 1869: “Do in writing give more details gossip &c.” 81 H’ry,in1877:“BeholdallthebasegossipIcaninvent.” H’ry, in 1910, in the very last line of the very last letter of the correspondence, apologizing for his need to gossip: “Doing these things helps me, I find, most blessedly on.” H’ry took his lead on gossip from George Sand. In 1877, he recalled the preface to “André” in which Sand revealed that she had eavesdropped on her servants during a stay in Venice, ostensibly to acquaint herself with the local dialect, but in doing so coming into possession “of a large amount of local gossip.” What this revealed to Sand was that men and women from all places tended to concern themselves with the same kinds of things. H’ry absorbed the motto: we were all alike in gossip. Andwhatdopeopletendtogossipabout?Wegossip over suggested facts of lives, over assertions that, correct or not, seem truer than what people will publicly attest to. Gossip is the excitement of ambiguity, of incomplete knowledge, of the tension between what you’ve heard and what you know. Drama results when the two don’t jibe. We are alternately thrilled and terrified that the truth may out. The reading of others’ letters stems from the same basic impulse: in letters, 82 we are more honest than when we craft an argument or tell a story addressed to a broader audience. Literature rides the horse; letters peer into its mouth. H’ry believed this. A great deal of his early critical work is dedicated to the collected correspondence of other writers—Flaubert, Eliot, Balzac, St. Beuve, Lowell, Arnold, this a list of only the pieces that merited discussion in Wm and H’ry’s own private exchange. (Wm ’s recommendation to H’ry of Goethe and Schiller’s correspondence accidentally anticipates the effect of the brothers’ letters: “The spectacle of two such earnestly living & working men is refreshing to the soul of any one, but in their aesthetic discussions you will find a particular profit I fancy.”) Letters play an important role in H’ry’s fiction as well. The tension is almost alwaysthesame :aletterhasbeenwritten,whatdoesthe letter writer truly think, and who might come to know its contents? Again and again, characters confront the overwhelming impulse to interrupt the social contract and snatch up the delectable missive sitting in...