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

Chapter 13

83 .13. The problem with Wm and H’ry’s “bottled-lightning” sister, Alice, seems to have been an inability to unstopper herself. Alice had the same mind as her favored brothers, and the great biographical question of her life is whether her intellectual talents went overlooked in the James family dynamic because she was sickly, or if she fell sick because her talents went overlooked. Alice started out life closer to her elder brother, but gravitatedtowardH’ryafterWm married.Shefollowed H’ry to London, where he cared for her until she died of breast cancer in 1892. Though, like Proust, Alice is famous for having rarely left her bed, an active life in London came to her. She could go weeks without seeing H’ry, and her “Boston marriage” to Katherine Loring —like the lure of H’ry’s sexuality—has cracked the wax seal of so many critical inkwells that one wishes thatif Alicehadbeentoo-littleunstopperedthencritics might have remained more so. In any event, her own modest trickle of ink was how Alice ensured that even if she went overlooked she would not be forgotten. For the last several years of her life, she kept a copious diary, a soaring account of her mind and her suffering 84 that included a range of juicy tidbits about those in the London social circle—gossip. Two years after she died,KatherineLoringhadthemanuscripttypesetand bound in a tiny, four-copy edition. “Oh yes, please send it to him!” H’ry said, when he first learned of the diary’s existence. Katherine Loring had written to ask whether a copy could be forwarded to unfavored brother Bob. H’ry hadn’t yet read the diary , and he regretted having given his assent as soon as hegothishandsonit;itwasfilled,hetoldWm ,witheverything he had “gossiped to the sister.” H’ry liked the diary—it was “heroic in its individuality, its independence ”—andhewasgratefultohaveit,ashehadnever hadmanylettersfromAlice.Butheworriedbecausein relatingdetailsthathenowsawrepeated,hewasforced to admit that he had, on occasion, “‘coloured’ [things] to divert Alice!” He didn’t know what Bob intended to dowiththebook.“Iamtroubledaboutitineveryway,” he wrote. What he hoped, he said, was that they could edit the diary ever so slightly “& then carefully burn with fire” the four extant copies. (H’ry failed in this, but the diary was not printed again in full until 1964.) Wm thought H’ry was overreacting. “I don’t see the slightestdanger of any extracts from it floating about.” 85 Wm had a wholly different attitude toward gossip. By themid-1890s,hewasactiveintheSocietyforPsychical Research—the investigation of supernatural phenomena —and on this front gossip was both a danger and a boon: on the one hand, gossip could explain how a false medium, intentionally or unwittingly, could give the impression of having come into possession of private knowledge; on the other, gossip was a tool that could and should be used, Wm suggested, to expand the reach of psychical research. Either way, he was far more dispassionate on the subject, which helps to explain why he often thought the “matter” of H’ry’s fiction “too slight.” Exactly those same societal pressures from which Wm seemed insulated—propriety, social status, reputation—shined bright in the backgrounds of H’ry’s stories. In 1879, H’ry admitted that he was perplexed as to why Wm had remained cold to a particular tale. “I have got (heaven knows!) plenty of gravity within me,” he wrote, “& I don’t know why I can’t put it more into the things I write.” On occasion, however, the concern ran the other way—and emotions flared. In January 1885, The BostoniansstirredangeramongWm ’sneighbors.Acharacter in the story, “Miss Birdseye,” seemed to local read- 86 ers too close an analog to a certain “Miss Peabody,” whom everyone knew to resemble the character and who even had the same identifying habit of misplacing her eyeglasses. Wm hadn’t yet read the book when he first complained that the furor was “a really pretty bad business.” H’ry fumed at this. He’d meant no such association at all. He had known, of course, that titling the book TheBostonians would cause him to be “much abused,” but the thing that really seemed to hurt was Wm ’sthoughtlessnessonthematter.“Ihavedonenothing to deserve it,” H’ry wrote, “& think your tone on the subject singularly harsh & unfair.” Of course, a vague resemblance between Miss Birdseye and Miss Peabody had occurred to him as he wrote—but there had been no intentional attempt to render her...