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

Chapter 14

87 you thought as much—so that I find this charge on the subject of Miss P. a very cold douche indeed.” It took H’ry’s angry letter nearly six weeks to arrive. Wm replied only briefly: “I trust your troubled soul is at rest.” TheBostonians is the only major novel H’ry left out of the New York edition. .14. A decade later, as renowned as he would ever become but still smarting from the theater, H’ry began to feel the pressures of a too-active social life. Fame and family had produced a near endless string of visitors and dining obligations. His work was suffering as a result. In early February 1896, he attended a meeting of the Society for Psychical Research—an address of Wm ’s was presented by the organization’s champion, Frederic Myers. “It had great success,” H’ry wrote of the reading of Wm ’s address. “How worked & strained & overladen you must feel & how pitiful must seem to you my slow, small dribble of production.” H’ry was accompanied that evening by an unusual guest. Mrs. Mahlon Sands was a figure as tragic and prodigious as any of the women in H’ry’s fiction. A 88 transport from Newport, Rhode Island, Mrs. Sands and her husband had years earlier eased their way into the Marlborough House set, where she had become renownedforherbeautyandwit(“TheloveliestAmerican that has yet dawned upon the world of London,” claims a diplomat’s memoir). She remained a fixture in society even after her husband died in a riding accident in 1888. It’s not clear how she first met H’ry, but they seem to have formed something of a bond over the vexationof social obligation.In1894,H’ryadvisedMrs. Sands as to how she should approach sitting for John SingerSargent.“Youcan’tcollaborateorco-operate,except by sitting still and looking beautiful,” H’ry wrote. “Cultivate indifference, cultivate not looking at it or thinkingaboutit.”AtChristmas,1895,Mrs.Sandsgifted H’ry a canary, a charming animal whose quiet comfort H’ry described to Wm after a season of endless visitors. Mrs. Sands was a “great Psychist & devotee of yours,” H’ry wrote in the same letter in which he reported on Wm ’s speech. He described Mrs. Sands in terms that reflected the tolls levied by social pressures: “She was a pathetic, ballottée creature—with nothing small or mean & with a beauty that had once been the greatest.” 89 Wm sent Mrs. Sands a copy of his essay “Is Life Worth Living?,” which was published as a small book in 1896. The essay would have affirmed Mrs. Sands’s spiritualist interest. “Is Life Worth Living?” articulated the “will to believe” doctrine Wm had been working out through the 1880s and early 1890s, and amounted to a critical step on the path to pragmatism: we each havetherighttosupplementobservablerealitywithan unseenspiritualorderif onlytotherebymakelifeseem worth living. It’s often argued that Wm was reflecting 90 onhisdarkmoodhere,nowaquarter-centurypast,but he was hardly alone: “That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides declare. . . . As we sit here in our comfort, [we] must ‘ponder these things’ also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life is the life we share.” Wm quoted Ruskin to contrast “the lightness of heart of a London dinner party” with those outside its walls, and then he tightened his focus onto what for Mrs. Sands must have seemed a familiar ennui: “My task, let me say now, is practically narrow, and my words are to deal only with that metaphysical tedium vitæ which is peculiar to reflecting men.” On July 24, 1896, H’ry passed along Mrs. Sands’s gratitude for Wm ’s little book. Her note, H’ry said, arrived just at the climax of the London rush. He later recalled that she had implored him to visit her. “Are you not coming up at all?” she pleaded. “I am sick of the whole thing.” Mrs. Sands died three days later. Her maid left the room for just a moment while dressing her for a dinner party. She had collapsed to the floor. “She had a weakness of heart,” H’ry wrote. “That’s all that’s known.” Mrs. Sands was forty-one years old. ...