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

Chapter 15

91 .15. The death of Mrs. Sands illustrates what H’ry never stated: even if the “matter” of his fiction was light, the minds behind it lived and died as though it was very heavy indeed. He seemed to best understand this himself only after Wm fully fleshed out his system. “I can’t now explain save by the very fact of the spell itself . . . that [Pragmatism] cast upon me,” H’ry wrote in 1907. “All my life I have . . . unconsciously pragmatised.” And in 1909, “As an artist & a ‘creator’ I can catch on, hold on, to pragmatism, & can work in the light of it &applyit.”H’ry’sfictiondemonstratedWm ’s“method of truth.” Wm was never able to be quite so gracious in return. Tempered by occasional praise, his criticisms of his brother’s work started early, and never truly abated. In 1868, he lashed out at the “every day” elements of two of H’ry’s early stories, and then explained his purpose: “I have uttered this long rigmarole in a dogmatic manner , as one speaks, to himself, but of course you will use it merely as a mass to react against in your own way, so that it may serve you some good purpose.” He believed he was doing H’ry a service as he criti- 92 cized a growing tendency toward “over-refinement” or “curliness” of style. “I think it ought to be of use to you,” he wrote in 1872, “to have any detailed criticism fm even a wrong judge, and you don’t get much fm. any one else.” For the most part, H’ry agreed. “I hope you will continue to give me, when you can, your free impression of my performance. It is a great thing to have some one write to one of one’s things as if one were a 3d person & you are the only individual who will do this.” H’ry did not agree with all of Wm ’s “strictures.” Some were clearly born of an overprotective spirit. Whenever Wm advised that H’ry bend toward the “newspaporial,”orconcentrateonwritingof a“popularkind ,”H’rykickedback.“Themultitude,Iammore & more convinced, have absolutely no taste—none at least that a thinking man is bound to defer to. To write for the few who have is doubtless to lose money—but I am not afraid of starving.” Long after H’ry had established a successful career, Wm worried that he would have to care for his brother in his old age. H’ry’s bravado, however, and what he produced did not always jibe. He was afraid of starving .Evenapartfromhisspeculativesortieintothethe- 93 ater, his stories are often repetitive—he mined themes again and again, reselling the same idea to a range of venues—and he was well aware that some of his work was inferior. Ironically, this was the work that tended to please Wm most. When Wm praised “Longstaff’s Marriage” and wondered why H’ry had left it out of a collection, H’ry dismissed the story as a “poor affair.” And just a few months after the death of Mrs. Sands he disavowed an entire novel, The Other House, that Wm had enjoyed. “If that’s what the idiots want,” H’ry wrote, “I can give them their bellyfull.” Wm only grudgingly accepted H’ry’s most ambitiousmethods .“Itissuperlativelywelldone,”hewrote of The Bostonians, when he finally read it, “provided one admit that method of doing such a thing at all.” The earnest criticism of the early letters gave way to banter as Wm struggled to comprehend whatever it was H’ry was trying to achieve. In 1905, flustered by TheGoldenBowl,Wm called for something wholly new: But why won’t you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the 94 dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style? H’ry replied with a wry broadside: I mean . . . to try to produce some uncanny form of thing, in fiction, that will gratify you, as Brother—but let me say, dear William, that I shall greatly be humiliated if you do like it, & thereby lump it, in your affection, with things, of the current age, that I have heard you express admiration for & that I would sooner descend to a dishonoured grave than have written. More often, however, H’ry remained silent...