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

Chapter 16

96 teeredforhisarmy,andthatinthewarWm wagedH’ry was his fiercest champion and most decorated soldier? .16. On August 8, 1900, Wm related an embarrassing story. Throughout the summer, while traveling through Europe with his wife—named Alice, like the sister—he sufferedfromarangeof symptoms:nervousness,heart trouble. He needed help, but didn’t know where to turn. As it happened, he’d been receiving letters praising the work of a magnetic healer, a “Mrs. Melton” of Paris. Wm scoffed at Mrs. Melton, which had led to terrible fights with Alice. Even though Wm had long acted as a spiritualist leader, it was Alice who was more deeply beguiled by occult fads. Over the next few weeks, a variety of factors conspired to make Paris attractive: Wm got it in mind to seek an appointment with the city’s great heart man, Pierre Potain, and an invitation to stay in a private Parisian home offered relief from an endless string of hotels. Perhaps most important, Wm told H’ry, a visit to the magnetic healer would convince Alice that “the powers of the occult world were not being neglected.” 97 It was a mistake. Rather than relieving him of his ailments, the “nasty job” of Mrs. Melton’s treatment succeeded only in producing boils. “I made an ass of myself letting that spider of hell the ‘healer’ touch me,” Wm wrote. His next few letters express the usual pleasure the brothers took in relating the history of awkward ailments . “The chief remaining furuncle broke this a.m.” “The last boil is now disgorging its venomous heart.” Thepeculiarfunof boil-breakingiscorroboratedbyan accountof SwamiVivekananda,whohostedaconclave of healers and modern mystics while Wm was in Paris. Vivekananda was honored by Wm ’s attendance at the meeting, but he noted that the celebrated philosopher seemed distracted by careful self-ministrations from the opening gavel. Wm ’s only memorable contribution to the proceedings came when one of the attendees proposed proving the existence of the “Fire God” by lighting a blaze in the parlor: Wm lifted his head from his pustule-worrying and announced that he might well have had something to say upon the Fire God if only he were not entirely occupied with the evolution of Meltonian blisters. Wm ’sattitudetowardthemagnetichealerchallenges 98 a long-standing scholarly assumption that his interest in psychical research depended on a suspension of a critical faculty that would have better off left intact. Like the sciences whose methodology they imitate, history and biography crave contrast and absolutes and are therefore ill-prepared to survey enthusiasm tempered by skepticism. Wm was a believer (To H’ry, 1906: “There is something back there that shows that mindscommunicate,eventhoseof thedeadwiththose of the living”), but he was also a scientist who knew that he’d never proven a damn thing when it came to ghosts, prayer, or magical healing. That hardly mattered .Hisentirecareerwasanattempttoformapracticalresponse ,rootedinthemeasurableandobservable, to the fact that reality was ambiguous and appeared intent on staying that way. The study of séances and spirits might never yield proof of anything, yet it had the value of exploration: “occult” was a name for that which accepted psychological knowledge could only glimpse in the shadows of the not yet known and perhaps immeasurable. H’ry’s reaction to all this was equally complicated. As the years had passed, he had grown quite close to Wm ’s wife, Alice (they would live together, after Wm died), and her letters to him speak 99 of her “sittings” as though he is a confederate in belief. On at least one occasion H’ry asked that Wm phone a medium to arrange a series of séances for him. Yet even more than Wm , H’ry seemed to recognize that Wm ’s interest in the occult was an attempt to combine his psychology with his philosophy, his willingness to believe with his sickly soulfulness, and that all of it was an expression of a society so bored and weary of itself that it was actually ill and needed to be reminded that life was worth living. .17. In August 1889—a dozen years before the plague of Meltonian blisters—Wm returned to Boston after a long, lone trip to Europe. It was just at that moment when his life had begun to settle in. The Principles of Psychology was almost complete, and teaching offered financial security and a comfortable routine. Alice and the children were staying at the summerhouse in New...