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

Chapter 17

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 Hampshire he’d bought not long before, and Wm himself was lodging with friends in Cambridge whilebuilderscompletedanewfamilyhomeonIrving Street. He could see the almost-finished house from 100 his temporary bedroom window. Early one morning, still in his nightshirt, he rose and peered out at a dim, uncanny world. Past and future seemed to collide: the little town accounted for the majority of his history, andhewouldlivetherefortherestof hislife.Hewrote to his brother of the peculiar feeling of the moment. Theletterislost,butH’rytookcarefulnoteof it:“Gazing at your house in the August dawn—it must have seemed queer indeed, with all the dead past putting in such an appearance at the same time.” A return from Europe, a suspension between past and future, and queer sensations experienced at odd hours are all elements of “The Jolly Corner,” one of H’ry’s most famous ghost stories, published in 1907. Ghosts, for H’ry—Virginia Woolf claimed several years after he died that his handful of ghost stories werethebestof hiswork—spokefarlesstowhatmight be true of the natural world than to memory and the past.In1899,whenWm senthimashortnotepreserved from Henry Sr.’s youth, H’ry offered thanks for the “beautiful, innocent ghostly [letter] from Father’s 19th year.” Ghosts were a much-trodden route to psychologicalprojectionevenbeforeH ’ry’sprefaceto“SirEdmundOrme ”(Wm :“Perfect[thing]...whichIenjoyed 101 extremely”) claimed that “hauntedness” was romantic parlancefor“unconsciousobsession.”H’rycouldbeeither lighthearted about psychical research, as when he called on Wm to exert psychical pressure to ensure his success in the theater—“This is really the time to show your stuff”—or quietly critical, as in “Maud Evelyn,” a story in which a psychically inclined couple arrange a suitor for their dead daughter: the couple is portrayed as foolishly aggrieved, but their willingness to believe leads them to pragmatic contentedness, so who could argue with them? (Wm , apparently: when Alice read it aloud to him, he judged it “very exquisite but hardly realistic.”) H’ry’s real problem with psychical research was that, as ghost stories went, the scientific study of psychical phenomena didn’t yield particularly effective tales. In his preface to The Turn of the Screw, he argued that “correct” ghosts—ghosts that adhered to the kind of blasé, inexpressive incident clogging the psychical record—wouldmakebut“poorsubjects”instoriesthat mustabsolutelyaspiretoactionanddrama.Indeed,the apparitions of The Turn of the Screw, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, were “not ‘ghosts’ at all” in the traditional sense. Rather, they worked by helping H’ry express his “subject all directly and intensely.” In other words, his 102 ghosts were like his girls: they were symbols, figures, figments of the humanity that they spookily and portentously reflected. All this seems to have been lost on Wm , who, like those female readers prone to projecting themselves onto Daisy Miller or Milly Theale, was apt to thinking of literal inspiration. Throughout the letters Wm attempts to feed H’ry names and plots. He believed he recognized himself in TheAmerican’s “morbid little clergyman,” and he once offered up his wife as a possible character. No experience Wm ever had, however, was richer in potential material, he thought, than a particular night involving his psychical confrere Frederic Myers. About six months before Wm subjected himself to magnetic tortures, he and Alice stayed for a time in Carqueiranne, a resort town on the southern tip of France. They were accompanied by Myers; his wife, Silvia; and a “Mrs. Thompson,” a medium whom Myersheldforthasproof of aworldbeyondtheknowable...