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

Chapter 5

31 come out of space and lay themselves for a short time along of ours, and then off they whirl again into the unknown, leaving us with little more than an impression of their reality and a feeling of baffled curiosity as to the mystery of the beginning and end of their being. Emphasis on “whirl,” which speaks to the core of the brothers’ similar take on reality and their differences as to what ought to be done about it. .5. “Whirl” returns to Shakespeare, whose influence for Wm stretched all the way back to his very first letter, and who, for H’ry, was so “immense” that one “need not press the case of his example.” The letters cite Shakespeare often, without quotation marks, such as when H’ry, in 1893, complained of an overfull work schedule and social obligations: “It is again the whirligig of time.” That this slightly distorted TwelfthNight’s original meaning does not seem to have bothered Wm , who four years later, in complaining of a speaking engagement at a crowded park, hewed closer to 32 H’ry’s meaning: “It’s a strange freak of the whirligig of fortune that finds me haranguing the multitude on Boston Common.” Wm had a particular fondness for the word. In 1868, writing to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., he claimed that a sadness that had descended upon him was due to ghosts “dancing a senseless whirligig” abouthim,andinan1896essayheclaimedthatassoon as “the whirligig of time goes round,” science would appear shortsighted for having preferred an impersonal worldview to a personal one. H’ry must have taken careful note as “whirligigs” appeared serially in The Principles of Psychology, in The Will to Believe, in a speech that H’ry praised in 1903 (“your beautiful Harvard address”), and in a plaintive 1905 letter regretting the increasing infrequency of their correspondence: “The wheel of life seems to be whirling for each of us in such wise that we ‘don’t write.’” A few years later, in TheAmericanScene,H’ry set out to prove that he could stretch Shakespeare’s metaphor just as easily as he had stretched the stream of consciousness: The term I use may appear extravagant, but it was a fact, none the less, that I seemed to take full in my face, on this occasion, the cold stir of air 33 produced when the whirligig of time has made one of its liveliest turns. It is always going, the whirligig, but its effect is so to blow up the dust that we must wait for it to stop a moment, as it now and then does with a pant of triumph, in order to see what it has been at. Of the many attempts that have been made to distill thebrothers’essentialdifferences,noneworksquiteso simplyorsuccinctlyasthesnippingawayof “gig”from “whirligig.”If “whirligig,”asanameforatwirlinggadget , relies on Cartesian philosophy and characterizes theuniverseasasimpleturningmachinesusceptibleto comprehension and repair, then “whirl” melts the image (for example, “whirlpool”), and proposes that the onlytruesolacecomesfromrenderingsof thewhirling world whose accuracy makes bearable the turbulence of our own streams. Wm clearly preferred the former: when he came round to proposing his grand fix for the problem of truth in philosophy, pragmatism, he definedit ,inpart,asa“method,”echoingthe“methodof truth” that H’ry had found lacking in George Sand. In preferring the latter, H’ry proposed a different method for a different purpose. He did not aim for a unified 34 theory of truth; rather, adherence to a better, fluid realism—a realism that did not substitute certainty and simplicity for the universe’s irreducible spiraling complex ambiguity—is the thread woven through his career: it’s the figure in his carpet. But how exactly should one be a weaver of stories, when storytelling itself, as H’ry noted in “The Lesson of Balzac,”tendedtoorganizeunrulyrealityintoruled scenes? H’ry’s work proposed multiple solutions. Narrators in H’ry’s early stories balk at their own omniscience (“If I were telling my story from Mrs. Mason’s pointof view...Imightmakeaverygoodthingof the statement that this lady had deliberately and solemnly conferred . . . upon my hero; but I am compelled to let it stand in this simple shape”). His dialogue—maddeningly , for Wm —focused as much on the chaos of actual human speech as it did on clearly conveying the contentof theconversationsdescribed.Wm recognized the variety of H’ry’s techniques even if he couldn’t wholly sign on to them: he lamented the losing of “the story...