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

Chapter 6

35 psychologiclightonyourcreativeprocess.”Here,H’ry had acknowledged that his goal in the story of a dying young woman and the small cast of characters caught in the orbit of her demise was to depict the growing, changing consciousness of a girl, but to “approach her circuitously . . . as an unspotted princess is ever dealt with.” He was elaborating on the story itself, and the novel’s own description of Milly Theale defends his better realism: She worked—and seemingly quite without design—upon the sympathy, the curiosity, the fancy of her associates, and we shall really ourselves scarce otherwise come closer to her than by feeling their impression and sharing, if need be, their confusion. .6. They often returned to that word—“impression”—in both work and letters. On April 26, 1869, H’ry began a letter from Oxford that would take him four days to complete. He was replying to a malaise that Wm had been suffering for some time at home, having been laid low by his back 36 and frustrated ambitions. H’ry encouraged him to “spurn the azure demon,” and take heart from H’ry’s own “adventures.” How could Wm do that? H’ry sat down after dinner to record a walk he’d taken earlier in the afternoon. “I feel as if I should like to make a note of certain recent impressions,” he wrote, “before they quite fade out of my mind.” He proceeded with a story in which he acted as postman, walking through Oxford’s colleges to deliver a letter for a friend: It was a perfect evening & in the interminable British twilight the beauty of the whole place came forth with magical power. There are no words for these colleges. As I stood last eveg. within the precincts of mighty Magdalen, gazed at its great serene tower & uncapped my throbbing brow in the wild dimness of its courts, I thought that the heart of me would crack with the fulness of satisfied desire. Thechroniclecontinueslikewiseforseveralpages.The goalof theimpressionsis to getWm ascloseaspossible to H’ry’s “throbbing brow,” and thereby enable him to endure his dark mood. The value of recorded impressions could be applied to art as easily as to strolls, and 37 a few months later, now in Rome, H’ry harkened back to Wm ’s complaint about Herman Grimm’s want of animal spirits in describing his viewing of the paintings of Tintoretto: “I never manage to write but a very small fraction of what has originally occurred to me. What you call the ‘animal heat’ of contemplation is sure to evaporate within half an hour.” Long before the surviving correspondence begins, Wm and H’ry gestated together in the womb of art, forging their brotherhood in wandering turns through museums in Paris and London. When Wm studied paintingintheNewportstudioof WilliamHenryHunt in1860—atthetime,landscapeartistJohnLaFargewas theonlyotherstudent—H’rytaggedalong,sometimes dabbling with drawings of his own. “Your eyes are windows through which you receive impressions,” Hunt told them, “keeping yourself as passive as warm wax, instead of being active.” This maybe helps to explain why Wm abandoned art; biographers would later describe his personality in childhood as marked by “activity”; he was outgoing and extroverted. H’ry, by way of contrast, was marked by “passivity”; he was quiet, and lived in a “world of ‘impressions .’”H’ryhadnotalentasapainter,yetthetime 38 proved formative for him anyway: La Farge, who once painted H’ry’s portrait, is credited with introducing H’ry to Balzac and with helping to steer him toward writing with the observation that all the arts are one. (The Tragic Muse’s Nick Dormer: “All art is one—remember that, Biddy dear.”) The great truth and task of the universe, as both brothers saw it, now seems to congeal: we are all of us hopelessly awash inside a whipping, whirling, acceleratingrushof facts,images,incidents,experiences, 39 all of which buffet up against us, strike us, pound us, concuss us, leaving us battered, dented, impressed and depressed, until we find a way to usefully surf the whirlingcurrent .H’rywasfirsttofashionaseaworthyvessel in the form of a career, navigating his way to a viable channel long before Wm did. Wm ’s dark mood of the late 1860s—a crisis that appears thinly disguised as a case study of the “sick soul” in TheVarietiesof Religious Experience—can be attributed to an inability to plot a...