Brazil Through the Eyes of William James: Letters, Diaries, and Drawings, 1865-1866 / O Brasil no Olhar de William James: Cartas, Diários e Desenhos, 1865-1866 (review)

This is a beautiful book. Its many pages include William James's 18 letters to his family written during his youthful stint on a scientific expedition to Brazil in 1865–1866 and two diary essays. It also includes James's own short vocabulary of words in English, Portuguese, and the native language Tupi, numerous drawings, and editor Maria Machado's helpful and insightful introduction. This is all published between two covers bound inside with a period map of Brazil and clear identification of James's path of travel. It is a delight to browse through, as well as a clear and comprehensive collection of known materials on the future American philosopher's expedition. And that's just halfway through the book: in a wonderful gesture of cross-cultural scholarship, the contents are then duplicated in Portuguese.

Most of the primary material has been published elsewhere. All but two of the shortest letters and even more of James's drawings are collected in The Correspondence of William James, Volumes 1 and 4 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992 and 1995); one of the diary entries, "A Month on the Solimoens," is contained in full in The Works of William James volume entitled Manuscript Essays and Notes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Carleton Sprague Smith, in "William James in Brazil" Four Papers Presented in the Institute of Brazilian Studies (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1951), had reproduced portions of the Brazilian Diary, which has also been quoted widely as "Notebook Z," the name that James called the document now housed in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. James's vocabulary has been quoted in Christoph Irmscher, The Poetics of Natural History: From William Bartram to William James (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999); and my own Science and Religion in the Era of William James, Volume 2 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming). The great utility of this collection is that it is an assemblage of these documents in one place, and of the explanations given to them in the Machado's fine introduction, which is the most thorough account to date of the historical contexts surrounding twenty-three-year-old James in his first major independent enterprise. The editor also provides a brief background on Brazil at the time of the expedition and close coverage of James's encounter with scientific and racial theories while spending time south of the Equator. Another significance of this book is in the connections it establishes between Brazilian and United States history, first in dual-language publication, and also in its use of scholarship from both countries.

William James's year in Brazil is universally noted in James scholarship, but rarely with much detail or appreciation of its significance. The hard work of natural history collecting and the exposure to exotic climes seem out of step with the rest of young James's experiences studying science and often suffering from illness, depression, and confusion about the direction of his life. The James that emerges from these pages is "a fairly athletic and extroverted youth," and although he still exhibited ambivalence about staying on the trip and about his vocation, during this time, he made his first decisive plan for his future: "he decided to dedicate his future efforts to philosophy" (pp. 10 and 11). This is a foreshadowing of the "tough minded" sides of his later philosophy. While some commentators dismiss the significance of what he derived from his year in Brazil—Robert Richardson, in William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 2006) even calls his writings there "inept . . . bits of failed narrative...