"Henry James's Inward Aches"

In 1906, Henry James was astounded and moved by a personal message alleged to have come to him from his long-dead mother via a spiritualist. Relieved by this message—for he had been suffering from an unspoken anxiety—, James was also touched by the reopening of communication after twenty-four years. As his sister-in-law Alice noted, “If the spirits of the departed are to reach us, ‘tis we somehow who must keep the path open” (CWJ 3: 309). The incident was significant to James not merely for its disconcerting air of the supernatural, but also because he had struggled all of his adult life with the difficulty of achieving intimacy with his closest associates. In a world governed by social conventions, James found true contact between individuals often impossible, in spite of his lifelong efforts to cultivate sympathy, to share with his fellow mortals what he called the “inward ache” (CT 12: 428).

Both Henry James and his brother William wrestled with the paradox of sympathy throughout their intellectual careers. For them, the task of “keep[ing] the path open” to human contact promised to mitigate a world otherwise beset by alienation. As I shall argue, Henry James dramatized this problematic issue in two of his late tales, “The Beast in the Jungle” and “A Round of Visits.” The reader of their personal correspondence and professional writings also finds a sympathetic connection that sustained the two brothers and held them together, intellectually and emotionally, despite the ocean that often separated them during their adult years. One of James’s wistful comments to his older brother voices the dependence coupled with a sense of disappointment that characterizes their correspondence:

An intelligent male brain to communicate with occasionally would be a practical blessing. I have encountered none for so long that I don’t even know how to address yours and find it impossible to express a hundred ideas which at various times I have laid aside, to be propounded to you.

(CWJ 1: 206)

Henry’s tentativeness here suggests that even the closest of connections often fails to hold, as he once noted in a lament that seems aimed at all personal relations: “But do we, in talk or in writing, ever really answer each other? Each of us says his limited personal say out of the midst of his own circumstances, and the other one clips what satisfaction he can from it” (HJL 1: 427–28). The passage bespeaks an almost Emersonian despair about the barriers to human intimacy. As Emerson writes in “Experience,” “Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with” (48).

To keep the path open, one must struggle against this “innavigable sea” between people, as both Jameses knew. In 1899, William James published “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” an essay that might be read as an admission of the impossibility of intimacy in a world of strangers:

We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others—the others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours.

(132)

The supreme failure of sympathy—our blindness to the feelings of others, our obsessions with our own narrow interests, our inability to connect with other people’s claims except insofar as they intersect with our own—provides the subject of James’s essay, which ends with no solution but an exhortation to remember that certain important matters may fall outside our ken. For William, humans are forever blind, and only a leap of faith—unsupported by true insight into the feelings of others—can temper the otherwise inevitable isolation that we all experience. If the path between individuals cannot be kept open, at...