The Cosmopolitan American

If the Adams family is the first great American family, the James family is the second. John Adams said that he had to study politics and war so that his children could study mathematics and philosophy. They had to study these subjects, he explained, in order to give their children a right to study the fine arts. When Henry Adams the historian became a friend of William James the philosopher and Henry James the novelist, the great families were linked.

Robert D. Richardson has written the second full-length biography of William James to be published in the last eight years. Perhaps James is an irresistible subject not only because of his pioneering work in psychology, religion, and philosophy, but because of his gifts as a writer. Even off the page, as his sister fondly wrote, "he could give life and charm to a treadmill." He was an extraordinary letter-writer, so there is much in the archive for a biographer to use. But there are inevitable gaps. In The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) he wrote of a case of his being transfixed in panic and fear by the memory of seeing an idiotic epileptic patient in an asylum, provoking James to think: "That shape am I, I felt, potentially." There are over twenty pages cut out of James's diary. Did they contain a reference to his memory of the epileptic patient? We shall never know.

Ralph Barton Perry in The Thought and Character of William James (1936) was the first to take full measure of James's career, personality, and intellectual achievements. Perry identified three "forward steps": James's intellectual and moral discovery in 1870 of Renouvier's idea of free will, his securing a teaching post at Harvard in 1872, and his marriage to Alice Gibbens in 1878. Putting them in progressive order has led readers to think that James's illness could be similarly plotted on an upward curve from sickness to health.

Louis Menand has challenged the story of James's apparent recovery in 1870. A fragmentary record has been used to create a story of breakdown and recovery. Commentators assume that James was despondent after finishing medical school "because of some problem"—whether of family, sex, career, identity, or philosophy. But James was depressive "all his life," Menand argues. Under its cloud "everything else is a problem." Menand's essay on James (American Studies, 2002) is closely and incisively argued, but it is not as new an insight as Menand makes it seem. In Perry's view, for example, James's "periods of depression" had an "oscillating rhythm" that involved a "perpetual uprooting and replanting, and he reaped accordingly." He never rooted "brooding melancholy" out of his nature, and it was "a permanent, though intermittent and subordinate phase of his experience and character." Yet, even if Menand is right that the various problems he mentions don't explain James's illness, it doesn't follow that he did not have them.

James recognized that for psychology in his time "the madhouse, the nursery, the prison, and the hospital have been made to deliver up their material" about the "the world of mind." He eventually thought (as a modern psychiatrist or neurologist might) that his own baffling recurring bouts with illness may have been connected to "the secrets of the nervous system which the last trump may reveal."

In a feminist time it is not surprising that women have played a larger role in recent James biographies, especially Minny Temple, to whom Henry James paid handsome tribute in The Wings of the Dove (1902); Mary Calkins who, with William's determined backing, was eventually allowed to do graduate work at Harvard; and the vivacious and youthful Pauline Goldmark, with whom he ardently climbed mountains. Recent biographers emphasize the importance of William's marriage to Alice Gibbens, because, as Richardson writes, by it he was "reborn emotionally and set on his feet in the narrow professional sense. During this period he began to write the work that carries...