William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (review)

Robert Richardson introduces his excellent William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism as “an intellectual biography” (xiii). “As with my previous books on Thoreau and Emerson,” he explains, “I have tried to read what James read and to show how his reading is reflected in his writing.” Yet despite Richardson’s claim that the book “is primarily narrative, aiming more to present his life than to analyze or explain it,” his analysis of William James’s intellectual background, what he was reading and thinking, is itself an argument about the determining factors in James’s life. Like all worthwhile biographies, this one offers its own implicit answer to the question, “What made this man or woman great?”

Such a question is never simple, and in the case of William James it is particularly difficult. A biographer could easily choose, as so many previous biographers of both Henry and William James have done, to focus on the James family as the determining factor in William’s greatness. Indeed, an entire biography might well be organized around his relationships with each member of that family, especially with its idiosyncratic and tyrannical patriarch, or with brother Henry, whose own genius was both William’s driving inspiration and his chief aggravation. Or, like more recent biographers, one might focus on William’s epic battles with depression and indecision; on the extraordinarily generative intellectual circles in which he moved; or on the epochal political shifts that marked the United States between the Civil War and World War I.¹

Richardson’s methodological choice to focus his attention upon William’s intellectual life does not of course eclipse these other issues. On the contrary, it emphasizes the extent to which all these aspects of William’s life contributed to the rich intellectual atmosphere in which he moved. Richardson thus brings together the strengths of a number of previous books about William James. Like Kim Townsend in Manhood at Harvard, Richardson emphasizes the central role played by the university that furnished an institutional and an intellectual home for William James throughout his life. Like Louis Menand in The Metaphysical Club, he discusses two formative moments of William’s early life: his trip to the Amazon with Louis Agassiz, and his perspective on the Civil War. Like Leon Edel in his great biography of Henry James, Richardson examines the intense rivalries and productive agonistic struggles between brother and brother, and between father and son, that helped define William James’s familial relationships. And like William’s first biographer, Ralph Barton Perry, Richardson offers extended discussions of William’s friendships with the other leading philosophers of his time, excerpting generously from his correspondence to bring those relationships vividly to life.

One effect of these multiple vectors of argument is that they reveal the contradictions that defined William James both personally and intellectually. Here was a man who railed ceaselessly against the evils of all institutional forms (which he lumped together under the umbrella pejorative “bigness” [Letters 90]), yet remained thoroughly devoted to the particular institution of Harvard University throughout his career. His systematic and thoroughgoing skepticism was coupled with an almost unimaginably open mind. Indeed William, whose education was centered in the sciences, was actively curious about the possibility of supernatural events, spiritualism, and the periodic merging of seen and unseen worlds. Further, he gave the impression of boundless energy and physical vitality, yet he struggled throughout his life with a variety of physical and emotional ailments that sometimes left him in almost complete paralysis. And he shared with many other great men that most banal and tiresome of contradictions: he was a devoted husband and father and also an inveterate flirt, possibly even an adulterer.²

The book is primarily devoted to detailing and examining William’s reading and thinking, and thus to charting his influences and inspirations. Some of these influences will be familiar: his early readings of Darwin and responses to the influential anti-Darwinist Agassiz; his father’s own...