Wm & H’ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters between William & Henry James by J. C. Hallman (review)

In this delightful (auto)biographical memoir of a dedicated Jamesian bibliophile, the novelist J. C. Hallman offers us a deeply personal yet critically astute account of a life spent with the letters of William and Henry James. Launching from his conviction that “there exists no other epistolary commingling of minds as complete between figures that have each proven so influential” (viii), Hallman draws us in with a winning anecdote about his purchase of a complete set of William’s letters at “about half my net worth” at the time (x). Even before this pivotal purchase that initiates his extended preoccupation with the brothers’ correspondence, Hallman bicycles around Philadelphia with “cinder-block” library volumes stowed in his satchel, “their stiff library binding gouging my lower back as I biked around town. I humped them everywhere, like a penance” (viii). Hallman’s image of his fond penitential lugging of the volumes is proleptic of his account of the weight-lifting machine sent to Henry by William in 1886 to provide an exercise routine designed to counterbalance Henry’s demanding regimen of literary production. As Hallman observes, the “‘lifting cure’ cut both ways, however. It served just as well as a metaphor for the toil of literary study,” for, as suggested by a three-stage process for the integration of exercise with sitting that Henry devised to alleviate his back pain, “the real problem was the mysterious toll taken by language. Words and the body were incompatible, and the body had to be tricked into permitting prolonged literary work” (7, 8). The doubly curative and penitential consolations of lifting words and their weights applies equally to the effects of epistolary work itself. For both brothers, letters, “though often a kind of cure (‘my spirits were revived by the arrival of a most blessedly brotherly letter’), were made from language and could therefore become their own illness” (8–9). Not only did Henry’s epistolary production increase when he was ill, but many of his key plots hinge on illnesses, often nebulous or ontological in nature. Writing and illness were for Henry fundamentally interintricated: “Writing about illness became the laboratory in which he tested writerly theories. His later plots often hinge on whether characters are truly sick, and ailments, either mental or physical, were precisely the kind of citadel that language found it a challenge to breach” (10–11). In Derridean terms, language in general and letters in particular function as pharmakon, at once disease and cure, much like the weight-lifting machine or Hallman’s cinder-block library volumes. Whether consciously theorized or not, such moments in Hallman’s narrative rewardingly exemplify what Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, following Emerson, term “creative reading,” which both discovers and performs the unforeseeable singularity of literature (16). [End Page E-17]

Hallman figures the relation between the James brothers alternately as symbiotic and rivalrous. On one hand, they are imagined as twins whose shared aesthetic passion links them forever: “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 . . . Wm and H’ry never truly left the womb of art” (37, 43). In this trope of gestation, they are figured as unborn and conjoined twins forever consigned to a prenatal limbo of artistic appreciation. On the other hand, and unsurprisingly, this ambivalent conjoinment gives way, in Hallman’s tropology, to a splintered rhetoric of division and opposition. The brothers are repeatedly cast in terms of binaries: William was “marked by ‘activity,’” “outgoing and extroverted”; Henry, “by way of contrast, was marked by ‘passivity’; he was quiet, and lived in ‘a world of impressions’” (37). The scare quotes around “activity” and “passivity” perhaps register Hallman’s discomfort with the simplicity of these oppositions, but this binaristic construction persists as a major structuring device in his text. As he acknowledges...