Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters between Wiliam and Henry James

Chapter 19

112 .19. Wm may have preferred that H’ry write only of the literal, but that didn’t mean he was incapable of metaphoric or figurative language himself, particularly when it came to water imagery. In 1899, reacting to the warmongering of Governor Teddy Roosevelt, Wm leveled a charge of abstractness in the Boston Evening Transcript. “[Roosevelt] gushes over war as the ideal condition of human society,” Wm wrote. “He swamps everything together in one flood of abstract bellicose emotion.” If H’ry thought that the charge of abstractness might apply to him as well, he buried it beneath a general malaise. “You have an admirable eloquence,” he wrote of Wm ’s argument. “But the age is all to the vulgar.” Bythelate 1890s, Wm wasawell-known publicintellectual . He had begun lending his name to campaigns against wrongs ranging from vivisection, which he had promoted as a younger man, to an imperialist spirit grown rampant in the country. He may have felt even more responsible for the latter. In “Is Life Worth Living?” and “What Makes a Life Significant?” he had 113 argued that cultivating a certain “strenuousness” gave life its finest interest. This had been warped into Roosevelt ’s “The Strenuous Life” (Roosevelt had been Wm ’s student at Harvard), which employed a latent militant spirit as a fulcrum for utopian idealism. Wm tried to countermand this in The Varieties of Religious Experience , which argued that the “real strenuous life” was theonethatwaslivedasif Godexisted—thatis,alifein whichdecisionsandactionsweremadetochimewitha good one could sense afoot in the universe. TheVarieties of Religious Experience was a wild success, but it did nothing to prevent the country’s descent into imperial aggression, and soon the United States was occupying the Philippines, where in Wm ’s view his country was merely acting as pirate. H’ry agreed. The only thing that had so far offered balance to his country’s “crudities ” was the fact that until then it had no record of overseas murder and theft. “Terminato—terminato!” he wrote Wm . “One would like to be a Swiss or a Montenegrian now.” In the years following TheVarietiesof ReligiousExperienceandTheWingsof theDove,Wm andH’ryremained productive, but the rest of the decade proved disappointing for both of them. In 1907, Wm told H’ry that 114 he wouldn’t be surprised if Pragmatism triggered in philosophy something like “the protestant reformation .” It didn’t, and soon enough he was handing off the reins of even psychology to Sigmund Freud. That same year, publication began of the twenty-four volumes of H’ry’s New York edition, each furnished with a 7,000-word preface. H’ry hoped for remuneration, but the books sold poorly. If the brothers had gestated together in the womb of art, then their crib was a utopian spirit heady in the 1840s, the time of their extreme youth. Henry Sr. was an ardent follower of Emanuel Swedenborg and Charles Fourier, and at least one biographer has likened the James family household to a “stale phalanstery ,” after Fourier’s vision of the perfect living arrangement. Utopian imagery recurs throughout the letters. A note from Wm during his time in Brazil is addressed from the “Original Seat of Garden of Eden,” and in 1877 H’ry anticipated that his letter to Wm in Newport would find him “wrapped up in the enchantments of Paradise”—that is, reclining under a cedar in the same landscape John La Farge had painted. Utopian enthusiasm faded in the 1850s with the failure of the social experiments of Fourier and Robert 115 Owen, but it surged again in the 1890s in the wake of successful, idealistic novels by Samuel Butler, William Morris, Edward Bellamy, and many others. Wm must have felt pounded by opposing tides. On the one hand, his argument for a strenuous life had backfired horrifically ,andontheother,hehadalwaysbeensuspiciousof schemesbasedontoo-generousassessmentsof human nature. He had once written that the instinct toward ownership “discredit[ed] in advance all radical forms of communistic utopia,” and, even if it hadn’t, could the race truly be said to have outgrown the bloodlust that penetrated every nook of history? “The old humaninstinctsof war-makingandconquest,”Wm wrote H’ry in 1899, “sweep all principles away before them.” Still, Wm had tried. In an age of failed systems, he had proposed a system of his own, pragmatism, rooted in history and designed to avoid the hubris that doomed its predecessors. But it failed, too. Wholly committed to...