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Chapter 2
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6 for the better will come, I feel, with your advent,” H’ry rejoiced. “That will be my cure.” Wm arrived to comfort his brother in May. He was dead by August. H’ry lived another six years. .2. They wrote frequently, with zeal, of illness, of intestines ,of parasites,of orthopedicmystery.In1867,when Wm made passage to France on the Great Eastern, H’ry couldn’t wait for the first letter to arrive from Paris before writing himself. He was uninterested in impressions of the city. “I am more anxious than I can say to hear how you endured your journey . . . your back, that is what I want to hear about.” The trip interrupted Wm ’s medical training, which had begun in 1864. He graduated five years later, after tagging along on a South American expedition with Louis Agassiz and then spending a mostly idle year and ahalf inEurope.Hismedicaltrainingwasincomplete— inlateryears,hedistrusteddoctorshimself,andsampled a variety of unusual cures—but he happily dispensed advicetoH’ry.Onlyfifteenmonthsseparatedthebrothers , but Wm ’s letters often strike a parental tone. 7 Once, in 1886, after H’ry had established himself in England and begun his dizzying churn of novels and criticism, Wm offered to send along a weight-lifting machine. “[It] would be very welcome to me here,” H’ry replied , “as I don’t get exercise enough.” Wm senttheapparatusandasetof heavilyannotated directions. A long accompanying letter explained how the device should be installed and employed. “There is nomuscularcombinationwhichcannotbeexercisedon those weights,” Wm opined, “and a quarter of an hour . . . of from 10 to 20 different movements will wake one up all through one’s cubic contents.” As to the care of the machine, Wm drew a small oil can in the margin—in case H’ry didn’t know what an oil can looked like. The“liftingcure”cutbothways,however. It served just as well as a metaphor for the toilof literarystudy.In1901,Wm complained that work on TheVarietiesof ReligiousExperiencehadlefthim “tiredasamanmighttireof holding out a weight forever.” Long before, H’ry had drawnasimilarparallelinalongletterdetailingathreestage process he had devised to cure his ailing back: [54.224.52.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-30 09:47 GMT) 8 1. A stage in which exercise must go on increasing until it entirely predominates & attains its maximum—even to not sleeping, if necessary. 2. A stage in which sitting, reading, writing &c. may be gradually introduced & allowed to share its empire. 3. A stage in which they will hold their own against it & subsist on an equal & finally a superior footing. In other words, 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. H’ry once wrote of the “damnable nausea (as I call it for want of a better word) that continuous reading & writing bring on.” A doctor advised him to diet, exercise, and “not read.” In 1883,Wm notedthatanabsenceof “headwork”lefthim “consequently in excellent physical condition,” and H’ry lauded mountain climbing because “you sweat therhapsodicalfacultyoutof you.”Lettersthemselves, though often a kind of cure (“my spirits were revived by the arrival of a most blessedly brotherly letter”), weremadefromlanguageandcouldthereforebecome 9 their own illness. Both brothers complained of time lost to correspondence (Wm : “Have just written 15 letters ”; H’ry: “[This] is the 11th letter . . . I have written this morning”), but for H’ry in particular they became a symptom, “the very blight and leak, as it were, of my existence.” Wm always praised H’ry’s letters, but reminded him often that he needn’t feel obliged to write because there was plenty of him to take in through his regularly appearing stories and essays. It wasn’t always dire. Wm took a particular glee in revealing the most intimate details of whatever he suffered . Ringworms acquired en route to Rio de Janeiro “waved” across his face and neck with “undiminished fire.” A six-week growing itch on his “pubes, etc.” (the most subtle “etc.” in letters) proved on inspection to be “a plague of Lice!!” “Painful boils on [his] loins” were a terrible bother—“Christian doctrine is nothing to them”—but the endless attention they inspired, observingandreobserving,pokingandpressing,could “fill a day with quivering interest.” (In 1890, H’ry congratulated Wm on the end of twelve years’ work on The Principles of Psychology: “It must seem as good as the breaking of a boil.”) Special, and playful, attention was reserved for all manner of digestive failure. [54.224.52.210] Project MUSE (2024-03...