2. Growing Up Zigzag

WILLIAM JAMES WAS BORN on January 11, 1842, at the Astor House in New York City. He was the first child of Henry and Mary Walsh James, both thirty-one; they had just bought a house at 5 Washington Place but had returned to the hotel for the lying-in. On March 3, Ralph Waldo Emerson, then thirty-eight and just beginning to be known outside eastern Massachusetts, gave the first of a series of lectures, called “The Times,” at the New York Society Library. Among his hearers was the new father, Henry James, who was instantly impressed, writing Emerson a warmly appreciative letter and inviting him to his home.

Emerson was at this time trying to recover from the devastating loss of his own firstborn, Waldo, who had died of scarlatina on January 22 at the age of five. Emerson and Henry James quickly became friends, and James family tradition has it that Emerson went up to see and give his blessing to the new infant. Mythological coincidings should never be swallowed whole or dismissed out of hand. There is no doubt that Emerson came to have an effect on William, but there is also no doubt that Emerson’s immediate—and enormous—effect was on William’s father. The biographer of Henry James Sr. says that Henry’s letters to Emerson are “the richest emotional outpouring he left behind.” He further says that Emerson wholly changed the direction of James’s thinking, turning him from being “entrenched in a remote and embattled redoubt of the Scotch-Irish Presbyterian mind” to the “larger contemporary, non-sectarian intellectual world.”¹

When William was fifteen months old, his brother Henry, known first as Harry, then as Henry Junior, was born, on April 15, 1843. Their father took the family, with the two small boys, to England in October of the same year. Crossing the Channel to France, two-year-old William was seasick and “screamed incessantly to have the ‘hair taken out of his mouth.’”²

When Willy was two and a half and Harry just thirteen months old, their father had another life-changing experience; this one was shattering. They were living in a place called Frogmore Cottage, near Windsor Castle. Looking back from thirty-five years later, Henry Senior wrote:

 

One day... towards the close of May [1844], having eaten a comfortable dinner, I remained sitting at the table after the family had dispersed, idly gazing at the embers in the grate, thinking of nothing, and feeling only the exhilaration incident to a good digestion, when suddenly—in a lightning flash as it were—“fear came upon me, and trembling, which made all my bones to shake.” To all appearance it was a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life. The thing had not lasted ten seconds before I felt myself a wreck.³

 

James added that the depression he felt in the wake of this experience took him two years to pull out of, and that he came to see it as representative of what everyone had to go through in his or her development. It was a sort of second birth.

What life was like for the small boys while their father struggled out from under his “vastation” (a common seventeenth-century variant of “devastation,” an archaism by the 1840s) can only be imagined. Reliable details of William’s early life are scarce. We know that he called his father and mother “Henwy” and “Mawy” about this time; his father wished to avoid the more formal names and relationships, and he taught his sons to use first names before they could even pronounce them. It was an early example of what would now be seen as Henry Senior’s extraordinary parental narcissism. He also seems to have been genuinely fond of his children, and it is obvious that he got great pleasure from his systematic nonconformity. William, predictably, fought with his father and, equally predictably, had moments of tenderness toward his mother, though she always preferred his brother Henry. There is a curious sentence in a letter William wrote to the family from England in 1880 in which he said, “I found myself thinking in a manner unexampled in my previous life, of Father and Mother”—so much for Henwy and Mawy—“in their youth coming to live there as a blushing bridal pair, with most of us children still unborn, and all the works unwritten; and my heart flowed over with a kind of sympathy, especially for the beautiful, sylphlike, and inexperienced mother.”⁴

During the summer of 1845, Henry and Mary James took their little family back to America, where it continued to expand. When William was three and a half, Wilky (Garth Wilkinson James) was born. When he was four and a half, Bob (Robertson) was born, and when he was six and a half, in the summer of 1848, Alice was born. The next year Mary James suffered a miscarriage, after which she had no more children. As the family grew, it also moved about. William had lived in at least eighteen different houses by the time he was sixteen; this does not count the numerous long residences in hotels, which led his brother Henry to say that the young Jameses were “hotel children.”

It was mainly the father who moved the family around. For impulses that he called reasons, he sent and withdrew his children to and from school after school, starting with, and later interspersed with, stretches of home tutoring. Until William was ten he was taught at home, by a variety of tutors, mostly young women. When he was ten, he attended a New York school called the Institute Vergnes, on lower Broadway near Bond Street, learning French among “infuriated ushers,” as his brother Harry recalled it, “of foreign speech and flushed complexion, the tearing across of hapless ‘excersizes’ and dictees, and the hurtle through the air of dodged volumes.”⁵

Between the ages of ten and sixteen, William attended at least nine different schools, with various interludes of schooling at home. After the Institute Vergnes, the year William was eleven and twelve, he and Henry went to a school kept by one Richard Pulling Jenks. Jenks was “bald, rotund, of ruddy complexion” and was also, said Harry, “one of the last of the whackers.” This school was also on Broadway, near Fourth Street, and consisted of two upper rooms. William did Latin and Greek with Mr. Jenks, penmanship with Mr. Dolmidge, and drawing with Mr. Coe. The next year, 1854–55, it was yet another school, this one run by Messrs. Forest and Quackenbos, at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. William was in the “classical department,” which meant learning Latin with George Quackenbos.⁶

Formal education apart, life in the James family in New York was instructive in its own inimitable way. The boys went to some sort of theater almost every weekend. It might be Barnum’s Great American Museum or the dancer Lola Montez; they went to many different versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1854 they saw A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and in 1855 The Comedy of Errors. Pictures—that is, paintings—figured prominently as well. A large view of Florence by Thomas Cole hung in their home. They went to see Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, which was displayed “in a wondrous flare of projected gaslight.”⁷

Among the childhood books William later remembered fondly was Caroline Sturgis Tappan’s Rainbows for Children, which came out when he was six. His brother remembered that Hawthorne’s Wonder-Book “had helped to enchant our boyhood.” Harry also recalled later how Rodolph Toepffer’s two-volume Voyages en Zigzag was carefully perused by himself and by Willy, who evidently became lastingly fond of the term. Dickens’s David Copperfield was read aloud in the downstairs parlor. When the part about the Murdstones’ heartless treatment of young Davy was read, the parlor table, which was covered with a cloth, began to tremble and shake. Under the table was little Harry, sobbing uncontrollably, having sneaked down after his bedtime to listen. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in 1852 when Willy was ten, was a great family favorite, “much less a book,” Harry wrote later, “than a state of vision, of feeling, and of consciousness.”⁸

William also read the boys’ adventure books of Mayne Reid, beginning with Rifle Rangers in 1850 and Scalp Hunters in 1851. These are florid, swaggering, irresistible books, full of excitement and danger and violence. Reid, who was born in Ireland, came to America at twenty, traveled and traded on the Red River and the Missouri, wandered the American West and Mexico, became a journalist in Baltimore (where he knew Poe), fought in the Mexican War in 1846, and tried to fight in Hungary in 1849 before retiring to England at thirty-one to start writing up his adventures.

This is how Scalp Hunters starts: “Unroll the world’s map, and look upon the great northern continent of America. Away to the wild west, away toward the setting sun, away beyond many a far meridian, let your eyes wander. Rest them where golden rivers rise among peaks that carry the eternal snow. Rest them there.” Mayne Reid had a big impact on James, giving him his first real tilt toward the outdoor life. Years later he recalled how Reid “was forever extolling the hunters and field-observers of living animals’ habits, and keeping up a fire of invective against the ‘closet naturalists,’ as he called them, the collectors and classifiers, and handlers of skeletons and skins.”⁹

In 1855 Father took the family abroad again, intending, as he playfully wrote his friends Edmund and Mary Tweedy, to “educate the babies in strange lingoes.” They went to Geneva, where Willy, then thirteen, attended first the Institution Haccius, then the Pensionnat Roediger. Though he made some progress in German and, especially, French, his father soon concluded that Swiss schools were overrated, and he promptly moved the family to Paris. Then, in late November, he packed them off to London, where they continued to traipse from one address to another while being tutored at home in Latin and in the “ordinary branches of English education” by Robert Thomson (who later and quite coincidentally had Robert Louis Stevenson as a student).¹⁰

Willy got a microscope for Christmas in 1855. He was nearly fourteen, and his interests were in both science and art. In June 1856 Father shepherded the family back across the Channel to Paris. William wrote his friend Ed Van Winkle in New York, describing the cities he had recently lived in with colorful language that tells us something about his frame of mind. “Geneva,” he wrote, “is a queer old city... The old part is black, the streets are black, the houses are black, the people are black. It’s a regular 15th century place. In it is Calvin’s church with the very canopy under which he preached.” London he liked as little: “It is a great huge unwieldy awkward colorless metropolis with a little brown river crawling through it.” He liked Paris: “The sky is blue, the houses are white and everything else is red. There is a general red hue about the population which comes, I suppose, from the red trowsers of the soldiers. The sun and the white plaster and the bright colors are all very dazzling.” But New York was where William really wanted to be. “Taken as a whole,” he wrote, Paris “is not to be compared to New York.”¹¹

In Paris, in the fall of 1856, in a house Harry remembered as having “the merciless elegance of tense red damask,” William did Virgil, German, and math with a tutor, a poet named Lerambert, who was “spare and tightly black-coated, spectacled, pale and prominently intellectual.” On days when M. Lerambert did not appear, William studied history and geography with his father. He had no companions except his brothers, and he was not allowed to play in “these nasty narrow French streets” any more than he had been allowed to play in the streets of London. After a short while, William’s father put him in a language school called the Institution Fezandié in Paris, run by a follower of the Utopian thinker Charles Fourier.¹²

During the winter of 1857, the fifteen-year-old William was accepted into the atelier of the painter Léon Cogniet. Cogniet, then in his sixties, was a famous and honored painter who had run drawing schools in Paris since 1830. His Marius Meditating Among the Ruins of Carthage, which hung in the Luxembourg Gallery, “impressed us the more,” Harry recalled, “in consequence of this family connection.” Cogniet had been a friend of Théodore Géricault, whose Raft of the Medusa hung (still hangs) in the Louvre. In this titanic canvas of the remnants of a ship’s company on a disintegrating raft, the wretchedness of the ragged and the dying still assaults and washes over the viewer with a power like that of the sea itself.

Cogniet also knew Eugène Delacroix, who was William’s favorite painter. “I remember his [William’s] repeatedly laying his hand on Delacroix,” Harry recalled, “whom he found always and everywhere interesting—to the point of trying effects with charcoal and crayon, in his manner.” William particularly admired La Barque de Dante, in which Dante is surrounded by the tormented souls in hell. William liked paintings, of whatever size, that were full of vivid violence or moody desolation.¹³

Nothing ever suited Henry James Sr. for long. In June 1857 he moved the family to Boulogne and enrolled William in the Collège Impériale there. This, Willy explained to a friend, was more a high school than what Americans thought of as a college. One of William’s instructors told his father that William was “an admirable student, and that all the advantages of a first-rate scientific education which Paris affords ought to be accorded to him.” So back to Paris they all went. Henry Senior seems to have moved the family around more to facilitate William’s education than for any other single reason. But financial worries arose in Paris. So back to Boulogne they all went, where it was cheaper to live and where, as it happened, William was happier than anywhere else in Europe. “We... got to have a real home feeling there,” he wrote Ed Van Winkle. There were lots of English-speaking boys at his school. He had a camera now, a “big cumbrous camera,” his brother recalled, “involving prolonged exposure, exposure mostly of myself, darkened development, also interminable, and ubiquitous brown blot.” Willy also had galvanic batteries, administered shocks to anyone willing, and made the family careful to examine anything before they sat on it. He collected “marine animals in splashy aquaria” and went in for the “finely speculative and boldly disinterested absorption of curious drugs.”¹⁴

Perhaps he was already interested in various states of consciousness. What fifteen-year-old isn’t? Certainly he was, temperamentally, a risk taker all his life. His student and biographer Ralph Barton Perry says, “He ‘tried’ things, nitrous oxide gas, mescal, Yoga, Fletcherism, mental healers.” His experiment with mescal (when he was fifty-four) was a failure. He had a terrible hangover the next day, and declared, “I will take the visions on trust.” He said of alcohol that it excited the “yes” function in people, but his own nervous constitution made drinking unpleasant, and he came to regard it as a problem. “Beware of the enemy, your enemy,—alcohol, of course,” he wrote one friend. Coffee and tobacco also affected him adversely, and he (mostly) avoided them.¹⁵

William did well at school; Harry read voraciously and, it was now noticed, wrote all kinds of stories. The youngest brother, Bob, remembered only humiliation at the end of the school year in Boulogne. Writing to Alice many years later, Bob recalled “the college municipale and its stone vaulted ceiling where Wilky and I went and failed to take prizes... I see yet the fortunate scholars ascend the steps of his [the mayor’s] throne, kneel at his feet, and receive crown or rosette, or some symbol of merit which we did not get. The luck had begun to break early.” The father, eyes fixed mainly on William, saw only that his eldest son behaved very decently in Boulogne toward his brothers, being “perfectly generous and conciliatory... always disposed to help them and never oppress.”¹⁶

By the end of spring 1858, with William sixteen, Harry fifteen, Wilky almost thirteen, Bob almost twelve, and Alice almost ten, Father and Mother took the family back to America, to Newport. But a year in Newport revived disillusionment in Henry Senior. He did not want to go back to New York, he didn’t want to stay in Newport, and he couldn’t find a house he liked in Cambridge—he said he wanted to get Willy into the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard. But he took the whole family abroad once again, this time to Geneva, then to Bonn, and finally, in response to William’s revolt, home again to America.

When Henry James the novelist, many years later, looked back on this time, he found the family’s ceaseless comings and goings, the redoublings back and yet again forth, to be a narrative impossibility. In his memoir he simply omitted any mention of the year spent in Newport between European trips. William would probably have preferred to omit the whole European venture of 1859–60. There were parts he had loved, particularly in Boulogne. But recalling the stay in London and the long stay after it in Paris, William “denounced” it all to his brother Harry as “a poor and arid and lamentable time, in which missing such larger changes and connections as we might have reached out to, we had done nothing he”—Harry is here reporting what William told him—“and I but walk about together in a state of direst propriety, little ‘high’ black hats and inveterate gloves, the childish costume of the place and period, to stare at grey street scenery... dawdle at shop windows and buy water-colors and brushes.”

William’s rejection of his European schooling was not just the judgment of later years. Sixteen-year-old William sent this conclusion to Ed Van Winkle at the time: “We have now been three years abroad. I suppose you would like to know whether our time has been well spent. I think that as a general thing, Americans had better keep their children at home.”¹⁷