5. Newport and the Jameses, Continued

THERE WAS, OF COURSE, more to family life than the father, and time has not staled but, if anything, only increased our interest in all the Jameses, beyond even the warm and protective attention Harry threw back over them from the rosy retrospect of 1913, from another century and from the edge of an even more disastrous war than the one bearing down on America in 1860, when the mother and the father, the brothers and the sister, were all gone and there was no one left but Harry. “We were,” he wrote on page two of his autobiography, in what was essentially its founding statement, “to my sense, the blest group of us, such a company of characters and such a picture of differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us, to that fond fancy, pleads for preservation, and... I shall be ashamed, as of a cold impiety, to find any element altogether negligible.”¹

The mother, Mary Robertson Walsh, was Scottish on her mother’s side, Irish on her father’s. She met Henry James through her brother Hugh, who was a student with Henry at Princeton Theological Seminary. Mary had long talks with Henry, who persuaded her to leave her family’s Presbyterian church (because the Gospels do not require ministers) and persuaded her also to marry him. The ceremony was performed on July 28, 1840, by the mayor of New York, Isaac Varian. Mary was thirty, Henry twenty-nine. When Henry had his vastation Mary was thirty-four. In 1846, two years later, she wrote a friend about her enthusiasm for the utopian ideas of Charles Fourier, read to her by “my hopeful, loving Henry.”²

By 1848 she had five children, the oldest of whom was six and a half. About the time Alice was born in that year, Henry Senior was beginning to write and publish in the New York newspapers against the institution of marriage. In 1849 Mary had a miscarriage, a severe hemorrhage, and for a time her life was in great danger.

Mary ran the household, which in 1850 consisted of at least thirteen persons: the five children, herself, her husband, her sister Catharine—Aunt Kate—and five Irish servant girls between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. Her husband was against the women’s movement. He thought that a woman should serve as “man’s patient and unrepining drudge, his beast of burden, his toilsome ox, his dejected ass.” Henry Senior’s conflicted attitudes must have affected his children. Certainly they affected William. Henry Senior had the utopian’s dislike of all institutions. He indulged in high-minded—one might say overtheorized—denunciations of marriage, yet he himself stayed comfortably, parasitically, sybaritically within a relationship from which, if he ever thought seriously of leaving it, no trace of that thought has survived.³

Mary tolerated it all. She was the emotional and workaday center of the family, the rock that made it all possible. And whatever her irrepressible husband wrote or said, he was, like the children—like the other children, one wishes to say—utterly dependent on her. Alice found in her “the essence of divine maternity, from which I was to learn great things, give all but ask nothing.” In this way Mary made herself indispensable and, as Jean Strouse observed, put everyone permanently in her debt.

The 1850s saw the promulgation by the Vatican of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary and the publication of Coventry Patmore’s The Angel in the House. Women were being unrealistically adored and unreasonably subordinated at the same time. Mary’s favorite child was Harry; he gave her the least trouble. He spoke later of “her gathered life in us, and of her having no other... We simply lived by her.” He went on to say, “Nothing was in the least worth while without her,” and he never forgot “the mere force of her complete availability.” She saw things clearly and spoke her mind. She thought, as she said in 1874, that the trouble with William was “that he must express every fluctuation of feeling, and especially every unfavorable symptom.” She offered advice; she wrote warm letters. “My Darling Will,” she would start out, even when darling Will was thirty-two.⁴

For all the family’s reckless expressiveness and rebelliousness and its often indictable teasing, Mary’s place at its emotional center was completely secure. She knew it and seems, after a fashion, to have flourished in it. The following scrap of correspondence, written by Mary to her husband thirty years after they were married, when they were both sixty, is not the voice of a shattered or broken woman. She is away from home, tending to Alice. He is home, ill. “My heart melts with tenderness toward you, my precious one,” she writes, “but my prayer is that we may both be saved from the great folly and wickedness of anxiety about each other—your loving wifey.”⁵

Harry, her second son, was seventeen and a half when the family returned to America and to Newport in September 1860. A photograph of about this time shows a self-possessed, clean-shaven, fashionably dressed young man with a full head of dark hair. He is standing easily and looking straight at the camera. William usually did not. Harry’s eyes, which do not pierce or otherwise call attention to themselves, are already those of the artist, on whom, as he once said, “nothing is lost.” He was a good enough student, and he was an omnivorous reader. He had written letters, stories, and plays while abroad. After returning to Newport, he took art lessons from William Morris Hunt, as did his brother William, but his talent and his interest in this direction were less than William’s, and his real life was in reading, reading, and yet more reading. And, of course, in writing. In Newport this year he did some translations of plays by Alfred de Musset and tales by Prosper Mérimée. None of this was published.

Harry, most often paired with Willy, although sometimes with Wilky, was close now to his elder brother—though William, always and unforgettably the oldest, was beginning to move in a sphere by himself. Nevertheless, Harry was the nearest observer of his brother William’s entire life, and over the years, despite lapses, disagreements, and moments of devilment and pique, Harry was in the main William’s closest confidant, with the important exception of his wife, Alice. Because so much of what is known about William, especially in his youth, comes to us filtered by and through Henry, Henry must be considered the co-author of any serious account of William’s early life. But their closeness began to change in Newport as William’s choices led him to places where Henry did not care to follow, and where Henry was no longer obliged by their father to do so.

 

Wilky turned fifteen in the fall of 1860. (He used the “ie” ending; friends and family often wrote “Wilky.”) Frequently paired with Harry from Geneva (1855) on, he wore his hair like Harry’s, but he had a fuller, heavier face. He was, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian recalled, “of middle height, broad shouldered and symmetrical.” As a boy, he was healthy, robust, and very sociable. Once in Europe, in the mountains, when he was quite young, he was bitten by a snake, and his younger brother, Bob, recalled many years later how a village priest “thrust a heated knife into Wilkie’s adder-bitten finger and saved him from death.”⁶

Wilky was the only member of the family who disliked reading, an activity, Harry noted, that was “inhuman and repugnant to him.” When the family arrived in Newport in September 1860, the father took Wilky and Bob to Concord and enrolled them in the progressive school opened there by Frank Sanborn, a friend of Emerson and Thoreau and a close ally of the abolitionist John Brown. Wilky was a great favorite at the school; he was “incomparable,” said Julian Hawthorne. “Besides being the best dressed boy in the school, and in manner and talk the most engaging, his good humor was inexhaustible.” He soon had a visible crush on a girl named Grace Mitchell. From Julian’s point of view, Wilky just “could not preserve his poise in Grace’s presence.”⁷

Bob, a year younger than Wilky, was fourteen the year of the return to Newport. In later life Bob remembered his childhood as meager and sad, filled with disappointment and neglect, and disfigured by awful portents. “I developed such an ability for feeling hurt and wounded that I became quite convinced by the time I was twelve years old that I was a foundling,” he wrote. A photograph taken a year and a half after the return shows a good-looking young man, all dressed up, slumping in his chair and staring straight ahead with a troubled frown. Other evidence from this time suggests there was another side. When he was nine, his father thought he had “ten times the go-ahead of all the rest of his children.” We have Julian Hawthorne’s word that at the Sanborn school Bob was “robust and hilarious, tough, tireless as hickory, great in the playground, not much of a scholar... full of fun and audacities... He was hugely popular in the school.” Bob stayed only one year at Sanborn’s, though Wilky came back for a second. Bob’s year at home and subsequent stays at home were unhappy. Moody and self-pitying, he was a trial to his parents. His plan in 1860 was to go into dry goods and make a lot of money.⁸

When twenty-three-year-old Ellen Emerson and her twenty-year-old sister, Edith, visited Newport for three glorious weeks in July 1862, Bob James had been out of school and at home for over a year. Wilky, Bob, and Alice came in their small sailboat—called, one might have guessed, the Alice—to take Ellen and Edith sailing. Wilky sailed the boat at first, then handed the tiller to Ellen. Bob instantly came to Ellen’s side, to be helpful, as she reported in detail in a letter. “‘Take care, Miss Ellen,’ he had said. ‘That way Miss Ellen... No, no this way now.’ At last there came a very exciting moment. ‘So! So! No, the other way! Look out for heads! Here! Let me,’ and he seized the helm and screamed something to Wilky by the mast and the sail whirled across the boat which went up on one side and down on the other, turned half-way round, and we recovered ourselves and picked up our hats and laughed all but Robby who was quite shocked.” At home in the evenings Robby—Bob—was quieter and, Ellen wrote, “by his piquant silence and dancing eyes kept us in a chronic fever of curiosity.” Bob was not quite sixteen.⁹

Alice, the youngest, the brilliant sister, had just turned twelve when they all came back to Newport. In later years she was haunted, says her biographer, by a sense of deprivation, of “there not being enough love in her own family to go around.” There is not much from the early years to refute this. A photograph of her at six shows a sad little girl, all but extinguished by her long black dress, heavy black cape with geometrical trim, and tight white lace collar. A photo of her at nine shows her in Paris, bearing up stoically beneath a large spreading dress and a voluminous, fancy-cut three-quarter-length coat. Her eyes, in all her photographs, are focused on something in the distance. Her repose seems distant too. At eleven we see her studying at home under her father’s eye, “reducing decimal fractions to their lowest possible rate of subsistence.” Back in Newport, at twelve and a half, she is the quiet smiling sister at the table dominated by boisterous older boys. In July 1862, now almost fourteen, she goes with her father to call on Miss Ellen and Miss Edith, goes sailing with them in the boat named after her, and makes funny conversation with Robby.¹⁰

William wrote her fond, playful, hyperbolical, adoring letters for years; it was a long, teasing, brotherly flirtation, an ironical but affectionate courtship that has a modern reader wondering at its excesses. Alice must have found William’s attention both flattering and a burden. There is no question that there was a strong current of feeling between sister and brother. The most direct and revealing single image that survives of William James is a pencil sketch he did of himself when he was about twenty-four and Alice was seventeen or eighteen. Harry remembered him drawing it, sitting in front of a mirror. So he is not looking at us, but at himself. Or perhaps at Alice, to whom he gave the sketch. She kept it all her life, between the pages of a book, where her companion Katharine Loring found it after Alice James’s death.¹¹

Life among the Jameses was a perpetual tussle for control. Partly because there was so much unconventionality and gleeful disorder in the family, control was a strategy and a goal for most of the members. Unable ever to control himself for long, the father tried to control the family. His hectic moving them about is only the most obvious of his many controlling behaviors. His wife, Mary, exercised control by being the opposite of her husband, the calm and predictable center, the one who kept track of money and correspondence and who presided over family relations. Alice learned how to use her poor health to make and dominate a space for herself, creating conditions of exclusive and extensive personal needs. William had a prolonged and disorderly youth, as had his father, and, like his sister, William found ways to use his neurasthenia and precarious health to get his way. Henry Junior became famous for his control over his language, his point of view, his life, and his papers. Bob cultivated misfortune and aggressive resentment as ways of asserting an identity and making a place for himself. Wilky, whose inability to handle money was even worse than his father’s, was perhaps the one James offspring who never developed a successful way of controlling others.

 

Connecting the natural setting and the social liveliness of Newport, and giving expression to both, was the studio of William Morris Hunt, where William diligently went every day to prepare himself for a life of art. Hunt, now thirty-six, had been born in Brattleboro, Vermont. He went to Harvard, contracted tuberculosis, and traveled to Europe, where he stayed twelve years, during which time he studied with Jean-François Millet, who was then living in poverty in a basement in a village called Barbizon, near Paris. After buying Millet’s The Sower and many of his drawings, Hunt returned to America in 1856, settling at Newport in a house called Hill Top, with a large studio behind it.

Hunt was, in Harry’s description, “all muscular spareness and brownness and absence of waste [with a] long arch of handsome nose, upwardness of strong eyebrow, and glare, almost, of eyes that both recognized and wondered.” Here he taught, to John La Farge, William and Henry James, and perhaps a dozen others, the painting methods of Thomas Couture (a teacher of Manet’s) and “the universal humanistic significance of Millet’s treatment of rural subjects.” La Farge recalled how Hunt introduced him to “the teachings, the sayings, and the curious spiritual life which a great artist like Millet opens to his devotees.” Hunt’s studio was dominated by the spirit of Millet. “Every day some remark of Millet was quoted, some way of his was noticed, some part of his life was told. He was in this way, in those studios, a patron saint.”¹²

“Interest once shed upon a subject is liable to remain always with the subject,” William James later wrote in his Talks to Teachers, and his own early interest in Delacroix, Millet, Hunt, and La Farge remains visible in the paintings and drawings by James that survive. He did a portrait of Kitty Temple (she of the “Wheeeeew!” letter) that is strong and competent. His drawings show real mastery and power. With few exceptions they are studies of human figures, especially of heads, above all of faces. They are particularized and individuated, as are his drawings of animals, almost all of which convey tension, energy, and motion. Painting and drawing, not just for the professional artist but for anyone, are ways of paying attention to particular things. The habit of attention, the ability to regard every single thing and person with what Ruskin called a “separate intention of the eye,” is the most lasting and important thing William James got from his time as an apprentice artist.¹³

Hunt’s studios were attractive too because of the presence of Hunt’s most gifted student, John La Farge, a tall, darkly handsome American, born in New York but deeply and exotically Europeanized. Harry remembered La Farge as “jacketed in black velvet or clad from top to toe in old fashioned elegances of cool white, and leaning much forward with his protuberant and over-glazed, his doubting yet all seeing vision.” William had met La Farge at Hunt’s early in the summer of 1859, and had run to Harry and friends and burst out, “There’s a new fellow come to Hunt’s class. He knows everything. He has read everything. He has seen everything—paints everything. He’s a marvel!” La Farge, who would go on to a great career as a painter and decorative artist—he was the discoverer of the opalescent stained glass that Louis Tiffany took over, which made Tiffany famous—was, in Harry’s view as well, “quite the most interesting person we knew.”¹⁴

It was Harry’s judgment, much later, that there was “no stroke of it”—William’s drawing—that did not show “his possible real mastery of the art.” La Farge, who was as well or better qualified to say, told an interviewer that William drew “beautifully,” “repeating the word three or four times.” Later he wrote that William had showed an “extraordinary promise of being a remarkable, perhaps a great painter.”¹⁵

But William decided against a life as an artist, and around April 1861 he quit drawing and painting, with a suddenness that Harry never forgot, the same kind of suddenness that marked so many of his father’s decisions. Perhaps his father’s disapproval finally got to him; perhaps it was Hunt’s telling him that America did not value its artists; perhaps he convinced himself that he would never be more than a mediocre painter; perhaps it was the eye trouble and the nervous indigestion he was beginning to complain of. Many years later he would tell his son that the year in the studio had pretty much quenched his desire to be an artist. More startling and unexpected is his comment in The Principles of Psychology in which he called aesthetics the study of the useless.

Whatever the exact mixture of reason, rationale, and disinclination that propelled William’s decision, it must be noted that April 1861 was a troubling, exciting, decisive time of large changes in American life. The Confederates fired on Fort Sumter on April 12. Three days later President Lincoln issued a call to arms. Two days after that, on the seventeenth, Rhode Island militiamen marched off to fight. William James and Tom Perry went to see them off. That night a fire broke out in Newport, and Harry was injured while working at one of the huge, heavy pumping machines helping to put the fire out. Apparently he hurt his back; he would be years getting over it, and it would disqualify him for military service. Eight days after Harry’s accident, on April 26, William signed up as a ninety-day recruit in the Newport Artillery Company, a state militia unit. On the following day, Tom Perry noted, “we made bandages all evening.” Next morning, “after breakfast we all rolled bullets.” William Morris Hunt himself was swept up in the war and would soon move to Boston. Small wonder that the world of painting suddenly seemed inadequate.¹⁶

The charmed life at Newport did not collapse all at once. When Ellen and Edith Emerson visited in the summer of 1862, more than a year later, they had a glorious season, which appears to us as something far back, an age of unreachable innocence. “We are... having the best time in the world,” wrote Ellen, “taking walks on the Cliff, drives on the Avenue, baths on the beaches and going to parties in the evening.” They went for a picnic; it was like life in a wonderful painting. “The table was set in the valley under a tall ash-tree,” Ellen wrote. “Edith and I on the back and William and Wilky on the front seat of ‘the Tilbury’ drove over there 7 miles in the afternoon, having a grand time and laughing all the way. Our drive home was the best however,” she said, “through a thick fog and the boys singing.”

The moment seems all the more fragile because, as none of those young people could forget for very long, the guns had been firing for the past fifteen months; it was not just one wagonful of young people whose youth and innocence were driving off into the fog and the night.¹⁷