DURING THE SUMMER OF 1869, with his medical degree in hand, William James experienced a little upturn in his health and spirits. He spent July and August with the family, boarding in a farmhouse in Pomfret, Connecticut, a town in the northeast corner of the state, handy to the old New York and New England Railroad. He lolled in a hammock, read Browning, and became reacquainted with some friends from Newport days who were also staying in Pomfret, Lizzie Boott and her father, Francis. Francis, born in 1813, was a composer, a Bostonian who had spent most of his life in Florence. He was one of the models Henry James used for Gilbert Osmond in The Portrait of a Lady.
William found Lizzie “one of the very best members of her sex I ever met.” She had grown up in Europe, knew Italian, French, and German, was well educated, had “a great talent for drawing,” and was hard at work becoming a painter. Minnie Temple kept an eye on things, noting to a friend, “Lizzie Boott has been at Pomfret with the Jameses for a month and has fallen quite in love (or should I say into love) with them, especially Uncle Henry and Willy.” William found Lizzie interesting because, as he told Henry Bowditch, “she is in just about the same helpless state in which I was when I abandoned the art.” He also admitted to Bowditch that he hadn’t “realized before how much a good education... added to the charms of a woman.”1
There was quite a lot William hadn’t realized about women. In this, as in other respects, he took a long time to grow up. He had great difficulty in breaking away from home, and his idea of a wife, when he thought about such a thing, was strongly influenced by the example of his mother, the selfless, always available woman who lived for her husband and children. Virginia Woolf wrote of such a person, “When there was chicken she took the wing, when there was a draught, she sat in it.”
In August 1869 James read John Stuart Mill’s new book, On the Subjection of Women. He was a little shaken up by it, finding it “strangely startling and suggestive,” but he could not agree with Mill that the “actual characters” of men and women could and would change over time in response to changes in “the generally accepted ideal of what they ought to be.” Mill objected to the present “swallowing up of the woman in the man,” and to the current ideal of marriage in which the woman was subordinate. James conceded that there was “an enormous deal to be said on both sides,” but he insisted that there was “a strong presumption from use against Mill.”2
William was attracted to strong, creative, educated young women, women not much like his mother. He was also attractive to such women, but he did not consider himself fit for marriage (health, nerves), and the whole question seems to have been an abstract one for him at this time. He now wrote a review of two books on women for the North American Review, Mill’s book and Horace Bushnell’s Women’s Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature. James summarized but stopped short of endorsing Bushnell’s argument that “society should... make a resolute stand against admitting [women] to share in any sort of government.” What bothered James was Bushnell’s recommendation of self-sacrifice for women. He spotted Bushnell’s piously empty gallantry—though he was unable to see the same attitude in himself—and he objected to the idea that “suffering is a higher vocation than action.” James was willing to admit that such a doctrine had done “much good in its day,” saving slaves from despair and consoling the sick. “But,” he added firmly, “there has probably not been an unjust usage in Christendom which has not at some time sought shelter under its wings. No well man or free man ever adopted it for his own use.” For this and other weaknesses, James rejected Bushnell’s book, saying “it certainly will add nothing in any circle to Dr. Bushnell’s reputation either as a thinker or as an advocate.”3
Mill was a different matter, and James was uneasy about what he took to be Mill’s main point, his “thorough hostility to the accepted sentimental idea of the personal intercourse of man and wife.” Mill insisted that the only acceptable ideal of marriage was one of independent equals, “each party being able to subsist alone, and seeking a mate not to supply an essential need, but to be enjoyed as a mere ally.” James thought representative American men had a different ideal: “However he might shrink from expressing it in naked words, the wife his heart more or less subtly craves is at bottom a dependent being.” Because a man’s position in the outer world must be reconquered every day, and because “life is a struggle where success is only relative,” James’s American man “longs for one tranquil spot where he shall be valid absolutely and once for all; where, having been accepted, he is secure from further criticism.” Wife and home are to be support and refuge. James could not accept Mill’s “fervid passion for absolute equality, ‘justice’ and personal independence as the summum bonum for everyone.” Unsure of himself, unequal to the ordinary demands of work and career, William James was now a long way from feeling complete in himself. He could not, at this point, even imagine such a feeling.4
The fall of 1869 went badly. William was still living with his parents and Alice at 20 Quincy Street in Cambridge. He had moved back in with his family in November 1866, which was, perhaps not coincidentally, the month he hurt his back in the dissecting room, setting in motion the discouraging and debilitating train of ills and complaints that was still going on three years later. He wrote Harry, who was now in Italy, that his health had caved in at Pomfret toward the end of August. Since then he had felt “great fatigue,” and the “old weakness” had returned. He intended to try galvanism—that is, electrotherapy. He felt, as he said, “very much run down in nervous force,” and he had resolved to read little and study not at all in the months to come.5
What exactly was wrong with William James? He reminds one of the neurotic invalid Mr. Fairlie in The Woman in White, whose condition is described by one of the narrators, the admirable Marian Holcomb: “I don’t know what is the matter with him, and the doctors don’t know what is the matter with him, and he doesn’t know himself what is the matter with him. We all say it’s on the nerves, and we none of us know what we mean when we say it.”6
The news from Henry was both good and bad. He adored Rome. “At last—” he wrote, “for the first time—I live! It beats everything: it leaves the Rome of your fancy—your education—nowhere... I went reeling and moaning thro’ the streets, in a fever of enjoyment.” He was also reeling and moaning in the grip of massive, painful, intractable constipation. He poured himself out in letters to William; he detailed his agonies and cried out piteously, frantically, that “something must be done.” He was demoralized, it was a “grievous trial,” he was in a “wretched state,” unable or unwilling, as his father might have seen it, to “eliminate his private or subjective ambition.” With his bowels stopped up as with cement, the back problem that had kept him out of the war returned. He was utterly miserable, and hoped by his “frank and copious” letters to elicit medical help from William. “I palpitate to hear more,” he wrote, “and invoke the next mail with tears in my eyes.” William replied quickly and vigorously, recommending croton oil, senna, Epsom salts, electrotherapy, the English climate, and the “diet of Malvern.” In a second letter he proposed grapes and figs before breakfast, lots of butter and fat, aloes, rhubarb, and tincture of colchicum.7
In October 1869 William read Father’s new book, The Secret of Swedenborg, published in July. William still resisted his father’s ideas, but he kept grappling with them, and indeed Henry Senior now exerted the steady pressure of a prevailing wind on his eldest son’s mental course. Henry Senior’s judgments might be outrageous, but they were not easily forgotten. Concerning Kant, he held a “hearty conviction” that the German philosopher was “consummately wrong, wrong from top to bottom, wrong through and through, in short, all wrong.” Henry Senior hated the God of the orthodox churches, calling him the “obscene and skulking god of the nations,” and he foamed over with Ahab-like vehemence: “Against this lurid power—half-pedagogue, half-policeman, but wholly imbecile in both respects, I...raise my gleeful fist.” Swedenborg had come not to found a new denomination but to announce that institutional religion had ended. It was not all negative. Henry Senior believed that “Swedenborg’s ontological doctrine is summed up in the literal veracity of creation, meaning by that term the truth of God’s Natural Humanity, of the most living and actual unition of the divine and human natures.”8
Henry Senior had first come to Swedenborg shortly after his crippling breakdown, or vastation, in May 1844, when he found in Swedenborg a vision of regeneration. In the first volume of his Arcana Coelestia, Swedenborg explains vastation as a necessary stage the twice-born person must pass through. The (far-fetched) explanation is contained in his gloss on the second verse of Genesis: “And the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Swedenborg took “the face of the waters” to mean “the lusts of the unregenerate man,” and the verse as a whole to signify “the vastation of man frequently spoken of by the prophets, which precedes regeneration: for before man can know what is true, and be affected by what is good, there must be a removal of such things as hinder and resist their admission; thus the old man must needs die before the new man can be born.”9
William was able this fall to concede to Harry that “Father is a genius certainly—a religious genius,” but he still had massive problems with that genius.10 On one side William told Harry there were “many points which before were incomprehensible to me because doubtfully fallacious—[which] I now definitely believe to be entirely fallacious.” On the other side were certain unspecified “great and original ideas.” What most irritated William—and also Charles Peirce, who reviewed The Secret of Swedenborg at length—was his father’s “ignorance of the way of thinking of other men, and his cool neglect of their difficulties.”11
Both William and Harry now felt themselves to be marking time, if not slipping backward. Harry was disappointed not to be mastering German. He wrote William, “Here I am at 26 with such a waste of lost time behind me and such an accumulated ignorance of so many of the elements and rudiments of my own tongue, literature, etc piled up in my track.” William wrote Harry, urging him not to worry about trying to do justice to every country he visited. “We all learn sooner or later that we must gather ourselves up and more or less arbitrarily concentrate our interests, throw much overboard to save any.”12