RETURNING TO CAMBRIDGE in the fall of 1881 from their second summer at Keene Valley, William and Alice moved houses yet again, this time from the box on Arrow Street to a rented house on Quincy Street, just across from William’s aging parents, who were undergoing one of the periodic visits of the youngest and least stable of their sons, Bob. At the end of September William’s sister Alice returned to America from a European jaunt. In October William delivered his “Reflex Action and Theism” piece to the Unitarian Ministers Institute in Princeton. In early November brother Harry returned from England for a visit. George Howison was scolding William for his views on Hegel, and Tom Davidson and Henry Holt were scolding him about theism. In December Wilky traveled from Milwaukee to see his parents.
In January 1882, as Harris’s Hegel club ground logically on, meeting every Saturday at 3:15 in Tremont Temple in Boston, William James turned forty. On the twenty-third his friend Wendell Holmes was appointed professor of law at Harvard, and on the twenty-eighth James attended a Harvard Club banquet in Chicago, where he gave a short speech. It was “splendid as I composed it in my head,” he wrote his wife, “but unfortunately I left out all the transitions and one half of the substance,” thanks to the champagne. As William was returning on the train to Cambridge on the twenty-ninth, his seventy-one-year-old mother, who was thought to be re-covering from a bout of bronchial asthma, took a sudden turn for the worse, and before William got home, she died.
We know less about Mary Walsh James than about any other member of the family. She looks out from the few photographs of her that remain with a pleasant round face, her mouth set, neither smiling nor frowning. Her hands are clasped and her entire figure is enveloped in black taffeta, with an unconvincing bit of white material at the throat. Her hair is parted in the middle and is pulled back severely over her head and behind her ears. Her eyes are anxious and weary. Harry was her favorite son, the one who gave her the least trouble. William’s illnesses, ditherings, and sensitivities irked her. Bob was increasingly hostile and troublesome. Wilky stayed away from Cambridge. With Alice she had an especially close bond. Some pictures of Alice make her look a little like her mother. But these differences and preferences, real as they are, do not tell the whole story, for in practice Mary James treated all her children with fond endearments, steady concern, tactful (mostly) advice, and fundamental respect. Harry said she was the “sweetest, gentlest, most natural embodiment of maternity—and our protecting spirit, our household genius.”1 In his journal he wrote, “She was our life, she was the house, she was the keystone of the arch. She held us all together and without her we are scattered reeds.”2
Harry could exaggerate, he could conceal, and he could be sentimental, but there is an important core of truth to this description of his mother. The Jameses were almost always scattered around the country and the world—Mary’s funeral marked the first time since the Civil War that all five children were together under one roof—and what held them together, more than anything else, was writing. For years it was Mary James who managed and directed the family correspondence, the network of letters that was the institutional expression, so to speak, of a family that was so strong it could seem like a nation unto itself.
She kept track of who had heard from whom: “Elly Van Buren writes Wilky,” she told Alice, “that she saw you in New York looking as fat as butter.” She was the arranger: “I wrote cousin Helen on Sunday that we would be with her on Tuesday 22nd at 5 o-clock, so be sure to be on the spot,” she wrote Alice. She retailed gossip about who liked whom. Again to Alice: “Minny I think is quite disenchanted and evidently looks at Holmes with very different eyes from what she did.” She gave detailed instructions to her grown children on how to deal with each other. When William abruptly decided to go to Europe and was obliged to curtail a much-anticipated visit with his nineteen-year-old sister, Mary wrote Alice that Willy “feels very badly to go off in this way just before you get back,...so make light of it to him.” She most always tried to control, but sometimes she made a real effort not to. “Such a burden has been taken off my heart by Harry’s decision to come home,” she wrote Alice, going on to say that Father felt the same way, but he said nothing, “not wishing to add to my anxiety and wishing to leave Harry free.” When Alice went to Paris, Mary wrote in make-believe shock, “My daughter a child of France!”
Mary herself never left Cambridge, not wishing to leave her husband’s side. She had her own rules, both for life and for correspondence. Letters should be regular. “Don’t let more than a fortnight pass without writing,” she warned Willy. “It is necessary to our happiness to know how you are getting along.” If a letter wasn’t in time, she would write, “We are longing and looking every day for some news of you.” She expected replies to correspond to written inquiries. When they didn’t, or when a correspondent fell down on the job, she was quick and tart. “Wilk writes that he did get a letter from you about six weeks ago and means to write soon,” she told Willy. “Don’t be surprised if you don’t get a letter for six months.” Both her own preferences and certain broad hints, as well as her good-intentioned evenhandedness, shine out in a letter replying to Willy, who had written from Florence about how sick he and Harry had been. “Of course his [Harry’s] ‘angelic patience’ shows forth, as you say,” Mary writes, “but happily that side of his character is always in relief and does not need great occasions (as it does with some of us) to bring it to view. My heart yearns over both of you my precious children”—they were thirty-two and thirty—“to think of you both being ill and I so far away!”3
Mary was sitting in the closing dusk on Sunday evening, January 29, with her sister Kate, apparently recovering from her illness, when she unexpectedly collapsed and died of an “affection of the heart.” Harry was in Washington, D.C., with Henry and Clover Adams when he was called home. He found Father and Aunt Kate at the house. Bob was already in town. William arrived shortly from Chicago, Wilky from Milwaukee. On the day of the funeral, February 1, the four boys carried their mother’s coffin to a temporary vault in the part of the Cambridge Cemetery—not the Mount Auburn Cemetery, but the plainer one next to it—that lies near the Charles River. Harry recorded that it was a “splendid winter’s day—the snow lay deep and high.”4
Harry, the angel, was now thirty-eight; he had become a “large, stout, vigorous looking man” (Aunt Kate’s description) with a receding hairline and a full beard, trimmed close. He looked strong, almost hard, and his eyes were penetrating. He was, by any measure, the most successful of Mary’s children. He was a working journalist and novelist of phenomenal productivity and substantial reputation. He lived like a gentleman on money he made from his writing. He had published some sixteen books, including Roderick Hudson, The American, Washington Square, and The Europeans. Daisy Miller had been a huge success, and The Portrait of a Lady, just out, was also much admired. A fourteen-volume “Collective Edition” was only about a year ahead. He was permanently settled in London. Indeed, during the current trip back to America he wrote, sitting in a room in Boston, “My choice is the old world—my choice, my need, my life... My work lies there—and with this vast new world, je n’ai quefaire [I haven’t to do at all]. One can’t do both, one must choose.”
Harry was a social success too. Welcome everywhere, he was a gifted talker who took pains to make himself interesting to others. In Boston he saw much of Isabella Stewart Gardner. “Mrs. Jack,” the most brilliant, unconventional, amusing, and ambitious woman in town, had a serious, sustained interest in the arts. Harry read her his new dramatic version of Daisy Miller, with its happy ending. In New York he stayed with E. L. Godkin, longtime family friend and editor of The Nation, which James Bryce thought the best weekly not only in the United States but in the world.
In Washington Harry’s social center was the home of Henry and Clover Adams. He met everyone, dined with diplomats, senators and congressmen, the President, even Oscar Wilde. In the middle of this whirl, which impressed Harry not at all (he thought there wasn’t in Washington “enough history recorded or current, to go round”), a telegram came from William’s wife Alice: “Your mother exceedingly ill. Come at once.” He had just written her a letter: “Beloved mother, I must write to you and embrace you, though I am afraid it will be some time before you can return these attentions. I heard from Bob of your illness, two days ago and immediately begged him to give me more news.” Mary died the day the letter was written and mailed.5
Wilky, Mary’s “Darling Wilkums,” who had arrived in Cambridge from Milwaukee just a couple of hours before the funeral, was genial, gentle, kind, affable, much loved, and had by now a son, Joseph, who was seven, and a daughter, Alice, who was six. But his life was a sad mess. He was ruinously optimistic, never good at handling money, and his chain and bolt business had failed. In 1877 he had declared bankruptcy, his debts amounting to twenty thousand dollars more than his assets. Bob and his father held Wilkys notes and lost by his failure. His health had started to deteriorate even before 1877. The rheumatism in his wounded foot got so severe at times that it put him on crutches. He was also developing kidney and heart problems. He was thirty-six the year his mother died; the grand epoch of his life was long behind him. In the spring of 1880 he and Bob attended a reunion of seven thousand Union army veterans in Milwaukee. In November that same year he wrote and delivered a speech about his war experiences. Thanks to a gift of $250 from Harry, Wilky traveled to Cambridge, which he was still calling home, to see his mother and father in December 1881. He was grateful for Harry’s openhandedness, thanking him warmly with “a fraternal blessing for your princely gift.” No one knew that Wilky had less than two years to live.6
The youngest brother, the handsome “Hoppergrass Bob” of earlier years, was, at thirty-five, the most troubled. Pinched by poverty, going from railroad jobs to farm work for his father-in-law, married to a woman who wouldn’t leave Milwaukee and her family, Bob spent much of 1881 estranged from his wife and living in Cambridge, where his alcoholism, philandering, and moody behavior dismayed and burdened his parents and his sister. He had a bad temper and was often belligerent and full of maudlin self-pity. He showed up in Cambridge drunk and abusive; his mother thought him “apoplectic.”
In the summer of 1881 Bob checked himself into an asylum. He stares out from photographs of 1882 with knit brows and troubled eyes, carelessly dressed, with a full beard, and looking a lot like William. Bob’s afflictions seemed endless: he suffered from headaches, vertigo, rheumatism, lack of appetite, and sleeplessness. He was, said his father, “grim, self-inverted, thoughtful, speculative, religious, manly.” Father also thought him “the most subjective and self-conscious of creatures, sensitive, shy, suspicious, moody, cloudy, raining, freezing if need be.” Alice, Mother, and Father all dreaded his visits. But Harry remembered Bob’s “aptitude for admirable talk... charged with natural life, perception, humor and color.” Bob’s talk, said Harry, sometimes “struck me as the equivalent, for fine animation, of William’s epistolary [talk].”7 Bob got on especially well with William’s wife, and he loved going to their house and chatting with their friends. William stuck by Bob through everything, writing him warm and encouraging letters with a boundless fondness and, one suspects, strong fellow feeling.
Bob always found everything around him unsatisfactory. One has a persistent feeling that something crucial was missing in his makeup. Bob made repeated, futile attempts to study Swedenborg and his own father’s writings. He explained darkly and at some length that the latter “has not been fruitful of good... I have put my most earnest desire into understanding him and the fruit of it all has been nothing but sorrow to myself and my dear wife.”8 Bob found Father’s moralism and Christianity particularly objectionable. “In that book the family... is treated of at great length as a thing very little short of hellish.” William noted with a clinical eye that Bob had “no affection... yet in his crises he goes through the emotional expressions of an angel.” Bob’s life lurched from trouble to trouble.
Alice was now thirty-three and had made remarkable gains since her terrible collapse of 1878. With her companion, Katharine P. Loring, Alice made a number of excursions during 1879 and 1880. Katharine, a year younger than Alice, was from an old Massachusetts family; she was the eldest of four children. Her sight was so weak she learned Braille early on. She was a strong person, clearly capable of looking after both herself and Alice. She was active in public health and women’s educational organizations; her brothers—one a Massachusetts supreme court justice—deferred to her opinions. Katharine traveled and hiked extensively. When she and Alice went by themselves to the Putnam Camp in July 1879, where William and Alice Gibbens had spent their honeymoon the year before, Katharine kept a revolver handy. She and Alice also traveled to the White Mountains, to Lake Winnipesaukee, to Maine, Newport, and Cape Cod.
Alice’s life at this time was not at all that of a neurasthenic invalid. In 1881 Alice borrowed $2,500 from Father, bought some oceanfront land in Manchester, Massachusetts, and started building a three-story “cottage,” which was soon complete with horse, carriage, pier, rowboat, and boatman. Also in 1881 Alice and Katharine traveled to England, where her brother Henry thought Alice “rather weaker in body than I expected, but stronger in spirits, cheerfulness etc.” He remarked on her “animation, vivacity, gladness to see me, wit, grace, gayety etc.” This was for the benefit of Quincy Street. In private he was puzzled and a little miffed by Alice’s exclusive devotion to Katharine, finding himself “a fifth wheel to their coach.”
Katharine was now Alice’s companion for life. The two women had the kind of intense and exclusive relationship that has been called a Boston marriage. William’s wife suspected that Alice and Katharine were actually lovers, but said so only to William.
In the fall of 1881 Alice and Katharine returned to the United States; the family pronounced Alice “vastly improved.”9 Alice’s inner desire to “succeed” as a person, “to find something whole and authentic in her experience,” was of course the real struggle of her life, and far more important than outward successes, as Father tirelessly taught. But outward things must count for something too, and Alice now found herself, all told, more fully a match for life than ever before. Her mother even left Alice what property she possessed, which was mostly railroad stock that had lost value in the panic of 1879.
We do not know how Mary’s death affected her eldest son. William had always been Father’s favorite, just as Harry was Mother’s. It has been supposed that William felt the loss of his mother very little, since he left no rich outpouring like Harry’s tribute in his journal. But for an overcompensating, self-castigating person like William, the lack of warmth or appreciation between mother and son would have made her death harder, not easier, for him.
And there is the letter William wrote his parents in July 1880, just after leaving England, in which he said, “I found myself thinking in a manner unexampled in my previous life, of Father and Mother 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 new kind of sympathy, especially for the beautiful, sylph-like and inexperienced mother... Better late than never! But I wish that this new feeling might enable me to be more of a comfort to you in your old age than I have been of late years.”10 At least William had not saved all his flowers for the funeral.