IN MARCH 1886 William’s wife Alice made an effort to “develop” latent qualities that might help her become a medium. Reaction in the family was mixed. Alice’s mother and one sister were sympathetic. Sister Alice was skeptical about Mrs. Piper and, presumably, about the whole business. Aunt Kate urged William’s wife not to do it. Harry wrote William to say he felt sorry for Alice’s “trying to ‘develop’ for your use, qualities she may not have.”1 This is a curious comment coming from Henry James, who was, with William’s wife, somewhat more open to communications from “the other side” than William.
Alice’s son Henry would write years later that his mother carried on a flirtation with the supernatural and that she never stopped hoping for a message from William after his death. Like her husband, she considered a communication from the other side possible; like him, she was never satisfied that it had happened. Alice’s sister Mary became, in 1889, something of a medium, and Alice herself had one terrifying experience in England, “an adventure with an invisible felt presence in an English country house which haunted her and Peggy [her daughter Margaret, born in 1887] for two exhausting nights.” “Until then,” she said, “I had always believed that there could be nothing malign in the spirit world. But that thing was malignant and evil. It shook my confidence.”2
Despite this experience, Alice, like her husband, maintained her balance and even had a sense of humor about such matters. She went once, her son would write, “to a theosophical medium who told her she had thrice been burned to death as a heretic, once in Egypt, once during the Roman Empire, once by the Spanish Inquisition. The news of these appalling experiences... kept her in good spirits for a week.”3 There is a two-page manuscript in the James archive that throws an interesting light on Alice’s view of her husband’s work with mediums, trances, and hypnosis. It is a list in Alice’s handwriting, headed “Valuable and much prized by W.J.,” and it includes twelve items, among them “The Welsh Fasting Girl and her Father,” a manuscript by W. M. Wilkinson and Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, Henry Senior’s old friend; a letter from Dr. Wilkinson to William; a book by S. Weir Mitchell, Mary Reynolds: A State of Double Consciousness; a book by Albert Barnes Dorman, The Book of Mystery: Life of Mary Whitley, the Catholic Medium; and The Revelator, “An Account of 21 Days Entrancement at Belfast Maine by Abraham Pierce, a Spirit Medium.”4
If Alice had the same sort of active but not indiscriminate curiosity about spiritualist matters as her husband, it was only one of many interests they had in common. And despite the large family and household she oversaw and the constant moving around, they were always intellectually close. Indeed Alice seems to have had a considerable intellectual influence on William. She was as comfortable with French and German as he; she read to him when his eyes were bad; she wrote letters for him and went with him to the theater. He wrote her once to say how he missed her “soft chuckling beside me.”5
She was not merely a secretary; she had a keen intelligence of her own, with strong views and her own books, her own favorite quotations, her own intellectual style. Before she met William she was friendly with the Quaker poet Whittier, who was old enough to be her father, and who seems to have given her inscribed copies of at least five of his books.6 Alice liked to say, “Qui n’accept pas le regret, n’accept pas la vie” (“If you cannot accept regret, you cannot accept life”). She also liked “Si jeunesse savait; si age pouvait” (“If youth only knew; if age only could”). William read his drafts to her: “When some passage pleased her particularly, her exclamatory enthusiasm was immediate, and then her imagination would sometimes seem to take fire and flame up with a suggestion. ‘Oh William, that’s splendid. Do keep it. Can’t you go on and add what you were saying to me the other day? You remember, about—Don’t you recall what Carlyle said... ?’”7 Once when he was dictating a letter to Tom Davidson about the only kind of theism he, James, defended being that of “simple un-philosophical mankind,” Alice chipped in on her own account, “If there be a God, how the devil can we know what difficulties he may have had to contend with?”8 They discussed books, by letter, when apart. In one, he thanks her for her “dear letter this a.m.,” adding, “I am curious to know what you mean about the wife of Tolstoi’s hero.”9
Alice enjoyed biographies and essays. She took a special interest in “mind cure,” the popular new form of healing based on the belief that our troubles are all in our heads, but leaning more toward faith healing than psychoanalysis, and in a contemporary campaign to simplify English spelling. She also read widely. Her son noted that books were a constant resource for her. She read J. A. Froude’s Caesar: A Sketch, Frederick Locker-Lampson’s My Confidences, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (twice), and Cowper’s letters and poems. She read Emerson as well as Tolstoy and all of George Eliot’s novels. She recommended George Meredith’s Rhoda Fleming to William. Once, speaking about John Ruskin’s soundness of mind, she said sanity was the lowest virtue, adding, no doubt with a chuckle, “You must use people who have it and thank heaven it is no worse.” She was accustomed to reading what William wrote; once in a while she ran into difficulties. About radical empiricism she wrote him that “it is an awful thought that I cannot understand it, but just that is the truth.” William replied that his friend the psychologist Theodore Flournoy couldn’t understand it either.10
Once, when William couldn’t figure out how to end a speech he had to make, it was Alice who gave him the biblical reference that inspired his final sentence. When Harvard’s President Eliot asked James for a text for the frieze of Emerson Hall, the new philosophy building, it was Alice’s suggestion (Psalms 8:4) that was adopted: “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” She was quite capable of taking her own line. William remarked on her “siding with a certain opinion of Renouvier against me.”11 After reading and admiring Harry’s piece on George Eliot in the Atlantic Monthly, she thought, “If he had only said a word more about generosity of character being the main pre-occupation of G.E. in all her novels, it would have been absolutely perfect.”12
While it might seem to a modern reader that William was always dashing off somewhere without his family, it should be remembered that we know about many of these trips only because he wrote frequent, sometimes daily, letters to Alice. Their oldest son maintained that his mother was his father’s “almost inseparable companion.” It is often hard to understand the real dynamics of the marriages of one’s own family or intimates, let alone those of strangers a hundred years ago. Families faced with the choice of saving or destroying letters need not accept Hawthorne’s injunction to reveal, if not the worst, then at least some trait by which the worst may be inferred. William James must have been very difficult to live with. He was continually confessing his shortcomings or apologizing for some outburst of temper. “Dear child!” he wrote her once, from Maine. “I hope you are not having a headache. And I seem to myself to have been so peevish on departing. Shall I ever learn to take things genially, and not to sting back, like a wasp? But you know me, and that it is over in a moment, and means nothing.”13 Another time, when Alice was off in South Carolina and reporting that she felt lighthearted, William replied that it was “due to the fact that I the millstone, I the marplot, the complainer, the maker of impossibilities, the worrier, the contradicter, denyer and forbidder, am no longer there.”14
Alice clearly felt very protective toward her husband. “I feel like guarding your present immunity from [distractions],” she would write. “I say to myself ‘one week nearer, one week more of rest secured to him.’” Another time she wrote that “Aunt Kate talked to me of how you ought to be shielded from all appeals to your sympathy.”15 If a dominant note of William’s letters to Alice was apology, a dominant note of hers was tender and sympathetic concern. “I am filled with sorrow and sympathy for you, so far away,” she wrote William as his father lay gravely ill, “trying to wrest the whole truth from the bare words that have just gone over the wires. I can think of you away from me when you are prospering, but to know you alone and in trouble is almost more than I can bear. The dear, dear old man lies there, filled with the desire to die. O, William dear, your father and mother have been so dear to me, so endlessly kind to me and mine. I am losing a part of my own life in this dear old home of yours.”16
Alice herself was a complex person. Her colorful derogatory descriptions of people she disliked were remembered. She disliked Jews, Catholics, and customs officers. She disliked Royce’s wife. She sat over old correspondence in the attic, digging up evidence against a student of William’s she considered a bigamist. Not all her grandchildren remember her fondly. She kept tight reins on people, including herself. William told Alice’s mother that Alice “won’t wear her good things—new bag, ruby ring... She seems to think she is not good enough for anything good.”17
But however we may find ourselves struck by one hint or another of trouble, there is no question but that William and Alice regarded the marriage as mostly a great success. William called her “my only absolutely satisfying companion.”18 And Alice, toward the end of her life, wrote to her oldest son, “I have had a beautiful day quite to myself—thinking of all that has been given—of the miracle of this day forty-four years ago when your Father and I were engaged, having so pathetically considered all our disqualifications and resolved to trust the future. The apple blossoms were out and all the spring seemed blessing us. I ought to go on my way gratefully, for I have had my turn.”19
William trusted her and relied on her, in intellectual as in all other matters. Once, in 1888, he sent her a book by Prentiss Mulford, which, he explained, “I have not time to read. Pray read it if you can and tell me what is in it when we meet. Mark any good passages and note the pages of ’em in the fly-leaf.”20 Some years later William took up the work of Mulford, a mind-cure enthusiast, in his discussion of healthy-mindedness in The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Through good times and bad, whether apart or together, Alice Gibbens James was a steady and important influence on William James’s intellectual life, just as she was central and indispensable to every other aspect of his life. With William, she passionately held to the idea that it was legitimate and crucial for people to believe. After going to hear William Salter give a sermon on William Ellery Channing, she reported to William that “in his discourse on Channing, Salter said that ‘of all skepticism, the saddest is the refusal to believe in the possible.’”21 It was one sadness neither Alice nor William had to face.