AS WILLIAM JAMES turned fifty-three, in January 1895, his life was rich and full. He was a good father and a committed, if impatient, teacher with an inveterate habit of helpfulness. He had a host of colleagues whom he treated as equals, and a host of friends whom he treated as intimates. He was happily, solidly, married—though he contracted a mad crush on every other woman he met.
There was, for example, Sarah Wyman Whitman. She was exactly James’s age, an artist who won major commissions for her work in stained glass, a book designer for Houghton Mifflin, and a lively, beautiful, generous, and wealthy married woman whose home and studio were focal points for art and artists in Boston. Her circle took in Royce, Santayana, Holmes, James, John Jay Chapman, Sarah Orne Jewett, Willa Cather, and many others. She and James met sometime in the 1880s and struck up a warm friendship. The “high pressure at which she lived” and the fact that “she never stopped long in the outer courts of friendship” endeared her at once to William James, who lived the same way.1 She warmed especially to the artist in James, telling another friend, Minna Timmons, that he had said, “Looked at from one point of view, the artist was like any other man, except for the greater rapidity of his intuitions; what he saw at once others saw more slowly”2
Sarah Whitman helped him read the proofs of The Principles of Psychology. He took to going to her studio at 184 Boylston Street on the last Saturday of every month, just after his noon lecture (Harvard then had Saturday classes) and before the two-thirty dinner of the Saturday Club. There was a strong social intimacy, a bond of confidence, a guaranteed sympathy between them. When sister Alice’s diary arrived in its tiny edition of four copies—complicated as its birth was by Henry’s worries about gossip disclosures—William loaned his copy to Mrs. Whitman.
He called her “beloved madame” and many other endearments, delivered with gallant mushiness, irony damascened with sentiment. Merely affectionate banter, one concludes, but that seems not quite to cover it. He recommended she read Bettina von Arnim’s Goethe’s Correspondence with a Child, a still vivid masterpiece of the intimacy possible in correspondence. He liked Bettina’s side of it more than Goethe’s. Bettina led, challenged, held nothing back; Goethe responded with warm avuncular aplomb. James would tell Sarah Whitman about the sadness of the country place in Chocorua. He would invite her to the Adirondacks and ask her to imagine him “with thou beside me singing in the wilderness.” When he brought out “Is Life Worth Living?” in late 1895, she promised her friends copies and praised it in advance as “an eager and noble cry from such a brave and tender heart.”3
Then there was Rosina Emmet. She was a cousin, the daughter of Ellie Temple and a niece of Minnie Temple. Rosina came in the fall of 1894 to live with the James family and attend Radcliffe for a year. Rosina was twenty-one, a bright, outgoing person who wanted to write novels. Other young people clustered around her. When she first arrived at the Jameses’, her sister Bay (who would later paint an excellent portrait of William James) came for a while. Kitty Emmet’s daughter Elizabeth, and her sons Willy and Grenville, visited. Other young people from Cambridge and Boston were in and out. Suddenly the James house was “full of laughing, piano-playing etc young people, acting and making personal comments just like those we used to make together in the old days of innocence with ‘the Temples,’” William wrote Harry. “They [Rosina and Bay] are the most wholesome, innocent, free-hearted and generous girls, and it has done me real good.”4
Rosina brought back the past, the old gaiety of Newport and New York, the long-gone days of youth, the summer girls at summer hotels. Most of all, she reminded William James of Minnie Temple. “She is so much the type of Minny,” he wrote Harry, that if Harry were to meet her, “it would call up all sorts of dead and buried things.” She had, for James, “an extraordinary perceptive-personal intellect.” She wrote “finely in a slap-dash way,” and was capable of “that direct swoop at the vital facts of human character.” One evening as William was writing letters, Rosina entertained two of her “‘gentleman friends’ by telling their character by their handwriting.” James overheard her saying to one, “You enjoy sombre, wolfish, gloomy things.”5
James was immediately taken with Rosina. Less than a month after she arrived, he was writing to Harry that she was “a regular trump,” and adding, “In fact were I a youngster I should aim right at her ‘hand.’” Alice was bruised and hurt by William’s all too evident crush on Rosina, who was, after all, thirty years younger than he. Alice was unable to recover for herself the youthful, high-spirited tone that now prevailed around the house. She went to visit a sister. William typically did not draw back, even though he knew Alice was upset. He believed in acting on impulse, and he had his way. Eventually Alice came around, with what inner reluctance or misgivings we can well imagine.
In time William began to voice reservations about Rosina; he complained to Harry that she was a little selfish, a little egotistical, and “destitute of tenderness.” “She doesn’t give one any sentimental returns for her board.” But he retained a soft spot for the sprightly Rosina. When she went to Paris in late 1896, William sent her a hundred dollars spending money via Henry, with instructions to Henry not to acknowledge the money in his next letter.6
When James was writing with teasing gallantry to Sarah Whitman, and was attracted and haunted by the ghost of Minnie Temple in Rosina Emmet, he met another young woman with whom he was quickly—and lastingly—smitten. He first met Pauline Goldmark in September 1895, after presenting his teacher talks in Colorado Springs. When he returned to his beloved Adirondacks, he felt, he told his wife, more alive than he’d felt in years. Then, in this fine positive mood, he met Pauline and his letters to Alice suddenly soar: “I have been happy, happy HAPPY! With the exquisite imperishable beauty of this place, the place I know so well. Nature has made it for falling in love in, passing honeymoons and the like. There is a perfect little serious rosebud of a Miss Goldmark whom Miller [Dickinson Miller, a student of James’s who later became a well-known teacher] seems very sweet upon.” She was a Bryn Mawr graduate, a biologist, one of the children of the remarkable Goldmark family. Her father, a doctor and revolutionary in 1848, had fled to America from Austria and had gone into munitions manufacture. One of Pauline’s brothers was a chief engineer on the Panama Canal project. A sister, Alice, married Louis Brandeis, the U.S. Supreme Court justice; another sister, Helen, married Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical Culture movement and school.
Pauline loved the Keene Valley life; she was for James “such an up-at-sunrise, out-of-doors, and mountain-top kind of girl.” To another friend he described Pauline as a “tramper and camper and lover of nature such as one rarely meets, and withal a perfectly simple, good girl, with a beautiful face—and I fairly dote upon her and were I younger”—James was fifty-seven when he wrote this—“and ‘unattached’ should probably be deep in love.” Pauline was beautiful. Her face was shaped much like Alice’s, though she did not have Alice’s dark-eyed intensity. Pauline had regular yet mobile features; she looked composed, happy, self-confident, and unselfconscious.7
Perhaps because James had met Pauline in the Adirondacks, he always considered her part of the glorious outdoor life there. Indeed, as her sister Josephine perceived, Pauline was for James a “symbol of a mood, a region, a way of life.” Much later, Josephine wrote about Pauline and William James that “the primeval forest, uncut, uncleared; its primitive freedom; delight in these wild aspects of nature as compared with the trimmer and mellower European landscapes of other summers—all this was implied in their friendship.”8
James wrote Pauline Goldmark many letters, more than to almost anyone except his immediate family. He openly yearned for her company. “Two words from you have made me king of the world,” he wrote her, in French. At the very least he was king of the sweet-talkers, though it is clear that Pauline meant a great deal to James. Years later, he wrote her from Europe, “The sight of you, sporting in nature’s bosom once lifted me into a sympathetic region, and made a better boy of me in ways which it would probably amuse and surprise you to learn of, so strongly are characters useful to each other, and so subtly are destinies intertwined.”9
William James had always been attracted to interesting women. His mother had noticed it warily. Women found him attractive too. There has never been so much as a breath of scandal about these friendships. Of course one or more of them may have taken a physical turn, of course revealing letters may have been destroyed, and certainly the Jameses as a family could keep a secret. But even if James never ran off for a fling—as his brother Bob did once, as we saw—James’s women friends were an important part of his life and a source of dismay and sorrow for Alice.
Of course Alice held a steady place in James’s heart; there is the unending stream of warm and intimate letters to her to prove it. And of course she was the mother of his children and the idea of separating, which, as noted earlier, Alice and William had briefly considered early on, never arose again in their later life together. All this may be true, but it leaves something unsaid. James’s spontaneity was crucial to him, to his idea of himself, and it made him reckless, self-indulgent, and sometimes cruel when it came to friendships with attractive, vital women. He lived off their vitality, just as his brother Henry lived off that of Minnie Temple and Constance Woolson.10 If James was a natural poacher, with the poacher’s dislike of the gamekeeper, he was also a natural philanderer, with the philanderer’s lack of interest in settled arrangements. The cost of these happy, rejuvenating attachments never worried James. It was Alice who paid.
Alice knew all about all these crushes and pashes—and there were more. There was nothing clandestine about any of James’s enthusiasms, and Alice was always politely included in the correspondence. Sarah Whitman once wrote William to say she was relieved to hear that his health was better, but she would not positively believe it until “a certain person who cannot lie” confirms it. After the year of Rosina’s living with them, Alice became melancholy, and sometime around August 1895 she must have asked William whether he was now sorry he had married her.
His reply was that of a man who knows what is good for him. It was not a romantic reply, not gallant or flirtatious. He must have known it was a serious question. “When I look back over the years that we have passed together and see into what an entirely new man I have grown, all my normality and efficiency dating from my marriage, I cannot imagine anything different or what sort of a thing an alternative could be. That’s why I haven’t answered your question—it is asking whether I am sorry or not that this planet is the earth.” He signed himself “your own everlasting husband.”11 He was also everlastingly himself. Exactly seven days after writing this, he met, and was gushing to Alice about, Pauline Goldmark. William James must have been quite a handful.