79. William and Henry

THE SAME TREMENDOUS surge of energy, optimism, and good health that had carried James along since the previous summer now swept him off to the Mediterranean. He arrived in Naples on March 25, 1905, after touching at Gibraltar and Genoa. He saw old friends, met new people; he was never long in one place and always eager to see everything. From Naples he went to Capri, which he thought “glorious,” then to the peninsula south of Naples.¹

He traveled from Sorrento to Positano to Amalfi, and he wrote home describing the road, “a cornice affair, cut for the most part on the face of cliffs, and crossing little ravines (with beaches) on the sides of which nestle hamlets,” as being “positively ferocious in its grandeur, and on the side of it the azure sea, dreaming and blooming like a bed of violets.” His painter’s eye revived, not just in a taste for scenery but also in an interest in the human landscape. One afternoon he “walked alone through the old Naples, hilly streets, paved from house to house and swarming with the very poor, vocal with them too, their voices carry so that every child seems to be calling to the whole street... the street floor composed of cave-like shops, the people doing their work on chairs in the streets for the sake of light and in the black insides beds and a stove visible among the implements of trade. Such light and shade, and grease and grime, and swarm, and apparent amiability would be hard to match.” The “black old Naples streets” seemed to him “not suggestions, they are the reality itself—full orchestra.” His description is mixed with a curious sense of regret. “I have come here too late in life,” he wrote home, “when the picturesque has lost its serious reality. Time was when hunger for it haunted me like a passion.”²

He enjoyed the trip hugely. Crossing from Italy to Athens, he wrote his daughter that the whole trip was “almost absurdly ideal.” In Athens he saw the usual sights with the usual reactions. “There is a mystery of rightness about that Parthenon that I cannot understand.” In Athens, at the Hotel Minerva, he ran into George Santayana, the first two volumes of whose just published Life of Reason James had read, twice, on the Atlantic trip over.³

James had some reservations about the book (“wonderful, though I fear not quite true,” he wrote Alice) and about the man: “that gifted fish,” he called him. “He’s the oddest spectator of life—seems as if he took no active interest in anything.” The book was, however, appealing in some ways. Santayana’s very definition of reason, as “a name for all practical thought and all action justified by its fruits in consciousness,” would have seemed friendly to James’s own enterprise. Santayana wrote beautifully too. “Fanaticism,” he remarks, “consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.” It was, Santayana says, “visionary insolence in the Germans to make the constructive process anything more than common sense.” A few weeks later, back in Italy, writing from Orvieto and thinking about the “baldheaded and bald-hearted young men” of Cambridge, James was moved to say to Santayana, “Can’t you and I, who in spite of such divergence have yet so much in common in our weltanschauung start a systematic movement at Harvard against the desiccating and pedantifying process?”⁴

James went on to Rome, where he showed up at the Fifth International Congress of Psychology. He had not planned to take an active part in the proceedings, but when he went to register and gave his name, “the lady who was taking them almost fainted, saying that all Italy loved me... and finally [she] got me to consent to make an address at one of the general meetings.” The talk, written on the run at the last minute, and in French, was called “La Notion de Conscience.” It is a thoughtful summary of “Does Consciousness Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience,” and James liked it well enough to include it when he came later to plan a book on radical empiricism.

He used the occasion both to sharpen his attack and to consolidate his new position. Since French lacks a separate word for consciousness, James starts by pointing out that consciousness “is always considered as possessing an essence absolutely distinct from the essence of material objects, which, by a mysterious gift, it can represent and know.”⁵ This always leads, James says, to a dualistic outlook: there is consciousness and there is the world. James is out to challenge dualism. “The world may well exist by itself, but we know nothing of this because for us it is exclusively an object of experience.” In the end, then, both thinker and thought “are made of one and the same stuff, which as such cannot be defined but only experienced; and which, if one wishes, one can call the stuff of experience in general.”⁶

James’s appearance at the congress was a triumph. The Florentine pragmatists, headed by Papini, formed an admiring circle around him. He found himself referred to as “il più grande psicologo del mondo.” His friend Janet declared himself “stupéfait” at James’s performance in French. Just as America was welcoming Henry James back and crowding to his lectures in Chicago, Philadelphia, Bryn Mawr, and Boston, so Europe was welcoming and celebrating William.

Pisa was next, where he had lunch with the art critic Bernard Berenson. At Cannes he talked philosophy “hot and heavy” with Charles A. Strong. In Marseille he met Frank Abauzit, the French translator of The Varieties of Religious Experience. Then it was on to Geneva and lunch with his old friend Flournoy, then to Paris, where he finally met “the Beautiful Bergson.” After this, James made a quick stop at Oxford, where he had lunch with Schiller and three of Schiller’s friends. On top of everything, Bradley, whom he did not meet on this trip, sent him a long letter that said, among much else, “I am beginning to wonder whether I have not always myself been a Pragmatist.” Over and over, Bradley urged James to put his case at length, in a book; nothing but a whole volume “can possibly do the job.” The day after the Oxford lunch James hurried to Liverpool and, on June 2, boarded the ship for home. It had been a triumphal whirlwind tour, but his “damnable spring neurasthenic fag” was upon him as he returned to America and to Cambridge.⁷

The second half of 1905 went badly. Trouble began shortly after his arrival at home late in the day on June 11. On the thirteenth he started his lymph injections again; on the sixteenth Henry James arrived from California and New York, talking about the ghost experiences told him by a man named Bruce Porter in San Francisco.⁸ The next day William fired off a letter rejecting an invitation to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City. His letter to Robert Johnson, the editor and poet who was the secretary of the academy, cited his “life-long practice of not letting my name figure where there is not some definite work doing in which I am willing to bear a share.” He derided the academy as “an organization for the mere purpose of distinguishing certain individuals (with their own connivance) and enabling them to say to the world at large ‘we are in and you are out.’” Heated up now with his drumbeat of opposition, James pushed satirically on: “And I am the more encouraged to this course by the fact that my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy, and that if I were there too, the other families represented might think the James influence too rank and strong.”⁹

James’s feelings about the academy are understandable, though he was already a member of other academies that had no better reason for existence than this one, and he had accepted honorary degrees from Padua, Princeton, Edinburgh, and Harvard. He would eventually be a member of the national academies of France, Italy, Prussia, and Denmark, and would accept further honorary degrees from Durham, Geneva, and Oxford. He was indeed already a member of the parent organization of the academy, the American Institute of Arts and Letters. The academy was to be a very select thirty-member circle enclosing only the inmost of insiders.

One can imagine all this setting William off. Johnson was an officious man who valued good form above all else, and who had requested an “imperial sized” photograph of William. Knowing all this, William would have enjoyed irritating Johnson. But what explains William’s gratuitous remarks about Henry? Perhaps it was just another bit of James’s habitual irreverence, the epistolary horseplay he so enjoyed. But this is a letter he drafted and then rewrote; his first draft referred only to “my younger and vainer brother.” Revision did not soften the edge; it sharpened it. Perhaps William was miffed at being voted in on the fourth and last ballot, whereas Henry had been voted in on the second. Henry had also gotten into Who’s Who before William did.¹⁰ William can’t have thought his unkind crack wouldn’t get back to Henry; Johnson knew Henry and had been his editor at Century Magazine.

The recently dormant rivalry between William and Henry seemed to have come alive. Despite or perhaps because of their long-standing closeness, there were things each disapproved of in the other. Henry had recently been in Chicago, where he told his hostess he considered William’s wife “the finest woman living, only criminally sacrificed.” This was passed on to William. A little later, in the fall of 1905, we find Henry writing to William, “I am much puzzled by a mystery and ambiguity in all your sequences—Peg’s admission to Bryn Mawr, mixed up with her simultaneous social debut and your California absence etc. When do you go there, anyhow, and when does she go to B.M. and does she go to California with you, and if she doesn’t who takes her out, at home, and with whom does she abide?” Henry obviously thought William was neglecting Peggy. Where the unmarried Henry felt free to criticize William’s performance as a family man, William showed an equally unearned relish for telling Henry how to write novels.¹¹

It is easy to make too much of William’s lashing out at Henry in the letter to Robert Johnson. Neither brother was particularly thin-skinned, and we have to remember that in their lifelong relationship there was never anything even remotely approaching a break between them. Jacques Barzun has remarked that William and Henry understood each other better than their biographers have. The longer William and Henry lived, the closer the bond became.

About the only thing that went right for William this summer was his lecture engagement at the University of Chicago at the end of June. Expecting an audience of perhaps fifty, James found himself moved to a larger auditorium and lecturing to seven hundred and fifty people. He gave five lectures under the title “Characteristics of Individual Philosophy.” They were a reworking of his Wellesley lectures, and the emphasis was on both the pragmatic method and radical empiricism. The audience never fell below five hundred, and James was euphoric when, at the last lecture, he felt he had the audience so completely won over that they were “pulling on my line like one fish.”¹²

Henry returned to England in early July 1905 to begin work on the New York Edition of his writings, an edition planned to appear in twenty-three volumes, just as Balzac’s work had. William was sick for six weeks with the flu. Alice’s headaches were worse; she tried new doctors, new regimens, morphine. At the end of September classes began again. James gave his seminar in metaphysics as well as the opening part of Philosophy 1a, a general introduction he gave together with Royce and Münsterberg to 226 students. The courses went well enough, and James was confident he was lecturing well, but he sensed he was coming to the end of his teaching career. By the last days of October he was done with his part of Philosophy 1a.¹³ Routine and a certain distance had settled over his long association with Royce. James complained to his young friend Dickinson Miller that “Royce has never made a syllable of reference to all the stuff I wrote last year—to me, I mean. He may have spoken of it to others, if he has read it, which I doubt. So we live in parallel trenches and hardly show our heads.”¹⁴

Then he entered a particularly bad patch. From the last week of October through the first week of December James was in utter turmoil, caused either by the actual prospect of resigning or by other anxieties and dissatisfactions brought to the surface by that prospect. James’s diary for these weeks records an agony of indecision that seems comic in retrospect but can’t have been much fun at the time. Nov 3: “Resign!” Nov 4: “Resign?” Nov 6: “Doubtful about resigning.” Nov. 7: Resign!” Nov. 8: Don’t re-sign!” Nov. 9: “Resign!” And so on, for six long weeks.¹⁵

Two days after the last lecture in the big undergraduate course, William wrote Henry about The Golden Bowl. It is perhaps the most censorious letter he ever wrote to his brother. The novel puzzled him, William wrote, “and the method of narration by interminable elaboration of suggestive reference (I don’t know what to call it, but you know what I mean) goes agin the grain of all my own impulses in writing.” William did concede that Henry had achieved “a brilliancy and cleanness of effect, and... a high-toned social atmosphere” that was “unique and extraordinary,” and he seemed to set a seal of brotherly approval when he acknowledged “your extreme success in this book.” But then, falling into the old, loaded James family banter, William ground remorselessly on: “But why won’t you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style? Publish it in my name, I will acknowledge it, and give you half the proceeds... Seriously,” he added, “I wish you would, for you can, and I should think it would tempt you, to embark on a ‘fourth manner.’”¹⁶

Henry’s reply to this was a long letter—the same one in which he voiced his disapproval of William’s treatment of Peggy—in which he said he would indeed try to “produce some uncanny form of thing, in fiction, that will gratify you, as Brother.” Then Henry turned to attack William’s taste: “But let me say, dear William, that I shall greatly be humiliated if you do like it, and thereby lump it, in your affection, with things, of the current age, that I have heard you express admiration for and that I would sooner descend to a dishonored grave than have written.”¹⁷

Then Henry moderated his mood (“but it’s seriously too late at night... ”) to a more sober awareness of the large differences between them. “I’m always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of mine and always hope you won’t—you seem to me so constitutionally unable to ‘enjoy’ it, and so condemned to look at it from a point of view remotely alien to mine in writing it.” Henry wrote more to this effect, concluding with a sigh of regret, “It shows how far apart and to what different ends we have had to work out (very naturally and properly) our respective intellectual lives.” Then, in a generous move, an unexpected turn worthy of the master that he was, Henry proffered an olive branch. “And yet I can read you with rapture—having three weeks ago spent three or four days with Manton Marble at Brighton and found in his hands ever so many of your recent papers and discourses... Philosophically, in short, I am ‘with’ you, almost completely, and you ought to take account of this and get me over altogether.”¹⁸

What held these two brothers together would always outweigh what drew them apart. In the best-known photograph of the two of them, taken around 1900, Henry stands straight, but his head inclines sharply toward William. William holds his head perfectly erect, but his whole upper body inclines toward, even leans on, Henry.

Besides his complicated and, at the moment, vexed relationship with his brother, William confronted a philosophical problem this fall. Just as the golden bowl in Henry’s most recent novel—and the last he would complete—has a flaw, an all but indiscernible crack, and is not quite what it seems to be (it is not gold but gilded crystal), so William came to feel there was a major, indeed a fatal, flaw in his understanding and explanation of experience. As he faced up to the criticism of two philosophical colleagues, Boyd H. Bode and Dickinson Miller (Miller had once been a tutor for William’s children), and to perceived inconsistencies between his own work and that of Lotze, Royce, Fechner, Woodbridge, Dewey, and Bergson, James began, in late November and early December of 1905, to fill a pair of notebooks with his thoughts on the problem.¹⁹

The dilemma involved a serious discrepancy between his account of experience in The Principles of Psychology and his current understanding of experience, his new doctrine of “pure experience.” In the Principles James had argued that every part of our experience is a unique and unrepeatable bit of the ceaseless flow of the river of consciousness. He could say this because he then believed that there was an objective world “out there” that we as individuals could never know. Now, however, James had dropped the old dualism of subject and object and was arguing that experience is all there is.

The problem arose when one set out to show that two minds can know a single thing. If they can, doesn’t the agreement show that there is indeed an objective world out there for the two minds to agree on? By early December 1905 he was coming to think there was no satisfactory way to resolve the difference. If reality consisted entirely of a stream of experiences, each experience complete and separate from the one before and the one after, how could one ever maintain that there existed a world beyond our experiences? It was far too late in the day to resort to laboratory work; the subjective experiences James intended to make sense of went beyond what could be measured or weighed. His ongoing effort to defend the notion of pure experience also carried him to places where neither logic nor language was well adapted to help. James’s new idea was that the usual dualism of subject and object, of knower and known, is false. On the contrary, there is only experience, and somehow one experience carries or floats the next, and that relationship is what we call knowledge.²⁰

James wrestled with this and related problems for the next couple of years. The doctrine of pure experience is hard to defend, just as Whitehead remarked that no one can live by pure empiricism (according to which it does not matter how many times a ball drops when you let go of it; you are never entitled to conclude it will drop the next time). Philosophers are still divided as to whether James was here making a misstep or whether he had momentarily lost his way or just lost his nerve. In any case, he felt, especially during the last months of 1905, that he faced a problem. On an early page of what has come to be called “The Miller-Bode Objections” James wrote opposite a summary of an argument by Dickinson Miller, “Methinks that pure experience breaks down here definitively.” But toward the end of the notebook, James seems to have concluded against his earlier position and in favor of pure experience: “Thus, to sum up, mental facts can...compound themselves, if you take them concretely and livingly, as possessed of various functions. They can count variously, figure in different constellations, without ceasing to be ‘themselves.’”²¹

Following his prickly response to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the sniping at Henry and the attack on his third manner, the heated vacillation over whether and when to resign, and the growing controversy over pure experience, one final quarrel erupted in this unusually contentious stretch of James’s life. After he decided in early December to put off resigning for one more year, after writing a letter proposing himself for a series of Lowell Lectures the next year, after Peggy’s first ball, and after the unexpected death of Richard Hodgson—the remaining mainstay, in James’s view, of serious psychical research—there came, two days after Christmas, the dedication of Emerson Hall, the new home of the Harvard philosophy department.

Hugo Münsterberg was the chairman of the department, and after working out the details of the Emerson Hall ceremony at a meeting James missed, Münsterberg officiated and, in James’s opinion, disastrously dominated the proceedings. James, who could be tact itself in dealing with, say, F. H. Bradley, uncorked a tactless, indeed an offensive, letter to Münsterberg, saying, “I think you committed a fault of taste this afternoon in making such long speeches,” and adding, “A young man and a German ought not to have played the chief part in so peculiarly yankee-sentiment-arousing a ceremony.”

Münsterberg immediately sent in his resignation to the president of the university, along with an explanation of how the Emerson Hall program had evolved. Notes and letters sped back and forth. Eliot conceded that Münsterberg perhaps thought too much of himself, but he also felt obliged to tell James, “When you recommended Münsterberg for an appointment here you must have expected that he would be different from us, and doubtless reckoned on those very differences as part of the profit to the University.”

Doubtless. Still, it must have been with a sense of relief that James boarded the noon train on December 29 and set out for California and a semester at Stanford University.²²