GERTRUDE Stein sat in the lab across the table from a young woman who was attempting what they were calling automatic writing. Stein, conducting the experiment, had near her left hand a little lever, connected to a line run over a pulley, the line attached to a pencil held by the young woman. Stein could make small shifts with the lever so as to suggest writing to the hand and the subconscious of the woman facing her. Gertrude Stein was interested in the “second personality” suggested by the study of the subconscious, as were her brother Leo and many of the other people then experimenting in psychology, but, to be frank, she did not think that sitting across a table from someone she knew would generate much in the way of automatic writing. Later, when she became a writer, some people guessed that she was dismissive of automatic writing precisely because it was a source for her, and she was always cagey about sources. She allowed for the influence of painting—especially for the inspiration provided by Cézanne—but otherwise she insisted that her writing was in every way deliberate and her own. Still, when she was twenty-two and an undergraduate conducting psychology experiments in the lab at Harvard, she had not made any final decisions about the value of automatism, and she was, at that moment, focused on getting the woman to write.
After a certain number of dissatisfying fits and starts, Stein might not have been entirely surprised and would perhaps even have been slightly relieved had the door to the laboratory opened and Professor William James entered the room. When he came in, if he came in, the experiment went on fruitlessly for a moment, the additional observer making all naturalness impossible. Eventually, Gertrude Stein stopped and stood—she was half a foot shorter than James—and they moved toward the periphery of the room. James was very interested in mediums of all kinds. He wanted to know whether the young woman was reporting experiences from some other level of consciousness, which made Stein smile—Professor James’s affection for the occult was a subject of fond amusement among his students. He took her emphatic denial with good humor.
It was her junior year, and all her work in the lab was under James’s supervision. Automatic writing was a new pursuit—most of Stein’s previous experiments had been trials in color perception. Perceptual studies were one of the two paths that psychology was then following, and William James was interested in this material. It had formed the basis of his introductory chapters in Psychology: Briefer Course, where he discussed the interpretation of color in a manner that perhaps Stein enjoyed: “Surely our feeling of scarlet is not a feeling of pink with a lot more pink added; it is something quite other than pink.” This was meant to be not a description but part of James’s method of cataloging experience. Expressing himself in opposition to the work chosen by his brother, William James wrote that “examples are better than descriptions.”
Ever a straddler of intellectual camps, William James was also reading the work of another set of psychologists, those who were following the lead of Sigmund Freud and others in considering what James called “irruptions” into the “fields of consciousness,” with “hallucinations, pains, convulsions, paralyses of feeling and of motion, and the whole procession of symptoms of hysteric disease of body and of mind.” In 1896, the year William James might have interrupted Gertrude Stein’s experiment, he was beginning to think about the material for his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, in which he would observe, several decades in advance of the opinion becoming common, that the work of Freud and others was “the most important step forward that has occurred in psychology since I have been a student of that science.” These investigations required longer periods of time and produced less quantifiable information than did the analysis of the senses, but, at the time, the two methods were not all that separate. When Gertrude Stein went to medical school at Johns Hopkins—following, she later claimed, the advice of William James—her plan was to continue her perceptual laboratory experiments and to focus on that province later so important to Freud: the nervous diseases of women. That she failed out of medical school at the eleventh hour, in large part, it seems, because of her terrible bedside manner, was an indication of her fundamental preference for the difficulties of the experiment over those of treatment. She was always a person who laid out a hypothesis, devised a way to test it, and pursued it to its end. Other people’s experiences were not crucial to this process, and in this she was somewhat less encompassing than her professor.
William James never stayed long in the lab. Something about it made him uncomfortable—its rigidity, perhaps, or its air of expecting something from him. Talking to Gertrude Stein, he might soon have found a reason for them to walk out into the raw March day, and she would readily have agreed. She didn’t find a closed room so claustrophobic as he did, but she liked to be with him; he always said something interesting. She turned to the by now far-too-conscious subject of the experiment and asked the young woman if they might resume the following afternoon—psychological experimentation at the time had rather the flavor of a social engagement; scientists often used themselves and their friends as subjects. The young woman having departed, Gertrude Stein and William James walked out into Harvard Yard.
•
At the time that Gertrude Stein was an undergraduate, William James was in his middle fifties. His Principles of Psychology had become a standard text in many colleges; he was a senior and important member of Harvard’s faculty; and he would, the following year, in 1897, become an even more significant public figure in Boston when he delivered a speech at the unveiling of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s sculpture showing Robert Gould Shaw and members of the 54th Massachusetts; Shaw and his Black troops were remembered for the bravery of their attack on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. James was chosen to give the speech partly because he had been sympathetic to a variety of progressive causes and partly because one of his younger brothers, Garth Wilkinson James, had been an officer in the 54th, but mostly because it was the general opinion in Boston that William James’s orations kept one unusually good company in moments of private melancholy. Still, James was quite nervous before he delivered his speech. In preparing it, perhaps he thought of the oratorical conviction of his former student W. E. B. Du Bois, now back from Germany and teaching in Xenia, Ohio. James was relieved when the speech was a success and wrote to his brother Henry that emotions had run very high; it had felt like “the last wave of the war breaking over Boston.”
As James and Stein walked along in the yard together—William James, when asked to describe his vision of heaven, once said that he imagined it would look a good deal like Harvard Yard—he probably began the talking. He’d been giving lectures in Brooklyn, ones that would eventually become his Lowell lectures, on trance states, multiple personality, hysteria, demoniacal possession, mediumship, and last, and perhaps most important to Stein, on the subject of genius. His lecture “Is Life Worth Living?”—in which he exhorted his audience not to give in to despair—had struck a strong chord in her. In a composition written in the spring of 1895, she had asked his question again, “Is life worth living? Yes, a thousand times yes when the world still holds such spirits as Prof. James.”
William James made Gertrude Stein feel protected in a precarious world. Stein was studying at what was then called the Harvard Annex; she arrived in 1893, a year after her brother Leo had come to the Harvard reserved for men. These two Steins were the youngest children in their family; they had spent the whole of their Oakland childhood together and had become even closer upon the death of their mother when Gertrude Stein had been fourteen and Leo nearly sixteen. It made sense to the entire Stein family that Gertrude would rapidly have followed her brother east, but there she found herself in strange territory. The girls at what was soon to become Radcliffe College were mostly not from California and were mostly not Jewish and were mostly not of solid dimension. When they posed for pictures they looked willowy, corseted, and Christian. Gertrude Stein had a bit of the Buddha about her; the photographs she was in seemed to settle down and hold still around her.
Things did not really settle down around William James. If he didn’t quite, as his brother said of their father, move “in a high radiance, of precipitation and divulgation,” he did have to unsettle things in order to live. Plans must be changed, ambivalences attended to, mesmerists visited, ideas put forth and reconsidered, and students galvanized. Though he was himself sometimes paralyzed by indecision, he was a person who surrounded himself with action.
James’s students, men and women, said of him that he liberated them to develop their own ideas in their own ways. Stein would have heard about the very talented Mary Calkins, who had a master’s degree in philosophy and hoped to pursue her doctorate under James, but had been refused permission to do so by the president of Harvard. James wrote to Calkins that he thought the president’s decision “flagitious . . . enough to make dynamiters of you and all women,” and they initiated an unofficial program; in 1895, Calkins wrote and defended her thesis in what, James averred, “was much the most brilliant examination for the Ph.D. that we have had at Harvard.”
He was a conversationalist, not a monologuist. He might have asked Stein about her brother, who, with his usual preference for leaving things unfinished, had dropped James’s course Philosophy 3, or Cosmology, two years previously and had now left law school to go to Europe. She missed Leo. Thinking of her brother, perhaps she said that she had recently been to the opera, a habit she and Leo had formed together; they would go every night there was a performance in Boston. William James was also a lover of music. They might have talked of Wagner.
In later years, Gertrude Stein used to tell the story that one beautiful spring day, after she had been to the opera every night for a week and was tired, she had to take an exam in Professor James’s class, and she found that she “just could not.” Writing in the third person, she described herself sitting there: “Dear Professor James, she wrote at the top of her paper. I am so sorry but really I do not feel a bit like an examination paper in philosophy to-day, and left.” He wrote her a card saying that he perfectly well understood and, according to her, gave her the highest mark in the class. That she actually passed with a B seems to have been solidly obscured in her mind by her preference for her own version of the events—one that illustrated the deep sympathy between Gertrude Stein and William James.
•
Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were, in many senses, the inheritors of the James brothers. Henry James was the writer of the Steins’ crowd in college; they read each novel as it appeared, carefully parsing its every delicate suggestion. William James preferred not to think of this; he was critical of his younger brother’s work. Henry James, at first endlessly wounded by the rejection, was reconciled to this in part through the sympathy of his loyal sister. When, years before the Steins’ arrival in Cambridge, William wrote to their sister Alice, who was then living near Henry in England, that he didn’t much like Henry’s most recent novel, The Princess Casamassima, she replied in stinging defense of her favorite brother that it was sad “to have to class one’s eldest brother, the first fruits of one’s Mother’s womb among those whom Flaubert calls the bourgeois, but I have been there before!” “Rivalry,” William James wrote apropos of something else, “lies at the very basis of our being.”
Henry James and William James, 1902.
Gertrude and Leo Stein had a rivalry on a similarly monumental scale and theirs, too, was moderated by an Alice. When, thirty years after she was a student of William James, Gertrude Stein wrote the book that brought her the most fame—The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—she chose to tell her own life story from Alice’s perspective. The James brothers were recurring presences in the book, though Stein, typically, went to fairly great lengths to emphasize the falsehood that she had never read Henry James until she was established as a writer. She did not, however, quite hide her pleasure in the fact that when Toklas had hoped to produce a play based on one of James’s novels, Toklas had written to James and received a letter back but, overcome by the enormity of her impertinence, had neither replied nor kept the letter, though whether Stein’s pleasure was in the impertinence or the letter or its loss was hard to tell.
Both Gertrude and Leo Stein felt the pull of Europe, and both paid attention to Henry James’s perennial assertion that it was intellectually profitable to be an American writer abroad—an idea that Gertrude in particular would seize and transform in her own work. She also took from Henry James his sense of how one acquired knowledge, his method of staying close by a gradually changing subject. Gertrude Stein and Henry James, in their certainty and in being first to publish in their families, pushed their older brothers to curb their restlessness and finish writing projects of their own.
Leo Stein and William James were great walkers. William James hiked up and down the Adirondacks, on two occasions so exerting himself that he actually damaged his heart. Toward the end of his life, James suffered from angina, a small attack of which struck him when he was walking to a train station in Austria with Sigmund Freud. Leo Stein pounded the hills of Tuscany, sometimes in the company of the art critic Bernard Berenson; one of their walking and talking subjects was the implications of James’s The Principles of Psychology for a theory of art. Leo Stein retained his interest in psychology; he spent years in an extensive process of self-analysis, which he undertook with the works of Freud as a guide. This was later, after Leo and Gertrude Stein no longer spoke, and he had returned to Italy.
Around the time of their falling-out, Leo Stein began to accuse his sister of writing only on the surface and of lacking psychological depth in her work, a charge that she said was jealousy but must have terrified her nonetheless. It was perhaps because it was a way of justifying herself to her now absent and so psychologically minded brother that her other William James story became so important to her in later years. As she told it in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, some students in James’s class had been doing an experiment in the hopes of showing that the subconscious existed. Stein had been participating as a subject and had not been displaying much of a subconscious. The experimenter
began by explaining that one of the subjects gave absolutely no results and as this much lowered the average and made the conclusion of his experiments false he wished to be allowed to cut this record out. Whose record is it, said James. Miss Stein’s, said the student. Ah, said James, if Miss Stein gave no response I should say that it was as normal not to give a response as to give one and decidedly the result must not be cut out.
Gertrude and Leo Stein and Henry and William James all suffered from the sense that they might, at any moment, “be cut out”—for having a subconscious or not having one, for exploring it too deeply or not deeply enough; this danger was palpable in all their prose, in the way it sought and retracted, in its confidence and its anxiety.
•
All four of the James and Stein siblings loved painting best of all the arts. They were somewhat peripatetic in their approaches to the visual realm, though the Steins were more systematic in their study and in their collection than were the perpetually shifting Jameses. Eventually, on their walk through Harvard Yard, perhaps William James and Gertrude Stein talked of painting, or of the color wheels that Stein had been building. Perhaps she said that colors did and did not look a little different when you came back to them—yellow was always yellow, and yet it wasn’t yellow. William James might have revealed his early desire to be a painter, something Stein hadn’t previously known. She would have felt glad to be chosen for his confidence.
James might have remarked that the sun was getting low. Dinnertime was approaching, and James, notwithstanding his erratic way of picking up students when he felt in need of conversation, was careful in his household habits. They came to one of the gates in the wall that was gradually being built around the yard and bowed cordially in recognition of an unusually pleasant conversation. She took her way north toward her boardinghouse, thinking of James’s career as a painter, and of how she would tell Leo when she wrote him next. William James, his thoughts having reverted to the problem in his lecture that he had avoided by hunting up Gertrude Stein, walked home in the cold late afternoon, said good evening to the housekeeper in an absent tone of voice, and went up to his room to dress for dinner.