1868
WILLIAM, MEANWHILE, WAS NOT IMPROVING AT ALL.
By the next steamer came a letter confessing that his health was actually very poor. His German servants were greasy and unclean, he wrote, and the thought of his breakfast plates being handled by them sickened him. And no window was ever opened in that land.
My servant here asked me in great excitement if I slept with the window open. She said there was a man in Weimar who slept with his window open and he became blind! Out in the street the slaw and fine rain is falling as if it would never stop—and the street is filled with water and that finely worked up to a paste of mud which is never seen on our continent.
Although permeated by melancholy, this letter was at least leavened by humor. As it happened, it was the last letter from Germany that would be read aloud to the family group. Subsequent ones were read silently by Father and tucked away like contraband. Harry and I knew from his expression not to ask.
When William arrived home in late autumn, I thought at first I was meeting his ghost. I wanted to shake him out of this trance or whatever it might be, because this was not the William I knew. Thin, hollow-eyed, and silent, he conversed without animation, shuffled his feet when he walked, complained of always being cold, even next to a roaring fire. When he held a teacup, the coffee splashed onto the saucer or the tablecloth, and it was heartbreaking to see how he tried to hide the tremor from the family.
“I don’t know what’s eating him,” Mother said. “He looks transparent, as if you could poke a hole right through him.”
Sorrow registered in her eyes before she snapped back to her default mode of taking care of business and pretending everything was fine. Being the only robust member of the James family was her cross to bear, as she shouldered the various illnesses, black moods, breakdowns, financial disasters, and heartbreaks of her children, whose temperaments were complicated and foreign to her.
“He keeps saying it is philosophical hypochondria,” Harry said. “I can’t make out what he means.”
If you asked William what was wrong, you’d get a long laundry list. His back had “collapsed,” his eyes were bad, his brain “moribund,” he could not concentrate or remember anything. And, on top of all that, he suffered from “severe dyspepsia and chronic gastritis of frightful virulence and obstinacy.” He took long walks in the cold and came back half frozen, pale and silent. He rarely joked now, and a humorless William was like an ocean without tides.
Mother had her theories. “He has too much morbid sympathy!” she complained to Harry and me. “The other day he was fretting about the servants having only one armchair in the kitchen. He wouldn’t stop talking about it!”
Dejected at seeing his wunderkind so fragile and unhappy, Father blamed Darwinism and other atheistic doctrines.
At meals William was either silent as a wax figure or twitchy and combative, starting painful arguments with Father. “I have read your article on Swedenborg, Father, and I can’t comprehend the gulf you maintain between Head and Heart. To me they are inextricably intermingled.”
“Then you understand nothing, William. You are as dense as the pusillanimous clergy.”
(The pusillanimous clergy were a favorite target of Father’s bombasts.)
“Your theory of Creation is a muddle, Father. I cannot fathom what you mean by ‘the descent of the Creator into Nature.’ You don’t explain it, and it seems to be the kernel of the whole system. You live in such mental isolation that I cannot help but feel that you must see even your own children as strangers to what you consider the better part of yourself.”
Father’s face clouded as he hacked at the roast with the carving knife.
When William remarked one evening that he was unable to decide what he should be, Father said, “Being is from God. A man cannot decide to be anything.”
William grumbled under his breath, “A nice life, provided you can live off your dividends.”
At Sunday dinner, hunched over his soup bowl, narrowly focused on keeping his spoon from shaking, William observed, “I am convinced, Father, that we are Nature through and through and that we are wholly conditioned, that not a wiggle of our own will happens save as a result of physical laws.”
I failed to understand why men took philosophy so personally, as if their lives depended on it. William, compulsively philosophizing, seemed to me like a person who persists in taking a drug that everyone else can see plainly is making him ill.
Father had lured William into science in the first place so that he could use its methods to corroborate Father’s theories of D.N. He even permitted him to go to Harvard, although he’d always insisted that colleges were “hothouses of corruption where it is impossible to learn anything.” William’s studies led him in the opposite direction, into a cold mechanistic universe, which was now tearing him apart.
In a household less metaphysical than ours such topics might have caused only minor perturbation. Here the father–son arguments raged loud and fierce, like the wars of the gods on Mt. Olympus. Father would say, “It is very evident to me, William, that all your troubles arise from the purely scientific cast of your thought and the temporary blight exerted upon your metaphysical wit. All scientists are stupefied by the giant superstition we call Nature.”
According to Father’s private religion, there was Nature and then there was Divine Nature. Only Divine Nature was real; “the world” was a sort of dream.
William would mutter, “Hmm, I wonder which of us is more stupefied by superstition.”
Father would say, “The first requisite of being a philosopher is not to think but to become a living man by the putting away of selfishness from one’s heart!”
“Not think? Really, Father?”
In an attempt to defuse the argument, Mother began to describe some gardens she had seen along Brattle Street, but no one took this up. Throwing his napkin on the table, Father shoved his chair back, scraping the floor, and limped into the other room.
“Oh, now you’ve upset your father!”
“It is equally true that he has upset me.” William got up and climbed the stairs wearily, as if he were a hundred years old.
“Henry has pinned all his hopes on William,” Mother remarked to Aunt Kate. “I don’t know why William can’t keep his ideas to himself. And now they are both missing dessert!”
“More for us then,” I said, attempting to insert some levity into the near-daily wrangle. Mother glowered in my direction.
“Oh, I think they both rather enjoy sparring,” Aunt Kate said.
William did speak excellent German; you could say that for him.
Then he astonished us all by reviving, like a plant that is given water. It seemed to occur overnight. He’d gone to bed wrapped in his usual listless melancholy and the next morning bounded down the stairs two at a time, and amused us by reading absurdities from the Boston Evening Transcript, such as a witness in a murder trial who testified that the corpse was “pleasant-like and foaming at the mouth.”
He went out in bright spirits, wearing a jaunty hat, a colorful waistcoat and gloves he’d picked up in Europe—he’d always dressed like a dandy—and took long, brisk walks for miles. If you accompanied him, it was like walking an eager, inquisitive dog that was always straining at the leash. He took up the Lifting Cure that had helped Harry so much and reported that his back was improving from day to day. He was suddenly full of praise for the “transparency” of American skies, without Europe’s veils and mists.
The dinner table arguments became less rancorous. Father would say, “I suppose, William, you still put forward the absurd argument that thought has a material basis?”
With a mischievous grin, William would reply, “A study of the mind apart from the body is utterly barren, Father.” Then Father would rail against scientists, and William would say, “Father, your ideas are untestable. It’s only a matter of time, you know, until we prove that the higher mental operations, like the lower, are functions of the supreme nerve-centers, obeying the same physiological laws of evolution.”
“Well, I pray you wake up to the enormity of your foolhardiness, William.”
But it was clear from their faces that their arguments were sport again.
Buoyed by the improvement in his health, William picked up medicine where he’d left off and applied himself to studying for his M.D. exam. Every so often he’d call me into his room to examine a slide under a microscope, showing me how to focus the lens on the teeming micro-world under the glass.
“Can you guess what that is?”
I squinted through the lens. “Nothing good, I expect.”
“That, young lady, is a polypus of the nose. Now—this one.” He put in another slide.
“A hundred gnats entombed in a custard?”
“An inspired guess, Alice, but this is Nutmeg Liver. The patient died of phthisis. If I ever have a patient with this condition I will know what it looks like microscopically.”
“Is there a cure for Nutmeg Liver?”
“Death is the only one I know of.”
“Then what is the point, William?”
“Oh, Alice, I don’t intend to practice medicine, you know.”
But if he did not practice medicine, the vexed question of what William would do remained unresolved. Still, it was a relief to see him in high spirits again.
He passed his M.D. exam in March but showed no disposition to put up a shingle or seek patients. His mind had moved on. With a band of fellow truth-seekers he formed the Metaphysical Club, which met in the second-floor library of our house. Whenever I passed the room, arguments were flying like bullets, punctuated by bursts of masculine laughter. I was never invited in, which I did not mind, as I was not even sure what metaphysics was to begin with. Whenever the door was ajar, I heard strange things, as if from another world. I heard William say, “My father who looks at the Cosmos as if it had some life in it. . . .” I heard terms like “psychophysical parallelism” and “the thought-atom.” I heard William say, “If God is dead, how long are we going to keep all we know from the public?”
Did William really think God was dead? Had He been alive until recently? Was I part of the ignorant public that either would or would not be kept in ignorance of His demise?
Suddenly, I found myself truly wondering for the first time about God (who previously was only a vague figure wearing the robes of A Child’s Illustrated Old Testament). As I pondered the idea of God, I seemed to sink deeper into my being. Before, I’d felt that I was living my life “out there,” in the world, but I saw now that all along the world had also been living inside me. Or the dream of the world, you might say. And there was a pure awareness in me that was not trapped inside the bubble of thought. Or so it seemed. This was as far as I could go, and I did not know if that made me a believer or an unbeliever.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.—called Wendell—was a founding member of the Metaphysical Club and a proud atheist. (Atheism was his only point of compatibility with his father, the humorous, epigram-spewing Dr. Holmes.) My brothers idolized him, but whenever I met him on the landing, I tried to make myself invisible. The man made me shiver, like an evil wind. One evening when he stayed for supper, Mother whispered to me, “Did you notice how he carries his manuscript about in that green bag and never loses sight of it for a moment?”
We had just slipped into the front parlor between courses, supposedly to look for candles. Mother and I had our secret signals, which none of the men ever noticed. (And they claimed to be the superior sex!) Wendell always made it clear he had no use for Mother or me, and addressed himself only to Will, Harry, and Father when he was at our house.
“What manuscript?”
“His thesis, Will says. He started to go to Will’s room to wash his hands but came back for his bag, and when we were about to go to dinner—this was all before you came downstairs—Will said, ‘Don’t you want to take your bag with you?’ and Wendell said, ‘Yes, I always do at home.’”
“Maybe he is afraid his family will burn it.” The Holmeses were a fractious family who for mysterious reasons all seemed to loathe one another. My comment inspired silent spasms of laughter in Mother, and I caught a glimpse of the carefree girl she must have been before we wore her down with all our tribulations.
I asked William one day if he disagreed with all of Father’s Ideas. He said he’d “leafed through” a few of Father’s books recently (“leafing through” was his preferred method of taking in information; he absorbed an astonishing amount this way). He concluded that Father’s solution to the problem of evil was “philosophically unsatisfying.”
“What is Father’s solution?”
“Oh, that Nature is basically evil and Divine Nature is all good. It’s essentially watered-down Hegel and the Hegelian solution is like the maudlin stage of drunkenness. In my opinion.”
I should mention that a strict if unspoken economy of health held sway in our family. It boiled down to the principle that the sickest member should be permitted to use family funds to travel abroad to regain his (or her) health in the healthier European air. (All doctors agreed about the air.) The sickest James was now deemed to be Harry, with his persistent though ill-defined back trouble. Thus, three months after William’s return, he sailed to Europe with a letter of credit and went directly to the Malvern Spa (where, years before, Father first heard about Swedenborg) to take the famous waters.
His letters began arriving, one or two a week.
After Malvern he was not sure that his cure was “clinched” and thought he might need to go back a second time. Despite his mysterious “dorsal infirmity,” he sounded like a gay blade, describing a garden party he’d just attended with Grace Norton and Sara Sedgwick. It was held at the home of Mrs. Lewes, aka George Eliot, whom Harry went on to describe as magnificently ugly, deliciously hideous, an ugly likeness of Mrs. Sam Ward of Boston. This vision of Harry and the Nortons (and Sara!) conversing with the great George Eliot plunged me into a painful cognizance of my insignificance. In that brilliant society, why should either my brother or my friend spare a thought for me?
Harry’s letters were read aloud at the Emersons’ and the Howells’, and everyone said how marvelous they were. I wondered briefly if I could write something equally marvelous if I had more access to the picturesque, before remembering that such egotism was unbecoming in a woman.