1892
THE ROOM IN WHICH I WILL DIE HAS A PRESSED-TIN CEILING, which I have ample time to study whilst lying on my back. The frieze of pineapples turns out on closer scrutiny to be a frieze of palm fronds, and the tiny angels in the four corners of one tile only look (for a day or two) like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. As my dying progresses, the tiles begin changing from day to day, from silver to slate blue to pistachio green to gunmetal grey to old gold to Pompeiian red. Never know what I’ll see. My aunt’s profile cleverly concealed among some shrubbery, my cousin Minny Temple romping through a field of tasseled corn, a finger of God pointing to a cluster of grapes with a bee orbiting it.
Katherine says the “bee” is a flyspeck and I would do well to ignore it.
William comes from over the sea, sits by my bedside, visibly shaken by my decrepitude. Such delicious company. When you are soon to die, you see other people in their wholeness. You could sit and watch them all day like your favorite exhibits in a museum.
We discuss Henry’s play, which is chiefly what I think about these days. The American has been performed in the provinces and now moves inexorably toward London. The best actors are French, H. says, but for mise-en-scène the English are second to none.
I told Nurse that when Henry’s play comes to London, she ought to go and have a seat in the stalls. She said, “I think, Miss, I would rather go in the gallery, and I could get some of the maids to go with me, and I would be sure not to tell them before that it was written by Mr. James, and then if it did not succeed it wouldn’t be any matter.”
Hearing this, William roars with laughter.
“William, when I ‘pass over,’ please promise you won’t unleash your Mrs. Piper on my defenseless soul.”
Laying his hand over his heart, he says, “The name Alice James shall never pass my lips in her presence. But I’m afraid I can’t control Bob.”
“No one can control Bob!”
We laugh together as the afternoon stretches out, endless as a summer in early childhood. The curtains billow, and I breathe in the sweet smells of grass and earth. We are in a state in which everything strikes us as funny and we can’t stop laughing. And this is the last time we will see each other in life!
William is describing his “experiments” with nitrous oxide gas, “the most mystical of drugs,” according to him. Alice stays up with him all night, writing down everything he says in case there is anything important.
“What drugs have you not taken, William?”
“Didn’t you ever want to take something stimulating, Alice, so you felt yourself just going off and grasping for a second the unity of the universe?”
“Funny you should say that. That seems to be happening fairly often of late.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, well, I go off all on my own. I don’t need drugs.”
“You may be interested to know, Alice, that your friend Dr. Weir Mitchell”—he grins mischievously, knowing how I have loathed this man since meeting him years ago at the Fieldses—“sent me peyote recently, promising me I would be in ‘fairyland.’ I took some while I was in New Hampshire. I retched for hours and felt no other effect.”
“William! You ought to know better than to take that man’s medicine. And that horrid Rest Cure. It does no one any good; it’s perfectly obvious.”
Probably not, he concedes.
“Poor little Winnie Howells. You must admit it’s shocking, William. And these doctors so sure of themselves! By the way, the other day I was remembering Weir Mitchell’s gruesome story in the Atlantic Monthly—about a soldier who lost all four of his limbs. It gave me nightmares.”
“Ah, yes, the Human Stump. It made a deep impression on me as well.”
“Wouldn’t the man have bled to death, though?”
“Well, I suppose Weir Mitchell must know, being a neurologist.”
A fly zigzags insanely around the room. William picks up a newspaper to whack it and I say, “No, William, let it be.”
“If you want a fly buzzing around the room—”
“To that fly you and I are as gods, and today I shall be a merciful deity. How long do flies live, anyway? A day or two?”
He doesn’t know. I thought he would.
“You know,” I say, “I always pictured the Human Stump rolling along end over end like a ball, didn’t you?” He nods, and we both break up laughing again.
“How is Charlemagne these days, William? I hear that he gets the bequest of Lowell’s manuscripts and so on. He is his—what do you call it?”
“Literary executor. The way Charles gets his name stuck to every greatness is fabulous, isn’t it? Dante, Goethe, Carlyle, Ruskin, Fitzgerald, Chauncey Wright, and now Lowell.”
“Someone, I forget who, told Katherine that Charles goes around boasting that he has burned some of the sweetest love letters ever written, to make sure that ‘no eye but mine should ever see them.’ Can you imagine?”
We sit companionably in silence for a while. Well, William sits; I remain supine. The state of dying opens up all sorts of beautiful silences no one feels compelled to fill. A day could be an eternity; before long, a minute may last forever.
“Your essay ‘The Hidden Self’ interested me very much, William. I was quite taken with Marie, the woman with a fever, delirium, and chills—all hysterical, I gather. It was a buried memory of something, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, Janet found that she had immersed herself in a cold bath years before, trying to bring on a miscarriage.”
“Do you think everyone has one? A hidden self?”
“Definitely.”
“I am flooded these days with old memories and new illuminations. It is like a river rushing through me. I believe your doctor Janet would find me of interest.”
“I daresay he would.”
“I wish I could describe it properly, William. It is as though parts of myself have been living as captives in the basement while I tried to live on the upper floors of the house. From time to time I’d hear groans or a rattling of chains down there and I’d do my best to ignore it and think of something pleasant. Remember Mother saying, when we went to the dentist, ‘Just think of something pleasant, dear’?”
“If only it were so easy.”
“But it’s curious, William. I am no longer afraid of the captives in the cellar.”
To live one’s whole life in a cruel world wherein the heart’s desire is never attained, and then to discover it was there all along! I want to tell William about this, but I can’t find the words.
He has been trying to describe the “moving pictures” he saw recently, taken of the Paris Exposition, blurry people waving from a blurry moving walkway.
“I still don’t see how a picture can move, though.”
He explains that it is projected on a screen like a magic lantern show.
“Oh! Like the rats jumping into the man’s mouth,” I say, referring to the magic lantern shows we took in as children in London, where itinerant performers dazzled us with the wonders of science. “If life gets any more modern, what will become of us? Oh, William, you will live into the twentieth century!”
Sorrow flickers across his face. For a minute he looks as if he might cry. Dear William. Persists in believing I should have had a salon, a fuller life, even a whole country at my feet. If he only knew, the paralytic on his couch has a wider experience than Stanley slaughtering savages. But maybe you have to be a terrible invalid to know this.
“I wonder if women will ever get the vote,” I muse. It has become a matter of mere curiosity to me.
This inspires William to tell me about his students at the Annex, whom he seems to prefer on the whole to the young men, but then he would, being such a flirt. “It took me months to talk Eliot into letting Mary Calkins into my graduate seminary, held in my house. She is a professor at Wellesley College, a brilliant psychologist. He refused at first. I had to badger him for months. We men need to be put in our place, and the women will do it, I hope. It’s about time.”
“Well, Katherine goes on storming the barricades in her polite but stubborn way.”
“I hope she succeeds.”
“Think of it, William! In the past year and a half, Henry has published The Tragic Muse, brought out The American, and written another play, Mrs Vibert. Combined with your massive Psychology, not a bad show for the family! Especially if I get myself dead, the hardest job of all!”
William goes back to America. Bidding each other good-bye, we pretend we’ll see each other again, because how do you say good-bye forever? The strange thing is that now he is always with me. So is everyone I have ever known.
I try sitting up at table. Lean my head against the table, shut my eyes, feel the hum of the gas. I hear the stitches made by Katherine at her sewing. I swear I can even hear a spider spinning its web. Makes a web out of its body, then goes and lives in it. Just like Henry with his fiction—making a world and living back into it.
I cannot go back now to what I dreamt I was.
It appears that I was born a few years too soon. When the morphia I was taking for pain caused insomnia and nervous distress, K and H stumbled upon an article on hypnotism in The Fortnightly Review by a Dr. Tuckey. They somehow prevailed on the man to come here to instruct Katherine in his dark arts. To my surprise, the mild radiance of Dr. Tuckey’s moonbeam personality has penetrated with a little hope the black mists that enveloped us. Knew at a glance how susceptible my nerves were and said, “It is dangerous to put her to sleep all the way.” Did not say what would happen.
Katherine performs the hypnotism skillfully. It does little for the pain, by which I mean the ceaseless grinding of my bones, the vise tightening around my skull, the blinding spasms in various mysterious internal organs. But, as I wrote to William, what I do experience is a calming of my nerves and a quiescent passive state, and I fall asleep now without the sensations of terror that have accompanied that process for so many years. The first time I was hypnotized I floated into the deep sea of divine cessation, and saw all the dear old mysteries and miracles vanish into vapor.
A miracle! The snakes stilled at last. The inner watchdog worn out with its ceaseless vigil. As a child I absorbed from Mother and Aunt Kate that it was the job of women to worry. Is the laundress consumptive? Will the boys put someone’s eye out with a stick? Is there dust on top of the armoire? Is Alice taking her nap? Is the air too damp? Are the children learning profanities? Will everyone’s clothes be ready for the season? Is Father becoming fatigued?
I had my own worries. What if you forget me when we move? What if you sell me to the gypsies? What if my heart stops? What if I fall through the ice? What if my head gets cut off in a train-wreck? What if Françoise puts a sleeping draught in our soup and we fall asleep for a hundred years? What if Father goes away and doesn’t come back? What if he prays for me to die and God hears?
And then your heart finds peace and you learn to love the world. Should probably have been hypnotized as a babe in swaddling.
I watch Nurse pull the shade to half mast and reposition a vase of flowers gathered from our garden. How perfect she is. In the worst periods of my neurasthenic youth I used to cry out to Mother and Father in the infernal nights what would become of me when I lost them. Here was the answer—a little girl then toddling about in a Gloucestershire village.
Half a dozen times a day I think, “I must ask K about that,” or “I must find out about this,” thinking that someday I may need the knowledge. Then I laugh, remembering that “somedays” are over for me.
Constance Maud comes to bid me farewell before she sails to America. A tide of homesickness sweeps me under. Reading Godey’s Lady’s Book in Newport. Those namby-pamby tales. “An Old Maid’s Story.” Every woman must be married; it may not be happiest at first but it is later. Stuck to my mind for some reason, although I don’t believe it.
Someday the rights of women will be respected, I suppose.
My ashes to go in a small box, only six guineas and another for a parson. So convenient.
Do you wish to dictate something in your journal?
Not in front of Henry, for no one is to know, only you. You will know what to do when the time comes.
They will want to burn it, I think. Your words into ashes.
Perhaps just a private printing. For the family. Nearly everyone has a crazy aunt in the attic. Could you find someone with a typewriter? I would like to see my thoughts in type; it might give them more gravitas.
She smiles broadly. “I was so hoping you’d say that.”
“Then, who knows, it might be published someday. Or perhaps not.”
William’s little Peggy—Billy teases her dreadfully, Alice writes. “When I speak to Billy, it makes my stomach tremble,” Peggy said. Heaven forbid a portent of heredity!
Long, long ago in Newport when I first died. Sun beating down, heatstroke, dog dead, bleeding from the mouth. Wilky in the parlor, so grievously wounded. Out of his mind. Don’t let the flies.
Standing above the chasm, toes curled over the edge; ten toes, each with its toenail, the baby toenail nearly microscopic.
Sara and her laughing eyes, the Perseids streaking through the heavens.
Creakings on the stair. Aunt Kate opening the bedroom door in Mt. Vernon Street. We never knew if. Life-interest in a shawl. What you bequeath to a servant.
This granite substance in my breast. Gruesome way to pass through the Valley of the Shadow. Great weakness now, like a boulder pinning me down.
The old Swedenborgian lady dressed in black taffeta, her jiggling arms. What lovely manners your children have.
When the father takes it off at night there is a stump. A dead fish, white and purple. The mother rubs it with oil. The father lies on his back and sighs, “Never was a man so blessed as I am with my Mary.”
House in St. John’s Wood 1855. Overlooking a green where elegant ladies and gentlemen practice archery. Like characters out of Robin Hood.
In Paris I see my reflection in the gleaming floors. Robbie says he can see my drawers, and I say, no, you can’t, and he says, yes, yes, I can. Grown-ups tower above us like redwoods.
Such good boys, I have such good boys.
Boulogne. On the beach Robbie and I holding our breath as long as. Spinning like tops to make ourselves dizzy. All fall down! Our footprints in the wet sand filling with water and pieces of sky.
Who will help me cross the river Lethe? What is the ferryman’s name? Katherine will know.
Madame parle français comme une vache espagnole.
Don’t you ever have fun, Cousin Alice?
Dream one night of Clover Hooper. Well, call it a dream. Wearing a white lace dress, sitting on the lip of a baroque fountain, feeding pigeons from her hands. I sit down next to her.
She looks up, startled. “Alice James! I thought maybe you’d gone and done it, too. It’s not a sin, you know.”
“I know that.”
“You may still.”
“If it gets worse I shall ask K for the lethal dose. Morphine. Dr. Baldwin kindly told us. But you—why did you drink potassium cyanide? I thought you had the perfect life!”
“Not at all. We could not have children and there seemed no point in going on. I am very occupied with the children here.” I look down at the pigeons and see that they have changed into street urchins with smudged faces. “But the clergy, Alice! Scurrying around with their horrid rat faces.” She shudders. “No, Alice, the real story is this. Henry, mi caro sposo, fell in love with Mrs. Cameron. Do you know her? Her husband is a Senator. The love was all in his mind but Henry’s sensual organ is his mind. The rest of him hardly matters.”
“Do you mean to say—?”
“Yes, Alice. He wrote a depressing novel called Esther in which a woman bearing a striking resemblance to moi falls into a hopeless melancholy after her father dies. Henry wrote it before Papa died. A queer case of precognition, no? I can take a hint, you know!”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, and then he wrote a second novel, also anonymous. Most people thought I wrote it. But that’s not it, either. What was it? Oh, yes, my mad dead Aunt Susie kept invading my dreams. Said I would have to kill myself eventually, so why put it off? Her voice in my head all the time, all the time. Do you know what that’s like? To blot it out, I had to drink a poisonous chemical used in photography. Did you know I took up photography? Anyway, I died and two years later Ellen had to throw herself in front of a train. Then Ned. The whole family—a chain reaction!”
“But Ned is still alive. In Cambridge, Massachusetts.”
“Wait. In a few years’ time he’ll throw himself out of a window.”
They take turns at my bedside, K and H. Is it Sunday? Oh yes, the bells. Nurse at her religious debaucheries all day.
K reading aloud from Miss Woolson’s story “Dorothy” in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Stops to hypnotize me every twenty minutes.
Where did my hysteria go?
My feebleness extreme. Can no longer sit up, so many things behind me now. From the supine position I dictate something for my diary. Strange dream this afternoon, woke up choking. Lizzy Boott and Annie Dixwell standing up in a boat in a stream, passing through a cloud into golden sunlight. Look back toward shore, beckoning to me. Both dead.
“The welcoming committee,” Katherine says.
Katherine reading aloud again, hypnotizing me every twenty minutes.
Father dying. Oh, this disgusting world! Did he not see his only daughter? Was I not there by his side?
Nothing ever happened really. Once I was a small person in a big world. Now the world abides in me. Stars explode. Kingdoms rise and fall, turn to dust, seven layers of Troy, library of Alexandria in flames. Periclean Athens, Napoleon I and the other Napoleon, the one we saw in Paris. Try to tell Katherine and Henry but words become garbled passing through my lips. Time for talk over, I suppose.
I have always been the same: lively and sad, I have loved God my father and liberty. Madame de Staël, as quoted by Mademoiselle Danse. Feeding a goat a scrap of paper through the palings of a wooden fence. Bob Temple goes to prison for his crimes. Governesses depart in tears. God does not haggle. Henry James has kept the secret.
Please, Alice, do take some liquid.
This year my happiest ever. Enfolded in the love of friend and brothers.
La Revue des Deux Mondes. Says it will rain?
H writes W about my progress toward deterioration.
Nights long. Dreadful coughing. Breathing agony. Bones on fire.
I shee it! I shee it!
What, Alice? (Henry)
Typewrii .. fee—fee woman.
Horrible wracking cough. Nurse wipes my mouth tenderly and props me up against a firm pillow so I can breathe. Clots of bloody tissue on my nightdress, Katherine changes me into a clean one. I attempt speech.
Try to rest, dear. Save your strength.
For what? (Attempt to laugh; produce a witchy cackle.)
Bi-shycle, bi-shycle.
What’s that about a bicycle, Alice? (Henry)
Fee women. Becush closhe. Rub a bit of my nightdress between my thumb and index finger. Henry works it out. “Women who ride bicycles must wear functional clothing?”
Yesh! Yesh!
So women will be set free by the typewriter and the bicycle? (Katherine.)
Yesh. You will shee! Coming. Coming soon.
How nice to have friends and brothers who know me so well they can decode my gibberish.
Pain lifting now. If you squint you can see it. Like space, like the silence between words. A wave of emptiness washes over my mind. My hard core melting, melting. The emptier I get the fuller I am.
To William. A telegram, whispered into Henry’s ear. Tenderest love to all farewell am going soon Alice. How did people say good-bye before the telegraph?
Who has been dreaming the dream of Alice James?
Alice I can’t hear you, you’re whispering.
Sun through the mist. Pat of butter melting, melting. Carried off the ship like a plank. Alice James takes her bow, exits stage left. Look!
Please, Alice, try to take some—
Lock eyes with K, squeeze her hand, I think she receives. The pain that consumed me is gone. Please don’t ask me, oh please don’t, to stay another day.
HENRY JAMES
11 ARGYLL RD., KENSINGTON W.
JANUARY 12, 1893
TO WILLIAM JAMES
Her lungs, her heart, her breast are all in great distress, constant fever, a distressing choking retching cough. . . . She could not sleep. She is perfectly clear and humorous and would be talking if doing so didn’t bring on spasms of coughing.
March 6th, 1893—All through Saturday the 5th and even in the night, Alice was making sentences.
—Written by Katherine Peabody Loring at the end of Alice James’s diary.
CABLE FROM HENRY JAMES TO WILLIAM JAMES
MARCH 6. 1893
ALICE JUST PASSED AWAY PAINLESS
KATHERINE PEABODY LORING
11 ARGYLL RD., KENSINGTON W.
MARCH 8, 1893
TO FRANCES ROLLINS (FANNY) MORSE
I cannot give you any idea of the beauty of that last night, those last hours, when Alice knew that she was free at last, though she was too weak to say much.
Ed essa da martiro
E da essilio venne a questa pace
(“From martyrdom and exile to this peace”)
—inscription on Alice James’s funeral urn, from Dante