ALICE JAMES’S DIARY LAY UNPUBLISHED FOR NEARLY FORTY years. William James and his brother Robertson (Bob) died in 1910, Henry James in 1916, after destroying his copy of the diary. (Garth Wilkinson James, known as Wilky, had died in 1883.) To the world beyond the family and a few friends, the diary’s existence remained a secret. In 1923 Katherine P. Loring gave one of the remaining copies to William James’s eldest son, Henry James III, and this copy ended up at the Bancroft Library of the University of California. Katherine’s own copy was purchased and donated to the University of Virginia’s Alderman Library.
Katherine Loring kept the two notebooks containing the original, handwritten diary.
In 1933 Bob James’s daughter, Mary James Vaux, wrote to Miss Loring to say she’d like to publish the diary in a book devoted to the younger and less famous members of the James family. Miss Loring gave her permission to use the diary, which she said Alice had wanted published. Mary Vaux hired a writer, Anna Robeson Burr, to put together a volume about the family.
This news sent shock waves through the other Jameses. All of William James’s four children violently opposed publication. Henry James III informed his sister, Margaret James Potter (Peggy), that he was trying to persuade Edward (Ned) James, son of Bob, to “restrain” his sister. Ned, however, considered his aunt’s diary “one of the most important pieces of literature that have been produced by any James.” The diary, edited and cut, with proper names indicated by initials, was incorporated into a volume called Alice James: Her Brothers—Her Journal, published in 1934. It was published again thirty years later in an edition by James family biographer Leon Edel called simply The Diary of Alice James.
Appalled by the specter of publication of a diary of “neurasthenic and unadmirable character,” Peggy James Potter wrote that Henry James’s autobiographical work
gives all the family biography that should be for public consumption. Why parade the failures, neurasthenias, and depressions of its younger members, as does Mrs. Burr? The book is an exposure, in the worst possible taste. Though I never knew Aunt Alice, I did know and adore Uncle Henry and that is probably why I shrink and shudder so over this publication.
Katherine Loring wrote to Mrs. Potter, explaining that, originally, she’d had four copies printed.
I gave one to your Uncle Henry, which he tore up and said was not worth while for anyone to read; I gave one copy to your father, which I believe you have and which I understand you have shown to many friends. When your brother gave the James papers to the Harvard library, I sent him the third copy to deposit with the other papers. . . . As far as I can remember, your father never thanked me for his copy—simply acknowledged the receipt of it and certainly never made any suggestion as to its being read or not. I respected your Uncle Henry’s wish not to have it published; knowing him . . . I appreciated his horror of having any responsibility about himself or his friends.
Mary Vaux and her brother Edward [the children of Robertson—“Bob”—James] and his wife are the only grandchildren who have ever taken any interest in me . . . and asked me about my relations with the James family. Mary Vaux and her mother have been my intimate and valued friends and when Mary asked me to tell her about her Aunt Alice I gave her the journal, which, you will understand, belonged absolutely to me . . . and told her to do what she liked with it, all of the persons mentioned having died.
Alice had asked her to have it typewritten before her death, according to Miss Loring, and while she never said so, “I understood that she would like to have the diary published.”
To Mrs. Potter, she added, “I think your criticism of the impression that the diary would make is unjust, absurd and altogether unwarranted.”
The wider world agreed. Alice James’s diary was a literary sensation, earning rave reviews in the New York Herald Tribune, the (London) Times Literary Supplement, the New Republic, the Nation, and The New York Times, among other publications. The Sunday Times noted that “in character and intellect she was the equal of her distinguished brothers and a daughter, beyond all question, of her pungent and iconoclastic father,” while the New Republic cheered: “In some of her insights, some of her assessments of nineteenth-century humbug, Alice James went beyond either of her eminent brothers.”
In a thoughtful appreciation in 1943, Diana Trilling wrote, “There is a common [James] family store of perception, imagination, and, above all, gifts of style. Alice, too, can write that wonderful educated James prose with its incandescent accuracy and then its sudden flights of homeliness.” She compared Alice James to Emily Dickinson. In his group portrait The James Family, the biographer F.O. Matthiessen treated Alice James as an intellectual and a writer in her own right, observing that “Alice James, contemplating the world from her sanatorium, had come to a more incisive understanding of some of the forces in modern society than either of her brothers.”