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Gay Wilson Allen, in William James: A Biography (1967), had it that James told his son Henry when the vision of the epileptic had occurred, but this assumption seems to have no basis. Henry apparently learned about the episode the same way everyone else did, from Flournoy’s book, after his father’s death. And this means that we have no idea when the original experience actually took place. Assuming—no small assumption—that the autobiographical details in the phony Frenchman’s account are James’s own, it can be inferred that it happened after James had visited an asylum, during a period of uncertainty about his career, and while he was living at home. This narrows the possibilities down to some date before 1878, which is the year that, at the age of thirty-six, James finally got married. James was continually changing his mind about his career (as, nearly until the wedding, he continually changed his mind about his marriage). And he was often inside asylums. Insanity was a particular interest of his, and he knew people who were patients in asylums, notably his cousin Kitty James (who married her psychiatrist, Morton Prince). James was a student at the Harvard Medical School from 1866 to 1869, and probably visited asylums as part of his training. Although the diary in which the Renouvier entry appears is complete from December 1869 through April 1870, there is no mention in it of a vision of an epileptic, or even of a visit to an asylum. Yet commentators can be remarkably certain about the timing. Jacques Barzun, in A Stroll with William James, informs us that the episode of the epileptic occurred “within the week before or after” March 8, 1870—that is, the month before the Renouvier episode.7 He does not explain how he arrived at this determination.
In fact, there is nothing to exclude the possibility that the vision of the epileptic occurred after the Renouvier episode. Such a theory was proposed by the psychiatrist Howard M. Feinstein in an article published in 1981, which became the basis for his fascinating work of biographical speculation, Becoming William James (1984). Feinstein begins with the psychiatrist’s standard presumption that whatever the etiology of a crisis, the patient’s own account of it cannot possibly be the correct one. In his diary and letters beginning around 1867 and continuing into the early 1870s, James complains continually of a bad back, an inability to use his eyes, poor digestion, restlessness, pessimism, melancholy, misanthropy, general feelings of ineffectualness, and, a few times, suicidal impulses. Something, as Miss Clavel liked to say, was not right. Feinstein’s diagnosis is family dynamics: he thinks that (among other things) Henry Sr. was driving his son nuts on the subject of his future career. The Renouvier episode, in Feinstein’s view, was just another self-punishing effort by William during this period to take himself in hand and make something of his life—specifically, by denying himself (as the diary puts it) the “speculation and contemplative Grüblei in which my nature takes most delight.” There does indeed seem to be a load of bad superego in that passage.
Feinstein quotes a letter from William to his brother Robertson, who had settled in Milwaukee (a reasonable distance from the indeed distracting Henry Sr.), which seems to support the contention that the Renouvier episode was a hollow epiphany. The Renouvier diary entry is dated April 30, 1870; on July 25, 1870, William informs Robertson that “my own symptoms of improvement 2 months ago have not amounted to anything.” “As is so often the case with such self-treatment,” observes Dr. Feinstein, “the ‘cure’ was part of the problem.”8
But Feinstein did not wish to abandon the crisis-and-recovery narrative. He only wished to invert it. In his new chronology, the Renouvier episode becomes the crisis, and the vision of the epileptic marks the breakthrough. James had the vision, Feinstein argues, not in the winter of 1870, which is where Perry and most other commentators place it, but two and a half years later; and he offers as evidence another letter to Robertson, this one written in 1874, in which William reports that “I had a crisis just before and about the time of your last visit here.” Robertson’s “last visit” to the James family home in Cambridge took place in November 1872: he had just gotten married, and was introducing his new wife to the family. (She was approved, but only just: “She is in no way responsive; takes everything as her due, is a peer of all the world, and don’t know the beginning of a life beyond sense,” Henry Sr. reported serenely to his son the novelist.)9 The vision of the epileptic, Feinstein concludes, must have happened in the fall of 1872, long after the Renouvier episode. Many people, including the editors of the marvelous twelve-volume edition of The Correspondence of William James, have accepted Feinstein’s chronology.10
But it has a few holes. The July 25, 1870, letter to Robertson which Feinstein cites to show that the Renouvier “cure” had failed (“my own symptoms of improvement 2 months ago have not amounted to anything”) was preceded by another letter from William to Robertson, dated April 17, 1870, in which William reports that “after 3 months prostration I begin to show signs of getting on my legs again.”11This can’t be an allusion to the Renouvier episode, because the diary for April 30 states that “yesterday was a crisis in my life”—that is, April 29. What James is referring to, in fact, is his bad back, which was almost always the leading item on his list of health problems, and which at times prevented him from walking even short distances without pain. “Getting on my legs” is not a metaphor. There is, in James’s letters, always a strong correlation between the state of his back and the state of his spirits, as would be natural for someone with a chronic ailment. But he is not saying, in that July 25 letter, “Renouvier has failed me.” He’s saying that his back is bothering him again.
And the 1874 letter, also to Robertson, that Feinstein offers in support of his dating of the vision of the epileptic is at odds with his own theory. Feinstein cites the letter, but he does not quote it. Here is what it says:
I had a crisis just before and about the time of your last visit here, which was more philosophical than theological perhaps, that is did not deal with my personal relations to God as yours seem to have done [Robertson had written to William about his own developing religious interests]—but it was accompanied with anxiety and despair &c—I worked through it into the faith in free-will and into the final reign of the Good conditional on the co-operation of each of us in the sphere—small enough often—in which it is allowed him to be operative. Why God waits on our cooperation is not to be fathomed—but as a fact of experience I believe it—and having that belief open to me, I have lost much of my former interest in speculative questions—I have taken up Physiology instead of Philosophy and go along on a much calmer sea with a more even keel.12
This is essentially the language of the Renouvier diary entry.
Whatever this “crisis” in the fall of 1872 entailed, therefore, it was not a renouncement of Renouvier. On November 2, 1872, James wrote a letter to Renouvier himself, in which he expressed “the admiration and gratitude that reading your essays has inspired in me … . Thanks to you, I possess for the first time an intelligible and rational conception of freedom.”13 Six weeks later, he wrote to Robertson, who was safely back in Wisconsin again, advising him that when feelings of depression come, “the only thing is to have faith and wait, and resolve whatever happens to be faithful ‘in the outward act’ (as a philosopher says) that is do as if the good were the law of being, even if one can’t for the moment really believe it. The belief will come in its time.”14 And there is a letter from William’s father to Henry the novelist (then living in Rome), apparently written in March 1873, in which he reports that William has been crowing recently about the improvement in his health and spirits since the previous spring: “I ventured to ask what especially in his opinion had produced the change. He said several things: the reading of Renouvier (particularly his vindication of the freedom of the will) and of Wordsworth.”15
Finally, there is a piece of evidence that has not been mentioned before, but that brings us as close as we are likely to get to this mysterious crisis of 1872. It is on a single sheet of notepaper dated October 21, 1872, and it reads, in part:
Tonigh
t I feel full of Lebensmut [optimism] because of the unforeseen awakening in me within the past few days of dormant feelings and keen powers of thought. But this is an irrational ground of reconciliation with the Universe, being based on accidental particulars of experience, the which if they happened to be of an opposite quality wd. justify an opposite conclusion. The desideration is a conception of the whole which, no matter what be the experience of the moment, will reconcile one to it. So far I see only the: “for the sake of—!” The evil is somehow mechanically continuous with the good. The latter is thus ever imminent, ever potential and for its sake I’ll go the former.16
This does not correlate very well with the feelings aroused by the apparition of the epileptic patient described in The Varieties of Religious Experience.
What is significant about these notes and letters from 1872 and 1873 is that they indicate that James was still struggling to recover from some sort of breakdown two and a half years after recording in his diary the fresh start inspired by Renouvier. Feinstein is surely right to point out that an experience that does not produce results for almost three years can hardly be counted a breakthrough. The most we can say is that Renouvier’s idea about free will was one of the things James preserved from a long period of ill health and poor spirits. It was neither the cause of a breakdown nor the cure.
2
What was the problem? In 1979, a graduate student felicitously named James William Anderson reported, in his dissertation, rumors that James had once been a patient at the McLean Asylum for the Insane, outside Boston. The same rumor has been reported since by the historian of science Robert J. Richards, who said it had been confirmed for him by “someone who had worked in the hospital in an official capacity”; by Feinstein, in Becoming William James; and by Alfred Kazin, who wrote in 1993 that “years ago the famous Harvard psychologist Henry A. Murray told me that at one point in his life James had put himself into McLean’s.”17 In her biography of James, Genuine Reality, Linda Simon names a psychiatrist, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse, who did her residency at McLean in the 1950s and who says that she saw James’s patient records in the archives there.
This fresh wrinkle has had two effects. It has devalued somewhat the biographical significance of the Renouvier episode—since if James was hospitalized, it is not likely to have been for frustration with what is, after all, a fairly ancient philosophical puzzle about whether there is such a thing as free will. And it has redirected attention to the story about the epileptic patient. Hospitalization for a mental disorder not only seems to explain the shock of recognition in that story (“That shape am I”); it suggests that something more is possibly being masked than the nationality of “the sufferer.” James may have had deeper reasons for not wishing to give himself away, reasons having to do with an incident in his life he wished to remain suppressed, when he recalled the vision in The Varieties of Religious Experience.
But is it so? The McLean Hospital (the name was changed in 1892) still exists. Robert Lowell was a patient there; so was Sylvia Plath. It is now located in Belmont, and is affiliated, as it has been since its founding, in 1811, with Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School. Scholars who have asked to see James’s patient records there have been informed that hospital policy forbids the release of information about individual patients, including confirmation that someone was ever a patient.
I wrote to the archivist at McLean asking whether James might simply have been at the hospital in his capacity as a medical student, and met with this boilerplate rebuff. But when I approached the administration of the hospital, I got a different response, which is that requests for information about William James had been forwarded to the James family, which has refused to permit the information to be released.18 Robertson James, in later life an alcoholic, was a patient at McLean;19 so was William’s cousin Kitty James Prince (he used to visit her there). And William James, Jr., James’s son, may, as Linda Simon notes in her biography, also have been hospitalized at McLean for depression. So that the family’s reluctance to send researchers into the archives looking for folders labeled “James”—or even “James, William”—might only be an effort to protect the privacy of some of its less celebrated members. On the other hand, if the celebrated one was never an inmate, a statement to that effect would have sufficed to shield the rest. In the absence of such a statement, we can probably assume that he was.
The next question is, When? What makes incomplete biographical information generally worse than no information at all is that speculation fills the gaps and eventually becomes indistinguishable from “the facts”—as has happened with the dating of the episode of the epileptic patient. In the case of James’s hospitalization, the inclination is to insert the information into the period of his physical and mental distress—that is, sometime between 1867, when he began to complain regularly about his various symptoms, and late 1872, when, at the age of thirty, he finally got a job, as a part-time teacher at Harvard—and then to try to rewrite the crisis-and-recovery narrative around it.
The boldest venture in this direction so far is by Kim Townsend, in an original book called Manhood at Harvard, which is about the construction of a weirdly brittle culture of masculinity in late-nineteenth-century Cambridge. James is, quite appropriately, a leading character in the book, and Townsend has a long analysis of his breakdown. Townsend thinks that James’s hospitalization occurred before 1870, and he offers a letter (until now unnoticed) that appears in the second volume of Henry James the novelist’s autobiography, Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), as a possible smoking gun.
The letter is from Henry Sr. to Henry the novelist, written, according to the autobiography, in “the spring of ’70.” “Horatio Alger is writing a Life of Edwin Forrest,” the father reports in this letter, and has recently paid a visit to the James home in Cambridge. (Forrest was a popular actor whom Henry Sr. had known when the family was living in New York City.) “Alger talks freely about his own late insanity,” the letter continues, “—which he in fact appears to enjoy as a subject of conversation and in which he has somewhat interested William, who has talked with him a good deal of his experience at the Somerville Asylum.”20 “The Somerville Asylum” is McLean, which was originally located in Somerville. The “his” in that last clause is ambiguous: it can refer either to William’s or to Alger’s “experience at the Somerville Asylum.” But Horatio Alger was never a patient in an asylum.
Townsend (following Feinstein) believes that the episode of the epileptic patient happened later, in 1872, but he also thinks that the passage recalling it contains a screen memory: he thinks that the patient (“a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic, who used to sit all day … with his knees drawn up against his chin, and the coarse gray undershirt, which was his only garment, drawn over them”) is a man who has been driven insane by masturbation. Thus the shock of identification, and thus the “panic fear.”
The notion that James had a “problem” with what one biographer rather quaintly calls “self-abuse”21 predates the rumor about McLean. It seems to have been introduced to the world by the historian Cushing Strout, in an article published in 1968. Strout’s idea is that the episode of the epileptic occurred sometime between 1866, when James returned from a scientific expedition to Brazil led by Louis Agassiz, and decided that he didn’t want to become a naturalist, and 1869, when he received his medical degree, and decided that he didn’t want to become a doctor. Strout thinks that James became convinced, after reading a work called The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, by William Acton, that there is a linkage between introspection (“speculation and contemplative Grüblei”) and masturbation, and between masturbation and insanity. So that, Strout concludes: “That hideous figure [of the epileptic] … objectified not only the self-punishing guilt in his own symptoms, but also his fear of being trapped in a medical career which seemed to be his only option after his disillusionment with natural history.”22
This interp
retation was amplified a little by Sander Gilman, in a book on Disease and Representation, who suggested that the source for James’s vision of the epileptic patient might have been a work called Des maladies mentales, by Jean Etienne Dominique Esquirol, published in 1838 (and written, as Gilman points out, in the supposed language of James’s “sufferer”). Esquirol’s book contains full-length illustrations (drawings, obviously, not photographs) of mentally ill persons, one of which depicts a patient who looks uncannily like the epileptic described by James, and whom Esquirol identifies as an idiot and a masturbator. “James’s fear of madness,” Gilman concludes, “ … was a direct fear of receding into madness as a result of his own behavior.” And he quotes a passage from James’s diary, dated February 1, 1870, which, he says, refers to James’s masturbatory habit “in a direct manner”: “Hitherto I have tried to fire myself with the moral interest, as an aid in the accomplishing of certain utilitarian ends of attaining certain salutary but difficult habits. I tried to associate the feeling of Moral degradation with failure … . But in all this I was cultivating the moral … only as a means and more or less humbugging myself.”23 We have moved some distance from the philosophy of Charles Renouvier.