American Studies Page 3
The notion of William James as a compulsive masturbator (but are they, as the protagonist of the episode in the Varieties says of himself, afraid of the dark?) has a certain sensational appeal, so it is slightly disappointing to discover that every one of the leaves comes off this biographical onion. Townsend has, to begin with, made a mistake all students of the Jameses eventually learn to avoid, which is to rely on anything Henry James says in his autobiography. Henry freely changed dates, suppressed facts, and rewrote passages from other people’s letters, and then often added injury to insult by destroying the originals. Horatio Alger didn’t write a biography of Edwin Forrest. His cousin William Alger did. William Alger was a Unitarian clergyman who lived in Boston and was a friend of Emerson, which is how he would have known Henry James, Sr. Henry James, Jr., though, had probably never heard of him, or by 1914 had forgotten him if he had, so in transcribing this letter, he very likely either added the first name or changed it to Horatio on the assumption that his ditsy father had got it wrong.
Horatio Alger, too, had been a Unitarian minister, in Brewster, on Cape Cod, but he had been obliged to resign his ministry in 1866 following accusations (which he did not contest) of pederasty with members of his congregation. He fled to New York City, and soon after began his career as the author of the famous books for boys. He continued to cultivate friendships with eligible boys, but he is supposed to have forsworn further sexual indulgence. Alger evidently felt a good deal of anguish about his “sin,” but he is not likely to have volunteered to chat about it four years later with people he barely knew, and “insanity” (Henry Sr.’s term) seems, in any case, a couple of shades too strong.
William Alger, on the other hand, really had been insane. During a trip to Europe in 1871, he collapsed in Paris and was pronounced “hopelessly insane” by Charles Brown-Séquard, a renowned physiologist. (The diagnosis was reported in the Boston newspapers: so much for nineteenth-century notions of medical confidentiality.) Alger was brought back to Boston and immediately admitted into the McLean Asylum. He was released in the spring of 1872, and was able to return to his work.24 His Life of Edwin Forrest: The American Tragedian was published in 1877.
Then when did William Alger have his conversation at the James family home about his (not William James’s) experiences at McLean? In his autobiography, Henry says his father’s letter reporting that conversation was written in “the spring of ’70”—a year before William Alger’s breakdown. But he is, as usual, making it up. Henry Sr.’s letter, changing topics, continues: “Everyone hopes that J. G. hasn’t caught a Rosamund Vincy in Miss M.” J. G. is John Chipman Gray, an intimate friend of Henry and of William’s favorite cousin, Minny Temple (who died, of tuberculosis, in 1870, and who was the inspiration thirty years later for the character of Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove). Miss M. is Nina Mason; she and John Gray were married on June 4, 1873. Rosamund Vincy, of course, is the woman who marries and then ruins the ambitious physician Tertius Lydgate in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. That novel was published in December 1872. Henry’s date was therefore three years off. His father’s letter was written not in 1870, the year of the Renouvier diary entry, but in 1873. (The life of the Grays, by the way, did not imitate art. John Gray cofounded Ropes & Gray, the famous Boston law firm, and was a professor for forty years at the Harvard Law School. Nina Gray became, in later years, a confidant of her husband’s old friend Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes.) The “Horatio Alger letter,” in short, is a red herring.
Which leaves the self-abuse. There is no evidence that James ever read Acton on The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs or Esquirol on Des maladies mentales. But (as Townsend notes) he did read, and with some admiration, Henry Maudsley’s Body and Mind (1870), a respected psychology text, which warns that “the development of puberty may lead indirectly to insanity by becoming the occasion of a vicious habit of self-abuse in men.”25 But the connection between masturbation and mental disorder was a commonplace of nineteenth-century neurology. James was a medical student with a special interest in nervous disorders; he would not have needed any particular book to pick up the idea.
Leaving psychoanalytic interpretations of the story of the epileptic patient aside for the moment, it is not easy to find evidence that James ever felt that he had a problem with masturbation himself. The passage from his diary that Gilman quotes—“Hitherto I have tried to fire myself with the moral interest, as an aid in … attaining certain salutary but difficult habits”—is suggestive, but only if we read “moral” and “habit” in a twentieth-century sense. James was taking those terms from Alexander Bain’s The Emotions and the Will (1859), for decades a standard text in British psychology and a work James later relied on in key sections of his own Principles of Psychology. (This is the same Bain who turns up in the Renouvier entry three months later: “Today has furnished the exceptionally passionate initiative which Bain posits as needful for the acquisition of habits.”) In a chapter called “Moral Habits,” Bain uses, as an example of a situation in which such habits might be developed, what he describes as “one of the strongest of our fleshly indulgences”: sleeping late. The passage is such a choice specimen of the Victorian rhetoric of moral hygiene that it is worth quoting the heroic climax:
Some necessity that there is no escaping, compels a man from his early youth to be out of bed every morning at six o’clock. For weeks and months, and perhaps, years, the struggle and the suffering are acutely felt. Meanwhile, the hand of power is remorseless in the uniformity of its application. And now it is that there creeps a certain habitude of the system, modifying by imperceptible degrees the bitterness of that oft-repeated conflict. What the individual has had to act so many times in one way, brings on a current of nervous power, confirming the victorious, and sapping the vanquished, impulse. The force of determination that unites the decisive movement of jumping out of bed with the perception of the appointed hour, is invigorated slowly but surely. Iteration is softening down the harsh experience of the early riser, and bringing about, as time advances, an approach to the final condition of mechanical punctuality and entire indifference. Years may be wanted to arrive at this point, but sooner or later the plastic element in our constitution will succeed.26
If getting out of bed early is a “moral habit,” pretty much anything can be a moral habit. Nothing in his diary requires us to assume that James was talking about masturbation.
The only evidence that remains is the passage about the epileptic patient. But the crucial thing to notice about that passage is that the epileptic is epileptic. He is a person with an organic disorder, not a person who has made himself idiotic by “unhealthy habits.” “Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him,” says the Frenchman. The fear being expressed is the fear of unforeseen catastrophe. It is precisely not the fear of self-destruction.
The story of the epileptic is a story about what used to be called “the problem of evil”; that is why it appears in a book on religious experience. The epileptic patient represents the classic challenge to faith: innocent suffering. The realization that people can suffer as a result of their own actions does not cause a religious crisis. What causes a religious crisis is the realization that people can lead exemplary lives and suffer anyway. The Frenchman has been insulated by the assumption that in a rational universe, bad things cannot happen to good people. The blow to his ego, when the image of the patient is suddenly before him, comes from his recognition that moral worth does not immunize us against disaster. “The eternal God is my refuge” is the lesson of the vision: there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves against undeserved suffering. The only salvation is faith. Evil, in James’s time, was a motiveless malignancy. We think of evils as caused by something—by greed, or genes, or sexual abuse—and miss the point of James’s story.
3
The biggest impediment to getting a coherent crisis-and-recovery narrative out of the materials of
William James’s life between 1867 and 1873 is that large portions of the record are simply missing. James was never a daily diarist, but the entries in the notebook he used for a diary are fairly regular from April 1868, when it begins, to February 1869. Then twenty-one pages (as much as forty-two pages of writing) have been cut out, apparently with scissors. The next dated entry is for December 21, 1869. Most of James’s diary for 1869, in other words, has disappeared.
Those pages were probably destroyed either by James himself or by his widow, Alice, who winnowed her husband’s papers with meticulous care, sitting in front of a fireplace, and who had (like her brother-in-law Henry) small tolerance for the embarrassing detail. It is, of course, stimulating to imagine the sort of revelation that might have led James, or his heirs, to consign these pages to the flames. And people who want to place the vision of the epileptic or the McLean hospitalization in 1869 will naturally look upon the missing pages as the dog that does not bark.
The reason letters and diaries are usually destroyed, though, is that they contain references to other people. And there is one tiny clue that points in this direction. James graduated from medical school in June 1869 and spent the summer—the period the missing pages presumably cover—in Pomfret, Connecticut, on vacation with his family. He was, by his mother’s account in her letters to her son Henry, in fairly miserable shape. Two sheets of notepaper are preserved among his papers in an envelope labeled “Pomfret 1869.” James seems to have been trying to work out, on these pages, some sort of philosophy of conduct, and is weighing the alternative postures of sympathy (an “expansive embracing tendency”) and defensiveness, or what he calls “self-sufficingness”—and in the course of this he writes: “My feeling towards B.W (e.g.) comes from too partial a sympathy; so does the optimist’s each sympathizing with opposite sides of her being.” And later on: “sympathy gives pain (B.W.) Shd. sympathy go so far as to dictate suicide?”27 The wording is cryptic, but James seems to be referring to his feelings for a woman.
Certain identification of la belle B.W. sans merci is impossible. One candidate is Bessie Ward, the sister of Tom Ward, one of James’s best friends. Her father was the James family banker; her mother, the former Anna Hazard Barker, was a famous beauty. “The adorable Miss Bessy,” Henry later called the daughter after running into her in Rome; “ …—pretty, intelligent, gracious and elegant—a most noble and delightful maiden.”28 “Sympathy gives pain” suggests that if William had a crush on Bessie Ward (and she certainly sounds like a person compatible with crushes), it was not reciprocated. (William seems to have nursed a number of fruitless passions in his youth. He appears to have gotten involved, while he was in Germany, with an American woman, Catherine Havens, who was even more neurotic than he was; he was smitten by Fanny Dixwell, who married Oliver Wendell Holmes, and by Clover Hooper, who married Henry Adams. Bessie Ward, much to the amusement of William’s sister, Alice, eventually married a Saxon baron named Schönberg.) If William had committed his feelings about her (or some other B.W.) to paper, this might later have constituted a reason for destroying that portion of his diary. In any case, there is no hint of the asylum here.
And the excised pages from 1869 form the small gap in the record. After the extant diary resumes on December 21, 1869, there are regular entries up to the Renouvier episode, on April 30, 1870. But the next page is dated February 10, 1873—more than three and a half years later. There is one more entry, for April 10, 1873, and the diary ends. The silence of the diary would matter less if we had enough letters. But we don’t. Though James was ordinarily a prolific correspondent, between the July 25, 1870, letter to Robertson James, already quoted, and a letter dated May 30, 1872—a period of nearly two years—only four letters survive. If James wrote other letters besides these four, they were presumably destroyed along with the diary pages. Between August 1871 and May 1872, ten months, nothing remains at all.29 And third-person information about William’s activities during this period—for example, in letters written by other family members—is sparse. All kinds of things may have happened to James between 1869 and 1872. We know only a few.
Was the period for which there are neither letters nor diaries the period in which James was a patient at the McLean Asylum? Apparently not. Although Linda Simon was, of course, denied access to James’s medical records at McLean, she did arrange to examine the patient logs from 1866 through 1872 with the names blacked out. She found nothing in the remaining information about age, sex, occupation, and time of stay that matches up with William James. Given the fragmentary nature of our knowledge of James’s life in the early 1870s, it seems fair to conclude that the story of the epileptic patient is biographical flotsam. It is unmoored to any known event in James’s life. It can be interpreted as a precipitating crisis, as a psychological breakthrough, as simply one among many crises, most of which are now unrecoverable—or as a partial invention, a little work of faction.
Even considered as a discrete event, unembedded in some larger structure of negation and transcendence, the story of the epileptic is not exactly raw data. Simon registers some skepticism about the verisimilitude of the account in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and she is right to do so. The passage feels mildly precooked; the coda, in particular, about clinging to “scripture texts” in order to avoid insanity does not sound very much like William James (or, for that matter, like a Frenchman). The passage is designed, after all, to mimic a medical case history and to fit into a book about religious experiences. The Frenchman’s testimony is cross-referenced to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and to a well-known story James’s father wrote about his own spiritual crisis, which led to his conversion to Swedenborgianism, and remarkable similarities are pointed out by James. As Oscar Wilde once said of Wordsworth: He found under the stones the sermons he had already placed there. One reason for disguising the source must have been to license some opportunistic revisions of the original experience—whatever it was.
The literary self-consciousness of the passage, in particular the way in which it resembles Henry Sr.’s account of his crisis—which involved the apparition of “some damned shape squatting invisible to me … and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life”30—has been remarked on by a number of commentators. But even the perception that the boundary separating the epileptic from the “normal” person is paper-thin was probably not as spontaneous as the passage makes it appear. Charles Brown-Séquard, the man who diagnosed poor William Alger in Paris in 1871, had been William James’s teacher at the Harvard Medical School five years earlier. Diseases of the brain were his specialty, and he taught, according to William’s own lecture notes, that there is “a not[able] tendency in every man to some of the features of epilepsy.” He mentioned coitus and the involuntary jerking of muscles when being tickled or in sleep: “Thus degree by degree we are led to look on epilepsy as an incrd. degree of the normal reflex excitability of certain parts of nervous centres.”31
This notion, much amplified, grew to occupy a central place in James’s own psychology. “His thought was that there is no sharp line to be drawn between ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ minds, that all have something of both,” James’s former student Dickinson Miller recalled. “Once when we were returning from visits to two insane asylums at one of which we had seen a dangerous, almost naked maniac, I remember his saying, ‘President Eliot [Charles William Eliot, the president of Harvard] would not like to admit that no sharp line could be drawn between himself and the men we have just seen, but it is true.’”32 The epileptic patient had performed his heuristic role before.
4
Without suggesting that anything that might significantly transform our understanding of William James has been suppressed, we are entitled to note that the version of his early breakdown in his son Henry’s 1920 edition of the Letters and his protégé Perry’s 1935 biography is very much the authorized version. Two pieces of evidence—the story of the epileptic patient and the response to Renouvier—were pl
ucked from a fragmentary record and erected into the narrative emblems of a breakdown and recovery. For the story of a philosophical-spiritual crisis overcome by “the will to believe” is conveniently symmetrical with James’s writings in The Will to Believe (1897) and Pragmatism (1907), books that exhort us to act “as if” in the face of uncertainty—to believe that if we take a risk, the universe will meet us halfway. The biography is made to lend authenticity to the philosophy: James, too, knew pessimism and despair, and this is how he willed himself to overcome them.
Except that he never overcame them. Simon’s biography emphasizes, more fully than any earlier one, the persistence of James’s ill health. For James was depressive all his life. And this may be the diagnosis that explains the insufficiency of all other diagnoses. Commentators prefer to assume that James was despondent in the years after his graduation from medical school because of some problem—a family problem, a sexual problem, a career problem, an identity problem, a philosophical problem. But depression is not a problem; it’s a weather pattern. Under its cloud, everything else is a problem. When the weather changes, these problems disappear, or become “opportunities,” or “challenges”—until dark skies return.
Throughout James’s life, evidence in letters or diaries that he has recovered his health and spirits is always followed, sooner or later, by evidence that he has had a relapse. The letter from James’s father in the spring of 1873 announcing William’s new robustness is followed by a letter in the summer from his mother (never the tenderest analyst of her oldest child’s troubles) to Henry Jr. (her favorite), complaining that William “has such a morbid sympathy with every form of trouble and privation … . He is very despondent about himself.” In March 1874, she complains, again to Henry, that “the trouble with [William] is that he must express every fluctuation of feeling, and especially every unfavorable symptom.” And the following July: “His temperament is a morbidly hopeless one.” In the summer of 1880, Henry, after seeing his brother in London, confides to his mother that “I can’t get rid of the feeling that he takes himself, and his nerves, and his physical condition too hard and too consciously.” 33