Alice James : a biography

434 Pages·2011·5.71 MB·English

by  James

JEAN STROUSE is the author of Morgan, American Financier as well as Alice
James, which won the Bancroft Prize. Her essays and reviews have appeared in
The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times,
Newsweek, Architectural Digest, and Slate. She is currently the Sue Ann and
John Weinberg Director of the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for
Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
COLM TÓIBÍN is the author of six novels, including The Master (a novel based
on the life of Henry James) and Brooklyn, and two collections of stories,
Mothers and Sons and The Empty Family. He has been a visiting writer at
Stanford, the University of Texas at Austin, and Princeton, and is now Mellon
Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University.
ALICE JAMES
A Biography
JEAN STROUSE
Preface by
COLM TÓIBÍN
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
Contents
Cover
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Preface
Alice James
Introduction
PART I: AN ACCIDENTAL CHILD
Chapter One: Divine Maternity And a Calvinist God
Chapter Two: Natives of the Family
Chapter Three: A Sensuous Education
Chapter Four: Civil War
PART II: A FEMININE AGE
Chapter Five: Bostonians
Chapter Six: “Nerves”
Chapter Seven: Breakdown
Chapter Eight: “Trying To Idle”
Chapter Nine: A Grand Tour
Chapter Ten: Love and Work
Chapter Eleven: Dark Waters
Chapter Twelve: Gains and Losses
Chapter Thirteen: Alone
PART III: THE WIDER SPHERE OF REFERENCE
Chapter Fourteen: “Peculiar Intense and Interesting Affections”
Chapter Fifteen: A London Life
Chapter Sixteen: A Voice of One’s Own
Chapter Seventeen: Divine Cessation
Afterword: The Diary
Illustrations
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Copyright and More Information
Preface
Like the James family, the Yeats family produced two brothers who specialized
in finishing everything they started. While their father found it difficult to
complete an oil painting or write a whole book, W. B. Yeats, the poet, and his
brother Jack, the painter, produced a large quantity of work; they remained
single-minded and dedicated throughout their lives partly as a response to their
untidy upbringing and their father’s fondness for distraction.
In both the Yeats and the James families, there was also a talented, clever
sister who did not marry and lived all her life in her brothers’ orbit, whose letters
remain fascinating for their sharpness, wit, and intelligence. Lily Yeats and Alice
James did not write novels or poems or make paintings, but for all that, their
personalities emerge from the past with considerable gnarled energy. Their lives
were lived within limits—and how they managed within those limits tells us
much about the fate of clever women in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Yet in another sense, the limits left these two women free to be nothing
but themselves. That ambiguous position is what makes them so fascinating, and
it is why they had as much force and individuality as their famous brothers, and
at times even more.
Jean Strouse’s biography succeeds in giving Alice James her full due,
allowing a long-submerged figure to shine as a brilliant individual, while also
making clear that her unusual and unhappy fate was the result both of the rules
and restrictions of society and of the eccentricities of a particular family. Alice
appears as a woman caught between the demands of her own fierce intelligence
and the dullness of the domestic sphere occupied by her mother and aunt.
Strouse makes ingenious use of her letters and diaries, but is also superb in her
examination of the milieu in which Alice was raised. Alice’s parents, brothers,
and friends are all brought vividly before us. If the world of Alice James was
circumscribed, the limits were, as she herself was well aware, of the highest and
most interesting sort.
Strouse is a connoisseur of tone. She can read a letter from Alice with full
knowledge of its nineteenth-century context. She can also analyze the peculiar
fears, neuroses, and delusions which lie between the words. She depicts Alice’s
longings and sense of panic and inadequacy with subtlety and care. She moves
through the years making clear the significant influences, the moments of
change, the sudden shifts and turns in Alice’s psyche—her responses to life and
illness, and her family’s responses to her. But Strouse is not prepared to offer a
reductive interpretation or a blanket explanation. She is not a biographer who
begins with a theory and sets about proving it; her version of this complex life is
judicious and detailed. Alice James is allowed her proper strangeness.
Alice was clearly subject to damaging historical and family circumstances,
but she was also in some ways heroic. She suffered for much of her life, and
Strouse shows us how real and intense that suffering was. We see Alice’s
struggle against her mysterious invalidism, and yet we also see her wallowing in
it, needing it. In addition to telling a story of conflict within a woman of
intelligence and sensitivity, this biography sheds considerable light on the
history of nineteenth-century medicine. Strouse manages an evenness of tone in
her accounts of the theories about what was wrong with Alice and the efforts
made to cure her. Some of the treatments she endured, viewed from almost a
century and a half later, seem like pure quackery. Strouse understands, however,
that the field of medicine was groping to understand “nervous” disorders, and
that myriad, useless “cures” were new and seemed credible at the time.
It was Alice’s mother and father, and, less directly, her brother William—in
the sense that he teased her, flirted with her, and insisted on pitying her, which
she hated—who did much to crush her spirit. We can see the developing
dynamics of destruction because what happened within the James family is
unusually richly documented. Not only do we have letters which give a picture
of ordinary life, of the context for the dramas and the crises; we also have
Alice’s diaries, and the novels of Henry, which reveal a great deal about his own
preoccupations and preconceptions. And finally we have William’s writings on
psychology, which throw a strange light on his sister’s dilemma. Strouse sifts
through this extraordinary mass and variety of source material with the skill of a
literary critic, and also with remarkable sympathy and flair.
Thus her book is not only a life of the youngest of the five James children,
and the only girl among them, but a portrait of the inner workings of the entire
family. It shows how differently each one of them was treated by the parents and
what a distinct creature each one of them became. The biography is deeply
disturbing in its clear delineation of the essentially neurotic character of the
search for power and space within the James family and household. Out of this
neurosis, as if by right, grew two American geniuses. And out of it also emerged
the wounded figure of Alice.
By treating the family as a unit, Strouse also gives each of them a pure
individuality, whether as a striving artist or scientist, or a struggling patient (the
family members wrote constantly to each other about illnesses real and
imaginary)—a pure individuality, that is, within the genteel prison created for
them by their parents. The story of their lives is the story of how they each
sought to be released from this prison with various levels of success.
What Alice and her two oldest brothers shared—what sets them apart and
makes their lives of such continuing interest—was the quality and intensity of
their self-consciousness. These were lives deeply examined by the subjects
themselves, and yet the very subtlety and acuteness of their self-awareness
makes them highly unreliable as witnesses; what they left were clues or evasions
or half-truths, versions that are hardly to be trusted. The Jameses need and can
bear endless scrutinizing. Alice’s letters and diaries, her command of
vocabulary, her savage wit, her indiscretion, her brittle lack of self-pity, her
interest in the political world, her gift for friendship make her a character of
extraordinary interest.
In her final years in England, Alice became ever more of what Henry might
have called “a case.” Her taking to her bed and her intense relationship to her
friend Katharine Loring, not to speak of her relationships with the doctors who
treated her and the servants who looked after her, tempt us to feel that we are
following a story which is either vastly comic or utterly tragic. It is a credit to
Strouse’s sympathy and forensic patience that we are allowed the luxury of
neither extreme. She approaches this most complex psychology with remarkable
wisdom. She doesn’t gloss over difficulties; she doesn’t seek to simplify. She
gives us a masterly portrait of a brilliant mind placed under the greatest pressure,
of an extraordinary family that was expert at doing damage to its members, and
of a social and intellectual world in which William and Henry James were able
to thrive while their sister moved willfully or bravely into shadows which
become, in these pages, substantial and haunting.
—COLM TÓIBÍN
ALICE JAMES
Introduction
Why Alice James?
WHEN I AM GONE,” Alice James wrote to her brother William as she was
dying, “pray don’t think of me simply as a creature who might have been
something else, had neurotic science been born.”
By neurotic science she meant the science of nervous disorders, since her
existence had long been dominated by mysterious illnesses for which no organic
cause could be discovered and no cure found. Her prescient plea to William
insisted that her life be judged on its own terms, without apology or excuse. At
the same time, it recognized the temptation her friends and posterity would feel
to explain her somehow, to imagine what she might have been. And in
recognizing that temptation, Alice acknowledged that her life appeared to have
been a failure.
By conventional measures, it was. Alice James did not produce any
significant body of work. She never married. She did not have children. She was
not socially useful, particularly virtuous, or even happy. Her interests and talents
might have led her to become the “something else” she referred to in her letter to
William — perhaps (to ignore her injunction for a moment) a historian, or a
writer on politics, a pioneer in women’s education, or the leader of a radical
movement. Instead, she became an invalid. Like a great many other nineteenth-
century women, she was “delicate,” “high-strung,” “nervous,” and given to
prostrations. She had her first breakdown at the age of nineteen, and her
condition was called, at various points in her life, neurasthenia, hysteria,
rheumatic gout, suppressed gout, cardiac complication, spinal neurosis, nervous
hyperesthesia, and spiritual crisis. “Try not to be ill,” wrote her brother Henry in
1883, “— that is all; for in that there is a failure.”[1]
Alice would have liked to put her mind to use in ways the world could
recognize. She knew she was intelligent. When she was not incapacitated, she
held salons in Boston and London and taught correspondence courses in history
to women all over the United States. She had considerable power as a writer,
though it was undisciplined: all her life she wrote lively, detailed letters to
relatives and friends, and her diary, published after she died, presents a wide
range of original reflections on society, politics, literature, history, and the