The Dawning of Alice James

Introduction to The Dawning of Alice James

Alice James was the interesting, brilliant and largely unknown sister of psychologist William James and novelist Henry James, all children of Henry James, Sr., whose circle of friends included Bronson Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. The James family was certainly among America’s foremost intellectual families. Because of an inheritance from his father, Henry, Sr. could comfortably support his family without working. The James family lived mostly in New York and Massachusetts throughout the 1800’s, but also lived in Europe for periods of time. Henry James spent his later writing life in Europe and Alice spent her final years in London after the deaths of her parents.

Alice might have been an invisible member of the family if it were not for the diary she wrote in her final years. Alice was plagued from her young adult years with violent muscular attacks which often appeared in times of upheaval in her life. Without her paralyzing and undiagnosed ailments she might have had an accomplished career like her famous brothers. Alice was rather plain, and imagining that her sharp and caustic wit might be off-putting to suitors, she never married.

This is Alice’s story largely in her own words, a person and a story worth knowing.

THE DAWNING OF ALICE JAMES

My name is Alice James and I am dead . . . at last. I came into this world on August 7, 1848, a rather cataclysmic year all over the world, you’ll recall, although I am not willing to take blame. And it seems I have been working hard ever since at leaving it. Deed done! I am here as Exhibit A that death is reality. Father was right when he said death is the reality and life merely an experiment. That ramshackle body I put up with all those years, up in smoke; my spirit freed.

You’ve no doubt heard of my brothers, William and Henry. Well, now it’s my turn. Now, they were great and intelligent men but only because I, in my magnanimity, granted it. Every family, you know, is allotted only so much intelligence. I took a little less, so they could have more. But I kept warning them to be on their toes, to arm themselves against my dawn which could, at any moment I chose, cast them into obscurity. The time is now. My dawn is imminent.

Ours was no average, run-of-the-mill family by any stretch of the mind. Our dear father, Henry, Sr., never worked. I see him sitting in our library bent over his books, his wire spectacles gripping his nose, his beard growing long and white through the years as his hair receded. Grandfather James had left him fortune enough to allow us all to live very comfortably from the income. That was part of the reason Father could indulge in his books and theories, but he also had lost a leg when he was 13 when the leg of his pants was accidentally drenched with turpentine and caught on fire. For the rest of his life you could hear him coming as his cork leg clomped along in his uneven gait. His lack of occupation, his staying home like a mother, brought some embarrassment at times. Once my brother Henry breathlessly ran in from play to ask Father what he did. “The other boys’ fathers are in business. What should I say you do, Father?” Father said, “Say I’m a philosopher, say I’m a lover of humankind, say I’m an author of books, if you like, or, best of all just say I’m a student.” Henry slouched out of the room, knowing that answer would not impress the boys. But we were well taken care of.

Father’s world was in his thoughts, his books, his iron ideology. Conversation, not action, was the center of his life. The NY Sun wrote when Father died, “One of the most interesting minds ever known among Americans disappeared at Boston yesterday.” I’m sure Father would have objected to disappearing, but a life of the mind was what had died when Father passed on. Father thought it was important to be something. The life of the mind was limitless. To actually do something placed limitations on one’s life. In fact, the real world quite overwhelmed him. He would depart from the house for an overnight trip with much ado over goodbyes and two hours later he would be back, trembling with homesickness. We all would huddle around, assuring him and patting him back into the bosom of his family. The dear, dear creature!

He spoiled every Christmas. When Mother was out, he would steal in with us to the forbidden closet and give us a peep the week before. What an ungrateful wretch I was and how I used to wish he hadn’t done it. Father, the delicious infant! I wondered if Father ever confessed his sin to Mother. She would have flashed him that stern look and shaken her head. Her literal mind had no comprehension of his sense of whimsy. All of us children spent many desperate, drifting, groping years trying to arrive at some balancing act between doing and being, between a life of thought and a life of actions. Some of us were more successful than others.

Willliam . . . he was the psychologist . . . first came to understand this. He baptized his rebirth by saying, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” William thought life should be doing, suffering, creating. “Life,” he said, “is the self’s resistance to the world.” Whatever the world threw at you, your test was to withstand it, to bear up. William never gave Henry much credit for creating false worlds with words. He thought Henry hid himself from the world, afraid to face the trial of the world, eluding life’s suffering. But from my view, Henry stayed the course pretty firmly. He was companion to my spirit and he gave me his inheritance to supplement my income. My brothers Bob and Wilky were not so torn between action and thought. They had real jobs in the real world which were not without their problems. Wilky was the doer. He fought in the Civil War as an officer in the 54th black regiment, withstood the derision of serving in a “nigger” regiment, and nearly died at the battle of Ft. Wagner. After the war he tried his hand at ranching and construction, and died cruelly too soon from the effects of his wounds. The youngest, Bob, had so little self, he was almost not there at all, reminiscent, I thought, of a human bladder. His poor wife coped with his drinking, his emotional upheavals, downheavals and early death. Needless to say, Bob brought little resistance to the forces in the world and very little esteem from me.

And I, I was the last . . . and a girl. As Henry used to say, “Girls in our family seem scarcely to have had a chance,” but that didn’t mean they didn’t have opinions on how I should be raised. William gave advice to Father, “Let Alice cultivate a manner clinging yet self-sustained, reserved yet confidential; let her face beam with serious beauty and flow with quiet delight at having you speak to her; let her exhibit short glimpses of a soul with wings, (but very short wings); let her voice be musical and the tones of her voice full of caressing, and every movement of her full of grace, and you have no ideal how lovely she will become.” Of course, there was no doubt how Father felt. “Woman is inferior to man. She is inferior in passion, in intellect, and in physical strength. Learning and wisdom do not become her. A woman is made for virtue.” Surely my feminine virtue and grace is self-evident, although it may amaze you that I can read and write. In spite of his love for me, my father thought women were made to love and bless men. How convenient! Had my father educated his daughter in the same manner as his sons, I wonder if it would have made me any less of a fool than I am. I might have been deprived of those exquisite moments of mental flatulence which occasionally inflated my cerebral vacuum with a delicious sense of latent possibilities. Mother and I withstood the fight against all that male puffery and I think I may add not altogether unsuccessfully. Mother was the anchor, the glue, the person who made it all work. Mother and Father were perfect complements. Father had not a practical, real world bone in his body. He theorized about utopias and communal life while Mother kept the books, put up the curtain rods, managed the house. Mother was the one who attempted to ground us in money matters, but the lessons never took hold for any of us. How frustrated she must have been as the only realist among the idealists, how she must have struggled to tie us all down to earth. But isn’t that the joke? Isn’t that what keeps our attention? The irony of it all. How we flourish or fail here upon how our cunning and our character grapple with the space between the actual and the dream, between what we are and what we’d like to be, between our mother’s world and our father’s world! That’s the trick. The momentum for life comes from trying to connect the real and the dream and to make the leap between one mind and another. That is what pushes us to do what we do in this life. William wrote, “Perhaps the greatest breach in nature is from one mind to another.” Henry saw the same difficulty saying, “We are each a product of circumstances and there are stone walls which fatally divide us.” In our lives I see William, Henry and myself as trying to fill the breach between one mind and another, between our dreams and our reality—striving to build bridges over the chasms. Henry and William finally found their niches. And looking back, no doubt I, too, took up my pencil to etch my faint, frail footprint upon this earth.

My first entry belies my personal need: “I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me. A written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations. I shall at least have it all my own way and it may bring relief as an outlet to the geyser of emotions, sensations, speculation and reflections which ferment perpetually within my poor old carcass for its sins.”

My diary began to explore the wonder of this mysterious life and find my soul a home. So I took up that pencil as my only implement of doing, even though you might think it a feeble effort waiting until my 38th year and going downhill at a steady trot. Writing in my journal helped shape that formless mass within me as I picked through my ragbag of memory, trying to make whole cloth from my life—something which I could carry about in my pocket and work away upon equally in shower as in sunshine, away from those grotesque obstructions we otherwise call life.

Memory . . . what an odd thing memory. Why does one childish experience stand out so luminous and solid against the vague and misty background? The things we remember have a first-timeness about them which may be the reason for their survival. I must ask William some day if there is any theory on the subject, or better, whether ’tis worthy of a theory.

I remember distinctly the first time I was conscious of a purely intellectual process. It was the summer of ’56 . . . I was 8 . . . the whole family, save William, were packed in a large shabby carriage, going for a day in the country. All I can remember of the drive was a never-ending ribbon of dust stretching in front and the anguish greater even than usual of Wilky’s and Bob’s heels grinding into my shins. But there that afternoon came the first flowering of my measure of things intellectual. When Wilky and Bob had disappeared, not to my grief, Henry was sitting in the swing and I came up and stood near by as the sun began to slant over the desolate expanse, as the dreary hours, with that endlessness which they have for infancy, passed, when Henry suddenly exclaimed: “This might certainly called pleasure under difficulties!” My whole being stirred in response to the substance and exquisite, original form of this remark. My heart still beats now with the sisterly pride suddenly awakened by the higher nature of this appeal to my mind, rather than the rudimentary appeals to my cruder instincts which usually produced my childish explosions of laughter. That afternoon in my eighth year my world pivoted on a new understanding. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. I was made ready by my excellent parents who threshed out every ignoble superstition, and did not feel it to be their duty to fill our minds with dry husks, leaving them tabulae rasae to receive whatever stamp our individual experience was to give them, so that we had not the bore of wasting our energy in raking over and sweeping out the rubbish. On the other hand, as Henry said, we did wholesomely create inconsistency and eat and drink contradiction, smothered by indulgence, and incapacitated by talk. As children, Father had dragged us through Europe for all sorts of experimental schooling I warned William not to drag his children through such a rootless and accidental childhood. We were left on the precipice of adulthood vacillating between doing something and thinking about it.

In my late adolescence my body became victim to violent quakes as unpredictable and inexplicable as earth quakes. The first time I was conscious of abandoning portions of my consciousness, as William called it, was in 1867 or ’68. As I lay prostrate after the storm, I saw so distinctly that it was a fight between my body and my will, a battle in which the body ultimately triumphed. It became my forte. Better than anyone, I could topple over in a faint, take to my bed, mostly when some propitious occasion was imminent. Of course, there was no great demand for this talent and the remuneration was small. As I sat in the library reading, violent waves invaded my muscles. They urged me to throw myself out the window, or knock off the head of my kind silver-haired father as he sat writing. Imagine if you ever let yourself go for a moment your organism would slump into an unmanageable blob, or, at some imminent moment, the dykes would break and the flood waters would sweep in and make you abjectly impotent. I was a wretched, shriveled alien within four walls, fleshed in frail, mortal tissue. Inside me an emotional volcano was ready to erupt but outwardly I appeared to have the reverberation of a mouse and the physical significance of a chip of a lead pencil. All my strength and presence of mind was spent shoring up the levees. I was not to do anything too exciting, too demanding, too exhausting—and it was the job of others to see that my nerves were kept calm. No one could know what would set off my spinal neurosis, my rheumatic gout, my nervous hysteria, or whatever else was the current diagnosis. I clothed myself in neutral tints, walked by still waters , and possessed my soul in silence. I tiptoed around in my life.

My learning was thus curtailed. In my attempts to study, the most violent upheavals in my head overtook me so that I had to abandon my brain, as it were. I spent my life on “idle” because if I ran my engines too fast I “went off.” Anything that stuck of itself was free to do so, but conscious and continuous mental pursuit was an impossible exercise. Dr. Taylor had me believe that all that intellectualizing causes my nervous problems. Girls, you know, are not built for intellectual stimulation. It starves the body of its needed strength. Dr. Taylor said, “Give me the little woman who has not been educated too much and whose only ambition is to be a good mother and wife. Such women are capable of being mothers to men.” Father, of course, agreed wholeheartedly with that notion.

You must be asking, “Did she ever do anything constructive?" I did do a few things in my life. I was drawn to doing bandages for the soldiers in the war, I joined the Female Humane Society of Cambridge to help poor and sick women, and to my quilting bee society. One might discern that the bee was a facade for ladies’ gossip. Women can be so superfluous, so inane. For example, one of my inspired circle, on her return from London, when I asked her what she had heard, said, “It was all on public affairs and I never remember anything that doesn’t concern me.” But my proudest achievement was the correspondence school. Well, it was really called the Society to Encourage Studies at Home begun by Miss Anna Eliot Ticknow in Boston. She was concerned for the state of education of women and thought that if women did not balance their physical and mental sides their health might be affected. I helped in the history department by writing 30 or 40 letters a month on history to a half dozen women around the country who had not the access to education that I had and provided them with appropriate books. What a satisfaction to be able to help those poor women and offer them a hand into the world of education. But then I had nought else of importance to do. It also changed my life because it was there I met Katherine who was to be my support, literally my legs, for most of my remaining years.

I wish you could know Katherine. Katherine Loring, my best friend and ultimate caretaker, was head of the history department. She is the most wonderful being. She has all the mere brute superiority which distinguishes man from woman with all the feminine virtues. There is nothing she can’t do from hewing wood and drawing water, driving run-away horses and education all the women of North America. Once someone called her the New England Professor of doing things. You can imagine the extreme variance on the species exemplified by Katherine and myself.

She and I went to the Adirondacks for something of a camping trip for a month of invigorating fresh air and relaxation at the Putnam shanty. William always advised the outdoors as a panacea for all earthly ills. Unfortunately I found the air did not suit me at all—evidence that the bosom of nature was just about as much of a humbug as I always knew it was. Never again would I be taken in by Mother Nature’s snobbish worshipers, half of them too cowardly to admit how squalid it all is. The shanty lacked nothing in the way of discomfort. We stumbled gracefully over the stones in the brook. Katherine bathed therein, but I assure you that for purposes of bathing, a tub in the hand is worth fifty brooks in the bush. We perched ourselves on the sharpest stones we could find and religiously spent endless hours is listening to babbling water, the gentle hum of the mosquito, giving joy untold to the sportive midge who found me quite the loveliest production civilization had as yet sent to him. Katherine insisted on protecting my frailties by inserting a hideous rubber blanket between my fair form and all the mossy logs upon which I wished to extend it, thereby putting a cruel barrier between me and all the dear little crawlers with whom I had traveled so far to establish a rapport and who would no doubt have found me as delectable and succulent a feast as did their brethren. Fortunately, we had the shanty all to ourselves and the only romance in the situation was at night when we sat by our bonfire, the woods all round us and no one else within a mile, save some lively bulls who in the middle of the night with that unreasonableness characteristic of their sex would charge the shanty with their horns driving Katherine to her revolver and me under the bed.

For a few days Dr. Charles Putnam came to protect us. He ate and consorted with us through the day but when night fell, with great propriety he took himself to the other house. You no doubt are shocked to hear of two virgins of thirty summers living alone in the woods with a bachelor, but I think if you knew the piety of his mouth, his virtuous spectacles and the general maiden-aunt like turn of his figure, the veriest prig of you all would be ashamed to have had such thoughts. Our food was sent to us from the other house by the gentleman cook and a hired girl, which shows the same inequality between the sexes exists in the wilderness as in effete civilizations. The girl who served us last year, knowing we were teachers, pleaded with us to discourage her sister from seeking further education. As she said, it didn’t make any difference whether you were a lady-graduate or not once you were married. Then, of course, the sister turned out to be a semi-idiot and has since sought refuge in marriage . . . like so many others.

Still matrimony seems the only successful occupation that a woman can undertake. I love to hear of successful engagements. It always sends a thrill of joy through me although my own turn I feared, and rightly so, would never come on that side of the grave. There were times when I became ardently matrimonial, and if I could have gotten any man to be impassioned about me I should not have let him escape. Charles Jackson set my heart aflutter, but his affections were already captured by Miss Appleton who I confess when I met her at luncheon one day was indeed quite attractive. I refrained from looking in the mirror for some time after I got home. It’s most inconvenient to be possessed of so tender and apparently undesired being as mine. I think the difficulty is my inability to assume the receptive attitude, that cardinal virtue in woman, the absence of which has always made me so uncharming to and uncharmed by the male sex. But the circumstances in Boston at that time, as William once point out to Henry, was bleak for women. William wrote to encourage Henry to marry. “You know these first-class young spinsters do not always keep forever . . . although on the whole they tend to, in Boston.” I must include myself among those first-class spinsters. The shortage of men after the great war may or may not have contributed to my circumstance. Miss Jane Norton at dinner one night said that she thought all these Boston women, instead of devoting themselves to painting, clubs, societies, etc., ought to stay at home in a constant state of matrimonial expectation. When they were so happy together, men said to themselves, “Oh, she’s so happy we won’t marry her!” Surely this promoted the new view that men were attracted by depressed, gloomy females and married them out of compassion. Miss Norton also abused their habit of wearing waterproofs—her own gown being so hideous I should have been only too thankful to have one to wrap her in.

My friend Sara Sedgwick must listen to most of my rantings on the subject of marriage. I went on about the Whitney girls. They had no end of offers! It was insulting, for if such ragged growth as the Miss Whitneys were what was want it was no wonder that a rare exotic like — modesty forbids my saying who—was left unplucked upon its stem, to reach a bloom bordering, to put it delicately, on the full-blown. I did occasionally call Sara’s attention to the handsome butcher boy with whom I had an interview every morning for the purpose of telling him that Mrs. James does not wish anything. He must have thought that we were a curious race, living on our own fat, unless he knew that madam only had him come for looks and galavanted herself to market every morning. He was very good-looking and was felled with emotion whenever he saw me.

We ladies of Boston had to deal constantly with dukes and barons ready to be converted into husbands. I think that if I condescended to a title I should draw the line at duke. So commonplace to see those flimsy Barons always on hand to be converted into husbands. How much more respectable a good solid shoemaker would sound, even better than a butcher boy. Now our friend Sargy Perry took a new bride, Miss Lilla Cabot. I struggled to like her for a long period but it became a struggle that I could not longer keep up. When she confined her wonder and admiration to her intellectual achievements I could put up with her, but when she began ramming her moral perfections down my throat it was a little more than my imperfect digestion could stand. Sargy always had the capacities of a cormorant, so he was able to swallow her whole, without thinking about her as she was going down. Be that as it may, my soul will never stretch itself to allowing that it is anything else than a cruel and unnatural fate for a woman to live alone. To have no one to care and ‘do for’ daily is not only a sorrow, but sterilizing force.

These strange ailments of mine distract me from dwelling on my marital state. My pain brought a disposition to life. That same idea again and again resurfaced as truth—the resistance one brings to life is the measure on one’s strength. If we were made of rock, some of us would be sandstone and some granite. Life’s forces wear away at sandstone, but granite stands, resisting. When I happened to read the letters and journals of George Eliot, I thought, What a lifeless, diseased, self-conscious being! Not one burst of joy, not one ray of humor, not one living breath in one of her letters or journals! Her dank, moaning features haunt and pursue one through the book. She makes upon me the impression, morally and physically of mildew, or some morbid growth—a fungus of a pendulous shape. Of all the arts, the art of living is the most exquisite and rewarding, and it is not brought to perfection by wallowing in one’s disabilities and trials, as Miss Eliot did. Me chained to my couch can have wider experiences that Stanley slaughtering savages; the two-roomed cottage may enclose an infinitely richer, sweeter domestic harmony than the palace; let us not waste our sacred fire and wear away our tissues in the vulgar pursuit of what others have and we have not; admitting defeat is not the way to conquer and from every failure imperishable experience survives. All my experiences, the joyful and the painful, fed the flames that lit my small journey here. Even though the flame may have burned low at times, it never flickered out. There are poor creatures who never find their bearings, but are tossed like dried leaves hither, thither at the mercy of every change in the wind. They feel no shame at being languished, or at crying out at the common lot of pain and sorrow, who never dimly suspect that the only thing which survives is the resistance we bring to life and not the strain life brings to us. After all what is living but our struggle against our inheritance and the consequences of our actions. History does not exactly repeat itself, for each time we come at it, we have something more to meet it with.

And yet I cannot say that black waves of emptiness did not seep into the crevices of my mind. Looking back I realize I had been dying for so long . . . really since that hideous summer of ’78, that summer of all times when William . . . William who had been my knight on the white horse . . . married his sweet Alice, my namesake, and I caused such a commotion with my silly upheavals, going down to the deep sea, its dark waters closing over me, when I knew neither hope nor peace. That summer changed the possibilities. The family was breaking apart: my William, whose flirtations had kept my spirits alive, my Henry, whose friendship had sustained me, were leaving, were going off on their own and perhaps my body erupted in its own statement of despair. What would become of me when I lost them?

These nervous prostrations were not unique to me although I did bring them to near perfection. My father in his younger years had what we referred to as the “great vastation,” that as he sat in his chair, a revelation so shattering came upon him that his very own self was reduced to cinders. William, too, in his indecisive youth, experienced a similar revelation and perhaps many of us do. The flash of darkest nothingness which reduces us to such fearfulness about our own purpose, our own value. From that experience we find ourselves desperately creating a world in which we can live, weaving a netting that holds us above the black pit of nothingness.

The thought of suicide crossed my mind more than once, although I hated the idea with all my heart. I broached the subject with my father. He congratulated me on resisting that impulse, but he said, “You have my full permission to end your life whenever you please, but I would hope that you would do it in such a perfectly gentle manner as to not distress your family or friends.” Of course, I thanked him for permission, but now somehow it no longer had such a strong attraction although it crossed my mind. I chose to put up my best resistance against the world and its forces. I would fight the battle in concert with my father against evil. For some, either their resistance is not so great or their troubles are much greater. No doubt my good friend Edmund Gurney committed suicide. It’s bad that it is so untidy, for one bespatters one’s friends morally as well as physically, taking them so much more into one’s secret than they want to be taken. But how heroic to be able to suppress one’s vanity to confess the game is too hard. What ephemera we all are, to be sure—our experience leaves no permanent furrow but, like writing in sand, is washed out by every advancing ripple of changing circumstances. But, in defense, I shall proclaim that any one who spends her life as an appendage to five cushions and three shawls is justified in committing the sloppiest kind of suicide at a moment’s notice. After all, hadn’t father taught us that death was the reality and life simply an experiment?

The hideous summer of ’78 became prelude to only four years hence when Mother died, and then Father soon after, from sorrow and loneliness. In that brief time after Mother’s death, I looked after Father. I was needed. I ran the house, and felt well and productive. When it became clear he had chosen death over life and there was no changing his mind, I asked him what to do about his funeral . . . what to have the minister say. “Tell him to say only this ‘Here lies a man who has taught all his life, that the ceremonies attending birth, marriages and death were all damned nonsense’; don’t let him say a word more.” But there was no Unitarian even elastic enough for this. What a washed out, cowering mess humanity seems beside a creature as my father. That brief time held both death and life, childhood and adulthood, home and the world beating in from outside. The year of their deaths was the interlude between having my home to go to and having to go out and find a home for myself.

I was alone there in the little house on Mr. Vernon Street. In those first ghastly days how I longed to flee to the firemen next door and escape from the ‘Alone, Alone!’ that echoed through the house, rustled down the stairs, whispered from the wall, and confronted me, like a material presence, as I sat waiting, counting the moments as they turned themselves from today into tomorrow.

Part II

One can become accustomed to any burden with a little hewing and hacking. And I began to grow use to my loneliness, but there seemed to be little left for me in Boston. William had his home, his family, his teaching; Henry was traveling Europe; Katherine was in Europe tending her frail sister, Louise. Before I knew it I was settling in London in the pathway of Katherine and Henry. If I had known that my trip to England would be the last time I would set foot on American soil, I would have savored the smell of the earth, the freshness of air, the exhilaration of freedom. After years away, I came to long to see a shaft of sunshine shimmering through the pines, to breathe in the resinous air and throw my withered body down upon my mother earth, bury my face in the coarse grass, worshipping all that the ugly, raw emptiness of the blessed land stands for. America is the Huge Chance for hemmed in Humanity! It stretches and lends itself to all sizes and shapes of man . . . and woman; unfettered by the weight of a moss-grown, cobwebby past, and overflowing with a divine good-humor and generosity. It gives a helping hand to the faltering, an indulgent thought for the discredited, a heart of hope for every outcast of tradition. The selfless philosophy was the same as our father’s. Our father taught us that each person is valued—there is no difference between the most accomplished gentleman and the most infamous scoundrel, between the most virtuous lady and the vilest prostitute in God’s acceptance of people. Thus, I noted in my journal, God graciously gave to the frog the same delight in his croaking as the nightingale took in her song.

It is the contrast with the English that brings the American genuineness into focus. Father railed against the religion and superstitions of the English. I had thought their antiquated ideas nearly extinct, but when I arrived in England I was astonished at what vitality the ugly things still had. Of all their abominations, the greatest is their religion of conformity—a God with fixed and rigid outlines to be worshipped within a prescribed and formal ritual. We Americans relate more to the spontaneous inspiration of an aspiring soul, we are inspired by the worshipper whose bosom glows with the living, ever clearer knowledge of divine things or a soul whose communion is the common joys and sorrows, the simple sights and sounds.

Their religion perhaps embodies the English who wish to have everything in order, to be told what to do, and to find happiness living within some narrow trough that leads them through life without any distracting side roads to its inevitable conclusion. This stifling land where form is the god of gods! A nearly dead Yankee is worth twenty of the stupid, lazy, doughy lumps, when there is anything to be done. These English are like running your head into a feather bed. Even the most intelligent minds are merely cul-de-sacs, more or less long, but in time you will always come to the dead end. On their language, for example, they have a few tried phrases they use over and over until they rather lose their meaning. We Americans, on the other hand, try to startle people with our inventive language, which, of course, I am unable to demonstrate in public.

On the other hand, here in England I feel no shame for my invalid condition. In America if you weren’t always doing something, up and at ‘em, they looked down their noses at you. Here conditions are so easy, with their enhanced sense of leisure, work reduced to a minimum and the all-purpose god of Holiday worshipped so perpetually by all classes. There is no need to justify one’s existence when one is simply one more amid a million of the superfluous. The English class structure embeds its society with inertia. Class frees people from individual responsibilities. It is not their fault, after all; it is the class that puts them where they are. It is no denigration to accept government doles because they cannot help themselves. In England the working man has allowed himself to be patted and legislated out of all independence. Americans, with no class system, rely only on their individual dignity for their successes and failures.

I am not totally isolated here in England. Now and again people come to call. One surprise visitor made me forget my solitude and alienation. One day Henry came to lunch, and after lunch, he said, “I must tell you something.” I, of course, said, “You’re not going to be married!” “No,” he said, “but William is here and is waiting in the garden. If you survive the news, I am to tie a white handkerchief to the balcony.” I managed not to topple over and William came bounding into the room. What a joy it was to see him again, even though he had added slightly to his girth and lost a little hair from his head. Still those piercing eyes held my attention and his mind slipped through one idea to another like a blob of mercury through your fingers. What joy the three of us had in reliving memories of our parents, our childhood, our favorite stories.

“Do you remember when Grace Norton gave Mabel Quincy a copy of Montaigne for her wedding and she had glued all the naughty pages together? Imagine Mabel running to the teakettle holding those pages over the spout! Could there be anything so deliciously droll!”

“William, do you remember when you were so fascinated by seances and Mrs. Piper, the medium? In the name of science, of course. You asked for a lock of my hair, but did not know I played a trick? It was not a lock of my hair; it belonged to a friend of my nurse, who had died four years before. That’s a much better test of the medium’s powers. And besides, I should detest having my secrets laid bare to the public.” I did ask William’s forgiveness for my frivolous treatment of so serious a science.

It had been so long since we were all together—an oasis of family—with the illusion that what had seemed forever shattered had sprung up anew outside our memories—where it is forever green! But I do pray to Heaven that the dreadful Mrs. Piper won’t be loosed upon my defenseless soul now that I am dead.

My run-of-the-mill visitors come two or three times a week. Henry calls it my salon. That may be an exaggeration. Some are such vaguely realized persons they hardly dispel my solitude. They stay for a couple of hours in a, to them, very hot room, becoming from moment to moment more apoplectic, without any tea and bread-butter which they would naturally at that hour be consuming by the quart and the loaf, and then write me a note the next day to explain away all that they said. The two views others take of me rather neutralize each other. One says, “so subtle, just like your brother!” and the other “and above all, so original!” I told one Wordsworthian spinster that Father had hated all forms and ceremonies. She then assumed that I was born out of holy wedlock. When she could not longer contain herself, she asked Katherine, who with one burst of laughter restored me to virtue. But here I am pigeon-holing millions of creatures of the Empire, when my entire world is populated by a landlady, a hospital nurse and two Bath-chairman, one perpetually drunk!

And I do have my problems with servants! One servant, Mary, whom I employed in London brought the science of dawdle to perfection. And Wardy my nurse was out shopping one Tuesday when she found herself amidst a group of men haranguing and shouting. When I asked her whether they were workmen or ruffians, she replied with astonishment, “O, I would not for the world have looked at them!” Her field of speculation and reflection is narrowed to a thin rail. I cannot flatter myself that I have broadened her views; perhaps, only stupefied her. The other day, Wardy, after returning from church spied a cockroach and sprung into action—that being taking no more drastic action than to stand in the middle of the room with her petticoats gathered up, saying, “Oh, I’ll keep my eye on him!” The reckless invertebrate was unimpressed with this threat and went gaily upon his career, where upon I rose from my bed, went down upon my rickety knees and extinguished the creature with a towel. Wardy exclaimed, “Whatever shall we do without Miss Loring!” Now Katherine is a wonder of rationality and common sense, but great thought need not be wasted on one demon cockroach. Why do women seem to head toward their Darwinian fulfillment only by jerks of the string? Oh, the confinements of femininity! One day when my shawls were falling off to the left, my cushions falling out to the right and my comforter off my knees, one of those cases of misery in short, all in a day’s work for an invalid, Katherine exclaimed, “What an awful pity it is that you cannot say damn.” What a loss to women to have all those robust and sustaining expletives denied to one. In moments of such trial and tribulation, refinement is a feeble straw to lean upon. My invective is stored in what William calls my “bottled lightning,” which when uncorked, can strike an unsuspecting soul through with a flash of my tongue.

And Bowles, my bath chair-man! Last year the munificent Katherine presented me with this wonderful bath chair—we call it my invalid chair. It has rubber tires and bicycle wheels so that there is absolutely no jar and one can lie out in it like a bed if necessary. I wish I could have used it more often but it was difficult to coordinate the weather with my attacks. Once my outings were suspended for 10 days when my dear Bowles, who manipulated this vehicle, was drunk. He did not lie down in a ditch or pitch me out of the chair which is their usual way of diversifying the monotony of their profession, but he reared up with my chair quite enough to reduce my stomach, always on the look out for sensational opportunities, to despair. I used to remind Somer, my former bath-chair man, not to charge the cows with the chair, as I am sure they were afraid of me, but he never seemed to grasp the situation. We who are dependent upon the goodness and whim of others for our comfort have to live with surprise, along with occasional terror. On country outings, mon petit entourage would drag my chair through a gate into a meadow and I lay in the sun whilst they picked me flowerets, with a cuckoo in the distance, circling swallows overhead, broad sweeps of gentle wind slowly rustling through the trees near by; need I say I was happy? How fortunate it is that when lying in a shaded room, we can chew and re-chew the cud of past contemplations; a slant of light or a whiff of perfume, or a rustle of wind, and the illusion of shimmering vista, the murmuring pines and the damp divine earthiness. And there it is in all its perfection.

And the paces through which I put poor little Nurse: in the winter she had to applaud me Mind, is summer me beauty! And in moments of modesty(Don’t scoff, I have them!)I even consulted her about my letters, and you may be sure she knew which side her bread was buttered on. In the summer when we passed one old frump more sour than the last, I threw myself on her mercy and asked if I am as dreadful to look upon as that. She wisely says not. On outings we see these poor creatures, such heart-rending objects, dropped out of the race and left all limp by the wayside—creatures born with no chance, as if made of the scraps left over in the great human factory, and thrust forth weaponless to fight in this hideous battle of life. Cannon Leigh says they all drink, but I find that incredulous. Must we all find humanity’s shortcomings more succulent to chew upon that its perfections? I think of asking these poor wretches their thoughts on it all . . . but ah! me, I’m hopelessly relegated among the smug and the comfortable.

One of my downstair neighbors was a cleric, one whose life, one would think, above reproach. One night he and a companion man of the cloth were discussing theology in some public house with a companion bottle of whiskey. By the time both of them had arrived at our residence, they were so inebriated they mistook my door for his and burst forth into my rooms. Imagine opening your eyes and seeing these bat-like objects standing there! I was sure it would curdle my soul in its transit and entirely spoil my post-mortem expression. I had to take to my bed for days.

As you might conclude by now, many things make me take to my bed. Take children, for example. Now I look upon William’s children with joy, but with definite bias regarding whether it is a boy or girl. Upon the birth of a girl child, I wrote to William’s Alice “That he is a girl delights me. It will be so good for the boys, elevate the tone of the house and be someone for me to associate with in the future. You and she will be two again three. Your odds are still considerably better than Mother’s and mine.” But I did feel that I should hurry home and protect the innocent darling before she was analyzed, labeled and pigeon-holed out of existence. When a son arrived I was sorry that he had chosen the inferior sex, though I suppose it weighs less on one’s conscience to have brought forth an oppressor rather than one of the oppressed. One, then, does not have to look forward to evenings spent trembling lest he should not be engaged for the cotillion or left dangling without an arm for supper.

But William’s children are well cared for and wanted. My little neighbor girl told nurse, “My mother was awful bad last night and this morning a lady brought a baby to my house.” This is No. 5, father twenty-eight, and mother twenty-three—one more tiny voice to swell the vast human wail rising perpetually to the skies! I wonder if it is indelicate for a flaccid virgin to be so preoccupied with the multiplication of the species.

Yet the sound in this house last Christmas season echo in my mind. We could hear the woman upstairs giving birth. How my heart burned within me at the cruelty of men! I have been haunted by the thought of Alice and all child-bearing women since. Our household was the scene, we fear, of a deed of darkness. A little human soul was left to die, a perfect and beautiful boy who lived for three hours and when its mother was asked whether she wanted to see him, exclaimed, “Oh, no, take the brat away!” And when told later that it was dead exclaimed that she was glad and hoped that the doctor would bring her waist into shape, for she had laced herself as tight as she could not to show her condition. And as if finishing a social visit, she said with a flourish, “Now where is my sealskin jacket?”

But if in some slum under a black archway a filthy mass of rags creeps in and lays herself down upon the reeking stones for her hour of agony and then kills the little diseased object she brings forth and thereby saves it from its hideous fate, penal servitude is meted out to her, when the possessor of a sealskin jacket and gold bracelets, with a sodden, sullen creature beside her with his pockets full of sovereigns, destroys her beautiful child she drives gaily off in her coach—and this is the 1889th year of Christianity when nearly anything can become tolerable if our sensibilities are beaten down enough by repetition.

When I presented this story to my doctor, he flew back to the subject of the weather three times as a refuge from my “very odd” questions, my obsessed mind. He knew about cramps in the stomach, but cramps in the mind were not within the range of his practice. Henry said the doctor evades the subject because he has no cure for it in his bottles. It’s so curious that when something falls just outside their realm, they see no need to struggle with reflections. Their minds stop dead like hands of an unwound clock. This no doubt accounts for the handsome, firm features of English doctors. Unlike the Yankee, who from the cradle stretches himself out to reach what is beyond him, for whom there is always an alternative. No wonder the American profile is craggy and accidental.

Who, after all, is a greater authority on doctors than myself, having them as a near appendage, attached to the hip in youth? I have spent years waiting for doctors, which requires the strength of a horse. I have told my dreary tale to so many doctors that I’ve thought of having it printed up in a small pamphlet. One of my doctors, sir Andrew Clark, was wont to bound into the room several hours late and announce himself as “the late Sir Andrew Clark!” I had bet Katherine that he would make the same comment upon entering this room. When hark! the door opens, and a florid gentleman enters, and “the late Sir Andrew” falls upon our ears, followed by the self same burst of hilarity. That pun has become such an integral portion of his being he must lug it everywhere with him like the convict’s ball and chain. Sir Andrew is doubtless good and kind at bottom, but they are all terrible, talking by the hour without saying anything, while the pallid victim stretches out a sickly tendril, hoping for some human wart to catch on to, but it vainly slips off the polished surface, which is as comforting and nourishing as a billiard ball. And then one struggles fiercely to recover one’s self-respect after having been reduced to the mental level of an idiot. Dr. Torry was the only man who ever treated me like a rational being, who did not assume, because I was victim to many pains, that I had, of necessity, an arrested mental development, too.

My doctor came last week and examined me for an hour with a conscientiousness that my diaphragm has not hitherto been used to. When he came to the end, he was as inscrutable as they always are and the little he told me I was too tired to understand. I could get nothing out of him and he slipped through my cramped and clinging grasp as skillfully as if he had been shaped like an eel instead of a Dutch cheese. The truth was he was entirely puzzled about me and had not the manliness to say so. I was much disappointed by his lack of remedial suggestions. All great doctors are chiefly interested in the diagnosis and should have a lot of lesser men to do their dirty-work for them, like, curing their patients, for example.

Perhaps it was this ridicule of their profession that caused them to take their revenge on me and none too soon. To her who waits, all things come! Since I have been ill, I have longed for some palpable disease, no matter how congenitally dreadful a label it might have. Finally they have stopped plying me with guilt by accusing me of being personally responsible for my illness and they have given me a real and palpable disease. The doctor said that a lump I had in one of my breasts for three months, which had given me a great deal of pain, was a tumor, that nothing could be done for me but to alleviate pain, that it was only a question of time. Add this to my most distressing case of nervous hypersesthesis, the spinal neurosis that took me off my legs for seven years, and attacks of rheumatic gout in my stomach for the last twenty, certainly these could satisfy the most inflated pathologic vanity. I detest cataloging myself in this way but it shows that although I may have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity. George Eliot consistently listed her headaches and pains as an excuse for her cowardly moaning. Who needs to jot down every raw pain to remind you for all time when the memory of physical pain is by grace forgotten? At any rate, there seems a faint hope that I may fizzle out after all—my ultimate toppling off, my most glorious fainting away. Destiny has, after all, a sense of humor—offering my thistledown personality such an elaborate exit.

How fatally the lack of humor cripples the mind. What an awful loss it is that we can’t see our own follies, they must be so much more exquisite than any one else’s. It is the ironies of life that show us to its mysteries. For example, why did such a substance-full person like Lady Rosebery die and a rag-tag like me still be left fluttering in the breeze? Or Mrs. Lodge, taken so suddenly when she was so satisfied with her life and so unprepared to leave, and there I was all packed and ready to go.

Katherine and Henry were both at the announcement. They asked Dr. Baldwin, “Can she dies?” His consoling answer was, “They sometimes do.” The only drawback was that it would probably be in my sleep so that I should not be one of the audience. Dreadful fraud! Should not one who has been denied many of life’s dramatic episodes be allowed to watch the rags and tatters of one’s Vanity struggle with the Absolute, as the curtain comes down on this amusing humbuggery called Life? Having been denied baptism by my parents, marriage by obtuse and imperceptive man, it seems too bad not to assist myself at this first and last ceremony.

Looking back, the 1890’s might have been the decade for the James family. Henry published The Tragic Muse, brought out The American and wrote a play, embedding his pages, I might add, with many pearls fallen from my lips, that he stole in a most unblushing way saying simply, that he knew they had been said by family so it did not matter. And he added, “Why not share your wit? You are the best company in all of London!” but I digress. William finally finished his Principle of Psychology. Not a bad show for one family! And I was working away at getting dead, the hardest job of all.

What an interest death lends to the most common place things. It is the most supremely interesting moment if life, the only one in fact, when living seems life, and I count it as the greatest good fortune to have had these few months so full of interest and instruction in the knowledge of my approaching death. It lifts us out of the formless vague and sets us in the very heart of sustaining concrete. What an interesting moment it is when the familiar figures recede one by one and are seen in the right perspective and live at last. This death is our chance to do something absolutely complete in itself. What more could a human being ask? The difficulty about all this dying is that you can’t tell a fellow anything about it, so where does the fun come in?

Dr. Tuckey assured me I should live a good deal longer. When he observed my shock, he reassured me that I would be comfortable. “I don’t care about that, but boo-hoo,” I wailed. “It’s so inconvenient!” and he burst into a roar of laughter. You see all this dying does not lack amusement.

Cremation we find is very inexpensive, only six guineas and one extra for the parson. I was amused to think that if I had died before Katherine had left for America, she would be convulsed with seasickness while the remaining part of me safely in my urn upon the shelf would be no longer susceptible to those violent heavings.

Then we began upon my Will, which I wanted to make over again, leaving out, of course, those who had offended me since my last will. Katherine told me that as long as I indulged in no amateur legal terminology but confined myself strictly to my vernacular it would be all right, so she wouldn’t allow me even one decorative bequeath.

The Consul had to witness the signing. Perhaps it was the anticipation of such an august personage that caused me to ‘go off,’ but I had to be put to bed. I lay in a semi-faint, draped in as many frills as could be found the the occasion, attended by my nurse and Katherine, when through a mist I vaguely saw five black figures file into my little room, headed by the most extraordinary little man, all gesticulation and grimace, who planted himself at the foot of the bed and stroking my knees began a long harangue of his illnesses which somehow he hoped I guess that I, like he, would rise from my bed. Katherine, with difficulty restrained him from reading the Will aloud there and then. I felt as if I were assisting at the reading of my own will, surrounded by the greedy relatives, as in novels. After they had filed in and out several times and become tangled in as much resounding red-tape as the creature could reel off for the occasion, they went off downstairs to an elegant tea where the Consul entertained them with his whole history and digestive processes of his household, which seem to be in a sadly disorganized condition.

Long slow dying is no doubt instructive, but it is disappointingly free from excitements. Katherine was such a help. She is a most sustaining optimist. One morning she proposed to help me with my writing. Knowing she had many errands and appointments, I tried to help her beg off. “Why,” I said, “you won’t have time.” “Oh, yes,” she assured me, “I’m not going until twelve, and by that time you are always back again in bed, fainted.” One does slough off the activities one by one, and never realize that they’re gone, until suddenly one finds that the months have slipped away and the sofa will never more be laid upon, the morning paper read, or the loss of a book regretted; one revolves with equal content within the narrowing circle until the vanishing point is reached, I suppose.

Vanity still has sway, and I take satisfaction in feeling as much myself as ever, even perhaps more of an essence. If I could concern myself about the fate of my soul . . . but I never felt so absolutely uninterested in the poor, shabby, old thing. The fact was that I had been dying for so long . . . life had been a grim shoving of hours behind me since that hideous summer of ’78 when William married Alice and I began my steady downhill slide. Left now was only the shriveling of the empty pea pod, this frail shell of mine.

I wrote to William of my approaching demise, knowing he understood that I had long been awaiting death. He expressed his disappointment really that my body all these years had prevented my mind from reaching its full fruition, my mine being penned up in this unliberated body. He wrote, “When that which is you, Alice, passes out of the body, I am sure that there will be an explosion of liberated force and life, till then eclipsed and kept down. You who art always so overflowing with good humor and merriment . . . the quip, the merry joke, the flash of poetry, the tinge of pathos, the gleam of love would all be there. I can hardly imagine your transition without a great oscillation of both ‘worlds,’ as they regain their equilibrium after the change! Everyone will feel the shock, but you yourself will be more surprised than anybody else.” Now that sounds like something worth waiting for, doesn’t it?

I thanked him for not tiptoeing around my death but walking right up to it. I felt William was telling me that my death, my dawn was finally coming, but I assured him that I was one of the most potent creatures of my time and though I might not have had Harvard students huddled at my feet drinking in psychic truth, that I should not tremble at the last trump.

In spite of my ill health, as inconvenient and aesthetically unpleasing as it was, I still discovered that there were personal satisfactions to be attained in life, which were as independent of illness or of health, as they were of poverty or riches, so that by turning my attention exclusively to my own consciousness even my torpid career has not been without its triumphs and should not be pitied. Success comes in many delicate shades and subtle tones that often make no sign except to the one who attains it—it floods the mind with infinite delight—its song only heard by the ears of one’s soul. I have heard that song.

But you must remember that a woman, by nature, needs much less to feed upon than a man. A few emotions and she is satisfied; so now that I am gone, pray don’t think of me as a creature who might have been something else had neurotic science been born; notwithstanding the poverty of my outside experience I have always had a significance for myself, and every chance to stumble along my straight and narrow little path, and to worship at the feet of my Deity, and what more can a human soul ask?

My last year was one of the happiest I had ever known, surrounded by such affection and devotion of friend and brother, my mind deeply stirred by the world around me, my spirit broadened and strengthened by a clearer perception of the significance of experience. The succulent juices of life oozed at the slightest pressure from observing the human comedy. But now with the end in view there came such a change in me. A congenital faith flowed through me like a limpid stream, making the arid places green, continuously irrigating the snags of doubt from my life. Although non-existence is inconceivable, all longing for fulfillment, all passion to achieve had died down within me and whether the great Mystery resolved itself into eternal Death or glorious Life, I contemplated either with equal serenity. I was being ground slowly on the grim grindstone of physical pain, and on two nights I had almost asked for Katherine’s lethal dose . . . but . . . one steps hesitantly along such unaccustomed ways and endures from second to second. I went on living thinking that at least there were a good many jokes left, and that’s the main thing. Physical pain falls away like dry husks from the mind. It’s the moral discords and nervous horrors that sear the soul. Oh, that wonderful moment when I felt myself floated for the first time into the deep sea of divine cessation and saw all the dear old mysteries and miracles vanish into vapor.

You might think I’d be delirious to throw off that frail mantle of flesh of mine, but now there are no hours and days relentlessly gnawing through one’s life, no disparity between what we are and what we hoped to be. What is, is done and forever. What’s gone is that thing that brought to my life great joy and great pain—irony. I never realized the wonder of irony—that juxtaposition of opposites that so riveted my mind—holding up to the mirror sided by side our dream and our reality, watching the dark shadows haunt the lighted surfaces, grinding together opposites, stone against stone, until sparks ignited our spirits. Where we are so touchingly human is where we are caught between our frailties and our possibilities. Our measure as a human being is how we coped in that space between the real and the ideal, between dark and light, between our flawed humanity and our vision of what could be. That final irony in my life brought a hearty laugh, as irony does in its strange way. After all, my trouble had always been there had never been anything to die from, and there it was. Who else would have thought that finding a lump in one’s breast would bring the light of dawn to the last days of one’s life? Hallelujah!

Bibliography

Alice James: A Biography by Jean Strouse; Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA, 1984.

The Diary of Alice James; Penguin Books, New York, NY., 1934.

The Death and Letters of Alice James by Ruth Bernard Yeazell; University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angles, CA., 1981.

Henry James: A Life by Leon Edel; Harper and Row, New York, NY., 1985/

The Jameses by R.W.B. Lewis, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, NY, 1991.