Read Online Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James by J. C. Hallman - Free Book Online

“The
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    Gospel of Relaxation,” one of three essays Wm had
    decided to include at the end of Talks to Teachers. Here, Wm quoted a Scottish doctor who claimed that Americans wore “too much expression on [their] faces”; he
    suggested they “tone [them]selves down.” Wm dis-
    agreed, of course, and lashed out in turn at the codfish
    eyes and the “slow, inanimate demeanor” of all from
    the British Isles. What he surely wanted H’ry to note,
    however, was his claim that “Americans who stay in
    Europe long enough” wind up thinking and acting
    more like the Scottish doctor than they do their breth-
    ren. H’ry had been living in England for two decades
    by then.
    Eight years later, having more or less continuously
    fretted over The Wings of the Dove , Wm was invited to England to deliver the lectures that would become A
    Pluralistic Universe. He had gone a long way toward catching up to his brother by then. He had not published his first book until he was forty-eight, but his
    reputation had grown steadily thereafter, and in recent
    years he had become a very popular traveling speaker.
    In 101–102, he delivered Scotland’s Gifford lectures,
    which published in book form became The Varieties
    of Religious Experience , a best seller.The new appoint-65
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    ment enabled him to again visit H’ry in Rye. As it hap-
    pened, Lamb House had a garden, and the garden’s
    stone wall separated H’ry’s property from the grounds
    of a famous inn. Wm had heard a rumor that G. K.
    Chesterton, whom he had never met but suspected as
    a sympathizer to Wm’s even more recent Pragmatism , was then a guest. One day in H’ry’s garden, Wm struck
    on an idea: just as Kate Croy had deliciously imagined
    the initial meeting of her love, he seized a handy ladder and placed it against the stone wall so as to climb to the top and peer over in an attempt to spot Chesterton. But
    for H’ry, what was permissible for a fictional character’s inner life was vulgar in reality. It was simply not done
    in England, he objected. The brothers argued, and
    when H. G. Wells happened to drive up a short time
    later he found H’ry in such an agitated state that he
    separated the two. Wm went off with Wells willingly;
    his point had been made. H’ry forbade for himself in
    real life—indeed, counted them as vulgar—precisely
    those things that gave it zest.
    A similar issue had cropped up a few years earlier,
    as the brothers planned the trip together through the
    United States that H’ry would use to produce The American Scene . The journey’s initial outline triggered Wm’s 66
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    protective reflex. He worried over the “désagréments”
    that the trip would subject H’ry to, the “physical loath-
    ing” that certain American manners would inspire. Of
    particular concern was a practice that made even Wm
    contemplate expatriation. Whether in hotels or on
    trains, whenever Wm traveled he found himself con-
    fronted with the sight of his fellow Americans happily
    slurping butter-drenched boiled eggs from cups! He
    admitted that his reaction to this might be irrational,
    but the only thing worse to imagine than his own intes-
    tinal disgust at such a scene was the sickening tectonic
    quakes that would surely split H’ry’s fragile gut.
    Nonsense! H’ry replied. Wm completely misunder-
    stood his motives. Impressions, even of the vulgar,
    were precisely what he hoped to absorb and digest. To
    gobble up whatever impressions there were to be had
    was precisely the point of the entire excursion. Should
    he shrink from “the one chance that remains . . . in life of anything that can be called a movement ?” No. He must seek to convert, through observation, imagination, and reflection, even shocking experiences “into
    vivid and solid material .”
    What you say of the Eggs(!!!) . . . is utterly