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

Author:J. C. Hallman [Hallman, J. C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Philosophy, Modern (16th-21st Centuries), Biographies & Memoirs, Politics & Social Sciences, Arts & Literature, Modern, Philosophers, Professionals & Academics, Authors, 19th Century, Literature & Fiction
ISBN: 9781609381516
Amazon: 1609381513
Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
Published: 2013-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

.11.

H’ry had better relationships with women in his fiction

than in real life. The letters, however, offer no refuge to the cauldrons of ink that have been spilled by critical

covens endlessly toiling over the brew of H’ry’s sexual

orientation. Even on the subject of Wilde’s imprison-

ment, H’ry lets slip nothing to Wm—the audience to

whom he slipped everything else. The letters, in fact, upend the usual thought on both brothers’ attitudes toward girls and women.

It’s generally held that Wm and H’ry’s young cousin

Minny Temple, a vivacious girl who moved with her

family onto the same street as the Jameses in 11,

was an early romantic interest of Wm’s and served as

a model for many of H’ry’s heroines. Both brothers

have been said to have been in love with Minny, and

the girl’s death from tuberculosis in 10 has served as

a convenient biographical marker denoting the broth-

ers’ passage into adulthood—convenient even for H’ry,

who said as much in a memoir in 113. The letters,

however, confound too simplistic a take on Minny’s

role in the brothers’ lives.

On December 5, 1, just a few months before

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Minny died, Wm wrote to say that even though he en-

joyed her company now, he was conscious of having

nourished “unsympathetic hostility” to Minny. He re-

called “abusing her” to H’ry the winter before. H’ry

noted this only casually, refraining from comment until

Minny died. On March 2, 10, he claimed that it took

him only a few hours to reconcile himself to the news.

His letter indulges in playful, idiomatic glee in charac-

terizing her—Minny was “a mere subject without an

object”; “she has ‘gone abroad’ in another sense!”—

even as it claims that it is too soon to pretend to feel her death. Wm wrote back a few weeks later. The period

corresponds with his dark mood, but Minny is not his

reply’s first order of business, nor does it attribute his

“slough” to her death. Wm offers quick thanks for H’ry’s

letters about Minny—some were not preserved—and

then he writes several pages about a water cure that

H’ry might pursue in London.

In other words, Minny is less interesting as a nug-

get of biography than as a literary symbol. Even H’ry

recognized this. “She seems a sort of experiment of na-

ture,” he wrote. “An attempt, a specimen or example.”

Too exclusive a biographical focus on Minny under-

mines the impact other women had on Wm and H’ry:

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their sister, Alice; George Eliot and George Sand; and

much later, a range of younger friends and cousins.

The subject of women is the best possible lens to use

so as to refract the brothers’ mutual influence. H’ry’s

The Bostonians, about a mystic of the women’s suffrage movement, was written in the wake of a pair of reviews

Wm produced of women’s suffrage books. “Cut out

and send me your articles in the N[orth]. A[merican].

R[eview].,” H’ry had demanded. “Brute and Human

Intellect,” published just before H’ry wrote Washington Square and The Portrait of a Lady, ends with a description of the minds of “young wom[e]n of twenty,” the classic

age of H’ry’s heroines. It ran the other way as well. A

piece H’ry published on George Sand in 1—which

Wm had

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