There was nothing very unusual in Alice’s condition (so far); and many reasons for this kind of nervous weakness can be found both in the social history of well-to-do young women, whose uselessness reached its lowest point in the second half of the 19th century, and in the history of medicine, which was just beginning to address itself, through the new science of neurology, to diseases that were not entirely to do with the body and not entirely to do with the mind. Hysteria was thought to be a female affliction, but beyond that most neurologists didn’t know what to make of it: ‘It were as well called mysteria,’ said the excellent Weir Mitchell. Different doctors optimistically devised different treatments, the majority of which were tried on Alice, but most shared the view of Charles Taylor, Alice’s first doctor in New York, that the body should be stimulated and the mind soothed. From this it was only a short step to saying, as several neurologists did, that too much education was a bad thing for a woman. ‘For patience, for reliability, for real judgment in carrying out directions, for self-control,’ Taylor was to write, ‘give me the little woman who has not been “educated” too much, and whose ambition is to be a good wife and mother … Such women are capable of being the mothers of men.’ Jean Strouse picks up the fact that Alice’s diary description of her hysterical attacks had pictured her either in her father’s library or in the schoolroom, as if the attacks only occurred when she was trying to use her brain. On the other hand, it may be that these were the occasions when she most resented their occurrence. Whatever the reason, Alice had concluded that ‘conscious and continuous cerebration’ was ‘an impossible exercise’ – thereby incidentally, or not so incidentally, proving both her father and her doctor right: thinking was an unsuitable occupation for a woman. What is missing from Strouse’s common-sense, as well as sisterly, account of Alice’s maladies is the interpretation that Freud would have put on them. Yeazell, quite properly, points out the similarities between Alice’s symptoms and those of some of Freud’s most famous patients. It’s impossible to believe that there wasn’t a strong sexual element in Alice’s sufferings.
As her twenties progressed, and more and more of the women she knew got engaged, her letters to her few remaining unmarried friends began to fill up with catty remarks:
What do you suppose I heard the other day? Nothing less than that those dreadful Loverings had had no end of offers …
Between ourselves, can you conceive what the youth wants her for? You may say money, but after all she hasn’t got enough in her own right to make it worth while and her mother may live half a century …
Sargy [the man who was to marry Lilla Cabot] always had the capacities of a cormorant, so he is able to swallow her whole, not having to think about her as she is going down must make it much easier …
One or two young men briefly took her fancy, but they had no interest in her and she remained proposal-less. Strouse observes that her family never encouraged her to think of marriage (Too delicate? Father wouldn’t have liked the idea? Too obviously a spinster?), while she confined herself to jokes about ‘unattractive youths’ who couldn’t see her qualities. The only man to flirt with her was her brother William. The romance with William – or the appearance of romance, it’s not easy to tell how much of it was irony – had begun when she was a child, and in the 1870s he was still, for example, addressing her as ‘sweetlington’ and ‘beloved beautlet’ in letters charged with amorous suggestion. In 1878, when Alice was thirty, he announced his engagement to another Alice, a ‘peerless specimen of “New England womanhood”’, according to Henry. The first Alice was unable to go to the wedding – she had again collapsed.
This time, too, she had physical symptoms: her stomach was a ‘nest of snakes coiling and uncoiling themselves’, her legs gave way and a year later she could still barely walk. She was, however, much more unhappy than she had been during her first breakdown, and talked to her father about killing herself. Characteristically, he gave her permission to do so – or, as he put it, granted her the ‘freedom to do in the premises what she pleased’ – attributing her unhappiness to ‘our trouble as a race’ (the human race, that is) and ‘the burden of the mortal life’. He was confident that once he had given his permission she wouldn’t do it, and he was right. However, if her diary is to be trusted, she found a way round him. ‘The fact is,’ she wrote shortly before her death, ‘I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me … since that hideous summer of ’78 when I went to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope not peace, that now it’s only the shrivelling of an empty pea pod that has to be completed.’
There were another 14 years to go. In 1881, her mother died of an attack of bronchial asthma, and Alice didn’t collapse as everyone expected her to do. The usual bulletins were issued: she was seen by Robertson to ‘thrive under the ordeal of nursing’ her sick mother, and after Mary James had died Aunt Kate reported that ‘her mother’s death seems to have brought new life to Alice.’ She was happy, or ‘almost happy’ – content to think of her mother as a ‘beautiful illumined memory’ – and enjoying her new responsibilities. At the end of 1878, talking about her recent breakdown, she had said in a letter: ‘For a young woman who not only likes to manage herself but the rest of the world too, such a moral prostration taxed my common sense a good deal.’ Now she had a chance to manage and for the most part did it well. What she dreaded was that her father, too, would die, and soon enough he did. Whether or not he had an illness isn’t clear: for the most part he wanted to die, ‘yearned unspeakably’ to do so and thus rejoin his wife, who grew ever more perfect in his eyes. He stopped eating, complained that ‘this dying’ was ‘weary work’, and according to Alice’s new friend Katharine Loring, got over ‘the delay in dying by asserting that he [had] already died’. His last words were for his sons – ‘such good boys’. Henry returned from England two days after his father’s death and, true to the family metaphysic, read aloud over his grave a farewell letter from William that had arrived too late to be read at his bedside. Henry told William he was sure their father heard it ‘somewhere out of the depths of the still, bright winter air’.
This time Alice did, briefly, collapse: but now she had Katharine Loring to look after her (at least when Miss Loring was able to get away from the sick members of her own family). They had become friends some years earlier when Alice was recruited to teach history – it was the only thing she ever ‘did’ – by a group of Boston women who had started a charitable correspondence course for women: Katharine was head of the history department. It may sound like the beginning of a True Romance: in effect, it was the start of what was then known as a ‘Boston marriage’ – of which there were quite a few among the James family’s acquaintance. ‘I wish you could know Katharine Loring,’ Alice wrote to Sara Sedgwick, ‘she is a most wonderful being. She has all the mere brute superiority which distinguishes man from woman combined with all the distinctively feminine virtues. There is nothing she cannot do from hewing wood & drawing water to driving runaway horses & educating all the women in North America.’ Katharine was indeed an admirably practical woman – and an all too inspiring nurse. None of the other Jameses seems to have been at all fond of her (William’s wife suspected that she was Alice’s lover, which seems unlikely, and if any part of their relationship is described in The Bostonians, it’s clear that Henry didn’t like it), but they agreed that she was an unusual ‘blessing’ to Alice.
In 1884, Katharine Loring brought Alice to England, where she would spend the rest of her life, most of it in bed. She was now a full-time invalid, one pain succeeding another without interruption; and everything that happened to her, whether she was living in a room in Bournemouth or in a room in Leamington, happened within that room. There are many descriptions in her letters of what it was like to be so confined and so uncomfortable, all of them written with a robustness that seems to contradict their subject matter. There is also a great deal that isn’t about illnes
s: but about the friends she liked and, more often, those she half-liked, about Henry and his work, about England, the contemptible English and their contemptible politics. ‘I never expect to be deader than I am now,’ she wrote to William and then attacked him for his ‘bourgeois’ attitude to The Princess Casamassima. The poverty of the English poor, unemployment, strikes, the inequities of the Empire, and especially the Irish Question, were treated in her letters and her journal with a radical passion that is the only evidence we have that she may – possibly – have regretted not leading a more active life. As it was, she consoled herself with the thought that it was ‘a wonderful time to be living in when things are going at such a pace’.
It was in any case Alice’s view, so she said in her diary, that ‘the paralytic on the couch can have if he wants them wider experiences than Stanley slaughtering savages.’ Yes and no: but the notion mattered to her. At the end of her life Alice had found a philosophy which enabled her both to accept what was happening to her and – more important – to think well of herself. It wasn’t a grandiose vision such as her father’s discovery of Swedenborg had offered, but it made a virtue of her non-life. ‘We do not take our successes with us only the manner in which we have met our failures, that never crumbles in the dust,’ she wrote to the unfortunate Robert-son’s wife. She read the three volumes of George Eliot’s Journal and Letters and despised her for her ‘futile whining’. It’s reasonable to suppose, as everyone who has written about her does, that some part of Alice’s English decline can be attributed to a desire to have Katharine Loring’s full attention – and quite a bit of Henry’s. As before, her body said one thing and her mind another. She didn’t complain and made no explicit requests for sympathy. William, who always got it wrong, irritated her with pitying remarks about her sufferings and frustrations. To a letter in which he had her ‘stifling slowly in a quagmire of disgust and pain and impotence’ she replied that she had roared with laughter, ‘for I consider myself one of the most potent creations of my time, & though I may not have a group of Harvard students sitting at my feet drinking in psychic truth, I shall not tremble, I assure you, at the last trump.’ By then she had made not trembling at the last trump the thing that mattered most.
In 1891, doctor at last diagnosed a plausible (and fatal) organic illness: she had cancer of the breast and it was incurable. ‘To anyone who has not been there,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘it will be hard to understand the enormous relief of Sir A C’s uncompromising verdict, lifting us out of the formless vague and setting us within the very heart of the sustaining concrete.’ Impending death brought to her life the definition she required. It also brought her Katharine Loring’s absolute devotion. ‘As the ugliest things go to the making of the fairest,’ her diary reported, ‘it is not wonderful that this unholy granite substance in my breast should be the soil propitious for the perfect flowering of Katharine’s unexampled genius for friendship and devotion.’ She died, not trembling, but, Katharine Loring said, ‘very happy’ in the knowledge that the last trump was at hand. ‘Her disastrous, her tragic health,’ Henry wrote after her death, ‘was in a manner the only solution for her of the practical problem of life – as it suppressed the element of equality, reciprocity etc.’ It isn’t clear whether he meant that life was too much for her or that she was too much for life: both are distinct possibilities. ‘I have always had significance for myself,’ she had said in one of her retorts to William; after she died her brothers, reading her diary for the first time, found she had significance for the family too: the diary, they both agreed, constituted ‘a new claim for the family renown’. Unfortunately, Henry, fearing some ‘catastrophe of publicity’, didn’t want it given ‘to the world’, and it wasn’t until 1964 that the full text, edited by Leon Edel, was finally published. Katharine Loring never had any doubt that it was written for posterity to read.
Books reviewed:
Alice James by Jean Strouse
The Death and Letters of Alice James edited by Ruth Bernard Yeazell
Divorce Me
Twelve years ago Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy got divorced after ten years of marriage. In the unhappiness that followed he thought about himself and about society: would it break down too? In 1969, the year Gathorne-Hardy got his decree nisi, there were 60,000 divorces in Britain: in 1980 there were 150,000. ‘During the last century of the Roman Empire, as a great civilisation collapsed, a raging epidemic of divorces roared unchecked.’ A terrifying parallel? Seemingly not. ‘Even quite general knowledge about the past can have a calming effect,’ Gathorne-Hardy says and he should know because his knowledge is very general. ‘Roman culture’ was ‘too superficial to withstand the temptations that beset it’, and ‘the result was a moral collapse which we do not only not approach but can barely envisage.’ (The source for Gathorne-Hardy’s remarks about the Roman Empire is Jerome Carcopino’s Daily Life in Ancient Rome, published in translation by Routledge in 1941, when Carcopino was minister of national education in the Vichy government.) What’s happening to us is much grander: a ‘vast reorganisation of the modern psyche’, a ‘profound change in human consciousness’.
‘I see you have written a book about yourself and called it The World Crisis,’ Arthur Balfour once said to Churchill. Gathorne-Hardy is the author of two well-known books, The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny and The Public School Phenomenon: records not of his life but of his kind – tribal history. Love, Sex, Marriage and Divorce translates into world history the three-year analysis he underwent in the wake of his divorce. Now he is the doctor and we (his readers) the patient. ‘We must begin,’ he says, ‘like any sensible analyst does … by looking into the past.’ And what we see when we look into it is that it was never all that stable or all that virtuous. (‘Until the late Middle Ages frequent changes of partner were quite usual.’) It follows that there is nothing peculiarly bad or difficult about the present: ‘This is an age, uniquely, of anxiety and stress. You find this obvious – a cliché even? A cliché it certainly is. I don’t for one moment think it is true.’ Analysts are always inclined to make light of their patients’ troubles. Least said (by the analyst), soonest mended.
Psychoanalysis, as its critics have never been slow to point out, is a form of treatment resorted to by those who, in a sociological sense, have nothing to worry about. The troubles that preoccupy Gathorne-Hardy can similarly be construed as the product of unusual good fortune. His title is deceptive. Love, sex and marriage are contingent: what interests him is the divorce they lead to. The first cause of divorce is sex – not its failure but its staggering availability. This is the work – in Gathorne-Hardy’s telling, the single-handed achievement – of Kinsey, who ‘turned sexual freedom, from being a trend among the elite and literate, into a mass movement, possibly for the first time in history’. That Kinsey – Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology, as he liked to be known – was a thoughtful man is indicated by the first paper he wrote: ‘What do birds do when it rains?’ He was by nature a collector, and in his early years was devoted to the wasp: so devoted that he was eventually in a position to give the Natural History Museum a collection of four million different wasps. Although he disclaimed any interest in altering behaviour (Gathorne-Hardy: ‘This is rubbish’), he was always eager to point out that it was the most respectable people who had the busiest sex lives – ‘time and again a lawyer who has masturbated forty times a week,’ Gathorne-Hardy notes, ‘will be “distinguished in his profession”’ – and, conversely, that adolescents who came to sex early were, in Kinsey’s words, more ‘alert, energetic, vivacious, spontaneous, socially extrovert and/or aggressive individuals in the population’ than those who got to it late.
After the annals of sexual prowess, the annals of sexual infirmity. After Kinsey, Masters and Johnson – ‘it was around the clitoris that they made major discoveries.’ Sex is a problem because it is no longer supposed to be a problem. ‘Throughout history men have boasted of their conquests, and in liberated ages, women too,’ Gathor
ne-Hardy writes: ‘this is the first time conquerors and conquests have worried about how and how often they both come.’ (In this context it seems we must praise Kingsley Amis, who has given us, in Jake’s Thing, our only song of impotence and experience.) Gathorne-Hardy isn’t sure whether sex is a symptom or a cause of domestic unrest: ‘sex is central but also extremely elusive.’ At the end of his book, however, under the heading ‘Some Solutions to the Problems of Marriage, Sex and Divorce’, he painstakingly describes the complicated procedures devised by Masters and Johnson for the treatment of sexual ‘dysfunction’ (‘the sensate focus sessions inch towards the genitals’) and gives them credit for considerable feats of marital retrieval: ‘if their technique were applied generally’, premature ejaculation, ‘like some sexual smallpox’, could be ‘completely eliminated in ten years’.
The second cause of divorce is women. ‘There is a Japanese TV programme which specialises in getting back missing people. Twenty years ago, it was 70 per cent men running away; now it has reversed – 70 per cent women clearing off.’ In Gathorne-Hardy’s view, so many women clearing off isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Not only because it’s reasonable that women should want to get away from the dusting and the cooking (‘the main, indeed only, point about housework is that for large numbers of people it is awful’), but because it gives men the chance to replace them – not with the duster (this isn’t mentioned) but with the children. ‘As the ideology of the 1950s was dismantled and a new one erected to allow women to work, someone had to take the mother’s place in the family. Father.’ The ideology of the 1950s was the ideology of Winnicott and Bowlby: ‘Winnicott, a brilliant child psychologist, raised the mother’s role, especially the role of her breast, to lyrical heights … It seems possible that Winnicott wanted to be a nursing mother.’ It seems even more possible that Gathorne-Hardy wants to be a mother tout court. Certainly the passion that animates his book is that of a father whom divorce has separated from his children. In Denmark, he says, there are fathers who kidnap their children ‘just to force Bowlby-stuck judges to realise that fathers can look after their children’.
Human Relations and Other Difficulties Page 9
