James Alice - Alice James: a biography

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 TIBN 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 TIBN

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

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 fathers 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 limitsand 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 Strouses 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. Alices 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 Alices 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 Alices psycheher responses to life and illness, and her familys 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 Alices 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 Alices mother and father, and, less directly, her brother Williamin the sense that he teased her, flirted with her, and insisted on pitying her, which she hatedwho 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 Alices diaries, and the novels of Henry, which reveal a great deal about his own preoccupations and preconceptions. And finally we have Williams writings on psychology, which throw a strange light on his sisters 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 sharedwhat sets them apart and makes their lives of such continuing interestwas 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. Alices 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 Strouses sympathy and forensic patience that we are allowed the luxury of neither extreme. She approaches this most complex psychology with remarkable wisdom. She doesnt gloss over difficulties; she doesnt 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.