`Hammering Energies'

I am enjoying William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, by Robert D. Richardson, author of beautifully written, well-researched lives of Thoreau and Emerson. Thus far, my only quibble with the James biography is the absence of the wonderful drawings by Barry Moser that garnished the earlier volumes. That writers as inimitable as William and Henry James should have been brothers, and that the rest of their family should have been so enduringly interesting, if less accomplished (their sister, Alice, and father, Henry Sr., have already merited biographies), seems almost miraculous and makes them the obvious candidate for the title of America’s First Family (Adamses and Kennedys, move over). The James siblings were, Richardson reminds us, “first and last, citizens of the James family.” Here’s Richardson, in his Prologue, placing William James as a writer:

“In place of the mythological world of fixed ideas, James has given us a world of hammering energies, strong but evanescent feelings, activity of thought, and a profound and relentless focus on life now. For all his grand accomplishments in canonical fields of learning, James’s best is often in his unorthodox, half-blind, unpredictable lunges at the great question of how to live, and in this his work sits on the same shelf with Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne, Samuel Johnson, and Emerson. James’s best is urgent, direct, personal, and useful. Much of his writing came out of his teaching, and it has not yet lost the warmth of personal appeal, the sound of the man’s own voice.”

Save Spinoza, is any philosopher so lovable? When Richardson describes James family gatherings, with their lively contentiousness, good humor and “hammering energies,” we feel jealousy and disappointment for having not been invited. Like many sovereignties, the Jameses coined a language of their own:

“The whole family lived and communicated in a blizzard of pet names and nicknames, egged on by the gleeful parents. Garth Wilkinson James, the next-to-youngest brother, was Wilky, Wilkie, Wilk, and Wilkums. Robertson, the youngest brother, was Bob, Bobbins, Robby, Bobby, and Hoppergrass Bob. Thirteen-year-old Wilky addressed a letter home to “Dearest of the Daddybusses and Mommybusses on earth …. Alice had the most pet names, many of them showered on her by her older brother Willy. He called her Sweetlington, Sisterkin, Cherie de Soeur, Cherie de Jeune Bal, Beautlet, my Dearest darling Alice, the noiseless Alice, most kissworthy Alice, you lovely Babe, Dearest Child, la seule que j’aime, Cherie, charmante de Bal, and countless others.”

After the Jameses, the most idiosyncratically memorable (in this case, fictional) family in literature is the Pollitts, the swarm that inhabits Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. The father, Samuel Clemens Pollitt, is a tempestuous, loving, self-pitying, utterly self-absorbed man-boy who likewise speaks a language of his own. I wonder if Stead had the James family – especially the obliviously eccentric Henry Sr. -- in mind as a remote model for the Pollitts. Here’s a sample of Sam Pollitt:

“`By Jiminy!’ ejaculated Sam, who had strange oaths, since he could never swear foul ones, `genius burns: nothing succeeds like success! And did Dirty Jack jerk back his head and give me one of those looks of his with his slugs of eyes, to intimidate me; whereas, no one noticed him at all, at all, poor old Dirty Jack.’ He began to hum with his walking, `Oh, my darling Nelly Gray, they have taken you away.”

In his generous introduction to the 1965 republication of The Man Who Loved Children (25 years after its first appearance), Randall Jarrell wrote:

“Every family has words and phrases of its own; that ultimate family, the Pollitts, has what amounts to a whole language of its own. Only Sam can speak it, really, but the children understand it and mix phrases from it into their ordinary speech. (If anyone feels that it is unlikely for a big grown man to have a little language of his own, let me remind him of that great grown man Swift.) Children’s natural distortions of words and the distortions of Artemus Ward and Uncle Remus are the main sources of this little language of Sam’s. As we listen to Sam talking in it, we exclaim in astonished veneration, `It’s so!’ Many of the words and phrases of this language are so natural that we admire Christina Stead for having invented them at the same instant at which we are thinking, `No, nobody, not even Christina Stead could have made that up!’ – they have the uncreated reality of any perfect creation.”

Richardson quotes part of a letter 19-year-old William James wrote to Kitty Temple, who had mailed a photograph of herself:

“Wheeeeew! oohoo! a ha! la la! [here he drew a musical staff and a flourish] boisteroso triumpissimo. Chassez to the right, cross over, forward two, hornpipe and turn summerset. Up came the fire engines, but I proudly waved them aside.”

We’re not far from Swift’s “little language” to Stella, and Finnegans Wake – both productions of Ireland, likes the Jameses.