`This Dumb Region of the Heart'

An enterprising videographer has posted a brief interview with Robert D. Richardson, author of William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism. It shows up, improbably, on YouTube, more often the home of adolescent idiocy (and some wonderful music). Richardson was speaking in November at the Harvard Bookstore, in Cambridge, Mass. The piece is choppy and hardly more than three minutes long, but it gives Richardson time to comment on James’ understanding of conversion, his role as “one of the unacknowledged founders” of Alcoholics Anonymous, and his “belief in belief.” Richardson impresses me as thoughtful, articulate without glibness, casually erudite and not afraid to find failings in a man he clearly admires. He also seems charmingly nervous in front of the camera, and his speech echoes the precision of his prose. He talks about James the way you and I might talk about a teacher we admire.

What makes James such a convincing thinker and writer, whose thoughts are compelling even when they sometimes seem ridiculous (the psychic phenomena business), is their lived-in quality. His thought is rooted in his life, and his life was often painful and sorely tested. His low point came early in 1870, around the time of his 28th birthday, and we might diagnose it as a particularly complicated form of manic-depression (something his father also probably suffered from). Famously, James documented his case of “vastation” anonymously, in 1902, in the chapter on the sick soul in The Varieties of Religious Experience. James was already thinking in a way we might call “holistic.” He views the physical, the psychological and the spiritual as part of one inextricable package. In his biography, Richardson quotes at length from a diary entry James made on April 30, 1870. Here’s Richardson quoting James:

“`Hitherto,” [James] writes, `when I have felt like taking a free initiative, like daring to act originally, without carefully waiting for contemplation of the external world to determine all for me, suicide seemed the most manly form to put my daring into.’ In a flash, like a person impulsively jumping a brook, James is on the other side. `Now I will go a step further with my will, not only act with it, but believe as well; believe in my individual reality and creative power.’ Not only must he act, he must believe in his actions. And in order to believe, he must reformulate the question for himself. Resiliency, the ability, even when down – especially when down – to regroup and move forward, is the central fact of the life of William James. `My belief to be sure can’t be optimistic;’ he concludes, `but I will posit it, life (the real, the good) in the self-governing resistance of the ego to the world. Life shall be built [on] doing and creating and suffering.”

I find this stirring, in part because it resonates with events that occurred five years after James’ death in 1910. In the fall of 1915, with slaughter of unprecedented magnitude raging in Europe, the poet laureate of England, Robert Bridges, asked Henry James to contribute to an anthology of extracts from the work of philosophers and poets to be titled The Spirit of Man and intended as a boost to England’s wartime morale. Instead of choosing from his own work, the ailing, 72-year-old novelist, whose death was only three months away, suggested several paragraphs written by William in 1895. The passage comes at the end of an essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” (collected in The Will to Believe, in 1897), and it includes these lines:

“…If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight – as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild half-saved universe our nature is adapted. The deepest thing in our nature is this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and our unwillingnesses, our faiths and our fears…. These then are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”

Henry’s humble deferral to William is noble, and the choice of text is noteworthy for several reasons. It’s a public homage to his beloved brother, with whom he had sparred for decades, especially over the matter of Henry’s “third manner” – the stylistic convolutions of such late works as The Golden Bowl. More importantly, it’s significant that Henry did not mine his own published oeuvre, notably lacking in uplift and inspiration. John Marcher’s morbid passivity in “The Beast in the Jungle” was hardly likely to rally England’s flagging wartime spirits, though one of Lambert Stretcher’s more rousing set-pieces in The Ambassadors might have served the purpose.

There’s also a deeply personal irony in James’ selection, one probably not lost on this subtlest of novelists, whose fiction is peopled with onlookers, life’s spectators, many of whom end up regretting their misspent, unlived lives and suffer John Marcher’s “arid end.” The reluctance of such “poor sensitive gentlemen” to participate vigorously in life, to risk the vulnerability of a passionate existence, is the very opposite of William’s entreaty to “Be not afraid of life,” and likewise the opposite of Henry’s lifelong devotion to his art. Just seven months before his death, after H.G. Wells had mocked and parodied James in his satire Boon, James replied to Wells in a letter: “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance….and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its processes.”

William James, the pragmatist for whom doing determined being, was a proponent of the “strenuous life.” In Principles of Psychology, he condemned “the habit of excessive novel-reading and theater going…even the habit of excessive indulgence in music.” Such pastimes produce that “contemptible type of human character…who spends his life in a weltering sea of sensibility and emotion, but who never does a manly thing.” Allowing for hyperbole and a certain lack of charity (and his own lifelong devotion to “novel-reading”), William might have been writing about Henry.

The matter is not so simple as manly William and prissy Henry. Throughout his work, Henry James’ treatment of acting versus observing, dynamism versus passivity, is nuanced and unschematic. His passive characters are seldom wholly admirable or wholly contemptible; rather, they test our sympathy and our scorn. The consumptive Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady is a perfect Jamesian onlooker, a semi-invalid who arranges with his father to leave Isabel Archer a generous inheritance as a sort of experiment. He wishes to see what his American cousin, so dedicated to unencumbered freedom, will do with her fortune. This act lead Graham Greene to call him the “the sainted Ralph,” yet it’s Touchett’s seemingly benign plotting that results in Isabel’s disastrous marriage to the monstrous Gilbert Osmond.

In Awakenings, Dr. Oliver Sacks wrote admiringly, if briefly, of both William and Henry James. Here’s a passage from the volume not specifically about the Jameses but pertinent to their relationship, and echoing their thoughts and words:

“Kinship is healing; we are physicians to each other -- `A faithful friend is the physic of life’ ([Sir Thomas] Browne). The world is the hospital where healing takes place.

“The essential thing is feeling at home in the world, knowing in the depths of one’s being that one has a real place in the home of the world.”