'One of Those Drab Souls, Bloodless, Wholly Juiceless'

In 1865-66, while a student at Harvard Medical School, William James spent fifteen months in Brazil, accompanying one of his professors, Louis Agassiz, on a collecting expedition. James, 23, contracted varioloid, a form of smallpox, which left him unscarred but partially blind and damaged his vision for life. From Brazil he wrote to his brother Henry, “When I get home, I'm going to study philosophy all my days.” Unlike Henry, who was born a writer of fiction, William in his youth was notably indecisive. Among other careers he considered were painting and medicine. Instead he chose philosophy and a field that barely existed at the time, psychology. 

In 1986, the poet Herbert Morris published “William James in Brazil” in The New Criterion, collecting it in The Little Voices of the Pears (1989). I first heard of Morris when Counterpoint published What Was Lost (2000) with “Portland Place, London, 1906,” a photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn, on the cover. The first poem in that collection, “House of Words,” is narrated by Henry James shortly after Coburn had photographed him at Lamb House, in Rye. James included some of Coburn’s prints in the “New York Edition” of his work (“Portland Place” shows up in James’ masterpiece, The Golden Bowl), and it was the James connection that initially attracted me to Morris. Like “House of Words” and most of Morris’ work, the Brazil poem is a dramatic monologue, written in the form of a letter from William to Henry, addressed as “Harry,” his name within the James family:

 

“Dear Harry,

It may be, may very well be,

to you, to you alone, I can confide this:

this blindness is not wholly to be dreaded,

though I suspect—and you shall understand this—

the reasons will have less to do with me,

most likely, and more to do with Brazil.

You, I daresay, would flourish here, would read

into this richness, no doubt, equal richness . . .”

 

Morris’ James is overwhelmed by Brazil. The “extravagance of color, scent, heat, light” exacerbates his neuresthesia. William tells Henry he “would quite thrive here." A year younger than his brother, Henry had published his first short story in 1864. Harry was not yet Henry. Morris gives William the prescience to see Henry’s future genius:

 

“I am, perhaps for the first time, adrift,

cut from my moorings, like one of those creatures

in a story you have written, or shall write

(over and over, to my keen dismay),

one of those drab souls, bloodless, wholly juiceless,

from whom whatever life it—he?—possessed

has been squeezed, someone, Harry, whose existence

is thin, or beyond thin, thinner than thin,

his hold quite tenuous on solid objects . . .”

 

James is, in effect, diagnosing himself as a “sick soul,” which he describes decades later in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). He tells Henry about the photograph taken of him wearing dark glasses and a rakishly tipped hat. He also criticizes Henry’s approach to writing fiction:

 

“I know no one your characters resemble,

by which I mean they seem, each, not quite human,

not sufficiently lifelike to quite warrant

such relentless speculation about them—”

 

This foreshadows William’s dislike of Henry’s “third manner,” the stylistic convolutions of such late works as The Golden Bowl. Forty years later he advises Henry in a letter to “sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style.” What William proposes might read like a thriller but not like Henry James. The blind brother closes his letter like this:

 

“That is enough. (Discretion, as I said,

is what you were born to.) Convey to Alice

her brother’s deep, deepest, affection,

Willie”

 

We’re left with the impression, later to constitute one of Henry’s enduring themes, that even the wise and sensitive among us are condemned to misunderstand our loved ones.

[Eric Ormsby wrote of Morris’ work: “Though he favors the dramatic or interior monologue, Morris is difficult to categorize. Eschewing rhyme and metaphor, his verse gives an unadorned impression; at the same time, it is musical and densely textured. His true Penelope, we might say, is Henry James, and, like James, he accumulates clauses within clauses, like some sly lasso virtuoso, to achieve his unusual effects, at once Ciceronian and Prufrockian. Overlapping repetitions, variations on phrases, spilling rivulets of hesitancy and asseveration, lend serpentine momentum to his lines. The result is a kind of verbal impasto which, fused with an uncanny ear for cadences, creates an incantatory, rather mesmerizing pattern.”]