Showing posts with label William James. Show all posts
Showing posts with label William James. Show all posts

Sunday, November 06, 2022

James Family Values


Barry Sonnenfeld, dir.: Addams Family Values (1993)
June 17, 1905

Dear Mr. Johnson:

Just back from three months in Europe, I find your letter of May 16th awaiting me, with the very flattering news of my election into the Academy of Arts and Letters. I own that this reply gives me terrible searchings of the heart.

On the one hand the lust of distinction and the craving to be yoked in one Social body with so many illustrious names tempt me to say “yes.” On the other, bidding me say “no,” there is my life‐long practice of not letting my name figure where there is not some definite work doing in which I am willing to bear a share; and there is my life‐long professional habit of preaching against the world and its vanities.

I am not informed that this Academy has any very definite work cut out for it of the sort in which I could bear a useful part; and it suggests
tant soit peu the notion of an organization for the mere purpose of distinguishing certain individuals (with their own connivance) and enabling them to say to the world at large “we are in and you are out.”

Ought a preacher against vanities to succumb to such a lure at the very first call? Ought he not rather to “refrain, renounce, abstain,” even tho it seem a sour and ungenial act? On the whole it seems to me that for a philosopher with my pretensions to austerity and righteousness, the only consistent course is to give up this particular vanity, and treat myself as unworthy of the honour, which I assuredly am. And I am the more encouraged to this course by the fact that my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy, and that if I were there too, the other families represented might think the James influence too rank and strong.

Let me go, then, I pray you, “release me and restore me to the ground.” If you knew how greatly against the grain these duty‐inspired lines are written, you would not deem me unfriendly or ungenial, but only a little cracked.

By the same token, I think that I ought to resign from the Institute (in which I have played so inactive a part) which act I herewith also perform.

Believe me, dear Mr. Johnson, with longing regret,
heroically yours,

WILLIAM JAMES

Cambridge, Mass.


- Quoted from Letters to the Editor. The New York Times (April 16, 1972)


R. W. B. Lewis: The Jameses: A Family Narrative (1991)


I think you'll agree that this is quite an odd letter to send to someone inviting you to join their organisation - all the more so given that William James had already agreed to be one of the founding members of the American Institute of Arts and Letters some years before.

What can have motivated it? Was it really an expression of humility on his part, or was it - as Leon Edel, in his immense, magisterial five-volume biography of Henry James (1953-1972), suggests - because his "younger and shallower and vainer brother" was already in the Academy: i.e. had been asked first?

It's important to stress that William James was 63 at the time, with a worldwide reputation as one of the most influential psychologists and philosophers then living. His "younger and shallower and vainer brother", Henry, was 62, and already seen as a potential candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, for which he was nominated in 1911, 1912, and 1916.

William himself, in context, characterises his own reaction to this insult - an Academy daring to offer priority to his younger brother - as "a bit cracked." His choice of words in describing the possible "James influence" on that institution as "too rank and strong" is also strangely visceral - as if there were something lurking in his family background which literally sickened him.

I've written elsewhere about the mountain of books by and about Henry James collected by me over the years. Which is yet another reason for being surprised at Williams' characterisation of this "Master of nuance and scruple" (in W. H. Auden's phrase), this "great and talkative man," as a "younger and shallower and vainer brother." Vain, yes, perhaps - younger, definitely - but shallow? The mind boggles.

The family tree of the Jameses was more or less as follows ("A shilling life will give you all the facts" - Auden again):

On July 28, 1840, [Henry James Sr. (1811–1882), an American theologican and Swedenborgian mystic], was married to Mary Robertson Walsh (1810–1882), the sister of a fellow Princeton seminarian, by the mayor of New York ... The couple lived in New York, and together had five children:
  1. William James (1842–1910), a philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.
  2. Henry James Jr. (1843–1916), an author considered to be among the greatest novelists in the English language ...
  3. Garth Wilkinson "Wilkie" James (1845–1883) ...
  4. Robertson "Bob" James (1846–1910) ...
  5. Alice James (1848–1892), a writer and teacher who became well known for her diary published posthumously in 1934 ...
- Wikipedia: Henry James Sr.
[It could almost pass for a picture of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes, couldn't it? The article I borrowed this image from is even entitled "Henry James’s Smarter Older Brother." And is it just me, or is there something a little territorial in the way William is trying to tower over his brother, while Henry obligingly tilts his head to try and look as small as possible? It's like two cats establishing precedence when they meet in the backyard.]
I guess what interests me most about the James family, though, is not so much the primeval struggle for dominance between the two eldest brothers - it's a psychological commonplace that a second child tries to distinguish him or her self as much as possible from their older sibling. No, it's how that pattern affects the other children that concerns me.

And, yes, I am the youngest in a family of four children: my eldest brother embodies scientific method and logic; the next brother down is completely dedicated to creative writing and the exercise of the existential will; the next down, my sister, was an invalid a little like Alice James, very gifted artistically but unable to deal with the stresses of the workaday world.

So what was left for me, the youngest child? The necessity of avoiding all of these prior choices - in part, or wholly - in order to construct my own independent existence. And how successful have I been? Well, I'm not really in a position to judge: but all I can say is that I believe that your place in the succession, from first to last, has a massive influence on your own individual process of individuation, especially in families with a very dominant ethos: like the Jameses, or the Manns, or (for that matter) the Rosses.


Viktor Mann: Wir waren fünf. Bildnis der Familie Mann [There were five of us: A Mann Family Album] (1949)
Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (1840–1891), Lübeck merchant and senator, married Júlia da Silva Bruhns (1851–1923), a German-Brazilian writer. Together they had five children:
  1. [Luiz] Heinrich Mann (1871–1950), author, president of the fine poetry division of the Prussian Academy of Arts ...
  2. [Paul] Thomas Mann (1875–1955), author, Nobel Prize for Literature laureate in 1929 ...
  3. Julia Elisabeth Therese ['Lula'] Mann (1877–1927), married Josef Löhr (1862–1922), banker. She committed suicide by hanging herself at the age of 50.
  4. Carla [Augusta Olga Maria] Mann (1881–1910), actress. She committed suicide by taking poison at the age of 29.
  5. Karl Viktor Mann (1890–1949), economist, married Magdalena Nelly Kilian (1895–1962).
- Wikipedia: The Mann Family
[In this picture, taken around 1902, Heinrich seems still to be trying to assert dominance over Thomas. He was, after all, a well-known writer and cultural figure by this time. He'd already published a number of books. Thomas, by contrast, had only published one novel, but it was Buddenbrooks, a massively influential work which would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize. Is he already conscious, here, of biding his time?]
You see what I mean about the possible perilous effects of family dynamics? First Carla, then Lula, both sisters, both suicides. Carla was conscious that her acting career was not going as she'd planned: she had little hope left of rivalling her two elder brothers. Whatever miseries drove her to the final act, it cast a long shadow over the whole family. And, then, of course, Lula followed her example seventeen years later.

Thomas Mann's eldest son, Klaus, another writer, who'd striven all his life to get out from under his father's long shadow, would commit suicide in his turn in 1949. He, too, had lived much of his life in a closer-than-close conspiracy with his older sister Erika, a well-known actress married - for passport reasons - to homosexual poet W. H. Auden.

So what am I trying to say about this succession of family tragedies? Nothing to belittle or attempt to 'explain' them, I assure you. Let's return to the Jameses in an effort to make the point a little clearer.


Marie Leon: Henry and William James (early 1900s)


William and Henry had their intense rivalry, co-existing with a genuine love for each other, to keep them going. But what of the rest of the family?

You'll note that both brothers were just of an age to be eligible to join up for the American Civil War (1861-65) - William 19, Henry 18 - when it first broke out. Henry bowed out as the result of an 'obscure hurt', a phrase which generations of critics interpreted to mean some kind of debilitating accident in the genital regions: a little like the hero of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926). It explained a lot.

However, his biographer Leon Edel has deduced from careful sorting of the evidence that it was far more likely to have been a bad back. In any case, it was enough to spare him from joining the forces in any capacity whatsoever. Was it residual guilt over this that explains his rather patronising review of Walt Whitman's poetry book Drum-taps (1865), a record of the older poet's hospital visits and tending of wounded soldiers during the war? Certainly in later life Henry felt deeply ashamed at having so missed the merits of Whitman's work when he first encountered it.

William, by contrast, was already at Harvard, where he made sure he had enough to do in the scientific arena to make it quite impossible for him to find leisure to take note of the war. Nor was he alone in this. As was the case during the Vietnam war, very few university students in the North actually joined the colours. It was mostly those with manual jobs who marched off to the front.


Jane Maher: Biography of Broken Fortunes (1986)


It was Wilkie and Bob, their two younger brothers, who actually joined up. In her book Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James, Jane Maher traces the sorry saga of their lives thereafter: their abortive attempts to be accepted on their own terms, their business and other failures. Wilkie went bankrupt, was left out of his father's will, and died at the early age of 38. "Unsuccessful at poetry and painting, Bob, an alcoholic with a violent temper, spent many years in asylums, and died at 63, not long before his brother William," as her blurb has it.

But that's not really the whole story. It's important to note here that both brothers were legitimate war heroes, men of honour and principle, and that many of their subsequent difficulties ought properly to be attributed to post-traumatic stress. Both volunteered to serve as officers in Massachusetts' newly-formed Black regiments. As Wilkie put it in a speech to Union Veterans many years later:
When I went to war I was a boy of 17 years of age, the son of parents devoted to the cause of the Union and the abolition of slavery. I had been brought up in the belief that slavery was a monstrous wrong, its destruction worthy of a man’s best efforts, even unto the laying down of life.
Wilkie subsequently took part in the heroic (if misguided) Union assault on Battery Wagner in 1863 - the subject of the 1989 civil war film Glory - and was only a few steps behind Colonel Robert Shaw when he died.
Gathering together a knot of men after the suspense of a few seconds, I waved my sword for a further charge toward the living line of fire above us. We had gone then some thirty yards ... Suddenly a shell tore my side. In the frenzy of excitement, it seemed a painless visitation … A still further advance brought us to the second obstruction … The enemy’s fire did not abate for this crossing, and here it was I received my second wound, a canister ball in my foot.
He did eventually recover from his wounds, but walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

Bob, too, saw action in the sea islands off coastal South Carolina and Georgia, and nearly died of sunstroke while campaigning in Florida. Little was done by their family after the war to assist them in their transition to civilian life.

When their father decided to buy some land in Florida which he intended to farm with the help of freed slaves, Wilkie was put in charge of the venture. Bob joined him just before local hostility and bad financial conditions put an end to the experiment. They eventually both ended up working for the same railroad in Wisconsin.

Were they failures? In the material sense, perhaps yes. But as Henry remarked (a little guiltily?) of Wilkie:
"He is not particularly successful, as success is measured in this country; but he is always rotund and good-natured and delightful."
- quoted in Carl Swanson, Milwaukee Independent (2021)
As for Bob, his alcoholism gradually estranged him from his family, and:
In 1885 he returned to Concord to become, in the quarter-century remaining to him, an amiable dilettante, painting, writing poetry and endearing himself as a conversationalist of remarkable powers.
- Edwin M. Yoder, The Washington Post (1986)
Henry James found this brother's conversation, too, "charged with natural life, perception, humor and color ... the equivalent, for fine animation, of William's epistolary prowess."


Alice James (1848-1892)


What, then, of Alice, the youngest of the James siblings? Well, in many ways she had the oddest destiny of all. She became a professional invalid in the High Victorian manner: like the sofa-bound Signora Neroni in Trollope's Barchester Towers (1857), or (for that matter), the crippled heir of Redclyffe in Charlotte M. Yonge's famous novel.


Alice James & Katharine Loring (Leamington Spa, 1890)


William, the psychologist, was largely unimpressed by her vapours, but empathetic Henry lavished her with attention. It was mainly for that reason that she shifted her residence to Britain after their parents' death. She also wrote an exceptionally subtle and (at times) acerbic diary, which has become a classic in its own right.

Subsequent biographers and critics, Jean Strouse and Susan Sontag among them, have veered between sympathy and impatience with "Alice-as-icon and Alice-as-victim". She did, however, at least for a time, succeed in putting herself at the centre of the family discourse - which is more than her other two brothers, Wilkie and Bob, ever managed to do.


Leon Edel, ed. The Diary of Alice James (1964)






Anne Ross: Poinsettia: A Mermaid's Tale (2013)


My own sister, Anne Mairi Ross (1961-1991), a gifted writer and artist, took her own life some three decades ago now. The rest of us rage on. Surviving such family conflicts can be a difficult thing to achieve, and it's therefore with more than an Academic interest that I pore over the histories of the Jameses and the Manns - as well as those of various other creative families, the Bells (Julian and Quentin), the Powyses (John, Theodore, Llewellyn and their eight siblings).

I'm not so naïve as to think that such analogues could ever account for the complexities of any human life, but I'm not sure it's really feasible to ignore the similarities in all these Freudian sibling dramas, either.

I'd like to conclude with a poem from my latest book, The Oceanic Feeling. This one comes from the section called "Family plot," which begins with the following epigraph:
These works of fiction, which seem so full of hostility, are none of them really so badly intended … they still preserve, under a slight disguise, the child’s original affection for his parents. The faithlessness and ingratitude are only apparent.

– Sigmund Freud, ‘Family Romances’ (1909)

Jack Ross: The Oceanic Feeling (2021)


Oh br/other!


My eldest brother is flying up

to Auckland
for the weekend
to see my mother

Bronwyn is flying down
to see her sister
in Wellington on Friday

coincidence? hardly
Bronwyn’s younger brother
arrives today

last time we stayed with him
I had a tantrum
and wouldn’t sleep another night

under his roof
I read a thesis recently
on placing far less stress

on Oedipus
the br/other was the term
the author coined

for his new theory
Luke, I am your father!
try your brother

then the sparks will fly  



Anne Ross: Poinsettia (2013)






Friday, June 14, 2019

Henry James: The Legend of the Master



Simon Nowell-Smith: The Legend of the Master (1947)


At the Grave of Henry James

The snow, less intransigeant than their marble,
Has left the defence of whiteness to these tombs;
For all the pools at my feet
Accommodate blue, now, and echo such clouds as occur
To the sky, and whatever bird or mourner the passing
Moment remarks they repeat.
"A great and talkative man," W. H. Auden called him in this magnificent elegy, first published in Horizon in 1941. I too - to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous - have already written a short post on Henry James, some years ago, but solely in connection with his prowess as a writer of ghost stories.

His importance to Auden appears to have been as a kind of final court of literary appeal:
All will be judged. Master of nuance and scruple,
Pray for me and for all writers living or dead;
Because there are many whose works
Are in better taste than their lives, because there is no end
To the vanity of our calling: make intercession
For the treason of all clerks.
Others, too (Graham Greene among them), found his example strangely inspiring in the 1940s, as the brute beasts trampled the earth, and utter darkness threatened to swallow up the exquisite niceties of perception for which James stood for, both as man and writer.

Do I find him easy to read? Not really, no - with the exception of such fine early works as "Daisy Miller" or The American. I've never undertaken the task of reading a James novel without a certain trepidation. And there are still great gaps in my knowledge of his œuvre.

Paradoxically, though, I find him very easy to read about. I've worked my way through Leon Edel's magisterial, multi-volumed biography a couple of times now, and find it, alas, more enthralling than any of the Master's own books.

Of course it's only one among many biographies. And - just to make things simpler - it exists in a number of diverse forms. There's the original, five-volume edition, in which it first appeared between 1953 and 1972:



Leon Edel: Henry James (1978)


  1. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Untried Years: 1843-1870. 1953. New York: Avon Books, 1978.

  2. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Conquest of London: 1870-1881. 1962. New York: Avon Books, 1978.

  3. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Middle Years: 1882-1895. 1962. New York: Avon Books, 1978.

  4. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Treacherous Years: 1895-1901. 1969. New York: Avon Books, 1978.

  5. Edel, Leon. Henry James. The Master: 1901-1916. 1972. New York: Avon Books, 1978.

Then there's the unabridged, but slightly reorganised British paperback edition:



Leon Edel: The Life of Henry James (1977)


  1. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 1: 1843-89. 1953, 1962, 1963. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

  2. Edel, Leon. The Life of Henry James. Vol. 2. 1963, 1969, 1972. Peregrine Books. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

And then, finally, there's the one-volume abridgement of 1985, which unfortunately contains some extra material, and therefore needs to be acquired by the fastidious collector (though it turned out to consist mostly of some rather tenuous speculations about some possible new sources for "The Turn of the Screw"):



Leon Edel: Henry James: A Life (1978)


  1. Edel, Leon. Henry James: A Life. 1953, 1962, 1963, 1969, 1972 & 1977. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1985.

That really is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Jamesiana, though. There's the disreputably entertaining work by Simon Nowell-Smith pictured at the head of this post. And, if it's the Master's domestic arrangements that preoccupy you, there's the almost equally interesting work below by H. Montgomery Hyde:



H. Montgomery Hyde: Henry James at Home (1978)


  1. Nowell-Smith, Simon. The Legend of the Master: Henry James as Others Saw Him. 1947. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

  2. Hyde, H. Montgomery. Henry James at Home. London: Methuen, 1969.

Then there are the curious events of the so-called 'Year of Henry James' - 2004 - when a whole series of novelists seem to have decided simultaneously to make him the star of their books. David Lodge and Colm Tóibín are the most prominent among them, but Lodge lists a number of others in his book of essays on the subject:



David Lodge: Author, Author (2004)


  1. Lodge, David. Author, Author: A Novel. Secker & Warburg. London: Random House, 2004.

  2. Lodge, David. The Year of Henry James or, Timing is All: The Story of a Novel. With Other Essays on the Genesis, Composition and Reception of Literary Fiction. Harvill Secker. London: Random House, 2006.

  3. Tóibín, Colm. The Master: A Novel. Scribner. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.



Colm Tóibín: The Master (2004)


What other ways are there to fritter away your time in the beguiling province of Henry-Jamesia without venturing to scale the daunting mountain ranges of his late prose? I can think of a few answers.

First of all, there are a number of other books by Leon Edel to sample - not to mention an intriguing book on 'The Turn of the Screw' by Auckland University lecturer Dr Elizabeth Sheppard. But the real motherlode lies in the books by and about the rest of the family: not just his polymathic elder brother William, but also his fiercely intelligent 'professional invalid' of a sister, Alice:



Leon Edel, ed.: The Diary of Alice James (1964)


  1. Edel, Leon. The Psychological Novel, 1900-1950. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1955.

  2. Edel, Leon. Bloomsbury: A House of Lions. 1979. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

  3. Edel, Leon, ed. The Diary of Alice James. 1964. Introduction by Linda Simon. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999.

  4. Hardwick, Elizabeth, ed. The Selected Letters of William James. The Great Letters Series. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961.

  5. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. Great Books of the Western World, 53. Ed. Robert Maynard Hutchins. Chicago: William Benton, Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1952.

  6. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. 1901-2. Introduction by Arthur Darby Nock. 1955. The Fontana Library: Theology & Philosophy. London: Collins, 1968.

  7. Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. 1991. An Anchor Book. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

  8. Sheppard, E. A. Henry James and The Turn of the Screw. Auckland: Auckland University Press / Oxford University Press, 1974.

  9. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, ed. The Death and Letters of Alice James. 1981. Boston: Exact Change Books, 1997.

Sooner or later, of course, you'll have to bite the bullet and just start reading The Portrait of a Lady, or some other reasonably approachable early or mid-period novel, but even that can be put off for some considerable time if you choose to go via the distinctly less daunting letters-and-notebooks route:



Lyall H. Powers, ed.: Henry James and Edith Wharton (1990)


  1. Matthiessen, F. O., & Kenneth B. Murdock, ed. The Notebooks of Henry James. 1947. A Galaxy Book GB 61. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1961.

  2. Edel, Leon, ed. The Selected Letters of Henry James. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1955.

  3. James, Henry. Letters I: 1843-1875. Ed. Leon Edel. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1974.

  4. James, Henry. Letters II: 1875-1883. Ed. Leon Edel. 1975. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1978.

  5. James, Henry. Letters III: 1883-1895. Ed. Leon Edel. 1980. London: Macmillan London Limited, 1981.

  6. James, Henry. Letters IV: 1895-1916. Ed. Leon Edel. The Belknap Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 1984.

  7. James, Henry. Selected Letters. Ed. Leon Edel. The Belknap Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 1987.

  8. Edel, Leon, & Lyall H. Powers, ed. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1987.

  9. Horne, Philip, ed. Henry James: A Life in Letters. Viking Penguin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999.

  10. Powers, Lyall H, ed. Henry James and Edith Wharton. Letters: 1900-1915. London: George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Limited, 1990.

  11. Smith, Janet Adam, ed. Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948.

Once again (as usual), it's Leon Edel who leads the charge, with his four-volume edition of the Letters, as well as a couple of one-volume selected editions. But, as you can see from the list above, there are also number of correspondences with particular friends and fellow authors to be savoured - not to mention one of those 'Life in Letters' compilations which offer such a good way of selling essentially the same material twice.

All of which brings me to what is (ostensibly, at least) the actual subject of this post: the decision to complete my set of the Henry James volumes included in the Library of America. If you've read my recent piece on the subject, you'll know more than enough already about my obsession with this black-backed series of classics.

Their Henry James collection includes the complete novels (in six volumes), the complete stories (in five volumes), the collected travel writings (in two volumes), the collected literary criticism (in two volumes), and the complete autobiographical writings (in one volume): 16 volumes in all. When I receive the last couple of volumes of novels, I'll be proud to say that I have them all:



  1. James, Henry. Novels 1871-1880: Watch and Ward / Roderick Hudson / The American / The Europeans / Confidence. Ed. William T. Stafford. The Library of America, 13. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1983.

  2. James, Henry. Novels 1881-1886: Washington Square / The Portrait of a Lady / The Bostonians. Ed. William T. Stafford. The Library of America, 29. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1985.

  3. James, Henry. Novels 1886-1890: The Princess Casamassima / The Reverberator / The Tragic Muse. Ed. Daniel Mark Fogel. The Library of America, 43. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1989.

  4. James, Henry. Novels 1896-1899: The Other House / The Spoils of Poynton / What Maisie Knew / The Awkward Age. Ed. Myra Jehlen. The Library of America, 139. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2003.

  5. James, Henry. Novels 1901-1902: The Sacred Fount / The Wings of the Dove. Ed. Leo Bersani. The Library of America, 162. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2006.

  6. James, Henry. Novels 1903-1911: The Ambassadors / The Golden Bowl / The Outcry / Appendix: “The Married Son.” Ed. Ross Posnock. The Library of America, 215. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2011.

  7. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 1: 1864-1874. Ed. Jean Strouse. The Library of America, 111. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1999.

  8. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 2: 1874-1884. Ed. William L. Vance. The Library of America, 106. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1999.

  9. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 3: 1884-1891. Ed. Edward Said. The Library of America, 107. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1999.

  10. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 4: 1892-1898. Ed. David Bromwich and John Hollander. The Library of America, 82. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996.

  11. James, Henry. Complete Stories, Volume 5: 1898-1910. Ed. Denis Donoghue. The Library of America, 83. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1996.

  12. James, Henry. Collected Travel Writings. Great Britain and America: English Hours; the American Scene; Other Travels. Ed. Richard Howard. The Library of America, 64. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993.

  13. James, Henry. Collected Travel Writings. The Continent: A Little Tour in France; Italian Hours; Other Travels. Ed. Richard Howard. The Library of America, 65. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1993.

  14. James, Henry. Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature; American Writers; English Writers. Ed. Leon Edel & Mark Wilson. The Library of America, 22. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.

  15. James, Henry. Literary Criticism: French Writers; Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition. Ed. Leon Edel & Mark Wilson. The Library of America, 23. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 1984.

  16. James, Henry. Autobiographies: A Small Boy and Others / Notes of a Son and Brother / The Middle Years / Other Writings. 1913, 1914, 1917. Ed. Philip Horne. The Library of America, 274. New York: Literary Classics of the United States, Inc., 2016.







James (according to Leon Edel, at any rate) had an obsession with collected editions. His aspiration, from the very beginning, was to create a kind of American Comédie humaine in the spirit of Balzac's monumentally comprehensive portrait of nineteenth-century France. The set of Balzac he himself read was in 23 volumes. Hence the 23 volumes he attempted to compress his works into for the late New York edition (1907-9) of his works.

Unfortunately it sprawled into 24 volumes instead, and eventually included two posthumous volumes as well, so it's safe to say that his long-meditated enterprise didn't go quite as planned.

What's more, it was a financial disaster. He'd rewritten, revised, and radically pruned his early fiction to fit the aesthetic dictates of his late style, and the result was hardly pleasing to fans of the works in their earlier form. The elaborate prefaces he wrote for each volume, though subsequently collected as a kind of treatise on the art of fiction, were also seen as somewhat excessive.

This - as he perceived it - ruin of his life's work drove him into a depression, and it wasn't really until the pressure of war work in 1914 awoke him from lethargy that he was able to recover the will to live, let alone to write.

When he died in 1916, he accordingly left an immense but disordered legacy. Above all, there's the problem of which texts to read: the original versions or the revised ones? Leon Edel, by and large, preferred the novels and stories as they first appeared, and he attempted to restore them to popular attention in the many, many collections of James's works he edited or oversaw.

The most prominent of these was probably his 12-volume set of the Master's complete short stories:



Leon Edel, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James (1962-64)


  1. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 1: 1864-1868. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.

  2. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 2: 1868-1872. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.

  3. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 3: 1873-1875. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.

  4. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 4: 1876-1882. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962.

  5. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 5: 1883-1884. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.

  6. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 6: 1884-1888. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.

  7. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 7: 1888-1891. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.

  8. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 8: 1891-1892. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963.

  9. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 9: 1892-1898. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.

  10. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 10: 1898-1899. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.

  11. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 11: 1900-1903. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.

  12. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James. Volume 12: 1903-1910. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1964.



Leon Edel, ed. The Complete Tales of Henry James (Vol 10: 1898-1899)


I wouldn't want you to walk away with the impression that the Library of America edition of James is in any way complete, however. Perish the thought! Conspicuous among the absences are James's last two novels, unfinished and posthumously published: The Ivory Tower and The Sense of the Past (consituting, respectively, the last two volumes of the New York edition).

Then there are the plays (available in another fine edition by Leon Edel).



Leon Edel, ed. The Complete Plays of Henry James (1949)


Then there's his one, full-length biography, William Wetmore Story and His Friends (1903):



Of course, there are reasons for allowing at least some of these to sink into oblivion. The biography was a duty job: forced upon him as an obligation to some friends, and not written from the heart (he didn't even like the sculptor Story very much).

The plays, too, were a kind of slow-motion disaster which had occupied much of his time in the 1890s, and came very near to breaking his heart:

"I'm the last, My Lord, of the Domvilles," as the eponymous hero of his play Guy Domville intoned in its one, abortive production.

"And it's a bloody good thing y'are!" a rough voice shouted from the stalls.

What else? There are facsimile editions of his annotated copies of early novels intended as guides for his later revisions - there are reprints, selections, re-editions, in basically every series of modern classics known to man. Truly, once you start, there's no obvious end to the number of books you need to collect to see this strangest of beings, this - in many ways - most loveable of writers, whole.

As a teacher of creative writing, I often find myself quoting his precept for young writers: "Dramatise!"

Even more often, though, I think of his three rules for civilised conduct:
  1. Be kind
  2. Be kind
  3. Be kind



John Singer Sargent: Henry James (1913)

Henry James
(1843-1916)


    Novels:

  1. James, Henry. Watch and Ward. 1871 & 1878. Introduction by Leon Edel. 1959. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1960.

  2. James, Henry. The American: The Version of 1877 Revised in Autograph and Typescript for the New York Edition of 1907. Reproduced in Facsimile from the Original in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. Introduction by Rodney G. Dennis. Houghton Library Manuscript Facsimiles, 1. 1976. London: Scolar Press, 1978.

  3. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady: An Authoritative Text / Henry James and the Novel / Reviews and Criticism. 1881. Ed. Robert D. Bamberg. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975.

  4. James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. 1881. Ed. Geoffrey Moore. 1984. Notes by Patricia Crick. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.

  5. James, Henry. The Princess Casamassima. 1886. London: Heron Books / Macmillan & Co., n.d.

  6. James, Henry. A London Life and The Reverberator. 1888 & 1908. Ed. Philip Horne. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989.

  7. James, Henry. The Tragic Muse. 1890. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978.

  8. James, Henry. The Other House. 1896. Introduction by Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948.

  9. James, Henry. The Spoils of Poynton. 1897. Penguin Modern Classics, 1922. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963.

  10. James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. 1897 & 1908. Ed. Douglas Jefferson & Douglas Grant. 1966. The World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.

  11. James, Henry. The Awkward Age. 1899. With the Author’s Preface. New York Edition, 1908. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.

  12. James, Henry. The Sacred Fount. 1901. With an Introductory Essay by Leon Edel. 1953. A Black Cat Book. New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1979.

  13. James, Henry. The Wings of the Dove: An Authoritative Text / The Author and the Novel / Criticism. 1902 & 1909. Ed. J. Donald Crowley & Richard A. Hocks. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978.

  14. James, Henry. The Ambassadors: An Authoritative Text / The Author on the Novel / Criticism. 1903. Ed. S. P. Rosenbaum. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1964.

  15. James, Henry. The Golden Bowl. 1904. With the Author’s Preface. Penguin Modern Classics, 2449. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966.

  16. James, Henry, with William Dean Howells, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, Elizabeth Jordan, John Kendrick Bangs, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Edith Wyatt, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Alice Brown & Henry Van Dyke. The Whole Family: A Novel by Twelve Authors. 1908. Introduction by Alfred Bendixen. New York: the Ungar Publishing Company, 1986.

  17. James, Henry. The Outcry. Methuen's Colonial Library. London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1911.

  18. James, Henry. The Outcry. 1911. Introduction by Jean Strouse. New York Review Books Classics. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2002.

  19. James, Henry. The Ivory Tower. Preface by Percy Lubbock. 1917. With an Essay by Ezra Pound. 1954. Introduction by Alan Hollinghurst. New York Review Books Classics. New York: The New York Review of Books, 2004.

  20. James, Henry. The Sense of the Past. The Novels and Tales of Henry James: New York Edition, Volume XXVI. Preface by Percy Lubbock. 1917. Classic Reprint Series. N.p.: Forgotten Books [www.forgottenbooks.org], 2010.

  21. Stories:

  22. Aziz, Maqbool, ed. The Tales of Henry James. Volume One, 1864-1869. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973.

  23. James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw, The Aspern Papers and Other Stories. 1879-1910. Introduction by Michael Swan. Collins Classics. London: Collins, 1956.

  24. James, Henry. Ghost Stories. Ed. Martin Scofield. Tales of Mystery & the Supernatural. Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2001.

  25. Plays:

  26. Edel, Leon, ed. The Complete Plays of Henry James. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949.

  27. James, Henry. Guy Domville: A Play in Three Acts. With Comments by Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett. Preceded by Biographical Chapters, Henry James: The Dramatic Years. Ed. Leon Edel. 1960. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961.

  28. James, Henry. The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama, 1872-1910. Ed. Allan Wade. Foreword by Leon Edel. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949.

  29. Travel:

  30. Kaplan, Fred, ed. Travelling in Italy with Henry James: Essays. A John Curtis Book. London: Hodder and Stoughton Ltd., 1994.

  31. Literary Criticism:

  32. James, Henry. The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces. Introduction by Richard P. Blackmur. 1934. New York & London: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1947.

  33. James, Henry. The House of Fiction: Essays on the Novel. Ed. Leon Edel. 1957. Mercury Books, 24. London: The Heinemann Group of Publishers, 1962.

  34. James, Henry. Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Morris Shapira. Preface by F. R. Leavis. 1963. A Peregrine Book Y73. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

  35. Biography & Autobiography:

  36. James, Henry. William Wetmore Story and His Friends: From Letters, Diaries, and Recollections. In Two Volumes (Combined). 1903. London: Thames & Hudson, n.d.

  37. James, Henry. Autobiography: A Small Boy and Others; Notes of a Son and Brother; The Middle Years. 1913, 1914, 1917. Ed. Frederick W. Dupree. London: W. H. Allen, 1956.




John Singer Sargent: Henry James (detail)


Friday, January 18, 2019

Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences



Deborah Blum: Ghost Hunters (2006)


Among the founders of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1882 were psychologist Edmund Gurney (1847-1888), philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) and classicist Frederic W. H. Myers (1843-1901).

It was hoped, not unreasonably, that these learned and dedicated pioneers in the field of parapsychology might make some concerted attempt to "come through" after their deaths, given their sustained interest in the question of some kind of survival of bodily dissolution.



Myers' immense tome Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death was published posthumously, in 1903. He certainly believed that he had provided in its pages both strong evidence for survival and for the existence of a soul.

The strange phenomenon of the "cross-correspondences" (so-called) which unfolded over two decades, beginning with some automatic writing scripts by Cambridge Classics lecturer Margaret Verrall in 1901, is therefore either the strongest - albeit, also, one of the strangest - chains of evidence for human survival of bodily death, or else a colossal piece of delusion and self-deception afflicting some of the acutest minds of the time.

Essentially, by choosing your authority, you choose the view you will be encouraged to take of the story. If, for instance, you read Deborah Blum's Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death (2006), you will be left with a lingering sense of mystery and doubt surrounding the whole business.



Ruth Brandon: The Spiritualists (1983)


If, however, you read Ruth Brandon's trenchant The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1983), you may be left wondering why anyone could ever take seriously so bizarre a congerie of frauds and misfits?

The essence of the cross-correspondences was that it involved different mediums, on different continents, who separately received obscure and apparently nonsensical scripts which - when pieced together - produced more-or-less complete statements from (allegedly) specific individuals on "the other side."



The three principal conduits for these scripts were Mrs. Verrall (mentioned above), together with her daughter Helen; Mrs. Winifred Tennant (disguised under her professional name "Mrs. Willett"); and Mrs Alice Fleming, sister of Rudyard Kipling (who practised under the name of "Mrs Holland", thanks mainly to family disapproval).

As well as these, there was also some involvement from William James's favourite medium Leonora Piper in America. This geographical range from the United States to India has undoubtedly contributed something to the continuing fascination that still surrounds this psychic cause célèbre. And yet, what do these supposed "correspondences" actually amount to?

One of the earliest instances was noted by Alice Johnson, research officer of the Society for Psychical Research. While sorting through some of the papers held at their office in London, she noted some strange similarities between them:
in one case, Mrs. Forbes' script, purporting to come from her son, Talbot, stated that he must now leave her, since he was looking for a sensitive who wrote automatically, in order that he might obtain corroboration of her own writing. Mrs. Verrall, on the same day, wrote of a fir-tree planted in a garden, and the script was signed with a sword and a suspended bugle. The latter was part of the badge of the regiment to which Talbot Forbes had belonged, and Mrs. Forbes had in her garden some fir-trees, grown from seed sent to her by her son. These facts were unknown to Mrs. Verrall.
Taken alone, this might easily pass for coincidence, especially since, as she went on to say: "We have reason to believe that the idea of making a statement in one script complementary of a statement in another had not occurred to Mr. Myers in his lifetime — for there is no reference to it in any of his written utterances on the subject that I have been able to discover." However, in aggregate, she found the phenomenon less easy to dismiss:
Neither did those who have been investigating automatic script since his death invent this plan, if plan it be. It was not the automatists themselves that detected it, but a student of their scripts; it has every appearance of being an element imported from outside; it suggests an independent invention, an active intelligence constantly at work in the present, not a mere echo or remnant of individualities of the past.


Robert Browning: Abt Vogler (1864)


Another frequently mentioned example was the famous (or infamous) “Hope, Star, and Browning” correspondence. In this case three mediums made independent allusions to the poetry of Robert Browning. As Jill Galvan describes it:
First, Margaret Verrall wrote a script mentioning “anagram” and containing the phrases “rats star stars” and “tears stare,” along with a second script with the word “Aster,” which is both Greek for star and another anagram for tears and stare. Additionally, this second script contained a phrase beginning with the Greek word for passion and continuing, “the hope that leaves the earth for sky — Abt Vogler for earth too hard that found itself or lost itself — in the sky.” The investigators took the phrase to be an allusion to Browning’s “Abt Vogler” (1864), specifically to line 78, “The passion that left the ground to lose itself in the sky”; the script substitutes Browning’s original skyward “passion” with “hope.” Then, a couple of weeks later, a script by Piper asked if Margaret Verrall had gotten the message about “Hope Star and Browning.” Around the same time, Helen Verrall received a couple of scripts that each mentioned “star” and featured a drawing of one, as well as [alluding] to Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin” (1842), and one of these scripts also offered anagrams for star in “arts” and “rats.”
This is the case which so impressed occult investigator Colin Wilson. And it does, on the face of it, seem difficult to interpret except as a series of allusions to essentially the same matter. Though precisely what was meant to be conveyed remains unclear.



One explanation for this, however, may be supplied by the sheer difficulty of transmission of ideas when one has left the earthly plain. Or so the defunct Frederic Myers explained at a séance with fellow psychical researcher Sir Oliver Lodge:
Lodge, it is not as easy as I thought in my impatience ... Gurney says I am getting on first rate. But I am short of breath ... I am more stupid than some of those I deal with ... It is funny to hear myself talking when it is not myself talking. It is not my whole self talking. When I am awake I know where I am.
He stated further:
We communicate an impression through the inner mind of the medium. It receives the impression in a curious way. It has to contribute to the body of the message; we furnish the spirit of it ... In other words, we send the thoughts and the words usually in which they must be framed, but the actual letters or spelling of the words is drawn from the medium’s memory. Sometimes we only send the thoughts and the medium’s unconscious mind clothes them in words.
Another explanation of the process came from another psychic researcher, Dr. Richard Hodgson, via American medium Leonora Piper:
I find now difficulties such as a blind man would experience in trying to find his hat, and I am not wholly conscious of my own utterances because they come out automatically, impressed upon the machine [the medium’s body] … I impress my thoughts on the machine which registers them at random, and which are at times doubtless difficult to understand. I understand so much better the modus operandi than I did when I was in your world.
The last word, though, must remain with Myers:
Oh, if I could only leave you the proof that I continue. Yet another attempt to run the blockade - to strive to get a message through. How can I make your hand docile enough - how can I convince them? I am trying, amid unspeakable difficulties. It is impossible for me to know how much of what I send reaches you. I feel as if I had presented my credentials - reiterated the proofs of my identity in a wearisomely repetitive manner. The nearest simile I can find to express the difficulty of sending a message is that I appear to be standing behind a sheet of frosted glass, which blurs sight and deadens sound, dictating feebly to a reluctant and somewhat obtuse secretary. A feeling of terrible impotence burdens me. Oh it is a dark road.





On April 24, 1907, while in trance in the United States, ... Mrs [Leonora] Piper three times uttered the word Thanatos, a Greek word meaning "death," despite the fact that she had no knowledge of Greek. Such repetitions were often a signal that cross-correspondences were about to begin. But it had begun already. About a week earlier, in India, Mrs Holland [ie: Alice Kipling] had done some automatic writing, and in that script the following enigmatic communication had appeared: "Mors [Latin for death]. And with that the shadow of death fell upon his limbs." On April 29th, in England, Mrs Verrall, writing automatically, produced the words: "Warmed both hands before the fire of life. It fades and I am ready to depart." This is a quotation from a poem by nineteenth-century English poet, Walter [Savage] Landor. Mrs Verrall next drew a triangle. This could be Delta, the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. She had always considered it a symbol of death. She then wrote: "Manibus date lilia plenis" [give lilies with full hands]. This is a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid, in which an early death is foretold. This was followed by the statement: "Come away, come away, Pallida mors [Latin for pale death]," and, finally, an explicit statement from the communicator: "You have got the word plainly written all along in your writing. Look back." The "word," or "theme," was quite obvious when these fragments, given in the same month to three mediums thousands of miles apart, were put together and scrutinized. And in view of the lifelong interest of the communicator, it was certainly an appropriate theme. Death.


Rudyard and John Lockwood Kipling (c.1880)

When asked whether there was any basis to spiritualism,
Kipling replied “There is; I know. Have nothing to do with it.”
- George M. Johnson. Mourning and Mysticism in First World War Literature and Beyond: Grappling with Ghosts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.


Kipling's famous poem "En-dor" (1919) warns sternly of the dangers of false comfort from spirits - or, rather, their dubious lieutenants, mediums:
The road to En-dor is easy to tread
For Mother or yearning Wife.
There, it is sure, we shall meet our Dead
As they were even in life.
Earth has not dreamed of the blessing in store
For desolate hearts on the road to En-dor.
He was himself no stranger to the subject. The death of his son John in combat at the Battle of Loos in 1915 was a blow he never really recovered from. It was made worse by the fact that he had had to exert all his special influence to ensure that John would be allowed to serve. He had already been rejected for active service due to his poor eyesight.

His poem "My Boy Jack," though ostensibly about the drowned dead of the Battle of Jutland, seems to refer obliquely to his own grief, also:
“Have you news of my boy Jack?”
Not this tide.
“When d’you think that he’ll come back?”
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

“Has any one else had word of him?”
Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.


“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
None this tide,
Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind —
Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.
There's an almost Modernist fragmentedness about the gradual breakdown of the ballad form in this poem: a grief too great for the traditional forms Kipling had hitherto been sedulous in preserving.



Charles Sturridge, dir.: FairyTale (1997)


If you want some sense of the contemporary atmosphere of a kind of half-life lived in the shadow of these immense crowds of thronging war dead, Charles Sturridge's 1997 film FairyTale - about the strange saga of the Cottingley Fairies - does a wonderful job of conveying it. Virtually all the literature of the time, the immediate post-war era - not simply such obvious examples as Eliot's Waste Land or Pound's "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" - should be read with this in mind.

Kipling's own short stories and poems chart his own steadily less unavailing attempts to come to term with his own intolerable loss. From the harsh "Mary Postgate" (1915) he moved through the healing mechanisms of "A Madonna of the Trenches" and "The Janeites" (both 1924) to his most emotional and heartbreaking story of all, "The Gardener" (1925).

John Radcliffe & John McGivering's 2011 notes on “En-dor” (on the Kipling Society website) record the history of Kipling's engagements with spiritualism and the occult in general:

This ranges from his early story "The Sending of Dana Da" (Plain Tales from the Hills, 1888) - inspired by his father's scepticism about the claims of Madame Blavatsky, one of whose séances he attended in 1880 - to "They" (1904), whose unnamed narrator suggests that the company of the dead may be permitted to those who have not known them in life, but not to those who (like himself) are searching for a particular dead child. This story appears to have been inspired by the death from pneumonia of his elder daughter Josephine, or "Josie" (1892-1899).



Kipling was, it seems, only too aware of the presence in himself of something resembling the "second sight" common among the MacDonalds, on his mother's side of the family. He wrote sceptically of this ability in his autobiography, Something of Myself (1937), but is careful - if one reads between the lines - not so much to deny its existence as to disavow its usefulness to the living:
... there is a type of mind that dives after what it calls ‘psychical experiences.’ And I am in no way ‘psychic.’ Dealing as I have done with large, superficial areas of incident and occasion, one is bound to make a few lucky hits or happy deductions. But there is no need to drag in the ‘clairvoyance,’ or the rest of the modern jargon. I have seen too much evil and sorrow and wreck of good minds on the road to Endor to take one step along that perilous track.
Any unbiassed reader of his work will find it difficult to ignore the obvious fascination with telepathy, precognition, and other paranormal gifts which lies behind such stories as "Wireless" (1902), "The Wish House" (1924) and (perhaps most autobiographical of all) "The House Surgeon" (1909).

Nor would it be true to say that the perils of the "Road to En-dor" were more apparent to him after the First World War than before it. His simultaneous attraction-repulsion towards the occult seems to date from all stages of his career as a writer.

There are no reliable accounts of his own return from beyond the grave to answer any of the many questions raised by his works. His own comment on that is unequivocal. His late poem "The Appeal" - first published in 1939 - reads as follows:
It I have given you delight
By aught that I have done,
Let me lie quiet in that night
Which shall be yours anon:

And for the little, little, span
The dead are born in mind,
Seek not to question other than
The books I leave behind.




Rudyard Kipling: Something of Myself (1937)


The fear of such "unknown forces" was certainly great in Rudyard Kipling, but the temptation to write about them was evidently greater.

His younger sister Alice, known to the family as "Trix," who shared with him the appalling experiences of child-abuse and neglect - recorded in his classic story "Baa Baa Black Sheep" (1888) - which occurred when they were sent "home" to England from India in 1870, and who showed almost equal literary promise in her youth, took a rather different approach.

On her return to India at the age of 16, she married British army officer John Fleming, and, in 1893, "initially experimented with automatic writing." Her biography in the Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology remarks somewhat euphemistically:
After a long illness she returned to England in 1902 and in the following year read the classic study Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, by F. W. H. Myers. As a result she contacted the secretary of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR), London, regarding her own automatic writing.
This "long illness" is presumably the "recurrent mental illness" referred to in Radcliffe & McGivering's notes on her brother's poem "En-dor" (quoted above), which overtook her in "her thirtieth year":
Trix's family linked her madness with her psychic interests. When asked whether he thought there was anything in spiritualism, Rudyard Kipling replied "with a shudder": "There is; I know. Have nothing to do with it." He is presumed to have been thinking of his sister.
The Society for Psychical Research appears to have treated her abilities equally seriously, but rather more analytically, as is evidenced by a series of papers on the "cross-correspondences" controversy published by their research officer Alice Johnson in the Society's Proceedings:
  • "On the Automatic Writing of Mrs. Holland." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 21 (1908).
  • "Second Report on Mrs. Holland's Script." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 24 (1910).
  • "Supplementary Notes on Mrs. Holland's Scripts." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 22 (1909).
  • "Third Report on Mrs. Holland's Scripts." Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research 25 (1911).
Then (as now) we are left with a stark choice: either to follow the hints, the half-stated truths "known to nobody else", and the endlessly frustrating lack of definitive, convincing evidence of "survival" - or else to reject the whole business as cruel deception on the part of "sensitives" together with wish-fulfilment on the part of the client. Dr Johnson perhaps summed it up best, when remarking of ghosts:
It is wonderful that five thousand years have now elapsed since the creation of the world, and still it is undecided whether or not there has ever been an instance of the spirit of any person appearing after death. All argument is against it; but all belief is for it.
- Boswell: Life of Johnson (1791)


James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791)


And yet, and yet ... thirty years before, in Rasselas (1759) he had commented with almost equal cogency:
That the dead are seen no more ... I will not undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence; and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears.
"Some who deny it with their tongues, confess it by their fears." Kipling was very afraid of mental disturbances in the late 1890s, in the middle of a devastating quarrel with one of his wife's brothers (the "unstable" Beatty Balestier) which threatened to undermine his and Carrie's experiment of living in the United States.

His sister's mental illness, followed swiftly by the death of the Kiplings' daughter Josie, must have constituted a great temptation to give in to what Sigmund Freud, in 1910, referred to as "the black tide of mud of occultism." That temptation is already achingly strong in the story "They," and after John's avoidable death ten years later at the Battle of Loos, it may have seemed almost overwhelming.

The poem "En-Dor," then, is simply one instalment in that ongoing struggle with himself and with circumstances. For all the cogency of its description of spiritualism, one can't avoid the fact that - unlike Robert Browning, whose "Mr. Sludge, 'The Medium'" (1864) comes from a place of total non-belief - Kipling's resistance to communication with the dead seems to arise more from his conviction of its dangers to the living than from any inherent improbability in its claims:


Dmitry Nikiforovich Martynov: The Witch of Endor (1857)


Whispers shall comfort us out of the dark —
Hands — ah, God! — that we knew!
Visions and voices — look and hark! —
Shall prove that the tale is true,
And that those who have passed to the further shore
May be hailed — at a price — on the road to En-dor.

But they are so deep in their new eclipse
Nothing they say can reach,
Unless it be uttered by alien lips
And framed in a stranger's speech.
The son must send word to the mother that bore,
Through an hireling's mouth. 'Tis the rule of En-dor.
And what better summary of the cross-correspondences themselves can be found than the one contained in the following stanza?
Even so, we have need of faith
And patience to follow the clue.
Often, at first, what the dear one saith
Is babble, or jest, or untrue.
(Lying spirits perplex us sore
Till our loves — and their lives — are well-known at En-dor)....


Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)


"All argument is against it; but all belief is for it." Quite so. There are no atheists in foxholes, as the saying has it. It's not that the question is - or, it seems, ever can be - definitively settled. But I think Ursula Le Guin was right to say, in the third book of her "Earthsea" series, The Farthest Shore:
The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.
Rudyard Kipling, I suspect, would have agreed with her wholeheartedly.



Ursula Le Guin: The Farthest Shore (1972)