Painting William James With a Fine Pencil

Review of Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998. ISBN 0151930988, xxiii, 467 pp., $35.

Linda Simon does not situate her biography in relation to previous work on William James (1842-1910), and only two of her notes allude to any other scholarship on James. Nevertheless, her portrait is not inconsistent with the one Dr. Howard Feinstein and I discovered in 1968 when we collaborated in research on the identity crisis of James. She believes (as we did) that his intellectual career required a sense of liberation from his father’s control. She also sees that his father’s disparagement of work contaminated the son’s ability to persist in commitment to it, though she doesn’t make explicit the link between the father’s and son’s similar episodes of panic fear: the context of a crisis of vocational choice.

Feinstein and I wanted to explain the long deferral of James’s entry into teaching and writing about philosophy while he pursued the scientific career his father had expected him to follow, while at the same time disparaging it in comparison to metaphysics. We found ego psychology useful because of Erikson’s focus on work as a locus of conflict. The James story fitted Erikson’s idea of a parent precipitating a deeply disturbing identity crisis by selecting a child “who must justify the parent.” Over-identification by the child with a disturbed and partially crippled parent, such as William’s father, and over-commitment to a wrong choice, such as William’s experience of medical school, fitted the Eriksonian picture.

Simon emphasizes that James lived alternately in two different worlds — “one, unified and monistic, inherited from his father; the other, pluralistic and changeable, imagined by Darwin.” There is a doubleness also in her use of his

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photographs: the cover displays a cerebral thinker in a formal pose; the title page shows a much smaller photograph of him in a plaid shirt and casual pose as vacationer at Putnam Camp in the Adirondacks. Much of her book documents the more informal and less cerebral James.

She has her own psychological view of him as a person who feared that his public self hid “a repulsive inner self” and who found in his wife a person who was his “protector, nurturer, and nurse” and who saw his moods as transitory rather then evidence for a dissassociated self. In this sense, his engagement to her was “the most crucial event in Williams’s life.” Simon also sees another woman as important to him, Minnie Temple (usually linked only to William’s brother, the novelist Henry James), who loved him and died young. “Minnie would haunt him forever.” Simon reveals better than anyone else how he was attracted to young women both when he was young and when he was in his fifties. At the latter age he was fascinated with women young enough to be his daughters, especially Pauline Goldmark, of whom he said he would “probably be deep in love” if he were a young bachelor.

Professor Simon finds her method in his idea that “life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected.” Her title points to his idea in A Pluralistic Universe (1909) that “the word ‘or’ names a genuine reality.” Her focus is therefore on the alternatives he saw to the paths “prescribed by his culture, his class, his father” at times when the word “or” did name “a desired reality.” In this light “the single most important discovery of his life” was “the will to choose.” Her considerable achievement is to focus his story through his own characteristic ideas. The result is the best biography we have for the general reader.

Simon’s portrait situates him more thoroughly in the daily life of his family and the civic world of New England than in the currents of intellectual history. She begins her book with his public triumph of speaking on Decoration Day in 1897 at the unveiling of Saint-Gaudens’ statue to the slain Union hero Robert Gould Shaw, who led black troops at the battle of Fort Wagner. Though she doesn’t mention it, James’s emphasis on Shaw’s civic courage was a rebuke to Justice Holmes’s enthusiasm in his public speeches for “The Soldier’s Faith,” a difference reflecting James’s nonparticipation in the war and Holmes’s experience of being wounded three times fighting for the Union.

She documents how much of his time James gave all his life to his unrealized hope that trance mediums would provide new physical facts and possibilities that could perhaps be the “chosen instruments for a new era of faith.” She mentions the pertinent psychological fact that the death of the Jameses’ son Herman animated the parents’ hope that spiritualists might find proof that he was not forever lost to them. She also documents fully the extent of his experimenting with popular faddish remedies for neurasthenic symptoms by visiting “mind-cure” therapists.

Stronger on contexts than on texts, however, she devotes too little attention to the The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). Although she recognizes that James finds some value in the “once-born” optimism of “the healthy-minded” believers, she fails to see that for him “it is true that the outlook upon life of the twice-born — holding as it does more of the element of evil in solution — is the wider and completer.” What gives bite to James’s discussion of religion is his almost Calvinistic insistence (akin to his father’s) that evil facts are not only “a genuine portion of reality” but may “after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.”

While she briefly mentions in her introduction James’s public tribute to Emerson at Concord in 1903 on the centennial of his birth, rightly noting the context of James’s worrying about getting his own philosophical message out, she ignores his preparation for the event by rereading Emerson’s works and marking in the margins his affinities with and criticisms of Emerson’s characteristic ideas. Emerson, he told his brother Henry, had thrown a “strong practical light on my own path.” By exemplifying the wisdom of “the incorrigible way,” Emerson had “followed his own vocation”; James was encouraged to go his own way by writing Pragmatism (1907). If it is the shadow of the elder Henry James’ sense of sin and twice-bornness that falls on The Varieties of Religious Experience, it is Emersonian secular self-reliance (without his optimistic monism) that helps to animate James’ Pragmatism with its buoyant but tough-minded acceptance of moral action in an uncertain universe in which there are genuine losses and “something permanently drastic and bitter always remains at the bottom of the cup.” Perhaps my emphasis on this secular, confident side of James stems from my having read him when I was a young man,

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recuperating in an army hospital from pneumonia, while I was moving from Kierkegaard’s radical Protestantism to a more historical and secular outlook, a transition that James helped me make because he seemed to have a foot in both camps.

Linda Simon never glosses over James’s periods of anxiety and depression, but her book is unusually free of psychological labeling, feminist polemics, and conservative moralizing. Evaluation is implicit in her narrating and describing, and it is characteristic that when she comes to the end of her story, there is no summation. Instead, she simply describes a contrasting symbolism in his death. For all his informality, James preferred “dignity” to “sincerity” in his funeral service and wanted both a cathedral and ritual, as his wife even more decidedly did. Yet James was not buried with Boston’s worthies in the famous Mount Auburn cemetery but in a family plot at the rim of the “undistinguished Cambridge Cemetery,” facing “towards the life of the city,” the grave marked by “a simple, polished stone, unexpectedly small.”

Henry Adams spoke of a biographer needing “a fine pencil,” responsive to light and shadow, to make a portrait that would take account of the contradictions in Thomas Jefferson’s character. Unlike the recent Jefferson revisionists, Simon has painted her portrait of William James by using just such a pencil. She regrets, nevertheless, that we cannot know what it was like to know him and, instead, “all we have, really, are a few pages of print.” Perhaps that is why she edited an anthology of those who were acquainted with him. But their acquaintance-knowledge is, for the historian, only further evidence to be analyzed for its contribution to our knowledge about him. In the case of the James family, however, the abundant documentary evidence we have is very much greater than “a few pages of print.” No one knows this better in practice, for all her regrets, than Linda Simon.

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NB: Professor Linda Simon of Skidmore College was one of the Psychohistory Forum’s four March 7, 1998, presenters on the uses of empathy.