Alice in Bed Read online

  LEAMINGTON, WARWICKSHIRE, ENGLAND

  AUGUST 31, 1887

  TO WILLIAM JAMES

  Kath. and I roared with laughter over your portrait of me “stifling in a quagmire of disgust, pain & impotence,” for I consider myself one of the most potent creations of my time, & though I may not have a group of Harvard students sitting at my feet drinking in psychic truth, I shall not tremble, I assure you, at the last trump. I seem to present

  a very varied surface to the beholder. Henry thinks that my hardships are such that I shall have a crown of glory even in this inglorious world without waiting for the next, where it will be a sure thing & my landlady says, “You seem very comfortable, you are always ’appy within yourself, Miss.”

  THREE

  THE PARSON PRESENTS HIMSELF ON A WEDNESDAY: A HANDSOME young man with a wispy mustache. I watch his eyes avidly scan my poor sitting room, alighting in turn on the feeble watercolor of Mt. Vesuvius, the dreadful Nottingham lace, the lamp with its sticky mantle, Miss Clarke’s porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses, wrapped in their shawls of mauve or grey dust. (So far the visits of the parlormaid have succeeded only in moving the dust around.)

  He praises the view from my window and some features of the mantel, and I am struck by the fact that to fulfill his clerical duties he must substitute hearty enthusiasm for real connection, which produces a disagreeable impression of hailing someone across a great distance. Already the man is quite fatiguing and has only just arrived.

  I invite him to sit in one of the wing chairs, and after Nurse brings in tea and scones (simpering like a lovesick girl), I explain that I am basically a pagan with Unitarian influences, but I am reading the Bible now with great interest. The Old Testament, actually. At this the parson brightens, like a traveling salesman invited to display his wares.

  “Splendid, Miss James! Most people intend to read our Lord’s words but never get round to it. I always say, you could die tomorrow, and then where would you be?”

  I refrain from pointing out that the Old Testament surely cannot contain “our Lord’s words.” I explain that I was not in the habit of reading scripture and had no idea the Bible was full of so many abominations; indeed, when it comes to smitings, abominations, plagues, stonings, and the like, the Old Testament must have no equal.

  “Ah yes, that is why we find the New Testament far safer, Miss James. Particularly for ladies.” He is smooth as oil, this Roger Yardley. He has for the most part avoided looking directly at me, no doubt finding me quite hideous.

  Nurse glides through the room again, now in her woolen cloak, carrying her marketing basket, eyes cast down in her angelic mode, one of her standards. I watch the cleric’s hand slide into his Gladstone bag and emerge with a stack of tracts, which he places on the table between us. I read, upside down: The Wages of Sin is Death. (Shouldn’t it be are death? And since everyone dies, isn’t that an empty threat?) He asks if I’d like him to read to me, and I say, “Oh, no, thank you. Nurse is reading to me just now, from Tolstoy.” He looks perplexed. Only after he leaves will I realize that he was proposing to read one of the tracts to me.

  He and I lumber down several unpromising conversational paths. He asks me about the nature of my suffering, and I give a garbled account of suppressed gout, mind cramps, useless legs, attacks of panic, and am just about to describe the dreadful sensation of snakes coiling and uncoiling in my stomach that afflicts me just as I am falling asleep when I notice his glazed smile. In a flash, I see myself through his eyes: a boring invalid, full of peculiar fancies, pathetically grateful for a few kind words from a handsome young cleric.

  How far I have fallen and how quickly, too! Six months ago, in London, I presided briefly over what Henry referred to as my “salon,” and fashionable Londoners would call every Wednesday morning to sample my American drolleries. Even Fanny Kemble, the great actress, came, and her entrance never failed to be dramatic, owing to her breathlessness and pallor after the ordeal of my staircase. Although she was gracious and went around telling people about the “so very clever and droll Miss James,” I felt self-conscious in her presence, having heard that American women made her think of white mice shrieking. William’s friends from the Society for Psychical Research also came and discoursed amusingly about mediums and “beings.”

  Then my legs collapsed again, and I had to give up London for tranquil Leamington. (Tranquil is a kind way of putting it.) Katherine and I had a lovely two months here, until Louisa’s lungs went downhill again and K was summoned home. And here I am, stranded in the Midlands, unable to walk, far from every soul I have ever known. (But I shan’t sink into self-pity and become a bore even to myself.)

  The parson has been talking about the weather and from there has managed to leapfrog nimbly to Nature, in which he naturally discerns the hand of the Creator.

  “You have heard of Mr. Charles Darwin, I suppose?” I say.

  “Naturally, Miss James.” His jaw muscles work yeomanlike at his chewing.

  “Then you must know that Nature is just one thing eating a smaller thing all the way down. Even the birds seem to spend most of their time trying to peck one another’s eyes out.”

  “Miss James, I think you would be persuaded to change your mind if you were to read Bishop Paley. He gives this example: If a person who has never seen a watch were walking through a wood and came upon one, he would know immediately that it had been designed and could not have arisen by chance. So too with the human frame and the complex working of various organs, Miss James. Consider—” And he’s off and running, don’t ask me for details.

  In an instant I see through him as if he were transparent. Underneath the religiosity lurks a ruthless ambition. This young cleric is prepared to claw his way to the top of the heap, and will spend the remainder of his life groveling before his superiors and condescending to his inferiors.

  “The human eye, just to consider one organ, is too well designed to have arisen by accident,” he is saying, adding more anatomical minutiae, which I’ll spare you. A standard speechlet, I suppose. When he winds down, I say, “I wonder if your bishop ever went out into the woods and saw a wasp caught in a spider web. A torment worthy of Dante, I assure you. The wasp struggles, at first believing it will escape but becoming more tightly wrapped all the while in its sticky winding-sheet. The struggle is agonizing, lasting hours. When it stops struggling I am sure the wasp knows it will die.”

  With a handkerchief the clericule dabs at his nose, which (I have just now noticed) drips. His hands fumble with the tracts. His tongue darts out to catch a stray crumb from his mustaches. How quickly he is undone—by a supine female invalid.

  “It is a pity to waste your theology on me, Mr. Yardley, when there are other invalids who would be more easily redeemed.” He smiles thinly, fishes his gold watch from his waistcoat pocket, mimes surprise at the lateness of the hour, and takes off as if fleeing a pestilential city. Afterwards, I tell Nurse to toss out the tracts, which are no doubt crawling with microbes.

  “If you don’t mind, Miss, I’ll give them to the Bachellers.” The Bachellers are among the most miserable of Leamington’s impoverished families. Mrs. B has had all her teeth pulled and unable to afford new ones, subsists on soup and sop. Mr. B is grotesquely crippled from a work accident and cannot work. There are nine or ten small Bachellers in various states of misery.

  “I’m sure they’d prefer something more filling and sanitary, Nurse.”

  She clears the tea things briskly, without looking at me. I am afraid I am a continual disappointment to her. By early evening the duel with the cleric has ripened into a severe neuralgia. I am stretched out on my back like a dead Crusader, with the heavy velvet curtains drawn, thinking of the past, of Cambridge, of my dead parents, of poor Wilky, of William’s small son—all our beloved dead laid out in the earth of the Mt. Auburn Cemetery.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  GARDEN STREET, CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

  JULY 26TH 1887

  TO ALICE JAMES
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br />   I am desolated to hear of your latest troubles. We hear much about Suppressed Gout even here on these shores; Dr. Beach says that if the poison could be made to come out in your joints, your nervousness would leave you entirely.

  I think I have told you of Mrs. Leonora Piper, a Boston medium who has impressed me by minutely describing the illnesses of some of Alice’s California relations, as well as the most embarrassing secrets of our household. Most mediums are fakes and rogues but Mrs. P seems to be the genuine article. She has brought some comfort to poor Alice (and me) after the death of our little Herman.

  Would it be too much to ask you to snip a sample of your tresses (about two inches in length) and send it to me with your next letter, and I will let you know Mrs. P’s “diagnosis.” I know your skepticism about the occult, but what is there to lose?

  ALICE JAMES

  11 HAMILTON TERRACE

  LEAMINGTON, ENGLAND

  AUGUST 13TH 1887

  TO WILLIAM JAMES

  I hope you will forgive my base trick about the hair. It came not from my head but from a deceased friend of Nurse’s. I will be curious to hear what the woman will say about it. Its owner was in a state of horrible disease for a year before she died—tumors, I believe! I thought it would be a test of whether your prophetess was simply a mind-reader. If she were anything more, I should greatly dislike to have the secrets of my being exposed to the wondering public.

  FOUR

  IN A FIT OF BOREDOM (APPARENTLY I HAVE NO APPEAL TO THE Midland mind) I have been rereading George Sand’s journal. I just came to an entry where, after being jilted—again!—by Alfred de Musset, she hacks off her hair dramatically and sends it to him. I could have told her not to bother. A bit later she confides, At least I should regain my looks if I could stop crying. Isn’t that typically French!

  Since my beloved sailed, I have lost track of the date. Days pass, then weeks, alike as peas in a pod. In a long letter from South Carolina, Katherine describes the sanitarium, its amenities, and the invalids themselves. How curious of fate to send us both to spa towns four thousand miles apart (ironically, in my case, as I am considered too feeble to take the waters of the famous Royal Leamington Spa). Her letters tell of Southern ladies prone to fantastic feminine vapors who refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. Being a Northern Aggressor myself, I simply pretend to be intermittently deaf. Such a pity the proper climate for consumption should lie so far below the Mason–Dixon line. Her sweet references to our happier times get me through the next fortnight and her letter becomes quite dog-eared.

  Winter has descended. My windows are sealed tight against the cold, and the horses in the lane become mired in a thick mud-paste some days. A few virtuous matrons have come to nibble at me but no one worth recording; they all seem like the tamest of tame Boston. I tried to explain this in a letter to William, but gave up the attempt. How can he imagine what it is like to live shut up in Nurse’s little centimeter of mind?

  It is almost a relief to fall into a faint around noon, as is my custom. This is usually preceded by an “aura” in which the paintings on my wall glow with an inner light and beckon me into another world. More than once, Nurse, tall and narrow like a Fra Angelico madonna, has appeared to me stretched like taffy, words streaming out of her mouth in a Gothic script. Naturally, I don’t confide these visions, which might lead her to suspect me of witchcraft or insanity. When I come to, I generally ask her to read to me. She has a pleasant reading voice, almost musical. Sometimes we take up a novel; at other times I ask her to read to me from A Short History of the English People by J. R. Green, my favorite historian, whose widow attended my salon in London. Everything Nurse reads astonishes her (“War for a Hundred Years, Miss? That is too awful!”).

  This afternoon I ask her to read to me from the Standard. “You know the kind of thing I like, Nurse.”

  “Certainly, Miss. Tragic stories, debates in parliament, and news about Ireland.” She begins several articles that do not prove interesting enough to continue. Then she reads the following gem:

  An inquest was held on Thursday at Hull, touching on the death of Miss Amy Cullen, aged thirty-three. Miss Cullen, who resided by herself, was found dead in bed on Wednesday morning, having poisoned herself with vermin killer. It appeared that the deceased had been engaged to be married to a clerk named John Aston. On Wednesday he had requested her by letter to break off the engagement. On Thursday morning he received a letter from her—

  “Shall I read the whole letter, Miss?”

  “Please do, Nurse. I would be interested in hearing her reasons. If we are ever fully ourselves, surely it is in a suicide note.”

  Nurse reads on, in her high, clear voice:

  Dear Jack,—you have done right in letting me know the truth. You cannot gauge the depth and intensity of that love which you thus carelessly fling away as a thing not worth keeping. Pride would forbid me saying this to you if I had not made up my mind not to live; but what I could not say living I can say dying, for, oh, my darling, I cannot live without you. After the one glimpse of heaven that you have shown me I dare not face life with the prospect of never seeing you again. By the time you have received this I shall be no more; but don’t reproach yourself, dear . . .

  And the letter continues in that vein, full of love and forgiveness toward “Jack,” to whom the suicide bequeaths her grand piano. “What a beautiful sincerity and dignity,” I say when Nurse reaches the end.

  Nurse gasps. “But, Miss, he jilted this lady for another. Now the other lady will get her piano, too. That’s not right!”

  “I mean, Nurse, how happy and wise of her to go in the illusion of her sorrow and never learn that ‘Jack’ is a figment of her fancy, born simply of her rich and generous possibilities.”

  “I can’t fathom what you mean, Miss. How could she be happy or wise and take rat poison?”

  You cannot gauge the depth and intensity of that love which you thus carelessly fling away as a thing not worth keeping. No one means to carelessly fling love away, no one means to die from it either; they simply can’t help it.

  HENRY JAMES

  34, DE VERE GARDENS, KENSINGTON W.

  LONDON

  SEPTEMBER 6TH 1887

  TO WILLIAM JAMES

  The manner in which Alice bears the dullness, isolation & solitude of Leamington is almost beyond my comprehension. She is very political and very sure of certain things—the baseness of the Unionists, &c. I don’t think she likes England or the English very much. This is owing in large part to her isolation and the fact that she sees only women.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  18 GARDEN ST., CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

  OCTOBER 7, 1887

  TO HENRY JAMES

  I am reading The Bostonians now. One can easily imagine the story cut and made into a bright short sparkling thing of 100 pages . . . you have worked it up by dint of descriptions and psychologic commentaries into nearly 500—charmingly done for those who have the leisure and the peculiar mood to enjoy that amount of miniature work—but perilously near to turning away the great majority of readers who crave more matter & less art.

  WILLIAM JAMES

  CAMBR. MASS.

  JANUARY 13, 1888

  TO HENRY JAMES

  The only experiment I should feel like seeing Alice try would be some mesmeric experiment or other, if a good operator can be got—if Edmund Gurney, for example, could recommend someone as a magnetizer.

  FIVE

  NURSE HELPS ME TO SIT UP AND BRINGS ME MY CUP OF TEA ON A tray. The cup trembles in my hand and a few drops splash onto my quilted bed jacket. The hours of the day will be dealt out like a pack of cards, always the same hand. Nurse will go out to do the marketing and bring back eggs from a nearby farm and buns from the bakery. Miss Clarke will bring up the post, straighten pictures, and talk about her nieces. She will try to find out who my correspondents are without revealing that she has studied the postmarks with a spy’s single-mindedness. Nurse will return.
The midday papers will arrive. The sky will grow cloudy. Perhaps it will rain. By noon I will be exhausted and will most likely “go off.”

  But this is my holy hour. Nurse pulls back the heavy velvet curtains and the morning light gushes over my quilt like a river, bright white some days, pearly or opalescent if the sky is overcast. For a short while the earth and the heavens are brand-new again, unspoiled, like the Garden of Eden or the pure light of infancy. My cup runneth over, compensating me for whatever horrors or tedium will inevitably come. And Nurse thinks I am an unbeliever!

  Everything I think about is saturated with strong feeling now, as in significant dreams. Scenes of Cambridge, Newport, Paris, even fragments of New York City when I was an infant, flash through my mind. To an observer it looks as if I am immobilized, but I am a traveler with a spectral Baedecker, visiting all the places and the people I have known.

  In 1866, when I was seventeen, our family moved from Boston to 20 Quincy Street, Cambridge, across the street from the Harvard president’s house on the edge of Harvard Yard. When the wind blew from the Harvard direction, you could smell the row of privies on the far side of Mr. Eliot’s house. Cambridge was a small, ingrown world then. On a stroll you might run into the legendary Mr. Agassiz, or Professor Sophocles, who had been teaching Greek for as long as anyone could remember, or Mr. Childs, who collected ballads, or Mr. Eliot, with his port-wine birthmark and brusque remarks. (In Cambridge when you spoke of “the president,” you did not mean the President of the United States.)

  George Ticknor (Harvard Professor of Modern Languages) famously compared Boston to ancient Athens, and the period just before our family moved there was referred to, without irony, as the Periclean Age. Bostonians took their city and its institutions seriously and were ravenous for culture. The poet James Russell Lowell’s Harvard course on the English poets was repeated the next day in the afternoon for those who had not got there the evening before and printed in the newspaper the day after. There were dozens of Browning Societies in Boston, exceeded only by the number of Dante Circles; there were lectures on every subject under the sun, and so many of the city’s grand dames were committed to Hegelism that it was rare to get through a Back Bay dinner party without hearing about “the dialectic.”