As the boys grew up, they learned that not to question and to have no opinion was to shirk not only one's intellectual duty but one's moral responsibilities. As a result, both Henry and William learned to observe things, people, and art, a trait inherited from their even more adept father but largely denied to their brothers and sister. (Alice produced a diary, but it was not published in her lifetime.)
2. You may be more deeply influenced by your ancestors' choices than you know.
The second lesson from the James brothers is that many of the choices we make in our own life regarding work, love, sex, and religion may be heavily influenced by what has already happened in the lives of our immediate forebears. And although the patterns may already have been laid down, we at least may still have the freedom to find unique ways to work them out.
To get this in the Jameses, however, the reader must know that one of the biggest influences on William and Henry's career was their grandfather (and William's namesake), William James of Albany, a staunch Calvinist Presbyterian who married three times and sired 16 children. He was a fantastically rich financier of such projects as the Erie Canal (he once bought Syracuse, New York, for $30,000) and was responsible for raising the initial family fortune, so that Henry, the novelist, could later say, "We were not guilty of doing a lick of business for two-and-a-half generations."
If we begin to look across just these three generations, from William of Albany to his son Henry James, Sr., to his two sons William and Henry, some interesting patterns emerge. One concerns how the James brothers came to the vocation of writing.
When William of Albany came from Ireland to America in 1789, he landed with only a Bible and a desire to see one of the Revolutionary battlefields. His subsequent successes were wholly in business. He did no writing, and his speeches, while recorded for posterity because of his importance as a leading citizen, were not memorable. His son Henry, however, hated business but loved the luxurious life that the family wealth afforded him.
He obliged his father by starting divinity training at Princeton but fled after two-and-a-half years to make his own way in the world, first as a typesetter, then as a writer and public lecturer on topics of Christian socialism. He became a free-spirited religious philosopher, attracted to the teachings of sects like the Sandemanians, who believed that the greatest sin among Christians was pride in their morality, and he took up the mystical theology of Emanuel Swedenborg, which advocated the inward spiritual transformation of consciousness. He was close friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson (who became William's godfather), an acquaintance of Thomas Carlyle in England, and was known to the burgeoning cult of American intellectuals such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, William Dean Howells, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mark Twain, and others.
Insofar as they saw themselves as inheritors of this Swedenborgian and Transcendentalist legacy, William and Henry each took their father's spiritualized psychology one step further, in a more secular and scientific age. William helped launch the modern scientific study of consciousness, while Henry wrote about the internal workings of the mind when faced with an unsolvable moral dilemma.
Like their father, who was actually better at it than they were, William and Henry became writers. Their ideas in many ways were the same, but now transmuted by the differences between the generations. While their father wrote about arcane religious subjects, William wrote textbooks and Henry novels that conveyed their ideas to popular audiences and were widely read. To this, as a teacher at Harvard and a public lecturer, William added a lively and colorful lecture style, again taking after his father.
The problem was that Henry James, Sr., admonished his sons: "Don't become too narrow." Henry, the budding novelist, ignored him, escaped abroad at the earliest opportunity, and plunged right into the art of fiction. William, on the other hand, took his father so seriously he almost never found a niche. His father told him he could be anything he wanted, but each time he chose something the father said, "Well that's alright, but, don't become too narrow." The situation nearly drove William to despair. First he chose painting but then, to please his father, turned to science.
William's new involvement in laboratory work turned out to be a good escape from the suffocating influence of his father's religious ideas, except that William himself soon began to choke on the antiphilosophical and antireligious biases of the reductionistic scientists around him. Only after recovering from a near-suicidal depression, by "believing to believe" in free will, and by acknowledging that consciousness might have a life of its own independent of the physical body, did William finally discover the field of psychology, which he approached with a philosophical bent.
3. Male bonding can involve a love-hate relationship.
A third lesson from the James brothers is that birth order is no guarantee that the oldest always comes out on top. Henry's biographer, Leon Edel, calls this the Jacob and Esau complex, a Biblical allusion to the twin sons of Isaac in the Book of Genesis, Esau was born first, but Jacob arrived immediately thereafter by holding on to his brother's foot. When they grew up, the older brother served the younger, after Jacob appropriated Esau's inheritance and stole their father's blessing.
Tags:
american progenitor,
couples therapy,
expatriate,
experimenter,
family constellation,
famous siblings,
human relationships,
international acclaim,
physiological psychologist,
pragmatist,
professional literature,
prophetic voice,
psychological novel,
psychology texts,
scale samples,
sibling rivalry,
story writer,
vicissitudes
