And there was one funny episode in which the futurist H. G. Wells saw Henry actually lose his temper in a quarrel with William. The occasion was one of William's trips abroad, this time with his daughter. Wells was to pick them up at Henry's residence, Lamb House, for lunch. On approaching, Wells saw Henry completely unnerved, raising his voice about just what was and was not permissible behavior in England. William, for his part, appeared to be arguing in an indisputably American accent, with what Wells described as "an indecently naked reasonableness." William, lacking Henry's passionate regard for the polished surfaces of life, had discovered that a correspondent of his, the famous G. K. Chesterton, was staying at a little inn abutting Henry's property. William, desiring earnestly to get a look at Chesterton, had found a garden ladder and put it against the wall. He had clambered up and was just peeping over when Henry caught him at it.
Furious, Henry ordered the gardener to put the ladder away and continued to rage about the propriety of the whole thing, while William looked on rather sheepishly. As it turned out, Chesterton and his wife were not in the inn at that moment, but Wells, with William and his daughter in the car, ran into them on the road just outside town, so William was able to get his coveted impression anyway.
4. Even if you are a world-famous writer, it helps to have an equally adept brother who will unflinchingly read your stuff.
A fourth lesson is that sometimes your bonded sibling knows more about you than you do. One of the big secrets of the brothers' success was that they were always ready to give the most candid and unvarnished opinion of the other's work as soon as each new piece was published. They took each other's comments seriously and made adjustments accordingly in subsequent publications. In this way each helped to shape the other over their entire careers. But only in a general way did this make them similar. In the end, the method of unflinching criticism not only helped to create two radically different writing styles, but made the divergences for which Henry is best known almost incomprehensible to William.
William aspired to short sentences, although he confessed that their sheer number often got away from him. Henry, on the other hand, composed each sentence as if it were a labyrinthine wormhole into the subconscious mind of the reader. In the early 1890s, in the middle of writing Princess Cassimissma, in which his style perceptibly changed, Henry switched from scratching with his own pen to dictating. This made him not only more diffuse, but led him into a convoluted stream-of-consciousness style all his own. Yet he found it an easier and more inspiring way to write.
William, for his part, began writing late and did not find his voice for some time. In the late 1860s, when he was just beginning to publish, he sent his first pieces to younger Henry to edit out the more windy parts and submit them for him. Later, when his venue became articles, textbooks, and philosophy, he developed his own style as a vibrant portrait painter in words.
Eventually William, too, would turn to dictation but not to the extent that Henry did. In sum, William wrote about the stream of consciousness, while Henry adapted it into a method of composition
The origin of this method is not hard to find. Emerson, William's godfather, wrote frequently in his journals about the unceasing flow of conscious experience. William, from his physiological training, drew frequent analogies to the flow of blood and to the health of written text, as he was forever evaluating someone's narrative as either "too thick" or "too thin."
In 1855, moreover, both brothers, aged 11 and 12, respectively, had lived for a winter next door to the Swedenborgian physician James John Garth Wilkinson, a close family friend. At that point in his career, Wilkinson was intensively studying mediumship in his living room and would have a string of young feminine somnambulists parading through his house doing automatic writing. From this Wilkinson himself became an automatic writer, composed a book of some one thousand poems, and in the back described in detail his method for producing automatic speech, writing, and drawing.
We suspect that something like a dissociated state of consciousness resulted from this approach. Miss Bosanquet, Henry's amanuensis, reported that he would enter into a state of rapt absorption while dictating, completely oblivious to all outside noises. William, who made the stream-of-consciousness metaphor so famous, for his part developed automatic writing as a technique in the Harvard Psychological Laboratory and used it in the experimental study of dissociated states; he encouraged audiences to take it up as a therapeutic method of self-analysis; and he taught the technique to an aspiring young Radcliffe student, Gertrude Stein, who went on to make it a writing style of her own.
Thus girded with a method, the brothers then proceeded to objectively criticize each other's refinement of it. Their analyses almost always had two sides. William might write back that he thought some new piece of Henry's was "immortal," "most original," "everything in it human and good." Henry read William's Varieties of Religious Experience with "rapturous deliberation," and his Pragmatism with "thralldom." ("All of my life," he suddenly realized, "I have unconsciously pragmatized.") And to William's Pluralistic Universe, Henry proclaimed his "enchantment,...pride, and almost comprehension."
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