But William could be alternatively incisive and biting. He would wax philosophic about Henry's ability to accept criticism, then become deeply apologetic, taking back everything he had said in the face of Henry's angelic humility, wishing himself dead instead of sitting in judgment, always promising never to dispense advice again. Henry would often respond, in the way of continuing self-abnegation, with even more fierce criticisms of his own productions.
But Henry could bite back as well. After reading The Golden Bowl, one of the three great productions of Henry's later period, William wrote: "Why don't you, just to please your Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action, no fencing in the dialogue, no psychological commentaries, and absolute straightness in the style? Publish it in my name, I will acknowledge it, and give you half the proceeds."
Henry replied, "I mean... to try to produce some uncanny form of a thing, in fiction, that will gratify you--but let me say, dear William, that I shall greatly be humiliated if you do like it, and thereby lump it, in your affection, with things of a current age, that I have heard you express admiration for and that I would sooner descend to a dishonored grave than have written."
He then went on to give brother William one of those particularly convoluted Jamesian sentences that was the very subject of their exchange:
"I'm always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of mine, and always hope you won't--you seem to me so constitutionally unable to 'enjoy' it, and so condemned to look at it from a point of view remotely alien to mine in writing it, and to the conditions out of which, as mine, it has inevitably sprung--so that all the intentions that have been its main reason for being (with me) appear never to have reached you at all--and you appear even to assume that the life, the elements forming its subject-matter, deviate from felicity in not having an impossible analogy with the life of Cambridge." (The original sentence in its complete form had 135 words in it!)
William's rejoinder was to reiterate that Henry's new method seemed perverse: "Say it out, for God's sake, and have done with it." While William's opinion of Henry's writing style did not change, the two of them were characteristically soon back ontrack emotionally, gushing forth with brotherly affection and familial support. This paradox of brotherly love amidst all the differences then leads us to the final point to be exacted from their relationship:
5. While genius contains a dash of madness, no one flaw is fatal.
The fifth lesson is that you should judge a life in terms of the big picture and not on any one blemish. It is a curious fact of history that heroes and heroines are presented to us in so stereotyped a form that they seem Divine, more perfect than we could ever be. We are crestfallen when their idyllic reputations are sullied by some new biography showing they had faults, got colds, had enemies, and sometimes acted badly.
William and Henry were, of course, not perfect people. In the first place, they claimed never to be entirely well. They both feared a weak psyche based on defective genes, although their physical ailments seemed to get worse whenever they were together and to miraculously disappear when they were apart.
Second, they would be counted today as somewhat emotionally dysfunctional. William engaged in a sinister form of teasing with his sister Alice that had a distinctly sexual component. He remained shy with the women to whom he felt attracted and kept mainly to his fantasies. In the end, he let his father choose his wife for him. And once married, he dearly loved her and the children but would always leave the country whenever she was about to give birth. Henry, for his part, could never establish a long-term intimate relationship with a woman. He had many closer friends, such as Edith Wharton, but he remained a bachelor and left himself open to the interpretation of homoerotic leanings.
There was also a touch of narcissism to be found in some of their letters, as if they knew that they were great and that what they wrote ostensibly on intimate grounds was going to be read later by a wide audience. Henry was often found of referring to geniuses, including himself.
William, somewhat more self-effacing, wrote frequently on geniuses, describing the ferment of their state of mind, their unceasing crosscurrents of thought, and the inspiring effect of their creations on others.
There was a big debate in psychology in the late 19th century, however, over whether genius was actually a form of insanity. Geniuses were, after all, not normal, and they could always be found to have traits we would associate with neurosis or more severe mental illness. William was willing to acknowledge that "madness ferments in the dough of which great men are made." But he was unwilling to equate genius with mental illness.
Rather, he believed that great men and women, having an unhabitual view of things, are mistakenly labeled as pathological because they are different. To prove this he cited numerous examples of American geniuses who were not morbid, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and other members of the literary circle of Henry James, Sr. The test of their true status, William maintained, is the effect geniuses have on society. Rather than contributing to its disintegration, they are the ones who set their own newer and higher standards, break the barriers of the known, and show the rest of us the way. It is by their fruits, and not their roots, that they should be known.
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