The death of Minnie Temple
From Notes of a Son and Brother, 1914. In 1870 the death of James’s twenty-four-year-old cousin was a monumental loss, and in both The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove her presence is thought to be significant. In Notes of a Son and Brother James recalls her life and death, with many excerpts from her letters. Remarkably intelligent, Minnie Temple could be tough on a cousin she clearly loved; at one point she writes James that, “The trouble is, I think, that to me you have no distinct personality. I don’t feel sure to whom I am writing when I say to myself that I will write to you. I see mentally three men, all answering to your name, each liable to read my letters and yet differing so much from each other that if it is proper for one of them it is unsuitable to the others.”
Immediately, at any rate, the Albany cousins, or a particular group of them, began again to be intensely in question for us; coloured in due course with reflections of the War as their lives, not less than our own, were to become—and coloured as well too, for all sorts of notation and appreciation, from irrepressible private founts. Mrs. Edmund Tweedy, bereft of her own young children, had at the time I speak of opened her existence, with the amplest hospitality, to her four orphaned nieces, who were also our father’s and among whom the second in age, Mary Temple the younger, about in her seventeenth year when she thus renewed her appearance to our view, shone with vividest lustre, an essence that preserves her still, more than half a century from the date of her death, in a memory or two where many a relic once sacred has comparatively yielded to time. Most of these who knew and loved, I was going to say adored, her have also yielded—which is a reason the more why thus much of her, faint echo from too far off though it prove, should be tenderly saved. If I have spoken of the elements and presences round about us that “counted,” Mary Temple was to count, and in more lives than can now be named, to an extraordinary degree; count as a young and shining apparition, a creature who owed to the charm of her every aspect (her aspects were so many!) and the originality, vivacity, audacity, generosity, of her spirit, an indescribable grace and weight—if one might impute weight to a being so imponderable in common scales. Whatever other values on our scene might, as I have hinted, appear to fail, she was one of the first order, in the sense of the immediacy of the impression she produced, and produced altogether as by the play of her own light spontaneity and curiosity—not, that is, as through a sense of such a pressure and such a motive, or through a care for them, in others. “Natural” to an effect of perfect felicity that we were never to see surpassed is what I have already praised all the Albany cousinage of those years for being; but in none of the company was the note so clear as in this rarest, though at the same time symptomatically or ominously palest, flower of the stem; who was natural at more points and about more things, with a greater range of freedom and ease and reach of horizon than any of the others dreamed of. They had that way, delightfully, with the small, after all, and the common matters—while she had it with those too, but with the great and rare ones over and above; so that she was to remain for us the very figure and image of a felt interest in life, an interest as magnanimously far-spread, or as familiarly and exquisitely fixed, as her splendid shifting sensibility, moral, personal, nervous, and having at once such noble flights and such touchingly discouraged drops, such graces of indifference and inconsequence, might at any moment determine. She was really to remain, for our appreciation, the supreme case of a taste for life as life, as personal living; of an endlessly active and yet somehow a careless, an illusionless, a sublimely forewarned curiosity about it: something that made her, slim and fair and quick, all straightness and charming tossed head, with long light and yet almost sliding steps and a large light postponing, renouncing laugh, the very muse or amateur priestess of rash speculation. To express her in the mere terms of her restless young mind, one felt from the first, was to place her, by a perversion of the truth, under the shadow of female “earnestness”—for which she was much too unliteral and too ironic; so that, superlatively personal and yet as independent, as “off” into higher spaces, at a touch, as all the breadth of her sympathy and her courage could send her, she made it impossible to say whether she was just the most moving of maidens or a disengaged and dancing flame of thought. No one to come after her could easily seem to show either a quick inward life or a brave, or even a bright, outward, either a consistent contempt for social squalors or a very marked genius for moral reactions. She had in her brief passage the enthusiasm of humanity—more, assuredly, than any charming girl who ever circled, and would fain have continued to circle, round a ballroom. This kept her indeed for a time more interested in the individual, the immediate human, than in the race or the social order at large; but that, on the other hand, made her ever so restlessly, or quite inappeasably, “psychologic.” The psychology of others, in her shadow—I mean their general resort to it—could only for a long time seem weak and flat and dim, above all not at all amusing. She burned herself out; she died at twenty-four.
To the gallantry and beauty of which there is little surely to add. But there came a moment, almost immediately after, when all illusion failed; which it is not good to think of or linger on, and yet not pitiful not to note. One may have wondered rather doubtingly—and I have expressed that—what life would have had for her and how her exquisite faculty of challenge could have “worked in” with what she was likely otherwise to have encountered or been confined to. None the less did she in fact cling to consciousness; death, at the last, was dreadful to her; she would have given anything to live—and the image of this, which was long to remain with me, appeared so of the essence of tragedy that I was in the far-off aftertime to seek to lay the ghost by wrapping it, a particular occasion aiding, in the beauty and dignity of art. The figure that was to hover as the ghost has at any rate been of an extreme pertinence, I feel, to my doubtless too loose and confused general picture, vitiated perhaps by the effort to comprehend more than it contains. Much as this cherished companion’s presence among us had represented for William and myself—and it is on his behalf I especially speak—her death made a mark that must stand here for a too waiting conclusion. We felt it together as the end of our youth.
At the grave of Alice James
From “The American Journals,” 29 March 1905, in The Complete Notebooks, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers. While working on the essays for The American Scene, James made the following entry in his journal, although he included no reference to his sister’s grave in what he published on his American tour. James’s more contemporary Italian changes Dante’s exact words and makes one error (esilio would be the correct modern spelling), as he writes that “after long exile and martyrdom [she] comes to this peace.” The original text of Paradiso X reads “ed essa da martiro e da essilio venne a questa pace.” Of course “Basta, basta!”—enough, enough!—does not appear in the Commedia.
But these are wanton lapses and impossible excursions; irrelevant strayings of the pen, in defiance of every economy. My subject awaits me, all too charged and too bristling with the most artful economy possible. What I seem to feel is that the Cambridge tendresse stands in the path like a waiting lion—or, more congruously, like a cooing dove that I shrink from scaring away. I want a little of the tendresse, but it trembles away over the whole field—or would if it could. Yet to present these accidents is what it is to be a master; that and that only. Isn’t the highest deepest note of the whole thing the never-to-be-lost memory of that evening hour at Mount Auburn—at the Cambridge Cemetery when I took my way alone—after much waiting for the favouring hour—to that unspeakable group of graves. It was late, in November; the trees all bare, the dusk to fall early, the air all still (at Cambridge, in general, so still), with the western sky more and more turning to that terrible, deadly, pure polar pink that shows behind American winter woods. But I can’t go over this—I can only, oh, so gently, so tenderly, brush it and breathe upon it—breathe upon it and brush it. It was the moment;
it was the hour, it was the blessed flood of emotion that broke out at the touch of one’s sudden vision and carried me away. I seemed then to know why I had done this; I seemed then to know why I had come—and to feel how not to have come would have been miserably, horribly to miss it. It made everything right—it made everything priceless. The moon was there, early, white and young, and seemed reflected in the white face of the great empty Stadium, forming one of the boundaries of Soldiers’ Field, that looked over at me, stared over at me, through the clear twilight, from across the Charles. Everything was there, everything came; the recognition, stillness, the strangeness, the pity and the sanctity and the terror, the breath-catching passion and the divine relief of tears. William’s inspired transcript, on the exquisite little Florentine urn of Alice’s ashes, William’s divine gift to us, and to her, of the Dantean lines—
Dopo lungo exilio e martiro
Viene a questa pace—
took me so at the throat by its penetrating rightness, that it was as if one sank down on one’s knees in a kind of anguish of gratitude before something for which one had waited with a long, deep ache. But why do I write of the all unutterable and the all abysmal? Why does my pen not drop from my hand on approaching the infinite pity and tragedy of all the past? It does, poor helpless pen, with what it meets of the ineffable, what it meets of the cold Medusa-face of life, of all the life lived, on every side. Basta, basta! xxxxx
VI
CORRESPONDENCE
A few years before his death, James burned most of the letters he had received from his friends, and he urged his friends to do the same with those he had sent. Not everyone did. Leon Edel’s four-volume edition of the correspondence printed 1,092 letters of a then-estimated 15,000 that had survived immolation. More recently, Stephen H. Jobe’s scrupulous catalog has brought the figure closer to 10,400. This small selection is mostly addressed to close friends or family members, to whom James could sometimes write several thousand words in a single letter.
A thirteen-year-old in Paris writes to a young friend
The Van Winkles were New York neighbors on 14th Street. In 1913, in A Small Boy and Others, James would recall his friend Edgar’s family in the voice of his full maturity: “I recover, further, some sense of the high places of the Van Winkles, but I think of them as pervaded for us by the upper air of the proprieties, the proprieties that were so numerous, it would appear, when one had had a glimpse of them, rather than by the crude fruits of young improvisation.”
To Edgar Van Winkle, 1856, from Paris
Dear Eddy
As I heard you were going to try to turn the club into a Theatre And as I was asked w’ether I wanted to belong here is my answer. I would like very much to belong.
Yours Truly H. James
On the Grand Tour
This letter was one of many written while James was on tour in Europe—and sometimes mined for his subsequent travel essays—to members of his family (to “My darling Mammy,” “My dearest Daddy,” “Dear Bill,” “Beloved Bill,” “Beloved sister,” and, writing to his sister from Florence, “Carissima sorella”).
To William James, October 30, 1869, from Rome
My dearest William—
Some four days since I despatched to you and Father respectively, from Florence, two very doleful epistles, which you will in course of time receive. No sooner had I posted them, however than my spirits were revived by the arrival of a most blessed brotherly letter from you of October 8th, which had been detained either by my banker or the porter of the hotel and a little scrap from Father of a later date, enclosing your review of Mill and a paper of Howells—as well as a couple of Nations. Verily, it is worthwhile pining for letters for three weeks to know the exquisite joy of final relief. I took yours with me to the theatre whither I went to see a comedy of Goldoni most delightfully played and read and re-read it between the acts.—But of this anon.—I went as I proposed down to Pisa and spent two very pleasant days with the Nortons. It is a very fine dull old town—and the great Square with its four big treasures is quite the biggest thing I have seen in Italy—or rather was, until my arrival at this well-known locality.—I went about a whole morning with Charles Norton and profited vastly by his excellent knowledge of Italian history and art. I wish I had a small fraction of it. But my visit wouldn’t have been complete unless I had got a ramble solus, which I did in perfection. On my return to Florence I determined to start immediately for Rome. The afternoon after I had posted those two letters I took a walk out of Florence to an enchanting old Chartreuse—an ancient monastery, perched up on top of a hill and turreted with little cells like a feudal castle. I attacked it and carried it by storm—i.e. obtained admission and went over it. On coming out I swore to myself that while I had life in my body I wouldn’t leave a country where adventures of that complexion are the common incidents of your daily constitutional: but that I would hurl myself upon Rome and fight it out on this line at the peril of my existence. Here I am then in the Eternal City. It was easy to leave Florence; the cold had become intolerable and the rain perpetual. I started last night, and at 10 1/2 o’clock and after a bleak and fatiguing journey of twelve hours found myself here with the morning light. There are several places on the route I should have been glad to see; but the weather and my own condition made a direct journey imperative. I rushed to this hotel (a very slow and obstructed rush it was, I confess, thanks to the longueurs and lenteurs of the Papal dispensation) and after a wash and a breakfast let myself loose on the city. From midday to dusk I have been roaming the streets. Que vous en dirai-je? At last—for the first time—I live! It beats everything: it leaves the Rome of your fancy—your education—nowhere. It makes Venice—Florence—Oxford—London—seem like little cities of pasteboard. I went reeling and moaning thro’ the streets, in a fever of enjoyment. In the course of four or five hours I traversed almost the whole of Rome and got a glimpse of everything—the Forum, the Coliseum (stupendissimo!), the Pantheon, the Capitol, St. Peter’s, the Column of Trajan, the Castle of St. Angelo—all the Piazzas and ruins and monuments. The effect is something indescribable. For the first time I know what the picturesque is.—In St. Peter’s I stayed some time. It’s even beyond its reputation. It was filled with foreign ecclesiastics—great armies encamped in prayer on the marble plains of its pavement—an inexhaustible physiognomical study. To crown my day, on my way home, I met his Holiness in person—driving in prodigious purple state—sitting dim within the shadows of his coach with two uplifted benedictory fingers—like some dusky Hindoo idol in the depths of its shrine. Even if I should leave Rome tonight I should feel that I have caught the keynote of its operation on the senses. I have looked along the grassy vista of the Appian Way and seen the topmost stone-work of the Coliseum sitting shrouded in the light of heaven, like the edge of an Alpine chain. I’ve trod the Forum and I have scaled the Capitol. I’ve seen the Tiber hurrying along, as swift and dirty as history! From the high tribune of a great chapel of St. Peter’s I have heard in the papal choir a strange old man sing in a shrill unpleasant soprano. I’ve seen troops of little tonsured neophytes clad in scarlet, marching and countermarching and ducking and flopping, like poor little raw recruits for the heavenly host. In fine I’ve seen Rome, and I shall go to bed a wiser man than I last rose—yesterday morning.—It was a great relief to me to have you at last give me some news of your health. I thank the Lord it’s no worse. With all my heart I rejoice that you’re going to try loafing and visiting. I discern the “inexorable logic” of the affair; courage, and you’ll work out your redemption. I’m delighted with your good report of John La Farge’s pictures. I’ve seen them all save the sleeping woman. I have given up expecting him here. If he does come, tant mieux. Your notice of Mill and Bushnell seemed to me (save the opening lines which savored faintly of Eugene Benson) very well and fluently written. Thank Father for his ten lines: may they increase and multiply! —Of course I don’t know how long I shall be here. I would give my head to be able to remain
three months: it would be a liberal education. As it is, I shall stay, if possible, simply from week to week. My “condition” remains the same. I am living on some medicine (aloes and sulphuric acid) given me by my Florentine doctor. I shall write again very shortly. Kisses to Alice and Mother. Blessings on yourself. Address me Spada, Flamine and Cie. Banquiers, Rome. Heaven grant I may be here when your letters come. Love to Father.