Henry James
The death of Alice James
Judged as a “neurasthenic” invalid from a relatively young age, toward the end of her life Alice James received the diagnosis of breast cancer with some satisfaction (“I have longed and longed for a palpable disease”). Within an hour of Alice’s death, Henry James cabled the news to his brother William, and William cabled back with the caution that she might not really be dead, for, as he later explained, “Her neurotic temperament & chronically reduced vitality are just the field for trance-tricks. . . .” The reference to “your Alice” at the end of the letter is to the other Alice James, the wife of William James.
To William James, March 8, 1892, from London
My dear William
Alice died at exactly four o’clock on Sunday afternoon (about the same hour of the same day as mother), and it is now Tuesday morning. But, even now the earliest moment my letter can go, or could have gone, to you is tomorrow P.M.—and there were innumerable things yesterday to do. Yesterday afternoon came your cable. You wouldn’t have thought your warning necessary if you had been with us, or were with us now. Of course the event comes to you out of the comparative vague and unexplained, for you won’t get our letters of Wednesday last and of Saturday for some days yet, alas. I wrote you as fully as I could on both of these days. On Saturday the end seemed near—yet also as if her strange power to last might still, for a few days, assert itself. The great sign of change on Saturday A.M. and, as I wrote you, the inexpressibly touching one, was the sudden cessation of all suffering and distress, which, up to Friday night, had been constant and dreadful. The pleuritic pain, the cough, the fever, all the sudden complications of the previous few days which came, so unmistakably, as the determining accident at the mercy of which we had felt her to be (and without which she might still have lived on for some weeks—even possibly,—though this I greatly doubt—some months): all these things which, added to the suffering they already found, were pitiful to see, passed from her in the course of a few hours, fell away blissfully and left her consciously and oh, longingly, close to the end. As I wrote you on Saturday, the deathly look in her poor face, added to this simplification, and which, in its new intensity, had come on all together in the night, made me feel that the end might come at any moment. I came away on Saturday afternoon, not to break the intense stillness which Katharine wished to create near in order that she might sleep—for though she was quiet she didn’t sleep. Lloyd Tuckey saw her, that evening, for the second time that day, and I was back there for the hours before 10. I wanted to stay the night—but Katharine thought I had better not—and it turned out better. For I couldn’t have been in the room or done anything. She became restless again—but without pain—said a few barely audible things—(one of which was that she couldn’t, oh, she COULDN’T and begged it mightn’t be exacted of her, live another day), had two or three mouthfuls of nourishment at 1 or 2 and then, towards 6, sank into a perfectly gentle sleep. From that sleep she never woke—but after an hour or two it changed its character and became a loud, deep, breathing—almost stertorous, and this was her condition when I got to the house at 9. From that hour till 4 P.M. Katharine and Nurse and I sat by her bed. The doctor (who had doubted of the need of his returning, and judged that she would not live till morning) came at 11.30—but on Katharine’s going down to him and describing exactly Alice’s then condition, asked leave not to come into the room, as he preferred not to, in the last hour before death, when there was nothing to do or to suggest, unless it was insisted on. For about seven hours this deep difficult and almost automatic breathing continued—with no look of pain in the face—only more and more utterly the look of death. They were infinitely pathetic and, to me, most unspeakable hours. They would have been intolerable if it had not been so evident that all the hideous burden of suffering consciousness was utterly gone. As it is, they were the most appealing and pitiful thing I ever saw. But I have seen, happily, but little death immediately. Toward the end, for about an hour, the breathing became a constant sort of smothered whistle in the lung. The pulse flickered, came and went, ceased and revived a little again, and then with all perceptible action of the heart, altogether ceased to be sensible for some time before the breathing ceased. At three o’clock a blessed change took place—she seemed to sleep—I mean to breathe—without effort, gently, peacefully and naturally, like a child. This lasted an hour, till the respirations, still distinct, paused, intermitted and became rarer—at the last, for seven or eight minutes, only one a minute, by the watch. Her face then seemed in a strange, dim, touching way, to become clearer. I went to the window to let in a little more of the afternoon light upon it (it was a bright, kind, soundless Sunday), and when I came back to the bed she had drawn the breath that was not succeeded by another.
I went out and cabled you about half an hour later—I knew you would be in great suspense every hour after her cable of the day before. Since then I have sat many hours in the still little room in which so many months of her final suffering were compressed, and in which she lies as the very perfection of the image of what she had longed for years, and at the last with pathetic intensity, to be. She looks most beautiful and noble—with all of the august expression that you can imagine—and with less, than before, of the almost ghastly emaciation of those last days. Only last night (I have not yet been at the house today) had a little look of change begun. We have made all the arrangements—they have been on the whole simple and easy—with the Cremation Society, for a service tomorrow afternoon (early) at Woking. Of course you know her absolute decision on this point—and she had gone into all the details. For myself I rejoice, as you doubtless will, and Katharine does, that we are not to lay her, far off from the others, in this damp, black alien English earth. Her ashes shall go home and be placed beside Father’s and Mother’s. She wished we should be simply four—Katharine and I, her Nurse, and Annie Richards, who, though almost never seeing her, has shown devoted friendship to her ever since she (Annie) has been in England. I will try and send you a line tomorrow after it is over. Katharine is the unbroken reed, in all this, that you can imagine, and I rejoice, unspeakably in the rest and liberation that have come to her. The tension—the strain and wear—of these last months has been more serious than any before—and I hope she won’t go back immediately to new claims and responsibilities. She has, practically, a large margin of convenience here, as Alice’s lease of that pleasant little house runs on till May 1st. She will probably stay yet a month. She considers that there were almost unmistakable signs, in the last weeks of Alice’s life, of the existence of the internal tumour (the second one), which Baldwin last summer pronounced probable. The final “accident”—brought on (though at a moment when her strength was at the last ebb and her distress from the tumour in the breast and all her nervous condition and her perpetual gout and rheumatism was absolutely unbearable from day to day, and she was simply living from day to day, and night to night, on the last desperate resources of morphia and hypnotism)—this strange complication which simply made a sudden collapse of everything was ostensibly a mysterious cold, communicated by nurse (who had a bad one) and producing all the appearance of pleurisy—with a sharp pain in the side (she lived only in perpetual poultices the last three or four days—up to Saturday night when she wished everything off) and a dreadful cough which shook her to pieces and made impossible the quiet which was the only escape from the ever-present addition of “nervousness.” But Katharine thinks that an internal tumour close to the lung, where Baldwin placed it, was accountable for much of this last disorganization. However, she will tell you, later, of all these things—perhaps you will think I try to tell too much. I shall write by this post briefly to Bob, but won’t you please immediately send him this. I hope he got a prompt echo of my cable.—Katharine will probably also tell you immediately that Alice very wisely under the circumstances, I think, in an alteration made lately in her will, after your plan of coming abroad this summer for a year came home to
her, named her (K.P.L.) and J. B. Warner her executors. She had first named you and me—but she came later to think it probable that she would die this summer—live till then—during the months you would probably be in Europe—which would be for the execution of the will on your part a burdensome delay. Besides, with all the load upon you, she wished to spare you all trouble. But I must close this endless-ness—even if I send you more of it by the same post. Ever yours, and your Alice’s, and Bob’s affectionate
Henry James
The friendship with Hendrik C. Andersen
The friendship with the young Norwegian-American sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen (1872-1940) has been a focal point of the discussion of James’s sexual orientation. Of course these two particularly intense letters are written at a moment of crisis, just after the death of Andersen’s brother.
To Hendrik C. Andersen, February 9, 1902, from London
My dear, dear dearest Hendrik
Your news fills me with horror and pity, and how can I express the tenderness with which it makes me think of you and the aching wish to be near you and put my arms round you? My heart fairly bleeds and breaks at the vision of you alone, in your wicked and indifferent old far-off Rome, with the haunting, blighting, unbearable sorrow. The sense that I can’t help you, see you, talk to you, touch you, hold you close and long, or do anything to make you rest on me, and feel my participation—this torments me, dearest boy, makes me ache for you, and for myself; makes me gnash my teeth and groan at the bitterness of things. I can only take refuge in hoping you are not utterly alone, that some human tenderness of some sort, some kindly voice and hand are near you that may make a little the difference. What a dismal winter you must have had, with this staggering blow at the climax! I don’t of course know what fragment of friendship there may be to draw near to you, and in my uncertainty my image of you is of the darkest, and my pity, as I say, feels so helpless. I wish I could go to Rome and put my hands on you (oh, how lovingly I should lay them!) but that, alas, is odiously impossible. (Not, moreover, that apart from you, I should so much as like to be there now.) I find myself thrown back on anxiously and doubtless vainly, wondering if there may not, after a while, [be] some possibility of your coming to England, of the current of your trouble inevitably carrying you here—so that I might take consoling, soothing, infinitely close and tender and affectionately-healing possession of you. This is the one thought that relieves me about you a little—and I wish you might fix your eyes on it for the idea, just of the possibility. I am in town for a few weeks but I return to Rye April 1st, and sooner or later to have you there and do for you, to put my arm round you and make you lean on me as on a brother and a lover, and keep you on and on, slowly comforted or at least relieved of the first bitterness of pain—this I try to imagine as thinkable, attainable, not wholly out of the question. There I am, at any rate, and there is my house and my garden and my table and my studio—such as it is!—and your room, and your welcome, and your place everywhere—and I press them upon you, oh so earnestly, dearest boy, if isolation and grief and the worries you are overdone with become intolerable to you. There they are, I say—to fall upon, to rest upon, to find whatever possible shade of oblivion in. I will nurse you through your dark passage. I wish I could do something more—something straighter and nearer and more immediate but such as it is please let it sink into you. Let all my tenderness, dearest boy, do that. This is all now. I wired you three words an hour ago. I can’t think of your sister-in-law—I brush her vision away and your history with your father, as I’ve feared it, has haunted me all winter. I embrace you with almost a passion of pity.
Henry James
To Hendrik C. Andersen, February 28, 1902, from Rye
Dearest, dearest Boy, more tenderly embraced than I can say!—How woefully you must have wondered at my apparently horrid and heartless silence since your last so beautiful, noble, exquisite letter! But, dearest Boy, I’ve been dismally ill—as I was even when I wrote to you from town; and it’s only within a day or two that free utterance has—to this poor extent—become possible to me. Don’t waste any pity, any words, on me now, for it’s, at last, blissfully over, I’m convalescent, on firm grounds, safe, gaining daily—only weak and “down” and spent, and above all like a helpless pigmy before my accumulation of the mountain of a month’s letters etc. To make a long story of the shortest, I was taken in London, on January 29th—two days after getting there, with a malignant sudden attack, through a chill, of inflammation of the bowels: which threw me into bed, for a week, howling. Then I had a few days of false and apparent recuperation—one of which was the Sunday I wrote you from the Athenaeum on receipt of your direful letter. But I felt myself collapsing, relapsing again, and hurried down here on February 11th just in time to save, as it were, my life from another wretched siege out of my own house. I tumbled into bed here and had a dozen wretched days of complicated, aggravated relapse: but at least nursed, tended, cared for, with all zeal and needfulness. So I’ve pulled through—and am out—and surprisingly soon—of a very deep dark hole. In my deep hole, how I thought yearningly, helplessly, dearest Boy, of you as your last letter gives you to me and as I take you, to my heart. I determined, deliberately, not to wire you, for I felt it would but cruelly worry and alarm you; and each day I reached out to the hope of some scrawl—I mean toward some possibility of a word to you. But that has come duly now. Now, at least, my weak arms still can feel you close. Infinitely, deeply, as deeply as you will have felt, for yourself, was I touched by your second letter. I respond to every throb of it, I participate in every pang. I’ve gone through Death, and Death, enough in my long life, to know how all that we are, all that we have, all that is best of us within, our genius, our imagination, our passion, our whole personal being, become then but aides and channels and open gates to suffering, to being flooded. But, it is better so. Let yourself go and live, even as a lacerated, mutilated lover, with your grief, your loss, your sore, unforgettable consciousness. Possess them and let them possess you, and life, so, will still hold you in her arms, and press you to her breast, and keep you, like the great merciless but still most enfolding and never disowning mighty Mother, on and on for things to come. Beautiful and unspeakable your account of relation to Andreas. Sacred and beyond tears. How I wish I had known him, admirable, loveable boy—but you make me: I do. Well, he is all yours now: he lives in you and out of all pain. Wait, and you will see; hold fast, sit tight, stick hard, and more things than I can tell you now will come back to you. But you know, in your courage, your genius and your patience, more of these things than I need try thus to stammer to you. And now I am tired and spent. I only, for goodnight, for five minutes, take you to my heart. And I’m better, better, better, dearest Boy; don’t think of my having been ill. Think only of my love and that I am yours always and ever