CHAPTER SEVEN
THE PHOTOGRAPHS CAME as he had asked for them; one was close-up and detailed, showing in relief the monument to the soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment being led by Colonel Shaw, and the other taken from a distance, showing the Boston Common and Saint Gaudens’s monument in the corner. Henry carried the photographs to the window to study them in a better light and then went back to the table and found William’s letter calling the new monument a glorious work of art, simple and realistic. He could hear the certainty in William’s voice. William had given the official address on the unveiling of this memorial to the 54th Regiment, the first black regiment of the American army, in which their brother Wilky had served. He had spoken for three quarters of an hour, and then been, as he put it, toted around for two hours in a brake at the tail end of the procession. It was, he wrote to Henry, an extraordinary occasion for sentiment with everything softened and made poetic and unreal by the time which had passed.
It was easy for Henry to reply to him, to say that he would have given anything to have been there and to add, choosing his words carefully, that the spirit of their poor dead brother Wilky would have been very much present on Boston Common during the unveiling of the monument, and that the event would have been a poetic justice to him. Henry noticed that William had not enclosed a copy of his speech either with his letter or with the photographs and was glad now that he did not have to comment on it. William had become a public figure, full of manly expression and fearless opinions. Thus he could speak for forty-five minutes to a crowded hall about the nobility of the Yankee cause and the legacy of the Union dead, especially the dead of the 54th and 55th Regiments in which both Wilky and Bob had served.
Henry’s own sentences in his first story about the Civil War had remained in his mind through all the years: ‘The exploits of his campaign are recorded in the public journals of the day, where the curious may still pursue them. My own taste has always been for unwritten history and my present business is with the reverse of the picture.’ And he wondered, as he studied the photographs on and off throughout the day, what his own speech, his own reversed picture, might say about the 54th Regiment and the Civil War. He wondered also about the power of one unasked and tactless question which could have punctured the power of William’s speech at the unveiling. It concerned William personally and Henry too; and in soft whispers now it asked why neither of them had actually fought, along with their two brothers, for the cause of freedom.
THE STORY OF his father’s wooden leg was one of the often-told delights of his childhood. If Henry showed signs of illness, or hurt himself in a fall, or if he agreed to complete an arduous task, then he would be promised the story by his mother, who told it as though she had witnessed it. His father was a boy who loved to play, she said, and was happiest away from his parents who were very strict with him. He was most content when playing with his friends. One of the games they played in the park was dangerous and involved hot-air balloons. They used spirit of turpentine to produce the flame to make the hot air rise. When the balloon caught fire you had to be careful because the burning balloon could land on you, land on your hair or on your clothes and you too could catch fire, his mother said, her face serious and her voice slow and grave, because the turpentine was highly combustible.
He loved the word ‘combustible’ and made her repeat it. From an early age, he knew what it meant. But that day, she went on, his father had accidentally spilled the turpentine on his pantaloons, and, without understanding the danger he was in, he stood with all the other boys watching the balloons rise and then catch fire, one by one falling down, and all the boys standing out of the way, and warning each other to avoid them. But your father, she told him, saw one burning balloon floating towards the stables just beside the park, and he liked the horses there and the stable boys let him feed them sometimes, so when he noticed the balloon land in the hayloft above the stables he realized the danger and he ran towards the loft, climbing the ladder to stamp out the fire. But – and now his mother held Henry’s hand – as soon as he stood on the flame, and it wasn’t even a strong flame and the hay hadn’t even started to burn, as soon as the flame came in contact with the turpentine and his pantaloons, your father, just barely thirteen, went on fire and no one could help him. He ran from the hayloft screaming, but by the time they could put out the fire his two legs had been so badly burned that one of them had to be amputated.
It was cut from above the knee, and at this point of the story his mother put her hand around his knee, but he did not flinch, and she too remained calm, as she explained how painful it had been and how brave he was and how hard he tried not to scream. But, in the end, she said, it was impossible and they always recounted that his screams could be heard for miles around. For two years afterwards your father had to stay in bed, she told him, and he had to contemplate a future in which he would not be able to run, or play games. He would have to have a wooden leg, and that was a bigger test of his fortitude than the pain of the amputation.
What was strange – and here her voice grew tender as she spoke – was that only good came from this accident. Up to then, she said, your papa’s father was very strict with him, and was also much preoccupied with his myriad businesses – she watched him now as he nodded to signal that he understood the word ‘myriad’ from his Bible – and his mother had a large household and her other children. But now, after the accident, they came to their son’s aid, they showed him a new and deep tenderness and he felt enclosed and protected by their love. At the beginning, they never left his side and his father seemed to sense his pain and share his panic until many times his father had to be taken away in tears. Later, as he began to recover, they made sure he had everything he needed, and gradually then, your father replaced his dreams of races and games with the life of the mind, with books and speculation. He began, she said, to contemplate the fate of man in the world and the life of man in relation to God as no one else in America had ever done. He had all due grounding in the Bible and in youthful theology, but in his two years as an invalid he was allowed to read whatever he pleased and, of course, he had time to think. And thus commenced, his mother said, your father’s noble quest. Later, when he became friends with Emerson, Emerson always said that Henry James had an advantage over him: he knew about suffering first hand and he had learned to think and read away from school masters and fellow scholars. Emerson always said, his mother told him, that your father had a truly original mind.
On Sundays and during their holidays, when they were travelling and on days when there was no school, Henry stayed close to his mother; as the others found fulfilment in playing or boyish escapades, he would wait until she was free, or he would join in the work, and then they would move silently towards some comfortable place, often leaving Aunt Kate to finish what his mother had been doing, and his mother would talk to him, or read to him, or they would go through some of her things, tidying and putting them all in order.
THE FAMILY was divided into three parts – William and Henry, whose education was supervised in elaborate detail by their father; Wilky and Bob, whose noise-making skills and lack of scholarly initiative made their father unhappy, thus causing him to feel that sending Wilky and Bob to school together was not only convenient, since they were both so close in age, but that it might also be effective. Wilky might develop some of Bob’s caution; Bob might, under Wilky’s influence, learn to make himself agreeable to visitors and smile warmly at familiar faces. Alice was an independent republic.
When people asked them, especially in Newport, what their father did, all five James children had difficulty replying. Their father lived on his inheritance, the revenue from rent and dividends, but this was hardly what he did. He was also a sort of philosopher and sometimes he gave lectures and wrote articles. But none of this added up to a simple phrase, an easy answer. And when their father suggested they tell their enquirers that he was a seeker after the truth, the matter became more perplexing. As they grew older a second question, commonly asked, began to puzzle them further. What were they themselves going to become? William, at the beginning, was going to become a painter, and Bob, to the great hilarity of the others, wanted to open a dry goods store. Alice, clearly, was going to become a wife. But what were Henry and Wilky going to do? This question did not interest their father and could not be discussed easily with their mother and thus was left in abeyance, another example, if one were needed, of the strangeness of their family, which both they and the world of Newport had come to accept.
Since he relished clashings and new beginnings, Henry senior was ready to discuss any matter with any man, and was even prepared to discuss politics should the need arise, although he viewed the political world as a great distraction from, and impediment to, the possibility of human progress under the great light which God had made for humankind. The Civil War, however, began to fascinate him, not only because he saw it, in its essence, as a war between progress and cruelty, but also because he saw the end of the war as a time when protean energies could come to the fore, when there would be neither victors nor vanquished, but a grand transition in his country from youth to manhood, from appearance to reality, from passing shadow to deathless substance.
Nonetheless, in the early days of the Civil War Henry senior told anyone who came within his range that he was holding firmly to the coat-tails of his sons who were, he insisted, desperately trying to enlist. Henry senior did not believe that his own sons should join, he said, because he did not believe that any existing government, or any future government, was worth an honest human life or a clean one like theirs.
As his father discovered the pleasure of mixing political transcendence and prudent care for his family, Henry discovered a large bundle under the stairs of the house in Newport which contained back numbers of the Revue des Deux Mondes, complete with its salmon-coloured wrapping, which sang to him in the privacy of his room like a choir of angels. Even the names opened for him a world of possibility beyond the surrounding dullness and domesticity and patriotism and religiosity: Sainte-Beuve, the Goncourts, Mérimée, Renan. Names which suggested not only the modern mind at its most enquiring but the idea of style itself, of thinking as a kind of style, and the writing of essays not as a conclusive call to duty or an earnest effort at self-location, but as play, as the wielding of tone.
The shut door of his room, and his being left alone there, became the governing comforts of his life. He would appear at meals and accept the mockery of the others at his silences, his seriousness, his pale face and gaunt presence. Nothing mattered now except the spellbound time alone, not only with the Revue des Deux Mondes, but with Balzac, who wrote of a France that Henry had merely glimpsed, but enough to know that he himself would never possess a subject as richly layered and suggestive, as sharply focussed and centred, as the France of Balzac’s Human Comedy.
As William went to Harvard and Wilky made efforts to leave Sanborn, a boarding school that was ‘an experiment in coeducation’ supported by Emerson and Hawthorne, and Bob, having already left Sanborn, sailed his boat and made a nuisance of himself, Henry’s mother began to watch her bookish second son as though he were a patient. His mother protected his privacy and made sure also that no criticism of him was uttered by anyone, especially not by his father. Since Henry senior tended to find out what he believed by listening to his own utterances, his non-criticism of Henry meant approval, since he felt only benevolence for that towards which he did not express anathema.
His mother began to appear silently in Henry’s room two or three times a day with a mug of fresh milk, or a small jar of honey, or a jug of cool water. She entered the room without knocking, and usually did not speak, and suggested in her placid movements and her quietness an approval for the work being done. For the first time, Henry later thought, Mrs James was witnessing her husband’s theories about the need to discover and explore the secret pleasures of the self through reading and thinking put into practice without any accompanying fervid hint of the unreliable to unsettle her.
On one of those calm summer evenings at Newport, his mother came into his room to find that he had fallen asleep in his chair, his book on his lap. He woke to discover her hand on his brow and a worried look on her face. She went downstairs immediately and returned briskly with the maid who prepared the bed for him, his mother brandishing a freshly wetted cloth to attempt, she said, to cool him down. If this did not work, his mother said, she would call the doctor forthwith, but now he must go to bed. He had been overtaxing himself and he must rest, she said. He knew that he had not been overtaxing himself, knew that he had merely fallen asleep on a hot summer’s day, but by this time Aunt Kate had appeared and he was a patient, getting all the close attention that illness received in the family.
His mother began to carry his meals to his room and excuse him when company not to his taste was in the house, making sure also that he was not confined to bed during outings he would enjoy or when company that would interest him was present. She did not discuss his illness with him and when she asked him how he felt, it was to know if he were much the same or slightly better; she did not leave him free to reply that he was not ill at all.
There began then a conspiracy between them, a drama in which each knew the roles and the lines and the movements. Henry learned to walk slowly, never to run, to smile but never to laugh, to stand up hesitantly and awkwardly and to sit down with relief. He learned not to eat heartily or drink his fill.
Soon after this when gleeful and full-blooded talk of recruits and the need to serve his country filled the air, his mother watched over him daily with greater worry and indulgence. Often, when he woke in the morning he found her sitting by his bed, having stolen into his room, studying him gently and smiling soothingly when his eyes opened.
There were a few times he could not disguise his strength, or hide his readiness to take part. That October a high wind from the sea blew through Newport and a small conflagration at a stable on the corner of Beach and State quickly became a raging fire. Two whole streets, including shops and bars and stables and private residences, were in danger, and soon, as one stable was gutted, horses and carriages and valuable belongings were removed to safety. Every able-bodied person was needed to pump water from wells or carry water from cisterns. That night, as frenzied activity and fierce urgent shouting went on all around him, Henry worked without thinking. It was only when the fire had been extinguished and his arms and back ached that he thought of the probable extent of his mother’s concern.
She and his aunt, who had been alerted to his activity by Bob, were waiting for him when he came home.
They made him retire to the sofa and then set about filling a hot bath for him. He closed his eyes and lay back as they bustled about him. His mother’s mouth was shut tight. Later, when he had emerged from his hot bath, scrubbed and tired and ready for bed, she expressed the fear that he had injured his back. They would know by the morning, she said, if the injury was bad. Now it was late and he should sleep for as long as he could.
The next day, he did not rise until suppertime. His mother told him to move slowly. She helped him down the stairs. He entered the dining room leaning on her, as his father and his aunt moved the chairs out of the way so that he could pass easily. They helped him to sit down and watched him carefully, encouraging him to eat and drink to build up his strength. Later, his mother helped him back to bed and for a few days he took all his meals in his room and had the sympathy of the entire household.
Slowly, in the months that followed, as Henry started to work on translations from the French, Henry senior gradually changed his mind about the war. He began to see it not just as a cause worth supporting in theory but as a cause worth volunteering for. And as he propounded his opinions at the family table, much to the delight of Bob, too young to join but old enough to be fired with enthusiasm, his wife became increasingly solicitous of Henry.
Neither before the war broke out, nor during its early months, did Henry or his mother ever discuss his illness or its symptoms at any length, nor did Henry ever allow himself any clear reflection on whatever malady was affecting him. He began to live with it, managing his disability as neither a game nor an act but a strange, secret thing. By not insisting on its being defined, by allowing the conspiracy with his mother to run its guilty course, never having contemplated any other possibility, he lived his illness, even when he was alone, with sincerity.
As news came in, however, in this first year of the war, of cousins who had joined up, including Gus Barker and William Temple, Minny’s brother, who had been, much to his pride, made a captain on his first day in honour of his dead father, the fact that the James boys were remaining civilians, and Henry in idleness, could not but be noted by all those who paid even scant attention to the matter.
Henry’s mother understood that Henry’s nameless abstract ailment, his obscure hurt, could not continue indefinitely without a name, that a professional diagnosis would have to be arrived at. His father therefore accompanied him to Boston to see Dr Richardson, an eminent surgeon made even more eminent, in Aunt Kate’s opinion, by his dead wife’s large fortune. He was a known expert on injuries to the back.
Much time had elapsed since Henry had been alone with his father. On the journey to Boston, Henry senior seemed deeply uneasy with him, unsure, it appeared, whether he could share with his second son his views on the change which would come to America as a result of the war, this currently being the only topic that interested him. He was mostly silent, but not withdrawn. He looked like someone whose mind was working, whose brain was on the point of reaching some grand conclusion. When they arrived, Henry senior seemed to have greater difficulty walking in Boston than he did in Newport, as though his confidence or the power of his wooden leg had diminished as they reached the metropolis.
Dr Richardson’s face was illuminated with a sharp little smile, and with this smile playing in his clear eyes and on his neatly shaved lips he looked at his patient. He then became silent as Henry senior began to talk, explaining the length of their journey, the number of his offspring, their situation and his hopes for a new America. The doctor, as he contemplated Henry senior, replaced his smile with a scowl. His eyes became cold as he waited for him to finish. And when it was clear that his father had no real intention of finishing, the doctor simply sprang up and moved towards his patient. With his two hands he motioned him to remove the upper parts of his clothing. As Henry began to undress, his father faltered for a moment until the doctor fetched him a chair and motioned him to sit on it. By the time Henry had stripped to the waist, the doctor still had not spoken. He made Henry raise his arms above his head and then slowly, painstakingly, he began to study his frame, the bones in his arms, his shoulders, his rib cage. He then began meticulously to finger his spine. Eventually, he made him lie facedown on the couch as he repeated each exercise. Then, having indicated to Henry that he should remove all his clothing save his undershorts, he ran his hand clinically along his hip bones and pelvis, repeating the earlier exercise on his spine and arms and shoulders, pressing hard until Henry winced.
Henry had presumed that he would be asked where the pain centred and what sort of pain it was, and he was ready to answer this, but Dr Richardson asked him nothing, merely probed and studied, his hands hard, his examination slow and thorough and methodical, his silence dry. Finally, he went to the basin and poured some water over his hands and washed them with soap and then dried them with a towel. He handed Henry his clothes and nodded as Henry began to dress. He stood up to his full height and stretched.
‘There’s nothing the matter a good day’s work wouldn’t cure,’ he said. ‘Plenty of exercise. Up early, out early, that’s not the best cure for most things but it’s the best cure for this young man. He is in perfect condition, his whole life ahead of him. I’ll have to charge you, sir, for telling you this good news. There’s nothing at all wrong with your son. And I don’t make up my mind easily. What I tell you is the result of thirty years of observation.’
As Henry leaned over to pick up his jacket, Dr Richardson gripped his neck with his thumb and forefinger, pressing hard until Henry, his face contorted with pain, tried to wrench his hand away, but the doctor merely tightened his grip. His hand was strong.
‘Up early, out early,’ he said. ‘You won’t get better advice in many a long day. Home with you now.’
Even still, all these years later, he thought, he hated doctors, and had drawn a portrait of a most unpleasant member of the profession with much relish in Washington Square, using some of Dr Richardson’s more obnoxious mannerisms in his description of his Dr Sloper’s professional habits. He wondered indeed if the visit itself, in all its humiliation and roughness, had not in fact caused a genuine, serious backache that was with him to this day. He had suffered a great deal from constipation as well, and often blamed it on Dr Richardson, and made sure to keep away from others of his profession lest they should cause some new malady.
SEVERAL TIMES a day Henry looked at the photographs which William had sent him, having left them on a table in one of the downstairs rooms at Lamb House, and noted with more and more interest the place of honour which the monument had on Boston Common. His own name could have easily been among the dead, or the maimed, and he would have been a proud memory now to his brother and those who had survived.
As he explored the area around Rye, delighting in his new life, working on a new novel, feeling at home as though for the first time, he wondered at how easily it could have been otherwise. He was not cut out to be a soldier, he thought, but neither were most of the young men of his class and acquaintance who went to fight. It was not wisdom which kept him away, he believed, but something closer to cowardice, and as he walked the cobbled streets of his new town, he almost thanked God for it. He wished this gladness had been simple, but it came back to him, as much else, with guilt at its core and regret and memories of what had happened to his brother Wilky which these photographs made sharp and clear.
He remembered that he put on his jacket that day in Boston, and having watched his father pay the doctor, accompanied him to the street. Their silence on the return journey had a different tone. Now his father was deep in melancholy contemplation. Neither of them, Henry thought, would know what to say to his mother.
When they met her at the door of their house in Newport, he recalled that they both remained so solemn and their expressions were so worried that she believed, she told them later, that the news could not be worse. She suspected, she said, that Henry had a terminal illness. And now she was relieved to hear that the prognosis had been good, the injury to his back was not dangerous, not part of some wider ailment.
‘Rest,’ she said. ‘Rest will be enough. You’ll need to rest for the next few days after your long journey.’
Henry remembered that he watched his father and wondered if he was going to tell her the true prognosis but his father just then seemed to be having difficulty taking off his coat and had to be assisted. As soon as his coat was hanging in the hallway, his father found a book and settled down to read it. Henry guessed that even in the privacy of the night his father would not reveal what the doctor had really said. Yet there was no conspiracy between Henry and his father to deceive his mother. Henry felt now that his father had never told her that her son was perfectly healthy because it would have involved such a clear rebuttal of her own judgement, and implied a criticism of her. It would also have forced her to face the possibility that Henry’s weakness and disability had been a search for attention and sympathy. This would undermine Henry’s moral character in a household where illness was too serious a matter for such games not to be a sort of sacrilege, and this would be too unsettling for everyone, including his father.
His father needed time, Henry thought, to mull over the great discrepancy between the words ‘Up early, out early’ and the treatment Henry was receiving. He was conscious that his father’s propensity for change could make itself felt at any stage; he knew how much it tended towards the irrational, if it were not controlled and channelled. He knew that idling in his room all summer, being cosseted by his mother and his aunt, could cause his father suddenly to stand up, leave his book aside, and with fire in his eyes declare that something would have to be done about Henry.
He moved carefully, consulting William about the advisability of a course at Harvard and then his friend Sargy Perry who was about to enter the college. He did not allude directly to his father’s unpredictability and the course it could take. He maintained a high tone, explaining that it was time he ceased to idle at the family’s expense and considered a career. William nodded.
‘Have you considered the ministry? There will never not be a need for you, especially if you study divinity at Harvard, where the bedside manner, with exhortation to repent, is taught with such emphasis and zeal.’
He allowed William to joke, but did not let him stray from the subject. He was young enough still to care more about his immediate circumstances than any long-term vision of his career. Thus being left alone all summer reigned supreme among his desires. And when William said ‘law’, he realized that it was the only plausible option. His family, he knew, could number among their familiars some whose sons had taken a similar route. But more than anything, the study of law sounded serious and decisive, and it was also a change of direction. It would offer their father a brief thrill, and this would prevent him from wanting another such thrill – at least as far as Henry was concerned – for some time.
His mother, perhaps as a result of a chance remark or merely because of his father’s silence on the matter, began to ask him if his back was not, in fact, much improved. She wondered one day if more exercise rather than more rest might not be the solution. He thought from her uncertainty and her vague worried air that his father had said nothing directly, but he was also aware of how close the danger was now, that he could easily have a decision made for his future without his being consulted. It would take just one night, his parents beginning their discussions before they went to bed and continuing in muffled tones until they would have a decision and it would be announced at breakfast as a fact, something which had been decided and could not be amended.
Henry waited for the moment. He would need both of them together. He would begin by discussing his own unsettled state and his urge to make a decision about his future. He would suggest that he had no clear idea what to do; but he was alert to the danger here – if he left this door open for too long, his father would be capable of closing it and locking it very quickly by proposing he join the Union forces and, having made the proposal, allowing it to become more gravely and deeply the entire focus of the discussion to the exclusion of other possibilities. He would need to move the discussion forward quickly, to say perhaps that he had spoken to William, although that would also be a risk as William went in and out of favour depending on nothing more than the vagaries of his father’s thinking. He could not say that he wished ‘to be’ a lawyer as his father would pounce on the words ‘to be’ and lecture him about his own being as a precious gift to be cultivated with energy but also with subtle wisdom and consideration. Thus, his father would say, you cannot ‘be’ a lawyer nor can you ‘become’ one. Such language, his father would insist, is a way of offering offence to the greatest gift of our Creator – life itself and the grace our Creator offers us to move on from our being and become.
No, he would have to discuss his urge to study law rather than become a lawyer, to attend lectures about law, to broaden his intellect by applying it directly to a discipline. Such words, if uttered with spontaneity and sincerity, if he could speak as though his high hopes had focussed on this solution only now, as a result of this discussion, he might fire his father with enthusiasm at this change, and his mother would nod in agreement, carefully weighing up the consequences.
He thought of going to his mother first and telling her of his plan, but he knew that things had gone too far for that. In any case, his father would suspect both of them of conspiring at his exclusion. Henry’s injured back would also have to be mentioned, but it would have to be delicately brought into the conversation, as neither a deciding factor nor an impediment, but as something that might fade from the horizon, annihilated once and for all by the force of a new decision.
He found them as he dreamed of finding them, his father reading and his mother moving quietly about the room.
‘I need to discuss with you my present circumstances,’ he said.
‘Sit down, Harry,’ his mother said, moving to a tall chair by the table and sitting there with her hands joined in front of her.
‘I know that it is time for me to make a choice, and I have given it much thought, but perhaps not enough thought, and I have come to you both to see, perhaps, if you could help me clarify how I must live my life, what I must do.’
‘Each of us needs to clarify how he must live his life,’ Henry senior said. ‘It is a matter for all of us.’
‘I am aware of that, Father,’ Henry said and then left silence. He knew that his father could not now declare a career for him or suggest that he get up early and go out early. He had left things open for discussion rather than decision. He could see his father becoming bright-eyed and excited that an ordinary morning with his family in Newport had suddenly been transformed and was awash with possibility.
No one mentioned the army, but it hovered over the conversation, swooping to eye level now and then; nor did any of them mention his ailment, but it too lingered in the atmosphere. Henry was careful not to mention anything specific at first, merely his restlessness and his ambition and his need to clarify – he used the word several times – what he might do now.
‘I have become interested in America itself, Father, its traditions and history and indeed its future.’
‘Yes, but that is a subject for all Americans, we all must devote time and energy to the study of our heritage,’ his father said.
‘ America is developing and changing,’ Henry said, ‘in ways which are unique and require a serious approach.’
He wondered if the word ‘serious’ had not been a mistake, if it had not suggested that his father’s approach to his chosen subject had been less than serious. His father was easily wounded, but his mind was too busy now, and his bustling confidence too complete to take offence. Henry watched him pondering the full implications of the last remark and then noticed his eyes become steely, his expression hard. He loved how his father could change like this and regretted that it occurred so seldom. He did not look at his mother.
‘What is it you wish to do then?’ his father asked.
In that moment Henry senior appeared and sounded like someone powerful, a man with a large private income at his disposal and a high puritan sternness. This, he thought, was how his father’s own father must have been when plans and money were being discussed.
‘I do not wish to become an historian,’ Henry said. ‘I want to study something with a more specific application. In short, sir, I wanted to discuss with you whether I should study law.’
‘And keep us all out of jail?’ his father asked.
‘Do you wish to join your brother at Harvard?’ his mother asked.
‘William said it is the best law school in America.’
‘William would not even know how to break a law,’ his father said.
The idea of a changing legal system as part of a changing America, however, began to interest his father the more he spoke on the subject. When he had expounded on it at some length, he seemed to abandon whatever worries he had about the narrowness of the subject and indeed the confining nature of decisions themselves. The fact that his two eldest sons would spend their time, at his expense, in libraries while a war for the very survival of American values of freedom and individual rights raged outside, may have occurred to him, but, in Henry’s presence, he did not let it cloud his new enthusiasm, and his wife, with her mild silence and her smile, also indicated her approval that he should attend Harvard to study law.
NOW HENRY had the summer free from his father’s nervous, watchful eyes and his mother’s ministrations. His case had been put to rest. His parents could occupy themselves worrying about Wilky and Bob and Alice. Henry could savour the stifling heat of his bedroom; he could work with freedom; he could read whatever he liked without the foreboding that his father would at any moment and without warning appear at his bedroom door and tell him that there was a war on, his country needed him, it was time to submit to army discipline, to wear a uniform and sleep in barracks and march in file.
In the days after his father agreed that he could go to law school, Henry discovered Hawthorne. He knew his name, of course, as he knew Emerson and Thoreau, and he had glanced at some of his stories, paying him less attention than the two essayists because of a perceived level of dullness and bareness in the work he had read. They were simple moral tales about simple moral people, light and slight and tenderly trivial. Both Henry and Sargy Perry, with whom Henry discussed these matters, had agreed that literature at its most valuable and rich and intense was written in the countries which Napoleon had reigned over and attacked; literature lay in the places where Roman coins could be found in the soil. Hawthorne ’s Twice Told Tales reminded him and Perry of just that, tales which could have been told by their aunt about her aunt with all the social detail and sensuous landscape absent.
This would be the fate, they felt, of anyone who tried to write about New England lives, they would have to confront the thinness of the social air, the absence of a system of manners and the presence of a stultifying system of morals. All of this, he thought, would make any novelist miserable. There was no sovereign or court, no aristocracy, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, nor castles, nor manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches; no literature, nor novels, no museums nor pictures, no political society, nor sporting class. If these things are left out, he thought, for the novelist everything is left out. There is no flavour, no life to dramatize, merely paucity of feeling represented in paucity of tradition. Trollope and Balzac, Zola and Dickens would, he felt, have become bitter old preachers, or mad hairy schoolmasters had they been born in New England and condemned to live amongst its people.
Henry was thus surprised when Perry spoke with awe of The Scarlet Letter, which he had just finished reading. Perry insisted that Henry must read it immediately, and seemed disappointed a few days later when Henry still had not begun the book. Henry had, in fact, tried the opening pages and found them almost laughably ponderous, and then had been easily distracted by something else and left the novel aside. Now, trying once more, he believed that the semi-comic tone of the opening, with its talk of prisons and cemeteries and sweet moral blossoms, arose from the lack of a proper background, a varied social world. Hawthorne had replaced artistry with solemnity. This was, he thought, a puritan virtue, of which Henry’s grandfather, he was told, had been in full possession. He did not mind, he told Perry, reading about puritans, and he did not even mind having ancestors who embodied their virtues, but he did object somewhat to a book in which they and their virtues, if you could really call them that, had seeped into the tone, the very architecture of the work itself.
On Perry’s insistence, he kept the book close to him for several days as he busied himself with Mérimée’s stories, which he was attempting to translate, and a play by Alfred de Musset that had begun to fascinate him. Beside these, the lack of colour in Hawthorne ’s observations, the thinness of his characters and the slow, wooden tone in which he began did not entice Henry to spend more time with the book. He was thus thoroughly unprepared, when he embarked yet again upon its early pages, for what was to follow.
The book’s assault on his senses did not occur immediately, and even as its spell began to work on him he was unaware that he was being pulled in and held. He could not tell at what moment The Scarlet Letter started to glow and take on the same power as one of the novels by Balzac which he had been reading. At intervals, once he had supped with his family and the night wore on, he put the book down, amazed at how Hawthorne had not bothered himself with the daily, petty meanness of New England, the comic idiosyncrasies of speech or deportment or behaviour. Hawthorne had avoided whimsy; he had eschewed pettiness. He had even kept choice and chance at arm’s length and had gone instead for intensity, taking a single character, a single action, a single place, a single set of beliefs and a single development and surrounding them with a dark and symbolic forest, a great dense place of sin and temptation. Hawthorne had not observed life, Henry thought, as much as imagined it, found a set of symbols and images which would set life in motion. From the very sparseness of the material, from the narrowness and frigidity of the society itself, from the very sense of undeveloped relations and uniform, colourless belief, Hawthorne had taken advantage of what was missing in New England and pressed on with a gnarled and unrelenting vision to create a story that now gripped its reader all through that summer’s night.
Most of the books he read could not be discussed with anyone save Perry, or perhaps William, but now at table the next day he could ask his family about Hawthorne. Suddenly, his father became animated. Why, only six months earlier, he had met the novelist in question. When he travelled up to Boston for a meeting of the Saturday Morning Club, to which he had been specially invited, he found Hawthorne among the company. Some of the meeting was unsatisfactory, his father said, because Frederic Hedge could not stop chattering, and chattering high nonsense most of the time, so that it was difficult to hear what Hawthorne had to say. Not that he said much, he was very shy, but more than that, he was rustic and mannerless; he might have been happier saving the hay or walking on forest tracks. The main thing about him, Henry’s father remembered, was that, once the food came, he took no interest in anything else; he buried his eyes in the plate and ate with such voracity that no person dared to ask him a question.
Aunt Kate said that years before in Boston she had known one of Hawthorne ’s sisters, who was a pleasant lady, all the more pleasant for being extremely limited. The sister had told her that her brother’s marriage had crowned him, that up to then he had been a recluse, forcing his family to leave his meals outside the locked door of his room. He did not go out during the day, Aunt Kate said, and did not see the sun save through the small window in his room. He seldom chose to walk in Salem, where he lived, except at night. In the dusky hours, she said, his sister had told her that the novelist took walks of many miles along the coast, or else wandered about the sleeping streets of Salem. These were his pastimes, she said, and these were apparently his most intimate occasions of contact with life. And, Aunt Kate added ominously, his sister told her that Nathaniel had never made a single penny from all his work as a writer.
Henry senior then asked Wilky and Bob for their view, since they had both studied at Sanborn with Julian, the novelist’s son. Even Wilky, who was seldom at a loss, could think of nothing to say except that Julian was a very fine fellow. Bob told the table that he had believed until this moment that the elder Hawthorne was a minister. He thought only women wrote stories.
Henry’s mother had not spoken until now. She interrupted the general laughter to say that she had known all of the Hawthorne sisters and that they had told her of an injury Nathaniel received while playing ball which had caused him much pain and difficulty over several years so that he was confined to bed. It was, apparently, this very confinement, she said drily, which led to his becoming a writer.
Having sought out Perry to discuss the book with him and to tell him what he had gathered about its author, Henry discovered that Perry knew more, that Nathaniel Hawthorne had recently travelled much in Europe, especially in England and Italy, that he was not, as Henry’s father had supposed, a country bumpkin, but a serious artist, well read, well travelled, possibly one of the most sophisticated minds in America. Over the rest of the summer, as Henry and Perry prepared to enter Harvard, they read and re-read all of Hawthorne ’s books and met most days to share their impressions.
THE WAR, that first summer, seemed oddly distant. Even the proximity of a field hospital at Portsmouth Grove did not bring the conflict any closer. They could, they were told, visit the convalescing soldiers, the invalid troops lying under canvas or in roughly improvized shanties, as onlookers, tourists almost. With Perry, Henry went over in the steamboat, unsure what he would say, or how he would avert his eyes from wounds or missing limbs. On arrival at the camp he noticed the silence at first; he and Perry were unsure whom to approach or if they needed to ask permission to do so. As no one came towards them, they spoke briefly to an unshaven soldier sitting in his underwear on a log outside a tent. His voice was soft, but his tone quite indifferent, and his eyes were drained of all energy. He was content to offer no detailed information, merely that the two visitors were free to speak to anyone or to go anywhere they wished. At the end of the exchange, when they were at a loss to know how to take their leave, Perry gave the soldier a coin which the man hastily put away, looking around him to check if he had been observed.
The sick soldiers lay inert, half dead, watching the two young men from Newport from the sides of their eyes. What struck Henry first was how young most of them seemed, so soft and raw. As he and Perry separated and each moved alone among the soldiers, he felt a great tenderness for them and a desperate urge to console them. He had expected open wounds and blood and bandages, but what he found instead much of the time were fevers and infections. He went where he thought he could, where a pair of eyes had fixed on him and seemed receptive, where a figure seemed not too fevered to be unreachable and not too hostile. He was careful not to say too much at the beginning in case his voice or his tone, added to his general bearing and his clothes, might appear offensively opulent, but soon it became clear that this did not seem to matter, that, if anything, it added to the shy guarded welcome he received from each of the soldiers he visited.
One of these, he discovered, was younger than he was, a blond youth with clear blue eyes totally devoid of fear or fright. He asked the boy politely how he had been injured, then leaned in close to listen to his reply. The boy said nothing at first, shaking his head from side to side, but soon, as though he had been interrupted and was resuming a previous conversation, he began to speak about how he had not felt the bullet entering his leg, he had not felt it at all, he said, as though that alone were his problem. It was nothing more than a bite from a bug, he said, and it was only when he put his hand down and touched the place, that a terrible burning began.
He had hated the waiting, the boy said, the days sitting doing nothing, getting orders to march one way and then orders to march another way, with rumours all the time and nothing happening. And now, he said, the waiting was all over and he wished he were back waiting again.
Henry told the boy that he was sure he would get better, but the boy neither assented nor demurred. He had learned stoicism, Henry thought, which sat oddly with his youth. The agony had somehow entered into his spirit and rested there, unyielding. Henry wondered if the boy’s parents had been told of his missing limb, or if they knew where their son was. He thought of asking if he wanted a letter written or word sent, but he did not feel he could ask. It was obvious that if the infection did not clear he would have further surgery or he would die, and what Henry could not fathom as he tried to speak naturally and gently to the boy was his calm bravery, his whispering readiness for what was coming.
In the end, when he could think of nothing else, he offered the boy money, which the injured soldier quietly accepted, and he wrote his address at Newport down for him in case he was in need once he had recovered. The boy studied the writing and nodded, unsmiling. Henry did not think he could ask him if he was able to read.
He sat on a deckchair on the steamboat back to Newport that evening, he and Perry keeping apart as the creaking vessel paddled slowly home. While he watched the dwindling light and wallowed in the fading heat, he felt involved for once in an America from which he had kept himself apart. He had listened carefully but he had not known how to respond. He tried to imagine that young man’s life under the canvas, battling for survival, expecting the worst while hoping for home. He tried to conjure up the moment when the surgeon’s knife was solemnly unsheathed and the leg held down, and whatever available morphine and whisky were taken, and the arms were pinned back and the gag put into the mouth. He wanted to hold his young friend, help him now that the worst was over, take him home to his family to be looked after. But he also knew that, as much as he wanted to aid and console the soldier, he wanted to be alone in his room with the night coming down and a book close by and pen and paper and the knowledge that the door would remain shut until the morning came and he would not be disturbed. The gap between these two desires filled him with sadness and awe at the mystery of the self, the mystery of having a single consciousness, knowing merely its own bare feelings and experiencing singly and alone its own pain or fear or pleasure or complacency.
And suddenly now, on this return journey by steamboat in the warm evening, with the view of the soft and settling horizon, the realization of how deeply real and apart this self was came fiercely home to him; how intact and separate this self was once the knife was cutting ruthlessly into the flesh of someone else, into the fat and muscles, the tendons and nerves and blood vessels, the hard bone of another self, the someone in agony who was not you, the someone injured far from home under the canvas. He realized that his own separateness was complete, inviolate, just as the soldier could never know the comfort and privilege which came from being the son of Henry James senior, who had been kept away from the war.
IN SEPTEMBER 1862 his father travelled to Boston with Wilky and there he helped him and his friend Cabot Russell to join the Northern Army. Soon, having lied about his age, Bob James also joined. Wilky and Bob became the focus of all attention. Their most casual observations were treasured and often repeated; any scrap of news about either of the younger brothers was passed on without delay to the older ones.
In Cambridge Henry, after lodging with William for a brief stretch, found himself a small, square, low-browed room with deep window benches where he set about arranging his books with a highly refined system of classification. He walked the country roads around Cambridge and he studied with relish the solitary dwellings on the long grassy slopes under the tall elms; he imagined not only the life within, but how that life could be rendered, how it would be shaped and moulded were a young Hawthorne to pass by.
He joined his brother for meals at Miss Upsham’s at the corner of Kirkland and Oxford Streets, listening to every word uttered by the other diners, enjoying the protection of his voluble brother and not being called on to speak much himself. He loved the spare, dry, witty talk of the theology student; he listened with respect to old Professor Child, whose tone when the war was discussed was as sombre and darkly morbid as the many ballads he had collected.
During the lectures, Henry paid as much attention as he could to the subject in question, but mainly he examined his fellow students, studying the types, weighing the expressions from the dull and vaguely handsome to the memorable and remarkable. He sought to let his eyes do the thinking for him, deciphering the faces, the smiles and scowls, the ways of walking and moving, and transforming them into characters and temperaments. Most of his fellow students were New Englanders, and he could easily detect in their solemn faces during the lectures, in their lack of softness or easy humour, in the way they composed themselves and walked, that their ancestors had stood in pulpits and preached with fervour the difference between right and wrong, and that they had been brought up in homes where such principles were firmly established.
Now, as they sat through law lectures, a shadow hung over them, the shadow of the war for which they had not volunteered, a war never mentioned among them unless there was fresh and urgent news. They did not look like young men who would easily accept or give orders, or march in unison, or have their limbs amputated. They believed in the Union and the abolition of slavery as they believed in God, but they also believed in their own freedom and privilege. They knew that abolition was a noble cause, and they included it in their prayers; at the same time they took notes and read large tomes to prepare themselves for their future. Looking at them, Henry found, was easier than talking to them. In their physiognomies he saw a boyish rectitude guarding the rest of them like a great stone wall.
While Henry attended his lectures assiduously, he barely opened a book on the law. Instead, he read Sainte-Beuve, he wandered into Lowell ’s lectures on English and French literature, he listened to Emerson, when he came to Boston, attacking slavery. He went to the theatre. He steeped himself in whatever life Cambridge and Boston had to offer. The war was a faint sound which at intervals became louder and a few times piercingly close. One day in Harvard he had seen his cousin Gus Barker, clearly home on leave, in the distance but he had not run after him, believing that he would see him in the days that followed. But he did not see him and when Gus was shot dead in Virginia, he could not reconcile the memory of his cousin, his skin so white and his eyes so brimming with expectation, his body so full of coiled strength, with the idea that he had been broken and destroyed by a bullet, that he, so young and unready, had been wrenched asunder with pain, and left lying there as others passed by before he was buried in a distant place where no one knew him.
His mother, when she wrote telling him the news of Gus, said that she had also written to William. As Henry went to his next meal at Miss Upsham’s he did not know what he might say to William about their cousin, and he noticed as William came into the dining room a look of dark embarrassment crossing his face. He found himself shaking William’s hand, and this made the unease between them even worse. William nodded at him gravely. Neither of them could say anything. It was only when William told Professor Child that their cousin had been killed in Virginia by a sniper’s bullet that the spell was broken and Gus Barker’s death could be discussed.
‘All the doomed young men,’ Professor Child said, ‘all of them healthy and brave, and leaving those who loved them far behind, lying dead on the battlefield while the war goes on.’
Henry wondered if Professor Child was quoting from a ballad or if he was attempting to speak naturally. He noticed that William had tears in his eyes.
‘The best went to war,’ Professor Child said, ‘and the best were cut down.’
Sometimes, during these meals at Miss Upsham’s, Professor Child seemed on the verge of stating that those who remained at home, including his fellow diners at Miss Upsham’s, were cowards, but then he appeared to restrain himself.
In the months that followed neither William nor Henry ever mentioned the name of Gus Barker to each other. Each of them felt, Henry guessed, a guilt which they did not wish to admit to, or discuss.
WHEN HENRY went to visit Wilky at Readville he could not believe that this soft companion of his childhood should have mastered, by mere aid of his own gaiety and sociability, such mysteries and such hardships as the army offered. To become first a happy soldier and then an easy officer was, it seemed to Henry, for his younger brother an exercise in liking his fellow man. He later remembered his brother’s companions as laughing, welcoming and sunburnt youth, who, like his companions in law school, seemed to bristle with Boston genealogies, but, despite this, had taken to army life, displaying an openness, a joy in the outdoors and even a jokiness that belied their upbringing and background. The hospital camp at Portsmouth seemed very far away and, as he left that day to return to Harvard, he felt that a long war, or even a bloody one, was a distant prospect from the picture of golden order and good feeling that he had just witnessed.
His mother transcribed the parts of Wilky’s letters which she judged most informative or most edifying or most alarming and included them in her letters to Henry and William. In January Wilky wrote home about a malignant fever called malaria which was affecting both armies. ‘Two weeks ago,’ he wrote, ‘we buried two of our company in three days, and a great many have been taken sick with it.’ He managed to sound both impatient for action and impatient for home, but what Henry took from the letters more than anything was his brother’s idealism and belief in the rightness of his cause and his readiness to fight for it. Wilky wrote and his mother transcribed,
I am very well and in capital spirits, but now and then rather blue about home. If things don’t look more promising than they do now by the end of next May, I fear very much we shall not see home, for the government will I expect make an appeal to the 300,000 nine-months men to stay three months longer, that their services are really needed. What could they say to an appeal emanating from such a high place and for such a high cause. For myself, I am content to stay if the country needs it, but it would come hard I assure you.
Henry imagined his mother writing this out, having carefully selected it. He knew that she would have been in two minds about sending it as it suggested clearly where duty lay. She added nothing and Henry contented himself with the idea that she, as much as he or William, had engineered this state of affairs in which Wilky and Bob represented the James family in the war.
William and he did not communicate much with each other during these months, even though they ate at the same table three times a day. If a letter came from his mother which Henry thought that William should see, he handed it to him without comment; and William did the same. Both brothers were enjoying their solitude, the pleasures of introspection and intermittent company and freedom from parental interference and the noise of domestic life, but more than anything they were both wrapped up in their reading.
This was, on the other hand, an heroic time in Wilky’s life, which he would not experience again, and would not, indeed, recover from. He volunteered to serve under Colonel Shaw as an officer in the 54th Regiment. Its departure from Boston was a glorious occasion, which Henry James senior travelled specially to Boston to see, using the house of Oliver Wendell Holmes senior as a vantage point to view the parade, which would be for him a pivotal moment in the history of his family and the history of liberty in America.
William and Henry learned of the event from their mother. When her letter came informing them of their father’s arrival, it was clear that she presumed both brothers would wish to view for themselves Wilky’s brave triumph and personally to witness a singular conjoining of the family’s history with that of the country’s destiny. It seemed not to occur to her that they might not wish to attend.
William wrote, however, immediately to tell her that he had an important experiment to perform in the laboratory on that very day, that he would make every effort to be there, but should these efforts fail, then the event would have to take place without him.
Henry waited until the date came closer and then he wrote to his mother about his back, which was providing him with pain, and his need for rest and his hope that he would be much improved by 28 May, the date of the event, and, in fact, he promised to do his utmost to be there, but should his back continue to trouble him, or take a turn for the worse, then he would not be able to meet his father and accompany him to the house of Dr Holmes. He did not read it over before he sent it.
On the morning of 28 May Henry did not go to breakfast at Miss Upsham’s and, on arriving for lunch, found that William had arranged to absent himself from all meals that day. Professor Child and two of the others, all fanatical abolitionists, were preparing to attend the parade and presumed that William’s absence was due to his eagerness to see his brother, whose bravery in joining the 54th under Colonel Shaw they all admired. It struck Henry that they also presumed he had organized his own viewing of the regiment and, as he got ready to slip away, no one asked him where he was going.
As Henry lay on his bed, having returned quietly to his quarters, he felt that the stillness and the silence were more profound than usual, as if all noise had concentrated itself into the path of the parade and left him in this place on the undisturbed margins where there was no sound or action or movement. He stretched and walked over to the table and drummed his fingers lightly on its polished surface and relished the dullness, the faintness of the sound. He took down from his shelf a volume of Sainte-Beuve and flicked through it, but the feeling of being away from the heart of things was overwhelming now. He was suspended like a caught breath. It was almost exciting, but, more than that, as the afternoon wore on, he felt something approaching happiness, which did not resemble the happiness arising from work done, or from pure repose. Rather, he was in a room with a bed and books and a desk on a day when the outside air carried danger with it. When everyone else had fire in their blood, he was calm. So calm that he could neither read nor think, merely bask in the freedom that the afternoon offered, savour, as deeply as he could, this quiet and strange treachery, his own surreptitious withdrawal from the world.
THE HOUSEHOLD, when he returned to Newport, was in a constant state of expectation. The family barely noticed his arrival and did not pay any attention to his semi-exiled state. At meals nothing but Wilky and Bob and their comrades, many of whose names were known to the family, was discussed. Each letter was greeted with a fluttering cry from his mother and Aunt Kate and Alice but was preserved unopened to be handed first to Henry senior, who read it slowly and judiciously and quietly to himself before handing it over to his wife, who would read aloud the parts she deemed worthy of immediate release. Then it was given to Henry or William,if they were present,and then to Aunt Kate and Alice, who read it in unison. Henry senior would then peruse the letter again several times over, deeming some of Wilky’s correspondence worthy of reproduction in the Newport News, and he would set out alone, as briskly as he could and with much purpose, to hand over the missive to the editor.
It was a letter they received dated 18 July 1863 that told them Wilky was now entering his most testing time and that every day he would be in the most serious danger. The Newport News proudly printed it in full:
Dear Father, We are sailing down the Ediston River, on our way to the front. I have only time to say that we came out of the fight on the 16th with 47 killed and wounded. The regiment behaved nobly; and I would give my right arm to keep up the good name it has won. We are now on our way to Morris Island, the new attack on Fort Wagner commencing tomorrow at dawn. I hope and pray to God that the regiment will do as nobly there as it did at James Island.
All of them knew about Fort Wagner. It was, Henry senior told them gravely, the strongest single earthwork in the history of warfare. It would have to be taken, he said, but it could not be taken easily. Henry senior was greatly exercised at the wisdom of sending in the 54th, a regiment whose footsoldiers were mostly black, whose very appearance would provoke a fury among the Confederate soldiers. In the days afterwards, when they heard no news, he discussed this with the many anxious visitors who called to the James’s house and repeated everything he said to the next visitor and the next until he was sure that his attitude towards the battle was the correct one, indeed the only one worth having.
All they could do was wait. They knew that the battle had been a disaster and that Fort Wagner was still held by the confederate soldiers. They heard that the soldiers of the 54th had excelled themselves in bravery. And they heard that many of them were dead. But they knew nothing of Wilky. In the hot summer days and nights, so deeply associated with ease and happiness and pleasure, they did not sleep, their meals became enforced, awkward gatherings, and as time passed they understood that Wilky could not have walked away unscathed from the battle. He would have notified them by now. And so they waited in dread.
Henry thought of him buried with a pile of bodies, having no name to mark his resting place.
‘That would be the worst for your mother,’ Aunt Kate said to him, ‘thinking that he might have survived and thinking that he might come into the hall at any moment to surprise her. Your mother would never stop hoping.’
No one at any stage mentioned the threat, or rumour of a threat, that Jeff Davis had issued in a manifesto ordering the white officers of the 54th Massachusetts hanged if captured alive. When Aunt Kate found it in a newspaper, where Henry had already seen it, he watched her taking the paper into the kitchen and burning it in the stove.
In time, of course, they would discover the full horror of what happened at Fort Wagner, the ranks mowed down at almost every step, the bodies heaped high, the death of Colonel Shaw personally witnessed by Wilky, the death of his friend Cabot Russell, Wilky’s first wound in the side, and then the shock of a canister ball in the foot. As he lay injured he was noticed by two stretcher bearers who began to carry him to a temporary resting place for the wounded when a round shot blew off the head of the stretcher bearer to his rear. Wilky witnessed his instant and horrible death. The other stretcher bearer took to his heels. Wilky woke the morning of the following day inside the tents of the Sanitary Commission,nearly three miles away. After a while he was moved to Port Royal Hospital, which was not really a hospital, but a field full of the desperately injured and the dying, barely covered with a thin canvas, its patients offered only the slightest medical assistance. Wilky lay there half conscious, his wounds slowly becoming infected, with no way of contacting his family.
He was saved by a miracle. Cabot Russell’s father had travelled to South Carolina in search of his son, believing that he had been taken prisoner. Although he had been assured that his son had not survived the battle, he made a desperate, grief-stricken search in the tents where the wounded lay, and this was how he found Wilky, spotting him quite by chance among the injured soldiers. Immediately, he notified the James family by telegram and let them know that, while he would continue to look for his own son, he would also ensure that Wilky James was transported home. By the beginning of August, Mr Russell gave up his vain search in the chaos of South Carolina and accepted what he had originally been told – that his son was dead. He travelled by boat with Wilky on a stretcher as far as New York, Wilky’s infection worsening all the time, the canister ball which had lodged in his foot having to be removed on board. The other wound,close to Wilky’s spine,was even more severely infected but could not be touched.
When Wilky arrived in Newport, Mr Russell having travelled with him all the way, he was close to death. The stretcher was carried into the hallway, but the doctor ordered that it should be taken no further. The family gathered around him, relieved that the moment had come and he had been returned to them alive, but aware also that his time could be short, all of them sure that his survival was more important now than any other matter on the earth. Then they noticed the grieving face of Mr Russell, and Henry watched each of them as they tried not to sound too openly jubilant or too concerned about Wilky to the exclusion of all else in front of this broken father fresh from the battlefield where his son lay dead. In those first hours, as William took instructions from the doctor so that he could minister personally to his brother, and his parents held Wilky’s hand and kept visitors at bay, and his aunt and sister moved from the kitchen to the hallway with hot water and towels and fresh bandages, Henry studied Mr Russell, impressed by his grave and steady gentleness, and aware of the difference it would have made for him to be observing the patient with a still more intimate pity. Mr Russell remained quiet and tactful as he waited to depart; it was this very quietness and tact which eventually seeped into the atmosphere until the idea that this good, kind man was bereft of his only son and yet sat erect and dry-eyed at the guarded fact of the family’s relief made each one of them, as Henry saw it, move carefully and watchfully around him.
Less than a year earlier, Wilky and Cabot had lived in a state of complacent expectation, as if the stretch of earth they inhabited had been created and cleared especially for their freedom and happiness. In Boston and Newport and in the villages of New England, they were everywhere welcomed, their accents understood, their manners appreciated. In time their boyish openness would be tempered by experience, just as their handsomeness would ripen and their beliefs solidify. No one told them and no one warned their parents that they would be shot down before they were twenty. The New England which their grandparents and great-grandparents had created was not a place of violent death or battle roar or infected wounds, but of settlement, propriety, peace, righteousness. Henry knew, as he sat on a bench in the hallway close to Mr Russell, that their visitor’s shock came not only from the brutal disappearance from the earth of his golden son, but from the idea that a public pact, a version of the civic order as ordained by history, had been cruelly broken.
Wilky came home with no belongings. Even his uniform was rotting and had to be carefully removed. The blanket that covered him was thrown aside and left in a corner of the hallway. It was a few days before Henry, doing vigil over his brother, noticed it and carried it to the kitchen. As he unfolded it there, the smell was overwhelming,but so fiercely redolent of what Wilky’s suffering in the battlefield must have been like that he could not easily cast it aside. It smelled of tobacco, and it smelled of the strange mixture of rot and human sweat which Wilky’s uniform had reeked of. But more than anything, it smelled of the earth itself, the earth of mud and muck and of war, the earth which had been stormed by regiments and disturbed by grave diggers, the foetid earth. He found a place for the blanket in a shed behind the kitchen and went back to the hallway, but the smell remained with him. It was the most vivid testament to what his brother had been through.
THE HOUSE lived on the ebb and flow of Wilky’s pain. Henry realized that he had paid such close attention to Mr Russell on that first day because he would have done anything to avoid having to look at his brother and contemplate his future. Once Mr Russell had left, he had no choice but to take in the scene in all its horror. Wilky’s hair was matted and his body limp and sweaty. Wilky did not seem to sleep; he lay on his side, constantly moaning and as the pain intensified crying out suddenly. Sometimes the cries turned into shrieks and they filled the house. Henry believed that his brother was going to die.
Over breakfast on the third morning, his mother said that all of them, in whatever way they could, should try to share Wilky’s pain, take some of it from him and live with it themselves. Everyone in this house, she said, as her husband nodded, should dedicate themselves to taking the pain from Wilky and suffering a small part of it in their own bodies. When Henry looked at William, he discovered that his brother was nodding too, as though something eminently wise and practical had been said. When Henry went back to his room, he lay on the bed and concentrated on the infected wound in Wilky’s side which the doctors had cut open but which had not been cleared of infection. No amount of wishing, he thought, could do anything to alleviate his brother’s suffering. He went down to the hallway and sat close to Wilky who was groaning softly. He moved closer to him – as his Aunt Kate, who was already there, smiled at him – and held Wilky’s hand for a moment, but since this seemed to cause him pain he withdrew it. He wished that his brother could smile as he had always smiled, but his drawn face now appeared as though it would never smile again. It would wince and wrinkle up in distress rather than open in warm recognition. Henry and his Aunt Kate sat there with Wilky silently until his mother came and without speaking took her sister’s place on the bench beside the stretcher.
The family kept the gravity of Wilky’s state from Bob,and only when the patient began to improve did they tell Bob the truth about him. Bob managed to send them a private letter expressing his opinion and that of many others about the assault on Fort Wagner – that large matters of strategy were overlooked. The slain, he said, were monuments to folly. Bob’s letter did not please his parents; it lacked idealism and optimism. Bob, it became clear from other letters, was bored. He had suffered from sunstroke and dysentery and lack of respect for his superiors. His letters were read only by the immediate family, his mother expressing her disapproval by leaving some of the letters unread, allowing her husband to read her the more uplifting extracts, if he could find them.
As Wilky’s wounds began to heal, his nightmares started. He cried out as though the heat of battle or the mayhem of retreat were upon him. Each one of the family took turns to stay with him at night once he was well enough to be moved to his room, but no one knew how to restore order to his sleep, make him believe that he was not being attacked and shot at and his friends and comrades killed all around him. His nightmares stopped only when all the thrashing and frantic movement in the dreams caused him to wake. It was the pain that brought him back to his senses.
Often the day was no better as the memory of what he had seen and felt became a waking nightmare for Wilky. His father remained optimistic, certain of his recovery, and certain also that the dead of the war would now experience an eternal morning, an unimagined happiness. Even Wilky’s pain, he said, had united the family and could only lead Wilky to great spiritual distinction in the future.
Henry sat in the bedroom one day as Wilky, now able haltingly to speak, asked their father to preach a sermon. Wilky’s voice was weak, but his eyes were eager and he watched his father with an innocent hunger as Henry senior began, explaining that each mortal, the healthy and the rich, as much as the sick and the wounded, was equally dependent on the Divine hand, and our best interest lay in becoming as innocently ready to follow him as sheep. He continued until Wilky, at first falteringly, but then louder and with tears in his eyes, interrupted.
‘Ah Father, it is easy preaching faith in God’s care,’ he said, ‘but it was hard, where I have been, to practise it.’
Henry senior was silent. They watched Wilky gasping for breath, trying to speak more. His father turned to Henry as though to ask if his second son would know whether he should go on with the sermon or wait to see if Wilky had more to say. Henry did not respond, but soon Wilky’s voice found the strength to continue and he left them in no doubt that he did not wish to be preached to any more, even if it was he who had originally requested it.
‘I woke up lying in the sand under my tent, and slowly recalled much that had happened, my wounds, my fall, the two men that tried to drag me to the hospital tent, the fall of one of them, my feeble crawling to the ambulance. I woke up to find myself forgotten, and sick and faint for loss of blood. As I lay wondering whether I should ever see home again, I saw a poor Ohio man with his jaw shot away who found, I suppose, that I was near to him and unable to stand, he crept over and deluged me with his blood. At that I felt…’
Wilky covered his face with his hands and began to cry uncontrollably, but he could shape no more words. His crying grew louder, more hysterical, until he shook in the bed, his father and his brother watching him helplessly. Once his mother came, she held him and calmed him and spoke softly to all three of them.
‘When Wilky was a baby,’ she said when Wilky had finally fallen asleep, ‘and in his crib, he always seemed to be smiling. I tried to find out if he was smiling all the time, or if he heard me coming and began to smile only then. But I never could find out. That’s what I’d like now, that’s what I’m waiting for – that he will start to smile again.’
WILLIAM RETURNED to Harvard that September to continue his studies, but Henry did not follow him. His parents remained preoccupied with Wilky but were much relieved when, on a further assault on Fort Wagner which, fortunately, had been evacuated just before the attack, Bob survived unscathed.
Henry remained in his room as Wilky recovered and Bob stayed with his regiment. His mother’s response to his seclusion and his silence became sweeter once Wilky began to declare that he wished to return to the army as soon as he himself rather than his doctors felt that he could. His mother at mealtimes talked a great deal about the sacrifice and bravery of her two younger sons, but her tone was bitter rather than proud.
‘They have both seen things which no one of their age should see. They have both witnessed horrors and felt horrors, and I do not know now how they will ever settle down without being haunted by sights that none of us will ever be able to imagine. I wish they hadn’t joined. That’s all I can say. And I wish the war had never started.’
Aunt Kate nodded, but Henry senior stared passively and vaguely into the distance, as though his wife had made some mild observation. As soon as each meal was over, Henry returned to his room. His mother began, once more, to worry about his back, bringing him cushions and making him lie down rather than sit when he was reading.
He did not know what to tell them when his first story, written in the French style about an adulterous woman, was accepted by the Continental Monthly in New York. It would be published anonymously, so he knew that he could keep the news from them if he wished. He waited for a day or two, but then, on finding his father in the library alone, he decided to reveal his secret. Within an hour his father had read the story and expressed his disapproval of its contents, less than uplifting, he thought, and dramatizing the baser motives. Then his father wrote to William, who sent Henry a note mocking him and wondering how he came by his knowledge of adulterous French ladies. Finally, his father moved around Newport spreading the news of his son who was about to publish a story in the French style.
WILKY WENT back to his regiment, but was judged too unwell to continue, and so he returned home once more, determined on improving so that he could see the war out and be there for the victory. Nothing dimmed his enthusiasm. It became Henry’s habit, in this interlude as Wilky waited to rejoin his regiment, to sit with him silently reading while Wilky dozed or lay still without speaking. One night as he quietly prepared to return to his own room, leaving Wilky peaceful, he was confronted in the corridor by his Aunt Kate. She whispered to Henry that she had left some sweet-cake and some milk for him in the kitchen. Just as he was about to tell her that he did not want any cake or milk, he noticed her face darkening and her brow furrowing, and he understood that she wanted him to follow her to the kitchen.
On tiptoe the two of them moved down through the house. In the kitchen, she began to whisper something about Wilky’s recovery until she closed the door and then could talk out loud.
‘He’s mad to go back to the war,’ she said. ‘As though he didn’t have enough injuries, enough suffering.’
‘He remains idealistic about the cause,’ Henry said.
Aunt Kate pursed her lips disapprovingly.
‘He’ll never settle now, once this war is over. He is like all of the Jameses, except for you,’ she went on. ‘Headstrong, full of foolish enthusiasm.’
She studied his face to see if she had gone too far, but he smiled at her, amused, signalling that she could say more if she wished.
‘They were all the same, your father’s family. If they had one drink, then they had thousands of drinks. One night’s gambling led to them losing every penny. One page of theology and then…’ She stopped and shook her head and sighed.
‘And half of them died young, you know, leaving your cousins orphans, the Temple girls and poor Gus Barker. Of course, the old father, old William James of Albany, was as rich at that time as Mr Astor, but the Astors were all good at business, level-headed people, and the Jameses, once the father was dead, were good at gambling and drinking and dying young and running headlong towards foolish causes. Every time I listen to Wilky talking about going back to fight, I see the Jameses writ large, always ready to do something foolish. And William wanting to be a painter one day and a doctor the next. You’re the only one who takes after our side of the family, you’re the only solid one.’
‘But I studied law last year and changed my mind,’ Henry said.
‘You had no enthusiasm for the law. You did it to get away from here and with all the war madness going on, you were right. If you had stayed, they’d have joined you up and you would be limping around here with half of you amputated.’
Her voice was harsh now, and her eyes sharp, almost wild. In the dim lamplight she resembled a drawing of an old woman, both wise and mad. She stopped speaking and let her mouth and jaw settle. She watched him, waiting for a response. When he did not speak, she began again.
‘You’re the consistent one, the one who’ll know how to mind himself. At least we have you.’
BY THE TIME his son’s first story had appeared in print, Henry senior had grown restless once more and decided, he said, to move his family definitively to Boston. Henry was happy to leave Newport. He kept his stories secret now, letting his family see only the reviews he was writing for the periodicals – the Atlantic Monthly, the North American Review, the Nation. Without any of them knowing, he worked slowly and carefully every day on the story of a boy who goes to war, leaving his mother and his swee heart behind. When he began he was involved in a pure and artful invention, as though he were writing a ballad which Professor Child might collect. He established the difficult, proud and ambitious mother; John, her courageous and light-hearted son; and Lizzie, the sweetheart, innocent and pretty and flirtatious. He created each scene with deliberation, reading over each morning what he had written the previous day, constantly erasing and adding. He tried to work quickly so that there would be speed and flow to the narrative and, on one of these days, in the family’s new rented quarters on Beacon Hill, something occurred to him which shocked him but did not cause him to stop.
‘On the fourth evening, at twilight, John Ford,’ he wrote, ‘was borne up to the door on his stretcher, with his mother stalking beside him in rigid grief, and kind, silent friends pressing about with helping hands.’
John was too ill to be moved, and his injuries were too severe for him to be visited by his sweetheart Lizzie. As he wrote, Henry felt that he was closest to what concerned him in his waking life and most of his dreams: the fate of his injured brother. His father could not blame him for immorality nor William mock him for writing about a world he did not know. Suddenly an image came to him and he held his breath for worry that he might lose it: ‘When Lizzie was turned from John’s door, she took a covering from a heap of draperies that had been hurriedly tossed down in the hall: it was an old army blanket. She wrapped it round her and went out onto the veranda.’
He wanted to go into the shed behind the pantry and look for the blanket he had taken from Wilky, but then he remembered that they were in Boston now and not Newport and that the blanket would surely have been thrown out or left there in the move. He began to summon up the smell of the blanket, its aura of the battlefield and the army: ‘A strange earthy smell lingered in that faded old rug, and with it a faint perfume of tobacco. Instantly, the young girl’s senses were transported as they had never been before to those far-off Southern battlefields. She saw men lying in swamps and puffing their kindly pipes, drawing their blankets closer, canopied with the same luminous dusk that shone down upon her comfortable weakness. Her mind wandered amid these scenes…’
The feeling of power was new to him. This raid on his own memories, this parading of an object so close to him, so deeply part of his own personal store that no one might ever know where this moment in his story came from, made him believe that he had done something daring and original.
ТЕЛЕГРАМКанал с обзорами, анонсами новинок и книжными подборками
Книжный Вестник
Бот для удобного поиска книг (если не нашлось на сайте)
Поиск книг
Свежие любовные романы в удобных форматах
Любовные романы
О психологии, саморазвитии и личностном росте
Саморазвитие
Детективы и триллеры, все новинки
Детективы
Фантастика и фэнтези, все новинки
Фантастика
Отборные классические книги
Классика
ВКОНТАКТЕБиблиотека с любовными романами, которая наверняка придётся по вкусу женской части аудитории
Любовные романы
Библиотека с фантастикой и фэнтези, а также смежных жанров
Фантастика
Самые популярные книги в формате фб2
Топ фб2
книги