Skip to main content

Four Sons, One Daughter

Image result for Alice James

The James household of the 1850s consisted of a patriarch and matriarch, four sons, and one daughter.  Let's run through the scorecard this morning.

The patriarch was Henry James Sr., a graduate from Union College, a drop-out from Princeton Theological Seminary, and a participant at what seemed an earth-shaking movement at the time, but what has been nearly forgotten since -- Swedenborgian mysticism.

The matriarch was Mary Robertson James, nee Walsh, Irish on her father's side, Scottish on her mother's, introduced to her future husband by her brother, when both of the young men were students together at Princeton. In long talks Henry persuaded her first that the Bible doesn't require the office of Minister (he was talking himself into leaving the seminary), and then that she should marry him -- in a civil ceremony, of course. (The officiant at the wedding was the Mayor of NYC himself, Isaac Varian.)
Their oldest child was William James, who of course is the inspiration for this blog, and of whom for the remainder of this post we'll say no more;
Then there was Henry James Jr., an author of novels and short stories who examined the literary possibilities of trans-Atlantic irony, and in 1913 would write of this family unit, "the blest group of us [were] such a company of characters and such a picture of differences, and withal so fused and united and interlocked, that each of us ... pleads for preservation." 
Then there was Garth Wilkinson James, who once confessed that he felt like a “foundling” in the shadow of his two genius older brothers. Garth enlisted in the Union Army in the US Civil War, served heroically, suffered wounds that were nearly fatal, and drank himself to death after the war.
And what about Bob? Robertson James, also enlisted, served honorably but without Garth’s trauma, and after the war became one of the so-called “carpetbaggers,” i.e. one of the white northern folks moving into the south to make their entrepreneurial fortune. The move was often associated (as it was in Bob’s case) with the related goal of hiring the newly freed blacks of the south and proving that a wage system works better than slavery. Bob’s efforts in this regard (on Florida farm land) did not pan out. But he, unlike the family’s other veteran, Garth, lived a long life, much of it in comfortable circumstances since Bob was wise enough to marry well.
Finally (in chronological order only!) we come to Alice James, pictured above, a diarist and a keen observer of society who has in recent years become something of a feminist heroine. She seems to have had serious life long health problems that were ignored because in that day they could be written off as “hysteria,” just what happens when a woman over-extends her energies. 
That is the thumbnail precis for five great stories. Or seven. Or, as the novelist's words might suggest, one. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak