Wm & H'ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters Between Wiliam and Henry James by J. C. Hallman

sense. Rather, they worked by helping H’ry express his
    “subject all directly and intensely.” In other words, his 101
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    ghosts were like his girls: they were symbols, figures,
    figments of the humanity that they spookily and por-
    tentously reflected.
    All this seems to have been lost on Wm, who, like
    those female readers prone to projecting themselves
    onto Daisy Miller or Milly Theale, was apt to think-
    ing of literal inspiration. Throughout the letters Wm
    attempts to feed H’ry names and plots. He believed
    he recognized himself in The American ’s “morbid little clergyman,” and he once offered up his wife as a possible character. No experience Wm ever had, however,
    was richer in potential material, he thought, than a
    particular night involving his psychical confrere Fred-
    eric Myers.
    About six months before Wm subjected himself to
    magnetic tortures, he and Alice stayed for a time in
    Carquerieanne, a resort town on the southern tip of
    France. They were accompanied by Myers; his wife,
    Silvia; and a “Mrs. Thompson,” a medium whom My-
    ers held forth as proof of a world beyond the knowable
    universe. Myers’s relationship with Mrs. Thompson
    was mysterious, even to his wife, and late one night
    the heated threesome burst in on Wm and Alice’s late-
    burning fire. Could they arbitrate a dispute? Wm and
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    Alice cowrote an account of the incident for H’ry—the
    ensuing scene was ripe with lies, suggestions, and ad-
    umbrations—and the great tragedy of it, once every-
    one had returned to their rooms, was that H’ry had not
    been there to be impressed by it. It was just up H’ry’s
    line of “grotesque humors,” Wm fretted, strutting up
    and down the room, both for its three main players,
    and for Frederic and Silvia Myers’s two young children.
    “A queer pair,” Wm noted, “reminding me irresistibly
    of the two in the turn of the screw.”
    H’ry was interested in the story for its gossip value—
    “You must give me details when we meet—they will
    be very interesting”—but did he think the scene might
    make for a good tale? Probably not. H’ry would have
    disagreed with Woolf that his ghost stories were his
    best work (he derided even The Turn of the Screw as a
    “potboiler”), and the moments from Wm’s letters that
    inspired him most were not the suggestions of drama-
    laden plots, but the quiet intervals that Wm sometimes
    took care to describe, moments full of atmosphere
    and details that communicated mood and sensibility.
    As well, H’ry’s imagination by then must have already
    been burbling on The Wings of the Dove , even though he wouldn’t sign a contract for the book for another
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    few months. Written notably in the same time period
    when Wm was completing The Varieties of Religious
    Experience , The Wings of the Dove combines H’ry’s most ambitious impulses as a writer with an attempt to take
    on a story with a matter large enough for Wm’s taste.
    He completed it in the light of one final glimpse into
    the rift that separated him from his brother.

.18.
    In Carquerianne, at a quieter moment, Wm and Fred-
    eric Myers sat together with Mrs. Thompson and asked
    her what the future held. She predicted that Wm would
    soon recover from his various illnesses, and that Myers
    would be dead within two years. The men laughed, as
    the reverse seemed much more likely. Mrs. Thompson
    was wrong, but only in that her view of Myers’s demise
    was shortsighted. He was dead in ten months.
    On January 1, 101, Wm dictated a letter describing
    Myers’s death vigil in Rome. Myers had been struck by
    double pneumonia, and Wm had prescribed morphia
    when it became clear how far the disease had advanced.
    The death rattle had begun that morning. Myers had
    asked to be read to, and was read to. Now, it was