BIOGRAPHY: Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James,By Susan E Gunter, University of Nebraska Press, 422pp, $50
'I AM IN love, und zwar(forgive me) with Yourself." So William James wrote to Alice Gibbens from an Adirondack camp in 1876. The voices, interpolations, and shifts in register added by punctuation, capitalisation, and the German phrase turn this simple declaration of love into a slightly frightening riddle.
The philosopher then required Miss Gibbens to put any perceived obstacles to their union into statements. He would prove himself by disproving them.
What objection could she have? He was 34, she was 27, late in the day to be single. They both lived in Cambridge. She was a schoolteacher and participant in the Radical Club, a free-thinking debate society. Her father was long dead. His father was the son of one of the wealthiest landowners in New York State. He had made it his mission to give his children free range of European civilisation and early encounters with great men. Two of his sons were not yet, but certainly would become unquestionably great themselves, Henry as a novelist, and William as the finest American philosopher after his father’s friend Ralph Waldo Emerson.
This biography reveals a secret Alice Gibbens may well have wished to keep; it could have been a real obstacle to their union. At the end of the civil war, her father – a doctor, long separated from her mother, due to a drink-and-drugs habit – went to Dixie on government service. His superior was arrested and charged with accepting $25,000 in bribes. Called to testify, Dr Gibbens cut his throat with his shaving razor. The sum of $24,000 was found in the dead man’s bank account, inexplicable except as the extorted sum. The money was delivered to his widow. She left with her legacy and three daughters for three years in Germany.
They then settled in Cambridge, as a cultivated, well-off family of eligible women. The daughters all married professors.
The keynote of the mind of William James, as his brother noted, was that no door in it was ever finally closed; every conclusion was open to the challenge of further experience. That is a great quality in a thinker, but sometimes a shortcoming in a companion. On the point of any departure, he could never decide where to go, when, with whom, or for how long. After leaving, he had second thoughts. In the case of his marriage proposal, he could not even take yes for an answer.
Marrying him would be a fatal choice, he warned. She should only undertake it if she felt it was “spiritually laid upon her as a tragic duty to do so”. She must willingly bury herself that he might be. Did she really wish to be the nurse of his genius?
All this was okay by her. No, he could not allow her to accept his proposal; his nerves were too diseased. But in the end he concluded that he really, really needed “the corroboration of the woman he respects”. Her time of metaphysical testing lasted two years. She was up to 180lbs, and he was down to 140, when they rather suddenly tied the knot that was never to be untied. Then one “would make the other, by being itself other”, an excellent axiom about true marriage.
Their union was “fully embodied”, as Susan Gunter puts it. He liked to “nestle and vegetate” by her “sulphurous” side. She was pregnant six times, had five children, one of whom died in infancy from whooping cough.
William James kept up his contacts with the great cities and minds of Europe, by means of long visits abroad, from half a year to four years in length. At first he went alone, and that was bad for Alice. Then he brought the whole family, and that was bad for William. “We are primarily a nursery, with adults attached,” he sourly noted, and he did not feel that was his true vocation to be an appendage to a nursery. So the next time, he brought Alice and left the children at home with servants and in-laws, or placed them in boarding schools. That was not always so good for them. When Alice returned to Cambridge, her six-year old boy had grown into a 10-year-old who no longer knew her.
She was a great wife in the 19th-century style. She made William James twice the man he would otherwise have been, and was a vital support for his brother Henry too. Her reward is that the two men capture her in luminous sentence after sentence. Otherwise Alice Gibbens surely would have joined the ranks of the anonymous and eternally forgotten dead. Here is one from Henry James: “her voice, which lays down the law, communicating valuable information and advice to all, in a steady stream, is like clarified butter”. Her opinions were not particularly warm and buttery. William often chuckled at the extent to which his wife detested Irish people (her own ancestors, like his, were Irish Protestants), along with Catholics, Jews, and feminists.
But he was inspired by her beliefs in God and the afterlife. He could not believe himself, and disproved certain metaphysical claims, but concluded that there must be, or at least might well be, something behind it all. In his great The Varieties of Religious Experiencehe represented belief as an essential cause of human goodness, crucial to the ongoing improvement of life on earth. He had seen it to be so in his own wife, Alice Gibbens James.
At the end, she patiently saw William out of life, and obeyed his dying wish that she do the same for Henry. In 1915 she picked up sticks and moved to Lamb House, Rye, England, to organise the final months of the great novelist. In delirium, he believed himself to be Napoleon. In one scribbled message, Henry James offered Alice a great place in a minor capital of the French Republic. She deserved one.
Adrian Frazier is the director of the MA in writing and the MA in drama and theatre studies at NUI Galway
