In The Master, one family member does not simply manipulate a second; rather, the clan is an interwoven network, sensitive to any vibration and constantly reacting to
protect the stability of the whole. In the context of an alcoholic family, Mary’s manipulations and Henry’s masochism would not be personal idiosyncrasies – James family members would be responding with predictable coping mechanisms to the uncertainty and shame of living with alcoholics.
Paul Fisher’s biography House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (2008) is explicit about the role of alcoholism in Henry James’s life: “Henry Senior lived for nearly three decades as an alcoholic… At least one of his sons had a severe drinking problem, and all of his offspring developed coping mechanisms and character traits common to children of alcoholics.”188 Howard M. Feinstein’s biography Becoming William James and Carol Holly’s study Intensely Family: The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James both consider directly the formative
impact of growing up in an alcoholic home.189 Scholars that address this issue face the
challenge of avoiding anachronism, for alcohol was subject to changing standards and terminology over the course of James’s lifetime, which witnessed a great shift in the American attitude toward drinking. Today, terminologies of twelve-step recovery programs, addiction counseling or family-systems therapy describe alcoholism and the non-drinker’s behaviors that surround it, but this language was unavailable to James. In his lifetime the discussion was likely to borrow its language from morality or religion, the word “alcoholism” was only just entering popular usage, and the medical view was just emerging.
According to William A. White, the term “alcoholism” was coined in 1849, and referred to “chronic alcohol intoxication that was characterized by severe physical
pathology and disruption of social functioning.”190 The term did not exist earlier because
heavy drinking was the early-nineteenth-century norm. Daily drinking was woven into the culture, and many believed that hard liquor offered health benefits like strengthening the constitution, aiding digestion and helping with sleep. The work day and domestic routine revolved around periodic alcohol consumption: an average American might drink a glass of spirits with breakfast, stop work mid-morning and mid-afternoon to take a drink, have a cup after dinner and another nightcap before bed. The word “alcoholism” did not yet exist, but the word “eleveners” was in heavy rotation, describing the daily morning break when workers in shops and on farms would stop for a swig of hard
liquor.191 Though daily drinking was a predominantly male activity it was not necessarily
age dependent, and even young boys often participated. Public conceptions of drinking began to swing in the other direction in the 1830s and 1840s, which saw the rise of movements calling first for the prohibition of distilled liquor and then of all alcoholic beverages. Temperance movements emerged as parts of larger agendas such as religious revivals and neo-republican moral stewardship (which also encompassed abolition, women’s rights, and other issues). Independent temperance movements sprang up, such as the Washington Temperance Society, one precursor of Alcoholics Anonymous.192 In Manhood Lost, Elaine Frantz Parsons explains the link was clear, even then, between the
family environment and the problem drinker. Those in favor of drinking tended to believe the individual should be capable of controlling himself with his willpower, but temperance reformers tended to see the drinker as a victim of heredity who may be influenced by a troubled upbringing or a sordid environment, surrounded by hard-
drinking relatives and local saloons.193 The James family was one of many that suffered
from widespread addiction and the coping behaviors that accompany it, but the temperance reformer’s image of drunkards walking home from work through an unwholesome neighborhood is difficult to apply to the intellectually and socially elite James clan. The language of neurasthenia is more helpful in illuminating how the Jameses might have thought about their own problem drinking.
George M. Beard’s authoritative 1881 text, American Nervousness: Its Causes
and Consequences, describes drinking in the context of a now-obsolete disease that was
ubiquitous at the time. For Beard, a family environment of secrecy causes nervousness that may manifest in problem drinking. He describes a family suffering from financial worries and unexpressed tensions; repression puts so much stress on individuals that they may develop neurasthenia, manifesting symptoms including inebriety.194 Contemporary
approaches reverse this order, arguing the unpredictability of the alcoholic leads family and friends to become fearful and sensitive. Neurasthenic inebriety is different from “the mere vice” of drinking, Beard explains, because “[t]he simple habit of drinking even to an extreme degree may be broken up by pledges or by word promises or by quiet
resolution, but the disease inebriety can be no more cured in this way than can neuralgia or sick-headache, or neurasthenia, or hay-fever, or any of the family of diseases to which it belongs.”195 The “Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous: The Story of How Many Thousands of Men and Women Have Recovered from Alcoholism,
describes the difference between heavy drinking and alcoholism using similar language: though “a certain type of hard drinker” may make himself sick and die young, he can stop
on his own if he has good reason to do so, while “the real alcoholic… begins to lose all control of his liquor consumption, once he starts to drink.196 For both, the key distinction
is between the ability and inability to stop by one’s own will. Beard describes physical symptoms similar to those listed for alcohol dependency in the DSM-IV: “tremors, hallucinations, insomnia, mental depressions, and attacks of trance,” the term he uses for blackout states.197 Like the discourses of psychology and twelve-step recovery, Beard’s
text suggests inebriety is a family disease. Beard claims it is a growing issue in America because it is the most “demonstrably hereditary” nervous disease, bar none.198 Problem
drinking plagued many generations surrounding Henry James’s, and the impact of this variously-coded behavior (moral vice, weakness of willpower, or medical disease) touched both the drinkers and the non-drinking family members around them.
In fact, the American James family empire was built upon alcohol. After the elder William James moved his family from Ireland to America in 1789, he amassed great wealth as a shrewd businessman. In The Father, A Life of Henry James, Sr., Alfred Habegger writes,
A lengthy advertisement in the Albany Gazette for October 21, 1796, announced numerous products “Landing this Day, at Mark-Lane Wharf, for Wm. James and Co.” Heading the list were “28 puncheons high proof Jamaican spirits,” followed by rum, brandy, Teneriffe wine, and twelve quarter-casks of “excellent Malaga.” …And according to a great-
grandson of Thomas Addis Emmet, William had firsthand knowledge of his spirituous wares: “Old Billy James could hold his liquor, but some of his descendents couldn’t.”199
Albany had a relatively heavy-drinking population; an 1830 report by a temperance group counted over four hundred groceries and taverns where citizens could purchase alcohol,
and calculated that they generated a $100,000 annual trade.200 William of Albany cashed
in on America’s heavy-drinking habit in the first decades of the nineteenth century, and Habegger makes clear from first-hand accounts not only that the patriarch was a drinker, but that his favored spirit was gin. The robber baron left more to his son, Henry James Sr., than a disputed inheritance and memories of a strict Presbyterian upbringing.
Henry Senior writes of the beginning of his troubles in a letter to his son, Robertson, remembering that he began drinking by the age of ten, when, he stresses, morning and afternoon swigs of straight gin were already “habitual.”201 In the early
1820s a schoolboy’s habitual drinking might not have raised many eyebrows, but Henry Senior’s family took a stricter approach to propriety, which Henry Senior flouted both by drinking and by stealing liquor. Perhaps these early patterns acquired a darker meaning once he learned where the path would lead him. He remembers the progression of his drinking: “when I… went to college, I was hopelessly addicted to the vice. In college matters became very much worse with me and by the time I left I was looked upon as an utter victim to intemperance.”202 This vice continued through Henry Senior’s young
manhood, and he recounts drinking and gambling across the saloons of central New York State.203 He made an early attempt at sobriety in 1835, when he surrendered to a husband
and wife in one of the temperance societies, then lived for a period of time at a
temperance lodging called the Franklin House.204 However, he failed to achieve lasting
sobriety for another sixteen years. Henry Senior marked the achievement with
“Intemperance,” an August 26, 1851 editorial in The New York Daily Tribune, in which he articulates his views about problem drinking:
Now drunkenness is the vice of natures like mine. It is the besetting temptation of all those whose passive side is more developed than their practical ones… wine, by the imaginative exhilaration it produces, simulates for the subject the very power which his sober consciousness tells him he is deficient in. When I take a few glasses of wine, I am ready to measure strategy with Bonaparte, and… would not hesitate to encounter Antony in a rivalry for Cleopatra.205
Henry Senior describes drinking for the effect of alcohol until he lost control and his habit became a “vice.”206 Even after 1851, the family disease of alcoholism continued to
affect Henry Senior’s children. Without the help of alcohol, Henry Senior would find other ways to soothe his discomfort (most notably in his attempt to solve problems with geographic relocations). AA calls this state “untreated alcoholism” or the “dry drunk,” and it generally reinforces the same coping mechanisms that family members cultivate while the alcoholic is drinking.
There is little evidence of the younger William James’s drinking habits, but one passage in The Varieties of Religious Experience sounds very much like his father’s editorial:
The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties of human nature usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety
diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes. It is in fact the very great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with the truth.207
For Henry Senior the feeling William identifies as the “Yes function” is equivalent to willful masculinity, while William relates it to religious ecstasy. William searched for this feeling in mind-altering drugs as well, trying chloral, amyl nitrite and hashish.208
attraction as an escape from personality. Henry Senior was not the only alcoholic that affected William; his mentor Cauncey Wright succumbed to alcoholism and depression near the end of his life, and, more importantly, his wife Alice Howe Gibbens had to take over as the head of her family at the age of sixteen, when her alcoholic father committed suicide.209 When Alice and William James married, they joined together two alcoholic
families, and William’s wide experience with problem drinkers had a great impact on his writing.210 Twenty-five years after William’s death, The Varieties of Religious
Experience proved important in the birth of Alcoholics Anonymous when it convinced
Bill W., one of AA’s founders, that he had a genuine spiritual awakening.211
Henry James’s drinking habits are similarly unclear, though judging from the many references to beer drinking in Leon Edel’s biography, he was not a teetotaler.212
According to William James’s biographer Linda Simon, when William felt threatened by Henry’s successes, he took out his jealousy by writing of his brother’s drinking habits to the family: “When William divulged to his family that Harry had become ‘an utter slave’ to ‘spirituous liquors,’ on which he squandered much of his earnings, William was diagnosing in Harry the family’s most despised form of debauchery – alcoholism – and attacking the fiscal responsibility for which Harry had always been praised.”213 Whether
or not William’s accusation is correct, Henry James was deeply entangled in a social network of problem drinkers.
During Henry James Jr.’s lifetime the family agreed which among them had the real drinking problem: Robertson (Bob) James. Henry Senior wrote his revealing letter in an attempt to show his son he too understood what it felt like to struggle with addiction.
Of all the problem drinking in the James family tree, Bob’s is the best documented.214
His siblings corresponded with one another and with his wife, Mary Holton James, to keep each other apprised of Bob’s latest drinking bouts and his temporary glimmers of recovery. Mary kept a datebook in which she recorded Bob’s “sprees” and the various changes the family made in an attempt to cure him or to escape him: moves from
Wisconsin to Massachusetts and back again, as well as experiments with the family living apart from Bob and then reuniting – both patterns repeating many times over. Bob
struggled with alcohol throughout his life, never achieving sobriety, but his condition did improve in the last decade of his life as a result of his five-year residence at Dansville Asylum, near Buffalo, NY.215
In Bob’s case we see the deeply ambivalent struggle of Mary Holton James, who refused to grant Bob the divorce for which he repeatedly asked, but who also found it impossible to live with her husband and wrote in her datebook “the twenty-fifth
anniversary of my marriage and a sad day to me.”216 Bob’s two children were embroiled
in their parents’ drama and had to cope with an unpredictable childhood full of conflict and relocations. Bob’s siblings reacted in different ways.217 William and his wife
stepped into the role of surrogate parents, repeatedly taking Bob into their home, taking charge of his affairs and offering him support. Alice James renounced her brother and did not speak to him for six years before her death; according to a letter from William, Alice was so afraid of seeing her brother that she would leave Boston if she heard he was going to visit.218 Henry took a position of carefully-controlled neutrality. When the
I passed thus a day with him – which proved a much less disagreeable one than I had expected; but on that day not a word was exchanged between us on the question you put to me… I was with him but for those few hours – during which he both looked, talked, and behaved much better than I had feared; and not having seen him for years and feeling that I should perhaps never see him again, I made no move upon any contention or discussion, anything that could bring on a scene. I only wanted to get off without one and not have a horrid memory of my practically sole interview with him in so long a stretch of time.219
This real-life example has much in common with the fictional drama between Henry James and the Smiths. Henry’s first priority is to avoid “a scene,” to control events and preserve an appearance of calm. Henry writes that he had been preoccupied with the meeting before it took place: worrying, trying to predict Bob’s behaviors. Henry has good reason to be afraid of his brother’s behavior, which could cause physical pain, public humiliation or emotional damage. His desire to avoid, to control and above all to maintain the outer appearance of calm, makes good sense in this context. The conspiracy and avoidance with which Tóibín surrounds James’s boyhood illness may seem
frustrating eccentricities when we expect the Jameses to be like any other family, but they would have been consistent with patterns of addiction in the historical James family.220