What is at stake in these novelizations is not only a theory of psychology but questions of morality and identity. James uses the terms “soul,” “consciousness” and “personality” interchangeably in “Is There a Life After Death?”, insisting his continuous mental life is the only soul that he can imagine persisting after his physical death, and it is fitting to call contemporary interest a reflection on the nature of the “soul” as well as the consciousness. Tóibín, Ozick and Hollinghurst are not interested in religion per se, but in the secular religion that might constitute and limit the subject. The central figure in this approach is the addict, as characterized by contemporary twelve-step recovery methods. The focus on addiction is less surprising than it may seem, not only because so many members of the James family – William of Albany, Henry James Senior, and Bob James, for example – suffered from alcoholism, but also because William James’s The Varieties
of Religious Experience had an equally significant impact on his brother Henry James
and on the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous. James novelizations are preoccupied with the sick soul of the addict, as it is represented in the writings of both Henry and William, and as a major analogy of a common contemporary plight. Henry James is neither god nor drug, but the narrative of the addict’s search for a redemptive higher
power offers a model to describe the cultural and perhaps spiritual void that has sent dozens of recent novelists in search of him.
Novelizations are haunted by James and his creations, and James’s fictional worlds are haunted by the inescapable theological influence of William James and Henry James Senior. James’s father and brother suffered eerily similar crises that made them fear that at any moment the seemingly solid self could dissolve, order could fade into disorder, good could be overtaken by evil. In 1844, during a European tour, Henry James Senior had temporarily settled his young family in Frogmore Cottage in Windsor,
England. William was two years old, Henry was one, and Wilkie, Bob and Alice were not yet born. One May evening Henry Senior was sitting alone after dinner when he was struck by “a perfectly insane and abject terror” that seemed to come from “some damnèd shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.”59 He would later come to understand this
experience as a Swedenborgian vastation.60 In The Varieties of Religious Experience
William James attributes his own crisis to an anonymous melancholic: one evening, already feeling ill at ease, he went into a dim room to retrieve something and was similarly struck with the sense that his cohesive sense of self was no more than a fragile accident that could depart at any moment, leaving him in the same state as a paralyzed epileptic patient he once saw in a French asylum.61 The similarity between his
experience and his father’s was quite clear to William; he footnoted Henry Senior’s account in Varieties as another instance of the melancholic soul’s “panic fear.”
Father and son proposed different solutions to their shared problem. After enthusiastic study of Emanuel Swedenborg’s texts, Henry Senior formulated his own religious philosophy that explained his vastation as an inevitable – and in fact desirable – step in a man’s religious evolution. One key tenet of his theory is the wicked fiction of selfhood: man’s highest goal is his self-annihilating union with God.62 For William
James the crisis was not a sign of progress but the symptom of a melancholic sick soul, and it would need its own quite different solution.63 The sick soul is a monist that
struggles to reconcile the existence of evil with the idea of God as an all-encompassing Good: evil seems a permanent truth, so the sick soul fixates on it.64 He tends to
pessimistic melancholy and suffers from internal heterogeneity: William calls him the divided self. He may be incapable of integrating incompatible desires or values, but he is also always divided into one self that feels and acts and a second self that observes and judges the first. To end his suffering the sick soul must undergo a process of unification that William describes in a characteristically pragmatic manner: the divided self may become one in a sudden or gradual religious conversion, in a move to confident
irreligion, in a moment of personal upheaval, or through the domination of one inner self over the others. For Henry Senior progress can occur only in one direction: away from self and toward God; for William, it matters little whether the individual loses God or finds God, or which God he finds, as long as he has changed from inconsistent to stable, from melancholic to hopeful. The self is at the center of William’s theology, not
Henry James did not suffer an acute crisis, but he was an unmistakably
melancholic figure, suffering from diffuse self-doubt and periods of depression. And like both his father and brother, Henry James’s lifelong project was an exploration of
consciousness, which for him was synonymous with the soul. Critics have traced similarities between James’s literary approach and the theologies of both relatives,65 but
novelizations draw into relief an attitude that is closer to William’s: contemporary authors tend to depict James and his characters as divided pessimists who strive not for self-annihilation but for unity, and who find unity unattainable. Tóibín, Ozick and Hollinghurst all choose to engage a fiction by James that depicts the individual’s
continuity with others and discontinuity with herself: in other words, the plight of the sick soul.
The internal divisions of James’s characters are more nuanced than William’s description allows. His figures are talented compartmentalizers, keeping secrets from one another and from themselves. The Golden Bowl revolves around the secret of Charlotte and Prince Amerigo’s affair, and Maggie keeps secrets from herself as well, in an interior space she thinks of as a crowded room. Spencer Brydon keeps his nocturnal visits to the house on the jolly corner a secret, and he spends them hunting for a repressed version of himself. Fleda Vetch keeps her feelings for Owen a secret and at the end of the novel she has repressed her feelings, leaving them like abandoned luggage by the road. But these characters are William James’s divided souls as well: divided not because they hide that which they do not want to see, but because they are forced to constantly witness their own immorality or hypocrisy. Henry James uses imagery from
the theatre throughout his fictions, describing characters that feel they are both actors and spectators. Many of his characters are torn between mutually exclusive goals, like Fleda Vetch who wants to be faithful to Owen, to Mrs. Gareth and to her own higher code. In the climactic confrontation of The Jolly Corner Spencer Brydon is this problem made literal, the split incompatible self that threatens its own annihilation. William James would argue that Brydon is a successfully unified figure at the end, but as I address in “Speaking in James,” Henry seems less certain. The other two novels end with
unconverted sick souls. Maggie Verver and Fanny Assingham have invented new secrets and bred new divisions in previously unified characters; Fleda Vetch can no longer ignore that she is living a lie when she returns to Mrs. Gareth.
The characters in The Master, “Dictation” and The Line of Beauty all live in the world of the Jamesian sick soul. Ozick’s Lilian Hallowes is perhaps the most classic divided self, torn between irresistible desires for intimacy and for revenge and the higher moral self that stands in judgment of her actions. Tóibín’s fictional Henry James keeps many secrets; he is acutely aware of his appearance to others, split into an inner life and an observing self; and throughout the novel he negotiates his mutually-exclusive desires. As a child, for example, he enacts a fictional illness to please his mother, but is plagued by guilt as a result. Hollinghurst’s Nick Guest is an extreme case, losing himself as he tries to be all things to all people. He pursues opposing desires for abstract beauty, money, status, and the simultaneous approval of incompatible groups.
Henry James’s characters are divided in both personal and national loyalties, and of course the most familiar divisions they face are the cultural differences between
America and Europe. Pericles Lewis claims that most of James’s sick souls are
Americans who feel themselves torn between the competing values of the new world and the old.66 The reading leads to too narrow a view of the divided self in James’s fiction,
since James’s characters face moral and psychological divisions as well. Nor is the treatment of the Jamesian sick soul limited to America; James novelizations are widespread across Anglophone traditions, and my three chapters trace the similar preoccupations of an Irish, American and English author. The contemporary re-
imagining of the sick soul takes a strikingly different form, taking as its reference point both James’s characters and, more or less explicitly, the personality of the addict or alcoholic as conceived by twelve-step recovery communities. William James’s The
Varieties of Religious Experience influenced both Henry James’s fictions and the “Big
Book,” the central text of Alcoholics Anonymous; the AA characterization of the alcoholic betrays many similarities to the Jamesian sick soul. The Big Book claims the alcoholic is a melancholic, perpetually “restless, irritable and discontented,” and he suffers internal divisions that make him “a real Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”67 The
alcoholic can only hope for happiness and unification through a process of conversion in which he turns his will over to a higher power of his own choosing, which could be a deity or any other conception. In Varieties, William James points to Saint Paul’s assertion, “What I would, that do I not, but what I hate, that I do”: what is this but the portrait of a deeply divided addict that wants to quit but cannot, the alcoholic that
Alcoholism and addiction play a different role in each James novelization. In The
Master, Tóibín plumbs Henry James’s past for the influences that would shape his later
novels, and he narrates James’s lonely childhood defined by an unsettled father and an oppressively attentive mother. The root of the James family’s problems, Tóibín hints, is alcohol: Henry Senior suffers from the soul sickness of a dry alcoholic who has not yet been unified by a higher power, and his sickness takes its form in wanderlust and a desire to control others. The entire James family exhibits predictable dysfunction as a result, and the fictional Henry develops issues that persist into his adulthood. Ozick’s
“Dictation” imagines Henry James as the victim of irresistible forces and posits that an author’s style may be a compulsion he cannot resist. “Dictation” suggests Spencer Brydon uncannily prefigures the alcoholic who seeks unification through the twelve steps: his sane sober self seeks to look in the eye the unknowable drunk of his blackouts, and then by sharing this experience with another he seeks to change from an egotist to a member of a mutually-supportive community. In The Line of Beauty addiction becomes most explicit in its protagonist Nick Guest’s compulsive drug use, and in his boyfriend Wani’s addictions to cocaine and pornography. Nick thinks that drugs and alcohol make him a better reader and art critic, but Hollinghurst shows he will not be able to understand art until he has already achieved an inner unification.
These three James novelizations illuminate similarities among William James’s sick soul, Henry James’s novels and the recovering addict, suggesting not only that the James brothers were visionaries of discourses that would not emerge until after their deaths, but also that the figure of the addict may be a useful analogy for a widespread
contemporary malaise. William James writes that drugs and alcohol are the shallow substitute for the enriching experience of art: “To the poor and unlettered [alcohol] stands in the places of symphony concerts and of literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we might immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only in the fleeting earlier phases of what in its totality is so degrading a poison.”68 The desire for communion with
God, the desire for beauty in music and literature, the desire for alcohol: all of these may be described in the language of the sick soul, whose melancholy can only be relieved through its unification. I suggest that novelizations are symptoms of a cultural void that resembles the spiritual void of the addict, and instead of searching for a higher power they search for a life-changing engagement with art.