A Plea for Eros

Brown’s stand at Harpers Ferry, the school was more than an experiment in coeducation; it was a locus of feverish ideology. Both Wilkie and Bob left school to fight for the Union cause. Wilkie enlisted at seventeen and not long after joined the first regiment of black troops as adjutant to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. On May 28, 1863, accompanied by rousing fanfare, the 54th marched out of Boston. By the end of July that same year, nearly half its men and most of its officers had been killed during the assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston Bay. Wilkie James was badly injured but survived. After the war, he and Robertson, subsidized by their father, became the owners of a plantation in Florida that employed black laborers. The venture failed, but their effort remains a testament not only to the idealism of the brothers but to the hopes of the world that played a crucial role in shaping them—zealous, high-minded New England.
    There were other ideas wafting about the James household—imported ones. A disciple of both Emanuel Swe-denborg, the Swedish natural scientist turned mystic, and Francois-Marie Charles Fourier, the French social philosopher, Henry Senior embraced a miasmic coupling of spiritual enlightenment (Swedenborg believed he had found a key to an angelic reading of the Scriptures) and a Utopian vision of a new society in which human beings freed from repression and inhibition could release their true passionate selves and lead orderly, harmonious lives in communities known as phalanxes.
    As in every age, rigorous intellectual ideas mingled with more dubious notions. In both Europe and the United States, a rage for Mesmerism and the occult shook fashionable society and intellectual circles. Seances abounded. The novelist’s brother William James, the great American philosopher and psychologist, maintained a belief in spiritualism throughout his life and hoped to continue his researches beyond the grave. He asked his wife to try to contact him after he was dead, and she did try, but in vain. On another occasion, however, without his widow present, William was reported to have spoken from the other side. When Henry received news of the phantom voice, he called it “the most abject and impudent, the hollowest, vulgarest, and basest rubbish.” Then, as now, vegetarianism was in vogue among the forward thinking, but the enlightened fell for other health fads as well. A number of the Transcendentalists became enamored of Fletcherism, an eating practice that encouraged chewing food into a liquid mush before swallowing. Henry Junior took up the cause for a while and masticated with such vigor that William, a nonbe-liever, blamed Fletcherism for Henry’s myriad bowel troubles.
    If contemporary readers find these beliefs and ideas remote, I ask them to pause and reconsider. We live in an age of religious sects and mad militias, of gurus scattered about the country from California to New York, an age of channeling, colonics, crystals, and raw food crazes. In the United States, Utopian quests for purity, perfection, and self-improvement, no matter how wacky, have always found fertile ground in which to flourish. The question remains, however: Why did Henry James describe the lively intellectual climate (with its admittedly nutty fringes) of Boston and its environs as “arid” and “vacuous”? James felt that American culture was simply too young and too thin to sustain him as an artist. He was continually pulled by the lure of Europe, by its old and visible history—its architecture, painting, ruins, and, of course, its literature.
    For James, the single most important American writer was Nathaniel Hawthorne. He read and loved Hawthorne’s books as a youth, and although the young writer never met his literary mentor, the spiritual connection between the two writers would never be dissolved. Hawthorne, a sublime storyteller who criticized both American Puritanism and utopianism in his fiction, became
the
American literary precedent for James. When he woke up on May 19, 1864, to the news that the great American novelist was dead, the young Henry James sat on his bed and wept. Like most literary sons, however, he was critical of the father, and when writing about Hawthorne lie articulates his ambivalence about American fiction:
    But our author must accept the awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms only