Alice's Vanishing Act

...A new-found confidant, Fanny Morse, received messages of the heart on the days they didn't visit: "I just want lo send you a few lines for no purpose, except to tell you how glad I was to see you the other day and how much I wish I could see you oftener-in short that I love you very much...

...yes, they had four children in three years!' and thus our souls communed for half an hour in sweet accord...

...She flits through these many pages, casting shadows, but ultimately elusive...

...She must have your eyes moreover & a Gibbensian softness of outline, unalloyed by that James asperity which has led to sour spinsterhood in the one feminine blossom wh...

...Nonetheless, Alice did hang around for 44 years...

...Since Henry Sr...

...Conceive of never being without the sense that if you let yourself go for a moment your mechanism will fall into pie and that at some given moment you must abandon it all, let the dykes break and the flood sweep in...

...Long afterward she described this agonizing period in her diary...

...I think that if I can get into the habit of writing a little about what happens, or rather doesn't happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me...

...Alice regained precarious control of her "mechanism" (what a disembodied, Jamesian term) and for the next decade pursued decorous and untaxing activities, joining the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, a correspondence school, as a teacher of history and attending the best Brahmin dinner parties...

...Such friendships were both common and intense enough to go by the name of "Boston marriages...

...That there was a lighter side to Alice is evidenced by another book that has come out at the same time as Strouse's: The Death and Letters of Alice James, edited, with a biographical essay, by Ruth Bernard Yeazell (University of California, 214 pp., $12.95...

...for almost a year Alice positively flourished, looking after her father and setting up two households-a smaller residence in Boston and a summer cottage at Manchester-by-the-Sea with great efficiency...

...Jean Strouse has written a judicious and enthralling account of the vanishing act that was Alice James...

...This theory, as vague as it was benign, he applied as well to the education of his four sons and his daughter with, as Strouse notes, fatally confusing results: "Evil, acknowledged in the abstract, had no place at the family hearth...

...Haagen if talk it can be called, this is a specimen: 'You knew Dr...

...In the last three years of her life Alice James kept a diary, yielding to an impulse that must have verged on the forbidden for a woman as conflicted about her self-worth as Alice was: the impulse to make waves, to render herself in palpable terms...

...Mary Walsh James, in a family given to attenuated impulses, was the embodiment of the reality principle...

...Now she went under completely...

...She was a strong-willed ghost, to be sure, mocking with a vinegary wit the higher complacencies of the Boston elite she knew while growing up, and of the British lodging-house dwellers among whom she spent her last eight years...

...she smarted at being left out...

...Her long-suppressed energies, mental and physical, released themselves in "waves of violent inclination...

...Alice James came into the life she was to shun on August 7, 1848, the last of five children...

...Two years earlier she had attempted a "motorpathic" treatment with a doctor who specialized in female disorders, including hysteria and neurasthenia...

...The sustaining stuff of adult life, love and work, would not come easily to the James brood, raised as they were on essences...

...James' sister, Kate, and several servants...

...Thus there were glints of light, after all, but what these letters return to is the one unbearable constant of her life-loneliness, "the almost brutal aloofness in wh...

...Cambridge, my dear," a 26-year-old Alice wrote her friend "Sarakins," "is in one of its convulsive fits of gaiety...

...If there is something diaphanous about the Jamesian style in general one thinks of those endlessly allusive sentences, that remarkable quality of suggestiveness that was a hallmark of both William and Henry's prose-there is something positively ghostlike about Alice...

...Her brothers considered her their equal in intellect...

...Alice also is unremittingly witty at her own expense, possessed of a joyously self-deprecating slant on things that undoubtedly had its roots in the pathological but which she managed to convert into an enhancing mode of discourse...

...Although it is tempting to think of her merely as a tragic figure, the victim of 19th-century attitudes and a family inheritance of delicate nerves, she cautioned against precisely such future dispensations...

...I refrained from looking in the glass for some time after I got home...

...If Alice James, in some crucial way, avoided destiny, it remains unclear whether she would have met her fate any more fully in this century...

...In late 1884 she sailed for England with Katherine Loring, never to return...

...To me her death," Henry wrote to a friend, "makes a great and sad personal difference-her talk, her company, her conversation and admirable acute mind and large spirit were so much the best thing I have, of late years, known here...

...English politics absorbed her immensely and she took, in her way, a radical stance on many of the issues of the day...

...On receiving news that William's wife was pregnant again she warned: "I shall approve & congratulate only upon one condition & that is that you show yourself able to produce one of the nobler sex...

...we are from those to whom we owe the most...

...The very tenderness of the family atmosphere," she notes, "produced a sort of impotence in the children, made resistance and definition difficult...

...She is ever solicitous of Henry (who was equally considerate of her) and wryly deflating of the more patronizing William's illusions: ". . .though I may not have a group of Harvard students sitting at my feet drinking in psychic truth, I shall not tremble, I assure you, at the last trump...

...Alice, in particular, never traversed the bridge from self-conception to self-realization...

...Withal, she was the strangest of creatures and the blood ran very thinly in her veins...

...But for her it is only blessed and bountiful...

...She spent most of her daytime hours in bed, reading omnivorously, writing or dictating letters, chatting with Katherine and submitting herself tirelessly to obtuse medical examiners...

...Her parents had recently moved to New York City where they shared their house with Mrs...

...Alice herself sensed that deep within her, buried beneath layers of resistance, untold capabilities-the "potency of a Bismarck"smoldered...

...What appears to have disturbed her most deeply as she grew older was the least obscure of hurts: No one needed her...

...She resorted to yet another "cure "for her various ailments, a treatment of galvanic electrical currents, this time in New York ("an alien, odious spot...

...Death-"the most supremely interesting moment in life," as she described it in a letter to William-had hardly ever a more willing and grateful appointee...

...Alice's mother died in 1882...

...An energetic, upright soul, she doted on both Henrys and had a tolerant if uncomprehending outlook on her daughter's troubles...

...She considered suicide most seriously around the time William got engaged, in 1878, when she was 30 and could envision no salvation, matrimonial or otherwise...

...How anyone can live here and lead a virtuous life amidst the Jews, the tawdry, flimsy houses and the ash-barrels seems hard to understand...

...Freund, he has lost three children!' 'Impossible!' cried I, 'yes' said he, and consulted his wife in German, who turned to me and said 'oh...

...so when I am gone, "she wrote to William, "pray don't think of me simply as a creature who might have been something else, had neurotic science been born...

...And when she discovers that she has been short-changed in her beloved Aunt Kate's will, she is struck more by the absurdity than by the gracelessness...

...To be innocent and good meant not to know the darker side of one's own nature...

...In 1878 Alice collapsed again...

...It is weary work this dying," he said when a doctor prescribed rest...

...A year before her death she was still arguing the merits of her father's avowal of the former...

...Alice's father, Henry James Sr., was a philosopher who lectured and wrote about a self-styled system of "Divine Natural Humanity" that emphasized the Swedenborgian belief in man's propensity to freely choose good over evil...

...For a woman bent on abandoning the world, Alice James took a remarkably active, and detailed, interest in her family and friends...

...She spoke of it to her father and seems to have found a palliative of sorts in his characteristically-some might say horrifyingly detached advice: "I told her so far as I was concerned she had my full permission to end her life whenever she pleased...

...I shall at least have it all my own way and it may bring relief as an outlet to that geyser of emotions, sensations, speculations and reflections which ferments perpetually within my poor old carcass for its sins...

...That basic contradiction, between what their father espoused (man finds God only after directly experiencing the evil in his own nature) and what he practiced (evil does not exist), fostered in each of the children a preoccupation with morality and a tendency to dichotomize...

...Yeazell's 45-page essay is primarily about Alice's vocation of illness and is especially discerning on the effects of Henry Sr.'s "devastating gentleness" toward his daughter's self-destructiveness...

...To love and be loved, then, required the renunciation of certain kinds of knowledge and feeling...

...She is, from the earliest letters on, genuinely funny in her depictions of the nuanced social milieus that her brother Henry drew on for his novels...

...the race rose to bringing forth...

...in 1872, following Alice's return from her European "grand tour" with him, "but the life here offers her so few distractions, and she has so little spontaneous activity in a practical way, that I fear she may suffer from the temptation to fall back upon her books too much...

...Fourteen years later, Alice died in bed, perfectly gently, her uncertain ailments of the previous 25 years having finally led up to a diagnosis of breast cancer...

...I think the meaning of life-its adequacy for happiness, if you will-did not so much escape her as fail to hold her interest...

...The trouble seems to be," she wrote to William's wife, "there isn't anything to die of, but there are a good many jokes left still, and that's the main thing after all...

...She finally set out to discover the Continent for herself in her 22nd summer (with Henry as chaperone and guide), a trip she was to look back on as an unfading high point...

...though I have no productive worth, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity...

...Five years later she wrote to a friend: "I am frightened sometimes when I suddenly become conscious of how constantly I dwell on the memory of that summer I spent abroad...

...so here goes, my first Journal...

...Last night was a ball at the Bootts, which went off very pleasantly...

...Yet she left barely a trace, confining herself to the tiniest of stages, assuming the role of professional invalid from girlhood onward, except for one or two telling lapses into vigorous activity...

...it used to seem to me that the only difference between me and the insane was that I had not only all the horrors of suffering of insanity but the duties of doctor, nurse, and strait-jacket imposed upon me, too...

...tended to confuse aggressiveness with sinfulness, it is not surprising that his children, and his daughter especially, would have so much difficulty later on in asserting the claims of self upon the world...

...This eventually created severe identity crises for all the James children, who had difficulty trying to function practically as well as ideally...

...had frankly little interest in lingering on without his wife...

...The letters themselves, though, are surprisingly hearty, full of advice on home-furnishings and child-rearing...

...But the dilemma posed by James himself was more primary, it seems to me, than any one aspect of his meliorist worldview: To have a father engaged in the business of thinking rather than in, say, "the business of a stevedore"as was the father of Henry Jr.'s friend-established, if only by implication, the supremacy of being over doing...

...She watched many of her circle marry, and although she claimed a bemused disinterest in doing the same"Why is it that love affairs appeal so much less in real life to one's sympathy than they do in the silliest novel, even in a double-column Harper's reprint...

...She has heeded her subject's wish by refusing to make of her a didactic instance, a case in point for feminist or psychoanalytical readers of history...

...On March 6,1892, what Alice called her "mortuary inclinations" were satisfied for good...

...In one to William she encloses "an anti-fat recipe" that Henry has successfully been trying, and in another to her sister-in-law she speculates unabashedly that "to be able, if only once in one's life, to call a spade a spade is more productive of labial & mental health & decency than all the prunes and prisms & prudish evasions of a lifetime...

...It isn't in the sorrows and the pains," she declared shortly before her death, "but in the inexorable inadequacy for happiness that the tragedy lies...

...in December his work was ended and Alice was left, as her novelist-brother fearfully predicted, to "languish from loneliness...

...Twice during her child-hood(in 1855-58 and 1859-60) Alice had found herself transplanted to Europe for the sake of her brothers' cultural betterment...

...In 1868, at the age of 19, Alice suffered the first of two nervous breakdowns...

...A life-interest in a shawl," she exlaimed to William in a letter of 1889, "with reversion to a male heir, is so extraordinary & ludicrous a bequest that I can hardly think it could have been seriously meant, my desire wd...

...Jean Strouse's biography, Alice James (Houghton Mifflin, 367 pp., $15.00), is a beautifully-fashioned curio, focused less on its subject than on her ambience...

...But Henry Sr...

...In the 1860s Alice attended school in Newport, and once the family set up permanent residence in Cambridge she formed close friendships with young women of similar blue-blooded stock...

...She continues to seem much stronger than she was before she want away," Mary wrote to Henry Jr...

...of course, naturally be to renounce my passing claim to that also, as I can hardly conceive of myself under any conditions as so abject as to grasp at a life-interest in a shawl...

...only I hoped that if ever she felt like doing that sort of justice to her circumstances, she would do it in a perfectly gentle way in order not to distress her friends...

...It's most inconvenient to be possessed of so tender and apparently undesired an organ as mine...

...I had a talk with Dr...

...They took a number of trips around New England together-"To the amazement," Strouse writes, "of the James family"-with Katherine readily assuming the role of caretaker, and in 1881 they summered in England...

...After eyeing the affianced of the "beautiful and seductive" Charles Jackson, she admitted plaintively to a friend: "She does not attract me in the least, but I am forced to confess that she is not bad-looking, its painful, but true...

...When she resurfaced it was at the safe harbor of her relationship with Katherine Loring, who was as resourceful as Alice was needy...