Reading Note:
Alice James
26 June 2014
Last night, for the first time in my life, I made a really good cheeseburger. The burger itself, a quarter-pound clump of ground chuck that I dropped into a hot cast-iron pan and pressed into a patty with a spatula, then cooked for two minutes on one side and for a minute on the other, was actually delicious. All by itself, it would have been a treat. But it was even better with a slice of melting cheese, a slice of red onion, a leaf of lettuce, and a toasted potato roll lathered with mustard. (I have a tendency to dress cheeseburgers with a slice of bacon. I was very glad to have resisted it last night.) Kathleen’s burger was served to her taste, with cheese and ketchup.
So simple, so fast, so tasty — where have I been? Not behind the counter at a diner stove, apparently.
The key to success in this production is something called “the smash.” I first came across it in a recent Williams-Sonoma catalogue. For about twenty dollars, I could buy a cast-iron thingy, a smaller version of those weights that some people use to inhibit curls in frying bacon, with which to flatten a clump of meat into a patty. For four hundred dollars, I could have my head examined to see why I didn’t just use a spatula. A simple spatula is what’s called for in Sam Sifton’s Dining Section article on the subject, “Deconstructing a Perfect Burger,” which appeared in yesterday’s Times. I’m not sure that “smash” is the word — trust men to infuse their food talk with violence — but the secret does seem to lie in shaping the burger in the hot pan, and not before. It is also important to use a pan, and not to cook burgers over (or under) an open flame: “The point is to allow rendering beef fat to gather around the patties as they cook, like a primitive high-heat confit.”
George Motz, the documentary filmmaker and hamburger expert whom Sifton consulted, believes that the ground beef is best untouched by human hands. He uses a spoon or an ice cream scoop to form his clumps, and he advises working with meat that has been chilled in the refrigerator.
The potato roll is almost as key an ingredient as a the ground chuck. It’s very light, and by readily absorbing all the juices, it intensifies the burger’s flavor.
***
Jean Strouse’s biography, Alice James, came out in 1980. I dimly remember reading about it, and deciding not to read about someone whose neurasthenic, bedridden life was so dismally disappointing. A couple of years ago, the book was reissued by NYRB (which a preface by Colm Tóibín that seems startlingly phoned-in). By then, I knew a lot more about the James family and had also read dozens of wry snippets (it seemed) from Alice’s diary. So I bought it, but I didn’t read it until this week.
Alice James is a disturbing read, because Alice James herself cannot hold the center of her own biography. This might sound like some kind of fault, but it is actually the point. Strouse is to be praised for refraining from pushing her heroine forward, and indeed from decking her subject out as a heroine. She does not crudely “make a case” for Alice James. This case, presumably, would be that Alice James might have been a woman of achievement if her upbringing had not been so stifling. That she might have made an impact on the world if her older brothers had not been so successful at making their own. Indeed, far from presenting Alice as an unrealized version of William or Henry James, Strouse shows us a woman whose circumstances were not that unusual in Victorian America, where many gifted daughters were paled by successful older brothers. What sets Alice apart from the run of such women is that her older brothers are still famous well over a century later. Henry James is, if anything, more “famous” than he was in his lifetime. That we know about Alice at all owes entirely to her brothers’ persistent renown.
That Alice is an interesting figure, moreover, owes much to the egotistical nuttiness of her father, Henry James, Sr. James père is an exasperating windbag upon whom I don’t care to dwell — it is almost enough to say that he was a good friend of Emerson. When William James complied a book of extracts from his father’s “literary remains,” he introduced it with a deadly candor completely at odds with his family’s habitual veneration of their dear old patriarch.
With all the richness of style, the ideas are singularly unvaried and few. Probably few authors have so devoted their entire lives to the monotonous elaboration of one single bundle of truths.
The man didn’t have to support himself as a writer; he lived on a nice inheritance. He had ideas; he fancied himself an expert. He dragged his children around England, Switzerland and France in search of the ideal schooling for his four boys. Nothing came up to his mark, and his sons never formed strong attachments outside the home. This did not impair William much, and it may have been a great boon for Henry, but for the two younger brothers, Garth Wilkerson and Robertson, it was probably the root of their weedy failures. Alice, of course, was never sent to school at all.
Henry James, Sr, also had ideas about men and women, and they were nicely exemplified by himself and his wife. Mary Walsh James was — well, the first thing that you want to say about her, once she comes into focus, is that she was not a “James.” She did not share her family’s febrile constitution. She was placid, literal, and inexorable. She “gave all but asked for nothing.” Strouse unpacks this ideal of maternal sacrifice enough to demonstrate that Alice could never, ever follow in her mother’s footsteps. Alice was clever, and even somewhat temperamental. As a woman, however — as a woman according to her father’s understanding, that is — she had no real alternative course. Believing that women were innately moral creatures, Alice’s father never understood that he denied his daughter that ability to be moral. She was never anything — for him — but an obedient receptacle. The idea of a creative life simply did not compute. So Alice got sick. That was an option. It turned out to be such a good solution to her conundrum that when, in her early forties, Alice learned of a breast cancer that had metastasized to her liver, she welcomed death with an ecstasy that would have been Wagnerian had it not been so decorous. From her late teens on, Alice was the object of her family’s loving and anxious concern. She thus secured their attention.
Until the cancer, of course, doctors couldn’t find anything “organically wrong” with Alice, so they diagnosed her as hysterical. She had a couple of dramatic, paralyzing breakdowns in her life, but for the most part she was a becalmed invalid. She got on well with her parents and her brothers, and she always had a passel of women friends to write letters to, but her somewhat petulant sarcasm and her mock-pompous rhetoric were not immediately appealing outside her coterie, especially issuing from her round, expectant face. No man ever expressed a romantic interest in her, and few seem to have sought her friendship. It is not surprising that the daughter of a benignant misogynist and the sister of brilliant brothers had little use for ordinary men, even the ordinary men of Boston and Cambridge.
Toward the end of her life, Alice kept a diary. Strouse stresses that this diary is not an undiscovered masterpiece. It has considerable documentary evidence, however; among other things, it shows what the family literary gift might produce with little or no discipline. Upon a surprise visit from William, she wrote,
What a strange experience it was, to have what had seemed so dead and gone all these years suddenly bloom before one, a flowing oasis in this alien desert, redolent with the exquisite family perfume of the days gone by, made of the allusions, the memories and the point of view in common, so that my floating particle sense was lost for an hour or so in the illusion that what is forever shattered had sprung up anew, and existed outside of our memories — where it is forever green!
This complicated passage cries out for editing and reshaping. So does most of what Strouse quotes from the diary.
We feel sorry for Alice, of course. But we also tire of her, despite (or perhaps because of) Strouse’s expert handling. Then we think of the hundreds of thousands of women whose lives were just a little less remarkable — for dramatic illness as for illustrious connections — and the waste of humanity assumes a massive horror, a feminine counterpart of the dead of the Somme. It is in awe of that horror that we close Strouse’s magisterial study. This is why we need to know Alice James.
Daily Blague news update: Klinghoffer and the Met.