Reading Notes: The James Boys
What a treat The James Boys, by Richard Liebmann-Smith, is turning out to be. Among many other publications, the author has written for The National Lampoon, which alone may explain his ability to invigorate his turgidity-risking mélange of neo-Victorian and contemporary academic prose by stirring in the occasional up-to-date vulgarity.
Here is the opening of Chapter Three. Attend carefully.
For William James, the summer of 1876 was to prove a memorable one. The novice professor had just completed his first full year of teaching psychology at Harvard: the depression that had been plaguing him for years was finally beginning to lift; and — perhaps not coincidentally — he had recently made the acquaintance of a young lady named Alice Howe Gibbens, a relationship that was shaping up to be the first real love affair of his life, long overdue. For despite his trim good looks, piercing blue eyes, legendary conversational brilliance, and abundant charm, William James was, at the age of thirty-four, to the best of our historical knowledge (his putative compulsive masturbation notwithstanding), still a virgin. This was not just a manifestation of how notoriously difficult it was to get laid in the nineteenth century. Many of William’s contemporaries had long since managed to take the plunge into erotic manhood, even into marriage: His old friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, whose father’s essay on the criminal mind had so impressed Elena Hite, had tied the knot over four years earlier with Fanny Dixwell, a woman William once moonily described as “decidedly A-1” and “about as fine as they make ’em.” Granville Stanley Hall, William’s first graduated student in psychology, often regaled his professor with tales of his romantic exploits among the local fräuleins during his year of studying in Germany. Hall, who had trained for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary before turning to psychology, extolled his “loss of puritanical” inhibitions” on the continent. “I learned how great an enlightener love is and what a spring of mind Eros can be,” he later wrote in his Life and Confessions. “Not only did these companions facilitate my use of German but, what was vastly more important, they awoke capacities hitherto unusually dormant and repressed and thus made life seem richer and more meaningful.”
But for William James — whose German was perfectly serviceable to begin with…
Later in the same paragraph: “Even earlier, on an exploratory trip up the Amazon with the celebrated naturalist Louis Agassiz, William experienced the hots for some of the beautiful native Brazilian women he encountered…”Â
The James Boys punctuates, perhaps with a full stop but, it’s to be hoped, with no more than a semicolon, the late extravagance of interest in the James family, which seems to me to be propelled by a desire to acquaint oneself with the work of the Master without being obliged to read it.