When Henry James decided to come to America in 1904 and 1905, his elder brother, William James, was not immediately pleased. William said that while his wife, Alice, would welcome his visit (she and Henry had a firm bond), he felt "more keenly a good many of the désagréments to which you inevitably will be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you." There follows an account of how traveling Americans ate their boiled eggs, presumably in hotels and on trains, "bro't to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten with butter." As a source of physical loathing, this seems a bit excessive: one might linger over William's attempts to keep Henry's visit at bay. William's letter seems more to the point when he notes: "The vocalization of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ignobly awful … It is simply incredibly loathsome."
William's discouragement provoked from Henry a declaration of his determination not to be deterred from coming. "You are very dissuasive," he wrote to William. Henry, in a plaintive reply, noted that whereas William had traveled much, he had not been able to—he not been able to afford it nor to leave the demands of producing writing for money. It's as if Henry must plead for his brother's approval before he can travel back to his native land. And yet the pleading is accompanied by Henry's self-assertion, he's thought it through, analyzed the consequences. There is so often in their dialogues this deference of the younger brother to the elder, mixed with self-assertion, an insistence that the pathetic younger brother does know what he's doing. I suppose we might, in contemporary psychobabble, call Henry's relation to William passive-aggressive. William's to Henry, though, has a tinge of sadism that we will see take more overt forms. His response to Henry's desire to travel home is a strange mixture of welcome and repulse, a recognition of their sibling bonds along with the sense that they bind annoyingly, that he'd rather not have his brother around...
William and Henry James https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/04/01/william-and-henry-james/
William's discouragement provoked from Henry a declaration of his determination not to be deterred from coming. "You are very dissuasive," he wrote to William. Henry, in a plaintive reply, noted that whereas William had traveled much, he had not been able to—he not been able to afford it nor to leave the demands of producing writing for money. It's as if Henry must plead for his brother's approval before he can travel back to his native land. And yet the pleading is accompanied by Henry's self-assertion, he's thought it through, analyzed the consequences. There is so often in their dialogues this deference of the younger brother to the elder, mixed with self-assertion, an insistence that the pathetic younger brother does know what he's doing. I suppose we might, in contemporary psychobabble, call Henry's relation to William passive-aggressive. William's to Henry, though, has a tinge of sadism that we will see take more overt forms. His response to Henry's desire to travel home is a strange mixture of welcome and repulse, a recognition of their sibling bonds along with the sense that they bind annoyingly, that he'd rather not have his brother around...
William and Henry James https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2025/04/01/william-and-henry-james/
