As Christmas approached, Alice and Peggy, feeling snugly sentimental, began to plan a truly American festival, not understanding the extent to which the customs of their country coincided with those of England. William read and slept and spoke enough not to draw too much attention to his own deeply preoccupied state. After lunch one day when Alice and Peggy were making themselves busy in the kitchen, he asked Henry to wait in the dining room as he wished to speak to him. Henry politely closed the door behind him and sat at the table opposite William.
‘Harry, I have, I know, offered before my doleful views on your not having stayed in America, and said how much we miss you as a chronicler of our society. I think America still awaits the novelist with eyes as sharp as yours and sympathy as wide ranging.’
‘Indeed,’ Henry said and smiled.
‘But I do not think that you have found your subject in this country,’ William said sternly. He stared towards the window as he spoke, as though he were rehearsing a speech or a sermon. ‘I do not believe that The Spoils of Poynton or The Awkward Age or The Other House are worthy of your talent. The English have no spiritual life, only a material one. The only subject here is class and it is a subject of which you know nothing. The only striving is material striving and that you know nothing of either.You do not have in your possession the knowledge which Dickens or George Eliot or Trollope or Thackeray possessed of the mechanics of English greed. There is no yearning in England, no crying out for truth.’
‘Thank goodness for that,’ Henry said.
‘In short,’ William continued, as though Henry had not spoken, ‘I believe that the English can never be your true subject. And I believe that your style has suffered from the strain of constantly dramatizing social insipidity. I think also that something cold and thin-blooded and oddly priggish has come to the fore in your content.’
‘I am grateful to you for your opinion,’ Henry said.
‘Harry, I am an avid reader of you, and an admirer of your work.’
‘You seem to feel that I should have remained at home,’ Henry said and lifted his hand refusing to allow William to interrupt him, ‘charting the lives of the pinched intellectuals of Boston. Yes, that would have been a supreme subject.’
‘Harry, I find I have to read innumerable sentences you now write twice over to see what they could possibly mean. That is the long and the short of it. In this crowded and hurried reading age you will remain unread and neglected as long as you continue to indulge in this style and these subjects.’
‘I shall,’ Henry replied, ‘as I work in the future then, strive to gratify you, but perhaps I should add that I might be even more humiliated if you should like what I do and thereby merge it in your affection with things for which I have heard you express admiration. Things which I would sooner descend to a dishonoured grave than have written.’
‘No one is suggesting that you should lie in a dishonoured grave,’ William said, ‘but I did have a concrete proposal for you, a novel that is crying out to be written which would confound your critics, win you a large audience and give you immense satisfaction.’
‘A novel I should write?’
‘Yes, a novel with no grand English people, but dealing with the America you know.’
‘You speak with great confidence.’
‘Yes,’ William said, ‘I have put some thought into the matter. A novel which would deal with our American history rather than the small business of English manners, bad indeed as they are. A novel about the Puritan Fathers as told by you…’
Henry stood up and went to the window, forcing William to turn as he spoke. Henry felt that he had the advantage now by standing close to what light was left while his brother sat at the table in the deepening shadows.
‘May I interrupt you?’ Henry asked. ‘Or is this a lecture whose finish will be marked by the ringing of a bell?’
William turned his chair around and seemed ready to continue what he had begun to say.
‘May I put an end to this conversation,’ Henry said, ‘by stating clearly to you that I view the historical novel as tainted by a fatal cheapness and if you want a statement from me on the matter in clear American and since you wish me to pander to the crowded, hurried age as you call it, might I tell you my opinion of a novel to be written by me about the Puritan Fathers?’
He stopped, waiting for an answer.
‘Yes, please,’ William said. ‘I cannot stop you.’
‘It would be all one word,’ Henry said. ‘One simple word. It would be all humbug!’ he said and smiled gently, almost patronizingly at his brother.
AT SUPPER it struck him that William had not confided in Alice that he had bravely attempted to lecture his brother on the failure of his fiction. William’s eyes, he insisted, were sore and Alice tried to ensure that he slept more and did not read as much, while William, Henry saw, played the part of the unwilling and recalcitrant patient. William had begun to roam uneasily around Lamb House so that Henry was never sure in what room he would find him, or indeed at what time of the day or the night he would discover his brother restlessly creaking the floorboards in his bedroom or on the stairway.
He understood that William was attempting to fill Lamb House with his presence, using an invisible system, Henry believed, of imposing his authority, making subtle but insistent changes to meal times, for example, and how meals were served. William began to unnerve Burgess Noakes and the other household staff. At one point, until Alice forced him to desist, he even tried to alter the arrangement of the furniture in the drawing room and asked Burgess to remove certain ornaments from the mantelpiece which he did not like.
Henry avoided him; if he found him in the drawing room or one of the downstairs rooms, he quietly and diplomatically left him there. Alice still shadowed William. Although she seldom sat in the same room, she was always hovering close by, seeming to be busy. Peggy, on the other hand, buried herself in books, moving from classic novel to classic novel without lifting her head from them if she could help it. When she had finished with Jane Austen, she embarked on The Portrait of a Lady. Henry was surprised and amused to find that her parents felt free to express openly their disapproval of her latest choice, but was satisfied the next day that she had persisted with the book. She was, as she told them, too far involved in it now not to finish it. She would skip any passage which was too difficult or not suitable for her, she said. She was almost grown up, she added proudly. She looked at Henry calmly, without embarrassment, when he told her that, especially when compared with her Emmet cousins who spoke so badly, she was the most perfect young lady of his acquaintance.
WILLIAM, HENRY remembered, when he had come to London as part of a sabbatical in the year their mother died, had stayed with Henry also, and exuded the same strange resentment of his London life which extended to the very objects in the flat. And Henry had allowed William’s disapproval to dictate where he went and where he did not go; he had allowed William to organize the household to William’s satisfaction.
He recalled how it became apparent during that sojourn of William’s that their father had not long to live. He remembered a telegram saying that their father’s brain was softening and adding, as though with the same urgency, that William should not return. It was December in London. Alice,William’s wife, was staying with her mother who was helping to care for her two young sons. Alice James, the other Alice, was looking after their father with Aunt Kate. Both Alices had, for once, concurred: neither of them wanted William to return. Both of them, on the other hand, wished Henry to be there. Their father, the telegram insisted, could possibly live for months, and thus it seemed easy to persuade William that, since he had given up his house in Cambridge, his return would involve inhabiting cramped quarters with no lectures to give at Harvard and no other duties there. Instead, he should continue his sabbatical in Europe, enjoy his leisure, make new contacts and write and read in freedom. The wording of the telegram had been, Henry realized, immensely clever. By stating that their father’s brain was softening, both Alices had made clear to William that he would not be able, in his father’s dying days, to discuss with him how their divergent ideas of the soul and the purpose of life might finally and beautifully be made to converge.