William James Week was scheduled to end on Friday, but then I received a guest post from Robert D. Richardson, and since Richardson’s biography of James is one of my all-time favorite books, it gives me a thrill to extend the week to today. Richardson’s contribution is the post immediately below this one.

I’ll be traveling back to Brooklyn today from an annual visit to Saratoga Springs, and non-James-related activity will resume in full tomorrow. Lots of things are planned for the fall. In the meantime, a reminder that I’m still accepting entries for two book giveaways, here and here.

Lisa Levy is a writer in Brooklyn, New York. Her book on modernism and biography, We Are All Modern, is forthcoming from FSG.

Three incidents serve to illustrate the contentious nature of Henry James’ relationship with his older brother William.

Both were members of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, which established the Academy of Arts and Letters in 1905. Fifty initial members were chosen by ballot. Henry was chosen in the second ballot, William in the fourth. When William found out, he declined to join, citing several reasons but most crucially writing the Academy’s secretary, “I am the more encouraged to this course by the fact that my younger and shallower and vainer brother is already in the Academy and that if I were there too, the other families represented might think the James influence too rank and strong.” Henry knew nothing about this.

The second incident concerned William’s critique of Henry’s 1904 novel The Golden Bowl, which Henry considered his finest work. William pleaded with his brother to write a book “with no twilight or mustiness in the plot.” Henry, long used to his brother’s complaints about his indirect style, replied that he would be “humiliated to write such a thing that you like it!!!” This bantering continued in The American Scene, Henry’s 1907 account of his travels, including a long visit with William’s family. William remarked that Henry was on the verge of becoming “a curiosity of literature.” Henry coolly inscribed a copy of the book, “To William James, his incoherent, admiring, affectionate Brother, Henry James, Lamb House, August 21st 1907.”

Incoherent, admiring, affectionate: these adjectives describe the brothers’ relationship in its milder form. It was also intense, cantankerous, rivalrous, and petty. William once said of the expatriate Henry, “He is really a native of the James Family, and has no other country.” The James family was a nation with a small, itinerant population: William (born 1842), Henry (1843), Garth Wilkinson (called Wilky, 1845), Robertson (called Bob, 1846) and Alice (1848). As children, the dominant William monopolized the attention of their mercurial philosopher father, Henry James, Sr., who frequently uprooted his family in a grand experiment to give his children a “sensuous education,” while the milder Henry was the favored child of their stern mother, Mary. As young men, the brothers seemed to trade off periods of invalidism (both suffered from bad backs and stomach ailments, and later in life, heart problems), as if one of them had to be the object of parental attention while the other exercised the free will that Henry Senior often preached but his children found difficult to practice. Henry Senior was so intent on his boys being that both had trouble figuring out what they ought to be doing until well into their 20s; the elder boys, that is—the younger ones were sent to fight in the Civil War and make their own way in the world.

Maybe all sons of rich fathers without the cushion of wealth themselves suffer from such problems establishing themselves, and in William and Henry James we just see a version of those problems with a certain metaphysical bent. If, as Rebecca West famously wrote in her study of Henry James, one boy grew up to write philosophy as if it were fiction and the other to write fiction as if it were philosophy, then the brothers have more in common than William’s petulance and Henry’s gentle mocking in the incidents described above. There are general and specific moments of shared values in their work, as in William’s experiments in psychology and Henry’s development of the free indirect discourse technique, which delves into the consciousness of his characters. Henry’s biographer Leon Edel points out the thematic conjunction of William’s Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) and Henry’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903): both deal with finding one’s place in the world, and the ways in which people use one another. What Edel does not say is how utterly Jamesian these ideas are—they are all over the brothers’ writing, from Henry’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881) to William’s Pragmatism (1907). The obsession with finding one’s place in the world was the legacy Henry Senior left his sons. How people use one another fascinated both of them, but they responded in different ways. In his personal life, William tried to rise above it, though it is key to pragmatism. Henry, however, knew it was a necessary part of life, and could be benign or malicious: he was a compulsively social man, and wrote with unmatched nuance about the connections between people, about friendships, love affairs, parents and children, even siblings.

In 1916 during his final illness, Henry told his favorite niece, William’s daughter, Peggy, several times: “I should so like to have William with me.”

From A Pluralistic Universe by William James:

Souls have worn out both themselves and their welcome, that is the plain truth. Philosophy ought to get the manifolds of experience unified on principles less empty. Like the word ’cause,’ the word ’soul’ is but a theoretic stop-gap—it marks a place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy.

This being our post-humian and post-kantian state of mind, I will ask your permission to leave the soul wholly out of the present discussion and to consider only the residual dilemma. Some day, indeed, souls my get their innings again in philosophy—I am quite ready to admit that possibility—they form a category of thought too natural to the human mind to expire without prolonged resistance. But if the belief in the soul ever does come to life after the many funeral-discourses which humian and kantian criticism have preached over it, I am sure it will be only when some one has found in the term a pragmatic significance that has hitherto eluded observation. When that champion speaks, as he well may speak some day, it will be time to consider souls more seriously.

On August 26, 1910, William James died at the age of 68. To mark the centenary of his death, this week on The Second Pass will be devoted to James.

I read The Varieties of Religious Experience for the first time about four years ago, and I quickly became a James fanatic. In short order, I read several other books by or about him, some of which will be mentioned on the site throughout the week. Also in store: an excerpt from one of James’ best-known works will go up on the Backlist momentarily; a review of a biography of James’ wife will be published in Circulating; the Shelf will fill up with books related to James; and there will be guest posts on the blog by several very smart people who, like me, hold James dear. I’ve found since discovering his work for myself that fellow fans share my affection for him, my sense that he is almost a real friend — a remarkable feeling to have for any author, much less one who has been gone for a century. If you’re unacquainted with James, I hope that this week on the site will give you a sense of why that affection exists, and will motivate you to learn more about him. If you are acquainted, I hope you get something new from this effort and find it an appropriate tribute.

As always, thanks for reading.

This list at Forbes of the 10 highest-paid authors over the past year is unsurprising. James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer, John Grisham, etc. JK Rowling is just getting by on the residual wizardry ($10 million), but she better write something else soon.

What’s shocking is the following: “One out of every 17 novels bought in the U.S. are authored by Patterson.” Wow. That’s almost more dispiriting than straight-up illiteracy stats. Plus, this: Stephen King is working on a musical with John Mellencamp.

But as Sarah Crown pointed out on Twitter, the “real news” is Dean Koontz’s hair, which gives Blagojevich a run for his money.

Preeminent literary critic, essayist, and academic Frank Kermode has died at 90. In a thorough obituary for the Guardian, John Mullan writes, “His fusing of scholarly disinterestedness and live intellectual curiosity was hard and rare. It made him the leading literary critic of his generation.” From the same obituary:

The title of another collection of essays from his post-Cambridge period, An Appetite for Poetry (1989), reflected a new emphasis in Kermode’s thinking about literary criticism and the teaching of literature. He had become surer and surer that literary theory, which he had once invited into the seminar room, was strangling the understanding and love of literature. He had come to think that many university teachers and leading critics of literature, particularly in America, had no “appetite for poetry.” Earlier works from the 80s, Forms of Attention (1985) and History and Value (1988), had explored the need for a literary canon – a core of especially valuable works of the imagination to which we can keep returning. Now he believed that theory, frozen into formula, was the addiction of academic critics “who seem largely to have lost interest in literature as such.” Thus, a final irony: a man who had been one of the country’s leading literary theorists became a scathing critic – sometimes satirist – of literary theory’s self-importance.

(Photo of Kermode by Eamonn McCabe for the Guardian)

This Missouri Review interview with George Saunders is evidently from back in 2001, but it’s full of timeless humor, general good nature, and thoughts about the writing (and teaching-of-writing) process. Two tidbits here, but make time for the whole thing:

In my work, and in my psyche, there’s this very sentimental, traditional, conventional side that’s always in argument with a more radical, sarcastic side. Some of my stories are really sentimental, but they’re layered over with weird, satirical stuff. For example, “Sea Oak” is a very straightforward story about the haves and the have-nots, about one of the have-nots saying, “Why didn’t I get anything?” To get away with what could be a saccharine, sentimental arc, I cover it with all this dark, perverse stuff that makes the reader mistake me for a scatological cynic.

And:

Any mastery you can achieve in writing is totally personal and incredibly nuanced. It’s a sort of antimastery, feeling comfortable with being unsure. After fifteen years of doing this, what I know about writing is nothing I could actually say to you. It’s like boxing, maybe. A good boxer could tell you, “Always keep your hands up,” or “It’s important to be a good counterpuncher.” But the reason the boxer is a good boxer is not that he can articulate those things but because he can do them instantaneously—and also of course because he has great abs and can jump rope for three hours straight.

Wendy Lesser re-reads Henry James’ The Bostonians:

I even treasure the loathsome Tarrants — Verena’s father, a “mesmeric healer,” and her mother, the pathetic, social-climbing daughter of a well-known abolitionist — for their near-Dickensian vividness and ludicrousness. This is a novel in which no one is spared but in which everyone earns at least a grain of James’s sympathy, and sometimes (as in Olive’s and Basil’s case) much more than that.

I read The Bostonians (for the first time) earlier this year. I loved it, and shared a brief passage here.

(Via Mark Athitakis)

When the Caustic Cover Critic, who has a great eye for the bizarre and grotesque in book design (as well as the sublime), titles a post “Not Safe for Work, or Sane Humans,” I sit up and pay attention. The covers underneath the headline belong to the books of Harry Stephen Keeler (b. 1890). One site devoted to him says: “Today, if you’ve heard of him at all, it’s as the Ed Wood of mystery novelists, a writer reputed to be so bad he’s good.”

I hadn’t heard of him even as that, but further investigation was well worth it. First, plot synopses of two of his dozens of books:

A man is found strangled to death in the middle of a lawn, yet there are no footprints other than his own. Police suspect the “Flying Strangler-Baby,” a killer midget who disguises himself as a baby and stalks victims by helicopter. (X. Jones of Scotland Yard, 1936)

A disgruntled phone company employee calls every man in Minneapolis, telling him the morning papers will name him as the secret husband of convicted murderess Jemimah Cobb, who runs a whorehouse specializing in women with physical abnormalities. (The Man With the Magic Eardrums, 1939)

The Harry Stephen Keeler Society, based at Xavier University, maintains an informative web site. It also has a Twitter page dedicated, it seems, to showcasing Keeler’s sentences. (“Having no televisic gifts for seeing into the future, Penn Harding allowed his complex to be titillated.”; “To hell with all shirt salesmen!”) The site also has several examples of the original artwork and jacket copy for Keeler’s books, the best rabbit hole I’ve discovered in a while.

According to William Poundstone, Keeler, who wrote more than 70 novels, was committed to an insane asylum by his mother when he was a child. But, “Keeler cannot easily be pigeonholed as an ‘outsider.’ He was published by big houses internationally, and he was a pulp magazine editor as well.”

From a quick perusal of the evidence, it seems reading Keeler at any length would be a form of punishment. (McSweeney’s did reissue one of his books five years ago.) But reading about Keeler is a joy.

Back to the Caustic Cover Critic:

In learning more about Keeler, I came across Ramble House, a (then, at least) one-man operation dedicated to bringing all of Keeler’s works back into print. The owner, Fender Tucker, printed the books individually and then bound them in his kitchen with a hot glue gun and an iron.

God’s work.

Rosecrans Baldwin’s debut novel, You Lost Me There, about a neuroscientist, his recently deceased wife, and the different ways in which people remember, went on sale today. To mark the moment, Baldwin, co-founder of The Morning News, has published a pre-publication diary that he kept for The Millions, tracking the excitement and anxiety that leads up to having a book in the world. Three highlights below. When you have some time today, read the whole thing.

March 13, 2010
I’ve never kept a diary before. My wife and I live in the woods on the rural fringe of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We moved here after stints in New York and Paris because we wanted to be around nature again. We have blueberry bushes, a gigantic fig tree, and thousands of ticks. Behind our house is an acre of forest. On its back side, there’s a guy with a lumber business who wields a much bigger, louder gun than I do. Mine is my wife’s dead grandfather’s BB gun, which we use to frighten away deer, whereas the neighbor’s gun is a shoulder-mounted cannon that he fires whenever he likes.

April 2, 2010
Panic about the novel is set to low simmer. The next novel and the non-fiction book proposal aren’t flying, they’re flunking. Anxiety is causing my fingernails to reverse course and grow inward. What if You Lost Me There is perceived to be a bomb, would it be so bad? Playing around today, I figured out that Michiko Kakutani is an anagram for “Atomic Haiku Kink.” Michiko alone becomes, “Hi I Mock.”

May 24, 2010
Three days in New York with my sister. My sister lives in Brooklyn and we spent the weekend eating and drinking. Deviled eggs, I discovered, are in vogue in Manhattan right now, and now there’s a hatchery in my lower intestine. Diary note from the return flight, “New York is an office-park with a very good food court.” First gunshots this morning at 8:28 a.m. Good to be home.

Today in Circulating, my friend Jon Fasman and I discuss a recently published book by Josh Wilker about his childhood and his baseball card collection. One of the book’s funniest moments involves pitcher Dock Ellis. And believe it or not, it’s not the time Ellis threw a no-hitter while still under the lingering influence of LSD. To commemorate that moment, please enjoy this fantastic animated video (with narration by Ellis himself):

Congratulations to reader Joseph Benincase, who has won a copy of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.

And thanks to the many other readers who entered the contest, and who very kindly responded to my call for site feedback and baseball prognostication.

I’m formulating a regular giveaway plan, and the next opportunity will be announced on Monday, August 23 — which will also be the first day of a special, nerdy week around here. More soon…

Caitlin Roper interviews John Waters at the Paris Review blog. You learn, among other things, that when he was 17 he lived in Provincetown for two weeks, in a tree fort:

A guy named Prescott Townsend owned it. The first gay radical I had ever met. He was from a wealthy family from Cambridge and he seemed completely insane, in a great way. Part of the tree fort was a submarine. He had to like you to let you live there and it was free and he gave you free hot dogs and eventually the town burned it and then they cut the tree down.

And that when he says “cut and paste,” he means cut and paste:

My other ritual is that I write in longhand. On this one kind of legal pad called AMPAD Evidence. I like BIC pens, the clear black ones. And I have to use an exact kind of scotch tape when I cut things up—Scotch Magic Finish Tape. And I have to use the same style scissors.

So you use the scissors and the tape to take what you’ve written in longhand and rearrange it?

Yes. When I’m re-writing rather than copy the whole thing over and over, I’ll cut out three sentences and put ’em in. It’s a word processor, old fashioned, by hand. Then, when I get it back from my assistant typed, I cut it up again. Then there’s less and less writing the closer and closer it is until we start copyediting and proofreading and all that.

Read the whole entertaining thing.

Gaby Wood writes in the Telegraph about Eunice Frost, an editor at Penguin starting in the late 1930s who went on to become the house’s first female director. Frost is now largely forgotten, and Wood goes through heaps of her old files to paint a full, tender portrait (pardon the backwards quotation marks; WordPress stubbornly wants them to look that way for some reason):

In making up for men who were at the Front, Frost developed a career she probably wouldn’t have had without the war. Perhaps as a result, she sacrificed her life to hard work and assisted in the birth of a publishing house of great idealism and zeal. Much of the paperwork found in the archive was administrative – rights bought from agents, photographs requested and returned.

But she certainly had more than her fair share of eminent correspondents. There are letters here from Edith Sitwell (”Dear Miss Frost, What a very charming woman you must be – if I may say so.”); Dorothy L Sayers (”Dear Miss Frost, If you must write me up, for God’s sake keep off the personal. This concupiscence for intimate details about people is rotting away the brains of our civilisation…”); Graham Greene (”What I’d like to see you publish is one of my travel books”); Evelyn Waugh (”I saw the photograph your informant thought ‘wistful.’ It made me look like an ill-tempered publican. I expect that is a characteristic aspect but I don’t think it likely to excite the sympathy of your readers”). There are invitations to the memorial services of TS Eliot, Winston Churchill and Henry Moore. But by far the most interesting character to emerge from these boxes is Frost herself.

The second half of the piece, spurred by the more personal writings of Frost, is awfully sad but beautifully done:

Among Frost’s boxes is a set of 11 pages written in pencil, in a hand characteristic of something produced at great speed. It was obvious to me that the piece was some sort of autobiographical sketch, but the writing was so unclear I wanted to give up on it. I was just about to set it aside when I finally deciphered the first sentence, and knew I couldn’t let it go: “I was born the fourth, last, and unwanted child of parents who should never have had children at all.”

I will be away from the computer all day, so until Monday, have a great weekend everybody. And remember, if you haven’t yet thrown your hat in the ring for the Pynchon giveaway, I’m accepting hats until 11:59 Sunday night.

At n+1, Nick Holdstock writes about taking part in a Thomas Pynchon conference earlier this year in Poland. A piece:

I took a seat at the back (in what would have been “Togo” or “Benin”) next to a man who resembled a Biblical prophet as drawn by Robert Crumb. He had a long, grey beard and eyes like hot coals, and was with a woman whom he introduced as an “illustrator”—which word required him to relate the entire plot of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions. As he talked, and talked, I looked around the quickly filling room. Of the fifty or so people, most were middle-aged white males. It occurred to me that a) I had never met a woman who said she loved Thomas Pynchon and that b) while not a virgin, I was, at the age of 36, very far from married. I hoped these two facts were unrelated.

The first talk was by a British young man whose sentences were long, curving roads that forked repeatedly. Though the audience at first mistook this for garrulousness, after twenty minutes it became clear that he was paying deliberate homage to some of Pynchon’s more Byzantine passages, a fact we acknowledged with gentle nods and the occasional yawn of rapture. The only dissenting voice was the prophet to my right. “That boy talks out of his ass,” he said in an angry whisper.

So this is as good a time as any to remind you about the Pynchon book giveaway going on here this week. Details can be found here.

From Father and Son by Edmund Gosse (which will be explored at greater length on the Backlist, probably in September):

Sometimes in the course of this winter, my Father and I had long cosy talks together over the fire. Our favourite subject was murders. I wonder whether little boys of eight, soon to go upstairs alone at night, often discuss violent crime with a widower-papa? The practice, I cannot help thinking, is unusual; it was, however, consecutive with us. We tried other secular subjects, but we were sure to come round at last to ‘what do you suppose they really did with the body?’ I was told, a thrilled listener, the adventure of Mrs. Manning, who killed a gentleman on the stairs and buried him in quick-lime in the back-kitchen, and it was at this time that I learned the useful historical fact, which abides with me after half a century, that Mrs. Manning was hanged in black satin, which thereupon went wholly out of fashion in England.

Juliet Waters has a great idea. Like many of us, she’s tired (to the point of collapse) of Jane Austen vs. Mothra, or whatever other nonsense is being published this week. Waters writes:

Jane Austen hated horror. The first novel she ever completed (though it remained unpublished until after her death) was Northanger Abbey. It featured a heroine enthralled with The Mysteries of Udolpho, a popular gothic novel of her era. Catherine Moreland does not, however, overcome supernatural obstacles to land a handsome hero. Instead her poor taste in fiction almost costs her a good man who writes her off as a half brain. (She is, and remains, a half brain. But this being a novel of its time, he must marry her anyways.)

Her great idea is to reverse this trend, and to “Austenize” classic horror stories. Her proposed take on The Shining is called Redrum Park:

Poor Mrs. Price. She thought she’d married a good man, but he turned out to be the worst sort imaginable, a writer. One day she finds her young daughter, Fanny, tricycling up and down the hallway babbling dyslexically. She sends her to live with her sister Lady Bertram and her family, who live at Redrum Park.

Read the rest here.

Sometimes I can suss out how and why a spambot targeted my site. Sometimes I can’t:

I have used many workout for abs methods, and found yours really good.

There are things I keep promising to do, two of which jump out at me: Review Reality Hunger (which will happen, and soon), and read Robert Walser. The latter might have to wait a little while longer, but that didn’t keep my from enjoying Jacob Silverman’s recent piece about Walser in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Silverman describes the innovative Swiss writer as “an ethereal figure, divorced from time: an apolitical person in a period of great political upheaval; a barely educated wanderer who’s garnered the posthumous reputation of a hermit genius; a literary mystic miscast as blindly mad, when he in fact was all too aware of his own complicated demons.”

The essay is pegged to Walser’s “microscript” writing (Walser called it his “pencil method”), which allowed him to finish entire stories on surfaces like postcards, envelopes, and receipts.

Christopher Middleton, another of Walser’s translators into English, has likened Walser’s childlike wonderment toward the world, and his “untutored” development as a writer, to the primitivism and “naïve art” movements then underway in the form of practitioners like Henri Rousseau. [. . .] But any childlike character Walser may have had seems more like a method of escape from a tormented self than a concerted attraction to the markers of youth. Walser’s identity, if any, was predicated on self-abnegation, a gradual erasure: his characters desire nothing more than a small room to call their own and often comment that they are “zeros.” Reflecting on being in an asylum, the author told Seelig, “I am not here to write but to be mad.” Ironically, this vow of literary silence, a comment charged with disgust at an uncomprehending world, has become one of his most famous and quoted lines. [. . .]

When Walser was using the pencil method, he was not fully himself. He was plumbing a space somewhere between automatic writing and traditional composition. It was a half-conscious effort, a way to escape his analytical self, his self-castigating mind, by tricking it into being loose, uncaring and to learn to write, to play, anew.

Welcome to the first book giveaway on The Second Pass. It’s a tradition on other sites, and I hope I can do more of it in the future. This initial offering is the Penguin Classics edition of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. A lovely book, it can be yours for nothing at all. Just send an e-mail to john[at]thesecondpass[dot]com, with Pynchon in the subject line. If you’d like to add a brief note, telling me how much you like the site, or a way you think it could be improved, or who you think will win the National League’s central division this year, I would love that. No mailing address necessary — I’ll contact the winner for that. Winner will be determined by random drawing. I’ll accept entries until 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, August 8th.

Rest assured that your e-mail addresses will not be used for any nefarious purposes. I would have no idea how to do that, even if I wanted to, which I most certainly do not. I look forward to hearing from you. Good luck.

Last Friday marked the 75th anniversary of Penguin Books. Now a worldwide publisher of diverse titles in diverse formats, the press started in Britain as the brainchild of Allen Lane. As Phil Baines writes in the beautiful Penguin by Design: “The idea of publishing cheap, good-looking reprints of fiction and non-fiction in paperback was Allen’s first and foremost, though it was refined and added to by his brothers, Richard and John, also directors [at The Bodley Head, a publishing firm]. Allen was inspired by the dearth of cheap reading material at Exeter train station when returning from a weekend’s visit to Agatha Christie.”

The books’ minimalist but striking designs, featuring the now iconic logo of a cartoon penguin, helped establish the brand. The rest is history. Some people, like those in the Penguin Collectors Society, now fiercely seek out those original titles. The Guardian recently featured one such collector, Steve Hare, who owns nearly 3,000 Penguin paperbacks. There are several places online to find collections of the covers, like here and here.

You can learn more about the publisher’s plans to celebrate the anniversary here; more about the first 10 books in the Penguin series here; and a time line of the publisher’s history here. In just a few minutes, I’ll be posting about the first-ever giveaway on The Second Pass, to do my small part to commemorate the 75 years.