Alicia Puglionesi
Mar 2, 2022
Pajamas from Spirit Land: Searching for William James
After the passing of William James — philosopher, early psychologist, and investigator of psychic phenomena — mediums across the US began receiving messages from the late Harvard professor
I’ve been writing a book about a failed and forgotten science, poring over the testimony of people who saw and heard impossible things, for years now. I joke that it will make me crazy. People ask if I believe in ghosts, and I can always tell if they’re asking because they experience reality as haunted in some way, or because they think I’ve fixed on a wrong idea. Walking out of the icy American Society for Psychical Research (ASPR) library into the sunset-saturated clamor of evening on the Upper West Side, I feel like a shade among the living. I have my feet in other people’s inner worlds, their yearnings and anxieties are mine. Traffic, bodegas, the cartoon animals on children’s backpacks wash over me, meaning obscured by a curtain of sheer sensory noise. Unmoored, I take my cell phone out of my pocket and call whoever will answer. It’s as simple as trading gossip with my high school best friend or an old roommate. Unbeknownst to them, they’re talking me back into our common reality. But where am I when I’m drifting? What if no one answers the call? Over time, the people we love slip out of range.
It was hard for his friends to let William James go. “I always thought that [he] would continue forever”, declared the irascible editor John Jay Chapman, “and I relied upon his sanctity as if it were sunlight.”1 James’ death in August of 1910 came on quickly, though he had long suffered from ill health. The fact that he was so often sick, and the causes of his illness so obscure, made even James doubt that his heart would finally fail. Perhaps he could still think his way out of it. If only he could overcome the growing anxiety that his major contributions to philosophy, 1907’s Pragmatism and 1909’s A Pluralistic Universe, were being misinterpreted and poorly received. His gasping for breath was “partly a spasmodic phenomenon”, he insisted, something in the mind. Yet, as his brother and wife rushed him across the Atlantic after another failed Alpine rest cure, it became clear to all of them that it would be his last return to New England. In constant pain, he could no longer walk and had to be carried on a litter. Sixty-eight years of chaotic comings and goings, restless transmissions, had come to an end. This ending left Henry James “in darkness . . . abandoned and afraid”.2 The elder brother was a pillar shoring up Henry’s unstable emotions. “His death changes and blights everything for me”, Henry wrote, staggering under the weight and finality of loss.
Photograph of the James brothers, published in The Letters of William James, vol. 2 (1920)
Hyslop investigated Ritchie and found that the “alleged messages from Professor James do not present evidence of identity in any form that is scientifically recognizable.”18 No pink pajamas, that is. But Hyslop didn’t really know James. James, in fact, harbored mild personal dislike towards his ASPR successor, who he saw as blunt and unempathetic. The idea that Hyslop would be the target of James’ efforts at communication, out of mere professional courtesy, is somewhat absurd.
In Ritchie’s trance she mingled the initials W. J. and H. J. Supposedly unaware of either individual’s work, she scrawled William—Henry— James—Henry—William across the page. Said the dead one to the one who survived: “James lives my brother lives lives. Asking brother where my pen is.” Said the surviving brother of the dead one: “He is a possession, of real magnitude, and I shall find myself still living upon him to the end.”19
October 14, 1912: “William James will not Prof. James for there are no professor here. God * * but will W James Prof Jam . . . [ran off paper] James * * Jams James William James.”
A realist novelist of meticulous psychological insight, Henry James stood at the precipice of modernism. The more obsessively he captured his characters’ fragmentary memories, contradictory desires, and unconscious motives, the closer he came to dissolving the unitary Enlightenment self that made novels possible to begin with. Whether this tendency is related to William’s psychological theories or not, the brothers were in constant communication. They both struggled throughout their lives with episodes of paralyzing despair; one could suggest, as a causal factor, the suspicion that we are nothing more than a fleeting, unstable bundle of impressions and influences. Henry especially worried over the feminine valence of sensitivity, that receiving too much of others could unmake and unman. Yet through sheer force of authorship — persuasive, dazzling authorship — both brothers tried to assert a unified self that persists. Even in this lonely masculine project, each was necessary to the other.
Many things shattered in the interval between Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw and a text like Joyce’s Ulysses. William James explored the precarious nature of the self, but he denied the inevitability of despair — he asserted the nineteenth-century ideal of constant, disciplined self-making as a bulwark against the void. As modernist and postmodern poets adopted channeling as a writing technique, it became a discipline of dissolution, a poetics of confused, layered, fragmentary voices coming through from the far reaches of time and space. The poet taking dictation was the “tissue of trash” that Henry decried, a doomed explorer, a linguist translating from nonsense to nonsense, and ultimately, a specter. However, the channeling practice of poets like Jack Spicer was not easy or for show; Spicer was wholly consumed by the duty to take dictation. At some point, his determination to produce good art elided into a perilous responsibility to the dead.
