Booknotes

PROFESSOR LINDA SIMON, AUTHOR, "GENUINE REALITY:" Well, at the turn of the century, William James was probably the most popular intellectual in American life. That doesn't even begin to say what he meant to the people of the time. I think that if I were going to define him in a concise way, I would say he was a liberator of hearts and minds and spirits. He was also a professor of philosophy at Harvard, which, I think, seems to contradict that first definition. He was a psychologist who set up experimental psychology in this country, although he did not believe, really, in laboratory work. He was a psychical researcher and he was the eldest brother of Henry James, the novelist.

PROF. SIMON: The Jameses were a quirky family. There was Henry James Sr., who was a s--kind of self-proclaimed philosopher, the mother, Mary, who is a--still a little bit of a mystery to all of us, and there were four sons and a daughter. The two eldest sons became enormously well-known intellectuals. That's William and Henry. The youngest daughter, Alice, is known for her victimization. She wrote a diary that's--that's very interesting. And the two middle sons called themselves failures. They were the sort of expendable members of the James family. But at the time--this is from the mid-19th century until Henry James died after World War I--the Jameses were enormously influential in American life. They knew everyone. American intellectuals were a rather small circle. They were on the--the level of Emerson, the Alcotts, Thoreau, all of whom they knew. That's who the Jameses were in terms of our intellectual history. Who they were to each other is a different answer entirely.

PROF. SIMON: John McDermott is--he was a--a teacher I had as an undergraduate at Queens College, and at the time, still, I'm sure, the reigning James scholar.

PROF. SIMON: Well, you know, this was some sort of Western culture or introduction to philosophy course. And you know what philosophers are like when you're an undergraduate. They're so boring and they seem so downcast. They're--they just don't seem like happy people. And, in fact--we can get back to the part that they're not happy--but all of a sudden, James burst on to the scene and he was lively. His writings were accessible. And he said something to the spirit of who a t--a 20-year-old is at that time, which is a person who's asking questions about, `Who am I? What is the meaning of life? What should I do with my life? How do we make moral decisions?'--those kinds of questions. And James spoke to those so directly and--and so optimistically.

PROF. SIMON: No, this happens--I mean, that I--I, you know, had the fortune of taking this course with John McDermott--had nothing to do with what happened later. The next time James came into my life, really, was when I was working on a biography of Alice Toklas and--which, of course, was also a biography of Gertrude Stein, and Stein had been a student of James', an enormously adoring student of James'. She credited him with opening up so many paths in terms of literature and art as--and, more than that, for really affirming her own spirit and sense of identity. She said once, `Is life worth living? Yes, yes, 1,000 times yes when there is some man--such a man as William James.'

PROF. SIMON: Yes, he did like teaching girls. Well, he liked to flirt and be adored. That was part of it. He was really rather a professional flirt. This all comes, I think, from his long, long protracted search for affirmation of his own self-worth and manhood. And he sort of took that for the rest of his life. He liked to be praised and--and adored. And his women students, especially, were very willing to do that.

PROF. SIMON: The companion of Gertrude Stein.

PROF. SIMON: Long time ago. That was published in '77.

PROF. SIMON: Oh. Well, I had been to Paris, came home with a not very original idea of writing a literary guide to Paris. That I did didn't exactly congeal. But while I was doing some research, I started reading Gertrude Stein, and--and she was just an exciting and wonderful figure. Her centenary was sort of coming up. Someone else, James Mellow, was working on a biography of Stein. And I thought it would be just so much fun to write about Alice B. Toklas. But this was a time when I did not consider myself a writer. This was just something to do next. And I did it. The research was wonderful. The writing was wonderful. Everything about it was wonderful, and I decided afterwards why--why do anything else?

PROF. SIMON: Nothing. I was looking--I was searching for myself.

PROF. SIMON: No. No, that came afterwards, also.

PROF. SIMON: Partly in New York and--no, I think I--I finished this. I was living in New York, and then shortly after that moved to the Berkshires. But--but it was a sort of self-contained activity. It wasn't the begin--I didn't see it as the beginning of my career as a biographer.

PROF. SIMON: Well, Gertrude Stein was a quirky modernist. I think, though, that there's some analogy to William James in that Gertrude Stein is a sort of culture hero. You know, she had this salon in Paris. She knew everyone. She advised Hemingway on his writing. She championed Fitzgerald. And yet very few people actually read the writings of Gertrude Stein because the writing she took seriously as a modernist are impenetrable. And so she got her reputation from a kind of spirit of modernism, of what the possibilities for literature and language were. And because, I think, she paved a new way of living for herself, as did Alice Toklas, that was not the expected destiny for a Jewish girl brought up in Oakland, California.

PROF. SIMON: Yes.

PROF. SIMON: Mm-hmm.

PROF. SIMON: It works when you write biographies that you learn very much about yourself, I think, because if you go into a biography without a kind of psychological system that you're applying to your subject, then what you know about your subject, what you believe is true, is always tested against what you know about yourself or about living. And the more you ask questions about your subject, I think, the more you ask questions about yourself. And so, yes, it has taught me a lot. And James--I worked on this book for about six years--was just the most affirming and liberating companion. It's very hard to think that the book is over, not that James is over in my life, but that the book is over.

PROF. SIMON: Well, I was teaching at Harvard until recently, and now I'm at Skidmore. And most of the time, you know, I wrote it in James' territory, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, near where he lived, where he taught, where his voluminous papers are. It was...

PROF. SIMON: And where he's buried, absolutely.

PROF. SIMON: Yes.

PROF. SIMON: Not all the James--not the two middle brothers. They're buried in the Cambridge City Cemetery. There are--for those who know the Cambridge area, there's a wonderful cemetery called Mount Auburn. It's a garden cemetery, and it has statues and plantings and benches, and people go there to meditate and withdraw. But the Jameses were not buried there at all, although very many other important people were. They're buried in the Cambridge City Cemetery, which is just not very scenic.

PROF. SIMON: William James and his brother Henry.

PROF. SIMON: Yes.

PROF. SIMON: William James was the eldest. There's a 15-month difference.

PROF. SIMON: Well, Henry James, of course, gave us the mer--recent movies, "Washington Square" and "Wings of the Dove." He was a novelist and short story writer, an essayist and biographer, a very prolific writer and, certainly, now considered one of--one of the major American writers. In his own time, it was--there was a lot of competition out there. There was William Dean Howells. There was Edith Wharton. She outsold him, to his great distress, many times. But now he's been, you know, canonized in the Academy and--and, indeed, deserves it. He's a wonderful writer.

PROF. SIMON: William James died in 1910, and Henry James in 1916.

PROF. SIMON: Oh, they would be so happy. They so much wanted success. They wanted money. Henry James wanted much more publicity than just writing novels. He tried very much to write plays and couldn't. They failed miserably. But he would have wanted that very much.

PROF. SIMON: Mm-hmm.

PROF. SIMON: Surprised--that kind of speaks to their self-confidence and optimism. I would say William James would not be surprised. He would be--he would feel so vindicated that finally people were reading him. Henry, at the end of his life, was sadder. And I don't know. I don't know that he ever really thought or believed that he would be f--enormously popular.

PROF. SIMON: Right. Well, you know, when you have a family that names all the children William Henry and Henry and William, you have to find some way of distinguishing--Har--He--Henry James Jr. was called Harry by the family. And then when he was able to have a professional life, I called him Henry, because there wasn't the Henry James Sr. looming.

PROF. SIMON: Mm-hmm.

PROF. SIMON: Oh, no, not at all. John Dewey, who was a later famous American philosopher, said that when William James lived, it was James first and no second. He was so enormously influential. And--and this was before--let's do a little chronology just to get all this in place. He published his major works, the works that are kind of iconic, you know, late in his life. "Pragmatism" came out in 1907; "Pluralism & the Meaning of Truth" and all the other books that--all the other kind of keywords we associate with James came out very, very close to his death.

He was so enormously popular before then, that the question is: Why? And not among academics. It would be so wrong to call him an academic philosopher or even to--even when I say he was an intellectual, I know that some people are hearing, `Uh-oh, that's not for me.' He really wanted to speak and directed his works toward ordinary people, to students, to teachers, elementary school teachers, anybody that was interested in any questions of spirituality or religion and--and not on a kind of high philosophical vein, but, `How can I believe in God if--if the--if science tells me that I should only believe what can be proven?' I mean, a question like that. And James felt that what unites us--and this from the inventor of pluralism and, you know, that's, I'm sure, why Schlesinger has him on the list--but that there is--he believed that there was certain things--human needs that united us, and one of them was a craving to believe that there was some kind of transcendent spirituality that we could have faith in, that was beyond the empirical.

So even though he was grounded in experience and he--he exhorted people to trust their own experience, they could know the world. They didn't need philosophers to interpret the world for them. They didn't need scientists to prove the world for them. They just needed to look and feel and reflect on what it was to live in the world. Even that person believed that we all have a craving for some spirituality.

PROF. SIMON: English.

PROF. SIMON: Yes, I'm teaching a course...

PROF. SIMON: ...in William James and the James family.

PROF. SIMON: Well, of course, they--they elect to take this course, so they're interested in--in the ways that a novelist, a philosopher and the--the daughter who didn't become anything fit together. But one way that I saw them, you know, feel very enthusiastic was when we were talking about psychical research.

PROF. SIMON: It means that--well, psychical research was James' investigation into what we would call paranormal experiences, like mediums that would get messages from beyond, hallucinations, premonitions, anecdotes about people who had seen ghosts or felt that a house was haunted, anything that convinced a person that what he experienced was not explainable by any kind of real way. That's what this group--and it was a very erudite group. This was not a fringe looney group. That's what psychical research was. And when I ask my students or any group, `Have you ever had a psychical experience,' no matter how educated, no matter how intellectual and--the overwhelming answer is, `Yes, I've had an experience that I would call a psychical experience.'

And if--you know, if I were to say to them, `Well, do you really believe in ghosts? Do you believe that the dead can return,' I'm sure, if pressed, there would be a limit to what they would admit to. But they also admit that there are some experiences that you can't explain and that we want to believe, perhaps, that there's something out there.

PROF. SIMON: Leonora Piper was the medium that James investigated throughout his life. And there's an interesting story about how he found her. I'm sure you'd like to hear it. The Jameses--well, of course, William James had been interested in spiritualism--not spiritualism in terms of seances and table rappings and the sort of low-level popular, but the possibility of--of real spiritual connections for a very long time. But the Jameses suffered a real tragedy in 1885. They had a son who, at the age of about 18 months or 15 months, died of complications from whooping cough.

PROF. SIMON: Yes, Herman. It was the third child, and it was a devastating loss, especially for Alice, who was William James' wife.

PROF. SIMON: And even to make it more complicated, William's son, William, married an Alice. So William...

PROF. SIMON: ...William's wife, Alice, felt the loss so deeply, as, of course, anyone would. She was a--kind of a large, sturdy woman, but photographs of her after the child's death show someone that looks just stunned and drained and--and thin, and it was very devastating. And she desperately wanted some c--assurance that Herman still existed in some other realm. Her mother came back from a sitting with Leonora Piper that she had attended with another of her daughters, and she was very, very excited. She felt that Leonora Piper knew things about both the James family and her own family, who were the Gibbonses, that she could not have known unless she was an authentic medium. And it was such a vulnerable moment for William and Alice, that they rushed to her. She was then about 26. She was living in Boston. And she had a very modest kind of personality. Some of the--some of the mediums that advertised themselves were really showmen or showwomen, you know, but Leonora Piper was just a--a woman who was kind and quiet. And they sat--you know, they--they attended a seance and, indeed, they were persuaded that she was authentic.

PROF. SIMON: Well, everybody's sitting around a table, and it's dark or dim, the--the medium goes into a trance state and talks through what is called a control. So she would be talking in the voice of someone from, as they put it, beyond the veil. Leonora Piper's mediums were men, and they were very arrogant and imperious men, but that didn't seem to bother anybody. And she started talking and--and what would happen is the sitters would ask her questions, and then she would respond with messages about or from people that had died. She gave the Jameses information about the burial of their son, Herman, which certainly anybody could have known who knew the family, but which were distinct--you know, the flowers and the way they arranged them and certain things that they did--and, of course, persuaded the Jameses that she was authentic, but they wanted that at that point.

PROF. SIMON: They would come.

PROF. SIMON: James was a founding member of the American Society for Psychical Research, which was a branch of the London Society for Psychical Research. The London branch included Oxford and Cambridge faculty. Probably the most notable is Arthur Balfour, who later became prime minister of England. So this is not--you have to really understand it in context. These were not, sort of, New Age loonies. These were people who felt that scientific investigation might uncover something. And when the American branch was set up, James, some very noted theologians, like Phillips Brooks from Harvard, James' colleagues in the philosophy department, the head of it was Simon Newcomb, who was the head of the Smithsonian and a--a noted astronomer, probably the most famous scientist in America, and they set up committees to investigate psychical research.

PROF. SIMON: Oh, yes.

PROF. SIMON: James was trained as a physician, although he never practiced, and he...

PROF. SIMON: Yes, he was a medical doctor. He just decided not to practice that. His--his search for vocation went on very, very long, far longer than most people's. But he was very open to alternative medicine--what we would call alternative medicine--or mind cure movements, or anything out there that might make one feel better.

Just to backtrack, one of the prevalent maladies, especially among the educated class, was something called neurasthenia. We would call it now depression or being stressed out, or whatever we would say. But the symptoms were very similar. People would feel that they had very little reason to live. They were not very optimistic. They would have related gastrointestinal problems, and they--low self-esteem--I mean, all of the--all of those issues. And it was a very popular disease. It was almost a badge of bi--of intellectualism if you could claim that you were neurasthenic.

So there were lots of--of self-help movements to try to deal with these feelings. And one of them that James felt was a very exciting one was started by a--a businessman named Horace Fletcher. He was very overweight, and physically he felt terrible because he was so very overweight. He was also feeling very pessimistic. He didn't feel that being in business gave him much justification for living. He was discontent. So he walked away from his business, and he traveled. And one of the places he traveled to was Japan, and one of the things that he found in Japan was--was a s--just a sense of serenity that he wished he could achieve, but he was neurasthenic and he wasn't at all serene.

About the same time, he discovered this `chew-chew' movement that was popularized in England that Gladstone participated in. And it meant that you would chew every mouthful of food 32 times. That was the rule of it. And if you did that...

PROF. SIMON: Oh, yeah.

PROF. SIMON: Thirty-two times. And if you did that, you would reduce the food to liquid, you would lose weight, and also you would eat differently from the way people in the mid-19th century were eating. So instead of eating meat and eggs and fatty foods, you would focus on grains and breads and cereals. And so I would guarantee this to anyone out there, if you chew your food 32 times and cut out fats, you will start losing weight. And Horace Fletcher did, indeed, lose very great amounts of weight. He started feeling better, and so he started exercising. And he found that even though he was, I think, then in his 50s and had never done this before, he was stronger and--and much more at peace with himself.

So he decided that this was not only a dietary help, but this was a spiritual help, that if you could get yourself fit and strong, then your whole mental state would be much better. But not to end it there, if everybody's mental state was much better, society would be utopian. There would be no problems. There would be no need for jails, because people's aggressions would just melt away. Serenity would be the result of this, and, therefore, by chewing your food 32 times, you could enact major social reform. And James thought that was a wonderful idea. And not only James William, but Henry James did this so assiduously that he claimed, after he did it for years and years, that it really caused a kind of physical breakdown, because, well f--whatever he blamed it on. But he was--tended to overweight, and--and he thought Fletcherism was the answer to that.

PROF. SIMON: Oh, yes.

PROF. SIMON: Well, for a long time in his--as he was reaching adulthood, that was c--certainly true. There were different reasons for it. Yes, he was--he did suffer from depression, but, also, he didn't have, really, any sense of--of a goal in his life for such a long time. And he was persuaded by his father that having a goal w--no matter what that goal was, would pretty much be pandering to the marketplace. So for James to find a--a--an occupation that he could justify really took a very long time. And you can imagine that if you are, you know, a 20-year-old male and your father won't let you go to college the way other young men did and your father didn't want you to train for a profession the way your friends were, that you would feel very despondent. You know, what--what were you supposed to do?

That wa--I think was the cause of--of a lot of James' depression early in his life. Once he--once he got a job--which really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but it was a surprise to them--once he got a job and--and got affirmation and had a community and, especially, a teaching job where he had a feeling of authority, his depressions lightened considerably. And then when he married Alice, that was a big change, also.

PROF. SIMON: He was born in New York City in the Astor House.

PROF. SIMON: He--well, at the time, it was in lower New York, because that's where New York City was located in 1842. And the Astor House was really one of the most elegant hotels. The Jameses had money. The grandfather, who I'm afraid to tell you was also named William, settled in Albany, and he was reportedly the second- --richest man in America, second only to John Jacob Astor. Although he had very many children, they ended up with enough money to live independently.

PROF. SIMON: Yes. And he was...

PROF. SIMON: That was Albany.

PROF. SIMON: I d--I really don't remember. H--it was enough to support a family of five. I mean, that was for sure--and servants and--and not have to worry about managing money, because Henry James Sr. was not a very astute money manager.

PROF. SIMON: Henry...

PROF. SIMON: Right.

PROF. SIMON: Well, he was brought up in Albany and settled with his family in New York, lived here and there. A--they moved from New York to Europe, back to New York, to Europe, to Newport, perhaps to Europe again, back to Newport, then up to Cambridge. When he died, he was living in Cambridge.

PROF. SIMON: Newport--that's a very interesting question. The--they had some close family, and not only were they family, they were very close friends of the Jameses that--who were living in Newport. But it is curious, because Henry James Sr. wanted to be in the--in the cultural centers. He wanted recognition from his peers. He wanted to lecture, and he wanted to write. And Newport was a little off the beaten path. But at the times they were living there, the Jameses were not ready to commit themselves to settle. So Newport, being a kind of summer community, was just the right sort of place where people were coming in and out, and you didn't have to pretend that you had been there very long. And I think that suited what they needed at the time.

PROF. SIMON: Mm-hmm.

PROF. SIMON: There was Cambridge, where th--he was teaching. There was Chocorua, New Hampshire, where they had a--a country home, not just for summers, but really for retreats, which is quite lovely and s--still exists, much modified. And w--the--the really favorite place that William James had was Putnam Camp in the Adirondacks. And that, in fact, still exists, too. It was--he bought it with a group of friends, among whom were the Putnam brothers, and he would go hiking all the time. That was his r--that was his most serene and, you know, real place.

PROF. SIMON: I've been to all of them.

PROF. SIMON: I wish I could have--well, I was, of course, living in Cambridge. I came to Putnam Camp just by accident. A friend who knew that it still existed took me there, and I really was fortunate enough to be able to tour the Chi--Chocorua house. So, you know, it was just--there it was. I wish I could have followed in his footsteps through Europe. That would have been very nice, too, but...

PROF. SIMON: No, I didn't, actually. I didn't go to Rhode Island. I...

PROF. SIMON: I had been there before, so I knew the lay of the landscape, but it was interesting to see just the prospect--you know, what he could look out on and--and the surrounding land. Chocorua was a wonderful place. It's where he died. And it was a wonderful family place for them.

PROF. SIMON: OK.

PROF. SIMON: The belief that knowledge comes from interaction with experience rather than from a logical deduction of abstract ideas.

PROF. SIMON: Oh, well, the--the--the little clincher is panpsychic. And I guess that deserves some explanation. James was an empiricist who wanted to believe in what could not be known through experience. He desperately wanted to believe in this spiritual realm, and he conjured up explanations of what this could be. One of them was that there was a `mother-sea' as he put it, in which souls of dead--of the dead would just merge into this mother-sea. And our minds were constructed almost as kind of sieves. The more receptive of--of us could have the mother-sea sort of flow into our consciousness. And the more receptive, of course, would be the mediums or--or maybe ordinary people who were just quasi-receptive to this.

People reading that at the time got very incensed. They said, `No, I want to have my soul separate from other souls. I don't want to merge into a mother-sea. What's the good of that? And if I merged, I might merge with people not of my class.' So they were very upset about that and he sort of modified it.

But panpsychism, which was a philosophy that--that some people expounded, but most notably a friend of his, a st--former student, actually, named Charles Strong. Charles Strong was--was not an engaging person the way William James was, and he was working on this panpsychism and James was enormously excited about that. He thought that somehow Strong could figure it out and convey what James had been trying in all these sort of messy constructions to convey.

The interesting thing about Strong is that he was the son-in-law of John D. Rockefeller, and through him, James met Rockefeller and claimed that he gave Rockefeller some financial advice. So I think that's a little-known fact about James that probably should be thought about a little bit more. But--but James--this pluralistic ps--panpsychism--pluralism means that anybody's view of reality is to be respected and we should try to understand that view. It is v--what you experience is valid for you. And a philosopher shouldn't tell you what you have experienced.

PROF. SIMON: Yes.

PROF. SIMON: I hope that he would try to get us to understand that we need to go a little bit further with multicultural diversity because, in a way, multicultural diversity seems to come right from James' pluralism. He was looking at a society that was changing vastly and rapidly with--with immigrants, with a new middle class, with--with people that were not necessarily coming from the same kind of educational pedigree that James and his colleagues had.

These people needed to have a way of participating in the democracy. That's what James thought. They needed to become responsible people. They needed, as he put it, to know a good man when they saw one and vote for that man. And at that time, of course, it was man; now he would acknowledge it could be a woman, too. He convinced a lot of people that they had the right to have that authority; that they could, in fact, enact that role in the community. He felt very much that if a philosopher could not be a moral philosopher, take a stand in the moral questions of the community, then there was no reason to do it.

PROF. SIMON: Walter Lippmann adored him. Now Walter Lippmann had his own political predilections before he met James, you know. He--he was very much a man of the people before he met James. But he--he just thought James was right on in terms of the integrity of ordinary people and a kind of skepticism about people who claim to be the authority or claim to be elite.

PROF. SIMON: OK.

PROF. SIMON: Well, I hope these explanations are fine. If you want me to explain further, I certainly will try.

PROF. SIMON: OK.

PROF. SIMON: Mm-hmm.

PROF. SIMON: Mm-hmm.

PROF. SIMON: OK.

PROF. SIMON: He didn't want us to. He wanted us to understand life through perception, not by the name that things had. He felt that if we already came to experience with a preconception, a concept of what that experience would be, we wouldn't be open to change. And for him, the universe was going to change and we were going to change. And our--our very interaction with the universe was going to be a reciprocal reaction and, therefore, cause change in us and in the universe.

This was all coming from Darwin. I mean, the universe can change spontaneously and randomly. And individual interaction with the universe is part of that. So he saw that as a very liberating idea. This was not going to be a static universe that--that we live in. It wasn't and was not going to be. Every time we take a step, we take a step into something new and we are new.

PROF. SIMON: Mm-hmm.

PROF. SIMON: For James--what we know--if I'm looking at the--the chair I'm sitting in, for example, what I know about this chair comes from who I am, my experience with chairs, where I am at the moment in terms of my own life, and if I si--and, therefore, `chairness' is totally meaningless. It makes this static and it makes me not perceive a different experience in this chair, whereas if I found this chair out in the lobby or if I sit in this chair tomorrow, it's all going to be different.

Now with this chair, it's not going to be different in a major way, but there are experiences that are different in major ways and that's what James was saying. We are not static people in a static universe. We are changing ourselves, and the universe is changing also. And--and James' fellow philosophers felt that what they were doing was undermined by this kind of view because what they were trying to do was evolve systems whereby you could know the truth. And James was saying, `I don't think so.' And James' students and the people he talked to, it seemed so intuitively right and exciting. And what he wanted was a universe in which there was novelty. For James, choice and novelty were such important key words.

PROF. SIMON: Ten.

PROF. SIMON: At that point, it was really a health problem. He h...

PROF. SIMON: He was 68 and he had had heart disease for a long, long time. There was heart disease in the family. So--I mean, although that is interesting with James, too, yes, he was physically ill for many years. But at the end when he was dying--first of all, he was such a good performer, and he had been all his life, in making people feel that he was not ill that even close friends were shocked that he had died. The other thing is that his wife had an autopsy performed to--just to make sure that this was not psychosomatic. Because just as you're asking the question, his symptoms seemed so of a piece with the earlier symptoms. And yet, no, he was--he was ill and he was dying.

PROF. SIMON: Surprisingly few. The last one for general readers was in 1967. It was written by Gay Wilson Allen. There was a--a wonderful book about the James--the whole family by R.W.B. Lewis, I think, in '91 or '92. But William James alone, that was the last one that--it was really for general readers, you know, like you and other people.

PROF. SIMON: First of all, I had some different material. I had about 1,500 letters between James and his wife that had not been available to Gay Wilson Allen. And those were wonderful letters, very intimate letters and just a marvelous perspective on who James really was.

The other difference I think are--are new questions that we ask 30 years later about families, about the relationship between families. I think the--the earlier view of the Jameses--and this was not just Gay Wilson Allen--was that they were a kind of Bohemian family; that everybody was a little eccentric, but that they were generally--the father was interested in educating his children in this new and unconventional way, but he adored his children in that--and that the depressions were--were something else, you know, not necessarily related to the--to the family's life.

PROF. SIMON: That is identified as Leonora Piper in James' hand. So we can only assume that either it was Leonora Piper or a likeness of her. It--it's a very romantic photograph.

PROF. SIMON: Yeah. She was very young.

PROF. SIMON: Pauline Goldmark.

PROF. SIMON: She was an infatuation, one among many, but one that James got particular pleasure from. He met her when she was a student at Bryn Mawr. He would go lecturing at many, many colleges and meet many students. And she was very bright and--and spunky. He tended to like women that were forthright and--and had their own opinions and--and had a sense of what they were gonna do in the world. And he became correspondents with her and--and friends with her. He was in--in his early 50s and it was--it was definitely an infatuation. His letters to her are just so gushy.

PROF. SIMON: Yes. Well, she must have because they exist. The Jameses went through material and destroyed what they didn't want. To destroy--so that they exist means that Alice had decided they could stay for posterity.

PROF. SIMON: Yes, there are.

PROF. SIMON: Yes. Some of them--some of them are.

PROF. SIMON: Not the ones that I'm in contact with. I must say, though, that the spirit of generosity that James himself had definitely appears in the--in the descendants that I've had any contact with. They've been just wonderful.

PROF. SIMON: Lean, active, spry; he took great pride in his body. He wanted to be, you know, lean and attractive.

PROF. SIMON: Sixties.

PROF. SIMON: No, I don't. You know, it was a posed picture from one of his books.

PROF. SIMON: Yes. He loved to buy clothes. When he would go to Europe, he would come home with all kinds of jackets and ties and shirts made to order for himself. He had a--quite a different time trying to find gifts for his wife or anybody else, but he found loads of clothing for himself.

PROF. SIMON: His wife was frugal. Somebody had to be, but sh--but not de--he--she didn't deny him what he wanted to do.

PROF. SIMON: I think it was a wonderful marriage. He was--he could be trying and demanding. He--and egotistical. But he adored her and--and he was such an exciting and--and warm person to be with. So I think it was a very, very good marriage.

PROF. SIMON: Thilo.

PROF. SIMON: My husband and my son.

PROF. SIMON: Twenty.

PROF. SIMON: He's a student in college.

PROF. SIMON: At Skidmore right now.

PROF. SIMON: Where I'm teaching.

PROF. SIMON: But he has his own independent existence there.

PROF. SIMON: No.

PROF. SIMON: He's in business in--in the Albany area, where we're living now.

PROF. SIMON: Oh, much longer than that.

PROF. SIMON: Fourteen.

PROF. SIMON: Mm-hmm.

PROF. SIMON: Well, I was the director of the writing center and I taught expository writing.

PROF. SIMON: He thought it was getting to be too specialized. That's what he--he wrote an essay called the PhD Octopus. And he said, `We're going in the wrong direction. We shouldn't be carving out our tiny little areas where we're only talking to ourselves. We should be generalists and we should be talking to people out there.' So that was one criticism. He got a lot from Harvard, but he also felt because he wasn't a Harvard graduate, as an undergraduate, that he wasn't really, truly a Harvard man. And he had sometimes mixed feelings.

PROF. SIMON: He didn't get an undergraduate degree. His...

PROF. SIMON: No. His father thought that colleges were, and this is a quote, "hotbeds of corruption," and none of his children would participate in that. William did go...

PROF. SIMON: No, no, no.

PROF. SIMON: Oh, no. He never studied philosophy formally, which is why to call him a philosopher puts a different meaning on it, you know. He wasn't an academic philosopher. He studied at the Lawrence Scientific School, which was a technical school. He studied chemistry. And he went to the Harvard Medical School. You know, in those days, you could do that without having an undergraduate degree. But he had no formal f--liberal arts or philosophical education. It was--it's wonderful that that could happen, isn't it?

PROF. SIMON: Mm-hmm.

PROF. SIMON: Enormous impact. He really made it the major university that it is today. He started the elective system. He hired bright, new faculty. He had a very clear sense of how to make Harvard an institution that could move into the new century.

PROF. SIMON: Mm-hmm.

PROF. SIMON: Many, many writings that had that word in it and many, many definitions of that word in those writings, much to the dismay of his fellow philosophers.

PROF. SIMON: But basically it means--well, let me tell you the problem he was trying to solve. One was to dissuade philosophers from spending their attention on metaphysical problems that had no apparent consequence. In other words, he was saying to them, `What does it matter? Ask yourself, "How does it matter?" And if it doesn't matter, then ask a question that does matter.' So he was looking to the consequences of a belief or a system of beliefs.

And the word `consequences' is a very important word for pragmatism. For James, pragmatism was a way of thinking, of solving problems, of making especially moral decisions that looked to the effect in the community and in one's own heart of holding those beliefs or making those decisions. And this was not--it seems so self-evident to us. We're so used to that. In fact, we've corrupted it and we call it expediency, which is not what he meant at all.

James was writing in a time when people were making these decisions because they were idealists and they were talking about all kinds of high-sounding ideals for why we should, for example, go to war, which James felt we should definitely not be doing. And he wanted to have some influence on those moral decisions.

PROF. SIMON: It helps you understand America's value of--of innovation and individuality, that's for sure, but it also really so deeply helps you understand America's potential for consensus, although celebrating plurality. And that, I think, is such an important message. If James could give us a message today, it would be that. It would be that there's the possibility of empathy that transcends our differences. If we're going to say we're celebrating people because they're of their race, of their ethnicity, of their sexual orientation, of their gender, of--of all the other ways that we've sort of atomized the culture, what James is telling us is there are some common needs and yearnings and cravings and desires that transcend that.

PROF. SIMON: Yes.

PROF. SIMON: Yes. By looking at them, I'm not sure. We all know how t--to dress these days, but by what they had to say, yes. James wanted what he had to say to be relevant to actual experience. He wanted it to be applicable to actual experience.

PROF. SIMON: Yes. I guess anyone who deals with ideas and--and spends a whole lot of time reading them, writing them, figuring them out, making sense of experience in a way that makes it coherent, I would say that's an intellectual.

PROF. SIMON: I think he'd write for whoever wanted to publish him.

PROF. SIMON: Oh. I don't know. I don't--I really don't know. My sense is--well...

PROF. SIMON: Mm-hmm.

PROF. SIMON: No. I didn't know I got a favorable review. Sometimes these things are hidden from me. Why?

PROF. SIMON: Uh-huh. Well, I'll have to read it. Why?

PROF. SIMON: I think he'd probably be considered a conservative.

PROF. SIMON: Because he--he had a--a hierarchy of what was good, meaningful, important. I don't think he would have patience with the kind of relativism that perhaps is out there a little bit in terms of--of h--of what we think, you know, when we're making moral decisions. So I--I do think he would be a little bit conservative. One of the--one of the sweetest things that James wrote was that the biggest breach in nature is the breach between human minds. And I think the sense of--of a commitment, not only--he said there's a kind of outer tolerance. We're all very conversant in outer tolerance. But it's the inner tolerance, that feeling that we actually do empathize, we understand how someone feels--that's what's missing. That he said was missing in his own time. Well, if it was missing in his own time, I think it's certainly missing in our own time.

PROF. SIMON: Saratoga Springs, New York.

PROF. SIMON: Thank you.