Colby Quarterly Volume 35 Issue 2 June Article 4 June 1999 "Is There a Life after Death?": Henry James's Response to the New York Edition Christopher Stuart Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq Recommended Citation Colby Quarterly, Volume 35, no.2, June 1999, p.90-101 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Commons @ Colby. It has been accepted for inclusion in Colby Quarterly by an authorized editor of Digital Commons @ Colby. Stuart: "Is There a Life after Death?": Henry James's Response to the New "Is There a Life after Death?": Henry James's Response to the New York Edition by CHRISTOPHER STUART N THE SUMMER OF what was for him the tumultuous year of 1909, Henry I James wrote his extraordinary but seldom read essay, "Is There a Life after Death?" (1910). The essay is noteworthy, first of all, as one of James's few direct statements about religion and the afterlife, as well as for the way it has been largely overlooked by James's critics and biographers. This oversight is all the more remarkable when one considers the essay's delineation of the spiritual aspects of the Jamesian consciousness. There are, after all, few dis­ cussions of religion or the afterlife in James's fiction, nor does one often find in James's letters direct statements regarding his own religious beliefs. The article takes on an even greater significance when one considers that James wrote it during the same period in which he was attempting to grapple with the popular failure of his New York Edition, the twenty-three volumes of his own work selected and revised by himself. James had conceived of this edition of his collected works as a monument to his career; it was the achievement of a lifetime's work and suffering through which he had hoped to renew his fame and rescue himself from obscurity. "Is There a Life after Death?" can fruitfully be read as in part James's response to the collapse of the monument that he had dedicated so much of his life to building. His effort to immortalize himself through his art having failed him, James took the opportunity in "Is There a Life after Death?" to remind himself of tenets he had long before established for himself. There he argues that the hunlan consciousness is so expansive in its proportions as to take on spiritual quali­ ties and that the cultivation of this consciousness offers one the greatest chance for transcending death. Perhaps more than anything else, the essay reveals the surprising degree to which James felt himself driven by his need to believe in the immortality of the personal self. Those critics who have discussed "Is There a Life after Death?" have typi­ cally been struck by what they see as the essay's pervasive pessimism. Mildred Hartsock, one of the few writers to have considered the essay at length, contends that "[t]he prevailing tone of the essay is tentative," and that at most it offers the reader "a hesitant commitment to openness and futurity" (513). In his biography of James, Fred Kaplan briefly summarizes the essay: James's answer to the title.question was that "he did not know," but "that he thought it unlikely" (563). Like Kaplan, Leon Edel pays the essay scant 90 Published by Digital Commons @ Colby, 1999 1 Colby Quarterly, Vol. 35, Iss. 2 [1999], Art. 4 CHRISTOPHER STUART 91 attention, addressing it only in the final paragraph of his five-volume biogra­ phy. There Edel states flatly and confidently that the essay demonstrates that when it came to the afterlife James "believed there was none. Death was absolute" (II 819). According to Edel, the essay proves that "[l]ike Proust, he saw that art alone retains and holds the life-the consciousness-of man long after the finders and makers are gone. The true immortality was the immortal picture or statue, the immortal phrase whether of music or of words. This was his deepest faith" (II 819). As one reads James's essay, however, one feels that the perceptions of these critics may have been skewed by what they already knew, or thought they knew, about James. Although his novels, especially those written before the "Major Phase," surely emphasize the immortalizing power of the great "picture," "statue," or "phrase," he never touches on this theme in "Is There a Life after Death?" On the contrary, James repeatedly insists in the essay that any concept of immortality that does not involve the continued growth of one's personal consciousness would be meaningless to him. Indeed, I would suggest that by attempting to dissuade himself of the notion that the creation of an artistic masterpiece or a "monument" like the New York Edition was the only attainable immortality, James hoped to stave off the most severe depression of his life. A more thorough examination of the essay reveals that James was far more optimistic about the possibility of continued conscious­ ness after death than his previous critics have led readers to believe. On what date Elizabeth Jordan, the editor of Harper's Bazar from 1908­ 1912, first asked James for a few thousand consoling words about the after­ life is unclear, but it may very well have been in the fall of 1908. She had by then, one imagines, begun her hunt for contributors to a symposium on life after death to be published in installments between March 1909 and February 1910. Jordan imagined the symposium as being "in the nature of a counsel of consolation, addressed to those in immediate bereavement, and containing such comfort and hope as the great writers who prepare them can offer" (Edel and Powers 102). Eventually ten writers signed on and their contributions were later collected in a volume entitled In After Days, Thoughts on the Future Life (1910). Other contributors to the volume included William Dean Howells; Elizabeth Phelps Stuart, the best-selling author who specialized in fictional accounts of heaven; Emily Dickinson's first editor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson; and the poet and suffragette, Julia Ward Howe. If James did receive Jordan's request in the fall of 1908, he may very well have been penning his acceptance note just a few weeks before or after October 20, 1908 when he first received news that the monumental New York Edition, to which he had devoted the last four years of his life, had so far netted him royalties of a mere $211. In part the check was small because Scribner's used some of his royalties to pay other publishers for the rights to his works. Still, the amount was shockingly modest to James. Three days later, on October 23, 1908, James wrote to his agent, James Pinker, "I have https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/cq/vol35/iss2/4 2 Stuart: "Is There a Life after Death?": Henry James's Response to the New 92 COLBY QUARTERLY picked myself up considerably since Tuesday A.M., the hour of the shock, but I think it would ease off my nerves not a little to see you" (Letters IV 498). James explained to Pinker that, having heard no gloomy forecasts, he had "since the publication of the Series began ... found [him]self concluding in the sense of some probable fair return" (Letters IV 498). Although he had attempted to protect himself by repressing his own expectations for the Edition, he had nevertheless hoped for much more. He explains to Pinker, "I found myself ... beguiled thereto also by the measure ... of the treasures of ingenuity and labour I have lavished on the amelioration of every page of the thing, and as to which I felt that they couldn't not somehow tell" (Letters IV 498). Finally, Janles consoled himself that he was at least now prepared for the worst. "That mere fact," he wrote, "will by itself considerably relieve me" (Letters IV 499). Neither his meeting with Pinker, nor "that mere fact," however, was enough to restore James to equilibrium. Throughout the winter of 1908-1909 James suffered from what he described as heart problems but which in hind­ sight seem to have been merely the symptoms of acute anxiety. On December 19, just two months after James learned how poorly his collection was faring in the marketplace, he complained to his brother, who suffered from serious heart problems himself, that "[t]he accursed 'thoracic symptom' is a killer of enterprise with me, and I dare say it is little better with you. But the less said of it the better-it doesn't diminish"(372). By January Janles's anxiety about his health had increased. In a letter of February 3, 1909 James informed William that he had eleven or twelve days earlier been to see a local doctor by the name of Skinner who gave him digitalis "as a matter of course" but who seemed otherwise unalarmed (Correspondence 378). Still, James explained to William, "I am-have been today-a little solitarily wor­ ried and depressed. What I find myself desirous of is to get some authorita­ tive London judgement on the matter" (378). William responded, telling him that he should visit a Dr. James Mackenzie in London. On February 25, James visited the office of the celebrated heart specialist. James again reported the doctor's findings to his brother: "He at any rate finds so little the matter with me that it's rather difficult to say what he does find. Absolutely nothing grave or ominous at any rate.... He is the absolute reverse of an alarmist, & thinks the tendency to flurry and worry over so-called bad heart conditions greatly overdone" (384).