The Death and Letters of Alice James: Selected Correspondence

"An artist who we work with at David Zwirner, Raymond Pettibon, loves Henry James’ late novels, as do I, the ones that were dictated and have that sort of crazy syntax. I was talking with him about our shared interest, which led to a discussion of William James’ pedagogy. He countered by saying that the great genius in the family when it comes to observation and self-observation is not Henry, nor William, but Alice James. Pettibon, whose work is inflected with literary references, enjoined me to read these letters, in which he’d found more inspiration than from any of the writings of either of Alice’s more famous brothers. There is this intent in her letters, which can come across as very neurotic, as it probes the questions of how to live. She was arguably a professional hypochondriac, always ill, obviously very sickly. That study of herself and study of death, as it were, becomes the very material for her life. As it is lived, and as it is written about. Not unlike Proust, James is making a statement with her own kind of frailty. You have this lesser-known member of that very literary, very famous family who had turned self-study into a really high art form, one which was only ever captured in her letters and only ever captured privately. Alice did not have the intention, it seems, to have her letters published. Here again, I’m drawn to letters because the act of writing seems so direct and un-self-conscious. I really enjoy reading letters that don’t feel self-aware, that feel very much like they’re trying to communicate something about the self to another. Of course, there are those correspondents whose letter writing can feel very performative. Then, I’d rather read the published work. I’d rather read something that’s not masking but revealing intimacy. One gets the feeling that had she had the opportunities for creative outlet that her brothers had, Alice’s illness might not have been as severe as it was. What you’re seeing here is a very creative and gifted individual stunted by circumstances, who has nonetheless managed to have her sublimated talent expressed in the only form readily available to her. Emily Dickinson, for example: if she’d had the opportunities that someone like Ralph Waldo Emerson had, it might have been a very different story. Interestingly, Kafka actually made his illness into a career but, in a way, to spite himself. You see how deeply distressed he was—personally—through his letters in a way that you don’t always see in the work itself. You often intuit his personal pain from the stories and the novels, whereas in the letters his neurosis is plainly visible. Franz Kafka met Felice Bauer in August 1912, at his friend Max Brod’s, and she was everything he was not: practical, life-affirming and full of energy. Living in Prague and Berlin, respectively, theirs was an epistolary courtship. The more than 500 letters Kafka wrote to Felice, almost daily, lasted through their eventual breakup, a second engagement in 1917, and their final farewell later that year as Kafka was succumbing to tuberculosis. With Kafka, these letters, the diaries, the journals—which were also published much later, only appearing in Germany in 1967—give an incredible insight into the kind of existential terror that was really motivating him. It’s a constant tug-of-war between a desire for connection and the solitude of his craft. They are pervaded with what feels like fear of everything and completely overthinking other people’s reactions, this hyper-speculative mode of being in the world where everything is being read into with intense questioning, or even outright paranoia. It is often delusional, but also incredibly powerful and poetic because he has cathected everything. Everything has been imbued with a life that’s really not its own. It’s Kafka’s weird inner life that has been transmuted into the people and things that populate his prose. I was lucky to study with a really committed Kafka scholar named Rüdiger Campe. He was obsessed with all the paraphernalia around a writer’s life, so we would read the stories, but what he really wanted to focus on was all the stuff along the margins of a writer’s life, so the letters were a great focus, the letters and what they revealed about the story. It’s fitting somehow that in Kafka’s correspondence to Felice, only his half of the correspondence has survived. So, it’s almost like we’re witnessing a sort of monologue of somebody who was clearly caught in an echo chamber of his own very, very vivid neuroses."