An Adirondack Friendship: Letters of William James

I

‘WHAT most horrifies me in life is our brutal ignorance of one another,’ once wrote William James to a young correspondent whom he had recently met in the Adirondack woods and with whom he was to continue a friendship never far removed, either in actuality or in retrospect, from that region of virgin forest.

You will receive this week a little volume from my pen [he continues], of which you are familiar with most of the contents already, so that you need not read them. There is, however, one Essay ‘On a Certain Blindness etc.’ which I do want you to read, because I care very much indeed for the truth it so inadequately tries, by dint of innumerable quotations, to express, and I like to imagine that you care for it, or will care for it too.

The essay, thus sent to Pauline Goldmark, quotes Whitman, Tolstoy, Jefferies, Wordsworth, Hudson. And the ‘truth,’ so effectively illustrated, is the preciousness, to each one of us, of our own, particular, inner satisfactions and resources.

Central in the essay and at the heart of this friendship was William James’s feeling, passion almost, for the ‘peculiar sources of joy’ in living close to nature in the literal American sense. Echoes of camping and of what he calls in a later letter the ‘truths so communicable under these conditions’ fill the beautiful article which he commended to his young friend.

We of the highly educated classes (socalled) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. . . . We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and glib verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions, the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up. . . .

The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. . . . Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one’s body grows and grows. . . .

I am sorry for the boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious sensorial life with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but its vigilance and its supreme felicity.

Such supreme felicity, such rejuvenating powers of wild nature, William James had long since found in Keene Valley, in the heart of the Adirondack Mountains, when in 1895 he first met Pauline Goldmark there. The Valley is, indeed, not infrequently mentioned in his published Letters. To his brother Henry, for instance, he writes in 1906:—

You missed it, when here, in not getting to Keene Valley, where I have just been, and of which the sylvan beauty, especially by moonlight, is probably unlike aught that Europe has to show. Imperishable freshness! . . .

Even earlier he writes to Mrs. Henry Whitman, in the inimitable style which flashes in the shortest note or postcard, excusing himself from a proposed visit to her at Beverly: —

Just reviving from the addled and corrupted condition in which the Cambridge year has left me; just at the portals of that Adirondack wilderness for the breath of which I have sighed for years, unable to escape the cares of domesticity and get there; just about to get a little health into me, a little simplification and solidification and purification and sanification — things that will never come again if this one chance be lost; just filled to satiety with all the simpering conventions and vacuous excitements of so-called civilization; hungering for their opposite, the smell of the spruce, the feel of the moss, the sound of the cataract, the bath in its waters, the divine outlook from the cliff or hill-top over the unbroken forest — oh, Madam, Madam! do you know what medicinal things you ask me to give up? ... I wish that you also aspired to the wilderness. There are some nooks and summits in that Adirondack region where one can really ‘recline on one’s divine composure’ and, as long as one stays up there, seem for a while to enjoy one’s birth-right of freedom and relief from every fever and falsity.

It was natural that in writing to Pauline Goldmark — whom, especially in the early years, it pleased him to identify with the vigor of youth and the mountain tops — Keene Valley, ‘the blessed spot,’ should be more often mentioned than to other correspondents. She was at the time a girl of twenty-one, in her last year at Bryn Mawr. Her summers since early childhood had been spent in the woods and mountains of that Adirondack region. The primeval forest, uncut, uncleared; its pristine freshness; delight in these wild aspects of nature as compared with the trimmer and mellower European landscapes of other summers — all this was implicit in their friendship.

The theme is rarely elaborated, taken for granted rather, often caught in a phrase or a paragraph, a persistent and deep-lying sentiment. She was, as it were, the symbol of a mood, a region, a way of life.

‘But you, my dear young friend,’ he writes early in their friendship, ‘are such an up-at-sunrise, out-of-door, and mountain-top kind of a girl, that (knowing you in no other capacity and ignorant of all the hidden selfishnesses and sinister recesses of your character indoors) I give you credit for every conceivable sort of magnanimity, generosity and freedom. Ah, Pauline, don’t ever let me be disappointed! ’

Indeed, there is scarcely a letter written to her from any place during the fifteen years until his death in 1910 which does not have some reference to the Valley or the out-of-doors. ‘ Rather than be writing of Edinburgh,’ he ends an exquisite account of the old city, ‘I would be sitting or lying on any summit whatever in the neighborhood of K. V., communing with your adjacent soul.’ Or again in a note from the Harvard Club in New York: —

I go back to Boston in an hour, having been here 48 hours on other business and not seen you. I expected to when I left, if only for a minute, but I’m so ‘rushed’ and breathless that I’m ashamed to appear in your presence. You probably find those interview’s unsatisfactory yourself.

for about 6 hours of steady talk, with the world faded to immeasurable distance — ’t would be different. As it is, I must wait.

Or on another occasion, near the end of his life: —

Your piece of cardboard, dearest Pauline, which arrived at noon, when your full presence was looked for, was a sad substitute. But no matter, I’m resigned in these days to everything! I long to see you, but not cooped up in a room, on a hill or in a forest rather.

The Keene Valley of these letters is a narrow valley some six miles long, lying about twenty-five miles west of Lake Champlain in the northern part of New York State. The special grace of the Adirondacks derives from their long geologic past. Among the oldest mountains of the whole earth, they have been worn down through time into the lovely curves and graceful outlines which give them their special character.

Viewed from the little hill clearing at the southern end of Keene Valley, long known as ‘ Beede’s,’ low converging ranges of blue distance hem in the Valley to the north; on the east rises the Giant-of-the-Valley, broadbased and broad of summit, whose steep spruce and balsam heights are scarred by broad rock slides. The other high peaks mentioned in the letters — Gothics, Haystack, Marcy, and others — are clustered to the southwest, forming a sky line, seen from any eminence, of majestic grace. A large area has here been preserved as virgin forest to this day.

II

It was in the late summer of 1895 that our common friend Dickinson Miller first brought Mr. James to our summer home at ’Beede’s,’ a half mile from the Putnam-Bowditch shanty of which Mr. James was part owner. Mr. James’s own acquaintance with this region was of an earlier date, during the late seventies. His son, Henry James, has described his father’s first connection with the Valley.

Where the Ausable Club’s picturesque golf-course is now laid out, the fields of Smith Beede’s farm then surrounded his primitive, white-painted hotel. Half a mile to the eastward, in a patch of rocky pasture beside Giant Brook, stood the original Beede farmhouse, and this Henry P. Bowditch, Charles and James Putnam, and William James had bought for a few hundred dollars (subject to Beede’s cautious proviso in the deed that ‘ the purchasers are to keep no boarders’). They had adapted the little story-and-a-half dwelling to their own purposes and converted its surrounding sheds and pens into habitable shanties of the simplest kind. So they established a sort of camp, with the mountains for their climbing, the brook to bathe in, and the primeval forest fragrant about them.

William James’s love of the outdoors was compounded of many strains. Mountain climbing itself—its sheer exhilaration, the conquest of summits and the outlook from great heights — had for him its thrilling appeal.

‘To these youngsters, as to me long ago, and to you to-day, the rapture of the connexion with these hills is partly made of the sense of future power over them and their like,’ he wrote to Pauline in 1907, when he was obliged to confine his walking to the lower ranges.

In a memorial sketch of his life, Dr. James Putnam recalls Mr. James’s unusual grace and lightness of foot in climbing.

As a walker, he used to be among the foremost, in the earlier years, and it was a pleasure to watch his lithe and graceful figure as he moved rapidly up the steep trails or stretched himself on the slope of a rock, his arms under his head, for resting. He had the peculiarity, in climbing, of raising himself largely with the foot that was lowermost, instead of planting the other and drawing himself up by it, as is so common. This is a slight thing, but it was an element counting for elasticity and grace.

There were periods when he took the longest walks and climbs, but after a time he felt that very vigorous exertion did not agree with him; and this belief, combined with his love of talk with some congenial person on some congenial subject, usually kept him back from the vanguard and rather at the rear of the long line, where he could walk slowly if he liked and find the chance to pause from time to time in order to enjoy and characterize in rich terms the splendid beauty of the steep forest-clad slopes, with the sun streaming through the thick foliage and into the islets between the tall trees.

In such surroundings, the thing most treasured was not only the escape of the scholar and teacher from the winter’s routine, nor even the greater simplification of living such as that, for instance, which Mr. James enjoyed during his spring on a California campus and celebrated in letters home. It was something, as has been intimated, which satisfied a deeper, primal need. It was something which comes from life in the wilderness, sleeping upon the ground, close to nature and all earth forces; from the joy of the senses in sun and shade, water and wind, smell of wood smoke and forest air; a return to more primitive reactions and responses of our human nature; upwellings from the great Unconscious on which our lives are based.

wrote Emerson, who himself had known and camped on a lakeside in the Adirondacks, in his day.

An ‘organic-feeling need’ is the phrase repeatedly used by William James of his deep-seated longing for the woods, as when, for instance, he writes from Nauheim to Miss Fanny Morse, in July 1901: —

What I crave most is some wild American country. It is a curious organic-feeling need. One’s social relations with European landscape are entirely different, everything being so fenced or planted that you can’t lie down and sprawl. . . . Thank heaven that our nature is so much less ‘ redeemed ’!

In another letter from Europe, when ill and in exile, he touches on this deep undercurrent of feeling for the spiritual values in nature: —

Scenery seems to wear in one’s consciousness better than any other element in life. In this year of much solemn and idle meditation, I have often been surprised to find what a predominant part in my own spiritual experience it has played, and how it stands out as almost the only thing the memory of which I should like to carry over with me beyond the veil, unamended and unaltered. From the midst of everything else, almost, surgit amari aliquid; but from the days in the open air, never any bitter whiff, save that they are gone forever.

III

Even more significant and intense was the spiritual import of a night spent under the stars of which Mr. James left a unique account. It was a night spent near the summit of Mount Marcy, highest of the Adirondack peaks. He had bidden Pauline and a small party with her to meet him there, himself ascending from the Adirondack Lodge, a large log house isolated in the forest on the other side of the mountain.

From the Lodge, in June 1898, he writes to Pauline: —

This place is a regular sanctuary. I came up fearfully tired cerebrally, but have never felt such a sense of peace and of safety since I was born.

I assume that you are not in Europe and I hope that you are not at Woods Hole. I have been here for four days past; and basking in the moon’s rays on the Observatory last night, the brilliant idea struck me of writing to ask whether you do not think it would be the extremity of ‘ niceness ’ before the said moon has entirely ceased, to ‘organize a party,’ including the fair Josephine, and come up to the Marcy Camp, where I should meet you, and, after passing the night, all of us descend hither for as long as might seem pleasant, you and your sister being my guests, and then go out to Keene Valley by the trail, or rather by the lumber road which I am sorry to hear has been put through. Are not your brothers with you? F. Adler I suppose to be in Europe. But can’t Waldo come? Or is he in examination agonies as my poor Billy is? Bring anyone you can!

The meeting place thus set was known as ‘Panther Gorge,’ where a small Adirondack camp of rough-hewn logs had been built, open in front, and carpeted with balsam boughs on which perhaps a half-dozen persons might stretch out for the night. A little brook flowed down beside the camp, which overlooked the densely wooded gorge. But Mr. James could not spend the night under even this slight cover. In one of the most beautiful characterizations of places or moods from his pen, he subsequently described to Mrs. James what he calls ‘one of the most memorable of all my memorable experiences.’

The guide had got a magnificent provision of firewood, the sky swept itself clear of every trace of cloud or vapor, the wind entirely ceased, so that the fire-smoke rose straight up to heaven. The temperature was perfect either inside or outside the cabin, the moon rose and hung above the scene before midnight, leaving only a few of the larger stars visible, and I got into a state of spiritual alertness of the most vital description. The influences of Nature, the wholesomeness of the people around me, especially the good Pauline, the thought of you and the children, dear Harry on the wave, the problem of the Edinburgh lectures, all fermented within me till it became a regular Walpurgis Nacht. I spent a good deal of it in the woods; where the streaming moonlight lit up things in a magical checkered play, and it seemed as if the Gods of all the nature-mythologies were holding an indescribable meeting in my breast with the moral Gods of the inner life. . . . The intense significance of some sort, of the whole scene, if one could only tell the significance; the intense inhuman remoteness of its inner life, and yet the intense appeal of it; its everlasting freshness and its immemorial antiquity and decay; its utter Americanism and every sort of patriotic suggestiveness, and you and my relation to you part and parcel of it all, and beaten up with it, so that memory and sensation all whirled inexplicably together; it was indeed worth coming for, and worth repeating, year by year, if repetition could only procure what in its nature I suppose must be all unplanned for and unexpected. It was one of the happiest lonesome nights of my existence, and I understand now what a poet is.

The next day the party returned to the clearing over the summits, by what is still known as the ’ trail.

We plunged down Marcy, and up Basin Mountain [continues Mr. James], led by C. Goldmark, who had, with Mr. White, blazed a trail the year before;² then down again, away down, and up the Gothics, not counting a third down-and-up over an interesting spur. It was the steepest sort of work, and, as one looked from the summits, seemed sheer impossible, but the girls kept up splendidly, and were all fresher than I. It was true that they had slept like logs all night, whereas I was ‘on my nerves.’ I lost my Norfolk jacket, at the last third of the course — high time to say goodbye to that possession — and staggered up to the Putnams’ to find Hatty Shaw [the housekeeper] taking me for a tramp. Not a soul was there, but everything spotless and ready for the arrival today. I got a bath at Bowditch’s bathhouse, slept in my old room and slept soundly and well, and save for the unwashable staining of my hands and a certain stiffness in my thighs, am entirely rested and well. But I don’t believe in keeping it up too long, and at the Willey House will lead a comparatively sedentary life, and cultivate sleep, if I can. . . .

IV

The physical exertion of this trip proved too much for Mr. James, and resulted in a heart strain, writes his son, ‘though not great enough seriously to curtail his activities if he had given heed to his general condition and avoided straining himself again.’

Unfortunately, in the following June of 1899, after ‘some slow walks which seemed to do me no harm at all,’ he writes Pauline, he ‘drifted one day up to the top of Marcy,’ and then had the bad fortune to miss the short trail down, a mistake which ‘converted what would have been a three-hours’ downward saunter into a seven-hours’ scramble. This did me no good — quite the contrary; so I have come to Nauheim just in time.’

In the two following years of enforced rest abroad, the woods hold their supremacy of charm in retrospect, as these sentences from a letter of January 1900 show: —

Don’t commiserate me or think it necessary to indulge in condolences when you write; for to such completion — if not worse — must we all come at last, and I’ve had a happy life of it so far. But I shall never see Keene Valley again; and all the more precious are its memories.

Sometimes during this period, it is true, the letters are in a lower key, as in a postcard from Nauheim later in the same year: — Deux mots de toi m’ont fait le roi du monde, which is as much as to say that I have profoundly enjoyed your letter with its expressions of kindness, and its breath of health and life, wafted from another world. This is only to acknowledge its reception, for I am too much ‘out of it’ to enthusiastically write letters nowadays, least of all to the conquering young and well, of whom you are always my chief example. ‘I to the night of time decline, you rise into the morn!’ I’ve actually taken to a bath chair! I always used to think, when I met anyone in a bath chair, that they were born so and did it by nature. I now know better.

And again, the same month, on receipt of a balsam pillow sent to him from the Valley, in the same vein: —

BAD NAUHEIM, Sept. 29, 1900
Last night a notice came of a package from ‘Goldmark’ awaiting me at the Custom House. — ’What do you suppose it can be?’ said A. H. J. ‘I bet it’s a balsam pillow,’ replied I, and such, sure enough, it proved to be, when she went for it this morning. The Custom House people thought at first it might be a way of smuggling tea. Then they were doubtful whether to enter it under the class ‘pillows,’ or the class ‘perfumery.’ At last ‘pillow’s’ was chosen, and a duty paid of 25 pfennigs. What a happy thought it was of yours, and what a delicious reminder of other scenes of happiness! I take for granted that your own hands culled the needles. I wish I could make some analogous return, but such things have no analogue.

And a few days later: —

NAUHEIM, Oct. 2 (1900)
It is pleasant to know where the balsam came from and to think I got remembered on the Gothics. . . . The delicious golden weather continues — ‘ sublime in the sky swings the sun of September,’ and the paths of this exquisite park, which I wish you were here to admire, are strewn with yellow leaves. ... I have recommenced to write Gifford lectures at the rate of one ms. page a day, and now that October has begun, I feel as if next summer and home were not so distant. I like to hear of you at Seneca Lake and my dying advice to you is don’t give up your capacity for taking vacations! Adieu. W. J.

Even upon his return from abroad, Mr. James’s vigor had not yet returned. From New Hampshire he writes to Pauline, in September 1901: —

How good to think of you as the same old loveress of woods and skies and waters, and of your Bryn Mawr friends. May none of the lot of you ever grow insufficient or forsake each other! The sight of you sporting in Nature’s bosom once lifted me into a sympathetic region, and made a better boy of me in ways which it would probably amuse and surprise you to learn of, so strangely are characters useful to each other, and so subtly are destinies intermixed. But with you on the mountain-tops of existence still, and me apparently destined to remain grubbing in the cellar, we seem far enough apart at present and may have to remain so. Alas! how brief is life’s glory, at the best. I can’t get to Keene Valley this year, and [may] possibly never get there. Give a kindly thought, my friend, to the spectre who once for a few times trudged by your side, and who would do so again if he could. I’m a ‘motor,’ and morally ill-adapted to the game of patience. I have reached home in pretty poor case, but I think it’s mainly ‘nerves’ at present, and therefore remediable; so I live on the future, but keep my expectations modest.

V

This hope was, happily, borne out. And early in the new year he begins to look forward with all the old buoyancy:—

95 IRVING STREET March 26th, 1902 My DEAR PAULINE, The weeks and months fly by without our hearing from you or of you, so I think I might well break the silence by letting you hear from me. I hope that your news is as good as mine. Mine is better than I deserve — my health, which had begun to mend seriously already when you were here, has gone on steadily improving, so that during the past month I have been feeling quite like old times again, and am counting on Keene Valley once more in September, with who knows how much capacity for walking thrown in — Is n’t it nice? . . . Enough of ourselves. I wish I could frame a distincter imagination than I am able to, of what your life is like. We ought to be neighbors! But the original chaos out of which this world grew has been but imperfectly mended, and I live in Cambridge and you live in New York! This summer you will tell me more about it. We shall be back early in July. I trust that your Mother has had a well winter and that all the rest of you are well. This is just a word, dear Pauline, to check the process of oblivescence which I fear has been going on in your youthful soulrighteous oblivescence of such a decrepit old party as I have been. But phœnixes arise from ashes — and I at any rate don’t oblivesce! Ever affectionately yours,
WM. JAMES

I take it for granted that you are all going to Keene Valley again.

The high peaks Mr. James did not thereafter climb. But he returned to the Valley almost every summer and still enjoyed all that the woods afforded on the lower ranges. Trails to little lakes, lying hidden on the mountain side, encircled with blue gentian, sundew, and sphagnum moss; or to far outlooks from high rock ledges; or to one of the many waterfalls, crystal clear, which distinguish the Adirondack forest — these were still within his reach. To such lessened outings he refers in the course of a later letter:—

ST. HUBERTS, Sept. 14, ’07
DEAR PAULINE, Hurrah! hurrah! that communication should be at last re-established! Your dear letter of the 11th came yesterday with its implied prospect of more, and with its breath of your camping days, which maltreated you less rainily than I had been a-fearing. If I could only go camping with you again, even for 48 hours, I think the truths so communicable under those conditions would conduce to much appeasement. . . . No ‘camping’ for me this side the grave! A party of 14 left here yesterday for Panther Gorge, meaning to return by the ‘Range,’ as they call your ‘summit trail.’ Apparently it is easier than when on that to me memorable day we took it, for Carly Putnam swears he has done it in 5 1/2 hours. I don’t well understand the difference, except that they don’t reach Haystack over Marcy as we did, and there is now a good trail. . . . By going slowly and alone, I find I can compass such things as the Giant’s Washbowl, Beaver Meadow Falls, etc., and they make me feel very good. I have even been dallying with the temptation to visit Cameron Forbes at Manila; but I have put it behind me for this year at least. I think I shall probably give some more lectures (of a much less ‘popular’ sort) at Columbia next winter — so you see there’s life in the old dog yet. Nevertheless, how different from the life that courses through your arteries and capillaries! Today is the first honestly fine day there has been since I arrived here on the 2nd. (They must have been heavily rained on at Panther Gorge yesterday evening.) After writing a couple more letters I will take a book and repair to ‘Mosso’s Ledge’ for the enjoyment of the prospect. If you write to me again (which I by no means feel sure of!) pray explain your activities, and give me a scheme of your future peregrinations and addresses. Ever your friend
W. J.

But it was the Range trip or trail over the summits which remained in his mind ever after, as a kind of landmark. He wrote in remembrance: —

That summer, when we walked over the ‘Range’ and I went to California to ‘talk to teachers, ’ marked my completest union with my native land.

(To be concluded)