The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [4]
James had never been a physically imposing man. He stood just five feet eight inches tall, fine-boned, and high-strung. As a young medical student, with a barely suppressed preference for art, he’d sketched himself as a dreamer—sharp cheekbones, sensitive mouth, flowing hair, drooping mustache, shadowed eyes. Over the years, he’d shed the soft look but not the inner, idiosyncratic dreamer. He found upright Victorian tailoring uncomfortable, preferring to dress in tweed jackets with checked trousers, soft shirts, and thick, cushioned shoes. To the end, he found predictability dull, once complaining that spending time with one of his more methodical Harvard colleagues was “like being in the dentist’s chair.”
Arguing with a fellow researcher about the importance of the paranormal, James coolly reminded his colleague that science—the nineteenth-century powerhouse behind the electric light and the dynamo, the telegraph and the telephone—could be both arrogant and wrong. James wrote to Science magazine, a journal devoted to upholding the research ethic, that he loathed the reverential use of the word “scientist ... it suggests to me the priggish, sectarian view of science, as something against religion, against sentiment,” even against real-life experience.
His approach kept him often at odds with the views of his academic colleagues, whom he sometimes referred to as the “orthodoxers.” But unorthodoxy came to him naturally. He’d grown up in an almost dazzlingly unstable household, and he recognized, intuitively, the cultural instability of his times. The era was one of intense moral imbalance—religion apparently under siege from science, technology seemingly rewriting the laws of reality. Finding some balance, a way to make sense of existence in the changing world, seemed to him an imperative.
So James refused to accept the easy explanations and absolutes dictated by either side. He went further than that, even, deliberately challenging the traditions of both science and religion by choosing to explore the supernatural, to investigate and even support tales like that of the woman on the bridge.
His work on all fronts—psychology, philosophy, psychic—confirmed his own inclination, that the most important lessons might be learned in the most unexpected places.
FROM CHILDHOOD, William James breathed the air of pure, undiluted unpredictability. It was the atmosphere of life with his sometimes brilliant, always erratic father, Henry James Sr. Born into a wealthy New York family, married to a wealthy woman, the elder James had enough income to indulge his intellectual quests—and the will to do so. Henry’s determination had been honed by his own moralistic father and disciplined mother. But he’d been shaped even more by a horrific accident when he was teenager—and by his sense of the dark supernatural forces behind it.
At the time of the accident, in 1824, Henry was thirteen years old, a student at the privileged Albany Academy in New York. In science classes, the boys were studying principles of flight. In one series of experiments, they ignited paper balloons, dipped in turpentine, and watched the fire’s heat drive the balls upward. When burning remnants fell to the ground, the boys stamped them out. One day, however, an errant wind blew a balloon into a nearby stable. Sparks sizzled in the hay. Ever impetuous, young Henry James dashed into the building to beat out the fire. Instead, the rising flames set his trousers ablaze, charring his right leg almost to the bone. Surgeons amputated it below the knee, a torturous operation that involved sawing through skin and muscle and then snapping the bone in two. Even so, the damaged leg continued to fester. A year later, the doctors sawed off another section of leg, now spotted black with gangrene. This time the cut was above the knee.
As a result of the accident and surgeries, Henry was bedridden for more than three years. He became increasingly dependent on the alcohol he drank to ease the pain. His father worried