The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [93]
EARLY IN THE SUMMER of 1891, William James’s sister, Alice, wrote from her London home to warn her brother that doctors had discovered a tumor in her breast. He wrote back immediately, with his own unique idea of encouragement and advice.
Like all the James children, Alice had long been prone to ill health, the same “neuralgia and headache and weariness and palpitations and disgust” that were often William’s companions. Perhaps more than any of them, she suffered from miserable bouts with depression, what William called the “nervous weakness, which has chained you down for all these years.”
He wrote, “I should think you should be reconciled to the prospect [of death] with all its pluses and minuses. I know you’ve never cared for life and to me now at the age of nearly fifty, life and death seem singularly close together in all of us.” He assured Alice that for all her weaknesses, she also had amazing strengths—“fortitude, good spirits, unsentimentality”—in the midst of grief and illness. His work with Mrs. Piper, with “enlargements of the self in trance,” as he put it, encouraged him to believe that some people might achieve their best potential after death. He hoped his sister would find comfort in that: “When that which is you passes out of the body, I am sure there will be an explosion of liberated force and life until then eclipsed and kept down.” James imagined his sister’s entrance into the other world as something dramatic, a shock of energy and light.
“It may seem odd for me to talk to you in this cool way about your end; but my dear little sister, if one has things present to one’s mind, and I know they are present enough to your mind, why not bring them out?”
In late July, James received a letter from his sister’s companion, Katherine Loring, telling him that the cancer was malignant and spreading. Alice was sedated with morphine; she’d asked Loring to reassure her brother that the pain was not terrible. She also wanted him to know that whatever the future held, she was not unhappy with herself or her life: “when I am gone, pray don’t think of me simply as a creature that might have been something else.”
In late September, spurred to do more than share musings on life and death, James arrived in London. Alice teased that it was her “mortuary attractions” that had coaxed him across the ocean. Gradually, though, her first burst of cheerfulness faltered. “She talks death incessantly,” he wrote to his wife. “It seems to fill her with positive glee.”
He stayed two weeks before returning home. Alice was nauseated by the morphine. He recommended hypnotism to counter that, patiently teaching Loring how to induce a hypnotic state. But his sister fought the very idea. She considered hypnosis part of William’s psychical nonsense; it reeked of their father’s mystical ways and clutching spirits. She hadn’t found his metaphysical promises reassuring in the least. “I hope,” she confided to her diary, “the dreadful Mrs. Piper won’t be let loose upon my defenseless soul.”
IN THE DECEMBER 1891 issue of Harper’s, Mark Twain published a personal endorsement of the science of the supernatural. Twain began by declaring that the Society for Psychical Research had accomplished what many said could not be done. It had made the study of the occult a respectable endeavor.
Further, Twain said, the SPR pioneers had freed people like himself to speak out on such subjects, in this case, on telepathy