Inside Henry James

ANY READER INTERESTED IN Henry James’s bowels is, as it turns out, in fine company. “I blush to say,” William James writes to Henry in 1869, “that detailed bulletins of your bowels… are of the most enthralling interest to me.” ¹ Maybe it seems—to some— an odd site for such captivation, but I nonetheless want to argue that to attend passionately or well to much of James’s strongest writing is necessarily, as it were already, to be in thrall to what had long been his painful, fussy, immensely productive focus on the sensations, actions, and paralyses, accumulations and probings and expulsions of his own lower digestive tract. The recent publication of the two brothers’ early correspondence, including pages upon pages about Henry’s constipation (“what you term so happily my moving intestinal drama” [C 138]), begins to offer an objective correlative—startling in its detail and intimacy, if not in its substance—for what had before been inferential readings of the centrality of an anal preoccupation in James’s sense of his body, his production, and his pleasure. ²