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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 March 2014
In his intellectual biography, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Robert Richardson never defines modernism, and never addresses the reasons for its turbulence in America. But he does present the maelstrom through his subject, showing how James helped drive the modernist sensibility he inhabited—a whirlwind of creativity and intellectual passion “whose leading ideas,” to quote Richardson, “are still so fresh and challenging that they are not yet fully assimilated by the modern world they helped to bring about.” Presenting James as an intellectual activity, Richardson focuses on bringing the emotional background of that activity into view, chronicling James's intellectual history as splashes from a turbulent stream of consciousness. The book's dedication to Annie Dillard next to the book's epigraph from James reveals Richardson's respect for the volatility both writers represented. The dedication is: “For Annie, who wrote, ‘we have less time than we knew and that time buoyant, and cloven, lucent, missile, and wild,’” followed by the epigraph from James testifying that, “[life] feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem.”
85 Richardson, Robert, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006)Google Scholar, xii and 419.
86 Richardson, William James, 11–13.
87 Richardson, William James, 258 and 263.
88 Hutchison, William R., The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976)Google Scholar, 209; As for Bowne's idealistic concept of the self, James thought Bowne had “crawled into a hole and pulled the hole in after him.” McConnell, Francis John, Border Parker Bowne: His Life and Philosophy (New York: Abingdon Press, 1929)Google Scholar, 138; James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; New York: Library of America, 2010), 448–449.Google Scholar
89 James, Varieties, 64 and 21.
90 Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, 2; Marsden, George M., Fundamentalism and American Culture, 2nd. ed. (1980; New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, 146.
91 Hutchison, Modernist Impulse, 207–208.
92 Hughes, Robert, Barcelona (1992; New York: Vintage Books, 1993)Google Scholar, 393.
93 Ibid., 511.
94 Varieties, 142, 145, 178, and 316.
95 Giles, Paul, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992)Google Scholar, 11 and 107.
96 Gay, Peter, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy From Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 3–5Google Scholar
97 Richardson, William James, 168; Gay, Modernism, 40.
98 Menand, Louis, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2001), 439–440Google Scholar, 22, 95.