Henry James is now universally recognized as one of this country’s most important writers, but Northampton’s residents have their own reason to remember him: In one his earliest novels, “Roderick Hudson,” he says of a character that one of her “misfortunes” was to be living in Northampton.
James presumably based this slight on the fact that in the fall of 1864 he had been here to take “the water cure” at a Northampton establishment. Still, following the well-known principle of celebrity — “I don’t care what they say about me as long as they are talking about me”— we should allow Northampton to take pleasure in having hosted Henry when he made some of his earliest forays into the life of a professional author.
Less well known is that fact that in May 1905, while on his “farewell tour” of America, James, who lived in Europe most of his adult life, returned to the city to lecture at Smith College on the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. By that time, he had insisted that this “dig” should not be taken as his own opinion of the town — it was only a novelist’s little fictional jibe.
But as to that stay in 1864, a point of fact — call it a misunderstanding — needs to be corrected.
Virtually all accounts by local authors claim that, from early August to the end of November 1864, James, then living in Boston, stayed at the Round Hill Water Cure Retreat. And there is no question that between 1847 and 1870, Round Hill was one of the major hydrotherapy establishments in the country, attracting people from afar, some quite well known in their day.
Consider that a Thomas Jackson, from Virginia, came in 1860 but left as a U.S. civil war seemed imminent, one in which he would become “Stonewall” Jackson. Catherine Beecher, the noted feminist and educator, made two stays.
They both came to “take the cure,” but Round Hill also functioned more like a resort, and many other people came just for its pleasant environment. The Swedish opera star Jenny Lind is undoubtedly the most celebrated of those clients.
There is no question that Henry James came to Northampton in fall 1864 for health reasons. (Some scholars single out his back problems, others trouble with his bowels; it may well have been both.) He himself writes in an October 1864 letter that he was in Northampton as “a patient in a ‘Water Cure’ (wh. is my present dignity).”
But he was not at Round Hill.
Northampton in the mid 1800s had two other reputable water-cure establishments. One was in Florence, where it had been founded in 1845 by the nearly blind African-American journalist and abolitionist David Ruggles; after Ruggles died in 1849, the Florence business was taken over by Dr. Charles Munde from Germany.
The other water-cure center was called Springdale, founded by an Irish-born doctor, Edward Denniston. Denniston had in fact been on the staff of the original Round Hill Water Cure in 1847 but left a year later to found his own business, taking over an inn where Cooley Dickinson Hospital is now located.
Round Hill Water Cure was a quite grandiose building, but Springdale accommodated only 30 or so patients and does not seem to have had nearly the elaborate facilities of Round Hill. In a word, it was the type of laid-back place that a very young (21) and relatively impecunious Henry James would attend. And how do we know that he was there and not at Round Hill?
I was put onto it when, in the course of another project relating to Round Hill Road and its occupants, I stumbled on the letter quoted above (in the scholarly “Complete Letters: Vol. I,” 2006), and the footnote to that “water cure” identified it as Springdale, run by Dr. Denniston.
Then I discovered another letter from James in which he refers to his time at the water cure in Northampton. Although he does not mention either Springdale or Denniston by name, it seems as certain as anything that the place he is recalling is the more “homey” Springdale and not the grand resort that Round Hill had become.
That sent me to reading everything that might confirm or dispute this. Three of James’ major biographers (Leon Edel, Sheldon Novick, Fred Kaplan) do not say where he stayed in Northampton, but another does: the distinguished Oxford biographer Lyndall Gordon, author of “The Private Life of Henry James” (1996). Gordon identifies the treatment center as Denniston’s.
I contacted the co-editor of James’ “Complete Letters,” Prof. Pierre Walker of Salem State University, and he directed me to yet another letter I had overlooked. Writing to his father on April 1, 1869, when he was taking another “water cure,” this time at Malvern, England, James wrote: “The house is very large & comfortable & conducted with a completeness & finish which quite knocks into the shade poor old Dr. Denniston’s ramshackle establishment.”
QED. But how then did it come about that so many local texts place Henry James at Round Hill?
It turns out that most of the books by or about him (including his own autobiography, “Notes of a Son and Brother”) do not even mention his taking the water cure in Northampton. The earliest such attribution that has been called to my attention (by Brian Turner, my collaborator with the larger Round Hill Road project) dates from February 1934, when Gerald Stanley Lee, a Northampton author, made the claim in the Springfield Republican.
As Lee celebrates President Franklin Roosevelt’s birthday and triumph over polio, he compares Roosevelt’s respites at Warm Springs, Georgia, to the renowned health-promoting spas of Northampton: “Years ago . . . Henry James came to Northampton to relax his literary nerves at our water cure on Round hill[.]”
Accepting that for now as the first misidentification, it seems unlikely that the next person or persons to write about Henry James taking a water cure would have seen Lee’s letter. No, what I believe was at play is that subsequent writers simply assumed what Lee did: that James was there on Round Hill because that establishment had remained so well known and celebrated.
To this day, if you Google “Northampton Water Cure,” many items regarding the Ruggles and Round Hill establishments come up, but no mention of “poor old Dr. Denniston’s ramshackle” Springdale. One false reference simply led to another. So Northampton has a right to celebrate Henry James’s ties to this city— but not to Round Hill.
John Bowman is a longtime Northampton freelance editor and writer (retired) who over the years has contributed a series of pieces about little-known episodes in the city’s past.