Poor Henry James

Good morning.

I think I've told you that, like Bertie Wooster's uncle, I get my best ideas when my navel is immersed in warm bath water. Often, the idea hits as the two elements come in contact. Bingo.

That is what I felt yesterday, as I began my bath.  Henry James had Asperger's Syndrome.

Is that revelation important to the world? I don't know. It might be, to a scholar who's studying James'life.  It might be, to an interested observer like myself, in the context of making relationships, to a person who has always found it not easy to make relationships.

Or to a person who does not care deeply about making relationships. Or does not, more specifically, need to make relationships in order to have a meaningful life.  That is kind of where I am.
I've always wondered how I could have in my life moved so happily (relatively) from one place and set of friends to another place and set of friends.  It's been difficult for me twice in my life, the rest not...and I have moved about a lot.

I do make relationships and I do make friends. Sometimes through circumstances these relationships are lost.  Basically, I remember them well but I move on. I enjoy the new relationships very much. What is the matter with me? I have begun to think.

The problem began to surface lately with thinking about the relationship-capacity of a friend (always easier to see from the outside.)  I was prowling the web and came upon a page, "Take the Asperger's Test."  Actually I was looking for Autism.  I took the test and came out at 28. If you score 34, you definitely have got it.  Normal women's score is 14 or 15, whichever.  Bingo again. 

Asperger's is high-functioning autism.  A good syndrome for musicians (soloists)...writers...and others who do not have to be part of a team.  A bad syndrome for us ordinary folk who would like the warming support of lots of others around us doing what we're doing sometimes.  But--we can deal with it.  We have to.

It explains why as I child was called Greta Garbo by my mother.  " I want to be alone," was my motto often during a day when the family played games and I wanted to read.  But my favorite reading was often done in a big chair nearby as they wrangled over the card table. I wasn't completely hopeless.

It explains why my favorite things have always been writing, painting, piano-ing, solo singing.  It explains why I am so ill suited to be in choirs and choruses. It explains why I am not an orchestra member.  It explains why I don't like art classes (they are the most sociable of group artistic studies, it seems to me; admirable).  It explains why I hate committees and don't function very well at parties. 

It explains why I am adverse to bridge although I am more amenable and happy at card-playing in general than I used to be.  Even at cards,  I used to win at games where I was on my own, no partner.  Now, I am not disturbed by a partner though I'll take no nonsense.

What does all this have to do with Henry James? Do you remember my post of several weeks ago where I was writing about the novel, The Master, by Toim Cobin?  That novel has stayed with me, in my mind and heart, so much in the weeks since I finished it. What a nice, good person he was.  What a tragedy that he was really totally unable to have a relationship with almost anybody...he tried.  He was the prisoner of his nutty family, and his nutty upbringing.  But everyone has those. He was really the prisoner of his genetic makeup, and for that nobody can ever be to blame.  He was not really sad about it.  He saw the world with new eyes and kept writing.  No doubt he thought about (and perhaps wrote about) his disability in a more lucid and cogent way than I could ever hope to approach.  So, if he wasn't lugubrious about it, should we be? No. Henry James wasn't poor at all. Nor am I. YAZZYBEL