Henry James in Harley Street

Abstract

THE PAPER here reproduced was written twenty-five years ago by the late Dr. Harold L. Rypins (I892-I939), who, from I923 until the time of his death, was secretary of the New York State Board of Medical Examiners and Associate Professor of Medicine at the Albany Medical School. He was the author of a volume on medical licensure examinations which is still in wide use. A devoted student of psychology and of medical lore, he was also an ardent reader, and he had read Henry James closely enough to have been prompted to indulge in research which, if fragmentary, was fruitful-as this essay shows. It was found among his papers by his widow, who recently communicated it to me with the generous suggestion that the material might be of use in the biography of the novelist which I am now writing. On reading it, I felt that it merited publication even at this late date, and this in spite of its errors of omission-which really cannot be called errors, since the material on Henry James available to Dr. Rypins in the mid-ig2o's was the reverse of copious. The paper stands here as he wrote it; only the title has been changed. Dr. Rypins was writing as a medical man, with an interest directly pointed at Henry James in Harley Street, even though he veered away from Sir Luke Strett and turned to Lambert Strether toward the end of his paper. The linking of the two characters at first may seem curious; it is, in reality, a profound insight: from Strether of The Ambassadors to Strett of The Wings of the Dove (and both preceded by a name which begins with L) there flows a continuity which readers of James will recognize; even as the choice of the name Luke, the patron saint of healing and of painting, is in itself a characteristically conscious Jamesian selection. Dr. Rypins' study of Sir Luke tends to make us want to glance at other Harley Street men in the novels: the figure of Sir Matthew Hope comes to mind, ministering to Ralph Touchett in The Portrait of a Lady and then briefly returning to the Jamesian scene in The Tragic Muse to attend another dying patient, the political Mr. Carteret. Matthew and Luke then, in the novels of Henry James, both knights and therefore of England's elite, are healers, carrying with them the aura of Harley Street, the street of healing. But it is a worldly street as well,