J. C. Hallman studied at the University of Pittsburgh, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. He is the author of The Hospital for Bad Poets, The Devil is a Gentleman, The Chess Artist, and In Utopia, and served as editor for The Story About the Story: Great Writers Explore Great Literature. His new book, out today, is Wm & H’ry: Literature, Love, and the Letters between William and Henry James.

— Brandon Hobson

THE BELIEVER: In your introduction to Wm and H’ry, you mention that Emerson longed for an intimate correspondence through letters and that, similarly, you felt a certain intimacy when you read the letters of William and Henry James. Can you speak to that intimacy and why it’s important for you and for readers? Is this how the idea of the book began to form for you?

J. C. HALLMAN: Yes, much in the same way Emerson sensed, at the onset of modernity (to get a little fancy), that something was getting drained out of how we use language, I worry that despite all the benefits of online communities and social media (and there are many), something is getting lost because all of that is so incredibly public. We’re in the process of forgetting that, once upon a time, people wrote very carefully constructed letters that were not to be released to blog or twitter “followers,” but were sent to just a single, other person. I think I first felt an intimacy reading the James letters precisely because no other letters were, in fact, being addressed to me alone. They satisfied a craving I didn’t know I had. That was definitely the beginning.

BLVR: Do you think that intimacy in letters is lost with social media, emails, private messaging, etc.? Do you think letter-writing is a dead art?

JCH: I’m not sure letter-writing is dead, and I’m not sure it’s art. Certainly, a lot of social media is shot through with the illusion of intimacy—with false intimacy serving as a delivery mechanism for propaganda and marketing strategies. But that’s not really new, I don’t think. Is the post office delivering fewer letters these days? Probably. Is that bad? Probably.

BLVR: You’ve invested a great deal of time and work in researching this book. What is it about William and Henry’s correspondence that has a stronger impact on readers than, say, other literary figures?

JCH: The Jameses are sort of the first family, or the founding fathers, of Intellectual America. (We’d be remiss not to mention that Henry Sr. and Alice James...