The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

However, all this has taken me absurdly far, and you'll wonder why I should have broken away at such a tangent. You had given me the opportunity, but it's over and I shall never speak again! I wish you would, all the same—since it may still somehow come your way. Your paper as it stands is a gage of possibilities. But good-bye—I can't in this condition keep anything up; scarce even my confidence that Time, to which I have been clinging, is going, after all to help. I had from Saturday to Sunday afternoon last, it is true, the admirably kind and beneficent visit of a London friend who happens to be at the same time the great and all-knowing authority and expert on Herpes; he was so angelic as to come down and see me, for 24 hours, thoroughly overhaul me and leave me with the best assurance and with, what is more to the point, a remedy very probably more effective than any yet vouchsafed to me.... When I do at last emerge I shall escape from these confines and come up to town for the rest of the winter. But I shall have to feel differently first, and it may not be for some time yet. It in fact can't possibly be soon. You shall have then, at any rate, more news—"which," à la Mrs. Gamp, I hope your own has a better show to make.

    Yours all, and all faithfully,
    HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I hope my last report on the little Etretat legend—it seems (not the legend but the report) of so long ago!—gave you something of the light you desired. And how I should have liked to hear about the Colvin dinner and its rich chiaroscuro. He has sent me his printed—charming, I think—speech: "the best thing he has done."

To Mrs. Bigelow

Dictated.

    Lamb House, Rye.
    November 21st, 1912.

My dear Edith,

It is interesting to hear from you on any ground—even when I am in the stricken state that this form of reply will suggest to you.... For a couple of hours in the morning I can work off letters in this way—this way only; but let the rest be silence, till I scramble somehow or other, if I ever do, out of my hole. Pray for me hard meanwhile—you and Baby, and even the ingenuous Young Man; pray for me with every form and rite of sacrifice and burnt-offering.

As for the matter of your little request, it is of course easy, too easy, to comply with: why shouldn't you, for instance, just nip off my simple signature at the end of this and hand it to the artless suppliant? I call him by these bad names in spite of your gentle picture of him, for the simple reason that the time long ago, half a century ago, passed away when a request for one's autograph could affect one as anything but the cheapest and vaguest and emptiest "tribute" the futility of our common nature is capable of. I should like your young friend so much better, and believe so much more in his sentiments, if it exactly hadn't occurred to him to put forth the banal claim. My heart has been from far back, as I say, absolutely hard against it; and the rate at which it is (saving your presence) postally vomited forth is one of the least graceful features, one of the vulgarest and dustiest and poorest, of the great and glorious country beyond the sea. These ruthless words of mine will sufficiently explain to you why I indulge in no further flourish for our common admirer (for I'm sure you share him with me!) than my few and bare terminal penstrokes here shall represent! Put him off with them—and even, if you like, read him my relentless words. Then if he winces, or weeps, or does anything nice and penitent and, above all, intelligent, press him to your bosom, pat him on the back (which you would so be in a position to do) and tell him to sin no more.

What is much more interesting are your vivid little words about yourself and the child. I shall put them by, with your address upon them, till, emerging from my long tunnel, as God grant I may, I come up to town to put in the rest of the winter. I have taken the lease, a longish one, of a little flat in Chelsea, Cheyne Walk, which must now give me again a better place of London hibernation than I have for a long time had. It had become necessary, for life-saving; and as soon as I shall have turned round in it you must come and have tea with me and bring Baby and even the Ingenuous One, if my wild words haven't or don't turn his tender passion to loathing. I shall really like much to see him—and even send him my love and blessing. Even if I have produced in him a vindictive reaction I will engage to take him in hand and so gently argue with him (on the horrid autograph habit) that he will perhaps renew his generous vows! I shall have nothing to show you, later on, so charming as the rhythmic Butcher's or the musical Pub; only a dull inhuman view of the River—which, however, adds almost as much to my rent as I gather that your advantages add to yours! Yours all faithfully,

    HENRY JAMES.

P.S. I see the infatuated Youth is (on reading your note fondly over) not at your side (but "on the other side") and therefore not amenable to your Bosom (worse luck for him)—so I scrawl him my sign independently of this. But the moral holds!

To Robert C. Witt

It will be remembered that the story of The Outcry turns on the fortunes of a picture attributed to "Il Mantovano."

Dictated.

    Lamb House, Rye.
    November 27th, 1912.

Dear Sir,

I am almost shocked to learn, through your appreciative note, that in imaginatively projecting, for use in "The Outcry," such a painter as the Mantovano, I unhappily coincided with an existing name, an artistic identity, a real one, with visible examples, in the annals of the art. I had never heard (in I am afraid my disgraceful ignorance) of the painter the two specimens of whom in the National Gallery you cite; and fondly flattered myself that I had simply excogitated, for its part in my drama, a name at once plausible, that is of good Italian type, and effective, as it were, for dramatic bandying-about. It was important, you see, that with the great claim that the story makes for my artist I should have a strictly supposititious one—with no awkward existing data to cast a possibly invidious or measurable light. So my Mantovano was a creature of mere (convincing) fancy—and this revelation of my not having been as inventive as I supposed rather puts me out! But I owe it to you none the less that I shall be able—after I have recovered from this humiliation—to go and have a look at our N.G. interloper. I thank you for this and am faithfully yours,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton

Mrs. Wharton had sent him her recently published novel, The Reef.

Dictated.

    Lamb House, Rye.
    December 4th, 1912.

My dear E. W.

Your beautiful book has been my portion these several days, but as other matters, of a less ingratiating sort, have shared the fair harbourage, I fear I have left it a trifle bumped and bousculé in that at the best somewhat agitated basin. There it will gracefully ride the waves, however, long after every other temporarily floating object shall have sunk, as so much comparative "rot," beneath them. This is a rude figure for my sense of the entire interest and charm, the supreme validity and distinction, of The Reef. I am even yet, alas, in anything but a good way—so abominably does my ailment drag itself out; but it has been a real lift to read you and taste and ponder you; the experience has literally worked, at its hours, in a medicating sense that neither my local nor my London Doctor (present here in his greatness for a night and a day) shall have come within miles and miles of. Let me mention at once, and have done with it, that the advent and the effect of the intenser London light can only be described as an anticlimax, in fact as a tragic farce, of the first water; in short one of those mauvais tours, as far as results are concerned, that make one wonder how a Patient ever survives any relation with a Doctor. My Visitor was charming, intelligent, kind, all visibly a great master of the question; but he prescribed me a remedy, to begin its action directly he had left, that simply and at a short notice sent me down into hell, where I lay sizzling (never such a sizzle before) for three days, and has since followed it up with another under the dire effect of which I languish even as I now write.... So much to express both what I owe you or have owed you at moments that at all lent themselves—in the way of pervading balm, and to explain at the same time how scantly I am able for the hour to make my right acknowledgment.

There are fifty things I should like to say to you about the Book, and I shall have said most of them in the long run; but there are some that eagerly rise to my lips even now and for which I want the benefit of my "first flush" of appreciation. The whole of the finest part is, I think, quite the finest thing you have done; both more done than even the best of your other doing, and more worth it through intrinsic value, interest and beauty.

December 9th. I had to break off the other day, my dear Edith, through simple extremity of woe; and the woe has continued unbroken ever since—I have been in bed and in too great suffering, too unrelieved and too continual, for me to attempt any decent form of expression. I have just got up, for one of the first times, even now, and I sit in command of this poor little situation, ostensibly, instead of simply being bossed by it, though I don't at all know what it will bring. To attempt in this state to rise to any worthy reference to The Reef seems to me a vain thing; yet there remains with me so strongly the impression of its quality and of the unspeakably fouillée nature of the situation between the two principals (more gone into and with more undeviating truth than anything you have done) that I can't but babble of it a little to you even with these weak lips. It all shows, partly, what strength of subject is, and how it carries and inspires, inasmuch as I think your subject in its essence [is] very fine and takes in no end of beautiful things to do. Each of these two figures is admirable for truth and justesse; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes (that is some of them) sounded with a wonder of delicacy. I'm not sure her oscillations are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself. I suffer or worry a little from the fact that in the Prologue, as it were, we are admitted so much into the consciousness of the man, and that after the introduction of Anna (Anna so perfectly named) we see him almost only as she sees him—which gives our attention a different sort of work to do; yet this is really, I think, but a triumph of your method, for he remains of an absolute consistent verity, showing himself in that way better perhaps than in any other, and without a false note imputable, not a shadow of one, to his manner of so projecting himself. The beauty of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a Drama, and almost, as it seems to me, of the psychologic Racinian unity, intensity and gracility. Anna is really of Racine and one presently begins to feel her throughout as an Eriphyle or a Bérénice: which, by the way, helps to account a little for something qui me chiffonne throughout: which is why the whole thing, unrelated and unreferred save in the most superficial way to its milieu and background, and to any determining or qualifying entourage, takes place comme cela, and in a specified, localised way, in France—these non-French people "electing," as it were, to have their story out there. This particularly makes all sorts of unanswered questions come up about Owen; and the notorious wickedness of Paris isn't at all required to bring about the conditions of the Prologue. Oh, if you knew how plentifully we could supply them in London and, I should suppose, in New York or in Boston. But the point was, as I see it, that you couldn't really give us the sense of a Boston Eriphyle or Boston Givré, and that an exquisite instinct, "back of" your Racinian inspiration and settling the whole thing for you, whether consciously or not, absolutely prescribed a vague and elegant French colonnade or gallery, with a French river dimly gleaming through, as the harmonious fond you required. In the key of this, with all your reality, you have yet kept the whole thing: and, to deepen the harmony and accentuate the literary pitch, have never surpassed yourself for certain exquisite moments, certain images, analogies, metaphors, certain silver correspondences in your façon de dire; examples of which I could pluck out and numerically almost confound you with, were I not stammering this in so handicapped a way. There used to be little notes in you that were like fine benevolent finger-marks of the good George Eliot—the echo of much reading of that excellent woman, here and there, that is, sounding through. But now you are like a lost and recovered "ancient" whom she might have got a reading of (especially were he a Greek) and of whom in her texture some weaker reflection were to show. For, dearest Edith, you are stronger and firmer and finer than all of them put together; you go further and you say mieux, and your only drawback is not having the homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the affluent poverty, of a Country of your Own (comme moi, par exemple!) It makes you, this does, as you exquisitely say of somebody or something at some moment, elegiac (what penetration, what delicacy in your use there of the term!)—makes you so, that is, for the Racinian-sérieux—but leaves you more in the desert (for everything else) that surrounds Apex City. But you will say that you're content with your lot; that the desert surrounding Apex City is quite enough of a dense crush for you, and that with the colonnade and the gallery and the dim river you will always otherwise pull through. To which I can only assent—after such an example of pulling through as The Reef. Clearly you have only to pull, and everything will come.

These are tepid and vain remarks, for truly I am helpless. I have had all these last days a perfect hell of an exasperation of my dire complaint, the 11th week of which begins to-day, and have arrived at the point really—the weariness of pain so great—of not knowing à quel saint me vouer. In this despair, and because "change" at any hazard and any cost is strongly urged upon me by both my Doctors, and is a part of the regular process of dénouement of my accursed ill, I am in all probability trying to scramble up to London by the end of this week, even if I have to tumble, howling, out of bed and go forth in my bedclothes. I shall go in this case to Garlant's Hotel, Suffolk Street, where you have already seen me, and not to my Club, which is impossible in illness, nor to my little flat (21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, S.W.) which will not yet, or for another three or four weeks, be ready for me. The change to London may possibly do something toward breaking the spell: please pray hard that it shall. Forgive too my muddled accents and believe me, through the whole bad business, not the less faithfully yours,

    HENRY JAMES.

To A. F. de Navarro

Dictated.

    Lamb House, Rye.
    December 12th, 1912.

My dear delightful Tony,

Your missive, so vivid and genial, reaches me, alas, at a time of long eclipse and depression, during which my faculties have been blighted, my body tortured, and my resources generally exhausted.... I tell you these dismal things to explain in the first place why I am reduced to addressing you by this graceless machinery (I haven't written a letter with my own poor hand for long and helpless weeks;) and in the second place why I bring to bear on your gentle composition an intelligence still clouded and weakened. But I have read it with sympathy, and I think I may say, most of all with envy; so haunted with pangs, while one tosses on the couch of pain—and mine has been, from the nature of my situation, a poor lone and unsurrounded pallet—all one's visionary and imaginative life; which one imputes, day by day, to happy people who frisk among fine old gardens and oscillate between Clubs of the Arts and Monuments of the Past. I am delighted that the Country Life people asked you for your paper, which I find ever so lightly and brightly done, with a touch as easy and practised as if you were the Darling of the Staff. That is in fact exactly what I hope your paper may make you—clearly you have the right sympathetic turn for those evocations, and I shall be glad to think of you as evoking again and again. I only wish you hadn't to deal this time with a house so amply modernised, in fact so renewed altogether, save for a false front or two (or rather for a true one with false sides and backs), as I gather Abbotswood to be. The irrepressible Lutyens rages about us here, known at a glance by that modern note of the archaic which has become the most banal form of our cleverness. There is nothing left for me personally to like but the little mouldy nooks that Country Life is too proud to notice and everyone else (including the photographers) too rich to touch with their fingers of gold. I have too the inimitable old garden on my nerves; living here in a great garden county I have positively almost grown to hate flowers—so that only just now my poor contaminated little gardener is turning the biggest border I have (scarce bigger it is true than my large unshaven cheek) into a question, a begged question, of turf, so that we shall presently have "chucked" Flora altogether. Forgive, however, these morbid, maussade remarks; the blue devils of a long illness still interposing, in their insistent attitude, between my vision and your beauty—in which I include Mary's, largely, and that of all the fine complexion of Broadway. I return your lucid sheets with this, but make out that, as you are to be in town only till Thursday p.m. (unless I am mistaken), they will reach you the sooner by my sending them straight home. My wish for their best luck go with them! I ought to mention that under extreme push of my Doctors (for I luxuriate in Two) I am seeking that final desperate remedy of a "change" which imposes itself at last in a long illness, to break into the vicious circle and dissipate the blight, by going up to town—almost straight out of bed and dangling my bedclothes about me. This will, I trust, smash the black spell. I have taken a small flat there … on what appears to be a lease that will long survive me, and there I earnestly beg you to seek me as soon as may be after the new year. I am having first to crouch at an obscure hotel. I embrace you Both and am in much dilapidation but all fidelity yours always,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Henry James, junior

    21 Carlyle Mansions,
    Cheyne Walk, S.W.
    January 19th, 1913.

Dearest Harry,

I wrote, very copiously, and I hope not worryingly at all (for I only meant to be reassuring) to your Mother yesterday, from whom I had had two beautiful unacknowledged letters within the last days or so: unacknowledged save for a cable, of a cheerful stamp, which I sent off to Irving Street about a week ago, and which will have been sent on to you. But all the while your most blest letter, written during your Christmas moment at Cambridge, has been for me a thing to be so grateful for that I must express to you something of it to-day—even at the risk of a glut of information. My long silence—since I came up to town, including, I mean, my pretty dismal weeks at that "Garlant's" of ill association—has had a great inevitability, from several causes; but into these I shall have gone to your Mother, whom I think I explicitly asked to send you on my letter, and I don't want to waste force in repetitions. It won't be repeating too much to say again what I said to her, even with extreme emphasis, that I feel singularly justified of this basis for my winter times in London; so much does it appear, now that the preliminary and just postliminary strain of it is over, the very best thing I could have done for myself. My southward position (as to the rooms I most use) immediately over the River is verily an "asset," and not even in the garden-room at L.H., of summer mornings, have I been better placed for work. With which, all the detail here is right and pleasant and workable; my servants extremely rejoice in it—but I am too much repeating!… Above all, my forenoons being by the mercy of the Powers, whoever or whatever they are, my best time, I have got back to work, and, with my uncanny interest in it and zeal for it still unimpaired, feel that it must "mean something" that I am thus reserved, after many troubles, for a productive relation with it. The proof-sheets of "A Small Boy and Others" have been coming in upon me rapidly—all but the very last; and it ought, by the end of next month at furthest, to burst upon the world. Of course I shall have advance copies sent promptly to you and to Irving Street; but, with this, I intensely want you to take into account that the Book was written through all these months of hampering and baffling illness. It went so haltingly and worriedly even last winter (as distinguished from anything I was able to do in the summer and could get at all during the last afflicted three or four months,) last winter having really been a much more difficult time than I could currently confess to, or than dear Bill and Alice probably got any sense of. The point is at any rate that the Book is now, under whatever disadvantages, wholly done, and that if it seems "good" in spite of these, the proof of my powers, when my powers have really worked off more of the heritage of woe of the last three years, will be but the more substantial. A very considerable lot of "Notes of a Son etc." is done, and I am now practically back at it with this appearance of a free little field in spite of everything.... I welcome immensely (what I didn't mention to your Mother—waiting to do it thus) the valuable and delightful little collection received from you of your Grandfather's correspondence with Emerson. What beautiful and characteristic things in it and how I hope to be able to use the best of these, on your Grandfather's part at least. As regards Emerson's side of the matter I doubt whether I can do enough (in the way of extracts from him) to make it even necessary for me to apply to Edward for licence. I think I can hope but at the most to summarise, or give the sense of, some of Emerson's passages; the reason of this being my absolute presumable want of space. The Book will have to be a longer one than "A Small Boy," but even with this there must be limits involving suppressions and omissions. My own text I can't help attaching enough sense and importance and value to, not to want to keep that too utterly under, and I am more and more moved to give all of your Grandfather, on his vivid and original side, that I possibly can. Add to this all the application, of an illustrative kind, that I can't but see myself making of your Dad's letters, and I see little room for any one else's; though what I most deplore my meagre provision of is those of your Aunt Alice, written to our parents mainly during her times, and especially her final time, in Europe. The poverty of this resource cuts from under my feet almost all ground for doing much, as I had rather hoped in a manner to do, with her....

Jan. 23rd, 1913. I have been unable to go on with this these several days, and yet also unwilling to let it go without saying a few more things I wanted—so the long letter I have got off to your Mother will precede it by longer than I meant. I still write, under my disabilities of damaged body, with difficulty (I mean perform the act of writing,) but this is diminishing substantially though slowly—and I mainly mention it to extenuate these clumsy characters.

My conditions (of situation etc.) here meanwhile (this winter)—I mean these admirable and ample two rooms southward over the River, so still and yet so animated—are ideal for work. Some other time I will explain it to you—so far as you won't have noted it for yourself—how and why it is that I come to be so little beforehand financially. My fatally interrupted production of fiction began it, six years or more ago—and that began, so utterly against my preconception of such an effect, when I addressed myself to the so much longer and more arduous and more fatal-to-everything-else preparation of my "edition" than had been measurable in advance. That long period cut dreadfully into current gains—through complete arrest of other current labour; and when it was at last ended I had only time to do two small books (The Finer Grain and The Outcry) before the disaster of my long illness of Jan. 1910 descended upon me and laid a paralysis on everything. This hideous Herpetic episode and its developments have been of the absolute continuity of that, as they now make it (I hope), dire but departing Climax; and they have represented an interminable arrest of literary income (to speak of.) Now that I can look to apparently again getting back to decent continuity of work it becomes vital for me to aim at returning to the production of the Novel, my departure from which, with its heart-breaking loss of time, was a catastrophe, a perversity and fatality, so little dreamed of by me or intended. I yearn for it intellectually, and with all the force of my "genius" and imagination—artistically in short—and only when this relation is renewed shall I be again on a normal basis. Only how I want to complete "Notes of a Son and Brother" with the last perfection first! Which is what I shall, I trust, during the next three or four months do, with far greater rapidity than I have done the first Book—for all last winter and spring my forenoon, my working hours, were my worst, and for long times so bad, and my later ones the better, whereas it is now the other way round.

Jan. 28th. I have had, alas, dearest Harry, to break this off and not take it up again—through blighted (bed-ridden) late afternoons and whole evenings—my only letter-writing time unless I steal precious dictation-hours from Miss Bosanquet and the Book.... My vitality, my still sufficient cluster of vital "assets," to say nothing of my will to live and to write, assert themselves in spite of everything. This is 5.15 on a dismal wet afternoon; I have been out, but I came in again on purpose to get this off by to-morrow's, Wednesday's post. This apartment grows in grace—nothing really could have been better for me. I went into that long account, just above, of the reasons why through the frustration of fond Fiction I have (so much illness so aiding) sunk to this momentary gêne, I wanted to tell you, as against the appearance of too squalid a helplessness—for an early return to fond fiction will alter everything.... But what an endless sordid, illegible appeal! Take it, dearest Harry, in all indulgence, from your lately so much-tried and perhaps a little nervously over-anxious (by the effect of so much suffering,) but all unconquered and devoted old Uncle,

    HENRY JAMES.

P.S. A beautiful letter from your Mother of Jan. 13th (on receipt of my cable) has just come in. All tenderest love.

To Miss Grace Norton

Dictated.

    21 Carlyle Mansions,