The following refers to the offer, transmitted by Mr. Bailey, of the chairmanship of the English Association.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 11th, 1912.
My dear John,
Forgive (and while you are about it please commiserate) my having to take this roundabout way of acknowledging your brave letter. I am stricken and helpless still—I can't sit up like a gentleman and drive the difficult pen. I am having an absolutely horrid and endless visitation—being now in the seventh week of the ordeal I had the other day to mention to you. It's a weary, dreary business, perpetual atrocious suffering, and you must pardon my replying to you as I can and not at all as I would. And I speak here, I have, alas, to say, not of my form of utterance only—for my matter (given that of your own charming appeal) would have in whatever conditions to be absolutely the same. Let me, for some poor comfort's sake, make the immediate rude jump to the one possible truth of my case: it is out of my power to meet your invitation with the least decency or grace. When one declines a beautiful honour, when one simply sits impenetrable to a generous and eloquent appeal, one had best have the horrid act over as soon as possible and not appear to beat about the bush and keep up the fond suspense. For me, frankly, my dear John, there is simply no question of these things: I am a mere stony, ugly monster of Dissociation and Detachment. I have never in all my life gone in for these other things, but have dodged and shirked and successfully evaded them—to the best of my power at least, and so far as they have in fact assaulted me: all my instincts and the very essence of any poor thing that I might, or even still may, trump up for the occasion as my "genius" have been against them, and are more against them at this day than ever, though two or three of them (meaning by "them" the collective and congregated bodies, the splendid organisations, aforesaid) have successfully got their teeth, in spite of all I could do, into my bewildered and badgered antiquity. And this last, you see, is just one of the reasons—! for my not collapsing further, not exhibiting the last demoralisation, under the elegant pressure of which your charming plea is so all but dazzling a specimen. I can't go into it all much in this sorry condition (a bad and dismal one still, for my ailment is not only, at the end of so many weeks, as "tedious" as you suppose, but quite fiendishly painful into the bargain)—but the rough sense of it is that I believe only in absolutely independent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the serenely unsociable (or if need be at a pinch sulky and sullen) practice of the same; the observation of a lifetime having convinced me that no fruit ripens but under that temporarily graceless rigour, and that the associational process for bringing it on is but a bright and hollow artifice, all vain and delusive. (I speak here of the Arts—or of my own poor attempt at one or two of them; the other matters must speak for themselves.) Let me even while I am about it heap up the measure of my grossness: the mere dim vision of presiding or what is called, I believe, taking the chair, at a speechifying public dinner, fills me, and has filled me all my life, with such aversion and horror that I have in the most odious manner consistently refused for years to be present on such occasions even as a guest pre-assured of protection and effacement, and have not departed from my grim consistency even when cherished and excellent friends were being "offered" the banquet. I have at such times let them know in advance that I was utterly not to be counted on, and have indeed quite gloried in my shame; sitting at home the while and gloating over the fact that I wasn't present. In fine the revolution that my pretending to lend myself to your noble combination would propose to make in my life is unthinkable save as a convulsion that would simply end it. This then must serve as my answer to your kindest of letters—until at some easier hour I am able to make you a less brutal one. I know you would, or even will wrestle with me, or at least feel as if you would like to; and I won't deny that to converse with you on any topic under the sun, and even in a connection in which I may appear at my worst, can never be anything but a delight to me. The idea of such a delight so solicits me, in fact, as I write, that if I were only somewhat less acutely laid up, and free to spend less of my time in bed and in anguish, I would say at once: Do come down to lunch and dine and sleep, so that I may have the pleasure of you in spite of my nasty attitude. As it is, please let me put it thus: that as soon as I get sufficiently better (if I ever do at this rate) to rise to the level of even so modest an hospitality as I am at best reduced to, I will appeal to you to come and partake of it, in your magnanimity, to that extent: not to show you that I am not utterly adamant, but that for private association, for the banquet of two and the fellowship of that fine scale, I have the best will in the world. We shall talk so much (and, I am convinced in spite of everything, so happily) that I won't say more now—except that I venture all the same to commend myself brazenly to Mrs. John, and that I am yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 14th, 1912.
My dear William,
I am reduced for the present to this graceless machinery, but I would rather use it "on" you than let your vivid letter pass, under stress of my state, and so establish a sad precedent: since you know I never let your letters pass. I have been down these seven weeks with an atrocious and apparently absolutely endless attack of "Shingles"—herpes zonalis, you see I know!—of the abominable nature of which, at their worst, you will be aware from your professional experience, even if you are not, as I devoutly hope, by your personal. I have been having a simple hell (saving Letitia's presence) of a time; for at its worst (and a mysterious providence has held me worthy only of that) the pain and the perpetual distress are to the last degree excruciating and wearing. The end, moreover, is not yet: I go on and on—and feel as if I might for the rest of my life—or would honestly so feel were it not that I have some hope of light or relief from an eminent specialist ... who has most kindly promised to come down from London and see me three days hence. My good "local practitioner" has quite thrown up the sponge—he can do nothing for me further and has welcomed a consultation with an alacrity that speaks volumes for his now at last quite voided state.
This is a dismal tale to regale you with—accustomed as even you are to dismal tales from me; but let it stand for attenuation of my [failure] to enter, with any lightness of step, upon the vast avenue of complacency over which you invite me to advance to some fonder contemplation of Mr. Roosevelt. I must simply state to you, my dear William, that I can't so much as think of Mr. Roosevelt for two consecutive moments: he has become to me, these last months, the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented resounding Noise; the steps he lately took toward that effect—of presenting himself as the noisiest figure, or agency of any kind, in the long, dire annals of the human race—having with me at least so consummately succeeded. I can but see him and hear him and feel him as raging sound and fury; and if ever a man was in a phase of his weary development, or stage of his persistent decline (as you will call it) or crisis of his afflicted nerves (which you will say I deserve), not to wish to roar with that Babel, or to be roared at by it, that worm-like creature is your irreconcileable friend. Let me say that I haven't yet read your Eulogy of the monster, as enclosed by you in the newspaper columns accompanying your letter—this being a bad, weak, oppressed and harassed moment for my doing so. You see the savagery of last summer, thundering upon our tympanums (pardon me, tympana) from over the sea, has left such scars, such a jangle of the auditive nerve (am I technically right?) as to make the least menace of another yell a thing of horror. I don't mean, dear William, that I suppose you yell—my auditive nerve cherishes in spite of everything the memory of your vocal sweetness; but your bristling protégé has but to peep at me from over your shoulder to make me clap my hands to my ears and bury my head in the deepest hollow of that pile of pillows amid which I am now passing so much of my life. However, I must now fall back upon them—and I rejoice meanwhile in those lines of your good letter in which you give so handsome an account of your own soundness and (physical) saneness. I take this, fondly, too, for the picture of Letitia's "form"—knowing as I do with what inveterate devotion she ever forms herself upon you. I embrace you both, my dear William—so far as you consent to my abasing you (and abasing Letitia, which is graver) to the pillows aforesaid, and am ever affectionately yours and hers,
HENRY JAMES.
Mr. Gosse's volume was his Portraits and Sketches, just published.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 19th, 1912.
My dear Gosse,
I received longer ago than I quite like to give you chapter and verse for your so-vividly interesting volume of literary Portraits; but you will have (or at least I earnestly beg you to have) no reproach for my long failure of acknowledgment when I tell you that my sorry state, under this dire physical visitation, has unintermittently continued, and that the end, or any kind of real break in a continuity of quite damnable pain, has still to be taken very much on trust. I am now in my 8th week of the horrible experience, which I have had to endure with remarkably little medical mitigation—really with none worth speaking of. Stricken and helpless, therefore, I can do but little, to this communicative tune, on any one day; which has been also the more the case as my admirable Secretary was lately forced to be a whole fortnight absent—when I remained indeed without resource. I avail myself for this snatch of one of the first possible days, or rather hours, since her return. But I read your book, with lively "reactions," within the first week of its arrival, and if I had then only had you more within range should have given you abundantly the benefit of my impressions, making you more genial observations than I shall perhaps now be able wholly to recover. I recover perfectly the great one at any rate—it is that each of the studies has extraordinary individual life, and that of Swinburne in particular, of course, more than any image that will ever be projected of him. This is a most interesting and charming paper, with never a drop or a slackness from beginning to end. I can't help wishing you had proceeded a little further critically—that is, I mean, in the matter of appreciation of his essential stuff and substance, the proportions of his mixture, etc.; as I should have been tempted to say to you, for instance, "Go into that a bit now!" when you speak of the early setting-in of his arrest of development etc. But this may very well have been out of your frame—it might indeed have taken you far; and the space remains wonderfully filled-in, the figure all-convincing. Beautiful too the Bailey, the Horne and the Creighton—this last very rich and fine and touching. I envy you your having known so well so genial a creature as Creighton, with such largeness of endowment. You have done him very handsomely and tenderly; and poor little Shorthouse not to the last point of tenderness perhaps, but no doubt as handsomely, none the less, as was conceivably possible. I won't deny to you that it was to your Andrew Lang I turned most immediately and with most suspense—and with most of an effect of drawing a long breath when it was over. It is very prettily and artfully brought off—but you would of course have invited me to feel with you how little you felt you were doing it as we should, so to speak, have "really liked." Of course there were the difficulties, and of course you had to defer in a manner to some of them; but your paper is of value just in proportion as you more or less overrode them. His recent extinction, the facts of long acquaintance and camaraderie, let alone the wonder of several of his gifts and the mass of his achievement, couldn't, and still can't, in his case, not he complicating, clogging and qualifying circumstances; but what a pity, with them all, that a figure so lending itself to a certain amount of interesting real truthtelling, should, honestly speaking, enjoy such impunity, as regards some of its idiosyncrasies, should get off so scot-free ("Scot"-free is exactly the word!) on all the ground of its greatest hollowness, so much of its most "successful" puerility and perversity. Where I can't but feel that he should be brought to justice is in the matter of his whole "give-away" of the value of the wonderful chances he so continually enjoyed (enjoyed thanks to certain of his very gifts, I admit!)—give-away, I mean, by his cultivation, absolutely, of the puerile imagination and the fourth-rate opinion, the coming round to that of the old apple-woman at the corner as after all the good and the right as to any of the mysteries of mind or of art. His mixture of endowments and vacant holes, and "the making of the part" of each, would by themselves be matter for a really edifying critical study—for which, however, I quite recognise that the day and the occasion have already hurried heedlessly away. And I perhaps throw a disproportionate weight on the whole question—merely by reason of a late accident or two; such as my having recently read his (in two or three respects so able) Joan of Arc, or Maid of France, and turned over his just-published (I think posthumous) compendium of "English Literature," which lies on my table downstairs. The extraordinary inexpensiveness and childishness and impertinence of this latter gave to my sense the measure of a whole side of Lang, and yet which was one of the sides of his greatest flourishing. His extraordinary voulu Scotch provincialism crowns it and rounds it off really making one at moments ask with what kind of an innermost intelligence such inanities and follies were compatible. The Joan of Arc is another matter, of course; but even there, with all the accomplishment, all the possession of detail, the sense of reality, the vision of the truths and processes of life, the light of experience and the finer sense of history, seem to me so wanting, that in spite of the thing's being written so intensely at Anatole France, and in spite of some of A. F.'s own (and so different!) perversities, one "kind of" feels and believes Andrew again and again bristlingly yet bêtement wrong, and Anatole sinuously, yet oh so wisely, right!
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."
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 6th, 1913.
Dearest old friend!
Don't shudder, I beg you, at the sight of this grim legibility—even when you compare it with your own exquisite mastery of legibility without grimness! Let me down easily, in view of the long, the oh so much too long, ordeal that has pressed on me, and that has so hampered and hindered and harrowed me, that almost any sort of making shift to project my sentiments to a distance is a sort of victory won, or patch of ground wrested, from darkness and the devil! I am slowly slowly getting better of an interminable complicated siege of pain and distress; but it has left me with arrears of every sort piled up around me like the wild fragments of some convulsion of Nature, and I pick my way, or grope it, or even feebly and fatally fail of it, as I best can. There are things that help, withal, and one of these has been to receive your all-benignant little letter of two days ago. I needn't reaffirm to you at this time of day that all your long patiences and fidelities, all your generosities and gallantries of always rallying yet again, are always more beautiful to me than I ever seem to have managed punctually enough to help you, if need be, to feel—especially as of any such urgent "help" there need be no question now! You have had enough news of me from over your way, I infer, pretty dismal though it may have been, for me not to want fatuously to dose you with it (I mean given its bitter quality) further or at first hand; therefore let me rather convey to you at first hand that I am getting into distinctly less pitiful case.... I have been too complicated a sufferer for it to clear at every point at the same time; but the general sense is ever so much better—and I am going to ask of your charity to let Alice, over the way, see these yearning pages, for her better reassurance—even if I have after a fashion managed, just of late, to reassure her more directly. I want her to have all the testimony I can treat her, and, by the same token, my dear Grace, treat you to.
Your little letter breathes all your characteristic courage and philosophy—while, I confess, at the same time, it fills out—or rather perhaps, more exactly, further removes the veil from—my in its very nature vivid enough picture of your fairly august state of lone Cambridge survivorship. I admired you on that state at closer quarters winter before last—even though my testimony to my so doing was at that time, from poor physical interferences, hampered and awkward; but History is so interesting when one is able to follow with closeness a particular attaching strain of it that my imagination, my intention, my affection and fidelity, hang and hover about your own particular noble exhibition of it as intelligently (yes, my dear Grace, as intelligently, nothing less, I insist) as you could possibly desire or put up with! Your letter fills in again for me a passage or two of detail—so that I feel myself the more possessed and qualified.... What I mean is above all that even this imperfect snatch of talk with you is dear and blest to me, and that if by hook or by crook, and through whatever densities of medium and distance, I draw out a little the sense of relation with you, it will have been better than utter frustration. I look out here, while I thus communicate, from a bit of the old-time stretch of riverside Chelsea, my first far-away glimpse or sense of which has, like so many of my first London glimpses and senses (my very first of all, I mean,) a never-lost association with you and yours, or at least with yours and thereby with you: which means my having come here first of all, one day of the early spring of 1869, with Charles and Susan, they having in their kindness brought me to call with them on the great (if great!) and strange and more or less sinister D. G. Rossetti, whom Charles was in good relation with, difficult as that appeared already then to have become for most people, and my impression of whom on the occasion, with everything else of it, I have always closely retained. Part of it was just this impression of the really interesting and delightful old Thames-side Chelsea, over the admirable water-view of which these windows now hang—quite as if I had then secretly vowed to myself that some window of mine some day should. The River is more pompously embanked (making an admirable walk all the way to Westminster, of the most salutary value to me when I can at the soberest of paces attempt it;) but the sense of it all goes back, as I say, to my fond participation in that prehistoric Queen's Gate Terrace Winter. However, I am drenching you with numbered pages—I ask no credit for the number!—and I almost sit with you while you read them; not exactly watching for a glow of rapture on your face, but still, on the whole, seeing you take them, without a frown, for a good intention and a stopgap for something better. You tell me almost nothing of yourself, but all my sympathy and fidelity wait on you (sympathy always can come in somewhere!) and I am yours, my dear Grace, always all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 23rd, 1913.
My dear old Friend,
Let this mechanic form and vulgar legibility notify you a little at the start that I am in rather a hampered and hindered state, and that that must plead both for my delay in acknowledging your dear faithful letter of the New Year time, and for my at last having to make the best of this too impersonal art.... I won't go into the history of my woes—all the more that I really hope I have shuffled the worst of them off. Even in this most recent form they have been part and parcel of the grave illness that overtook me as long ago as at the New Year, 1910, and with a very imperfect recovery from which I was struggling during those weary American months of winter-before-last when we planned so in vain that I should come to you in Washington. I have deeply regretted, ever since, my failure of that pleasure—all the more that I don't see it now as conceivably again within my reach. I am restored to this soil, for whatever may remain to me of my mortal career. The grand swing across the globe, which you and Harry will again nobly accomplish—again and yet again—now simply mocks at my weakness and my reduced resources. Besides, I am but too thankful to have a refuge in which continuously to crouch. Please fix well in your mind that continuity—as making it easy for you some day to find me here. The continuity is broken simply by my reverting to the country for the summer and autumn—a mere change from the blue bed to the brown, and then from the brown back again to this Thames-side perch, which I call the blue. I hang here, for six months, straight over the River and find it delightful and interesting, at once ever so quiet and ever so animated. The River has a quantity of picturesque and dramatic life and motion that one had never appreciated till one had thrown oneself on it de confiance. But it's another London, this old Chelsea of simplifications and sacrifices, from the world in which I so like to feel that I for so long lived more or less with you. I feel somehow as much away from that now as you and Harry must feel amid your new Washington horizons—and it has of itself, for that matter, gone to pieces under the sweep of the big broom of Time, which has scattered it without ceremony. A few vague and altered relics of it occasionally dangle for a moment before me. I was going to say "cross my path"—but I haven't now such a thing as a path, or it goes such a very few steps. I try meanwhile to project myself in imagination into your Washington existence—and, besides your own allusions to it, a passing visit a few days since from Walter Berry helped me a little to fix the shining vision. W. B. had been, I gathered, but a day or two near you, and wasn't in possession of many particulars. Beyond this, too, though you shine to me you shine a bit fearfully—for I can't rid myself (in a world of Chelsea limits and fashions) of a sense of the formidable, the somehow—at least for the likes of me!—difficult and bristling and glaring, side of the American conditions. However, you of course lightly ride the whirlwind—or at any rate have only as much or as little of the storms as you will, and can pick out of it only such musical thunder-rolls and most purely playful forked lightnings as suit you best. What I mean is that here, after a fashion, a certain part of the work of discrimination and selection and primary clearing of the ground is already done for one, in a manner that enables one to begin, for one's self, further on or higher up; whereas over there I seemed to see myself, speaking only from my own experience, often beginning so "low down," just in that way of sifting and selecting, that all one's time went to it and one was spent before arriving at any very charming altitude. This you will find obscure, but study it well—though strictly in private, so as not to give me away as a sniffy critic. Heaven knows I indulge in the most remorseless habits of criticism here—even if I make no great public use of them, through the increasing privacy and antiquity of my life. I kind of wonder about the bearing of the queer Democratic régime that seems as yet so obscurely to loom upon any latent possibilities (that might have been) on Harry's and your "career"—just as I wonder what unutterable queerness may not, as a feature of the whole conundrum, "representatively" speaking, before long cause us all here to sit up and stare: one or two such startling rumours about the matter, I trust groundless, having already had something of that effect. But we must all wait, mustn't we? and I do indeed envy you both your so interesting opportunity for doing so, in a front box at the comedy, or tragedy, the fine old American show, that is, whatever turn it takes: it will all give you, these next months, so much to look at and talk about and expertly appreciate. Lord, how I wish I were in a state or situation to be dining with you to-night! I am dying, really, to see your House—which means alas that I shall die without doing so. No glimmer of a view of the new Presidential family as a White House group has come my way—so that I sit in darkness there as all around, and feel you can but say that it serves me right not to have managed my life better—especially with your grand example! Amen, amen!...
I rejoice to hear of your having had your grand-children with you, though you speak, bewilderingly, as if they had leaped across the globe in happy exemption from parents—or a parent. However, nothing does surprise me now—almost any kind of globe-leaping affects me, in my trou, as natural, possible, nay probable! I pat Harry ever so affectionately on the back, I hold you both in the most affectionate remembrance, and am yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
March 5th, 1913.
Dearest Alice,
An extreme blessing to me is your dear letter from Montreal. I had lately much longed to hear from you—and when do I not?—and had sent you a message to that effect in writing to Harry a week ago. Really to have some of your facts and your current picture straight from yourself is better than anything else....
I write you this in conditions that give me for the hour, this morning-hour, toward noon, such a sense of the possible beneficence of Climate, relenting ethereal mildness, so long and so far as one can at all come by it. We have been having, as I believe you have, a blessedly mild winter, and the climax at this moment is a kind of all uncannily premature May-day of softness and beauty. I sit here with my big south window open to the River, open wide, and a sort of healing balm of sunshine flooding the place. Truly I feel I did well for myself in perching—even thus modestly for a "real home"—just on this spot. My beginnings of going out again have consisted, up to to-day, in four successive excursions in a Bath-chair—every command of which resource is installed but little more than round the corner from me; and the Bath-chair habit or vice is, I fear, only too capable now of marking me for its own. This of course not "really"—my excellent legs are, thank heaven, still too cherished a dependence and resource and remedy to me in the long run, or rather in the long (or even the short) crawl; only, if you've never tried it, the B.C. has a sweet appeal of its own, for contemplative ventilation; and I builded better than I knew when I happened to settle here, just where, in all London, the long, long, smooth and really charming and beguiling Thames-side Embankment offers it a quite ideal course for combined publicity (in the sense of variety) and tranquillity (in the sense of jostling against nobody and nothing and not having to pick one's steps.) Add to this that just at hand, straight across the River, by the ample and also very quiet Albert Bridge, lies the large convenient and in its way also very beguiling Battersea Park: which you may but too unspeakably remember our making something of the circuit of with William on that day of the so troubled fortnight in London, after our return from Nauheim, when Theodate Pope called for us in her great car and we came first to just round the corner here, where he and I sat waiting together outside while you and she went into Carlyle's house. Every moment of that day has again and again pressed back upon me here—and how, rather suddenly, we had, in the park, where we went afterwards, to pull up, that is to turn and get back to the sinister little Symonds's as soon as possible. However. I don't know why I should stir that dismal memory. The way the "general location" seems propitious to me ought to succeed in soothing the nerves of association. This last I keep saying—I mean in the sense that, especially on such a morning as this, I quite adore this form of residence (this particular perch I mean) in order to make fully sure of what I have of soothing and reassuring to tell you.... Lamb House hangs before me from this simplified standpoint here as a rather complicated haze; but I tend, I truly feel, to overdo that view of it—and shan't settle to any view at all for another year. It is the mere worriment of dragged-out unwellness that makes me see things in wrong dimensions. They right themselves perfectly at better periods. But I mustn't yet discourse too long: I am still under restriction as to uttering too much vocal sound; and I feel how guarding and nursing the vocal resource is beneficial and helpful. I don't speak to you of Harry—there would be too much to say and he must shine upon you even from N.Y. with so big a light of his own. I take him, and I take you all, to have been much moved by Woodrow Wilson's fine, and clearly so sincere, even if so partial and provisional address yesterday. It isn't he, but it is the so long and so deeply provincialised and diseducated and, I fear—in respect to individual activity and operative, that is administrative value—very below-the-mark "personalities" of the Democratic party, that one is pretty dismally anxious about. An administration that has to "take on" Bryan looks, from the overhere point of view, like the queerest and crudest of all things! But of course I may not know what I'm talking about save when I thus embrace you all, almost principally Peg—and your Mother!—again and am your ever affectionate
HENRY JAMES.