[From THE NEW YORK TIMES, March 21, 1915.]
One of the compensations of the war, which we ought to take advantage
of, is the chance given the general public to approach on the personal
side some of the distinguished men who have not hitherto lived much in
the glare of the footlights. Henry James has probably done this as
little as any one; he has enjoyed for upward of forty years a reputation
not confined to his own country, has published a long succession of
novels, tales, and critical papers, and yet has apparently so delighted
in reticence as well as in expression that he has passed his seventieth
year without having responsibly "talked" for publication or figured for
it otherwise than pen in hand.
Shortly after the outbreak of the war Mr. James found himself, to his
professed great surprise, Chairman of the American Volunteer Motor
Ambulance Corps, now at work in France, and today, at the end of three
months of bringing himself to the point, has granted me, as a
representative of THE NEW YORK TIMES, an interview. What this departure
from the habit of a lifetime means to him he expressed at the outset:
"I can't put," Mr. James said, speaking with much consideration and
asking that his punctuation as well as his words should be noted, "my
devotion and sympathy for the cause of our corps more strongly than in
permitting it thus to overcome my dread of the assault of the
interviewer, whom I have deprecated, all these years, with all the force
of my preference for saying myself and without superfluous aid, without
interference in the guise of encouragement and cheer, anything I may
think worth my saying. Nothing is worth my saying that I cannot help
myself out with better, I hold, than even the most suggestive young
gentleman with a notebook can help me. It may be fatuous of me, but,
believing myself possessed of some means of expression, I feel as if I
were sadly giving it away when, with the use of it urgent, I don't
gratefully employ it, but appeal instead to the art of somebody else."
It was impossible to be that "somebody else," or, in other words, the
person privileged to talk with Mr. James, to sit in presence of his fine
courtesy and earnestness, without understanding the sacrifice he was
making, and making only because he had finally consented to believe that
it would help the noble work of relief which a group of young Americans,
mostly graduates of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, are carrying on along
their stretch of the fighting line in Northern France.
Mr. James frankly desired his remarks to bear only on the merits of the
American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. It enjoys today the fullest
measure of his appreciation and attention; it appeals deeply to his
benevolent instincts, and he gives it sympathy and support as one who
has long believed, and believes more than ever, in spite of everything,
at this international crisis, in the possible development of "closer
communities and finer intimacies" between America and Great Britain,
between the country of his birth and the country, as he puts it, of his
"shameless frequentation."
There are many people who are eloquent about the war, who are
authorities on the part played in it by the motor ambulance and who take
an interest in the good relations of Great Britain and the United
States; but there is nobody who can tell us, as Mr. James can, about
style and the structure of sentences, and all that appertains to the
aspect and value of words. Now and then in what here follows he speaks
familiarly of these things for the first time in his life, not by any
means because he jumped at the chance, but because his native kindness,
whether consciously or unconsciously, seemed so ready to humor the
insisting inquirer.
"It is very difficult," he said, seeking to diminish the tension so
often felt by a journalist, even at the moment of a highly appreciated
occasion, "to break into graceful license after so long a life of
decorum; therefore you must excuse me if my egotism doesn't run very
free or my complacency find quite the right turns."
He had received me in the offices of the corps, businesslike rooms,
modern for London, low-ceiled and sparely furnished. It was not by any
means the sort of setting in which as a reader of Henry James I had
expected to run to earth the author of "The Golden Bowl," but the place
is, nevertheless, today, in the tension of war time, one of the few
approaches to a social resort outside his Chelsea home where he can be
counted on. Even that delightful Old World retreat, Lamb House, Rye, now
claims little of his time.
The interviewer spoke of the waterside Chelsea and Mr. James's long
knowledge of it, but, sitting not overmuch at his ease and laying a
friendly hand on the shoulder of his tormentor, he spoke, instead, of
motor ambulances, making the point, in the interest of clearness, that
the American Ambulance Corps of Neuilly, though an organization with
which Richard Norton's corps is in the fullest sympathy, does not come
within the scope of his remarks.
"I find myself Chairman of our Corps Committee for no great reason that
I can discover save my being the oldest American resident here
interested in its work; at the same time that if I render a scrap of
help by putting on record my joy even in the rather ineffectual
connection so far as 'doing' anything is concerned, I needn't say how
welcome you are to my testimony. What I mainly seem to grasp, I should
say, is that in regard to testifying at all unlimitedly by the aid of
the newspapers, I have to reckon with a certain awkwardness in our
position. Here comes up, you see, the question of our reconciling a
rather indispensable degree of reserve as to the detail of our activity
with the general American demand for publicity at any price. There are
ways in which the close presence of war challenges the whole claim for
publicity; and I need hardly say that this general claim has been
challenged, practically, by the present horrific complexity of things at
the front, as neither the Allies themselves nor watching neutrals have
ever seen it challenged before. The American public is, of course,
little used to not being able to hear, and hear as an absolute right,
about anything that the press may suggest that it ought to hear about;
so that nothing may be said ever to happen anywhere that it doesn't
count on having reported to it, hot and hot, as the phrase is, several
times a day. We were the first American ambulance corps in the field,
and we have a record of more than four months' continuous service with
one of the French armies, but the rigor of the objection to our taking
the world into our intimate confidence is not only shown by our still
unbroken inability to report in lively installments, but receives also a
sidelight from the fact that numerous like private corps maintained by
donations on this side of the sea are working at the front without the
least commemoration of their deeds--that is, without a word of
journalistic notice.
"I hope that by the time these possibly too futile remarks of mine come
to such light as may await them Mr. Norton's report of our general case
may have been published, and nothing would give the committee greater
pleasure than that some such controlled statement on our behalf, best
proceeding from the scene of action itself, should occasionally appear.
The ideal would, of course, be that exactly the right man, at exactly
the right moment, should report exactly the right facts, in exactly the
right manner, and when that happy consummation becomes possible we shall
doubtless revel in funds."
Mr. James had expressed himself with such deliberation and hesitation
that I was reminded of what I had heard of all the verbal alterations
made by him in novels and tales long since published; to the point, we
are perhaps incorrectly told of replacing a "she answered" by a "she
indefinitely responded."
I should, indeed, mention that on my venturing to put to Mr. James a
question or two about his theory of such changes he replied that no
theory could be stated, at any rate in the off-hand manner that I seemed
to invite, without childish injustice to the various considerations by
which a writer is moved. These determinant reasons differ with the
context and the relations of parts to parts and to the total sense in a
way of which no a priori account can be given.
"I dare say I strike you," he went on, "as rather bewilderedly weighing
my words; but I may perhaps explain my so doing very much as I the other
day heard a more interesting fact explained. A distinguished English
naval expert happened to say to me that the comparative non-production
of airships in this country indicated, in addition to other causes, a
possible limitation of the British genius in that direction, and then on
my asking him why that class of craft shouldn't be within the compass of
the greatest makers of sea-ships, replied, after brief reflection:
'Because the airship is essentially a bad ship, and we English can't
make a bad ship well enough.' Can you pardon," Mr. James asked, "my
making an application of this to the question of one's amenability or
plasticity to the interview? The airship of the interview is for me a
bad ship, and I can't make a bad ship well enough."
Catching Mr. James's words as they came was not very difficult; but
there was that in the manner of his speech that cannot be put on paper,
the delicate difference between the word recalled and the word allowed
to stand, the earnestness of the massive face and alert eye, tempered by
the genial "comment of the body," as R.L. Stevenson has it.
Henry James does not look his seventy years. He has a finely shaped
head, and a face, at once strong and serene, which the painter and the
sculptor may well have liked to interpret. Indeed, in fine appreciation
they have so wrought. Derwent Wood's admirable bust, purchased from last
year's Royal Academy, shown by the Chantrey Fund, will be permanently
placed in the Tate Gallery, and those who fortunately know Sargent's
fine portrait, to be exhibited in the Sargent Room at the San Francisco
Exhibition, will recall its having been slashed into last year by the
militant suffragettes, though now happily restored to such effect that
no trace of the outrage remains.
Mr. James has a mobile mouth, a straight nose, a forehead which has
thrust back the hair from the top of his commanding head, although it is
thick at the sides over the ears, and repeats in its soft gray the color
of his kindly eyes. Before taking in these physical facts one receives
an impression of benignity and amenity not often conveyed, even by the
most distinguished. And, taking advantage of this amiability, I asked if
certain words just used should be followed by a dash, and even boldly
added: "Are you not famous, Mr. James, for the use of dashes?"
"Dash my fame!" he impatiently replied. "And remember, please, that
dogmatizing about punctuation is exactly as foolish as dogmatizing about
any other form of communication with the reader. All such forms depend
on the kind of thing one is doing and the kind of effect one intends to
produce. Dashes, it seems almost platitudinous to say, have their
particular representative virtue, their quickening force, and, to put it
roughly, strike both the familiar and the emphatic note, when those are
the notes required, with a felicity beyond either the comma or the
semicolon; though indeed a fine sense for the semicolon, like any sort
of sense at all for the pluperfect tense and the subjunctive mood, on
which the whole perspective in a sentence may depend, seems anything but
common. Does nobody ever notice the calculated use by French writers of
a short series of suggestive points in the current of their prose? I
confess to a certain shame for my not employing frankly that shade of
indication, a finer shade still than the dash.... But what on earth are
we talking about?" And the Chairman of the Corps Committee pulled
himself up in deprecation of our frivolity, which I recognized by
acknowledging that we might indeed hear more about the work done and
doing at the front by Richard Norton and his energetic and devoted
co-workers. Then I plunged recklessly to draw my victim.
"May not a large part of the spirit which animates these young men be a
healthy love of adventure?" I asked.
The question seemed to open up such depths that Mr. James considered a
moment and began:
"I, of course, don't personally know many of our active associates, who
naturally waste very little time in London. But, since you ask me, I
prefer to think of them as moved, first and foremost, not by the idea of
the fun or the sport they may have, or of the good thing they may make
of the job for themselves, but by that of the altogether exceptional
chance opened to them of acting blessedly and savingly for others,
though indeed if we come to that there is no such sport in the world as
so acting when anything in the nature of risk or exposure is attached.
The horrors, the miseries, the monstrosities they are in presence of are
so great surely as not to leave much of any other attitude over when
intelligent sympathy has done its best.
"Personally I feel so strongly on everything that the war has brought
into question for the Anglo-Saxon peoples that humorous detachment or
any other thinness or tepidity of mind on the subject affects me as
vulgar impiety, not to say as rank blasphemy; our whole race tension
became for me a sublimely conscious thing from the moment Germany flung
at us all her explanation of her pounce upon Belgium for massacre and
ravage in the form of the most insolent, 'Because I choose to, damn you
all!' recorded in history.
"The pretension to smashing world rule by a single people, in virtue of
a monopoly of every title, every gift and every right, ought perhaps to
confound us more by its grotesqueness than to alarm us by its energy;
but never do cherished possessions, whether of the hand or of the
spirit, become so dear to us as when overshadowed by vociferous
aggression. How can one help seeing that such aggression, if hideously
successful in Europe, would, with as little loss of time as possible,
proceed to apply itself to the American side of the world, and how can
one, therefore, not feel that the Allies are fighting to the death for
the soul and the purpose and the future that are in _us_, for the
defense of every ideal that has most guided our growth and that most
assures our unity?
"Of course, since you ask me, my many years of exhibited attachment to
the conditions of French and of English life, with whatever fond play of
reflection and reaction may have been involved in it, make it inevitable
that these countries should peculiarly appeal to me at the hour of their
peril, their need and their heroism, and I am glad to declare that,
though I had supposed I knew what that attachment was, I find I have any
number of things more to learn about it. English life, wound up to the
heroic pitch, is at present most immediately before me, and I can
scarcely tell you what a privilege I feel it to share the inspiration
and see further revealed the character of this decent and dauntless
people.
"However, I am indeed as far as you may suppose from assuming that what
you speak to me of as the 'political' bias is the only ground on which
the work of our corps for the Allies should appeal to the American
public. Political, I confess, has become for me in all this a loose and
question-begging term, but if we must resign ourselves to it as
explaining some people's indifference, let us use a much better one for
inviting their confidence. It will do beautifully well if givers and
workers and helpers are moved by intelligent human pity, and they are
with us abundantly enough if they feel themselves simply roused by, and
respond to, the most awful exhibition of physical and moral anguish the
world has ever faced, and which it is the strange fate of our actual
generations to see unrolled before them. We welcome any lapse of logic
that may connect inward vagueness with outward zeal, if it be the zeal
of subscribers, presenters or drivers of cars, or both at once,
stretcher-bearers, lifters, healers, consolers, handy Anglo-French
interpreters, (these extremely precious,) smoothers of the way; in
short, after whatever fashion. We ask of nobody any waste of moral or of
theoretic energy, nor any conviction of any sort, but that the job is
inspiring and the honest, educated man a match for it.
"If I seem to cast doubt on any very driving intelligence of the great
issue as a source of sympathy with us, I think this is because I have
been struck, whenever I have returned to my native land, by the
indifference of Americans at large to the concerns and preoccupations of
Europe. This indifference has again and again seemed to me quite beyond
measure or description, though it may be in a degree suggested by the
absence throughout the many-paged American newspaper of the least
mention of a European circumstance unless some not-to-be-blinked war or
revolution, or earthquake or other cataclysm has happened to apply the
lash to curiosity. The most comprehensive journalistic formula that I
have found myself, under that observation, reading into the general case
is the principle that the first duty of the truly appealing sheet in a
given community is to teach every individual reached by it--every man,
woman and child--to count on appearing there, in their habit as they
live, if they will only wait for their turn.
"However," he continued, "my point is simply my plea for patience with
our enterprise even at the times when we can't send home sensational
figures. 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' and the essence of
our utility, as of that of any ambulance corps, is just to be there, on
any and every contingency, including the blessed contingency of a
temporary drop in the supply of the wounded turned out and taken
on--since such comparative intermissions occur. Ask our friends, I beg
you, to rid themselves of the image of our working on schedule time or
on guarantee of a maximum delivery; we are dependent on the humors of
battle, on incalculable rushes and lapses, on violent outbreaks of
energy which rage and pass and are expressly designed to bewilder. It is
not for the poor wounded to oblige us by making us showy, but for us to
let them count on our open arms and open lap as troubled children count
on those of their mother. It is now to be said, moreover, that our
opportunity of service threatens inordinately to grow; such things may
any day begin to occur at the front as will make what we have up to now
been able to do mere child's play, though some of our help has been
rendered when casualties were occurring at the rate, say, of 5,000 in
twenty minutes, which ought, on the whole, to satisfy us. In face of
such enormous facts of destruction--"
Here Mr. James broke off as if these facts were, in their horror, too
many and too much for him. But after another moment he explained his
pause.
"One finds it in the midst of all this as hard to apply one's words as
to endure one's thoughts. The war has used up words; they have weakened,
they have deteriorated like motor car tires; they have, like millions of
other things, been more overstrained and knocked about and voided of the
happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages
before, and we are now confronted with a depreciation of all our terms,
or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression through increase of
limpness, that may well make us wonder what ghosts will be left to
walk."
This sounded rather desperate, yet the incorrigible interviewer,
conscious of the wane of his only chance, ventured to glance at the
possibility of a word or two on the subject of Mr. James's present
literary intentions. But the kindly hand here again was raised, and the
mild voice became impatient.
"Pardon my not touching on any such irrelevance. All I want is to invite
the public, as unblushingly as possible, to take all the interest in us
it can; which may be helped by knowing that our bankers are Messrs.
Brown Brothers & Co., 59 Wall Street, New York City, and that checks
should be made payable to the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps."