Since winter was approaching, Henry James had begun to use a panelled,
green-painted room on the upper floor of Lamb House for his work. It was
known simply as the green room. It had many advantages as a winter
workroom, for it was small enough to be easily warmed and a wide south
window caught all the morning sunshine. The window overhung the smooth,
green lawn, shaded in summer by a mulberry tree, surrounded by roses and
enclosed behind a tall, bride wall. It never failed to give the owner
pleasure to look out of this window at his charming English garden where
he could watch his English gardener digging the flower-beds or mowing
the lawn or sweeping up fallen leaves. There was another window for the
afternoon sun, looking towards Winchelsea and doubly glazed against the
force of the westerly gales. Three high bookcases, two big writing-desks
and an easy chair filled most of the space in the green room, but left
enough dear floor for a restricted amount of the pacing exercise that
was indispensable to literary composition. On summer days Henry James
liked better to work in the large "garden room" which gave him a longer
stretch for perambulation and a window overlooking the cobbled street
that curved up the hill past his door. He liked to be able to relieve
the tension of a difficult sentence by a glance down the street; he
enjoyed hailing a passing friend or watching a motor-car pant up the
sharp little slope. The sight of one of these vehicles could be counted
on to draw from him a vigorous outburst of amazement, admiration, or
horror for the complications of an age that produced such efficient
monsters for gobbling protective distance.
The business of acting as a medium between the spoken and the
typewritten word was at first as alarming as it was fascinating. The
most handsome and expensive typewriters exercise as vicious an influence
as any others over the spelling of the operator, and the new pattern of
a Remington machine which I found installed offered a few additional
problems. But Henry James's patience during my struggles with that
baffling mechanism was unfailing--he watched me helplessly, for he was
one of the few men without the smallest pretension to the understanding
of a machine--and he was as easy to spell from as an open dictionary.
The experience of years had evidently taught him that it was not safe to
leave any word of more than one syllable to luck. He took pains to
pronounce every pronounceable letter, he always spelt out words which
the ear might confuse with others, and he never left a single,
punctuation mark unuttered, except sometimes that necessary point, the
full stop. Occasionally, in a low "aside" he would interject a few words
for the enlightenment of the amanuensis, adding, for instance, after
spelling out "The Newcomes," that the words were the title of a novel by
one Thackeray.
The practice of dictation was begun in the nineties. By 1907 it was a
confirmed habit, its effects being easily recognizable in his style,
which became more and more like free, involved, unanswered talk. "I
know," he once said to me, "that I'm too diffuse when I'm dictating."
But he found dictation not only an easier but a more inspiring method of
composing than writing with his own hand, and he considered that the
gain in expression more than compensated for any loss of concision. The
spelling out of the words, the indication of commas, were scarcely felt
as a drag on the movement of his thought. "It all seems," he once
explained, "to be so much more effectively and unceasingly _pulled_ out
of me in speech than in writing." Indeed, at the time when I began to
work for him, he had reached a stage at which the click of a Remington
machine acted as a positive spur. He found it more difficult to compose
to the music of any other make. During a fortnight when the Remington
was out of order he dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident
discomfort, and he found it almost impossibly disconcerting to speak to
something that made no responsive sound at all. Once or twice when he
was ill and in bed I took down a note or two by hand, but as a rule he
liked to have the typewriter moved into his bedroom for even the
shortest letters. Yet there were to the end certain kinds of work which
he was obliged to do with a pen. Plays, if they were to be kept within
the limits of possible performance, and short stories, if they were to
remain within the bounds of publication in a monthly magazine, must be
written by hand. He was well aware that the manual labour of writing was
his best aid to a desired brevity. The plays--such a play as _The
Outcry_, for instance--were copied straight from his manuscript, since
he was too much afraid of "the murderous limits of the English theatre"
to risk the temptation of dictation and embroidery. With the short
stories he allowed himself a little more freedom, dictating them from
his written draft and expanding them as he went to an extent which
inevitably defeated his original purpose. It is almost literally true to
say of the sheaf of tales collected in _The Finer Grain_ that they were
all written in response to a single request for a short story for
_Harper's Monthly Magazine._ The length was to be about 5,000 words and
each promising idea was cultivated in the optimistic belief that it
would produce a flower too frail and small to demand any exhaustive
treatment. But even under pressure of being written by hand, with
dictated interpolations rigidly restricted, each in turn pushed out to
lengths that no chopping could reduce to the word limit. The tale
eventually printed was _Crapy Cornelia_, but, although it was the
shortest of the batch, it was thought too long to be published in one
number and appeared in two sections, to the great annoyance of the
author.