process of "seeing" my native country) perpetually writing letters; and
yet I blush with the consciousness of not having yet got round to _you_
again--since the arrival of your so genial New Year's greeting. I have
been lately in constant, or at least in very frequent, motion, on this
large comprehensive scale, and the right hours of _recueillement_ and
meditation, of private communication, in short, are very hard to seize.
And when one does seize them, as you know, one is almost crushed by the
sense of accumulated and congested matter. So I won't attempt to remount
the stream of time save the most sketchily in the world. It was from
Lenox, Mass., I think, in the far-away prehistoric autumn, that I last
wrote you. I reverted thence to Boston, or rather, mainly, to my
brother's kindly roof at Cambridge, hard by--where, alas, my five or six
weeks were harrowed and ravaged by an appalling experience of American
transcendent _Dentistry_--a deep dark abyss, a trap of anguish and
expense, into which I sank unwarily (though, I now begin to see, to my
great profit in the short human hereafter,) of which I have not yet
touched the _fin fond_. (I mention it as accounting for treasures of
wrecked _time_--I could do nothing else whatever in the state into which
I was put, while the long ordeal went on: and this has left me belated
as to everything--"work," correspondence, impressions, progress through
the land.) But I was (temporarily) liberated at last, and fled to New
York, where I passed three or four appalled midwinter weeks (Dec. and
early Jan.;) appalled, mainly, I mean, by the ferocious discomfort this
season of unprecedented snow and ice puts on in that altogether
unspeakable city--from which I fled in turn to Philadelphia and
Washington. (I am going back to N.Y. for three or four weeks of
developed spring--I haven't yet (in a manner) seen it or cowardly "done"
it.) Things and places southward have been more manageable--save that I
lately spent a week of all but polar rigour at the high-perched
Biltmore, in North Carolina, the extraordinary colossal French chateau
of George Vanderbilt in the said N.C. mountains--the house 2500 feet in
air, and a thing of the high Rothschild manner, but of a size to contain
two or three Mentmores and Waddesdons.... Philadelphia and Washington
would yield me a wild range of anecdote for you were we face to
face--will yield it me then; but I can only glance and pass--glance at
the extraordinary and rather personally-fascinating President--who was
kind to me, as was dear J. Hay even more, and wondrous, blooming,
aspiring little Jusserand, all pleasant welcome and hospitality. But I
liked poor dear queer flat comfortable Philadelphia almost ridiculously
(for what it is--extraordinarily _cossu_ and materially civilized,) and
saw there a good deal of your friend--as I think she is--Agnes Repplier,
whom I liked for her bravery and (almost) brilliancy. (You'll be glad to
hear that she is extraordinarily better, up to now, these two years, of
the malady by which her future appeared so compromised.) However, I am
tracing my progress on a scale, and the hours melt away--and my letter
mustn't grow out of my control. I have worked down here, yearningly, and
for all too short a stay--but ten days in all; but Florida, at this
southernmost tip, or almost, does beguile and gratify me--giving me my
first and last (evidently) sense of the tropics, or _a peu pres_, the
subtropics, and revealing to me a blandness in nature of which I had no
idea. This is an amazing winter-resort--the well-to-do in their tens,
their hundreds, of thousands, from all over the land; the property of a
single enlightened despot, the creator of two monster hotels, the
extraordinary agrement of which (I mean of course the high pitch of mere
monster-hotel amenity) marks for me [how] the rate at which, the way
_in_ which, things are done over here changes and changes. When I
remember the hotels of twenty-five years ago even! It will give me
brilliant chapters on hotel-civilization. Alas, however, with perpetual
movement and perpetual people and very few concrete objects of nature or
art to make use of for assimilation, my brilliant chapters don't get
themselves written--so little can they be notes of the current
picturesque--like one's European notes. They can only be notes on a
social order, of vast extent, and I see with a kind of despair that I
shall be able to do here little more than get my saturation, soak my
intellectual sponge--reserving the squeezing-out for the subsequent, ah,
the so yearned-for peace of Lamb House. It's all interesting, but it
isn't thrilling--though I gather everything is more really curious and
vivid in the West--to which and California, and to Mexico if I can, I
presently proceed. Cuba lies off here at but twelve hours of
steamer--and I am heartbroken at not having time for a snuff of that
flamboyant flower.
_Saint Augustine, Feb. 18th._
I had to break off day before yesterday, and I have completed meanwhile,
by having come thus far north, my sad sacrifice of an intenser
exoticism. I am stopping for two or three days at the "oldest city in
America"--two or three being none too much to sit in wonderment at the
success with which it has outlived its age. The paucity of the signs of
the same has perhaps almost the pathos the signs themselves would have
if there _were_ any. There is rather a big and melancholy and "toned"
(with a patina) old Spanish fort (of the 16th century,) but horrible
little modernisms surround it. On the other hand this huge modern hotel
(Ponce de Leon) is in the style of the Alhambra, and the principal
church ("Presbyterian") in that of the mosque of Cordova. So there are
compensations--and a tiny old Spanish cathedral front ("earliest church
built in America"--late 16th century,) which appeals with a yellow
ancientry. But I must pull off--simply sticking in a memento[A] (of a
public development, on my desperate part) which I have no time to
explain. This refers to a past exploit, but the leap is taken, is being
renewed; I repeat the horrid act at Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis,
San Francisco and later on in New York--_have_ already done so at
Philadelphia (always to "private" "literary" or Ladies' Clubs--at
Philadelphia to a vast multitude, with Miss Repplier as brilliant
introducer. At Bryn Mawr to 700 persons--by way of a _little_ circle.)
In fine I have waked up _conferencier_, and find, to my stupefaction,
that I can do it. The fee is large, of course--otherwise! Indianapolis
offers L100 for 50 minutes! It pays in short travelling expenses, and
the incidental circumstances and phenomena are full of illustration. I
can't do it _often_--but for L30 a time I should easily be able to. Only
that would be death. If I could come back here to abide I think I should
really be able to abide in (relative) affluence: one can, on the spot,
make so much more money--or at least I might. But I would rather live a
beggar at Lamb House--and it's to that I shall return. Let my
biographer, however, recall the solid sacrifice I shall have made. I
have just read over your New Year's eve letter and it makes me so
homesick that the bribe itself will largely seem to have been on the
side of the reversion--the bribe to one's finest sensibility. I have
published a novel--"The Golden Bowl"--here (in two vols.) in advance (15
weeks ago) of the English issue--and the latter will be (I don't even
know if it's out yet in London) in so comparatively mean and
fine-printed a London form that I have no heart to direct a few gift
copies to be addressed. I shall convey to you somehow the handsome New
York page--don't read it till then. The thing has "done" much less ill
here than anything I have ever produced.
But good-night, verily--with all love to all, and to Mrs. Nelly in
particular.
/*
Yours always,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
[A] Card of admission to a lecture by H. J. (The Lesson of
Balzac), Bryn Mawr College, Jan. 19, 1905.
_To Mrs. W. K. Clifford._
/*
Hotel Ponce de Leon,
St. Augustine, Florida.
February 21st, '05.
*/
/*
Dearest old Friend!
*/
I am leaving this subtropical Floridian spot from one half hour to
another, but the horror of not having for so long despatched a word to
you, the shame and grief and contrition of it, are so strong, within me,
that I simply seize the passing moment by the hair of its head and glare
at it till it pauses long enough to let me--as it were--embrace you. Yet
I feel, have felt, all along, that you will have _understood_, and that
words are wasted in explaining the obvious. Letters, all these weeks and
weeks, day to day and hour to hour letters, have fluttered about me in a
dense crowd even as the San Marco pigeons, in Venice, round him who
appears _to_ have corn to scatter. So the whole queer time has gone in
my scattering corn--scattering and chattering, and being chattered and
scattered to, and moving from place to place, and surrendering to people
(the _only_ thing to do here--since things, apart from people, are
_nil_;) in _staying_ with them, literally, from place to place and week
to week (though with old friends, as it were, alone--that is mostly,
thank God--to avoid new obligations:) doing that as the only solution of
the problem of "seeing" the country. I _am_ seeing, very well--but the
weariness of so much of so prolonged and sustained a process is, at
times, surpassing. It would be a strain, a weariness (kept up so,)
_anywhere_; and it is extraordinarily tiresome, on occasions, here.
Vastness of space and distance, of number and quantity, is the element
in which one lives: it is a great complication alone to be dealing with
a country that has fifty principal cities--each a law unto itself--and
unto _you_: England, poor old dear, having (to speak of) but one. On the
other hand it is distinctly interesting--the business and the country,
as a whole; there are no exquisite moments (save a few of a _funniness_
that comes to that;) but there are none from which one doesn't _get_
something....And meanwhile I am _lecturing_ a little to pay the Piper,
as I go--for high fees (of course) and as yet but three or four times.
But they give me gladly L50 for 50 minutes (a pound a minute--like
Patti!)--and always for the same lecture (as yet:) _The Lesson of
Balzac_. I do it beautifully--feel as if I had discovered my
vocation--at any rate amaze myself. It is _well_--for without it I don't
see how I could have held out.
...This winter has been a hideous succession of huge snow-blizzards,
blinding polar waves, and these southernmost places, even, are not their
usual soft selves. Yet the very south tiptoe of Florida, from which I
came three days ago, has an air as of molten liquid velvet, and the palm
and the orange, the pine-apple, the scarlet hibiscus, the vast magnolia
and the sapphire sea, make it a vision of very considerable beguilement.
I _wanted_ to put over to Cuba--but one night from this coast; but it
was, for reasons, not to be done--reasons of time and money. I _shall_
try for Mexico--and meanwhile pray for me hard. My visit is doing--_has_
done--my little reputation here, save the mark, great good. _The Golden
Bowl_ is in its _fourth_ edition--unprecedented! You see I "answer" your
last newses and things not at all--not even the note of anxiety about T.
Such are these cruelties, these ferocities of separation. But I drink in
everything you tell me, and I cherish you all always and am yours and
the children's twain ever so constantly,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Edward Warren._
/*
University Club,
Chicago.
March 19th, 1905.
*/
/*
Dearest Edward,
*/
This is but a mere breathless blessing hurled at you, as it were,
between trains and in ever so grateful joy in your brave double letter
(of the lame hand, hero that you are!) which has just overtaken me here.
I'm not pretending to write--I can't; it's impossible amid the movement
and obsession and complication of all this overwhelming _muchness_ of
space and distance and time (consumed,) and above all of people
(consuming.) I start in a few hours straight for California--enter my
train this, Monday, night 7.30, and reach Los Angeles and Pasadena at
2.30 Thursday afternoon. The train has, I believe, barber's shops,
bathrooms, stenographers and typists; so that if I can add a postscript,
without too much joggle, I will. But you will say "_Here_ is joggle
enough," for alack, I am already (after 17 days of the "great Middle
West") rather spent and weary, weary of motion and chatter, and oh, of
such an unimagined dreariness of _ugliness_ (on many, on most sides!)
and of the perpetual effort of trying to "do justice" to what one
doesn't like. If one could only damn it and have done with it! So much
of it is rank with good intentions. And then the "kindness"--the
princely (as it were) hospitality of these clubs; besides the sense of
_power_, huge and augmenting power (vast mechanical, industrial, social,
financial) everywhere! This Chicago is huge, _infinite_ (of potential
size and form, and even of actual;) black, smoky, _old_-looking, very
like some preternaturally _boomed_ Manchester or Glasgow lying beside a
colossal lake (Michigan) of hard pale green jade, and putting forth
railway antennae of maddening complexity and gigantic length. Yet this
club (which looks old and sober too!) is an abode of peace, a
benediction to me in the looming largeness; I _live_ here, and they put
one up (always, everywhere,) with one's so excellent room with perfect
bathroom and w.c. of its own, appurtenant (the _universal_ joy of this
country, in private houses or wherever; a feature that is really almost
a consolation for many things.) I have been to the south, the far end of
Florida &c--but prefer the far end of Sussex! In the heart of golden
orange-groves I yearned for the shade of the old L.H. mulberry tree. So
you see I am loyal, and I sail for Liverpool on July 4th. I go up the
whole Pacific coast to Vancouver, and return to New York (am due there
April 26th) by the Canadian-Pacific railway (said to be, in its first
half, sublime.) But I scribble beyond my time. Your letters are really a
blessed breath of brave old Britain. But oh for a talk in a Westminster
panelled parlour, or a walk on far-shining Camber sands! All love to
Margaret and the younglings. I have again written to Jonathan--he will
have more news of me for you. Yours, dearest Edward, almost in nostalgic
_rage_, and at any rate in constant affection,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. William James._
/*
Hotel del Coronado,
Coronado Beach, California.
Wednesday night,
April 5th, 1905.
*/
/*
Dearest Alice,
*/
I must write you again before I leave this place (which I do tomorrow
noon;) if only to still a little the unrest of my having condemned
myself, all too awkwardly, to be so long without hearing from you. I
haven't all this while--that is these several days--had the letters
which I am believing you will have forwarded to Monterey sent down to me
here. This I have abstained from mainly because, having stopped over
here these eight or nine days to write, in extreme urgency, an article,
and wishing to finish it at any price, I have felt that I should go to
pieces as an author if a mass of arrears of postal matter should come
tumbling in upon me--and particularly if any of it should be troublous.
However, I devoutly hope none of it has been troublous--and I have done
my best to let you know (in any need of wiring etc.) where I have been.
Also the letterless state has added itself to the deliciously simplified
social state to make me taste the charming sweetness and comfort of this
spot. California, on these terms, when all is said (Southern C. at
least--which, however, the real C., I believe, much repudiates,) has
completely bowled me over--such a delicious difference from the rest of
the U.S. do I find in it. (I speak of course all of nature and climate,
fruits and flowers; for there is absolutely nothing else, and the sense
of the shining social and human inane is utter.) The days have been
mostly here of heavenly beauty, and the flowers, the wild flowers just
now in particular, which fairly _rage_, with radiance, over the land,
are worthy of some purer planet than this. I live on oranges and olives,
fresh from the tree, and I lie awake nights to listen, on purpose, to
the languid list of the Pacific, which my windows overhang. I wish poor
heroic Harry could be here--the thought of whose privations, while I
wallow unworthy, makes me (tell him with all my love) miserably sick and
poisons much of my profit. I go back to Los Angeles to-morrow, to (as I
wrote you last) re-utter my (now loathly) Lecture to a female culture
club of 900 members (whom I make pay me through the nose,) and on
Saturday p.m. 8th, I shall be at Monterey (Hotel del Monte.) But my stay
there is now condemned to bitterest brevity and my margin of time for
all the rest of this job is so rapidly shrinking that I see myself
_brulant mes etapes_, alas, without exception, and cutting down my
famous visit to Seattle to a couple of days. It breaks my heart to have
so stinted myself here--but it was inevitable, and no one had given me
the least inkling that I should find California so sympathetic. It is
strange and inconvenient, how little impression of anything any one ever
takes the trouble to give one beforehand. I should like to stay here all
April and May. But I am writing more than my time permits--my article is
still to finish. I ask you no questions--you will have told me
everything. I live in the hope that the news from Wm. will have been
good. At least at Monterey, may there be some.... But good night--with
great and distributed tenderness. Yours, dearest Alice, always and ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To William James._
_Dictated._
/*
95 Irving Street,
Cambridge, Mass.
July 2nd, 1905.
*/
/*
Dearest W.,
*/
I am ticking this out at you for reasons of convenience that will be
even greater for yourself, I think, than for me.... Your good letter of
farewell reached me at Lenox, from which I returned but last evening--to
learn, however, from A., every circumstance of your departure and of
your condition, as known up to date. The grim grey Chicago will now be
your daily medium, but will put forth for you, I trust, every such
flower of amenity as it is capable of growing. May you not regret, at
any point, having gone so far to meet its queer appetites. Alice tells
me that you are to go almost straight thence (though with a little
interval here, as I sympathetically understand) to the Adirondacks:
where I hope for you as big a bath of impersonal Nature as possible,
with the tub as little tainted, that is, by the soapsuds of _personal_:
in other words, all the "board" you need, but no boarders. I seem
greatly to mislike, not to say deeply to mistrust, the Adirondack
boarder....I greatly enjoyed the whole Lenox countryside, seeing it as
I did by the aid of the Whartons' big strong commodious new motor, which
has fairly converted me to the sense of all the thing may do for one and
one may get from it. The potent way it deals with a country large enough
for it not to _rudoyer_, but to rope in, in big free hauls, a huge
netful of impressions at once--this came home to me beautifully,
convincing me that if I were rich I shouldn't hesitate to take up with
it. A great transformer of life and of the future! All that country
charmed me; we spent the night at Ashfield and motored back the next
day, after a morning there, by an easy circuit of 80 miles between
luncheon and a late dinner; a circuit easily and comfortably prolonged
for the sake of good roads....But I mustn't rattle on. I have still
innumerable last things to do. But the portents are all
propitious--_absit_ any ill consequence of this fatuity! I am living, at
Alice's instance, mainly on huge watermelon, dug out in spadefuls, yet
light to carry. But good bye now. Your last hints for the "Speech" are
much to the point, and I will try even thus late to stick them in. May
every comfort attend you!
/*
Ever yours,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Margaret James._
/#
The project of a book on London was never carried further, though
certain pages of the autobiographical fragment, _The Middle Years_,
written in 1914-15, no doubt shew the kind of line it would have
taken.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 3rd, 1905.
*/
/*
Dearest Peg,
*/
...In writing to your father (which, however, I shall not be able to do
by this same post) I will tell him a little better what has been
happening to me and why I have been so unsociable. This unsociability is
in truth all that has been happening--as it has been the reverse of the
medal, so to speak, of the great arrears and urgent applications (to
work) that awaited me here after I parted with you. I have been working
in one way and another with great assiduity, squeezing out my American
Book with all desirable deliberation, and yet in a kind of panting dread
of the matter of it all melting and fading from me before I have worked
it off. It does melt and fade, over here, in the strangest way--and yet
I did, I think, while with you, so successfully cultivate the impression
and the saturation that even my bare residuum won't be quite a vain
thing. I really find in fact that I have more impressions than I know
what to do with; so that, evidently, at the rate I am going, I shall
have pegged out two distinct volumes instead of one. I have already
produced almost the substance of one--which I have been sending to
"Harper" and the N.A.R., as per contract; though publication doesn't
begin, apparently, in those periodicals till next month. And then
(please mention to your Dad) all the time I haven't been doing the
American Book, I have been revising with extreme minuteness three or
four of my early works for the Edition Definitive (the settlement of
some of the details of which seems to be hanging fire a little between
my "agent" and my New York publishers; not, however, in a manner to
indicate, I think, a real hitch.) Please, however, say nothing whatever,
any of you to any one, about the existence of any such plan. These
things should be spoken of only when they are in full feather. That for
your Dad--I mean the information as well as the warning, in particular;
on whom, you see, I am shamelessly working off, after all, a good deal
of my letter. Mention to him also that still other tracts of my time,
these last silent weeks, have gone, have _had_ to go, toward preparing
for a job that I think I mentioned to him while with you--my pledge,
already a couple of years old to do a romantical-psychological-pictorial
"social" _London_ (of the general form, length, pitch, and "type" of
Marion Crawford's _Ave Roma Immortalis_) for the Macmillans; and I have
been feeling so nervous of late about the way America has crowded me off
it, that I have had, for assuagement of my nerves, to begin, with piety
and prayer, some of the very considerable reading the task will require
of me. All this to show you that I haven't been wantonly
uncommunicative. But good-night, dear Peg; I am going to do another for
Aleck. With copious embraces,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To H. G. Wells._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 19th, 1905.
*/
/*
My dear Wells,
*/
If I take up time and space with telling you why I have not _sooner_
written to thank you for your magnificent bounty, I shall have,
properly, to steal it from my letter, my letter itself; a much more
important matter. And yet I _must_ say, in three words, that my course
has been inevitable and natural. I found your first munificence here on
returning from upwards of 11 months in America, toward the end of
July--returning to the mountain of arrears produced by almost a year's
absence and (superficially, thereby) a year's idleness. I recognized,
even from afar (I had already done so) that the Utopia was a book I
should desire to read only in the right conditions of _coming_ to it,
coming with luxurious freedom of mind, rapt surrender of attention,
adequate honours, for it of every sort. So, not bolting it like the
morning paper and sundry, many, other vulgarly importunate things, and
knowing, moreover, I had already shown you that though I was slow I was
safe, and even certain, I "came to it" only a short time since, and
surrendered myself to it absolutely. And it was while I was at the
bottom of the crystal well that Kipps suddenly appeared, thrusting his
honest and inimitable head over the edge and calling down to me, with
his note of wondrous truth, that he had business with me above. I took
my time, however, there below (though "below" be a most improper figure
for your sublime and vertiginous heights,) and achieved a complete
saturation; after which, reascending and making out things again, little
by little, in the dingy air of the actual, I found Kipps, in his place,
awaiting me--and from his so different but still so utterly coercive
embrace I have just emerged. It was really very well he was there, for I
found (and it's even a little strange) that I could read _you_
only--_after you_--and don't at all see whom else I could have read. But
now that this is so I don't see either, my dear Wells, how I can "write"
you about these things--they make me want so infernally to talk with
you, to see you at length. Let me tell you, however, simply, that they
have left me prostrate with admiration, and that you are, for me, more
than ever, the most interesting "literary man" of your generation--in
fact, the only interesting one. These things do you, to my sense, the
highest honour, and I am lost in amazement at the diversity of your
genius. As in everything you do (and especially in these three last
Social imaginations), it is the quality of your intellect that primarily
(in the Utopia) obsesses me and reduces me--to that degree that even the
colossal dimensions of your Cheek (pardon the term that I don't in the
least invidiously apply) fails to break the spell. Indeed your Cheek is
positively the very sign and stamp of your genius, valuable to-day, as
you possess it, beyond any other instrument or vehicle, so that when I
say it doesn't break the charm, I probably mean that it largely
constitutes it, or constitutes the force: which is the force of an irony
that no one else among us begins to have--so that we are starving, in
our enormities and fatuities, for a sacred satirist (the satirist _with_
irony--as poor dear old Thackeray was the satirist without it,) and you
come, admirably, to save us. There are too many things to say--which is
so exactly why I can't write. Cheeky, cheeky, cheeky is _any_
young-man-at-Sandgate's offered Plan for the life of Man--but so far
from thinking that a disqualification of your book, I think it is
positively what makes the performance heroic. I hold, with you, that it
is only by our each contributing Utopias (the cheekier the better) that
anything will come, and I think there is nothing in the book truer and
happier than your speaking of this struggle of the rare yearning
individual toward that suggestion as one of the certain assistances of
the future. Meantime you set a magnificent example--of _caring_, of
feeling, of seeing, above all, and of suffering from, and with, the
shockingly sick actuality of things. Your epilogue tag in italics
strikes me as of the highest, of an irresistible and touching beauty.
Bravo, bravo, my dear Wells!