l'Enigme_ of all my long gaps and delinquencies these many months
past--my terror of not keeping sufficiently ahead in doing my part of it
(all the revising, rewriting, retouching, Preface-making and
proof-correcting) has so paralysed me--as a panic fear--that I have let
other decencies go to the wall. The printers and publishers tread on my
heels, and I feel their hot breath behind me--whereby I keep _at_ it in
order not to be overtaken. Fortunately I have kept at it so that I am
almost out of the wood, and the next very few weeks or so will
completely lay the spectre. The case has been complicated badly,
moreover, the last month--and even before--by my having, of all things
in the world, let myself be drawn into a theatrical adventure--which
fortunately appears to have turned out as well as I could have possibly
expected or desired. Forbes Robertson and his wife produced on the 26th
last in Edinburgh--being on "tour," and the provincial production to
begin with, as more experimental, having good reason in its favour--a
three-act comedy of mine ("The High Bid")--which is just only the little
one-act play presented as a "tale" at the end of the volume of the "Two
Magics"; the one-act play proving really a perfect three-act one,
dividing itself (by two _short_ entractes, without fiddles) perfectly at
the right little places as climaxes--with the artful beauty of unity of
time and place preserved, etc.... It had a _great_ and charming success
before a big house at Edinburgh--a real and unmistakable victory--but
what was most brought home thereby is that it should have been
discharged straight in the face of London. That will be its real and
best function. This I am hoping for during May and June. It has still to
be done at Newcastle, Liverpool, etc. (was done this past week three
times at Glasgow. Of course on tour three times in a week is the most
they can give a play in a minor city.) But my great point is that
preparations, rehearsals, _lavishments_ of anxious time over it (after
completely re-writing it and improving it to begin with) have
represented a sacrifice of days and weeks to them that have direfully
devoured my scant margin--thus making my intense nervousness (about
them) doubly nervous. I left home on the 17th last and rehearsed hard
(every blessed day) at Manchester, and at Edinburgh till the
production--having already, three weeks before that in London, given up
a whole week to the same. I came back to town a week ago to-night (saw a
second night in Edinburgh, which confirmed the impression of the first,)
and return to L.H. to-morrow, after a very decent _huitaine de jours_
here during which I have had quiet mornings, and even evenings, of work.
I go to Paris about the 20th to stay _10_ days, at the most, with Mrs
Wharton, and shall be back by May 1st. I yearn to know positively that
your Dad and Mother arrive definitely on the Oxford job then. I have had
to be horribly inhuman to them in respect to the fond or repeated
_expression_ of that yearning--but they will more than understand why,
"druv" as I've been, and also understand how the prospect of having them
with me, and being with them, for a while, has been all these last
months as the immediate jewel of my spur. Read them this letter and let
it convey to them, all tenderly, that I _live_ in the hope of their
operative advent, and shall bleed half to death if there be any hitch.
...But I embrace you all in spirit and am ever your fond old Uncle,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. D. Howells._
/#
The "lucubrations" are of course the prefaces written for the
collected edition. The number of volumes was eventually raised to
twenty-four, but _The Bostonians_ was not included. The "one thing"
referred to, towards the end of this letter, as likely to involve
another visit to America would seem to be the possible production
there of one of his plays; while the further reason for wishing to
return was doubtless connected with his project of writing a novel
of which the scene was to be laid in America--the novel that
finally became _The Ivory Tower_.
#/
/*
_Dictated_.
Lamb House, Rye.
17th August, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Howells,
*/
A great pleasure to me is your good and generous letter just
received--with its luxurious implied licence for me of seeking this aid
to prompt response; at a time when a pressure of complications (this is
the complicated time of the year even in my small green garden) defeats
too much and too often the genial impulse. But so far as compunction
started and guided your pen, I really rub my eyes for vision of where it
may--save as most misguidedly--have come in. You were so far from having
distilled any indigestible drop for me on that pleasant _ultimissimo_
Sunday, that I parted from you with a taste, in my mouth, absolutely
saccharine--sated with sweetness, or with sweet reasonableness, so to
speak; and aching, or wincing, in no single fibre. Extravagant and
licentious, almost, your delicacy of fear of the contrary; so much so,
in fact, that I didn't remember we had even spoken of the heavy
lucubrations in question, or that you had had any time or opportunity,
since their "inception," to look at one. However your fond mistake is
all to the good, since it has brought me your charming letter and so
appreciative remarks you therein make. My actual attitude about the
Lucubrations is almost only, and quite inevitably, that they make, to
me, for weariness; by reason of their number and extent--I've now but a
couple more to write. This staleness of sensibility, in connection with
them, blocks out for the hour every aspect but that of their being all
done, and of their perhaps helping the Edition to sell two or three
copies more! They will have represented much labour to this latter
end--though in that they will have differed indeed from no other of
their fellow-manifestations (in general) whatever; and the resemblance
will be even increased if the two or three copies _don't_, in the form
of an extra figure or two, mingle with my withered laurels. They are, in
general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for
Appreciation on other than infantile lines--as against the so almost
universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our
general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart. However, I am afraid
I'm too sick of the mere doing of them, and of the general strain of the
effort to avoid the deadly danger of repetition, to say much to the
purpose about them. They ought, collected together, none the less, to
form a sort of comprehensive manual or _vade-mecum_ for aspirants in our
arduous profession. Still, it will be long before I shall want to
collect them together for that purpose and furnish _them_ with a final
Preface. I've done with prefaces for ever. As for the Edition itself, it
has racked me a little that I've had to leave out so many things that
would have helped to make for rather a more vivid completeness. I don't
at all regret the things, pretty numerous, that I've omitted from
deep-seated preference and design; but I do a little those that are
crowded out by want of space and by the rigour of the 23 vols., and 23
only, which were the condition of my being able to arrange the matter
with the Scribners at all. Twenty-three do seem a fairly blatant
array--and yet I rather surmise that there may have to be a couple of
supplementary volumes for certain too marked omissions; such being, on
the whole, detrimental to an all professedly comprehensive presentation
of one's stuff. Only these, I pray God, without Prefaces! And I have
even, in addition, a dim vague view of re-introducing, with a good deal
of titivation and cancellation, the too-diffuse but, I somehow feel,
tolerably full and good "Bostonians" of nearly a quarter of a century
ago; that production never having, even to my much-disciplined patience,
received any sort of justice. But it will take, doubtless, a great deal
of artful re-doing--and I haven't, now, had the courage or time for
anything so formidable as touching and re-touching it. I feel at the
same time how the series suffers commercially from its having been
dropped so completely out. _Basta pure--basta!_
I am charmed to hear of your Roman book and beg you very kindly to send
it me directly it bounds into the ring. I rejoice, moreover, with much
envy, and also a certain yearning and impotent non-intelligence, at your
being moved to-day to Roman utterance--I mean in presence of the so
bedrenched and vulgarised (I mean more particularly _commonised_) and
transformed City (as well as, alas, more or less, Suburbs) of our
current time. There was nothing, I felt, to myself, I could _less_ do
than write again, in the whole presence--when I was there some fifteen
months agone. The idea of doing so (even had any periodical wanted my
stuff, much less bid for it) would have affected me as a sort of
give-away of my ancient and other reactions in presence of all the
unutterable old Rome I originally found and adored. It would have come
over me that if those ancient emotions of my own meant anything, no
others on the new basis could mean much; or if any on the new basis
should pretend to sense, it would be at the cost of all imputable
coherency and sincerity on the part of my prime infatuation. In spite,
all the same, of which doubtless too pedantic view--it only means, I
fear, that I am, to my great disadvantage, utterly bereft of any
convenient journalistic ease--I am just beginning to re-do ... certain
little old Italian papers, with titivations and expansions, in form to
match with a volume of "English Hours" re-fabricated three or four years
ago on the same system. In this little job I shall meet again my not
much more than scant, yet still appreciable, old Roman stuff in my
path--and shall have to commit myself about it, or about its general
subject, somehow or other. I shall trick it out again to my best
ability, at any rate--and to the cost, I fear, of your thinking I have
retitivation on the brain. I haven't--I only have it on (to the end that
I may then have it a little consequently _in_) the flat pocket-book. The
system has succeeded a little with "English Hours"; which have sold
quite vulgarly--for wares of mine; whereas the previous and original
untitivated had long since dropped almost to nothing. In spite of which
I could really shed salt tears of impatience and yearning to get back,
after so prolonged a blocking of traffic, to too dreadfully postponed
and neglected "creative" work; an accumulated store of ideas and
reachings-out for which even now clogs my brain.
We are having here so bland and beautiful a summer that when I receive
the waft of your furnace-mouth, blown upon my breakfast-table every few
days through the cornucopia, or improvised resounding trumpet, of the
Times, I groan across at my brother William (now happily domesticated
with me:) "Ah why _did_ they, poor infatuated dears? why _did_
they?"--and he always knows I mean Why did you three hie you home from
one of the most beautiful seasons of splendid cool summer, or splendid
summery cool, that ever was, just to swoon in the arms of your Kittery
_genius loci_ (genius of perspiration!)--to whose terrific embrace you
saw me four years ago, or whatever terrible time it was, almost utterly
succumb. In my small green garden here the elements have been, ever
since you left, quite enchantingly mixed; and I have been quite happy
and proud to show my brother and his wife and two of his children, who
have been more or less collectively and individually with me, what a
decent English season can be....
Let me thank you again for your allusion to the slightly glamour-tinged,
but more completely and consistently forbidding and forbidden, lecture
possibility. I refer to it in these terms because in the first place I
shouldn't have waited till now for it, but should have waked up to it
eleven years ago; and because in the second there are other, and really
stouter things too, definite ones, I want to do, with which it would
formidably interfere, and which are better worth my resolutely
attempting. I never have had such a sense of almost bursting, late in
the day though it be, with violent and lately too much repressed
creative (again!) intention. I _may_ burst before this intention fairly
or completely flowers, of course; but in that case, even, I shall
probably explode to a less distressing effect than I should do, under
stress of a fatal puncture, on the too personally and physically
arduous, and above all too gregariously-assaulted (which is what makes
it most arduous) lecture-platform. There is one thing which may
conceivably (if it comes within a couple of years) take me again to the
_contorni_ of Kittery; and on the spot, once more, one doesn't know what
might happen. _Then_ I should take grateful counsel of you with all the
appreciation in the world. And I _want_ very much to go back for a
certain thoroughly practical and special "artistic" reason; which would
depend, however, on my being able to pass my time in an ideal
combination of freedom and quiet, rather than in a luridly real one of
involved and exasperated exposure and motion. But I may still have to
talk to you of this more categorically; and won't worry you with it till
then. You wring my heart with your report of your collective Dental
pilgrimage to Boston in Mrs Howells' distressful interest. I read of it
from your page, somehow, as I read of Siberian or Armenian or Macedonian
monstrosities, through a merciful attenuating veil of Distance and
Difference, in a column of the Times. The distance is half the
globe--and the difference (for me, from the dear lady's active
afflictedness) that of having when in America undergone, myself, so
prolonged and elaborate a torture, in the Chair of Anguish, that I am
now on t'other side of Jordan altogether, with every ghost, even, of a
wincing nerve extinct and a horrible inhuman acheless void installed as
a substitute. Void or not, however, I hope Mrs Howells, and you all, are
now acheless at least, and am yours, my dear Howells, ever so
faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. With all of which I catch myself up on not having told you,
decently and gratefully, of the always sympathetic attention with which
I have read the "Fennel and Rue" you so gracefully dropped into my lap
at that last hour, and which I had afterwards to toy with a little
distractedly before getting the right peaceful moments and right
retrospective mood (this in order to remount the stream of time to the
very Fontaine de Jouvence of your subject-matter) down here. For what
comes out of it to me more than anything else is the charming freshness
of it, and the general miracle of your being capable of this under the
supposedly more or less heavy bloom of a rich maturity. There are places
in it in which you recover, absolutely, your first fine rapture. You
confound and dazzle me; so go on recovering--it will make each of your
next things a new document on immortal freshness! I can't remount--but
can only drift on with the thicker and darker tide: wherefore pray for
me, as who knows what may be at the end?
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 13th, 1908.
*/
/*
My very dear Friend,
*/
I cabled you an hour ago my earnest hope that you _may_ see your way to
sailing ... on the 20th--and if you _do_ manage that, this won't catch
you before you start. Nevertheless I can't not write to you--however
briefly (I mean on the chance of my letter being useless)--after
receiving your two last, of rapprochees dates, which have come within a
very few days of each other--that of Oct. 5th only to-day. I am deeply
distressed at the situation you describe and as to which my power to
suggest or enlighten now quite miserably fails me. I move in darkness; I
rack my brain; I gnash my teeth; I don't pretend to understand or to
imagine.... Only sit tight yourself _and go through the movements of
life_. That keeps up our connection with life--I mean of the immediate
and apparent life; behind which, all the while, the deeper and darker
and unapparent, in which things _really_ happen to us, learns, under
that hygiene, to stay in its place. Let it get out of its place and it
swamps the scene; besides which its place, God knows, is enough for it!
Live it all through, every inch of it--out of it something valuable will
come--but live it ever so quietly; and--_je maintiens mon
dire_--waitingly!... What I am really hoping is that you'll be on your
voyage when this reaches the Mount. If you're not, you'll be so very
soon afterwards, won't you?--and you'll come down and see me here and
we'll talk a perte de vue, and there will be something in that for both
of us.... Believe meanwhile and always in the aboundingly tender
friendship--the understanding, the participation, the _princely_ (though
I say it who shouldn't) hospitality of spirit and soul of yours more
than ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To J.B. Pinker._
/#
By this time the monthly issue of the volumes of the "New York"
edition was well under way--with the discouraging results to be
inferred from the following letter.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
October 23rd, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear Pinker,
*/
All thanks for your letter this a.m. received. I have picked myself up
considerably since Tuesday a.m., the hour of the shock, but I think it
would ease off my nerves not a little to see you, and should be glad if
you could come down on Monday next, 26th, say--by the 4.25, and dine and
spend the night. If Monday _isn't_ convenient to you, I must wait to
indicate some other near subsequent day till I have heard from a person
who is to come down on one of those dates and whom I wish to be free of.
I am afraid my anticlimax _has_ come from the fact that since the
publication of the Series began no dimmest light or "lead" as to its
actualities or possibilities of profit has reached me--whereby, in the
absence of special warning, I found myself concluding in the sense of
some probable fair return--beguiled thereto also by the measure, known
only to myself, of the treasures of ingenuity and labour I have lavished
on the ameliorations of every page of the thing, and as to which I felt
that they couldn't _not_ somehow "tell." I warned _myself_ indeed, and
kept down my hopes--said to myself that any present payments would be
moderate and fragmentary--very; but this didn't prevent my rather
building on something that at the end of a very frequented and invaded
and hospitable summer might make such a difference as would outweigh--a
little--my so disconcerting failure to get anything from ----. The
non-response of _both_ sources has left me rather high and dry--though
not so much so as when I first read Scribner's letter. I have recovered
the perspective and proportion of things--I have committed, thank God,
no anticipatory _follies_ (the worst is having made out my income-tax
return at a distinctly higher than at all warranted figure!--whereby I
shall have early in 1909 to pay--as I even did last year--on parts of an
income I have never received!)--and, above all, am aching in every bone
to get back to out-and-out "creative" work, the long interruption of
which has fairly sickened and poisoned me. (_That_ is the real hitch!) I
am afraid that moreover in my stupidity before those unexplained--though
so grim-looking!--figure-lists of Scribner's I even seemed to make out
that a certain $211 (a phrase in his letter seeming also to point to
that interpretation) _is_, all the same, owing me. But as you say
nothing about this I see that I am probably again deluded and that the
mystic screed meant it is still owing _them_! Which is all that is
wanted, verily, to my sad rectification! However, I am now, as it were,
prepared for the worst, and as soon as I can get my desk _absolutely_
clear (for, like the convolutions of a vast smothering boa-constrictor,
_such_ voluminosities of Proof--of the Edition--to be carefully
read--still keep rolling in,) that mere fact will by itself considerably
relieve me. And I have _such_ visions and arrears of inspiration--! But
of these we will speak--and, as I say, I shall be very glad if you can
come Monday. Believe me, yours ever,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Ellen Emmet._
/#
H. J.'s interest in the work of this "paintress-cousin" (afterwards
Mrs. Blanchard Rand) has already appeared in a letter to her
mother, Mrs. George Hunter (vol. i, p. 258).
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
November 2d, 1908.
*/
...I have taken moments, beloved Bay, to weep, yes to bedew my pillow
with tears, over the foul wrong I was doing _you_ and the generous and
delightful letter I so long ago had from you--and in respect to whose
noble bounty your present letter, received only this evening and already
moving me to this feverish response, is a heaping, on my unworthy head,
of coals of fire. It is delightful at any rate, dearest Bay, to be in
relation with you again, and to hear your sweet voice, as it were, and
to smell your glorious paint and turpentine--to inhale, in a word, both
your goodness and your glory; and I shall never again consent to be
deprived of the luxury of you (long enough to notice it) on any terms
whatever....
_November 3d._ I had to break off last night and go to bed--and as it is
now much past mid-night again I shall almost surely not finish, but only
scrawl you a few lines more and then take you up to London with me and
go on with you there, as I am obliged to make that move, for a few days,
by the 9.30 a.m. Among the things I have to do is to go to see my
portrait by Jacques Blanche at the Private View of the New Gallery
autumn show--he having "done" me in Paris last May (he is now quite the
Bay Emmet of the London--in particular--portrait world, and does all the
billionaires and such like: that's where _I_ come in--very big and fat
and uncanny and "brainy" and awful when I last saw myself--so that I now
quite tremble at the prospect, though he has done a rather wondrous
thing of Thomas Hardy--who, however, lends himself. I will add a word to
this after I have been to the N.G., and if I _am_ as unnatural as I
fear, you must settle, really, to come out and avenge me.) ... When you
see William, to get on again with _his_ portrait--in which I am
infinitely and yearningly interested--as I am in every invisible stroke
of your brush, over which I ache for baffled curiosity or
wonderment--when you _do_ go on to Cambridge (sooner, I trust, than
later) he and Alice and Peggy will have much to tell you about their
quite long summer here, lately brought to a close, and about poor little
old Lamb House and its corpulent, slowly-circulating and
slowly-masticating master. It was an infinite interest to have them here
for a good many weeks--they are such endlessly interesting people, and
Alice such a heroine of devotion and of everything. We have had a
wondrous season--a real golden one, for weeks and weeks--and still it
goes on, bland and breathless and changeless--the rarest autumn (and
summer, from June on) known for years: a proof of what this much-abused
climate is capable of for benignity and convenience. Dear little old
Lamb House and garden have really become very pleasant and developed
through being much (and virtuously) lived in, and I do wish you would
come out and add another flourish to its happy sequel. But I _must_ go
to bed, dearest Bay--I'm ashamed to tell you what sort of hour it is.
But I've not done with you yet.
_105 Pall Mall._ November 6th. I've been in town a couple of days
without having a moment to return to this--for the London tangle
immediately begins. What it will perhaps most interest you to know is
that I "attended" yesterday the Private View of the Society of Portrait
Painters' Exhibition and saw Blanche's "big" portrait of poor H. J. (His
two exhibits are that one and one of himself--the latter very flattered,
the former not.) The "funny thing about it" is that whereas I sat in
almost full face, and left it on the canvas in that bloated aspect when
I quitted Paris in June, it is now a splendid Profile, and with the body
(and _more_ of the body) in a quite different attitude; a wonderful
_tour de force_ (the sort of thing _you_ ought to do if you understand
your real interest!)--consisting of course of his having begun the whole
thing afresh on a new canvas after I had gone, and worked out the
profile, in my absence, by the aid of fond memory ("secret notes" on my
silhouette, he also says, surreptitiously taken by him) and several
photographs (also secretly taken at that angle while I sat there with my
whole beauty, as I supposed, turned on. The result is wonderfully "fine"
(for _me_)--_considering_! I think one sees a little that it's a
_chic'd_ thing, but ever so much less than you'd have supposed. He dines
with me to-night and I will get him to give me two or three photographs
(of the picture, not of _me_) and send them to you, for curiosity's
sake. But I really think that (for a certain _style_--of presentation
of H.J.--that it has, a certain dignity of intention and of
indication--of who and what, poor creature, he _is_!) it ought to be
seen in the U.S. He (Blanche) wants to go there himself--so put in all
your own triumphs first. However, it would _kill_ him--so his triumphs
would be brief; and yours would then begin again. Meanwhile he was
almost as agreeable and charming and beguiling to sit to, as _you_, dear
Bay, in your own attaching person--which somebody once remarked to me
explained _half_ the "run" on you!... Dear Gaillard Lapsley (I hope
immensely you'll see _him_ on his way to Colorado or wherever) has given
me occasional news of Eleanor and Elizabeth--in which I have
rejoiced--seeming to hear their nurseries ring with the echo of their
prosperity. As they must now have children enough for them to take care
of _each other_ (haven't they?) I hope they are thinking of profiting by
it to come out here again--where they are greatly desired.... _But_,
beloved Bay, I must get this off now. I send tenderest love to the
Mother and the Sister; I beseech you not to let your waiting laurel,
here, wither ungathered, and am ever your fondest,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To George Abbot James._
/#
This refers to the death of Mrs. G. A. James, sister of the Hon. H.
Cabot Lodge, Senior Senator for Massachusetts. H. J.'s friendship
with his correspondent, dating from early years, is commemorated in
_Notes of a Son and Brother_.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
Nov. 26th, 1908.
*/
/*
My dear old Friend,
*/