three hundred in number, of his English circle seized the occasion to
make him a united offering of friendship. They asked him to allow his
portrait to be painted by one of themselves, Mr. John S. Sargent. Henry
James was touched and pleased, and for the next year the fortunes of Mr.
Sargent's work are fully recorded in the correspondence--from its happy
completion and the private view of it in the artist's studio, to the
violence it suffered at the hands of a political agitatress, while it
hung in the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1914, and its successful
restoration from its injuries. The picture now belongs to the National
Portrait Gallery. On Mr. Sargent's commission a bust of Henry James was
at the same time modelled by Mr. Derwent Wood.
Early in 1914, after an interval of all but ten years, Henry James began
what he had often said he should never begin again--a long novel. It was
the novel, at last, of American life, long ago projected and abandoned,
and now revived as The Ivory Tower. Slowly and with many interruptions
he proceeded with it, and he was well in the midst of it when he left
Chelsea for Lamb House in July 1914. His health was now on a better
level than for some time past, and he counted on a peaceful and fruitful
autumn of work at Rye.
_To T. Bailey Saunders._
/*
L. H.
Jan. 27th [1910].
*/
/*
My dear Bailey,
*/
I am still in bed, attended by doctor and nurse, but doing very well and
mending _now_ very steadily and smoothly--so that I hope to be
practically up early next week. Also I am touched by, and appreciative
of, your solicitude. (You see I still cling to syntax or style, or
whatever it is.) But I have had an infernal time really--I may now
confide to you--pretty well all the while since I left you that sad and
sinister morning to come back from the station. A digestive crisis
making food loathsome and nutrition impossible--and sick inanition and
weakness and depression permanent. However, _bed_, the good Skinner,
M.D., the gentle nurse, with very small feedings administered every 2
hours, have got the better of the cursed state, and I am now hungry and
redeemed and convalescent. The Election fight has revealed to me how
ardent a Liberal lurks in the cold and clammy exterior of your
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/#
The allusions in the following are to articles by Mr. W. Morton
Fullerton (in the _Times_) on the disastrous floods in Paris, and
to Alfred de Musset's "Lettres d'amour a Aimee d'Alton."
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
February 8th, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
I am in receipt of endless bounties from you and dazzling revelations
about you: item: 1st: the grapes of Paradise that arrived yesterday in a
bloom of purple and a burst of sweetness that made me--while they cast
their Tyrian glamour about--ask more ruefully than ever what porridge
poor _non_-convalescent John Keats mustn't have had: 2d: your exquisite
appeal and approach to the good--the really admirable Skinner, who has
now wrung tears of emotion from my eyes by bringing them to my
knowledge: 3d: your gentle "holograph" letter, just to hand--which
treats _my_ stupid reflections on your own patience with such heavenly
gentleness. When one is still sickish and shaky (though that, thank
goodness, is steadily ebbing) one tumbles wrong--even when one has
wanted to make the most delicate geste in life. But the great thing is
that we always tumble together--more and more never apart; and that for
that happy exercise and sweet coincidence of agility we may trust
ourselves and each other to the end of time. So I gratefully grovel for
everything--and for your beautiful and generous inquiry of Skinner ...
more than even anything else. The purple clusters are, none the less, of
a prime magnificence and of an inexpressible relevance to my state. This
is steadily bettering--thanks above all to three successive morning
motor-rides that Skinner has taken me, of an hour and a half each
(to-day in fact nearly two hours), while he goes his rounds in a fairly
far circuit over the country-side. I sit at cottage and farmhouse doors
while he warns and comforts and commands within, and, these days having
been mild and grey and convenient, the effect has been of the last
benignity. I am thus exceedingly sustained. And also by the knowledge
that you are not being wrenched from your hard-bought foyer and your
neighbourhood to your best of brothers. Cramponnez-vous-y. I don't ask
you about poor great Paris--I make out as I can by Morton's playing
flashlight. And I read Walkley on Chantecler--which sounds rather like a
glittering void. I have now dealt with Alfred and Aimee--unprofitable
pair. What a strange and compromising French document--in this sense
that it affects one as giving so many people and things away, by the
simple fact of springing so characteristically and almost squalidly out
of them. The letter in which Alf. arranges for her to come into his
dirty bedroom at 8 a.m., while his mother and brother and others
unknowingly _grouillent_ on the other side of the cloison that shall
make their _nid d'amour_, and _la facon dont elle y vole_ react back
even upon dear old George rather fatally--apropos of dirty bedrooms,
thin cloisons and the usual state of things, one surmises, at that hour.
What an Aimee and what a Paul and what a Mme Jaubert and what an
everything!
/*
Ever your
H. J.
*/
_To Miss Jessie Allen._
/#
The plan here projected of looking for a house in Eaton Terrace,
where Miss Allen lived, was not carried further.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
February 20th, 1910.
*/
/*
My dear eternally martyred and murdered Goody,
*/
I am horribly ashamed to have my poor hand forced (you see what it is
and what it's reduced to) into piling up on your poor burdened
consciousness the added load of _my_ base woes (as if you weren't lying
stretched flat beneath the pressure of your own and those of some
special dozen or two of your most favourite and fatal vampires.) I
proposed you should know nothing of mine till they were all over--if
they ever _should_ be (which they are not quite yet:) and that if one
had to speak of them to you at all, it might thus be in the most
pluperfect of all past tenses and twiddling one's fingers on the tip of
one's nose, quite vulgarly, as to intimate that you were a day after the
fair.... But why do I unfold this gruesome tale when just what I most
want is _not_ to wring your insanely generous heart or work upon your
perversely exquisite sensibility? I am pulling through, and though I've
been so often somewhat better only to find myself topple back into black
despair--with bad, vilely bad, days after good ones, and not a _very_
famous one to-day--I do feel that I have definitely turned the corner
and got the fiend down, even though he still kicks as viciously as he
can yet manage. I am "up" and dressed, and in short I _eat_--after a
fashion, and have regained considerable weight (oh I had become the
loveliest sylph,) and even, I am told, a certain charm of appearance. My
good nephew Harry James, priceless youth, my elder brother's eldest
son, sailed from N.Y. yesterday to come out and see me--and that alone
lifts up my heart--for I have felt a very lonesome and stranded old
idiot. My conditions (of circumstance, house and care, &c) have on the
other hand been excellent--my servants angels of affection and devotion.
(I have indeed been _all_ in Doctor's and Nurse's hands.) So don't take
it hard now; take it utterly easy and allow your charity to stray a
little by way of a change into your own personal premises. Take a look
in _there_ and let it even make you linger. To hear you are doing _that_
will do me more good than anything else....
I yearn unutterably to get on far enough to begin to plan to come up to
town for a while. I have of late reacted intensely against this exile
from some of the resources of civilization in winter--and deliriously
dream of some future footing in London again (other than my club) for
the space of time between Xmas or so and June. What is the rent of a
house--unfurnished of course (a little good _inside_ one)--in your
Terrace?--and are there any with 2 or 3 servants' bedrooms?
Don't answer this absurdity now--but wait till we go and look at 2 or 3
together! Such is the recuperative yearning of your enfeebled but not
beaten--you can see by this scrawl--old
/*
H. J.
*/
_To Mrs. Bigelow._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
April 19th, 1910.
*/
/*
My dear Edith,
*/
I have been much touched by your solicitude, but till now absolutely too
"bad" to write--to do anything but helplessly, yearningly languish and
suffer and surrender. I have had a perfect Hell of a Time--since just
after Xmas--nearly 15 long weeks of dismal, dreary, interminable illness
(with occasional slight pickings-up followed by black relapses.) But the
tide, thank the Powers, has at last definitely turned and I am on the
way to getting not only better, but, as I believe, creepily and abjectly
well. I sent my Nurse (my second) flying the other day, after ten deadly
weeks of her, and her predecessor's, aggressive presence and policy, and
the mere relief from that overdone discipline has done wonders for me. I
must have patience, much, yet--but my face is toward the light, which
shows, beautifully, that I look ten years older, with my bonny tresses
ten degrees whiter (like Marie Antoinette's in the Conciergerie.)
However if I've lost all my beauty and (by my expenses) most of my
money, I rejoice I've kept my friends, and I shall come and show you
_that_ appreciation yet. I am so delighted that you and the Daughterling
had your go at Italy--even though I was feeling so pre-eminently
un-Italian. The worst of that Paradise is indeed that one returns but to
Purgatories at the best. Have a little patience yet with your still
struggling but all clinging
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To W. E. Norris._
/*
Hill Hall,
Theydon Bois,
Epping.
May 22nd, 1910.
*/
/*
My dear Norris,
*/
Forgive a very brief letter and a very sad one, in which I must explain
long and complicated things in a very few words. I have had a
dismal--the most dismal and interminable illness; going on these five
months nearly, since Christmas--and of which the end is not yet; and of
which all this later stage has been (these ten or twelve weeks) a
development of nervous conditions (agitation, trepidation, black
melancholia and weakness) of a--the most--formidable and distressing
kind. My brother and sister-in-law most blessedly came on to me from
America several weeks ago; without them I had--should have--quite gone
under; and a week ago, under extreme medical urgency as to change of
air, scene, food, everything, I came here with my sister-in-law--to some
most kind friends and a beautiful place--as a very arduous experiment.
But I'm too ill to be here really, and shall crawl home as soon as
possible. I'm afraid I can't see you in London--I can plan nor do
nothing; and can only ask you, in my weakness, depression and
helplessness, to pardon this doleful story from your affectionate and
afflicted old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Bittongs Hotel Hohenzollern,
Bad Nauheim.
June 10th, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
Your kindest note met me here on my arrival with my sister last evening.
We are infinitely touched by the generous expression of it, but there
had been, and could be, no question for us of Paris--formidable at best
(that is in general) as a place of rapid transit. I had, to my sorrow, a
baddish drop on coming back from high Epping Forest (that is "Theydon
Mount") to poor little flat and stale and illness-haunted Rye--and I
felt, my Dr. strongly urging, safety to be in a prompt escape by the
straightest way (Calais, Brussels, Cologne, and Frankfort,) to this
place of thick woods, groves, springs and general Kurort soothingness,
where my brother had been for a fortnight waiting us alone. Here I am
then and having made the journey, in great heat, far better than I
feared. Slowly but definitely I _am_ emerging--yet with nervous
possibilities still too latent, too in ambush, for me to do anything but
cling for as much longer as possible to my Brother and sister. I am
wholly unfit to be alone--in spite of amelioration. That (being alone) I
can't even as yet think of--and yet feel that I must for many months to
come have none of the complications of society. In fine, to break to you
the monstrous truth, I have taken my passage with them to America by the
Canadian Pacific Steamer line ("short sea") on August 12th--to spend the
winter in America. I must break with everything--of the last couple of
years in England--and am trying if possible to let Lamb House for the
winter--also am giving up my London perch. When I come back I must have
a better. There are the grim facts--but now that I have accepted them I
see hope and reason in them. I feel that the completeness of the change
la-bas will help me more than anything else can--and the amount of
corners I have already turned (though my nervous spectre still again and
again scares me) is a kind of earnest of the rest of the process. I
cling to my companions even as a frightened cry-baby to his nurse and
protector--but of all that it is depressing, almost degrading to speak.
This place is insipid, yet soothing--very bosky and sedative and
admirably arranged, a l'allemande--but with excessive and depressing
heat just now, and a toneless air at the best. The admirable ombrages
and walks and pacifying pitch of life make up, however, for much. We
shall be here for three weeks longer (I seem to entrevoir) and then try
for something Swiss and tonic. We must be in England by Aug. 1st.
And now I simply _fear_ to challenge you on your own complications. I
can _bear_ tragedies so little. Tout se rattache so a _the_ thing--the
central depression. And yet I want so to know--and I think of you with
infinite tenderness, participation--and such a large and helpless
devotion. Well, we must hold on tight and we shall come out again face
to face--wiser than ever before (if that's any advantage!) This address,
I foresee, will find me for the next 15 days--and we might be worse
abrites. Germany has become _comfortable_. Note that much as I yearn to
you, I don't nag you with categorical (even though in Germany)
questions.... Ever your unspeakable, dearest Edith,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
July 29th, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/
It's intense joy to hear from you, and when I think that the last news I
gave you of myself was at Nauheim (it seems to me), with the nightmare
of Switzerland that followed--"Munich and the Tyrol etc.," which I
believe I then hinted at to you, proved the vainest crazy dream of but a
moment--I feel what the strain and stress of the sequel that awaited me
really became. That dire ordeal (attempted Nach-Kurs for my poor brother
at _low_ Swiss altitudes, Constance, Zurich, Lucerne, Geneva, &c.)
terminated however a fortnight ago--or more--and after a bad week in
London we are here waiting to sail on Aug. 12th. I am definitely much
better, and on the road to be _well_; a great gain has come to me, in
spite of everything, during the last ten days in particular. I say in
spite of everything, for my dear brother's condition, already so bad on
leaving the treacherous and disastrous Nauheim, has gone steadily on to
worse--he is painfully ill, weak and down, and the anxiety of it, with
our voyage in view, is a great tension to me in my still quite
_struggling_ upward state. But I stand and hold my ground none the less,
and we have really brought him on since we left London. But the
dismalness of it all--and of the sudden death, a fortnight ago, of our
younger brother in the U.S. by heart-failure in his sleep--a painless,
peaceful, enviable end to a stormy and unhappy career--makes our common
situation, all these months back and now, fairly tragic and miserable.
However, I am convinced that his getting home, if it can be securely
done, will do much for William--and I am myself now on a much "higher
plane" than I expected a very few weeks since to be. I kind of _want_,
uncannily, to go to America too--apart from several absolutely
imperative reasons for it. I rejoice unspeakably in the vision of seeing
you ... here--or even in London or at Windsor--one of these very next
days....
/*
Ever your all-affectionate, dear Edith,
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Bruce Porter._
/#
The "betises" were certain Baconian clues to the authorship of
Shakespeare's plays, which Mr. Bruce Porter had come from America
to investigate.
#/
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
[August 1910.]
*/
/*
My dear--very!--Bruce,
*/
I rejoice to hear from you even though it entails the irritation (I
brutally showed you, in town, my accessibility to that) of your
misguided search for a sensation. You renew my harmless rage--for I hate
to see you associated (with my firm affection for you) with the most
provincial _betises_, and to have come so far to do it--to _be_ it
(given over to a, to _the_ Betise!) in a fine finished old England with
which one can have so much better relations, and so many of them--it
would make me blush, or bleed, for you, could anything you do cause me a
really _deep_ discomfort. But nothing can--I too tenderly look the other
way. So there we are. Besides you have _had_ your measles--and, though
you might have been better employed, go in peace--be measly no more. At
any rate I grossly want you to know that I am really ever so much better
than when we were together in London. I go on quite as well as I could
decently hope. It's an ineffable blessing. It's horrible somehow that
those brief moments shall have been all our meeting here, and that a
desert wider than the sea shall separate us over there; but this is a
part of that perversity in life which long ago gave me the ultimate
ache, and I cherish the memory of our scant London luck. My brother,
too, has taken a much better turn--and we sail on the 12th definitely.
So rejoice with me and believe me, my dear Bruce, all affectionately
yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Miss Grace Norton._
/*
Chocorua, New Hampshire.
August 26, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Grace,
*/
I am deeply touched by your tender note--and all the more that we have
need of tenderness, in a special degree, here now. We arrived, William
and Alice and I, in this strange, sad, rude spot, a week ago
to-night--after a most trying journey from Quebec (though after a most
beautiful, quick, in itself auspicious voyage too,) but with William
critically, mortally ill and with our anxiety and tension now (he has
rapidly got so much worse) a real anguish.... Alice is terribly
exhausted and spent--but the rest she will be able to take must
presently increase, and Harry, who, after leaving us at Quebec, started
with a friend on a much-needed holiday in the New Brunswick woods (for
shooting and fishing), was wired to yesterday to come back to us at
once. So I give you, dear Grace, our dismal chronicle of suspense and
pain. My own fears are the blackest, and at the prospect of losing my
wonderful beloved brother out of the world in which, from as far back as
in dimmest childhood, I have so yearningly always counted on him, I feel
nothing but the abject weakness of grief and even terror; but I forgive
myself "weakness"--my emergence from the long and grim ordeal of my own
peculiarly dismal and trying illness isn't yet absolutely complete
enough to make me wholly firm on my feet. But _my_ slowly recuperative
process goes on despite all shakes and shocks, while dear William's, in
the full climax of his intrinsic powers and intellectual ambitions,
meets this tragic, cruel arrest. However, dear Grace, I won't further
wail to you in my nervous soreness and sorrow--still, in spite of so
much revival, more or less under the shadow as I am of the miserable,
damnable year that began for me last Christmas-time and for which I had
been spoiling for two years before. I will only wait to see you--with
all the tenderness of our long, unbroken friendship and all the host of
our common initiations. I have come for a long stay--though when we
shall be able to plan for a resumption of life in Irving Street is of
course insoluble as yet. Then, at all events, with what eagerness your
threshold will be crossed by your faithfullest old
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. It's to-day blessedly cooler here--and I hope you also have the
reprieve!
P.S. I open my letter of three hours since to add that William passed
unconsciously away an hour ago--without apparent pain or struggle. Think
of us, dear Grace, think of us!
_To Thomas Sergeant Perry._
/*
Chocorua, N.H.
Sept. 2nd, 1910.
*/
/*
My dear old Thomas,
*/
I sit heavily stricken and in darkness--for from far back in dimmest
childhood he had been my ideal Elder Brother, and I still, through all
the years, saw in him, even as a small timorous boy yet, my protector,
my backer, my authority and my pride. His extinction changes the face of
life for me--besides the mere missing of his inexhaustible company and
personality, originality, the whole unspeakably vivid and beautiful
presence of him. And his noble intellectual vitality was still but at
its climax--he had two or three ardent purposes and plans. He had cast
them away, however, at the end--I mean that, dreadfully suffering, he
wanted only to die. Alice and I had a bitter pilgrimage with him from
far off--he sank here, on his threshold; and then it went horribly fast.
I cling for the present to _them_--and so try to stay here through this
month. After that I shall be with them in Cambridge for several more--we
shall cleave more together. I should like to come and see you for a
couple of days much, but it would have to be after the 20th, or even
October 1st, I think; and I fear you may not then be still in
villeggiatura. _If_ so I _will_ come. You knew him--among those living
now--from furthest back with me. Yours and Lilla's all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Mrs. Wharton._
/*
Chocorua, N.H.
Sept. 9th, 1910.
*/
/*
Dearest Edith,
*/