matters, of a less ingratiating sort, have shared the fair harbourage, I
fear I have left it a trifle bumped and _bouscule_ in that at the best
somewhat agitated basin. There it will gracefully ride the waves,
however, long after every other temporarily floating object shall have
sunk, as so much comparative "rot," beneath them. This is a rude figure
for my sense of the entire interest and charm, the supreme validity and
distinction, of The Reef. I am even yet, alas, in anything but a good
way--so abominably does my ailment drag itself out; but it has been a
real lift to read you and taste and ponder you; the experience has
literally worked, at its hours, in a medicating sense that neither my
local nor my London Doctor (present here in his greatness for a night
and a day) shall have come within miles and miles of. Let me mention at
once, and have done with it, that the advent and the effect of the
intenser London light can only be described as an anticlimax, in fact as
a tragic farce, of the first water; in short one of those _mauvais_
tours, as far as results are concerned, that make one wonder how a
Patient ever survives _any_ relation with a Doctor. My Visitor was
charming, intelligent, kind, all visibly a great master of the question;
but he prescribed me a remedy, to begin its action directly he had left,
that simply and at a short notice sent me down into hell, where I lay
sizzling (never such a sizzle before) for three days, and has since
followed it up with another under the dire effect of which I languish
even as I now write.... So much to express both what I owe you or _have_
owed you at moments that at all lent themselves--in the way of pervading
balm, and to explain at the same time how scantly I am able for the hour
to make my right acknowledgment.
There are fifty things I should like to say to you about the Book, and I
shall have said most of them in the long run; but there are some that
eagerly rise to my lips even now and for which I want the benefit of my
"first flush" of appreciation. The whole of the finest part is, I think,
quite the finest thing you have done; both _more_ done than even the
best of your other doing, and more worth it through intrinsic value,
interest and beauty.
_December 9th._ I had to break off the other day, my dear Edith, through
simple extremity of woe; and the woe has continued unbroken ever
since--I have been in bed and in too great suffering, too unrelieved and
too continual, for me to attempt any decent form of expression. I have
just got up, for one of the first times, even now, and I sit in command
of this poor little situation, ostensibly, instead of simply being
bossed by it, though I don't at all know what it will bring. To attempt
in this state to rise to any worthy reference to The Reef seems to me a
vain thing; yet there remains with me so strongly the impression of its
quality and of the unspeakably _fouillee_ nature of the situation
between the two principals (more gone into and with more undeviating
truth than anything you have done) that I can't but babble of it a
little to you even with these weak lips. It all shows, partly, what
strength of subject is, and how it carries and inspires, inasmuch as I
think your subject in its essence [is] very fine and takes in no end of
beautiful things to do. Each of these two figures is admirable for truth
and _justesse_; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her
characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes (that is some of
them) sounded with a wonder of delicacy. I'm not sure her oscillations
are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt
and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself. I suffer
or worry a little from the fact that in the Prologue, as it were, we are
admitted so much into the consciousness of the man, and that after the
introduction of Anna (Anna so perfectly named) we see him almost only as
she sees him--which gives our attention a different sort of work to do;
yet this is really, I think, but a triumph of your method, for he
remains of an absolute consistent verity, showing himself in that way
better perhaps than in any other, and without a false note imputable,
not a shadow of one, to his manner of so projecting himself. The beauty
of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a Drama, and almost, as it
seems to me, of the psychologic Racinian unity, intensity and gracility.
Anna is really of Racine and one presently begins to feel her throughout
as an Eriphyle or a Berenice: which, by the way, helps to account a
little for something _qui me chiffonne_ throughout: which is why the
whole thing, unrelated and unreferred save in the most superficial way
to its _milieu_ and background, and to any determining or qualifying
_entourage_, takes place _comme cela_, and in a specified, localised
way, in France--these non-French people "electing," as it were, to have
their story out there. This particularly makes all sorts of unanswered
questions come up about Owen; and the notorious wickedness of Paris
isn't at all required to bring about the conditions of the Prologue. Oh,
if you knew how plentifully we could supply them in London and, I should
suppose, in New York or in Boston. But the point was, as I see it, that
you couldn't really give us the sense of a Boston Eriphyle or Boston
Givre, and that an exquisite instinct, "back of" your Racinian
inspiration and settling the whole thing for you, whether consciously or
not, absolutely prescribed a vague and elegant French colonnade or
gallery, with a French river dimly gleaming through, as the harmonious
_fond_ you required. In the key of this, with all your reality, you have
yet kept the whole thing: and, to deepen the harmony and accentuate the
literary pitch, have never surpassed yourself for certain exquisite
_moments_, certain images, analogies, metaphors, certain silver
correspondences in your _facon de dire_; examples of which I could pluck
out and numerically almost confound you with, were I not stammering this
in so handicapped a way. There used to be little notes in you that were
like fine benevolent finger-marks of the good George Eliot--the echo of
much reading of that excellent woman, here and there, that is, sounding
through. But now you are like a lost and recovered "ancient" whom _she_
might have got a reading of (especially were he a Greek) and of whom in
_her_ texture some weaker reflection were to show. For, dearest Edith,
you are stronger and firmer and finer than all of them put together; you
go further and you say _mieux_, and your only drawback is not having the
homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the
affluent poverty, of a Country of your Own (_comme moi, par exemple_!)
It makes you, this does, as you exquisitely say of somebody or something
at some moment, elegiac (what penetration, what delicacy in your use
there of the term!)--makes you so, that is, for the Racinian-serieux--but
leaves you more in the desert (for everything else) that surrounds Apex
City. But you will say that you're content with your lot; that the
desert surrounding Apex City is quite enough of a dense crush for you,
and that with the _colonnade_ and the gallery and the dim river you will
always otherwise pull through. To which I can only assent--after such an
example of pulling through as The Reef. Clearly you have only to pull,
and everything will come.
These are tepid and vain remarks, for truly I am helpless. I have had
all these last days a perfect hell of an exasperation of my dire
complaint, the 11th week of which begins to-day, and have arrived at the
point really--the weariness of pain so great--of not knowing _a quel
saint me vouer_. In this despair, and because "change" at any hazard and
any cost is strongly urged upon me by both my Doctors, and is a part of
the regular process of _denouement_ of my accursed ill, I am in all
probability trying to scramble up to London by the end of this week,
even if I have to tumble, howling, out of bed and go forth in my
bedclothes. I shall go in this case to Garlant's Hotel, Suffolk Street,
where you have already seen me, and not to my Club, which is impossible
in illness, nor to my little flat (21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk,
Chelsea, S.W.) which will not yet, or for another three or four weeks,
be ready for me. The change to London may possibly do something toward
breaking the spell: please pray hard that it shall. Forgive too my
muddled accents and believe me, through the whole bad business, not the
less faithfully yours,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To A. F. de Navarro._
_Dictated._
/*
Lamb House, Rye.
December 12th, 1912.
*/
/*
My dear delightful Tony,
*/
Your missive, so vivid and genial, reaches me, alas, at a time of long
eclipse and depression, during which my faculties have been blighted, my
body tortured, and my resources generally exhausted.... I tell you these
dismal things to explain in the first place why I am reduced to
addressing you by this graceless machinery (I haven't written a letter
with my own poor hand for long and helpless weeks;) and in the second
place why I bring to bear on your gentle composition an intelligence
still clouded and weakened. But I have read it with sympathy, and I
think I may say, most of all with envy; so haunted with pangs, while one
tosses on the couch of pain--and mine has been, from the nature of my
situation, a poor lone and unsurrounded pallet--all one's visionary and
imaginative life; which one imputes, day by day, to happy people who
frisk among fine old gardens and oscillate between Clubs of the Arts and
Monuments of the Past. I am delighted that the Country Life people asked
you for your paper, which I find ever so lightly and brightly done, with
a touch as easy and practised as if you were the Darling of the Staff.
That is in fact exactly what I hope your paper may make you--clearly
you have the right sympathetic turn for those evocations, and I shall be
glad to think of you as evoking again and again. I only wish you hadn't
to deal this time with a house so amply modernised, in fact so renewed
altogether, save for a false front or two (or rather for a true one with
false sides and backs), as I gather Abbotswood to be. The irrepressible
Lutyens rages about us here, known at a glance by that modern note of
the archaic which has become the most banal form of our cleverness.
There is nothing left for _me_ personally to like but the little mouldy
nooks that Country Life is too proud to notice and everyone else
(including the photographers) too rich to touch with their fingers of
gold. I have too the inimitable old garden on my nerves; living here in
a great garden county I have positively almost grown to hate flowers--so
that only just now my poor contaminated little gardener is turning the
biggest border I have (scarce bigger it is true than my large unshaven
cheek) into a question, a begged question, of turf, so that we shall
presently have "chucked" Flora altogether. Forgive, however, these
morbid, _maussade_ remarks; the blue devils of a long illness still
interposing, in their insistent attitude, between my vision and your
beauty--in which I include Mary's, largely, and that of all the fine
complexion of Broadway. I return your lucid sheets with this, but make
out that, as you are to be in town only till Thursday p.m. (unless I am
mistaken), they will reach you the sooner by my sending them straight
home. My wish for their best luck go with them! I ought to mention that
under extreme push of my Doctors (for I luxuriate in Two) I am seeking
that final desperate remedy of a "change" which imposes itself at last
in a long illness, to break into the vicious circle and dissipate the
blight, by going up to town--almost straight out of bed and dangling my
bedclothes about me. This will, I trust, smash the black spell. I have
taken a small flat there ... on what appears to be a lease that will
long survive me, and there I earnestly beg you to seek me as soon as may
be after the new year. I am having first to crouch at an obscure hotel.
I embrace you Both and am in much dilapidation but all fidelity yours
always,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
_To Henry James, junior._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
January 19th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest Harry,
*/
I wrote, very copiously, and I hope not worryingly at all (for I only
meant to be reassuring) to your Mother yesterday, from whom I had had
two beautiful unacknowledged letters within the last days or so:
unacknowledged save for a cable, of a cheerful stamp, which I sent off
to Irving Street about a week ago, and which will have been sent on to
you. But all the while your most blest letter, written during your
Christmas moment at Cambridge, has been for me a thing to be so grateful
for that I must express to you something of it to-day--even at the risk
of a glut of information. My long silence--since I came up to town,
including, I mean, my pretty dismal weeks at that "Garlant's" of ill
association--has had a great inevitability, from several causes; but
into these I shall have gone to your Mother, whom I think I explicitly
asked to send you on my letter, and I don't want to waste force in
repetitions. It won't be repeating too much to say again what I said to
her, even with extreme emphasis, that I feel singularly justified of
this basis for my winter times in London; so much does it appear, now
that the preliminary and just postliminary strain of it is over, the
very best thing I could have done for myself. My southward position (as
to the rooms I most use) immediately over the River is verily an
"asset," and not even in the garden-room at L.H., of summer mornings,
have I been better placed for work. With which, all the detail here is
right and pleasant and workable; my servants extremely rejoice in
it--but I _am_ too much repeating!... Above all, my forenoons being by
the mercy of the Powers, whoever or whatever they are, my best time, I
have got back to work, and, with my uncanny interest in it and zeal for
it still unimpaired, feel that it must "mean something" that I am thus
reserved, after many troubles, for a productive relation with it. The
proof-sheets of "A Small Boy and Others" have been coming in upon me
rapidly--all but the very last; and it ought, by the end of next month
at furthest, to burst upon the world. Of course I shall have advance
copies sent promptly to you and to Irving Street; but, with this, I
intensely want you to take into account that the Book was written
through all these months of hampering and baffling illness. It went so
haltingly and worriedly even last winter (as distinguished from anything
I was able to do in the summer and could get at all during the last
afflicted three or four months,) last winter having really been a much
more difficult time than I could currently confess to, or than dear Bill
and Alice probably got any sense of. The point is at any rate that the
Book is now, under whatever disadvantages, wholly done, and that if it
seems "good" in spite of these, the proof of my powers, when my powers
have really worked off more of the heritage of woe of the last three
years, will be but the more substantial. A very considerable lot of
"Notes of a Son etc." is done, and I am now practically back at it with
this appearance of a free little field in spite of everything.... I
welcome immensely (what I didn't mention to your Mother--waiting to do
it thus) the valuable and delightful little collection received from you
of your Grandfather's correspondence with Emerson. What beautiful and
characteristic things in it and how I hope to be able to use the best of
these, on your Grandfather's part at least. As regards Emerson's side of
the matter I doubt whether I can do enough (in the way of extracts from
him) to make it even necessary for me to apply to Edward for licence. I
think I can hope but at the most to summarise, or give the sense of,
some of Emerson's passages; the reason of this being my absolute
presumable want of space. The Book will have to be a longer one than "A
Small Boy," but even with this there must be limits involving
suppressions and omissions. My own text I can't help attaching enough
sense and importance and value to, not to want to keep that too utterly
under, and I am more and more moved to give all of your Grandfather, on
his vivid and original side, that I possibly can. Add to this all the
application, of an illustrative kind, that I can't but see myself making
of your Dad's letters, and I see little room for any one else's; though
what I most deplore my meagre provision of is those of your Aunt Alice,
written to our parents mainly during her times, and especially her final
time, in Europe. The poverty of this resource cuts from under my feet
almost all ground for doing much, as I had rather hoped in a manner to
do, with her....
_Jan. 23rd, 1913._ I have been unable to go on with this these several
days, and yet also unwilling to let it go without saying a few more
things I wanted--so the long letter I _have_ got off to your Mother will
precede it by longer than I meant. I still write, under my disabilities
of damaged body, with difficulty (I mean perform the act of writing,)
but this is diminishing substantially though slowly--and I mainly
mention it to extenuate these clumsy characters.
My conditions (of situation etc.) here meanwhile (this winter)--I mean
these admirable and ample two rooms southward over the River, so still
and yet so animated--are ideal for work. Some other time I will explain
it to you--so far as you won't have noted it for yourself--how and why
it is that I come to be so little beforehand financially. My fatally
interrupted production of fiction began it, six years or more ago--and
that began, so utterly against my preconception of such an effect, when
I addressed myself to the so much longer and more arduous and more
fatal-to-everything-else preparation of my "edition" than had been
measurable in advance. That long period cut dreadfully into current
gains--through complete arrest of other current labour; and when it was
at last ended I had only time to do two small books (The Finer Grain and
The Outcry) before the disaster of my long illness of Jan. 1910
descended upon me and laid a paralysis on everything. This hideous
Herpetic episode and its developments have been of the absolute
continuity of that, as they now make it (I hope), dire but departing
Climax; and they have represented an interminable arrest of literary
income (to speak of.) Now that I can look to apparently again getting
back to decent continuity of work it becomes _vital_ for me to aim at
returning to the production of the Novel, my departure from which, with
its heart-breaking loss of time, was a catastrophe, a perversity and
fatality, so little dreamed of by me or intended. I yearn for it
intellectually, and with all the force of my "genius" and
imagination--artistically in short--and only when this relation is
renewed shall I be again on a normal basis. Only _how_ I want to
complete "Notes of a Son and Brother" with the last perfection first!
Which is what I shall, I trust, during the next three or four months do,
with far greater rapidity than I have done the first Book--for all last
winter and spring my forenoon, my working hours, were my worst, and for
long times so bad, and my later ones the better, whereas it is now the
other way round.
_Jan. 28th._ I have had, alas, dearest Harry, to break this off and not
take it up again--through blighted (bed-ridden) late afternoons and
whole evenings--my only letter-writing time unless I steal precious
dictation-hours from Miss Bosanquet and the Book.... My vitality, my
still sufficient cluster of vital "assets," to say nothing of my will to
live and to write, assert themselves in spite of everything. This is
5.15 on a dismal wet afternoon; I have been out, but I came in again on
purpose to get this off by to-morrow's, Wednesday's post. This apartment
grows in grace--nothing really could have been better for me. I went
into that long account, just above, of the reasons why through the
frustration of fond Fiction I have (so much illness so aiding) sunk to
this momentary _gene_, I wanted to tell you, as against the appearance
of too squalid a helplessness--for an early return to fond fiction will
alter everything.... But what an endless sordid, illegible appeal! Take
it, dearest Harry, in all indulgence, from your lately so much-tried and
perhaps a little nervously over-anxious (by the effect of so much
suffering,) but all unconquered and devoted old Uncle,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/
P.S. A beautiful letter from your Mother of Jan. 13th (on receipt of my
cable) has just come in. All tenderest love.
_To Miss Grace Norton._
_Dictated._
/*
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 6th, 1913.
*/
/*
Dearest old friend!
*/
Don't shudder, I beg you, at the sight of this grim legibility--even
when you compare it with your own exquisite mastery of legibility
without grimness! Let me down easily, in view of the long, the oh so
much _too_ long, ordeal that has pressed on me, and that has so hampered
and hindered and harrowed me, that almost any sort of making shift to
project my sentiments to a distance is a sort of victory won, or patch
of ground wrested, from darkness and the devil! I am slowly slowly
getting better of an interminable complicated siege of pain and
distress; but it has left me with arrears of every sort piled up around
me like the wild fragments of some convulsion of Nature, and I pick my
way, or grope it, or even feebly and fatally fail of it, as I best can.
There are things that help, withal, and one of these has been to receive
your all-benignant little letter of two days ago. I needn't reaffirm to
you at this time of day that all your long patiences and fidelities, all
your generosities and gallantries of always rallying yet again, are
always more beautiful to me than I ever seem to have managed
_punctually_ enough to help you, if need be, to feel--especially as of
any such urgent "help" there need be no question now! You have had
enough news of me from over your way, I infer, pretty dismal though it
may have been, for me not to want fatuously to dose you with it (I mean
given its bitter quality) further or at first hand; therefore let me
rather convey to you at first hand that I am getting into distinctly
less pitiful case.... I have been too complicated a sufferer for it to
clear at every point at the same time; but the general sense is ever so
much better--and I am going to ask of your charity to let Alice, over
the way, see these yearning pages, for her better reassurance--even if I
have after a fashion managed, just of late, to reassure her more
directly. I want her to have all the testimony I can treat her, and, by
the same token, my dear Grace, treat _you_ to.
Your little letter breathes all your characteristic courage and
philosophy--while, I confess, at the same time, it fills out--or rather
perhaps, more exactly, further removes the veil from--my in its very
nature vivid enough picture of your fairly august state of lone
Cambridge survivorship. I admired you on that state at closer quarters
winter before last--even though my testimony to my so doing was at that
time, from poor physical interferences, hampered and awkward; but
History is so interesting when one is able to follow with closeness a
particular attaching strain of it that my imagination, my intention, my
affection and fidelity, hang and hover about your own particular noble
exhibition of it as intelligently (yes, my dear Grace, as intelligently,
nothing less, I insist) as you could possibly desire or put up with!
Your letter fills in again for me a passage or two of detail--so that I
feel myself the more possessed and qualified.... What I mean is above
all that even this imperfect snatch of talk with you is dear and blest
to me, and that if by hook or by crook, and through whatever densities
of medium and distance, I draw out a little the sense of relation with
you, it will have been better than utter frustration. I look out here,
while I thus communicate, from a bit of the old-time stretch of
riverside Chelsea, my first far-away glimpse or sense of which has, like
so many of my first London glimpses and senses (my very first of all, I
mean,) a never-lost association with you and yours, or at least with
yours and thereby with you: which means my having come here first of
all, one day of the early spring of 1869, with Charles and Susan, they
having in their kindness brought me to call with them on the great (_if_
great!) and strange and more or less sinister D. G. Rossetti, whom
Charles was in good relation with, difficult as that appeared already
then to have become for most people, and my impression of whom on the
occasion, with everything else of it, I have always closely retained.
Part of it was just this impression of the really interesting and
delightful old Thames-side Chelsea, over the admirable water-view of
which these windows now hang--quite as if I had then secretly vowed to
myself that some window of mine some day should. The River is more
pompously embanked (making an admirable walk all the way to Westminster,
of the most salutary value to me when I can at the soberest of paces
attempt it;) but the sense of it all goes back, as I say, to my fond
participation in that prehistoric Queen's Gate Terrace Winter. However,
I am drenching you with numbered pages--I ask no credit for the
number!--and I almost sit with you while you read them; not exactly
watching for a glow of rapture on your face, but still, on the whole,
seeing you take them, without a frown, for a good intention and a
stopgap for something better. You tell me almost nothing of yourself,
but all my sympathy and fidelity wait on you (sympathy always _can_ come
in somewhere!) and I am yours, my dear Grace, always all faithfully,
/*
HENRY JAMES.
*/