_To H. G. Wells._
The reference in the second paragraph of this letter is to
_Covering End_, the second story of _The Two Magics_. Mr. Wells was
at this time living near Folkestone, distant from Rye by the
breadth of Romney Marsh.
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 9th, 1898.
My dear H. G. Wells,
Your so liberal and graceful letter is to my head like coals of fire--so
repeatedly for all these weeks have I had feebly to suffer frustrations
in the matter of trundling over the marsh to ask for your news and wish
for your continued amendment. The shortening days and the deepening mud
have been at the bottom of this affair. I never get out of the house
till 3 o'clock, when night is quickly at one's heels. I would have taken
a regular day--I mean started in the a.m.--but have been so ridden,
myself, by the black care of an unfinished and _running_ (galloping,
leaping and bounding,) serial that parting with a day has been like
parting with a pound of flesh. I am still a neck ahead, however, and
_this_ week will see me through; I accordingly hope very much to be able
to turn up on one of the ensuing days. I will sound a horn, so that you
yourself be not absent on the chase. Then I will express more
articulately my appreciation of your various signs of critical interest,
as well as assure you of my sympathy in your own martyrdom. What will
you have? It's all a grind and a bloody battle--as well as a
considerable lark, and the difficulty itself is the refuge from the
vulgarity. Bless your heart, I think I could easily say worse of the T.
of the S., the young woman, the spooks, the style, the everything, than
the worst any one else could manage. One knows the most damning things
about one's self. Of course I had, about my young woman, to take a very
sharp line. The grotesque business I had to make her picture and the
childish psychology I had to make her trace and present, were, for me at
least, a very difficult job, in which absolute lucidity and logic, a
singleness of effect, were imperative. Therefore I had to rule out
subjective complications of her own--play of tone etc.; and keep her
impersonal save for the most obvious and indispensable little note of
neatness, firmness and courage--without which she wouldn't have had her
data. But the thing is essentially a pot-boiler and a _jeu d'esprit_.
With the little play, the absolute creature of its conditions, I had
simply to make up a deficit and take a small _revanche_. For three
mortal years had the actress for whom it was written (utterly to try to
_fit_) persistently failed to produce it, and I couldn't wholly waste my
labour. The B.P. won't read a play with the mere names of the
speakers--so I simply paraphrased these and added such indications as
might be the equivalent of decent acting--a history and an evolution
that seem to me moreover explicatively and sufficiently smeared all over
the thing. The moral is of course: Don't write one-act plays. But I
didn't mean thus to sprawl. I envy your hand your needle-pointed
fingers. As you don't say that you're _not_ better I prepare myself to
be greatly struck with the same, and with kind regards to your wife,
Believe me yours ever,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. What's this about something in some newspaper?--I read least of
all--from long and deep experience--what my friends write about me, and
haven't read the things you mention. I suppose it's because they know I
don't that they dare!
_To F. W. H. Myers._
Lamb House, Rye.
Dec. 19, 1898.
My dear Myers,
I don't know what you will think of my unconscionable delay to
acknowledge your letter of so many, so very many days ago, nor exactly
how I can make vivid to you the nature of my hindrances and excuses. I
have, in truth, been (until some few days since) intensely and anxiously
busy, finishing, under pressure, a long job that had from almost the
first--I mean from long before I had reached the end--begun to be
(loathsome name and fact!) "serialized"--so that the printers were at my
heels and I had to make a sacrifice of my correspondence _utterly_--to
keep the sort of cerebral freshness required for not losing my head or
otherwise collapsing. But I won't expatiate. Please believe my silence
has been wholly involuntary. And yet, now that I _am_ writing I scarce
know what to say to you on the subject on which you wrote, especially as
I'm afraid I don't quite _understand_ the principal question you put to
me about "The Turn of the Screw." However, that scantily matters; for in
truth I am afraid I have on some former occasions rather awkwardly
signified to you that I somehow can't pretend to give any coherent
account of my small inventions "after the fact." There they are--the
fruit, at best, of a very imperfect ingenuity and with all the
imperfections thereof on their heads. The one thing and another that are
questionable and ambiguous in them I mostly take to be conditions of
their having got themselves pushed through at all. The _T. of the S._ is
a very mechanical matter, I honestly think--an inferior, a merely
_pictorial_, subject and rather a shameless pot-boiler. The thing that,
as I recall it, I most wanted not to fail of doing, under penalty of
extreme platitude, was to give the impression of the communication to
the children of the most infernal imaginable evil and danger--the
condition, on their part, of being as _exposed_ as we can humanly
conceive children to be. This was my artistic knot to untie, to put any
sense or logic into the thing, and if I had known any way of producing
_more_ the image of their contact and condition I should assuredly have
been proportionately eager to resort to it. I evoked the worst I could,
and only feel tempted to say, as in French: "Excusez du peu!"
I am living so much down here that I fear I am losing hold of some of my
few chances of occasionally seeing you. The charming old humble-minded
"quaintness" and quietness of this little brown hilltop city lays a
spell upon me. I send you and your wife and all your house all the
greetings of the season and am, my dear Myers, yours very constantly,