_To W. D. Howells._
The book already begun, and now "the greatest obsession of all," is
evidently _The Ambassadors_.
_Dictated.
Read P.S. (Aug. 14th) first!_
Lamb House, Rye,
August 9, 1900.
My dear Howells,
I duly received and much pondered your second letter, charming and
vivid, from Annisquam; the one, I mean, in reply to mine dispatched
immediately on the receipt of your first. If I haven't since its arrival
written to you, this is because, precisely, I needed to work out my
question somewhat further first. My impulse was immediately to say that
I wanted to do my little stuff at any rate, and was willing therefore to
take any attendant risk, however, measured as the little stuff would be,
at the worst, a thing I should see my way to dispose of in another
manner. But the problem of the little stuff itself intrinsically worried
me--to the extent, I mean, of my not feeling thoroughly sure I might
make of it what I wanted and above all what your conditions of space
required. The thing was therefore to try and satisfy myself
practically--by threshing out my subject to as near an approach to
certainty as possible. This I have been doing with much intensity--but
with the result, I am sorry to say, of being still in the air. Let the
present accordingly pass for a provisional communication--not to leave
your last encompassed with too much silence. Lending myself as much as
possible to your suggestion of a little "tale of terror" that should be
also international, I took straight up again the idea I spoke to you of
having already, some months ago, tackled and, for various reasons, laid
aside. I have been attacking it again with intensity and on the basis of
a simplification that would make it easier, and have done for it, thus,
110 pages of type. The upshot of this, alas, however, is that though
this second start is, if I--or if _you_--like, magnificent, it seriously
confronts me with the element of _length_; showing me, I fear, but too
vividly, that, do what I will for compression, I shall not be able to
squeeze my subject into 50,000 words. It will make, even if it doesn't,
for difficulty, still beat me, 70,000 or 80,000--dreadful to say; and
that faces me as an excessive addition to the ingredient of "risk" we
speak of. On the other hand I am not sure that I can hope to substitute
for this particular affair _another_ affair of "terror" which will be
expressible in the 50,000; and that for an especial reason. This reason
is that, above all when one has done the thing, already, as I have
rather repeatedly, it is not easy to concoct a "ghost" of any freshness.
The want of ease is extremely marked, moreover, if the thing is to be
done on a certain scale of length. One might still toss off a spook or
two more if it were a question only of the "short-story" dimension; but
prolongation and extension constitute a strain which the merely
apparitional--discounted, also, as by my past dealings with it--doesn't
do enough to mitigate. The beauty of this notion of "The Sense of the
Past," of which I have again, as I tell you, been astride, is precisely
that it involves without the stale effect of the mere bloated bugaboo,
the presentation, for folk both in and out of the book, of such a sense
of gruesome malaise as can only--success being assumed--make the
fortune, in the "literary world," of every one concerned. I haven't, in
it, really (that is save in one very partial preliminary and expository
connection,) to make anything, or anybody, "appear" to anyone: what the
case involves is, awfully interestingly and thrillingly, that the
"central figure," the subject of the experience, has the terror of a
particular ground for feeling and fearing that _he himself_ is, or may
at any moment become, a producer, an object, of this (for you and me)
state of panic on the part of others. He lives in an air of _malaise_ as
to the malaise he may, woefully, more or less fatally, find himself
creating--and that, roughly speaking, is the essence of what I have
seen. It is less gross, much less _banal_ and exploded, than the dear
old familiar bugaboo; produces, I think, for the reader, an almost equal
funk--or at any rate an equal suspense and unrest; and carries with it,
as I have "fixed" it, a more truly curious and interesting
drama--especially a more human one. _But_, as I say, there are the
necessities of space, as to which I have a dread of deluding myself only
to find that by trying to blink them I shall be grossly "sold," or by
giving way to them shall positively spoil my form for your purpose. The
hitch is that the thing involves a devil of a sort of prologue or
preliminary action--interesting itself and indispensable for
lucidity--which impinges too considerably (for brevity) on the core of
the subject. My one chance is yet, I admit, to try to attack the same
(the subject) from still another quarter, at still another angle, that I
make out as a possible one and which may keep it squeezable and short.
If this experiment fails, I fear I shall have to "chuck" the
supernatural and the high fantastic. I have just finished, as it
happens, a fine flight (of eighty thousand words) _into_ the high
fantastic, which has rather depleted me, or at any rate affected me as
discharging my obligations in that quarter. But I believe I mentioned to
you in my last "The Sacred Fount"--this has been "sold" to Methuen here,
and by this time, probably, to somebody else in the U.S.--but, alas,
not to be serialized (as to which indeed it is inapt)--as to the title
of which kindly preserve silence. The _vraie verite_, the fundamental
truth lurking behind all the rest, is furthermore, no doubt, that
preoccupied with half a dozen things of the altogether human order now
fermenting in my brain, I don't care for "terror" (terror, that is,
without "pity") so much as I otherwise might. This would seem to make it
simple for me to say to you: "Hang it, if I can't pull off my Monster on
_any_ terms, I'll just do for you a neat little _human_--and not the
less international--fifty-thousander consummately addressed to your more
cheerful department; do for you, in other words, an admirable short
novel of manners, thrilling too in its degree, but definitely ignoring
the bugaboo." Well, this I _don't_ positively despair of still
sufficiently overtaking myself to be able to think of. _That_ card one
has always, thank God, up one's sleeve, and the production of it is only
a question of a little shake of the arm. At the same time, here, to be
frank--and above all, you will say, in this communication, to be
interminable--that alternative is just a trifle compromised by the fact
that I've two or three things begun ever so beautifully in such a key
(and only awaiting the rush of the avid bidder!)--each affecting me with
its particular obsession, and one, the most started, affecting me with
the greatest obsession, for the time (till I can do it, work it off, get
it out of the way and fall with still-accumulated intensity upon the
_others_,) of all. But alas, if I don't say, bang off, that _this_ is
then the thing I will risk for you, it is because "this," like its
companions, isn't, any way I can fix it, workable as a fifty-thousander.
The scheme to which I am _now_ alluding is lovely--human, dramatic,
international, exquisitely "pure," exquisitely everything; only
absolutely condemned, from the germ up, to be workable in not less than
100,000 words. If 100,000 were what you had asked me for, I would fall
back upon it ("terror" failing) like a flash; and even send you, without
delay, a detailed Scenario of it that I drew up a year ago; beginning
then--a year ago--to _do_ the thing--immediately afterwards; and then
again pausing for reasons extraneous and economic.... It really
constitutes, at any rate, the work I intimately want actually to be
getting on with; and--if you are not overdone with the profusion of my
confidence--I dare say I best put my case by declaring that, if you
don't in another month or two hear from me either as a Terrorist or as a
Cheerful Internationalist, it will be that intrinsic difficulties will
in each case have mastered me; the difficulty in the one having been to
keep my Terror down by _any_ ingenuity to the 50,000; and the difficulty
in the _other_ form of Cheer than the above-mentioned obsessive
hundred-thousander. I only wish you wanted _him_. But I have now in all
probability a decent outlet for him.
Forgive my pouring into your lap this torrent of mingled uncertainties
and superfluities. The latter indeed they are properly not, if only as
showing you how our question does occupy me. I shall write you
again--however vividly I see you wince at the prospect of it. I have it
at heart not to fail to let you know how my alternatives settle
themselves. Please believe meanwhile in my very hearty thanks for your
intimation of what you might perhaps, your own quandary straightening
out, see your way to do for me. It is a kind of intimation that I find,
I confess, even at the worst, dazzling. All this, however, trips up my
response to your charming picture of your whereabouts and present
conditions--still discernible, in spite of the chill of years and
absence, to my eye, and eke to my ear, of memory. We have had here a
torrid, but not a wholly horrid, July; but are making it up with a brave
August, so far as we have got, of fires and floods and storms and
overcoats. Through everything, none the less, my purpose holds--my
genius, I may even say, absolutely thrives--and I am unbrokenly yours,