VII
RYE AND CHELSEA
(1910-1914)
For the next year—that is for the whole of 1910—Henry James was under the shadow of an illness, partly physical but mainly nervous, which deprived him of all power to work and caused him immeasurable suffering of mind. In spite of a constitution that in many ways was notably strong, the question of his health was always a matter of some concern to him, and he was by nature inclined to anticipate trouble; so that his temperament was not one that would easily react against a malady of which the chief burden was mental depression of the darkest kind. It would be impossible to exaggerate the distress that afflicted him for many months; but his determination to surmount it was unshaken and his recovery was largely a triumph of will. Fortunately he had the most sympathetic help at hand, over and above devoted medical care. Professor and Mrs. William James had planned to spend the summer in Europe again, and when they heard of his condition they hastened out to be with him as soon as possible. The company of his beloved brother and sister-in-law was the best in the world for him—indeed he could scarcely face any other; only with their support he felt able to cover the difficult stages of his progress. It was William James's health, once more, that had made Europe necessary for him; he was in fact much more gravely ill than his brother, but it was not until later in the summer that his state began to cause alarm. By that time Henry, after paying a visit with his sister-in-law to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Hunter at Epping, had joined him at Nauheim, in Germany, where a very anxious situation had to be met. While William James was losing ground, Henry was still suffering greatly, and the prospect of being separated from his family by their return to America was unendurable to him. It was decided that he should go with them, and they sailed before the end of August. They had just received the news of the death in America of their youngest brother, Robertson James, whose epitaph, memorial of an "agitated and agitating life," was afterwards written with grave tenderness in the "Notes of a Son and Brother."
William James sank very rapidly as they made the voyage, and the end came when they reached his home in the New Hampshire mountains. There is no need to say how deeply Henry mourned the loss of the nearest and dearest friend of his whole life; nothing can be added to the letters that will presently be read. All the more he clung to his brother's family, the centre of his profoundest affection. He remained with them during the winter at Cambridge, where very gradually he began to emerge from the darkness of depression and to feel capable of work again. He took up with interest a suggestion, made to him by Mrs. William James, that he should write some account of his parents and his early life; and as this idea developed in his mind it fed the desire to return home and devote himself to a record of old memories. He lingered on in America, however, for the summer of 1911, now so much restored that he could enjoy visits to several friends. He welcomed, furthermore, two signs of appreciation that reached him almost at the same time—the offer of honorary degrees at Harvard and at Oxford. The Harvard degree was conferred before he left America, the Oxford doctorate of letters in the following year, when he received it in the company of the Poet Laureate.
As soon as he was established at Lamb House again (September 1911) he set to work upon A Small Boy and Others, and for a long time to come he was principally occupied with this book and the sequel to it. He went abroad no more and was never long away from Rye or London; but his power of regular work was not what it had been before his illness, and excepting a few of the papers in Notes on Novelists the two volumes of reminiscences were all that he wrote before the end of 1913. His health was still an anxiety, and his letters show that he began to regard himself as definitely committed to the life of an invalid. Yet it would be easy, perhaps, to gain a wrong impression from them of his state during these years. His physical troubles were certainly sometimes acute, but he kept his remarkable capacity for throwing them off, and in converse with his friends his vigour of life seemed to have suffered little. He had always loved slow and lengthy walks with a single companion, and possibly the most noticeable change was only that these became slower than ever, with more numerous pauses at points of interest or for the development of some picturesque turn of the talk. The grassy stretches between Rye and its sea-shore were exactly suited to long afternoons of this kind, and with a friend, better still a nephew or niece, to walk with him, such was the occupation he preferred to any other. For the winter and spring he continued to return to London, where he still had his club-lodging in Pall Mall. After a sharp and very painful illness at Rye in the autumn of 1912 he moved into a more convenient dwelling—a small flat in Cheyne Walk, overhanging the Chelsea river-side. Here the long level of the embankment gave him opportunities of exercise as agreeable in their way as those at Rye, and he found himself liking to stay on in this "simplified London" until the height of the summer.
April 15, 1913, was his seventieth birthday, and a large company, nearly 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 à Aimée 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 Aimée—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 façon dont elle y vole react back even upon dear old George rather fatally—àpropos of dirty bedrooms, thin cloisons and the usual state of things, one surmises, at that hour. What an Aimée and what a Paul and what a Mme Jaubert and what an everything!
Ever yourH. 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 là-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, à 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 à 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 abrités. 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.