To Miss Theodora Bosanquet
On this appeal Miss Bosanquet, H. J.'s amanuensis, secured rooms for him in Lawrence Street, Chelsea.
105 Pall Mall, S.W.October 27th, 1911.
Dear Miss Bosanquet,
Oh if you could only have the real right thing to miraculously propose to me, you and Miss Bradley, when I see you on Tuesday at 4.30! For you see, by this bolting in horror and loathing (but don't repeat those expressions!) from Rye for the winter, my situation suddenly becomes special and difficult; and largely through this, that having got back to work and to a very particular job, the need of expressing myself, of pushing it on, on the old Remingtonese terms, grows daily stronger within me. But I haven't a seat and temple for the Remington and its priestess—can't have here at this club, and on the other hand can't now organize a permanent or regular and continuous footing for the London winter, which means something unfurnished and taking (wasting, now) time and thought. I want a small, very cheap and very clean furnished flat or trio of rooms etc. (like the one we talked of under the King's Cross delusion—only better and with some, a very few, tables and chairs and fireplaces,) that I could hire for 2 or 3—3 or 4—months to drive ahead my job in—the Remington priestess and I converging and meeting there morning by morning—and it being preferably nearer to her than to me; though near tubes and things for both of us! I must keep on this place for food and bed etc.—I have it by the year—till I really have something else by the year—for winter purposes—to supersede it (Lamb House abides, for long summers.) Your researches can have only been for the unfurnished—but look, think, invent! Two or three decent little tabled and chaired and lighted rooms would do. I catch a train till Monday, probably late. But on Tuesday!
Yours ever,HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. William James
The book on which H. J. was now at work was A Small Boy and Others.
The Athenaeum, Pall Mall, S.W.Nov. 13th, 1911.
Dearest Alice,
I must bless you on the spot for your dear letter of the 22nd—continued on the 31st. I clutch so at everything that concerns and emanates from you all that I kind of pine for the need of it all the while—or at any rate am immensely and positively bettered by every scrap of the dear old Library life that you can manage to waft over to me.... I find, naturally, that I can think of you all, and mingle with you so, ever so much more vividly than I could of old—through the effect of all those weeks and months of last year—which have had at any rate that happy result, that I have the constant image of your days and doings. You must think now very cheerfully and relievedly of mine—because distinctly, yes, dear brave old London is working my cure. The conditions here were what I needed all the while that I was so far away from them—I mean because they are of the kind materially best addressed to helping me to work my way back to an equilibrium.... I shall see how it works—from 10.30 to 1.30 each day—and let you hear more; but it represents the yearning effort really to get, more surely and swiftly now, up to my neck into the book about William and the rest of us. I have written to Harry to ask him for certain of the young, youthful letters (copies of them) which I didn't bring away with me—on the other hand I have found some six or eight very precious ones mixed up with the mass of Father's that I have with me (thrust into Father's envelopes etc.) Of Father's, alas, very few are useable; they are so intensely domestic, private and personal.
November 19th. I find with horror, dearest Alice, that I have inadvertently left this all these days in my portfolio (interrupted where I broke off above,) under the impression that I had finished and posted it. This is dreadful, and I am afraid shows how the beneficent London, for all its beneficence, does interpose, invade and distract, giving one too many things to do and to bear in mind at once. What sickened me is that I have thus kept my letter over a whole wasted week—so far as being in touch with you all is concerned. On the other hand this lapse of time enables me blessedly to confirm, in the light of further experience, whatever of good and hopeful the beginning of the present states to you....
In the third place a most valued letter from Harry has come, accompanying a packet of more of William's letters typed, for which I heartily thank him, and promising me some others yet. I am writing to him in a very few days, and will then tell him how I am entirely at one with him about the kind of use to be made by me of all these early things, the kind of setting they must have, the kind of encompassment that the book, as my book, my play of reminiscence and almost of brotherly autobiography, and filial autobiography not less, must enshrine them in. The book I see and feel will be difficult and unprecedented and perilous—but if I bring it off it will be exquisite and unique; bring it off as I inwardly project it and oh so devoutly desire it. I greatly regret only, also, the almost complete absence of letters from Alice. She clearly destroyed after Father's death all the letters she had written to them—him and Mother—in absence, and this was natural enough. But it leaves a perfect blank—though there are on the other hand all my own intimate memories. Could you see—ask—if Fanny Morse has kept any? that is just possible. She wrote after all so little. I marvel that I have none—during the Cambridge years. But she was so ill that writing was rare for her—very rare. However, I must end this. I hope the Irving St. winter wears a friendly face for you. I think so gratefully and kindly now of the little chintzy parlour—blest refuge. I re-embrace dearest Peg and I do so want some demonstration of what Aleck is doing. It's a pang to hear from you that he "isn't so well physically." What does that sadly mean? I send him all my love and to your mother. Ever your
HENRY.
To Mrs. Wharton
Reform Club, Pall Mall, S.W.Nov. 19th, 1911.
Dearest Edith,
There are scarce degrees of difference in my constant need of hearing from you, yet when that felicity comes it manages each time to seem pre-eminent and to have assuaged an exceptional hunger. The pleasure and relief, at any rate, three days since, were of the rarest quality—and it's always least discouraging (for the exchange of sentiments) to know that your wings are for the moment folded and your field a bit delimited. I knew you were back in Paris as an informer passing hereby on his way thence again to N.Y. had seen you dining at the Ritz en nombreuse compagnie, "looking awfully handsome and stunningly dressed." And Mary Hunter cesjours-ci had given me earlier and more exotic news of you, yet coloured with a great vividness of sympathy and admiration.... But I feel that it takes a hard assurance to speak to you of "arriving" anywhere—as that implies starting and continuing, and before your great heroic rushes and revolutions I can only gape and sigh and sink back. It requires an association of ease—with the whole heroic question (of the "up and doing" state)—which I don't possess, to presume to suggestionise on the subject of a new advent. Great will be the glory and joy, and the rushing to and fro, when the wide wings are able, marvellously, to show us symptoms of spreading again—and here I am (mainly here this winter) to thrill with the first announcement. London is better for me, during these months, than any other spot of earth, or of pavement; and even here I seem to find I can work—and n'ai pas maintenant d'autre idée. Apropos of which aid to life your remarks about my small latest-born are absolutely to the point. The little creature is absolutely of the irresistible sex of her most intelligent critic—for I don't pretend, like Lady Macbeth, to bring forth men-children only. You speak at your ease, chère Madame, of the interminable and formidable job of my producing à mon âge another Golden Bowl—the most arduous and thankless task I ever set myself. However, on all that il y aurait bien des choses à dire; and meanwhile, I blush to say, the Outcry is on its way to a fifth edition (in these few weeks), whereas it has taken the poor old G.B. eight or nine years to get even into a third. And I should have to go back and live for two continuous years at Lamb House to write it (living on dried herbs and cold water—for "staying power"—meanwhile;) and that would be very bad for me, would probably indeed put an end to me altogether. My own sense is that I don't want, and oughtn't to try, to attack ever again anything longer (save for about 70 or 80 pages more) than the Outcry. That is déjà assez difficile—the "artistic economy" of that inferior little product being a much more calculated and ciphered, much more cunning and (to use your sweet expression) crafty one than that of five G.B.'s. The vague verbosity of the Oxusflood (beau nom!) terrifies me—sates me; whereas the steel structure of the other form makes every parcelle a weighed and related value. Moreover nobody is really doing (or, ce me semble, as I look about, can do) Outcries, while all the world is doing G.B.'s—and vous-même, chère Madame, tout le premier: which gives you really the cat out of the bag! My vanity forbids me (instead of the more sweetly consecrating it) a form in which you run me so close. Seulement alors je compterais bâtir a great many (a great many, entendezvous?) Outcries—and on données autrement rich. About this present one hangs the inferiority, the comparative triviality, of its primal origin. But pardon this flood of professional egotism. I have in any case got back to work—on something that now the more urgently occupies me as the time for me circumstantially to have done it would have been last winter, when I was insuperably unfit for it, and that is extremely special, experimental and as yet occult. I apply myself to my effort every morning at a little repaire in the depths of Chelsea, a couple of little rooms that I have secured for quiet and concentration—to which our blest taxi whirls me from hence every morning at 10 o'clock, and where I meet my amanuensis (of the days of the composition of the G.B.) to whom I gueuler to the best of my power. In said repaire I propose to crouch and me blottir (in the English shade of the word, for so intensely revising an animal, as well) for many, many weeks; so that I fear dearest Edith, your idea of "whirling me away" will have to adapt itself to the sense worn by "away"—as it clearly so gracefully will! For there are senses in which that particle is for me just the most obnoxious little object in the language. Make your fond use of it at any rate by first coming away—away hither....
Yours all and always,HENRY JAMES.
P.S. This was begun five days ago—and was raggedly and ruthlessly broken off—had to be—and I didn't mark the place this Sunday a.m. where I took it up again—on page 6th. But I put only today's date—as I didn't put the other day's at the time.
To W. E. Norris
Lamb House, Rye.January 5th, 1912.
My dear Norris,
I don't know whether to call this a belated or a premature thing; as "a New Year's offering" (and my hand is tremendously in for those just now, though it is also tremendously fatigued) it is a bit behind; whereas for an independent overture it follows perhaps indiscreetly fast on the heels of my Christmas letter. However, as since this last I have had the promptest and most beautiful one from you—a miracle of the perfect "fist" as well as of the perfect ease and grace—I make bold to feel that I am not quite untimely, that you won't find me so, and I offer you still all the compliments of the Season—sated and gorged as you must by this time be with them and vague thin sustenance as they at best afford. If I hadn't already in the course of the several score of letters which had long weighed on me and which I really retired to this place on Dec. 30th to work off as much as anything else, run into the ground the image of the coming year as the grim, veiled, equivocal and sinister figure who holds us all in his dread hand and whom we must therefore grovel and abase ourselves at once on the threshold of, as to curry favour with him, I would give you the full benefit of it—but I leave it there as it is; though if you do wish to crawl beside me, here I am flat on my face. I am putting in a few more days here—in order to bore if possible through my huge heap of postal obligations, the accumulation of three or four years, and not very visibly reduced even by the heroic efforts of the last week. I have never in all my life written so many letters within the same space of time—and I really think that is in the full sense of the term documentary proof of my recovery of a normal senile strength. I go to-morrow over into Kent to spend Sunday with some friends near Maidstone (they have lately acquired and extraordinarily restored Allington Castle, which is down in a deep sequestered bottom, plants its huge feet in the Medway, actually overflowed, I believe, up to its middle). I come back here again (with acute lumbago, I quite expect,) and begin again—that is, write 300 more letters; after which I relapse fondly, and I think very wisely, upon London. Now that I am not obliged to be in this place (by having so committed myself to it for better for worse as I had in the past) I find I quite like it—having enjoyed the deep peace and ease of it this last week; but I have to go away to prove to myself the non-obligation to stay, and that takes some doing—which I shall have set about by the 15th. London was quite delicious during that brown still Xmastide—the four or five days after I wrote to you: the drop of life and of traffic was beyond anything of the sort I had ever seen in that frame. The gregariousness of movement of the population is an amazing phenomenon—they had vanished so in a bunch that the streets were an uncanny desert, with the difference from of old that the taxis and motors were more absent than the cabs and carriages and busses ever were, for at any given moment the horizon is through this power of disappearance, void of them—whereas the old things had, through their slowness, to hang about. One gets a taxi, by the way, much faster than one ever got a handsome (lo, I have managed to forget how to write the extinct object!)—and yet one gets it from so much further away and from such an at first hopeless void....
Very romantic and charming the arrival of your gallant George—from all across Europe—for his Xmas eve with you; your account of it touches me and I find myself ranking you with the celebrated fair of history and fable for whom the swimmings of the Hellespont and the breakings of the lance were perpetrated. I congratulate you on such a George in these for the most part merely "awfully sorry" days, and him on a chance of which he must have been awfully glad. And àpropos of such felicities—or rather of felicities pure and simple, and not quite such, I do heartily hope that you will go on to Spain with your niece in the spring—I'm convinced that you'll find it a charming adventure. I've myself utterly ceased to travel—I'm a limpet now, for the rest of my life, on the rock of Britain, but I intensely enjoy the travels of my friends.
My pen fails and my clock strikes and I am yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Miss M. Betham Edwards
Lamb House, Rye,Jan. 5th, 1912.
Dear Miss Betham Edwards,
I can now at last tell you the sad story of the book for Emily Morgan—which I am having put up to go to you with this; as well as explain a little my long silence. The very day, or the very second day, after last seeing you, a change suddenly took place, under great necessity, in my then current plans and arrangements; I departed under that stress for London, practically to spend the winter, and have come back but for a very small number of days—I return there next week. "But," you will say, "why didn't you send the promised volume for E. M. from London then? What matter to us where it came from so long as it came?" To which I reply: "Well, I had in this house a small row of books available for the purpose and among which I could choose—also which I came away, in my precipitation, too soon to catch up in flight. In London I should have to go and buy the thing, my own production—while I have two or three bran-new volumes, which will be an economy to a man utterly depleted by the inordinate number of copies of The Outcry that he has given away and all but six of which he has had to pay for—his sanguinary (admire my restraint!) publisher allowing him but six." "Why then couldn't you write home and have one of the books in question sent you?—or have it sent to Hastings directly from your house?" "Because I am the happy possessor of a priceless parlourmaid who loves doing up books, and other parcels, and does them up beautifully, and if the volume comes to me here, to be inscribed, I shall then have to do it up myself, an act for which I have absolutely no skill and which I dread and loathe, and tumble it forth clumsily and insecurely! Besides I was vague as to which of my works I did have on the accessible shelf—I only knew I had some—and would have to look and consider and decide: which I have now punctually done. And the thing will be beautifully wrapped!" "That's all very well; but why then didn't you write and explain why it was that you were keeping us unserved and uninformed?" "Oh, because from the moment I go up to town I plunge—plunge into the great whirlpool of postal matter, social matter, and above all, this time, grey matter of cerebration—having got back to horrible arrears of work and being at best so postally submerged during these last weeks that every claim of that sort that could be temporarily dodged was a claim that found me shameless and heartless." But you see the penalty of all is that I have to write all this now.
I'm glad you like adverbs—I adore them; they are the only qualifications I really much respect, and I agree with the fine author of your quotations in saying—or in thinking—that the sense for them is the literary sense. None other is much worth speaking of. But I hope my volume won't contain too many for Emily Morgan. Don't let her dream of "acknowledging" it. She can do so when we meet again. Perhaps you can even help her out with the book by reading, yourself, the Beast in the Jungle, say—or the Birthplace. May our generally so ambiguous 1912 be all easy figuring for you. Yours, dear Miss Betham Edwards, all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.
To Wilfred Sheridan
Mr. and Mrs. Wilfred Sheridan had asked him to be godfather to their eldest child.
105 Pall Mall, S.W.Jan. 12th, 1912.
My dear Wilfred,
Beautiful and touching to me your conjoined appeal, with dear Clare's, but I beg you to see the matter in the clear and happy light when I say that I'm afraid it won't do and that the blest Babe must really be placed, on the threshhold of life (there should be but one h there—don't teach her to spell by me!) under some more valid and more charming protection than that of my accumulated and before long so concluding years. She mustn't be taken, for her first happy holiday, to visit her late godfather's tomb—as would certainly be the case were I to lend myself to the fond anachronism her too rosy-visioned parents so flatteringly propose. You see, dear Wilfred, I speak from a wealth of wisdom and experience—life has made me rather exceptionally acquainted with the godpaternal function (so successful an impostor would I seem to have been,) and it was long since brought home to me that the character takes more wearing and its duties more performing than I feel I have ever been able to give it. I have three godchildren living (for to some I have been fatal)—two daughters and a son; and my conscience tells me that I have long grossly neglected them. They write me—at considerable length sometimes, and I just remember that I have one of their last sweet appeals still unanswered. This, dear Clare and dear Wilfred, is purely veracious history—a dark chapter in my life. Let me not add another—let me show at last a decent compunction. Let me not offer up a helpless and unconscious little career on the altar of my incompetence. Frankly, the lovely child should find at her font a younger and braver and nimbler presence, one that shall go on with her longer and become accessible to her personal knowledge. You will feel this together on easier reflection—just as you will see how my plea goes hand in hand with my deep appreciation of your exquisite confidence.
You must indeed, Wilfred, have been through terrific tension—I gathered from Ethel Dilke's letter that Clare's crisis had been dire; such are not the hours when a man most feels the privilege and pride of fatherhood. But I rejoice greatly in the good conditions now, and already make out that the daughter is to be of prodigious power, beauty and stature. I feel for that matter that by the time Easter comes I should drop her straight into the ritual reservoir—with a scandalous splash. It will take more than me—! (though you may well say you don't want more—after so many words!) I embrace you all three and am devotedly yours,
HENRY JAMES.