To Miss Grace Norton
Dictated.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.Christmas Day, 1897.
My dear Grace,
Is it really a year? I have been acutely conscious of its getting to be a horrible time, but it hadn't come home to me that it was taking on quite that insolence. Well, you see what the years—since years il y a—are making of me: I don't write to you for a hideous age, and then, when at last I do, I take the romantic occasion of this particular day to write in this unsympathetic ink. But that is exactly what, as I say, the horrid time has made of me. The use of my hand, always difficult, has become impossible to me; and since I am reduced to dictation, this form of dictation is the best. May its distinctness make up for its indirectness....
I dare say that, from time to time, you hear something of me from William; and you know, by that flickering light, that my life has had, for a long time past, a very jog-trot sort of rhythm. I have ceased completely to "travel." It is going on into four years since I have crossed the Channel; and the day is not yet. This will give you a ghastly sense of the insular object that I must have become; however, I shall break out yet, perhaps, and surprise you. Meanwhile, none the less, I was unable, these last days, to break the spell of immobility even to the extent of going over to Paris to poor Daudet's funeral. I felt that, là-bas—by which I mean in the immediate house—a certain expectation rested on me, but I looked it straight in the face and cynically budged not. I dislike, more and more, the terrific organized exploitation, in Paris, on the occasion of death and burial, of every kind of personal privacy and every kind of personal hysterics. It is newspaperism and professionalism gone mad—in a way all its own; and I felt as if I should go mad if I even once more, let alone twenty times more, heard Daudet personally compared (more especially facially compared, eyeglass and all) to Jesus Christ. Not a French notice of him that I have seen but has plumped it coquettishly out. I had not seen him, thanks to my extreme recalcitrance, since the month he spent more than two years ago in London. His death was not unhappy—was indeed too long delayed, for all his later time has been sadly (by disease, borne with wonderful patience and subtlety) blighted and sterilized. Yet it is a wonderful proof of what a success his life had been that it had remained a success in spite of that. It was the most worked thing that ever was—I mean his whole career. His talent was so great that I feel, as to his work, that the best of it will quite intensely remain. But he was a queer combination of a great talent with an absence of the greater mind, as it were—the greater feeling.
Well, my dear Grace, I can't tell you the comfort and charm it is to be talking with you even by this horrid machinery, and to squeeze the little round golden orange of your note dry of every testimony to your honoured tranquillity that I can gouge out of it. My metaphors are mixed, but my fidelity is pure. How is the mighty Montaigne? I don't read him a millionth part as much as I ought, for of all the horrors of London almost the worst horror is the way it conspires against the evening book under the evening lamp. I don't "go out"—and yet, far too much of the time, I am out. The main part of the rest I devote to wondering how I got there. A propos of which, as much as anything, do you read Maurice Barrès? If you do, his last thing, Les Déracinés, is very curious and serious, but a gruesome picture of young France. If it didn't sound British and Pharisaic I would almost risk saying that, on all the more and more showing, young and old France both seem to me to be in a strange state of moral and intellectual decomposition. But this isn't worth saying without going into the detail of the evidence—and that would take me too far. Then there is Leslie Stephen and the little Kiplings. Leslie seems to be out-weathering his woes in the most extraordinary way. His health is literally better than it was in his wife's lifetime, and is perhaps, more almost than anything else, a proof of what a life-preserver in even the wildest waves is the perfect possession of a métier. His admirable habit and knowledge of work have saved him.... Rudyard and his wife and offspring depart presently for South Africa. They have settled upon a small propriété at Rottingdean near the [Burne-Jones's], and the South Africa is but a parenthetic family picnic. It would do as well as anything else, perhaps, if one still felt, as one used to, that everything is grist to his mill. I don't, however, think that everything is, as the affair is turning out, at all; I mean as to the general complexity of life. His Ballad future may still be big. But my view of his prose future has much shrunken in the light of one's increasingly observing how little of life he can make use of. Almost nothing civilised save steam and patriotism—and the latter only in verse, where I hate it so, especially mixed up with God and goodness, that that half spoils my enjoyment of his great talent. Almost nothing of the complicated soul or of the female form or of any question of shades—which latter constitute, to my sense, the real formative literary discipline. In his earliest time I thought he perhaps contained the seeds of an English Balzac; but I have quite given that up in proportion as he has come steadily from the less simple in subject to the more simple—from the Anglo-Indians to the natives, from the natives to the Tommies, from the Tommies to the quadrupeds, from the quadrupeds to the fish, and from the fish to the engines and screws....
Goodbye, my dear Grace. Believe that through all fallacious appearances of ebb and flow, of sound and silence, of presence and absence, I am always constantly yours,
HENRY JAMES.
V
RYE
(1898-1903)
The first five years that Henry James spent at Rye were the least eventful and the most serenely occupied of his life. Even at the height of his London activities he had always clung fast to his daily work; and now that his whole time was his own, free from all interruptions save those invited by his own hospitality, he lived in his writing with a greater concentration than ever before. His letters shew indeed that he could still be haunted occasionally by the thought of the silence with which his books were received by the public at large—an indifference, it must be said, which he was always inclined to exaggerate; but these misgivings were superficial in comparison with the deep joy of surrender to his own genius, now at the climax of its power. He was satisfied at length with his mastery of his instrument; he knew perfectly what he wished to do and knew that he could do it; and the long mornings of summer in the pleasant old garden-room of Lamb House, or of winter in his small southern study indoors, were perhaps the best, the most intimately contenting hours he had ever passed. He was now confirmed in the habit of dictation, and never again wrote his books with his own hand except under special stress. At Rye or in London his secretary would be installed at the typewriter by ten o'clock in the morning, and for three or four hours he would pace the room, pausing, hesitating, gradually massing and controlling the stream of his imagination, till at a favouring moment it rolled forward without a check. So, in these five years, the most characteristic works of his later maturity were produced. They began with The Awkward Age, The Sacred Fount, and many short stories presently collected in The Soft Side and The Better Sort; and they culminated, still within the limit of this short period, with the great triad of novels that were to crown the long tale of his fiction—The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl.
With his life at Rye, too, his correspondence with his family and his friends began to spread out in an amplitude of which the following selection can give at the best a very imperfect idea. The rich apologies for silence and backwardness that preface so many of his letters must be interpreted in the light, partly indeed of his natural luxuriance of phraseology, but much more of his generous conception of the humblest correspondent's claim on him for response. He could not answer a brief note of friendliness but with pages of abounding eloquence. He never dealt in the mere small change of intercourse; the post-card and the half-sheet did not exist for him; a few lines of enquiry would bring from him a bulging packet of manuscript, overwhelming in its disproportion. No wonder that with this standard of the meaning of a letter he often groaned under his postal burden. He discharged himself of it, in general, very late at night; the morning's work left him too much exhausted for more composition until then. At midnight he would sit down to his letter-writing and cover sheet after sheet, sometimes for hours, with his dashing and not very readable script. Occasionally he would give up a day to the working off of arrears by dictation, seldom omitting to excuse himself to each correspondent in turn for the infliction of the "fierce legibility" of type. The number of his letters was in fact enormous, and even within the limits of the present selection they form a picture of his life at Rye to which there is little to add.
He had intended Lamb House to be a retreat from the pressure of the world, but it need hardly be said that from the first it was thrown open to his friends with hospitable freedom. In the matter of entertainment his standard again was munificently high, and the consequences it entailed were sometimes weightier than he found to his liking. But once more it is necessary to read his laments over his violated hermitage with many reserves. Lonely as he was in his work, he was not made for any other kind of solitude; he needed companionship, and soon missed it when it was withdrawn. After a few experiments he discovered that the isolation of the winter at Rye by no means agreed with him; for the short days and long evenings he preferred Pall Mall, where (after letting his flat in Kensington) he engaged a permanent lodging at the Reform Club. He could thus divide the year as he chose between London and Rye, and the arrangement was so much to his liking that in five years he made only one long absence from home. In 1899 he returned again to Italy for the summer, paying a visit on the way to M. and Mme. Bourget at Hyères. At Rome many associations were recalled for him by a suggestion that he should write the life of William Wetmore Story, his friend and host of twenty years before—a suggestion carried out somewhat later in a book filled, as he said, with the old Roman gold-dust of the seventies. He brought back new impressions also from a visit to Mrs. Humphry Ward at Castel Gandolfo—where she and her family were spending some weeks at the Villa Barberini, on the ridge between the Roman Campagna and the Alban lake—and another to Marion Crawford at Sorrento. He stayed briefly at Florence and Venice, and returned home to find a special reason awaiting him for renewed application to work. He had taken Lamb House on a lease, but the death of its owner now made it necessary to decide whether he should purchase it outright. He paid the price without hesitation; he was by this time deeply attached to the place and he seized the chance of making it his own. The earnings of his work would not go far towards paying for it, but he felt it all the more urgent to concentrate upon production for some time to come. He did not leave England again till four years later, nor his own roof for more than a few days now and then.
By far the greatest of all his interests, outside his work, was the opportunity he now had of seeing more than hitherto of his elder brother and his household. In the autumn of 1899 Professor and Mrs. William James came to Europe for a visit of two years, and during that time the brothers were together in London or at Lamb House as often as possible. Unfortunately it was the state of his health that had made a long holiday desirable for William James, and most of the time had to be spent by him in a southern climate, in Italy or on the Riviera. Nevertheless it was a deep delight to the younger brother to feel able to share the life of the elder at nearer range. They were curiously unlike in their whole cast of mind; nothing could have been further from Henry James's massive and ruminatory imagination than his brother's quick-footed, freely-ranging, experimental genius. But their devotion to each other grew only the closer as their intellectual lives diverged; and as they approached old age together, there was still something protective in William James's attitude, and in Henry something that appealed to his brother, and to his brother only, for moral support and reassurance. The next generation, moreover, were by this time growing up and were beginning to take a place in Henry James's life that was a source of ever-increasing pride and pleasure to him. From now onward there was nothing he so welcomed as the recurring visits to Lamb House of one or other of his elder brother's children. William James was again in Europe in 1902, delivering at Edinburgh the lectures that presently appeared as The Varieties of Religious Experience.
It was now all but twenty years since Henry had last seen America, and the desire once more to visit his country began to stir obscurely in his mind. The idea was long pondered and circuitously approached, but it will be seen from one of the following letters that it had become definite in 1903. Long absence had made a return seem a formidable adventure, and it was not in his nature to undertake it without many scruples and debates. In the midst of these his mind was gradually made up and the journey determined upon for 1904.
To W. D. Howells
34 De Vere Gardens, W.January 28th, 1898.
My dear Howells,
Too long, too long have I delayed to thank you for your last good letter; yet if I've been thus guilty the fault—as it were! the deep responsibility—is largely your own. It all comes from that wonderful (and still-in-my-ears reverberating) little talk we had that morning here in the soft lap, and under the motherly apron, of the dear old muffling fog—which will have kept every one else from hearing ever—and only let me hear, and have been heard! I mean that the effect of your admirable counsel and comfort was from that moment to give me the sense of being, somehow, suddenly, preposterously, renewingly and refreshingly, at a kind of practical high pressure which has—well, which has simply, my dear Howells, made all the difference! There it is. It is the absurd, dizzy consciousness of this difference that has constituted (failing other things!) an exciting, absorbing feeling of occupation and preoccupation—and thereby paralysed the mere personal activity of my pen....
I hope you have by this time roared—and not wholly with rage and despair!—through the tunnel of your dark consciousness of return. I dare say you are now quite out on the flowery meads of almost doubting of having been away. This makes me fear your promise to come back—right soon—next summer—may even now have developed an element of base alloy. I rushed off to see Mrs. Harland the instant I heard she was back, and got hold of you—and of Mildred—for five minutes (and of all the handsomest parts of both of you) in her talk. She had left a dying mother, however, and her general situation has, I fear, its pressure and pinch. What an interest indeed your boy's outlook must be to you! But, as you say—seeing them commence—! Well, they never commenced before; and the pain is all in us—not out of us. The thing is to keep it in. But this scrawl—or sprawl—is about all my poor hand can now sustainedly perpetrate; if I continue I shall have to clamour for a mount—a lift—my brave boy of the alphabetic hoofs. But I spare you those caracoles. I greet you each again, affectionately, and am yours, my dear Howells, intensely,
HENRY JAMES.
To Arthur Christopher Benson
The origin of The Turn of the Screw in an anecdote told him by Archbishop Benson is described in the preface that H. J. wrote for it when it appeared in the collected edition of his works.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.March 11th, 1898.
My dear Arthur,
I suppose that in the mysterious scheme of providence and fate such an inspiration as your charming note—out of the blue!—of a couple of days ago, is intended somehow to make up to me for the terror with which my earlier—in fact all my past—productions inspire me, and for the insurmountable aversion I feel to looking at them again or to considering them in any way. This morbid state of mind is really a blessing in disguise—for it has for happy consequences that such an incident as your letter becomes thereby extravagantly pleasant and gives me a genial glow. All thanks and benedictions—I shake your hand very hard—or would do so if I could attribute to you anything so palpable, personal and actual as a hand. Yet I shall never write a sequel to the P. of an L.—admire my euphonic indefinite article. It's all too faint and far away—too ghostly and ghastly—and I have bloodier things en tête. I can do better than that!
But à propos, precisely, of the ghostly and ghastly, I have a little confession to make to you that has been on my conscience these three months and that I hope will excite in your generous breast nothing but tender memories and friendly sympathies.
On one of those two memorable—never to be obliterated—winter nights that I spent at the sweet Addington, your father, in the drawing-room by the fire, where we were talking a little, in the spirit of recreation, of such things, repeated to me the few meagre elements of a small and gruesome spectral story that had been told him years before and that he could only give the dimmest account of—partly because he had forgotten details and partly—and much more—because there had been no details and no coherency in the tale as he received it, from a person who also but half knew it. The vaguest essence only was there—some dead servants and some children. This essence struck me and I made a note of it (of a most scrappy kind) on going home. There the note remained till this autumn, when, struck with it afresh, I wrought it into a fantastic fiction which, first intended to be of the briefest, finally became a thing of some length and is now being "serialised" in an American periodical. It will appear late in the spring (chez Heinemann) in a volume with one other story, and then I will send it to you. In the meanwhile please think of the doing of the thing on my part as having sprung from that kind old evening at Addington—quite gruesomely as my unbridled imagination caused me to see the inevitable development of the subject. It was all worth mentioning to you. I am very busy and very decently fit and very much yours, always, my dear Arthur,
HENRY JAMES.
To William James
The following letter was written immediately before the outbreak of war between Spain and the United States.
Dictated.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.20 April, 1898.
My dear William,
There are all sorts of intimes and confidential things I want to say to you in acknowledgment of your so deeply interesting letter—of April 10th—received yesterday; but I must break the back of my response at least with this mechanical energy; not having much of any other—by which I mean simply too many odd moments—at my disposal just now. I do answer you, alas, almost to the foul music of the cannon. It is this morning precisely that one feels the fat to be at last fairly in the fire. I confess that the blaze about to come leaves me woefully cold, thrilling with no glorious thrill or holy blood-thirst whatever. I see nothing but the madness, the passion, the hideous clumsiness of rage, of mechanical reverberation; and I echo with all my heart your denouncement of the foul criminality of the screeching newspapers. They have long since become, for me, the danger that overtops all others. That became clear to one, even here, two years ago, in the Venezuela time; when one felt that with a week of simple, enforced silence everything could be saved. If things were then saved without it, it is simply that they hadn't at that time got so bad as they are now in the U.S. My sympathy with you all is intense—the whole horror must so mix itself with all your consciousness. I am near enough to hate it, without being, as you are, near enough in some degree, perhaps, to understand. I am leading at present so quiet a life that I don't measure much the sentiment, the general attitude around me. Much of it can't possibly help being Spanish—and from the "European" standpoint in general Spain must appear savagely assaulted. She is so quiet—publicly and politically—so decent and picturesque and harmless a member of the European family that I am bound to say it argues an extraordinary illumination and a very predetermined radicalism not to admire her pluck and pride. But publicly, of course, England will do nothing whatever that is not more or less—negatively—for our benefit. I scarcely know what the newspapers say—beyond the Times, which I look at all for Smalley's cables: so systematic is my moral and intellectual need of ignoring them. One must save one's life if one can. The next weeks will, however, in this particular, probably not a little break me down. I must at least read the Bombardment of Boston. May you but scantly suffer from it!…
I rejoice with intense rejoicing in everything you tell me of your own situation, plans, arrangements, honours, prospects—into all of which I enter with an intimacy of participation. Your election to the Institut has, for me, a surpassing charm—I simply revel and, as it were, wallow in it. Je m'y vautre. But oh, if it could only have come soon enough for poor Alice to have known it—such a happy little nip as it would have given her; or for the dear old susceptible Dad! But things come as they can—and I am, in general, lost in the daily miracle of their coming at all: I mean so many of them—few as that many may be: and I speak above all for myself. I am lost, moreover, just now, in the wonder of what effect on American affairs, of every kind, the shock of battle will have. Luckily it's of my nature—though not of my pocket—always to be prepared for the worst and to expect the least. Like you, with all my heart, I have "finance on the brain." At least I try to have it—with a woeful lack of natural talent for the same. It is none too soon. But one arrives at dates, periods, corners of one's life: great changes, deep operations are begotten. This has more portée than I can fully go into. I shall certainly do my best to let my flat when I am ready to leave town; the difficulty, this year, however, will be that the time for "season" letting begins now, and that I can't depart for at least another month. Things are not ready at Rye, and won't be till then, with the limited local energy at work that I have very wisely contented myself with turning on there. It has been the right and much the best way in the long run, and for one's good little relations there; only the run has been a little longer. The remnant of the season here may be difficult to dispose of—to a sub-lessee; and my books—only a part of which I can house at Rye—are a complication. However, I shall do what I can this year; and for subsequent absences, so long as my present lease of De Vere Gardens runs, I shall have the matter on a smooth, organised, working basis. I mean to arrange myself always to let—being, as such places go, distinctly lettable. And for my declining years I have already put my name down for one of the invaluable south-looking, Carlton-Gardens-sweeping bedrooms at the Reform Club, which are let by the year and are of admirable and convenient (with all the other resources of the place at one's elbow) general habitability. The only thing is they are so in demand that one has sometimes a long time to await one's turn. On the other hand there are accidents—"occasions." … I embrace you all—Alice longer than the rest—and am—with much actuality of emotion, ever your
HENRY.