The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

HENRY JAMES.

To Gaillard T. Lapsley

Reform Club,Pall Mall, S.W.March 17th, 1908.

My dear, dear Gaillard!

I can't tell you with what tender sympathy your rather disconcerting little news inspires me nor how my heart goes out to you. Alack, alack, how we do have to pay for things—and for our virtues and grandeurs and beauties (even as you are now doing, overworked hero and model of distinguished valour,) as well as for our follies and mistakes. However, you have on your record exactly that mistake of too generous a sacrifice. Fortunately you have been pulled up before you have quite chucked away your all. It must be deuced dreary—yet if you ask me whether I think of you more willingly and endurably thus, or as your image of pale overstrain haunted me after you had left me at the New Year, I shall have no difficulty in replying. In fact, dearest Gaillard, and at the risk of aggravating you, I like to keep you a little before me in the passive, the recumbent, the luxurious and ministered-to posture, and my imagination rings all the possible changes on the forms of your noble surrender. Lie as flat as you can, and live and think and feel and talk (and keep silent!) as idly—and you will thereby be laying up the most precious treasure. It's a heaven-appointed interlude, and cela ne tient qu'à vous (I mean to the wave of your white hand) to let it become a thing of beauty like the masque of Comus. Cultivate, horizontally the waving of that hand—and you will brush away, for the time, all responsibilities and superstitions, and the peace of the Lord will descend upon you, and you will become as one of the most promising little good boys that ever was. Après quoi the whole process and experience will grow interesting, amusing, tissue-making (history-making,) to you, and you will, after you get well, feel it to have been the time of your life which you'd have been most sorry to miss. Some five years ago—or more—a very interesting young friend of mine, Paul Harvey (then in the War Office as Private Sec. to Lord Lansdowne), was taken exactly as you are, and stopped off just as you are and consigned exactly to your place, I think—or rather no, to a pseudo-Nordrach in the Mendips. I remember how I sat on just such a morning as this at this very table and in this very seat and wrote him on this very paper in the very sense in which I am no less confidently writing to you—urging him to let himself utterly go and cultivate the day-to-day and the hand-to-mouth and the questions-be-damned, even as an exquisite fine art. Well, it absolutely and directly and beautifully worked: he recula—to the very limit—pour mieux sauter, and has since sauté'd so well that his career has caught him up again.... Your case will have gone practically quite on all fours with this. I am drenching you with my fond eloquence—but what will you have when you have touched me so by writing me so charmingly out of your quiet—though ever so shining, I feel—little chamber in the great Temple of Simplification? I shall return to the charge—if it be allowed me—and perhaps some small sign from you I shall have after a while again. I came up from L.H. yesterday only—and shall be in town after this a good deal, D.V., through the rest of this month and April and May. At some stage of your mouvement ascensionnel I shall see you—for I hope they won't be sending you up quite to Alpine Heights. Take it from me, dear, dear G., that your cure will have a social iridescence, for your acute and ironic and genial observation, of the most beguiling kind. But you don't need to "take" that or any other wisdom that your beautiful intelligence now plays with from any other source but that intelligence; therefore be beholden to me almost only for the fresh reassurance that I am more affectionately than ever yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. Wharton

The first performance of The High Bid took place in Edinburgh three days after the date of the following.

Roxburghe Hotel, Edinburgh.March 23rd, 1908.

My dear Edith!

This is just a tremulous little line to say to you that the daily services of intercession and propitiation (to the infernal gods, those of jealousy and guignon) that I feel sure you have instituted for me will continue to be deeply appreciated. They have already borne fruit in the shape of a desperate (comparative) calm—in my racked breast—after much agitation—and even to-day (Sunday) of a feverish gaiety during the journey from Manchester, to this place, achieved an hour ago by special train for my whole troupe and its impedimenta—I travelling with the animals like the lion-tamer or the serpent-charmer in person and quite enjoying the caravan-quality, the bariolé Bohemian or picaresque note of the affair. Here we are for the last desperate throes—but the omens are good, the little play pretty and pleasing and amusing and orthodox and mercenary and safe (absit omen!)—cravenly, ignobly canny: also clearly to be very decently acted indeed: little Gertrude Elliott, on whom it so infinitely hangs, showing above all a gallantry, capacity and vaillance, on which I had not ventured to build. She is a scrap (personally, physically) where she should be a presence, and handicapped by a face too small in size to be a field for the play of expression; but allowing for this she illustrates the fact that intelligence and instinct are capables de tout—so that I still hope. And each time they worry through the little "piggery" it seems to me more firm and more intrinsically without holes and weak spots—in itself I mean; and not other in short, than "consummately" artful. I even quite awfully wish you and Teddy were to be here—even so far as that do I go! But wire me a word—here—on Thursday a.m.—and I shall be almost as much heartened up. I will send you as plain and unvarnished a one after the event as the case will lend itself to. Even an Edinburgh public isn't (I mean as we go here all by the London) determinant, of course—however, à la guerre comme à la guerre, and don't intermit the burnt-offerings. More, more, very soon—and you too will have news for yours and Edward's right recklessly even though ruefully,

HENRY JAMES.

To Henry James, junior

105 Pall Mall, S.W.April 3rd, 1908.

Dearest Harry,

The Nightmare of the Edition (of my Works!) is the real mot de l'Enigme of all my long gaps and delinquencies these many months past—my terror of not keeping sufficiently ahead in doing my part of it (all the revising, rewriting, retouching, Preface-making and proof-correcting) has so paralysed me—as a panic fear—that I have let other decencies go to the wall. The printers and publishers tread on my heels, and I feel their hot breath behind me—whereby I keep at it in order not to be overtaken. Fortunately I have kept at it so that I am almost out of the wood, and the next very few weeks or so will completely lay the spectre. The case has been complicated badly, moreover, the last month—and even before—by my having, of all things in the world, let myself be drawn into a theatrical adventure—which fortunately appears to have turned out as well as I could have possibly expected or desired. Forbes Robertson and his wife produced on the 26th last in Edinburgh—being on "tour," and the provincial production to begin with, as more experimental, having good reason in its favour—a three-act comedy of mine ("The High Bid")—which is just only the little one-act play presented as a "tale" at the end of the volume of the "Two Magics"; the one-act play proving really a perfect three-act one, dividing itself (by two short entractes, without fiddles) perfectly at the right little places as climaxes—with the artful beauty of unity of time and place preserved, etc.... It had a great and charming success before a big house at Edinburgh—a real and unmistakable victory—but what was most brought home thereby is that it should have been discharged straight in the face of London. That will be its real and best function. This I am hoping for during May and June. It has still to be done at Newcastle, Liverpool, etc. (was done this past week three times at Glasgow. Of course on tour three times in a week is the most they can give a play in a minor city.) But my great point is that preparations, rehearsals, lavishments of anxious time over it (after completely re-writing it and improving it to begin with) have represented a sacrifice of days and weeks to them that have direfully devoured my scant margin—thus making my intense nervousness (about them) doubly nervous. I left home on the 17th last and rehearsed hard (every blessed day) at Manchester, and at Edinburgh till the production—having already, three weeks before that in London, given up a whole week to the same. I came back to town a week ago to-night (saw a second night in Edinburgh, which confirmed the impression of the first,) and return to L.H. to-morrow, after a very decent huitaine de jours here during which I have had quiet mornings, and even evenings, of work. I go to Paris about the 20th to stay 10 days, at the most, with Mrs Wharton, and shall be back by May 1st. I yearn to know positively that your Dad and Mother arrive definitely on the Oxford job then. I have had to be horribly inhuman to them in respect to the fond or repeated expression of that yearning—but they will more than understand why, "druv" as I've been, and also understand how the prospect of having them with me, and being with them, for a while, has been all these last months as the immediate jewel of my spur. Read them this letter and let it convey to them, all tenderly, that I live in the hope of their operative advent, and shall bleed half to death if there be any hitch.

But I embrace you all in spirit and am ever your fond old Uncle,

HENRY JAMES.

To W. D. Howells

The "lucubrations" are of course the prefaces written for the collected edition. The number of volumes was eventually raised to twenty-four, but The Bostonians was not included. The "one thing" referred to, towards the end of this letter, as likely to involve another visit to America would seem to be the possible production there of one of his plays; while the further reason for wishing to return was doubtless connected with his project of writing a novel of which the scene was to be laid in America—the novel that finally became The Ivory Tower.

Dictated.

Lamb House, Rye.17th August, 1908.

My dear Howells,

A great pleasure to me is your good and generous letter just received—with its luxurious implied licence for me of seeking this aid to prompt response; at a time when a pressure of complications (this is the complicated time of the year even in my small green garden) defeats too much and too often the genial impulse. But so far as compunction started and guided your pen, I really rub my eyes for vision of where it may—save as most misguidedly—have come in. You were so far from having distilled any indigestible drop for me on that pleasant ultimissimo Sunday, that I parted from you with a taste, in my mouth, absolutely saccharine—sated with sweetness, or with sweet reasonableness, so to speak; and aching, or wincing, in no single fibre. Extravagant and licentious, almost, your delicacy of fear of the contrary; so much so, in fact, that I didn't remember we had even spoken of the heavy lucubrations in question, or that you had had any time or opportunity, since their "inception," to look at one. However your fond mistake is all to the good, since it has brought me your charming letter and so appreciative remarks you therein make. My actual attitude about the Lucubrations is almost only, and quite inevitably, that they make, to me, for weariness; by reason of their number and extent—I've now but a couple more to write. This staleness of sensibility, in connection with them, blocks out for the hour every aspect but that of their being all done, and of their perhaps helping the Edition to sell two or three copies more! They will have represented much labour to this latter end—though in that they will have differed indeed from no other of their fellow-manifestations (in general) whatever; and the resemblance will be even increased if the two or three copies don't, in the form of an extra figure or two, mingle with my withered laurels. They are, in general, a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for Appreciation on other than infantile lines—as against the so almost universal Anglo-Saxon absence of these things; which tends so, in our general trade, it seems to me, to break the heart. However, I am afraid I'm too sick of the mere doing of them, and of the general strain of the effort to avoid the deadly danger of repetition, to say much to the purpose about them. They ought, collected together, none the less, to form a sort of comprehensive manual or vade-mecum for aspirants in our arduous profession. Still, it will be long before I shall want to collect them together for that purpose and furnish them with a final Preface. I've done with prefaces for ever. As for the Edition itself, it has racked me a little that I've had to leave out so many things that would have helped to make for rather a more vivid completeness. I don't at all regret the things, pretty numerous, that I've omitted from deep-seated preference and design; but I do a little those that are crowded out by want of space and by the rigour of the 23 vols., and 23 only, which were the condition of my being able to arrange the matter with the Scribners at all. Twenty-three do seem a fairly blatant array—and yet I rather surmise that there may have to be a couple of supplementary volumes for certain too marked omissions; such being, on the whole, detrimental to an all professedly comprehensive presentation of one's stuff. Only these, I pray God, without Prefaces! And I have even, in addition, a dim vague view of re-introducing, with a good deal of titivation and cancellation, the too-diffuse but, I somehow feel, tolerably full and good "Bostonians" of nearly a quarter of a century ago; that production never having, even to my much-disciplined patience, received any sort of justice. But it will take, doubtless, a great deal of artful re-doing—and I haven't, now, had the courage or time for anything so formidable as touching and re-touching it. I feel at the same time how the series suffers commercially from its having been dropped so completely out. Basta pure—basta!

I am charmed to hear of your Roman book and beg you very kindly to send it me directly it bounds into the ring. I rejoice, moreover, with much envy, and also a certain yearning and impotent non-intelligence, at your being moved to-day to Roman utterance—I mean in presence of the so bedrenched and vulgarised (I mean more particularly commonised) and transformed City (as well as, alas, more or less, Suburbs) of our current time. There was nothing, I felt, to myself, I could less do than write again, in the whole presence—when I was there some fifteen months agone. The idea of doing so (even had any periodical wanted my stuff, much less bid for it) would have affected me as a sort of give-away of my ancient and other reactions in presence of all the unutterable old Rome I originally found and adored. It would have come over me that if those ancient emotions of my own meant anything, no others on the new basis could mean much; or if any on the new basis should pretend to sense, it would be at the cost of all imputable coherency and sincerity on the part of my prime infatuation. In spite, all the same, of which doubtless too pedantic view—it only means, I fear, that I am, to my great disadvantage, utterly bereft of any convenient journalistic ease—I am just beginning to re-do … certain little old Italian papers, with titivations and expansions, in form to match with a volume of "English Hours" re-fabricated three or four years ago on the same system. In this little job I shall meet again my not much more than scant, yet still appreciable, old Roman stuff in my path—and shall have to commit myself about it, or about its general subject, somehow or other. I shall trick it out again to my best ability, at any rate—and to the cost, I fear, of your thinking I have retitivation on the brain. I haven't—I only have it on (to the end that I may then have it a little consequently in) the flat pocket-book. The system has succeeded a little with "English Hours"; which have sold quite vulgarly—for wares of mine; whereas the previous and original untitivated had long since dropped almost to nothing. In spite of which I could really shed salt tears of impatience and yearning to get back, after so prolonged a blocking of traffic, to too dreadfully postponed and neglected "creative" work; an accumulated store of ideas and reachings-out for which even now clogs my brain.

We are having here so bland and beautiful a summer that when I receive the waft of your furnace-mouth, blown upon my breakfast-table every few days through the cornucopia, or improvised resounding trumpet, of the Times, I groan across at my brother William (now happily domesticated with me:) "Ah why did they, poor infatuated dears? why did they?"—and he always knows I mean Why did you three hie you home from one of the most beautiful seasons of splendid cool summer, or splendid summery cool, that ever was, just to swoon in the arms of your Kittery genius loci (genius of perspiration!)—to whose terrific embrace you saw me four years ago, or whatever terrible time it was, almost utterly succumb. In my small green garden here the elements have been, ever since you left, quite enchantingly mixed; and I have been quite happy and proud to show my brother and his wife and two of his children, who have been more or less collectively and individually with me, what a decent English season can be....

Let me thank you again for your allusion to the slightly glamour-tinged, but more completely and consistently forbidding and forbidden, lecture possibility. I refer to it in these terms because in the first place I shouldn't have waited till now for it, but should have waked up to it eleven years ago; and because in the second there are other, and really stouter things too, definite ones, I want to do, with which it would formidably interfere, and which are better worth my resolutely attempting. I never have had such a sense of almost bursting, late in the day though it be, with violent and lately too much repressed creative (again!) intention. I may burst before this intention fairly or completely flowers, of course; but in that case, even, I shall probably explode to a less distressing effect than I should do, under stress of a fatal puncture, on the too personally and physically arduous, and above all too gregariously-assaulted (which is what makes it most arduous) lecture-platform. There is one thing which may conceivably (if it comes within a couple of years) take me again to the contorni of Kittery; and on the spot, once more, one doesn't know what might happen. Then I should take grateful counsel of you with all the appreciation in the world. And I want very much to go back for a certain thoroughly practical and special "artistic" reason; which would depend, however, on my being able to pass my time in an ideal combination of freedom and quiet, rather than in a luridly real one of involved and exasperated exposure and motion. But I may still have to talk to you of this more categorically; and won't worry you with it till then. You wring my heart with your report of your collective Dental pilgrimage to Boston in Mrs Howells' distressful interest. I read of it from your page, somehow, as I read of Siberian or Armenian or Macedonian monstrosities, through a merciful attenuating veil of Distance and Difference, in a column of the Times. The distance is half the globe—and the difference (for me, from the dear lady's active afflictedness) that of having when in America undergone, myself, so prolonged and elaborate a torture, in the Chair of Anguish, that I am now on t'other side of Jordan altogether, with every ghost, even, of a wincing nerve extinct and a horrible inhuman acheless void installed as a substitute. Void or not, however, I hope Mrs Howells, and you all, are now acheless at least, and am yours, my dear Howells, ever so faithfully,

HENRY JAMES.

P.S. With all of which I catch myself up on not having told you, decently and gratefully, of the always sympathetic attention with which I have read the "Fennel and Rue" you so gracefully dropped into my lap at that last hour, and which I had afterwards to toy with a little distractedly before getting the right peaceful moments and right retrospective mood (this in order to remount the stream of time to the very Fontaine de Jouvence of your subject-matter) down here. For what comes out of it to me more than anything else is the charming freshness of it, and the general miracle of your being capable of this under the supposedly more or less heavy bloom of a rich maturity. There are places in it in which you recover, absolutely, your first fine rapture. You confound and dazzle me; so go on recovering—it will make each of your next things a new document on immortal freshness! I can't remount—but can only drift on with the thicker and darker tide: wherefore pray for me, as who knows what may be at the end?

To Mrs. Wharton

Lamb House, Rye.October 13th, 1908.

My very dear Friend,

I cabled you an hour ago my earnest hope that you may see your way to sailing … on the 20th—and if you do manage that, this won't catch you before you start. Nevertheless I can't not write to you—however briefly (I mean on the chance of my letter being useless)—after receiving your two last, of rapprochées dates, which have come within a very few days of each other—that of Oct. 5th only to-day. I am deeply distressed at the situation you describe and as to which my power to suggest or enlighten now quite miserably fails me. I move in darkness; I rack my brain; I gnash my teeth; I don't pretend to understand or to imagine.... Only sit tight yourself and go through the movements of life. That keeps up our connection with life—I mean of the immediate and apparent life; behind which, all the while, the deeper and darker and unapparent, in which things really happen to us, learns, under that hygiene, to stay in its place. Let it get out of its place and it swamps the scene; besides which its place, God knows, is enough for it! Live it all through, every inch of it—out of it something valuable will come—but live it ever so quietly; and—je maintiens mon dire—waitingly!… What I am really hoping is that you'll be on your voyage when this reaches the Mount. If you're not, you'll be so very soon afterwards, won't you?—and you'll come down and see me here and we'll talk à perte de vue, and there will be something in that for both of us.... Believe meanwhile and always in the aboundingly tender friendship—the understanding, the participation, the princely (though I say it who shouldn't) hospitality of spirit and soul of yours more than ever,

HENRY JAMES.

To J.B. Pinker

By this time the monthly issue of the volumes of the "New York" edition was well under way—with the discouraging results to be inferred from the following letter.

Lamb House, Rye.October 23rd, 1908.

My dear Pinker,

All thanks for your letter this a.m. received. I have picked myself up considerably since Tuesday a.m., the hour of the shock, but I think it would ease off my nerves not a little to see you, and should be glad if you could come down on Monday next, 26th, say—by the 4.25, and dine and spend the night. If Monday isn't convenient to you, I must wait to indicate some other near subsequent day till I have heard from a person who is to come down on one of those dates and whom I wish to be free of. I am afraid my anticlimax has come from the fact that since the publication of the Series began no dimmest light or "lead" as to its actualities or possibilities of profit has reached me—whereby, in the absence of special warning, I found myself concluding in the sense of some probable fair return—beguiled thereto also by the measure, known only to myself, of the treasures of ingenuity and labour I have lavished on the ameliorations of every page of the thing, and as to which I felt that they couldn't not somehow "tell." I warned myself indeed, and kept down my hopes—said to myself that any present payments would be moderate and fragmentary—very; but this didn't prevent my rather building on something that at the end of a very frequented and invaded and hospitable summer might make such a difference as would outweigh—a little—my so disconcerting failure to get anything from –. The non-response of both sources has left me rather high and dry—though not so much so as when I first read Scribner's letter. I have recovered the perspective and proportion of things—I have committed, thank God, no anticipatory follies (the worst is having made out my income-tax return at a distinctly higher than at all warranted figure!—whereby I shall have early in 1909 to pay—as I even did last year—on parts of an income I have never received!)—and, above all, am aching in every bone to get back to out-and-out "creative" work, the long interruption of which has fairly sickened and poisoned me. (That is the real hitch!) I am afraid that moreover in my stupidity before those unexplained—though so grim-looking!—figure-lists of Scribner's I even seemed to make out that a certain $211 (a phrase in his letter seeming also to point to that interpretation) is, all the same, owing me. But as you say nothing about this I see that I am probably again deluded and that the mystic screed meant it is still owing them! Which is all that is wanted, verily, to my sad rectification! However, I am now, as it were, prepared for the worst, and as soon as I can get my desk absolutely clear (for, like the convolutions of a vast smothering boa-constrictor, such voluminosities of Proof—of the Edition—to be carefully read—still keep rolling in,) that mere fact will by itself considerably relieve me. And I have such visions and arrears of inspiration—! But of these we will speak—and, as I say, I shall be very glad if you can come Monday. Believe me, yours ever,