The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

Dear Edith,

I'm horribly in arrears with you and it hideously looks as if I hadn't deeply revelled and rioted in your beautiful German letter in particular—which thrilled me to the core. You are indeed my ideal of the dashing woman, and you never dashed more felicitously or fruitfully, for my imagination, than when you dashed, at that particular psychologic moment, off to dear old rococo Munich of the "Initials" (of my tender youth,) and again of my far-away 30th year. (I've never been there depuis.) Vivid and charming and sympathetic au possible your image and echo of it all; only making me gnash my teeth that I wasn't with you, or that at least I can't ply you, face to face, with more questions even than your letter delightfully anticipates. It came to me during a fortnight spent in London—and all letters that reach me there, when I'm merely on the branch, succeed in getting themselves treasured up for better attention after I'm back here. But the real difficulty in meeting your gorgeous revelations as they deserve is that of breaking out in sympathy and curiosity at points enough—and leaping with you breathless from Schiller to Tiepolo—through all the Gothicry of Augsburg, Würzburg, und so weiter. I want the rest, none the less—all the rest, after Augsburg and the Weinhandlung, and above all how it looks to you from Paris (if not Paradise) regained again—in respect to which gaping contrast I am immensely interested in your superlative commendation of the ensemble and well-doneness of the second play at Munich (though it is at Cabale und Liebe that I ache and groan to the core for not having been with you.) It is curious how a strange deep-buried Teutonism in one (without detriment to the tropical forest of surface, and half-way-down, Latinism) stirs again at moments under stray Germanic souffles and makes one so far from being sorry to be akin to the race of Goethe and Heine and Dürer and their kinship. At any rate I rejoice that you had your plunge—which (the whole pride and pomp of which) makes me sit here with the feeling of a mere aged British pauper in a workhouse. However, of course I shan't get real thrilling and throbbing items and illustrations till I have them from your lips: to which remote and precarious possibility I must resign myself.... And now I am back here for—I hope—many weeks to come; having a morbid taste for some, even most—though not all—of the midwinter conditions of this place. Turkeys and mince pies are being accumulated for Xmas, as well as calendars, penwipers, and formidable lists of persons to whom tips will be owing; a fine old Yuletide observance in general, quoi!… But good night—tanti saluti affetuosi.

    Ever your
    H. J.

To Madame Wagnière

    Lamb House, Rye.
    Dec. 22nd, 1909.

My dear Laura Wagnière,

The general turmoil of the year's end has done its best to prevent my sooner expressing to you my great rejoicing in all the pleasantness of your news of your settled state by the "plus beau des lacs"; a consummation on which I heartily congratulate you both. A real rest, for the soles of one's feet, a receptacle and domestic temple for one's battered possessions, is what I myself found, better than I had ever found it before, some dozen years ago in this decent nook, and I feel I can only wish you to even get half as much good of it as I have got of my small impregnable stronghold—or better still, incorruptible hermitage. Yours isn't a hermitage of course, since hermits don't—in spite of St. Anthony and his famous complications (or rather and doubtless by reason of them)—have wives or female friends: and very holy women don't even have husbands.

But it's evidently a delightful place, on which I cast my benediction and which I shall rejoice some day to see, so that you must let me tenderly nourish the hope. I have always had, and from far back, my première jeunesse, a great sentiment for all your Vaudois lake shore. I remember perfectly your Tour de Peilz neighbourhood, and at the thought of all the beauty and benignity that crowds your picture I envy you as much as I applaud. If I did not live in this country and in this possibility of contact with London, for which I have many reasons, I think I too would fix myself in Switzerland, and in your conveniently cosmopolite part of it, where you are in the very centre of Europe and of a whole circle of easy communications and excursions. I was immensely struck with the way the Simplon tunnel makes a deliciously near thing of Italy (the last and first time I came through it a couple of years ago;) and when I remember how when I left Milan well after luncheon, I was at my hotel at Lausanne at 10.30 or so, your position becomes quite ideal, granting the proposition that one doesn't (any longer) so much want to live in that unspeakable country as to feel whenever one will, well on the way to it. And you are on the way to so many other of the interesting countries, the roads to which all radiate from you as the spokes from the hub of a wheel—which remarks, however, you will have all been furiously making to yourselves; "all" I say, because I suppose Marguerite is now with you, and I don't suppose that even she wants to be always on the way to Boston only.

I hope you are having là-bas a less odious year than we poverini, who only see it go on from bad to worse, the deluge en permanence, with mud up to our necks and a consequent confinement to the house that is like an interminable stormy sea voyage under closed hatches. I have now spent some ten or eleven winters mainly in the country and find myself reacting violently at last in favour of pavements or street lamps and lighted shop fronts—places where one can go out at 4 or at 5 or at 6, if the deluge has been "on" the hour before and has mercifully abated. Here at 5 or 6 the plunge is only into black darkness and the abysmal crotte aforesaid. I don't say this to discourage you, for I am sure you have shop-fronts and pavements and tramcars highly convenient, and also without detriment to the charming-looking house of which you send me the likeness. It is evidently a most sympathetic spot, and I shall positively try, on some propitious occasion, to knock at its door. I envy you the drop into Italy that you will have by this time made, or come back from, after meeting your daughter. I send her my kindest remembrance and the same to her father.

I catch the distracted post (so distracted and distracting at this British Xmas-tide) and am, dear Laura Wagnière, your affectionate old friend,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Thomas Sergeant Perry

    Lamb House, Rye.
    Dec. 22, 1909.

My dear Thomas,

As usual my silence has become so dense and coagulated that you might cut monstrous slabs and slices off it for distribution in your family—were you "maliciously" disposed! But my whole security—as my whole decency (so far as claim to decency for myself goes)—is that we are neither of us malicious, and that I have often enough shown you before that, deep as I may seem to plunge into the obscure, there ever comes an hour when, panting and puffing (as even now!) my head emerges again, to say nothing of my heart. I have treasured your petit mot from a point of space unidentified, but despatched from a Holland-America ship and bearing a French and a Pas-de-Calais postage-stamp (a bit bewilderingly)—treasured it for the last month as a link with your receding form: the recession of which makes me miss your presence in this hemisphere out of proportion somehow to the—to any—frequency with which fortune enables me to enjoy it. But I still keep hold of the pledge that your retention (as I understand you) of your Paris apartment constitutes toward your soon coming back—and really feel that with a return under your protection and management absolutely guaranteed me, I too should have liked to tempt again the adventure with you; should have liked again to taste of the natal air—and perhaps even in a wider draught than you will go in for. However, I have neither your youth, your sinews, nor your fortune—let alone your other domestic blessings and reinforcements—and somehow the memory of what was fierce and formidable in our colossal country the last time I was there prevails with me over softer emotions, and I feel I shall never alight on it again save as upborne on the wings of some miracle that isn't in the least likely to occur. The nearest I shall come to it will be in my impatience for your return with the choice collection of notes I hope you will have taken for me. You have chosen a good year for absence—I mean a deplorable, an infamous one, in "Europe," for any joy or convenience of air or weather. The pleasant land of France lies soaking as well as this more confessed and notorious sponge, I believe;—and I have now for months found life no better than a beastly sea-voyage of storms and submersions under closed hatches. We rot with dampness, confinement and despair—in short we are reduced to the abjectness, as you see, of literally talking weather. You will see our Nephew Bill, I trust, promptly, in your rich art-world là-bas, and I beg you to add your pressure to mine on the question of our absolutely soon enjoying him over here. I am under a semi-demi-pledge to go to Paris for a fortnight in April—but it would be a more positive prospect, I think, if I knew I were to find you all there. Give my bestest love to Lilla, please, and my untutored homages to the Daughters of Music. Try to see Howells chez lui—so as to bring me every detail. Feel thus how much I count on you and receive from me every invocation proper to this annual crisis. May the genius of our common country have you in its most—or least?—energetic keeping. Yours, my dear Thomas, ever,

    HENRY JAMES.

To Owen Wister

The links will be recognised in this letter with H. J.'s old friend, Mrs. Fanny Kemble. Her daughters were Mrs. Leigh, wife of the Dean of Hereford, and the mother of Mr. Owen Wister.

    Lamb House, Rye.
    Dec. 26th, 1909.

Dearest Owen!

Your so benevolent telegram greatly touches me, and I send you off this slower-travelling but all faithful and affectionate acknowledgment within an hour or two of receiving it. It hasn't told me much—save indeed that you sometimes think of me and are moved, as it were, toward me; and that verily—though I am incapable of supposing the contrary—is not a little. What I miss and deplore is some definite knowledge of how you are—deeply aware as I am that it adds a burden and a terror to ill-health to have to keep reporting to one's friends how ill one is—or isn't. That's the last thing I dream of from you—and I possess my soul, and my desire for you, in patience—or I try to. I don't see any one, however, whom I can appeal to for light about you—for I missed, most lamentably, Florence La Farge during her heart-breaking little mockery of sixteen days in England a few weeks ago; she having written me in advance that she would come and see me, and then, within a few hours after her arrival, engaged herself so deep that she apparently couldn't manage it—nor I manage to get to London during the snatch of time she was there (for she was mainly in the country only.) I had had an idea that she would authentically know about you, and had I seen her I would have pumped her dry. I was at the Deanery for three or four days in September (quite incredibly—for the Hereford Festival,) and they were most kind, the Dean dear and delightful beyond even his ancient dearness etc.; but we only could fondly speculate and vainly theorize and yearn over you—and that didn't see us much forrarder. That I hope you are safe and sound again, and firm on your feet, and planning and tending somehow hitherward—that I hope this with fierce intensity I need scarcely assure you, need I? But the years melt away, and the changes multiply, and the facilities (some of them) diminish; the sands in the hour-glass run, in short, and Sister Anne comes down from her tower and says she sees nothing of you. But here I am where you last left me—and writing even now, late at night, in the little old oaken parlour where we had such memorable and admirable discourse. The sofa on which you stretched yourself is there behind me—and it holds out appealing little padded arms to you. I don't seem to recognise any particular nearness for my being able to revisit your prodigious scene. The more the chill of age settles upon me the more formidable it seems. And I haven't myself had a very famous year here—for a few months in fact rather a bad and perturbing one; but which has considerably cleared and redeemed itself now. We are just emerging from the rather deadly oppression of the English Xmastide—which I have spent at home for the first time for four years—a lone and lorn and stranded friend or two being with me; with a long breath of relief that the worst is over. Terrific postal matter has accumulated, however—and the arrears of my correspondence make me quail and almost collapse. You see in this, already, the rather weary hand and head—but please feel and find in it too (with my true blessing on your wife and weans) all the old affection of your devoted

    HENRY JAMES.

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 your
    H. 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....