The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II

To Mrs. W. K. Clifford

Hotel Ponce de Leon,

St. Augustine, Florida.

February 21st, '05.

Dearest old Friend!

I am leaving this subtropical Floridian spot from one half hour to another, but the horror of not having for so long despatched a word to you, the shame and grief and contrition of it, are so strong, within me, that I simply seize the passing moment by the hair of its head and glare at it till it pauses long enough to let me—as it were—embrace you. Yet I feel, have felt, all along, that you will have understood, and that words are wasted in explaining the obvious. Letters, all these weeks and weeks, day to day and hour to hour letters, have fluttered about me in a dense crowd even as the San Marco pigeons, in Venice, round him who appears to have corn to scatter. So the whole queer time has gone in my scattering corn—scattering and chattering, and being chattered and scattered to, and moving from place to place, and surrendering to people (the only thing to do here—since things, apart from people, are nil;) in staying with them, literally, from place to place and week to week (though with old friends, as it were, alone—that is mostly, thank God—to avoid new obligations:) doing that as the only solution of the problem of "seeing" the country. I am seeing, very well—but the weariness of so much of so prolonged and sustained a process is, at times, surpassing. It would be a strain, a weariness (kept up so,) anywhere; and it is extraordinarily tiresome, on occasions, here. Vastness of space and distance, of number and quantity, is the element in which one lives: it is a great complication alone to be dealing with a country that has fifty principal cities—each a law unto itself—and unto you: England, poor old dear, having (to speak of) but one. On the other hand it is distinctly interesting—the business and the country, as a whole; there are no exquisite moments (save a few of a funniness that comes to that;) but there are none from which one doesn't get something....And meanwhile I am lecturing a little to pay the Piper, as I go—for high fees (of course) and as yet but three or four times. But they give me gladly £50 for 50 minutes (a pound a minute—like Patti!)—and always for the same lecture (as yet:) The Lesson of Balzac. I do it beautifully—feel as if I had discovered my vocation—at any rate amaze myself. It is well—for without it I don't see how I could have held out.

This winter has been a hideous succession of huge snow-blizzards, blinding polar waves, and these southernmost places, even, are not their usual soft selves. Yet the very south tiptoe of Florida, from which I came three days ago, has an air as of molten liquid velvet, and the palm and the orange, the pine-apple, the scarlet hibiscus, the vast magnolia and the sapphire sea, make it a vision of very considerable beguilement. I wanted to put over to Cuba—but one night from this coast; but it was, for reasons, not to be done—reasons of time and money. I shall try for Mexico—and meanwhile pray for me hard. My visit is doing—has done—my little reputation here, save the mark, great good. The Golden Bowl is in its fourth edition—unprecedented! You see I "answer" your last newses and things not at all—not even the note of anxiety about T. Such are these cruelties, these ferocities of separation. But I drink in everything you tell me, and I cherish you all always and am yours and the children's twain ever so constantly,

HENRY JAMES.

To Edward Warren

University Club,

Chicago.

March 19th, 1905.

Dearest Edward,

This is but a mere breathless blessing hurled at you, as it were, between trains and in ever so grateful joy in your brave double letter (of the lame hand, hero that you are!) which has just overtaken me here. I'm not pretending to write—I can't; it's impossible amid the movement and obsession and complication of all this overwhelming muchness of space and distance and time (consumed,) and above all of people (consuming.) I start in a few hours straight for California—enter my train this, Monday, night 7.30, and reach Los Angeles and Pasadena at 2.30 Thursday afternoon. The train has, I believe, barber's shops, bathrooms, stenographers and typists; so that if I can add a postscript, without too much joggle, I will. But you will say "Here is joggle enough," for alack, I am already (after 17 days of the "great Middle West") rather spent and weary, weary of motion and chatter, and oh, of such an unimagined dreariness of ugliness (on many, on most sides!) and of the perpetual effort of trying to "do justice" to what one doesn't like. If one could only damn it and have done with it! So much of it is rank with good intentions. And then the "kindness"—the princely (as it were) hospitality of these clubs; besides the sense of power, huge and augmenting power (vast mechanical, industrial, social, financial) everywhere! This Chicago is huge, infinite (of potential size and form, and even of actual;) black, smoky, old-looking, very like some preternaturally boomed Manchester or Glasgow lying beside a colossal lake (Michigan) of hard pale green jade, and putting forth railway antennae of maddening complexity and gigantic length. Yet this club (which looks old and sober too!) is an abode of peace, a benediction to me in the looming largeness; I live here, and they put one up (always, everywhere,) with one's so excellent room with perfect bathroom and w.c. of its own, appurtenant (the universal joy of this country, in private houses or wherever; a feature that is really almost a consolation for many things.) I have been to the south, the far end of Florida &c—but prefer the far end of Sussex! In the heart of golden orange-groves I yearned for the shade of the old L.H. mulberry tree. So you see I am loyal, and I sail for Liverpool on July 4th. I go up the whole Pacific coast to Vancouver, and return to New York (am due there April 26th) by the Canadian-Pacific railway (said to be, in its first half, sublime.) But I scribble beyond my time. Your letters are really a blessed breath of brave old Britain. But oh for a talk in a Westminster panelled parlour, or a walk on far-shining Camber sands! All love to Margaret and the younglings. I have again written to Jonathan—he will have more news of me for you. Yours, dearest Edward, almost in nostalgic rage, and at any rate in constant affection,

HENRY JAMES.

To Mrs. William James

Hotel del Coronado,

Coronado Beach, California.

Wednesday night,

April 5th, 1905.

Dearest Alice,

I must write you again before I leave this place (which I do tomorrow noon;) if only to still a little the unrest of my having condemned myself, all too awkwardly, to be so long without hearing from you. I haven't all this while—that is these several days—had the letters which I am believing you will have forwarded to Monterey sent down to me here. This I have abstained from mainly because, having stopped over here these eight or nine days to write, in extreme urgency, an article, and wishing to finish it at any price, I have felt that I should go to pieces as an author if a mass of arrears of postal matter should come tumbling in upon me—and particularly if any of it should be troublous. However, I devoutly hope none of it has been troublous—and I have done my best to let you know (in any need of wiring etc.) where I have been. Also the letterless state has added itself to the deliciously simplified social state to make me taste the charming sweetness and comfort of this spot. California, on these terms, when all is said (Southern C. at least—which, however, the real C., I believe, much repudiates,) has completely bowled me over—such a delicious difference from the rest of the U.S. do I find in it. (I speak of course all of nature and climate, fruits and flowers; for there is absolutely nothing else, and the sense of the shining social and human inane is utter.) The days have been mostly here of heavenly beauty, and the flowers, the wild flowers just now in particular, which fairly rage, with radiance, over the land, are worthy of some purer planet than this. I live on oranges and olives, fresh from the tree, and I lie awake nights to listen, on purpose, to the languid list of the Pacific, which my windows overhang. I wish poor heroic Harry could be here—the thought of whose privations, while I wallow unworthy, makes me (tell him with all my love) miserably sick and poisons much of my profit. I go back to Los Angeles to-morrow, to (as I wrote you last) re-utter my (now loathly) Lecture to a female culture club of 900 members (whom I make pay me through the nose,) and on Saturday p.m. 8th, I shall be at Monterey (Hotel del Monte.) But my stay there is now condemned to bitterest brevity and my margin of time for all the rest of this job is so rapidly shrinking that I see myself brûlant mes étapes, alas, without exception, and cutting down my famous visit to Seattle to a couple of days. It breaks my heart to have so stinted myself here—but it was inevitable, and no one had given me the least inkling that I should find California so sympathetic. It is strange and inconvenient, how little impression of anything any one ever takes the trouble to give one beforehand. I should like to stay here all April and May. But I am writing more than my time permits—my article is still to finish. I ask you no questions—you will have told me everything. I live in the hope that the news from Wm. will have been good. At least at Monterey, may there be some.... But good night—with great and distributed tenderness. Yours, dearest Alice, always and ever,

HENRY JAMES.

To William James

Dictated.

95 Irving Street,

Cambridge, Mass.

July 2nd, 1905.

Dearest W.,

I am ticking this out at you for reasons of convenience that will be even greater for yourself, I think, than for me.... Your good letter of farewell reached me at Lenox, from which I returned but last evening—to learn, however, from A., every circumstance of your departure and of your condition, as known up to date. The grim grey Chicago will now be your daily medium, but will put forth for you, I trust, every such flower of amenity as it is capable of growing. May you not regret, at any point, having gone so far to meet its queer appetites. Alice tells me that you are to go almost straight thence (though with a little interval here, as I sympathetically understand) to the Adirondacks: where I hope for you as big a bath of impersonal Nature as possible, with the tub as little tainted, that is, by the soapsuds of personal: in other words, all the "board" you need, but no boarders. I seem greatly to mislike, not to say deeply to mistrust, the Adirondack boarder....I greatly enjoyed the whole Lenox countryside, seeing it as I did by the aid of the Whartons' big strong commodious new motor, which has fairly converted me to the sense of all the thing may do for one and one may get from it. The potent way it deals with a country large enough for it not to rudoyer, but to rope in, in big free hauls, a huge netful of impressions at once—this came home to me beautifully, convincing me that if I were rich I shouldn't hesitate to take up with it. A great transformer of life and of the future! All that country charmed me; we spent the night at Ashfield and motored back the next day, after a morning there, by an easy circuit of 80 miles between luncheon and a late dinner; a circuit easily and comfortably prolonged for the sake of good roads....But I mustn't rattle on. I have still innumerable last things to do. But the portents are all propitious—absit any ill consequence of this fatuity! I am living, at Alice's instance, mainly on huge watermelon, dug out in spadefuls, yet light to carry. But good bye now. Your last hints for the "Speech" are much to the point, and I will try even thus late to stick them in. May every comfort attend you!

Ever yours,

HENRY JAMES.

To Miss Margaret James

The project of a book on London was never carried further, though certain pages of the autobiographical fragment, The Middle Years, written in 1914-15, no doubt shew the kind of line it would have taken.

Lamb House, Rye.

November 3rd, 1905.

Dearest Peg,

In writing to your father (which, however, I shall not be able to do by this same post) I will tell him a little better what has been happening to me and why I have been so unsociable. This unsociability is in truth all that has been happening—as it has been the reverse of the medal, so to speak, of the great arrears and urgent applications (to work) that awaited me here after I parted with you. I have been working in one way and another with great assiduity, squeezing out my American Book with all desirable deliberation, and yet in a kind of panting dread of the matter of it all melting and fading from me before I have worked it off. It does melt and fade, over here, in the strangest way—and yet I did, I think, while with you, so successfully cultivate the impression and the saturation that even my bare residuum won't be quite a vain thing. I really find in fact that I have more impressions than I know what to do with; so that, evidently, at the rate I am going, I shall have pegged out two distinct volumes instead of one. I have already produced almost the substance of one—which I have been sending to "Harper" and the N.A.R., as per contract; though publication doesn't begin, apparently, in those periodicals till next month. And then (please mention to your Dad) all the time I haven't been doing the American Book, I have been revising with extreme minuteness three or four of my early works for the Edition Définitive (the settlement of some of the details of which seems to be hanging fire a little between my "agent" and my New York publishers; not, however, in a manner to indicate, I think, a real hitch.) Please, however, say nothing whatever, any of you to any one, about the existence of any such plan. These things should be spoken of only when they are in full feather. That for your Dad—I mean the information as well as the warning, in particular; on whom, you see, I am shamelessly working off, after all, a good deal of my letter. Mention to him also that still other tracts of my time, these last silent weeks, have gone, have had to go, toward preparing for a job that I think I mentioned to him while with you—my pledge, already a couple of years old to do a romantical-psychological-pictorial "social" London (of the general form, length, pitch, and "type" of Marion Crawford's Ave Roma Immortalis) for the Macmillans; and I have been feeling so nervous of late about the way America has crowded me off it, that I have had, for assuagement of my nerves, to begin, with piety and prayer, some of the very considerable reading the task will require of me. All this to show you that I haven't been wantonly uncommunicative. But good-night, dear Peg; I am going to do another for Aleck. With copious embraces,

HENRY JAMES.

To H. G. Wells

Lamb House, Rye.

November 19th, 1905.

My dear Wells,

If I take up time and space with telling you why I have not sooner written to thank you for your magnificent bounty, I shall have, properly, to steal it from my letter, my letter itself; a much more important matter. And yet I must say, in three words, that my course has been inevitable and natural. I found your first munificence here on returning from upwards of 11 months in America, toward the end of July—returning to the mountain of arrears produced by almost a year's absence and (superficially, thereby) a year's idleness. I recognized, even from afar (I had already done so) that the Utopia was a book I should desire to read only in the right conditions of coming to it, coming with luxurious freedom of mind, rapt surrender of attention, adequate honours, for it of every sort. So, not bolting it like the morning paper and sundry, many, other vulgarly importunate things, and knowing, moreover, I had already shown you that though I was slow I was safe, and even certain, I "came to it" only a short time since, and surrendered myself to it absolutely. And it was while I was at the bottom of the crystal well that Kipps suddenly appeared, thrusting his honest and inimitable head over the edge and calling down to me, with his note of wondrous truth, that he had business with me above. I took my time, however, there below (though "below" be a most improper figure for your sublime and vertiginous heights,) and achieved a complete saturation; after which, reascending and making out things again, little by little, in the dingy air of the actual, I found Kipps, in his place, awaiting me—and from his so different but still so utterly coercive embrace I have just emerged. It was really very well he was there, for I found (and it's even a little strange) that I could read you only—after you—and don't at all see whom else I could have read. But now that this is so I don't see either, my dear Wells, how I can "write" you about these things—they make me want so infernally to talk with you, to see you at length. Let me tell you, however, simply, that they have left me prostrate with admiration, and that you are, for me, more than ever, the most interesting "literary man" of your generation—in fact, the only interesting one. These things do you, to my sense, the highest honour, and I am lost in amazement at the diversity of your genius. As in everything you do (and especially in these three last Social imaginations), it is the quality of your intellect that primarily (in the Utopia) obsesses me and reduces me—to that degree that even the colossal dimensions of your Cheek (pardon the term that I don't in the least invidiously apply) fails to break the spell. Indeed your Cheek is positively the very sign and stamp of your genius, valuable to-day, as you possess it, beyond any other instrument or vehicle, so that when I say it doesn't break the charm, I probably mean that it largely constitutes it, or constitutes the force: which is the force of an irony that no one else among us begins to have—so that we are starving, in our enormities and fatuities, for a sacred satirist (the satirist with irony—as poor dear old Thackeray was the satirist without it,) and you come, admirably, to save us. There are too many things to say—which is so exactly why I can't write. Cheeky, cheeky, cheeky is any young-man-at-Sandgate's offered Plan for the life of Man—but so far from thinking that a disqualification of your book, I think it is positively what makes the performance heroic. I hold, with you, that it is only by our each contributing Utopias (the cheekier the better) that anything will come, and I think there is nothing in the book truer and happier than your speaking of this struggle of the rare yearning individual toward that suggestion as one of the certain assistances of the future. Meantime you set a magnificent example—of caring, of feeling, of seeing, above all, and of suffering from, and with, the shockingly sick actuality of things. Your epilogue tag in italics strikes me as of the highest, of an irresistible and touching beauty. Bravo, bravo, my dear Wells!

And now, coming to Kipps, what am I to say about Kipps but that I am ready, that I am compelled, utterly to drivel about him? He is not so much a masterpiece as a mere born gem—you having, I know not how, taken a header straight down into mysterious depths of observation and knowledge, I know not which and where, and come up again with this rounded pearl of the diver. But of course you know yourself how immitigably the thing is done—it is of such a brilliancy of true truth. I really think that you have done, at this time of day, two particular things for the first time of their doing among us. (1) You have written the first closely and intimately, the first intelligently and consistently ironic or satiric novel. In everything else there has always been the sentimental or conventional interference, the interference of which Thackeray is full. (2) You have for the very first time treated the English "lower middle" class, etc., without the picturesque, the grotesque, the fantastic and romantic interference of which Dickens, e.g., is so misleadingly, of which even George Eliot is so deviatingly, full. You have handled its vulgarity in so scientific and historic a spirit, and seen the whole thing all in its own strong light. And then the book has throughout such extraordinary life; everyone in it, without exception, and every piece and part of it, is so vivid and sharp and raw. Kipps himself is a diamond of the first water, from start to finish, exquisite and radiant; Coote is consummate, Chitterlow magnificent (the whole first evening with Chitterlow perhaps the most brilliant thing in the book—unless that glory be reserved for the way the entire matter of the shop is done, including the admirable image of the boss.) It all in fine, from cover to cover, does you the greatest honour, and if we had any other than skin-deep criticism (very stupid, too, at that,) it would have immense recognition.

I repeat that these things have made me want greatly to see you. Is it thinkable to you that you might come over at this ungenial season, for a night—some time before Xmas? Could you, would you? I should immensely rejoice in it. I am here till Jan. 31st—when I go up to London for three months. I go away, probably, for four or five days at Xmas—and I go away for next Saturday-Tuesday. But apart from those dates I would await you with rapture.

And let me say just one word of attenuation of my (only apparent) meanness over the Golden Bowl. I was in America when that work appeared, and it was published there in 2 vols. and in very charming and readable form, each vol. but moderately thick and with a legible, handsome, large-typed page. But there came over to me a copy of the London issue, fat, vile, small-typed, horrific, prohibitive, that so broke my heart that I vowed I wouldn't, for very shame, disseminate it, and I haven't, with that feeling, had a copy in the house or sent one to a single friend. I wish I had an American one at your disposition—but I have been again and again depleted of all ownership in respect to it. You are very welcome to the British brick if you, at this late day, will have it.

I greet Mrs Wells and the Third Party very cordially and am yours, my dear Wells, more than ever,

HENRY JAMES.