The Portable Henry James

  À toi H.J. jr

  Henry James, expatriate

  Although no one quite recognized it at the time, James’s permanent residency in England had just begun.

  To the James family, November 1, 1875, from London

  Dear People all—

  I take possession of the old world—I inhale it—I appropriate it! I have been in it now these twenty-four hours, having arrived at Liverpool yesterday at noon. It is now two o’clock, and I am sitting, in the livid light of a London November Sunday, before a copious fire, in my own particular sitting-room, at the establishment mentioned above. I took the afternoon train from Liverpool yesterday, and having telegraphed in advance, sat down at 10 P.M. to cold roast beef, bread and cheese and ale in this cosy corner of Britain. I have been walking up Piccadilly this morning, and into Hyde Park, to get my land-legs on; I am duly swathed and smoked and chilled, and feel as if I had been here for ten years.—Of course you got my letter from Sandy Hook, and learned that my voyage began comfortably. I am sorry to say it didn’t continue so, and I spent my nights and my days declaring that the sea shouldn’t catch me again for at least twenty years. But of course I have already forgotten all that and the watery gulf has closed over my miseries. Our voyage was decently rapid (just 10 days) owing to favoring winds; but the winds were boisterous gales, and after the second day we tumbled and tossed all the way across. I was as usual, but I kept pretty steadily on deck, and with my rugs and my chair, managed to worry thro’. The steamer is a superb one, but she was uncomfortably crowded, and she presumably bounced about more than was needful. I was not conversational and communed but little with my multitudinous passengers. My chief interlocutor was Mrs. Lester Wallack, whose principal merit is that she is the sister of Millais the painter. She offers to take me to his studio if he returns to town before I have—which he won’t. We had also Anthony Trollope, who wrote novels in his state room all the morning (he does it literally every morning of his life, no matter where he may be,) and played cards with Mrs. Bronson all the evening. He has a gross and repulsive face and manner, but appears bon enfant when you talk with him. But he is the dullest Briton of them all. Nothing happened, but I loathed and despised the sea more than ever. I managed to eat a good deal in one way and another, and found it, when once I got it well under way, the best help to tranquillity. It isn’t the eating that hurts one, but the stopping. —I shall remain in this place at most a week. It is the same old big black London, and seems, as always, half delicious, half dismal. I am profoundly comfortable, thanks to Mr. Story, the usual highly respectable retired butler, who gives me a sitting room, a bedroom, attendance, lights and fire, for three guineas a week. Everything is of the best, and it is a very honorable residence. Why didn’t Aunt Kate and Alice bring me here in ’72? I shall probably start for Paris a week from tomorrow, and hope to find there a line from home. If anything very interesting befalls me here I will write again, but in my unfriended condition this is not probable. I hope the Western journey has been safely and smoothly executed and count upon hearing full particulars. If Aunt Kate has gone to New York let her see this. Each of you hold Dido an hour against your heart for me. The sight of all the pretty genteel dogs in Hyde Park a while since brought tears to my eyes. I think that if I could have had Dido in my berth I would have been quite well. But perhaps she would have been sea-sick. I have been haunted since I left home by the recollection of three small unpaid bills, which I pray mother to settle for me.

  1.At Dollard’s, the cobbler’s. About 2 dollars.

  2.Schönhof and Moellers. About $3.00

  3d. At Smith’s, the tailor’s, 7$ for that summer coat: not 7.50,

  as his bill said, which I left on my bedroom table. Excuse these sordid details. This sitting still to write makes me swim and roll about most damnably. Your all-affectionate

  H. James jr.

  The literary scene in Paris

  The enduring friendship between James and William Dean Howells began in 1866 and was nurtured by many shared interests beyond that of the novel, for Howells also had a passion for travel, and especially for France. During a thirteen-month stay in Paris from 1875 to 1876, James published numerous social and artistic letters for the New York Tribune.

  To William Dean Howells, May 28, 1876,

  from Paris

  Dear Howells—

  I have just received (an hour ago) your letter of May 14th. I shall be very glad to do my best to divide my story so that it will make twelve numbers, and I think I shall probably succeed. Of course 26 pp. is an impossible instalment for the magazine. I had no idea the second number would make so much, though I half expected your remonstrance. I shall endeavour to give you about 14 pp., and to keep doing it for seven or eight months more. I sent you the other day a fourth part, a portion of which, I suppose, you will allot to the fifth.

  My heart was touched by your regret that I hadn’t given you “a great deal of my news”—though my reason suggested that I couldn’t have given you what there was not to give. “La plus belle fille du monde ne peut donner que ce qu’elle a.” I turn out news in very small quantities—it is impossible to imagine an existence less pervaded with any sort of chiaroscuro. I am turning into an old, and very contented, Parisian: I feel as if I had struck roots into the Parisian soil, and were likely to let them grow tangled and tenacious there. It is a very comfortable and profitable place, on the whole—I mean, especially, on its general and cosmopolitan side. Of pure Parisianism I see absolutely nothing. The great merit of the place is that one can arrange one’s life here exactly as one pleases—that there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and that everything is accepted and understood. Paris itself meanwhile is a sort of painted background which keeps shifting and changing, and which is always there, to be looked at when you please, and to be most easily and comfortably ignored when you don’t. All this, if you were only here, you would feel much better than I can tell you—and you would write some happy piece of your prose about it which would make me feel it better, afresh. Ergo, come—when you can! I shall probably be here still. Of course every good thing is still better in spring, and in spite of much mean weather I have been liking Paris these last weeks more than ever. In fact I have accepted destiny here, under the vernal influence. If you sometimes read my poor letters in the Tribune, you get a notion of some of the things I see and do. I suppose also you get some gossip about me from Quincy Street. Besides this there is not a great deal to tell. I have seen a certain number of people all winter who have helped to pass the time, but I have formed but one or two relations of permanent value, and which I desire to perpetuate. I have seen almost nothing of the literary fraternity, and there are fifty reasons why I should not become intimate with them. I don’t like their wares, and they don’t like any others; and besides, they are not accueillants. Tourguéneff is worth the whole heap of them, and yet he himself swallows them down in a manner that excites my extreme wonder. But he is the most loveable of men and takes all things easily. He is so pure and strong a genius that he doesn’t need to be on the defensive as regards his opinions and enjoyments. The mistakes he may make don’t hurt him. His modesty and naïveté are simply infantine. I gave him some time since the message you sent him, and he bade me to thank you very kindly and to say that he had the most agreeable memory of your two books. He has just gone to Russia to bury himself for two or three months on his estate, and try and finish a long novel he has for three or four years been working upon. I hope to heaven he may. I suspect he works little here.

  I interrupted this a couple of hours since to go out and pay a visit to Gustave Flaubert, it being his time of receiving, and his last Sunday in Paris, and I owing him a farewell. He is a very fine old fellow, and the most interesting man and strongest artist of his circle. I had him for an hour alone, and then came in his “following,” talking much of Émile Zola’s catastrophe—Zola having just had a serial novel for which he was being handsomely paid interrupted on account of protests fro
m provincial subscribers against its indecency. The opinion apparently was that it was a bore, but that it could only do the book good on its appearance in a volume. Among your tribulations as editor, I take it that this particular one at least is not in store for you. On my [way] down from Flaubert’s I met poor Zola climbing the staircase, looking very pale and sombre, and I saluted him with the flourish natural to a contributor who has just been invited to make his novel last longer yet.

  Warner has come back to Paris, after an apparently rapturous fortnight in London, and the other morning breakfasted with me—but I have not seen him since, and I imagine he has reverted to London. He is conspicuously amiable. I have seen no other Americans all winter—men at least. There are no men here to see but horribly effeminate and empty-pated little crevés. But there are some very nice women.—I went yesterday to see a lady whom and whose intérieur it is a vast pity you shouldn’t behold for professional purposes: a certain Baroness Blaze de Bury—a (supposed) illegitimate daughter of Lord Brougham. She lives in a queer old mouldy, musty rez de chaussée in the depths of the Faubourg St. Germain, is the grossest and most audacious lion-huntress in all creation and has the two most extraordinary little French, emancipated daughters. One of these, wearing a Spanish mantilla, and got up apparently to dance the cachacha, presently asked me what I thought of incest as a subject for a novel—adding that it had against it that it was getting, in families, so terribly common. Basta! But both figures and setting are a curious picture.—I rejoice in the dawning of your dramatic day, and wish I might be at the première of your piece at Daly’s. I give it my tenderest good wishes—but I wish you had told me more about it, and about your comedy. Why (since the dramatic door stands so wide open to you) do you print the latter before having it acted? This, from a Parisian point of view, seems quite monstrous. —

  Your inquiry “Why I don’t go to Spain?” is sublime—is what Philip Van Artevelde says of the Lake of Como, “softly sublime, profusely fair!” I shall spend my summer in the most tranquil and frugal hole I can unearth in France, and I have no prospect of travelling for some time to come. The Waverley Oaks seem strangely far away—yet I remember them well, and the day we went there. I am sorry I am not to see your novel sooner, but I applaud your energy in proposing to change it. The printed thing always seems to me dead and done with. I suppose you will write something about Philadelphia—I hope so, as otherwise I am afraid I shall know nothing about it. I salute your wife and children a thousand times and wish you an easy and happy summer and abundant inspiration.

  Yours very faithfully, H. James Jr.

  Growing fame

  Miss Alger’s invitation came when The Portrait of a Lady was near the end of its serialization in the Atlantic Monthly, but James’s authority concerning the question of “the American girl” had been well established since the publication of Daisy Miller: A Study. For most of his career James was shy of the lecture stage, but during his 1904-1905 American tour he did in fact speak, on “The Question of Our Speech,” to young women graduating from Bryn Mawr College.

  To Miss Abbey Alger, November 21, 1881,

  from Cambridge, Massachusetts

  Dear Madam

  I am extremely obliged to you for the honour you do me in inviting me to address an audience of seventy young women at the Saturday morning club; but hasten to assure you that the absence of a topic, the entire want of the habit of public speaking, the formidable character of the assembly, and an extremely personal diffidence, present themselves to me as cogent reasons for refusing myself the distinction you so kindly place within my reach. I remain, with many thanks, regrets and compliments, and the request that you will assure the ladies of the Saturday morning club of my extreme consideration,

  Very respectfully yours Henry James Jr.

  The friendship with Robert Louis Stevenson

  James first met Stevenson in 1885. When Stevenson died in Samoa of tuberculosis, James wrote to his widow that “He lighted up a whole province of the globe and was in himself a whole province of one’s imagination.”

  To Robert Louis Stevenson, July 31, 1888, from London

  My dear Louis.

  You are too far away—you are too absent—too invisible, inaudible, inconceivable. Life is too short a business and friendship too delicate a matter for such tricks—for cutting great gory masses out of ’em by the year at a time. Therefore come back. Hang it all—sink it all and come back. A little more and I shall cease to believe in you: I don’t mean (in the usual implied phrase) in your veracity, but literally and more fatally in your relevancy—your objective reality. You have become a beautiful myth—a kind of unnatural uncomfortable unburied mort. You put forth a beautiful monthly voice, with such happy notes in it—but it comes from too far away, from the other side of the globe, while I vaguely know that you are crawling like a fly on the nether surface of my chair. Your adventures, no doubt, are wonderful, but I don’t successfully evoke them, understand them, believe in them. I do in those you write, heaven knows—but I don’t in those you perform, though the latter, I know, are to lead to new revelations of the former and your capacity for them is certainly wonderful enough. This is a selfish personal cry: I wish you back; for literature is lonely and Bournemouth is barren without you. Your place in my affection has not been usurped by another—for there is not the least little scrap of another to usurp it. If there were I would perversely try to care for him. But there isn’t—I repeat, and I literally care for nothing but your return. I haven’t even your novel to stay my stomach withal. The wan wet months elapse and I see no sign of it. The beautiful portrait of your wife shimmers at me from my chimney-piece—brought some months ago by the natural Mc-Clure—but seems to refer to one as dim and distant and delightful as a “toast” of the last century. I wish I could make you homesick—I wish I could spoil your fun. It is a very featureless time. The summer is rank with rheumatism—a dark, drowned, unprecedented season. The town is empty but I am not going away. I have no money, but I have a little work. I have lately written several short fictions—but you may not see them unless you come home. I have just begun a novel which is to run through the Atlantic from January 1st and which I aspire to finish by the end of this year. In reality I suppose I shall not be fully delivered of it before the middle of next. After that, with God’s help, I propose, for a longish period, to do nothing but short lengths. I want to leave a multitude of pictures of my time, projecting my small circular frame upon as many different spots as possible and going in for number as well as quality, so that the number may constitute a total having a certain value as observation and testimony. But there isn’t so much as a creature here even to whisper such an intention to. Nothing lifts its hand in these islands save blackguard party politics. Criticism is of an object density and puerility—it doesn’t exist—it writes the intellect of our race too low. Lang, in the D[aily] N[ews], every morning, and I believe in a hundred other places, uses his beautiful thin facility to write everything down to the lowest level of Philistine twaddle—the view of the old lady round the corner or the clever person at the dinner party. The incorporated society of authors (I belong to it, and so do you, I think, but I don’t know what it is) gave a dinner the other night to American literati to thank them for praying for international copyright. I carefully forbore to go, thinking the gratulation premature, and I see by this morning’s Times that the banquetted boon is further off than ever. Edmund Gosse has sent me his clever little life of Congreve, just out, and I have read it—but it isn’t so good as his Raleigh. But no more of the insufferable subject. I see—or have lately seen—Colvin in the mazes of the town—defeated of his friends’ hope for him of the headship of the museum—but bearing the scarcely-doubted-of loss with a gallantry which still marks him out for honourable preferment. I believe he has had domestic annoyances of a grave order—some embroilment in the City, of his feckless brother and consequent loss of income to his Mother etc.—Of all this however, I have only vague knowledge—only eno
ugh to be struck with the fine way he is not worsted by it. We always talk of you—but more and more as a fact not incontestable. “Some say he is going to such and such a place—there is a legend in another quarter that he was last heard of—or that it is generally supposed—” But it is weak, disheartened stuff. Come, my dear Louis, grow not too thin. I can’t question you—because, as I say, I don’t conjure you up. You have killed the imagination in me—that part of it which formed your element and in which you sat vivid and near. Your wife and Mother and Mr. Lloyd suffer also—I must confess it—by this failure of breath, of faith. Of course I have your letter—from Manasquan (is that the idiotic name?) of the—ingenuous me, to think there was a date! It was terribly impersonal—it did me little good. A little more and I shan’t believe in you enough to bless you. Take this, therefore, as your last chance. I follow all with an aching wing, an inadequate geography and an ineradicable hope. Ever, my dear Louis, yours, to the last snub—