Henry James
The death of William James
In 1910 James found himself in the grip of a “black depression.” During the spring, his brother William crossed the ocean with his wife, Alice, partly to raise Henry’s spirits, partly to see if the cure at Bad Nauheim in Germany could improve his own failing health. While staying in Switzerland, Henry and William received news of the death of their brother Robertson back in the United States. When William and Alice sailed home in August, Henry went with them. Two weeks later William James died at his New Hampshire home.
To Thomas Sergeant Perry, September 2, 1910,
from Chocorua, New Hampshire
My dear old Thomas.
I sit heavily stricken and in darkness—for from far back in dimmest childhood he had been my ideal Elder Brother, and I still, through all the years, saw in him, even as a small timorous boy yet, my protector, my backer, my authority and my pride. His extinction changes the face of life for me—besides the mere missing of his inexhaustible company and personality, originality, the whole unspeakably vivid and beautiful presence of him. And his noble intellectual vitality was still but at its climax—he had two or three ardent purposes and plans. He had cast them away, however, at the end—I mean that, dreadfully suffering, he wanted only to die. Alice and I had a bitter pilgrimage with him from far off—he sank here, on his threshold; and then it went horribly fast. I cling for the present to them—and so try to stay here through this month. After that I shall be with them in Cambridge for several more—we shall cleave more together. I should like to come and see you for a couple of days much, but it would have to be after the 20th, or even October 1st, I think; and I fear you may not then be still in villeggiatura. If so I will come. You knew him—among those living now—from furthest back with me. Yours and Lilla’s all faithfully,
Henry James
To H. G. Wells, September 11, 1910,
from Chocorua, New Hampshire
My dear Wells.
We greatly value, my sister-in-law and I, your beautiful and tender letter about my beloved Brother and our irreparable loss. Be very gratefully thanked for it, and know we are deeply moved by your admirably-expressed sense of what he was, so nobly and magnanimously. He did surely shed light to man, and gave, of his own great spirit and beautiful genius, with splendid generosity. Of my personal loss—the extinction of so shining a presence in my own life, and from so far back (really from dimmest childhood) I won’t pretend to speak. He had an inexhaustible authority for me, and I feel abandoned and afraid, even as a lost child. But he is a possession, of real magnitude, and I shall find myself still living upon him to the end. My life, thank God, is impregnated with him. My sister-in-law and his children are very interesting and absorbing to me, and I shall stay on here (in America I mean) for some months—so that we may hold and cling together. And I hope in the future never to be without some of them. When I return to England I shall see you promptly—and you have perhaps meanwhile an inadequate idea of the moral and aesthetic greed (enriched by criticism) with which I read you. Yours all faithfully
Henry James
The publication of Boon, and the break with H. G. Wells
Although Henry James and H. G. Wells had been friends since 1898, in 1914 Wells took offense when, in “The Younger Generation” (revised as “The New Novel”), James noted the “robust pitch” of the much younger man’s work but included him with those insufficiently artistic writers who produced “affluents turbid and unrestrained.” Wells considered himself primarily a novelist of ideas, not forms, and his Boon soon attacked James as “the culmination of the Superficial type” and, stylistically, a “painful hippopotamus.”
To H. G. Wells, July 6, 1915, from London
My dear Wells.
I was given yesterday at a club your volume Boon, etc., from a loose leaf in which I learn that you kindly sent it me and which yet appears to have lurked there for a considerable time undelivered. I have just been reading, to acknowledge it intelligently, a considerable number of its pages—though not all; for, to be perfectly frank, I have been in that respect beaten for the first time—or rather for the first time but one—by a book of yours: I haven’t found the current of it draw me on and on this time—as unfailingly and irresistibly before (which I have repeatedly let you know). However, I shall try again—I hate to lose any scrap of you that may make for light or pleasure; and meanwhile I have more or less mastered your appreciation of H.J., which I have found very curious and interesting, after a fashion—though it has naturally not filled me with a fond elation. It is difficult of course for a writer to put himself fully in the place of another writer who finds him extraordinarily futile and void, and who is moved to publish that to the world—and I think the case isn’t easier when he happens to have enjoyed the other writer enormously, from far back; because there has then grown up the habit of taking some common meeting-ground between them for granted, and the falling away of this is like the collapse of a bridge which made communication possible. But I am by nature more in dread of any fool’s paradise, or at least of any bad misguidedness, than in love with the idea of a security proved and the fact that a mind as brilliant as yours can resolve me into such an unmitigated mistake, can’t enjoy me in anything like the degree in which I like to think I may be enjoyed, makes me greatly want to fix myself, for as long as my nerves will stand it, with such a pair of eyes. I am aware of certain things I have, and not less conscious, I believe, of various others that I am simply reduced to wish I did or could have; so I try, for possible light, to enter into the feelings of a critic for whom the deficiencies so preponderate. The difficulty about that effort, however, is that one can’t keep it up—one has to fall back on one’s sense of one’s good parts—one’s own sense; and I at least should have to do that, I think, even if your picture were painted with a more searching brush. For I should otherwise seem to forget what it is that my poetic and my appeal to experience rest upon. They rest upon my measure of fulness—fulness of life and of the projection of it, which seems to you such an emptiness of both. I don’t mean to say I don’t wish I could do twenty things I can’t—many of which you do so livingly; but I confess I ask myself what would become in that case of some of those to which I am most addicted and by which interest seems to me most beautifully producible. I hold that interest may be, must be, exquisitely made and created, and that if we don’t make it, we who undertake to, nobody and nothing will make it for us; though nothing is more possible, nothing may even be more certain, than that my quest of it, my constant wish to run it to earth, may entail the sacrifice of certain things that are not on the straight line of it. However, there are too many things to say, and I don’t think your chapter is really inquiring enough to entitle you to expect all of them. The fine thing about the fictional form to me is that it opens such widely different windows of attention; but that is just why I like the window so to frame the play and the process!
Faithfully yours Henry James
To H. G. Wells, July 10, 1915, from London
My dear Wells.
I am bound to tell you that I don’t think your letter makes out any sort of case for the bad manners of Boon, so far as your indulgence in them at the expense of your poor old H.J. is concerned—I say “your” simply because he has been yours, in the most liberal, continual, sacrificial, the most admiring and abounding critical way, ever since he began to know your writings: as to which you have had copious testimony. Your comparison of the book to a wastebasket strikes me as the reverse of felicitous, for what one throws into that receptacle is exactly what one doesn’t commit to publicity and make the affirmation of one’s estimate of one’s contemporaries by. I should liken it much rather to the preservative portfolio or drawer in which what is withheld from the basket is savingly laid away. Nor do I feel it anywhere evident that my “view of life and literature,” or what you impute to me as such, is carrying everything before it and becoming a public menace—so unaware do I seem, on the con
trary, that my products constitute an example in any measurable degree followed or a cause in any degree successfully pleaded: I can’t but think that if this were the case I should find it somewhat attested in their circulation—which, alas, I have reached a very advanced age in the entirely defeated hope of. But I have no view of life and literature, I maintain, other than that our form of the latter in especial is admirable exactly by its range and variety, its plasticity and liberality, its fairly living on the sincere and shifting experience of the individual practitioner. That is why I have always so admired your so free and strong application of it, the particular rich receptacle of intelligences and impressions emptied out with an energy of its own, that your genius constitutes; and that is in particular why, in my letter of two or three days since, I pronounced it curious and interesting that you should find the case I constitute myself only ridiculous and vacuous to the extent of your having to proclaim your sense of it. The curiosity and the interest, however, in this latter connection are of course for my mind those of the break of perception (perception of the vivacity of my variety) on the part of a talent so generally inquiring and apprehensive as yours. Of course for myself I live, live intensely and am fed by life, and my value, whatever it be, is in my own kind of expression of that. Therefore I am pulled up to wonder by the fact that for you my kind (my sort of sense of expression and sort of sense of life alike) doesn’t exist; and that wonder is, I admit, a disconcerting comment on my idea of the various appreciability of our addiction to the novel and of all the personal and intellectual history, sympathy and curiosity, behind the given example of it. It is when that history and curiosity have been determined in the way most different from my own that I myself want to get at them—precisely for the extension of life, which is the novel’s best gift. But that is another matter. Meanwhile I absolutely dissent from the claim that there are any differences whatever in the amenability to art of forms of literature aesthetically determined, and hold your distinction between a form that is (like) painting and a form that is (like) architecture for wholly null and void. There is no sense in which architecture is aesthetically “for use” that doesn’t leave any other art whatever exactly as much so; and so far from that of literature being irrelevant to the literary report upon life, and to its being made as interesting as possible, I regard it as relevant in a degree that leaves everything else behind. It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. If I were Boon I should say that any pretence of such a substitute is helpless and hopeless humbug; but I wouldn’t be Boon for the world, and am only yours faithfully
Henry James
VII
DEFINITION AND DESCRIPTION
Although in 1886 Thomas Hardy judged that Henry James had “a ponderously warm way of saying nothing in infinite sentences,” he eventually would consider the mature writer to be the finest living novelist and a master at the “extraordinary complicated texture of subtle thoughts and minute sensations.” In fact, at every stage of his career, Henry James produced a prose that was often startling in wit and force—as well as in subtlety—and his syntax was rarely as labyrinthine as some have claimed. The following passages, a number of them taken from long novels that could not be included in this edition, suggest the precision of James’s language, as well as the evolution of his matchless cadence.
An American encounters some aristocrats
From The American, 1877. Christopher Newman—an American who has made his fortune and now wants a wife—pays a visit to the home of Comtesse Claire de Bellegarde de Cintré.
He walked across the Seine, late in the summer afternoon, and made his way through those gray and silent streets of the Faubourg St. Germain whose houses present to the outer world a face as impassive and as suggestive of the concentration of privacy within as the blank walls of Eastern seraglios. Newman thought it a queer way for rich people to live; his ideal of grandeur was a splendid façade, diffusing its brilliancy outward too, irradiating hospitality. The house to which he had been directed had a dark, dusty, painted portal, which swung open in answer to his ring. It admitted him into a wide, graveled court, surrounded on three sides with closed windows, and with a doorway facing the street, approached by three steps and surmounted by a tin canopy. The place was all in the shade; it answered to Newman’s conception of a convent. The portress could not tell him whether Madame de Cintré was visible; he would please to apply at the farther door. He crossed the court; a gentleman was sitting, bareheaded, on the steps of the portico, playing with a beautiful pointer. He rose as Newman approached, and, as he laid his hand upon the bell, said with a smile, in English, that he was afraid Newman would be kept waiting; the servants were scattered, he himself had been ringing, he didn’t know what the deuce was in them. He was a young man, his English was excellent, and his smile very frank. Newman pronounced the name of Madame de Cintré.
“I think,” said the young man, “that my sister is visible. Come in, and if you will give me your card I will carry it to her myself.”
Newman had been accompanied on his present errand by a slight sentiment, I will not say of defiance—a readiness for aggression or defense, as they might prove needful—but of reflective, good-humored suspicion. He took from his pocket, while he stood on the portico, a card upon which, under his name, he had written the words “San Francisco,” and while he presented it he looked warily at his interlocutor. His glance was singularly reassuring; he liked the young man’s face; it strongly resembled that of Madame de Cintré. He was evidently her brother. The young man, on his side, had made a rapid inspection of Newman’s person. He had taken the card and was about to enter the house with it when another figure appeared on the threshold—an older man, of a fine presence, wearing evening dress. He looked hard at Newman, and Newman looked at him. “Madame de Cintré,” the younger man repeated, as an introduction of the visitor. The other took the card from his hand, read it in a rapid glance, looked again at Newman from head to foot, hesitated a moment, and then said, gravely but urbanely, “Madame de Cintré is not at home.”
The younger man made a gesture, and then, turning to Newman, “I am very sorry, sir,” he said.
Newman gave him a friendly nod, to show that he bore him no malice, and retraced his steps. At the porter’s lodge he stopped; the two men were still standing on the portico.
“Who is the gentleman with the dog?” he asked of the old woman who reappeared. He had begun to learn French.
“That is Monsieur le Comte.”
“And the other?”
“That is Monsieur le Marquis.”
“A marquis?” said Christopher in English, which the old woman fortunately did not understand. “Oh, then he’s not the butler!”
An ambitious young Frenchwoman
From The American, 1877. Newman cautions Claire de Cintré’s brother, Count Valentin de Bellegarde, concerning an attractive young social climber.
“Hanged if I should want to have a greedy little adventuress like that know I was giving myself such pains about her!” said Newman.
“A pretty woman is always worth one’s pains,” objected Valentin. “Mademoiselle Nioche is welcome to be tickled by my curiosity, and to know that I am tickled that she is tickled. She is not so much tickled, by the way.”
“You had better go and tell her,” Newman rejoined. “She gave me a message for you of some such drift.”
“Bless your quiet imagination,” said Valentin, “I have been to see her—three times in five days. She is a charming hostess; we talk of Shakespeare and the musical glasses. She is extremely clever and a very curious type; not at all coarse or wanting to be coarse; determined not to be. She means to take very good care of herself. She is extremely perfect; she is as hard and clear-cut as some little figure of a sea-nymph in an antique intaglio, and I will warrant that she has not a grain more of sentiment or heart than if she were s
cooped out of a big amethyst. You can’t scratch her even with a diamond. Extremely pretty,—really, when you know her, she is wonderfully pretty,—intelligent, determined, ambitious, unscrupulous, capable of looking at a man strangled without changing color, she is, upon my honor, extremely entertaining.”
“It’s a fine list of attractions,” said Newman; “they would serve as a police-detective’s description of a favorite criminal. I should sum them up by another word than ‘entertaining.’ ”
“Why, that is just the word to use. I don’t say she is laudable or lovable. I don’t want her as my wife or my sister. But she is a very curious and ingenious piece of machinery; I like to see it in operation.”
“Well, I have seen some very curious machines, too,” said Newman; “and once, in a needle factory, I saw a gentleman from the city, who had stepped too near one of them, picked up as neatly as if he had been prodded by a fork, swallowed down straight, and ground into small pieces.”
Sarah Bernhardt, the muse of the newspaper
From “The Comédie Française in London,” 1879. Acclaimed as France’s greatest actress, Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) received little praise from James, who judged her more as a phenomenon than as an actress. Even after her leg was amputated in 1915, she continued to perform and attract attention.