HENRY JAMES.
14th August.
P.S. The hand of Providence guided me, after finishing the preceding, to which the present is postscriptal, to keep it over a few days instead of posting it directly: so possible I thought it that I might have something more definite to add—and I was a little nervous about the way I had left our question. Behold then I have then to add that I have just received your letter of August 4—which so simplifies our situation that this accompanying stuff becomes almost superfluous. But I have let it go for the sake of the interest, the almost top-heavy mass of response that it embodies. Let us put it then that all is for the moment for the best in this worst of possible worlds; all the more that had I not just now been writing you exactly as I am, I should probably—and thanks, precisely, to the lapse of days—be stammering to you the ungraceful truth that, after I wrote you, my tale of terror did, as I was so more than half fearing, give way beneath me. It has, in short, broken down for the present. I am laying it away on the shelf for the sake of something that is in it, but that I am now too embarrassed and preoccupied to devote more time to pulling out. I really shouldn't wonder if it be not still, in time and place, to make the world sit up; but the curtain is dropped for the present. All thanks for your full and prompt statement of how the scene has shifted for you. There is no harm done, and I don't regard the three weeks spent on my renewed wrestle as wasted—I have, within three or four days, rebounded from them with such relief, vaulting into another saddle and counting, D.V., on a straighter run. I have two begun novels: which will give me plenty to do for the present—they being of the type of the "serious" which I am too delighted to see you speak of as lifting again ... its downtrodden head. I mean, at any rate, I assure you, to lift mine! Your extremely, touchingly kind offer to find moments of your precious time for "handling" something I might send you is altogether too momentous for me to let me fail of feeling almost ashamed that I haven't something—the ghost or t'other stuff—in form, already, to enable me to respond to your generosity "as meant." But heaven only knows what may happen yet! For the moment, I must peg away at what I have in hand—biggish stuff, I fear, in bulk and possible unserialisability, to saddle you withal. But thanks, thanks thanks. Delighted to hear of one of your cold waves—the newspapers here invidiously mentioning none but your hot. We have them all, moreover, réchauffées, as soon as you have done with them; and we are just sitting down to one now. I dictate you this in my shirtsleeves and in a draught which fails of strength—chilling none of the pulses of yours gratefully and affectionately,
HENRY JAMES.
To W. E. Norris.
Lamb House, Rye,
September 26th, 1900.
My dear Norris,
Charming and "gracious" your letter, and welcome sign of your restoration in more senses than one. Though I see you, alas, nowadays, at such intervals, I feel this extremely individual little island to be appreciably less its characteristic self when you are away from it, and sensibly more so, and breathing the breath of relief, when it gets you back and plumps you down with a fond "There!" on your high hilltop, a beacon-like depository of traditions no one else so admirably embodies. Your invitation to come and share for a few days your paradise with you finds me, I am very sorry to say, in a hindered and helpless moment. I am obliged to recognise the stern fact that I can't leave home just now. I have had a complicated and quite overwhelmed summer—agreeably, interestingly, anxiously and worriedly, even; but inevitably and logically—waves of family history, a real deluge, having rolled over my bowed head and left me, as to the question of work, production, time, ease and other matters, quite high and dry. I went on Saturday last to Dover to see my sister-in-law off to the Continent—and as she took a night boat had to stop there over Sunday, at the too-familiar (and too other things) Lord Warden; after which I came back to bury (yes, bury!) my precious, my admirable little Peter, whom I think you had met. (He passed away on Sunday at St. Leonard's, fondly attended by the local "canine specialist"—after three days of dreadful little dysentery.) Thus is constituted the first moment of my being by myself for about four months. It may last none too long, and is, already, to be tempered by the palpable presence of Gosse from Saturday p.m. to Monday next. So, with arrears untold, in every direction, with preoccupations but just temporarily arranged, I feel that I absolutely must sit close for a good many weeks to come; in fact till the New Year—after which I depart. I don't quite know what becomes of me then, but I don't, distinctly, for a third year, hibernate here. My London rooms are as probably as sordidly let for 1901 (though not to a certainty,) and it will (my wretched fate—not fat—fate) depend more or less upon that. My brother, ill, but thank God, better, wants me to come to Egypt with him and his wife for 12 weeks—his health demanding it, but he only going if I will accompany him. So the pistol is at my head. Will it bring me down? I've a positive terror of it. The alternatives are Rome (of which I've a still greater terror than of Egypt, for it's an equal complication and less reward,) or De Vere Gardens, or a more squalid perch in town if De V.G. are closed to me. The latter, the last-named, doom is what I really want. If I should, clingingly, clutchingly, stick to these shores, I might then, were it agreeable to you, be able to put in three days of Underbank, which I've never seen in its tragic winter mood. But these things are in the lap of the gods.
Later, same night.