To Mrs. Waldo Story.
The book to which the following refers is of course William Wetmore Story and his Friends, published in 1903.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
Jan. 6th, 1903.
Dear Mrs. Waldo,
Let my first word be to ask you to pardon this vulgar machinery and this portentous legibility: the fruit of dictation, in the first place (now made absolutely necessary to me;) and the fruit, in the second place, of the fact that, pegging away as I am at present, in your interest and Waldo's (and with the end of our business now, I am happy to say, well in sight), I so live, as it were, from day to day and from hour to hour, by the aid of this mechanism, that it is an effort to me to break with it even for my correspondence. I had promised myself to write you so that you should receive my letter on the very Capo d'Anno; and if I had then overcome my scruple as to launching at you a dictated thing, you would some time ere this have been in possession of my news. I have delayed till now because I was every day hoping to catch the right moment to address you a page or two of my own proper hieroglyphics. But one's Christmas-tide burden (of writing) here is heavy; I didn't snatch the moment; and this is a brave precaution lest it should again elude me; which, in the interest of lucidity, please again forgive.
So much as that about a minor matter. The more important one is that, as you will both be glad to know, I have (in spite of a most damnable interruption of several weeks, this autumn, a detested compulsion to attend, for the time, to something else) got on so straight with the Book that three quarters of it are practically written, and four or five weeks more will see me, I calculate, at the end of the matter.... All the material I received from you has been of course highly useful—indispensable; yet, none the less, all of it put together was not material for a Biography pure and simple. The subject itself didn't lend itself to that, in the strict sense of the word: and I had to make out, for myself, what my material did lend itself to. I have, I think, made out successfully and happily; if I haven't, at any rate, it has not been for want of a great expenditure of zeal, pains, taste (though I say it who shouldn't!) and talent! But the Book will, without doubt, be an agreeable and, in a literary sense, really artistic and honourable one. I shall not have made you all so patiently, amiably, admirably wait so long for nothing.... I have looked at the picture, as it were, given me by all your material, as a picture—the image or evocation, charming, heterogeneous, and a little ghostly, of a great cluster of people, a society practically extinct, with Mr. and Mrs. Story, naturally, all along, the centre, the pretext, so to speak, and the point d'appui. This course was the only one open to me—it was imposed with absolute logic. The Book was not makeable at all unless I used the letters of other people, and the letters of other people were useable with effect only so far as I could more or less evoke and present the other people....
But I am writing you at hideous length—and crowding out all space for matters more personal to ourselves. When once the Book is out I shall want, I shall need, exceedingly, to see you all; and I don't think that, unless some morbid madness settles on me, I shall fear to. But that is arrangeable and shall be arranged.... My blessing on all of you.
Yours, dear Mrs. Waldo, most faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.