For the rest, I have been trying to sit tight and get on with work that has been much retarded, these two months, and much interrupted and blighted.... I hope you will be able to give me, when we next meet, as good an account of your adventures and emotions. I have taken again the liberty of this machinery with you, for having broken in your great amiability I don't want to waste my advantage. Wherever you are buon divertimento! I really hope for you that you are in town, which has resources and defences against this execrable August that the bare bosom of Nature, as we mainly know it here, sadly lacks.
Believe me yours always,
HENRY JAMES.
To W. E. Norris.
Lamb House, Rye.
September 17th, 1903.
My dear Norris,
Your letter from the unpronounceable Japanese steamer is magnificent—so magnificent, so appreciated and so felt, that it really almost has an effect contrary to the case it incidentally urges—the effect of undermining my due disposition to write to you! Your adventures by land and sea, your commerce with the great globe, your grand imperial and cosmic life, hover before me on your admirable page to make me ask what you can possibly want of the small beer of any chronicle of mine. My "beer," always, to my sense, of the smallest, sinks to positively ignoble dregs in the presence of your splendid record—of which I think also I am even moved to a certain humiliated jealousy. "All this and heaven too?"—all this and letters from Lamb House, Rye, into the bargain? That slightly sore sense has in fact been at the bottom of my failure to write to you altogether—that and a wholly blank mind as to where to address, catch or otherwise waylay you. Frankly, really, I seemed to imagine you out of tune (very naturally and inevitably) with our dull lives and only saying to yourself that you would have quite enough of them on getting back to them and finding them creep along as tamely as ever. Let me hasten to add that I now rejoice to learn that you have actually missed the sound of my voice, the scratch of my poor pen, and I "sit down" as promptly, almost, as you enjoin, to prepare a message which shall overtake you, or meet you somewhere. May it not have failed of this before we (you sternly, I guiltily) are confronted! Your appeal, scented with all the spices of the East and the airs of the Antipodes, arrived in fact four or five days ago, and would have had my more instant attention if the world, in these days, the small world of my tiny point on the globe, were not inconveniently and oppressively with me, making great holes in my all too precious, my all too hoarded and shrunken treasure of Time. We have had an execrable, an infamous summer of rain—endless rain and wild wintry tempest (the very worst of my long lifetime;) but it has not in the least stayed the circulation of my country-people (in particular,) and I have been running a small crammed and wholly unlucrative hotel for their benefit, without interruption, ever since I returned here from London the middle of May. As I have to run it, socially and personally speaking, all unaided and alone, I am always in the breach, and my fond dream of this place as a little sheltered hermitage is exposed to rude shocks. I am just now, in short, receiving a fresh shock every day, and the end is so far from being in sight that the rest of this month and the replete form of October loom before me as truly formidable. This once comparatively quiet corner has, it is impossible to doubt, quite changed its convenient little character since I first knew and adopted it, and has become, for the portion of the year for which I most so prized it, a vulgarly bustling rendezvous of indiscreet and inferior people. (I don't so qualify my own visitors, poor dears—but the total effect of these harried and haunted months, whereof the former golden air has been turned to tinkling brass. It all makes me glad I am old, and thereby soon to take leave of a world in which one is driven, unoffending, from pillar to post.) You see I don't pretend to take up your wondrous tale or to treat you to responsive echoes and ejaculations. It will be delightful to do so when we meet again and I can ask you face to face the thousand questions that your story calls to my lips. Let me even now and thus, however, congratulate you with all my heart on such a fine bellyful of raw (and other) material as your so varied and populated experience must have provided you withal. You have had to ingurgitate a bigger dose of salt water than I should personally care for, and I don't directly wish that any of your opportunities should have been mine—so wholly, with the lack of means to move, has the appetite for movement abandoned my aged carcass. But I applaud and enjoy the sight of these high energies in those who are capable and worthy of them, and distinctly like to think that there are quasi-contemporaries of longer wind (and purse,) and of stouter heart than mine—though I am planning at last to go to the U.S. (for the first time for 21 years) next summer, and remain there some 6 or 8 months. (But there is time to talk of this.).. Your letter is full of interesting things that I can, however, send back to you no echo of—since if I do I shall still be writing it when you get back, and you will come and look at it over my shoulder. Interesting above all your hints of your convictions or impressions or whatever, about the great colonial question and the great Joseph's probable misadventure—as to which I find it utterly impossible to have a competent opinion. I have nothing but an obscure and superstitious sense that this country's "fiscal" attitude and faith has for the last half century been superior and distinguished, and that the change proposed to her reeks, probably, with political and economical vulgarity. But that way, just now, madness lies—you will find plenty of it when you get back. As to the probable date of that event you give me no hint, but I look forward to your return with an eager appetite for your high exotic flavour, which please do everything further possible, meanwhile, to intensify: unless indeed the final effort of everything shall have been (as I shrewdly suspect) to make you more brutally British. You will even then, anyway, be an exceedingly welcome reappearance to yours always and ever,
HENRY JAMES.
To Howard Sturgis.
The proof-sheets in question were those of Mr. Sturgis's forthcoming novel, Belchamber.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 8th, 1903.