34 De Vere Gardens, W.
January 28th, 1898.
My dear Howells,
Too long, too long have I delayed to thank you for your last good letter; yet if I've been thus guilty the fault—as it were! the deep responsibility—is largely your own. It all comes from that wonderful (and still-in-my-ears reverberating) little talk we had that morning here in the soft lap, and under the motherly apron, of the dear old muffling fog—which will have kept every one else from hearing ever—and only let me hear, and have been heard! I mean that the effect of your admirable counsel and comfort was from that moment to give me the sense of being, somehow, suddenly, preposterously, renewingly and refreshingly, at a kind of practical high pressure which has—well, which has simply, my dear Howells, made all the difference! There it is. It is the absurd, dizzy consciousness of this difference that has constituted (failing other things!) an exciting, absorbing feeling of occupation and preoccupation—and thereby paralysed the mere personal activity of my pen....
I hope you have by this time roared—and not wholly with rage and despair!—through the tunnel of your dark consciousness of return. I dare say you are now quite out on the flowery meads of almost doubting of having been away. This makes me fear your promise to come back—right soon—next summer—may even now have developed an element of base alloy. I rushed off to see Mrs. Harland the instant I heard she was back, and got hold of you—and of Mildred—for five minutes (and of all the handsomest parts of both of you) in her talk. She had left a dying mother, however, and her general situation has, I fear, its pressure and pinch. What an interest indeed your boy's outlook must be to you! But, as you say—seeing them commence—! Well, they never commenced before; and the pain is all in us—not out of us. The thing is to keep it in. But this scrawl—or sprawl—is about all my poor hand can now sustainedly perpetrate; if I continue I shall have to clamour for a mount—a lift—my brave boy of the alphabetic hoofs. But I spare you those caracoles. I greet you each again, affectionately, and am yours, my dear Howells, intensely,
HENRY JAMES.
To Arthur Christopher Benson.
The origin of The Turn of the Screw in an anecdote told him by Archbishop Benson is described in the preface that H. J. wrote for it when it appeared in the collected edition of his works.
34 De Vere Gardens, W.
March 11th, 1898.
My dear Arthur,
I suppose that in the mysterious scheme of providence and fate such an inspiration as your charming note—out of the blue!—of a couple of days ago, is intended somehow to make up to me for the terror with which my earlier—in fact all my past—productions inspire me, and for the insurmountable aversion I feel to looking at them again or to considering them in any way. This morbid state of mind is really a blessing in disguise—for it has for happy consequences that such an incident as your letter becomes thereby extravagantly pleasant and gives me a genial glow. All thanks and benedictions—I shake your hand very hard—or would do so if I could attribute to you anything so palpable, personal and actual as a hand. Yet I shall never write a sequel to the P. of an L.—admire my euphonic indefinite article. It's all too faint and far away—too ghostly and ghastly—and I have bloodier things en tête. I can do better than that!