I have been a prey to agitations and complications, many assaults, invasions and inconveniences, since leaving town—whereby I have had to put off thanking you for two brilliant letters. And yet I have wanted to write—to tell you (explaining) how I found myself swallowed up by one social abyss after another, and tangled in a succession of artful feminine webs, at Stafford House that evening, so that I couldn't get into touch with you, or with Ethel, again, before you were gone, as I found when I finally made a dash for you. That too was very complicated, and evening-parties bristle with dangers.... The very critical business of the final luminous copy is, how ever, coming to an end—I mean the arriving at the utterly last intense reductions and compressions. So much has to come out, however, that I am sickened and appalled—and this sacrifice of the very life-blood of one's play, the mere vulgar anatomy and bare-bones poverty to which one has to squeeze it more and more, is the nauseating side of the whole desperate job. In spite of which I am interesting myself deeply in the three act comedy I have undertaken for Frohman—and which I find ferociously difficult—but with a difficulty that, thank God, draws me on and fascinates. If I can go on believing in my subject I can go on treating it; but sometimes I have a mortal chill and wonder if I ain't damnably deluded. However, the balance inclines to faith and I think it works out. You shall hear what comes of it—even at the worst. Meanwhile for yourself, dearest Lucy, buck up and patiently woo the Muse. She responds at last always to true and faithful wooing—to the right artful patience—and turns upon one the smile from which light breaks. I have been reading over the Long Duel (which I immediately return)—with a sense of its having great charm and care of execution, and quality and grace, but also, dear Lucy, of its drawbacks for practical prosperity. The greatest of these seems to me to be fundamental—to reside in the fact that the subject isn't dramatic, that it deals with a state, a position, a situation (of the "static" kind), and not, save in a very minor degree, with an action, a progression; which fact, highly favourable to it for a tale, a psychologic picture, is detrimental to its tenseness—to its being matter for a play and developed into 4 acts. A play appears to me of necessity to involve a struggle, a question (of whether, and how, will it or won't it happen? and if so, or not so, how and why?—which we have the suspense, the curiosity, the anxiety, the tension, in a word, of seeing; and which means that the whole thing shows an attack upon oppositions—with the victory or the failure on one side or the other, and each wavering and shifting, from point to point.) But your hero is thus not an agent, he is passive, he doesn't take the field. I say all this because I think there is light on the matter of the history of the fate of the play in it—and also think that there are other elements of disadvantage for the piece too. The elderly (or almost?) French artist with a virtuous love-sorrow doesn't, for the B.P., belong to the actual; he's romantic, and old-fashionedly romantic, and remote; and the case is aggravated by the corresponding maturity of the heroine. You will say that there is the young couple, and what comes of their being there, and their "action"; but the truth about that, I fear, is that innocent young lovers as such, and not as being engaged in other difficulties and with other oppositions (of their own,) have practically ceased to be a dramatic value—aren't any longer an element or an interest to conjure with. Don't hate me for saying these things—for working them out critically, and so far as may be, illuminatingly, in face of the difficulty the L.D. seems to have had in getting itself brought out. We are dealing with an art prodigiously difficult and arduous every way—and in which one seems most of all to sink into a Sea of colossal Waste. I'm not sure that The Other House, after all my not-to-be-reckoned labour and calculation on it, isn't (to be) wasted. But these are dreary words—it is much past midnight. I am damned critical—for it's the only thing to be, and all else is damned humbug. But I don't mean a douche of cold water, and am ever so tenderly and faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Miss Grace Norton.
Lamb House, Rye.
August 10th, 1909.
....I break ground with you thus, dear Grace, late in the evening (too late—for I shall soon have to go most belatedly to bed) of a singularly beautiful and glowingly hot summer's day—one of a succession that August has at last brought us (and with more, apparently, in store,) after a wholly damnable June and July, a hideous ordeal of wet and cold. English fine weather is worth waiting for—it is so sovereign in quality when it comes, and the capacity of this little place of a few marked odd elements to become charming, to shine and flush and endear itself, is then so admirable. I went out for my afternoon walk under stress of having promised my good little gardener (a real pearl of price—these eleven years—in the way of a serving-man) to come and witness his possible triumphs at our annual little horticultural show, given this year in some charming private grounds on a high hill overlooking our little huddled (and lower-hilled) purple town. There I found myself in the extraordinary position—save that other summers might—but haven't—softened the edge of the monstrosity—of seeing "Henry James Esq." figure on thirteen large cards commemorative of first, second and third prizes—and of more first, even, if you can believe it, than the others. It always [seems] to point, more than anything else, the moral, for me, of my long expatriation and to put its "advantages" into a nutshell. In what corner of our native immensity could I have fallen—and practically without effort, helpless ignoramus though I be—into the uncanny flourish of a swell at local flower shows? Here it has come of itself—and it crowns my career. How I wish you weren't too far away for me to send you a box of my victorious carnations and my triumphant sweet peas! However, I remember your telling me with emphasis long years ago that you hated "cut flowers," and I have treasured your brave heresy (the memory of it) so ineffaceably so as to find support in it always, and fine precedent, for a very lukewarm adhesion to them myself, except for a slight inconsistency in the matter of roses and sweet peas (both supremely lovable, I think, in their kind,) which increase and multiply and bless one in proportion as one tears them from the stem. However, it's 1.30 a.m. o'clock—and I am putting this to bed; till to-morrow night again, when I shall pull it forth and add to its yearning volume. I have to write at night, and even late at night—to write letter-things at all; for the simple reason of being so vilely constituted for work that when my regularly recurring morning stint is done (from after breakfast to luncheon-time,) I am "done" utterly, and so cerebrally spent (with the effort to distil "quality" for three or four hours,) that I can't touch a pen till as much as possible of the day has elapsed, to build out and disconnect my morning's association with it. That is one reason—and always has been—of my baseness as a correspondent. The question is whether the effect I produce as a "story writer" is of a nature to make up for it. You will say "most certainly not!"—and who shall blame you? But goodnight and à demain.
August 11th. I don't mean this to be a diary—but it has been another splendid summer day—and I am wondering if you sit in the loose but warm embrace of bowery Cambridge. Every now and then I read in the Times of "92° in the shade in America," and Cambridge is so intensely your America that I ask myself—though my imagination breaks down in the effort to place you anywhere, even as I write again, by my late ticking clock, in this hot stillness, [but] in the vine-tangled porch where I sat so often anciently, but only a little, alas, that other more often and more variously hindered year. It has been almost 92° in the shade, or has almost felt like it here to-day; in spite of which I took—and enjoyed—a long slow walk over the turf by our tidal "channel" here (which goes straight forth to the channel, and over to France, at the end of a mile or two, and has a beautiful colour at the flow.) ... I'm spending a very quiet summer, to which the complete absence of any visiting or sojourning relative (a frequent and prized feature with me most other years) gives a rather melancholy blankness. But I'm hoping for a nephew or two—William's Bill, that is, next month; and meanwhile the season melts in my grasp and ebbs with an appalling rush (don't you find, at our age?), for there are still things I want to do, and I ask myself, at such a rate, How? I lately, as I think I've mentioned, spent a couple of months in London, and saw as much as I could of Sally and Lily, whom I found most agreeable, and confirmed in their respective types of charm and character. Lily is still in England—and of course you know all about her—I hope to have her with me here before long for a couple of days. But there is nothing I more wonder at, dear Grace, than the question of what Cambridge has become to you, or seems to you, without (practically) a Shady Hill, after the long years. It must be, altogether, much of a changed world—and thus, afar off, I wonder. It is a way of getting again into communication with you, or at any rate of making you a poor wild and wandering sign, as over broken and scarce sounding wires, of the perfect affectionate fidelity of your firm old friend, my dear Grace, of all and all the wonderful years,
HENRY JAMES.
To William James.
Lamb House, Rye.
Aug. 17th, 1909.
Dearest William,