HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Wharton.
Chocorua, N.H.
Sept. 9th, 1910.
Dearest Edith,
Your letter from Annecy ... touches me, as I sit here stricken and in darkness, with the tenderest of hands. It was all to become again a black nightmare (what seems to me such now,) from very soon after I left you, to these days of attempted readjustment of life, on the basis of my beloved brother's irredeemable absence from it, in which I take my part with my sister-in-law and his children here. I quitted you at Folkestone, August 9th (just a month ago to-day—and it seems six!) to find him, at Lamb House, apparently not a little eased by the devoted Skinner, and with the elements much more auspicious for our journey than they had been a fortnight before. We got well enough to town on the 11th, and away from it, to Liverpool, on the 12th, and the voyage, in the best accommodations &c. we had ever had at sea, and of a wondrous lakelike and riverlike fairness and brevity, might, if he had been really less ill, have made for his holding his ground. But he grew rapidly worse again from the start and suffered piteously and dreadfully (with the increase of his difficulty in breathing;) and we got him at last to this place (on the evening of the Friday following that of our sailing) only to see him begin swiftly to sink. The sight of the rapidity of it at the last was an unutterable pang—my sense of what he had still to give, of his beautiful genius and noble intellect at their very climax, never having been anything but intense, and in fact having been intenser than ever all these last months. However, my relation to him and my affection for him, and the different aspect his extinction has given for me to my life, are all unutterable matters; fortunately, as there would be so much to say about them if I said anything at all. The effect of it all is that I shall stay on here for the present—for some months to come (I mean in this country;) and then return to England never to revisit these shores again. I am inexpressibly glad to have been, and even to be, here now—I cling to my sister-in-law and my nephews and niece: they are all (wonderful to say) such admirable, lovable, able and interesting persons, and they cling to me in return. I hope to be in this spot with them till Oct. 15th—there is a great appeal in it from its saturation with my brother's presence and life here, his use and liking of it for 23 years, a sad subtle consecration which plays out the more where so few other things interfere with it. Ah, the thin, empty, lonely, melancholy American "beauty"—which I yet find a cold prudish charm in! I shall go back to Cambridge with my companions and stay there at least till the New Year—which is all that seems definite for the present....
All devotedly yours, dearest Edith,
HENRY JAMES.
To Mrs. Charles Hunter.
Chocorua, N.H.
Oct: 1: 1910.