There are scarce degrees of difference in my constant need of hearing from you, yet when that felicity comes it manages each time to seem pre-eminent and to have assuaged an exceptional hunger. The pleasure and relief, at any rate, three days since, were of the rarest quality—and it's always least discouraging (for the exchange of sentiments) to know that your wings are for the moment folded and your field a bit delimited. I knew you were back in Paris as an informer passing hereby on his way thence again to N.Y. had seen you dining at the Ritz en nombreuse compagnie, "looking awfully handsome and stunningly dressed." And Mary Hunter cesjours-ci had given me earlier and more exotic news of you, yet coloured with a great vividness of sympathy and admiration.... But I feel that it takes a hard assurance to speak to you of "arriving" anywhere—as that implies starting and continuing, and before your great heroic rushes and revolutions I can only gape and sigh and sink back. It requires an association of ease—with the whole heroic question (of the "up and doing" state)—which I don't possess, to presume to suggestionise on the subject of a new advent. Great will be the glory and joy, and the rushing to and fro, when the wide wings are able, marvellously, to show us symptoms of spreading again—and here I am (mainly here this winter) to thrill with the first announcement. London is better for me, during these months, than any other spot of earth, or of pavement; and even here I seem to find I can work—and n'ai pas maintenant d'autre idée. Apropos of which aid to life your remarks about my small latest-born are absolutely to the point. The little creature is absolutely of the irresistible sex of her most intelligent critic—for I don't pretend, like Lady Macbeth, to bring forth men-children only. You speak at your ease, chère Madame, of the interminable and formidable job of my producing à mon âge another Golden Bowl—the most arduous and thankless task I ever set myself. However, on all that il y aurait bien des choses à dire; and meanwhile, I blush to say, the Outcry is on its way to a fifth edition (in these few weeks), whereas it has taken the poor old G.B. eight or nine years to get even into a third. And I should have to go back and live for two continuous years at Lamb House to write it (living on dried herbs and cold water—for "staying power"—meanwhile;) and that would be very bad for me, would probably indeed put an end to me altogether. My own sense is that I don't want, and oughtn't to try, to attack ever again anything longer (save for about 70 or 80 pages more) than the Outcry. That is déjà assez difficile—the "artistic economy" of that inferior little product being a much more calculated and ciphered, much more cunning and (to use your sweet expression) crafty one than that of five G.B.'s. The vague verbosity of the Oxusflood (beau nom!) terrifies me—sates me; whereas the steel structure of the other form makes every parcelle a weighed and related value. Moreover nobody is really doing (or, ce me semble, as I look about, can do) Outcries, while all the world is doing G.B.'s—and vous-même, chère Madame, tout le premier: which gives you really the cat out of the bag! My vanity forbids me (instead of the more sweetly consecrating it) a form in which you run me so close. Seulement alors je compterais bâtir a great many (a great many, entendezvous?) Outcries—and on données autrement rich. About this present one hangs the inferiority, the comparative triviality, of its primal origin. But pardon this flood of professional egotism. I have in any case got back to work—on something that now the more urgently occupies me as the time for me circumstantially to have done it would have been last winter, when I was insuperably unfit for it, and that is extremely special, experimental and as yet occult. I apply myself to my effort every morning at a little repaire in the depths of Chelsea, a couple of little rooms that I have secured for quiet and concentration—to which our blest taxi whirls me from hence every morning at 10 o'clock, and where I meet my amanuensis (of the days of the composition of the G.B.) to whom I gueuler to the best of my power. In said repaire I propose to crouch and me blottir (in the English shade of the word, for so intensely revising an animal, as well) for many, many weeks; so that I fear dearest Edith, your idea of "whirling me away" will have to adapt itself to the sense worn by "away"—as it clearly so gracefully will! For there are senses in which that particle is for me just the most obnoxious little object in the language. Make your fond use of it at any rate by first coming away—away hither....
Yours all and always,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. This was begun five days ago—and was raggedly and ruthlessly broken off—had to be—and I didn't mark the place this Sunday a.m. where I took it up again—on page 6th. But I put only today's date—as I didn't put the other day's at the time.
To W. E. Norris.
Lamb House, Rye.
January 5th, 1912.
My dear Norris,
I don't know whether to call this a belated or a premature thing; as "a New Year's offering" (and my hand is tremendously in for those just now, though it is also tremendously fatigued) it is a bit behind; whereas for an independent overture it follows perhaps indiscreetly fast on the heels of my Christmas letter. However, as since this last I have had the promptest and most beautiful one from you—a miracle of the perfect "fist" as well as of the perfect ease and grace—I make bold to feel that I am not quite untimely, that you won't find me so, and I offer you still all the compliments of the Season—sated and gorged as you must by this time be with them and vague thin sustenance as they at best afford. If I hadn't already in the course of the several score of letters which had long weighed on me and which I really retired to this place on Dec. 30th to work off as much as anything else, run into the ground the image of the coming year as the grim, veiled, equivocal and sinister figure who holds us all in his dread hand and whom we must therefore grovel and abase ourselves at once on the threshold of, as to curry favour with him, I would give you the full benefit of it—but I leave it there as it is; though if you do wish to crawl beside me, here I am flat on my face. I am putting in a few more days here—in order to bore if possible through my huge heap of postal obligations, the accumulation of three or four years, and not very visibly reduced even by the heroic efforts of the last week. I have never in all my life written so many letters within the same space of time—and I really think that is in the full sense of the term documentary proof of my recovery of a normal senile strength. I go to-morrow over into Kent to spend Sunday with some friends near Maidstone (they have lately acquired and extraordinarily restored Allington Castle, which is down in a deep sequestered bottom, plants its huge feet in the Medway, actually overflowed, I believe, up to its middle). I come back here again (with acute lumbago, I quite expect,) and begin again—that is, write 300 more letters; after which I relapse fondly, and I think very wisely, upon London. Now that I am not obliged to be in this place (by having so committed myself to it for better for worse as I had in the past) I find I quite like it—having enjoyed the deep peace and ease of it this last week; but I have to go away to prove to myself the non-obligation to stay, and that takes some doing—which I shall have set about by the 15th. London was quite delicious during that brown still Xmastide—the four or five days after I wrote to you: the drop of life and of traffic was beyond anything of the sort I had ever seen in that frame. The gregariousness of movement of the population is an amazing phenomenon—they had vanished so in a bunch that the streets were an uncanny desert, with the difference from of old that the taxis and motors were more absent than the cabs and carriages and busses ever were, for at any given moment the horizon is through this power of disappearance, void of them—whereas the old things had, through their slowness, to hang about. One gets a taxi, by the way, much faster than one ever got a handsome (lo, I have managed to forget how to write the extinct object!)—and yet one gets it from so much further away and from such an at first hopeless void....
Very romantic and charming the arrival of your gallant George—from all across Europe—for his Xmas eve with you; your account of it touches me and I find myself ranking you with the celebrated fair of history and fable for whom the swimmings of the Hellespont and the breakings of the lance were perpetrated. I congratulate you on such a George in these for the most part merely "awfully sorry" days, and him on a chance of which he must have been awfully glad. And àpropos of such felicities—or rather of felicities pure and simple, and not quite such, I do heartily hope that you will go on to Spain with your niece in the spring—I'm convinced that you'll find it a charming adventure. I've myself utterly ceased to travel—I'm a limpet now, for the rest of my life, on the rock of Britain, but I intensely enjoy the travels of my friends.
My pen fails and my clock strikes and I am yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.