Lamb House, Rye.
October 17th, 1912.
My dear Gosse,
It's very well invoking a close to this raging fever of a correspondence when you have such arts for sending and keeping the temperature up! I feel in the presence of your letter last night received that the little machine thrust under one's tongue may well now register or introduce the babble of a mind "affected"; though interestingly so, let me add, since it is indeed a thrill to think that I am perhaps the last living depositary of Maupassant's wonderful confidence or legend. I really believe myself the last survivor of those then surrounding Gustave Flaubert. I shrink a good deal at the same time, I confess, under the burden of an honour "unto which I was not born"; or, more exactly, hadn't been properly brought up or pre-admonished and pre-inspired to. I pull myself together, I invoke fond memory, as you urge upon me, and I feel the huge responsibility of my office and privilege; but at the same time I must remind you of certain inevitable weaknesses in my position, certain essential infirmities of my relation to the precious fact (meaning by the precious fact Maupassant's having, in that night of time and that general failure of inspiring prescience, so remarkably regaled me.) You will see in a moment everything that was wanting to make me the conscious recipient of a priceless treasure. You will see in fact how little I could have any of the right mental preparation. I didn't in the least know that M. himself was going to be so remarkable; I didn't in the least know that I was going to be; I didn't in the least know (and this was above all most frivolous of me) that you were going to be; I didn't even know that the monkey was going to be, or even realise the peculiar degree and nuance of the preserved lustre awaiting ces messieurs, the three taken together. Guy's story (he was only known as "Guy" then) dropped into my mind but as an unrelated thing, or rather as one related, and indeed with much intensity, to the peculiarly "rum," weird, macabre and unimaginable light in which the interesting, or in other words the delirious, in English conduct and in English character, are—or were especially then—viewed in French circles sufficiently self-respecting to have views on the general matter at all, or in other words among the truly refined and enquiring. "Here they are at it!" I remember that as my main inward comment on Maupassant's vivid little history; which was thus thereby somehow more vivid to me about him, than about either our friends or the Monkey; as to whom, as I say, I didn't in the least foresee this present hour of arraignment!
At the same time I think I'm quite prepared to say, in fact absolutely, that of the two versions of the tale, the two quite distinct ones, to which you attribute a mystic and separate currency over there, Maupassant's story to me was essentially Version No. I. It wasn't at all the minor, the comparatively banal anecdote. Really what has remained with me is but the note of two elements—that of the Monkey's jealousy, and that of the Monkey's death; how brought about the latter I can't at all at this time of day be sure, though I am haunted as with the vague impression that the poor beast figured as having somehow destroyed himself, committed suicide through the separate injuria formae. The third person in the fantastic complication was either a young man employed as servant (within doors) or one employed as boatman, and in either case I think English; and some thin ghost of an impression abides with me that the "jealousy" was more on the Monkey's part toward him than on his toward the Monkey; with which the circumstance that the Death I seem most (yet so dimly) to disembroil is simply and solely, or at least predominantly, that of the resentful and impassioned beast: who hovers about me as having seen the other fellow, the jeune anglais or whoever, installed on the scene after he was more or less lord of it, and so invade his province. You see how light and thin and confused are my data! How I wish I had known or guessed enough in advance to be able to oblige you better now: not a stone then would I have left unturned, not an i would I have allowed to remain undotted; no analysis or exhibition of the national character (of either of the national characters) so involved would I have failed to catch in the act. Yet I do so far serve you, it strikes me, as to be clear about this—that, whatever turn the dénouement took, whichever life was most luridly sacrificed (of those of the two humble dependants), the drama had essentially been one of the affections, the passions, the last cocasserie, with each member of the quartette involved! Disentangle it as you can—I think Browning alone could really do so! Does this at any rate—the best I can do for you—throw any sufficient light? I recognise the importance, the historic bearing and value, of the most perfectly worked-out view of it. Such a pity, with this, that as I recover the fleeting moments from across the long years it is my then active figuration of the so tremendously averti young Guy's intellectual, critical, vital, experience of the subject-matter that hovers before me, rather than my comparatively detached curiosity as to the greater or less originality of ces messieurs!—even though, with this, highly original they would appear to have been. I seem moreover to mix up the occasion a little (I mean the occasion of that confidence) with another, still more dim, on which the so communicative Guy put it to me, àpropos of I scarce remember what, that though he had remained quite outside of the complexity I have been glancing at, some jeune anglais, in some other connection, had sought to draw him into some scarcely less fantastic or abnormal one, to the necessary determination on his part of some prompt and energetic action to the contrary: the details of which now escape me—it's all such a golden blur of old-time Flaubertism and Goncourtism! How many more strange flowers one might have gathered up and preserved! There was something from Goncourt one afternoon about certain Swans (they seem to run so to the stranger walks of the animal kingdom!) who figured in the background of some prodigious British existence, and of whom I seem to recollect there is some faint recall in "La Faustin" (not, by the way, "Le Faustin," as I think the printer has betrayed you into calling it in your recent Cornhill paper.) But the golden blur swallows up everything, everything but the slow-crawling, the too lagging, loitering amendment in my tiresome condition, out-distanced by the impatient and attached spirit of yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES,
To H. G. Wells.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
October 18th, 1912.
My dear Wells,
I have been sadly silent since having to wire you (nearly three weeks ago) my poor plea of inability to embrace your so graceful offer of an occasion for my at last meeting, in accordance with my liveliest desire, the eminent Arnold Bennett; sadly in fact is a mild word for it, for I have cursed and raged, I have almost irrecoverably suffered—with all of which the end is not yet. I had just been taken, when I answered your charming appeal, with a violent and vicious attack of "Shingles"—under which I have lain prostrate till this hour. I don't shake it off—and perhaps you know how fell a thing it may be. I am precariously "up" and can do a little to beguile the black inconvenience of loss of time at a most awkward season by dealing after this graceless fashion with such arrears of smashed correspondence as I may so presume to patch up; but I mayn't yet plan for the repair of other losses—I see no hope of my leaving home for many days, and haven't yet been further out of this house than to creep feebly about my garden, where a blest season has most fortunately reigned. A couple of months hence I go up to town to stay (I have taken a lease of a small unfurnished flat in Chelsea, on the river;) and there for the ensuing five or six months I shall aim at inducing you to bring the kind Bennett, whom I meanwhile cordially and ruefully greet, to partake with me of some modest hospitality.