Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
October 24th, 1912.
My dear Mary Ward,
I feel I must really thank you afresh, even by the freedom of this impersonal mechanism, for your renewed expression of kindness—very soothing and sustaining to me in my still rather dreary case. I am doing my utmost to get better, but the ailment has apparently endless secrets of its own for preventing that; an infernal player with still another and another vicious card up his sleeve. This is precisely why your generous accents touch me—making me verily yearn as I think of the balm I should indeed find in talking with you of the latest products of those producers (few though they be) who lend themselves in a degree to remark. I have but within a day or two permitted myself a modicum of remark to H.G. Wells—who had sent me "Marriage"; but I should really rather have addressed the quantity to you, on whom it's not so important I should make my impression. I mean I should be in your case comparatively irrelevant—whereas in his I feel myself relevant only to be by the same stroke, as it were, but vain and ineffectual. Strange to me—in his affair—the coexistence of so much talent with so little art, so much life with (so to speak) so little living! But of him there is much to say, for I really think him more interesting by his faults than he will probably ever manage to be in any other way; and he is a most vivid and violent object-lesson. But it's as if I were pretending to talk—which, for this beastly frustration, I am not. I envy you the quite ideal and transcendent jollity (as if Marie Corelli had herself evoked the image for us) of having polished off a brilliant coup and being on your way to celebrate the case in Paris. It's for me to-day as if people only did these things in Marie—and in Mary! Do while you are there re-enter, if convenient to you, into relation with Mrs. Wharton; if she be back, that is, from the last of her dazzling, her incessant, braveries of far excursionism. You may in that case be able to appease a little my always lively appetite for news of her. Don't, I beseech you, "acknowledge" in any manner this, with all you have else to do; not even to hurl back upon me (in refutation, reprobation or whatever) the charge I still persist in of your liking "politics" because of your all having, as splendid young people, the perpetual good time of being so intimately in them. They never cease to remind me personally, here (close corporation or intimate social club as they practically affect the aged and infirm, the lone and detached, the abjectly literary and unenrolled alien as being,) that one must sacrifice all sorts of blest freedoms and immunities, treasures of detachment and perception that make up for the "outsider" state, on any occasion of practical approach to circling round the camp; for penetration into which I haven't a single one of your pass-words—yours, I again mean, of the splendid young lot. But don't pity me, all the same, for this picture of my dim exclusion; it is so compatible with more other initiations than I know, on the whole, almost what to do with. I hear the pass-words given—for it does happen that they sometimes reach my ear; and then, so far from representing for me the "salt of life," as you handsomely put it, they seem to form for me the very measure of intellectual insipidity. All of which, however, is so much more than I meant to be led on to growl back at your perfect benevolence. Still, still, still—well, still I am harmoniously yours,
HENRY JAMES.
To Gaillard T. Lapsley.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
October 24th, 1912.
My dear grand Gaillard,
I seem to do nothing just now but hurl back gruff refusals at gracious advances—and all in connection with the noble shades and the social scenes you particularly haunt. I wrote Howard S. last night that I couldn't, for weary dreary reasons, come to meet you at Qu'acre; and now I have just polished off (by this mechanical means, to which, for the time, I'm squalidly restricted) the illustrious Master of Magdalene, who artfully and insidiously backed by your scarce less shining self, has invited me to exhibit my battered old person and blighted old wit on some luridly near day in those parts. I have had to refuse him, though using for the purpose the most grovelling language; and I have now to thank you, with the same morbid iridescence of form and the same invincible piggishness of spirit, for your share in the large appeal. Things are complicated with me to the last degree, please believe, at present; and the highest literary flights I am capable of are these vain gestes from the dizzy edge of the couch of pain. I have been this whole month sharply ill—under an odious visitation of "Shingles"; and am not yet free or healed or able; not at all on my feet or at my ease. It has been a most dismal summer for me, for, after a most horrid and undermined July and August, I had begun in September to face about to work and hope, when this new plague of Egypt suddenly broke—to make confusion worse confounded. I am up to my neck in arrears, disabilities, and I should add despairs—were my resolution not to be beaten, however battered, not so adequate, apparently, to my constitutional presumption. Meanwhile, oh yes, I am of course as bruised and bored, as deprived and isolated, and even as indignant, as you like. But that I still can be indignant seems to kind of promise; perhaps it's a symptom of dawning salvation. The great thing, at any rate, is for you to understand that I look forward to being fit within no calculable time either to prance in public or prattle in private, and that I grieve to have nothing better to tell you. Very charming and kind to me your own news from là-bas. I won't attempt to do justice now to "all that side." I sent Howard last night some express message to you—which kindly see that he delivers. We shall manage something, all the same, yet, and I am all faithfully yours,
HENRY JAMES.