To John Bailey.
The following refers to the offer, transmitted by Mr. Bailey, of the chairmanship of the English Association.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 11th, 1912.
My dear John,
Forgive (and while you are about it please commiserate) my having to take this roundabout way of acknowledging your brave letter. I am stricken and helpless still—I can't sit up like a gentleman and drive the difficult pen. I am having an absolutely horrid and endless visitation—being now in the seventh week of the ordeal I had the other day to mention to you. It's a weary, dreary business, perpetual atrocious suffering, and you must pardon my replying to you as I can and not at all as I would. And I speak here, I have, alas, to say, not of my form of utterance only—for my matter (given that of your own charming appeal) would have in whatever conditions to be absolutely the same. Let me, for some poor comfort's sake, make the immediate rude jump to the one possible truth of my case: it is out of my power to meet your invitation with the least decency or grace. When one declines a beautiful honour, when one simply sits impenetrable to a generous and eloquent appeal, one had best have the horrid act over as soon as possible and not appear to beat about the bush and keep up the fond suspense. For me, frankly, my dear John, there is simply no question of these things: I am a mere stony, ugly monster of Dissociation and Detachment. I have never in all my life gone in for these other things, but have dodged and shirked and successfully evaded them—to the best of my power at least, and so far as they have in fact assaulted me: all my instincts and the very essence of any poor thing that I might, or even still may, trump up for the occasion as my "genius" have been against them, and are more against them at this day than ever, though two or three of them (meaning by "them" the collective and congregated bodies, the splendid organisations, aforesaid) have successfully got their teeth, in spite of all I could do, into my bewildered and badgered antiquity. And this last, you see, is just one of the reasons—! for my not collapsing further, not exhibiting the last demoralisation, under the elegant pressure of which your charming plea is so all but dazzling a specimen. I can't go into it all much in this sorry condition (a bad and dismal one still, for my ailment is not only, at the end of so many weeks, as "tedious" as you suppose, but quite fiendishly painful into the bargain)—but the rough sense of it is that I believe only in absolutely independent, individual and lonely virtue, and in the serenely unsociable (or if need be at a pinch sulky and sullen) practice of the same; the observation of a lifetime having convinced me that no fruit ripens but under that temporarily graceless rigour, and that the associational process for bringing it on is but a bright and hollow artifice, all vain and delusive. (I speak here of the Arts—or of my own poor attempt at one or two of them; the other matters must speak for themselves.) Let me even while I am about it heap up the measure of my grossness: the mere dim vision of presiding or what is called, I believe, taking the chair, at a speechifying public dinner, fills me, and has filled me all my life, with such aversion and horror that I have in the most odious manner consistently refused for years to be present on such occasions even as a guest pre-assured of protection and effacement, and have not departed from my grim consistency even when cherished and excellent friends were being "offered" the banquet. I have at such times let them know in advance that I was utterly not to be counted on, and have indeed quite gloried in my shame; sitting at home the while and gloating over the fact that I wasn't present. In fine the revolution that my pretending to lend myself to your noble combination would propose to make in my life is unthinkable save as a convulsion that would simply end it. This then must serve as my answer to your kindest of letters—until at some easier hour I am able to make you a less brutal one. I know you would, or even will wrestle with me, or at least feel as if you would like to; and I won't deny that to converse with you on any topic under the sun, and even in a connection in which I may appear at my worst, can never be anything but a delight to me. The idea of such a delight so solicits me, in fact, as I write, that if I were only somewhat less acutely laid up, and free to spend less of my time in bed and in anguish, I would say at once: Do come down to lunch and dine and sleep, so that I may have the pleasure of you in spite of my nasty attitude. As it is, please let me put it thus: that as soon as I get sufficiently better (if I ever do at this rate) to rise to the level of even so modest an hospitality as I am at best reduced to, I will appeal to you to come and partake of it, in your magnanimity, to that extent: not to show you that I am not utterly adamant, but that for private association, for the banquet of two and the fellowship of that fine scale, I have the best will in the world. We shall talk so much (and, I am convinced in spite of everything, so happily) that I won't say more now—except that I venture all the same to commend myself brazenly to Mrs. John, and that I am yours all faithfully,
HENRY JAMES.