Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 14th, 1912.
My dear William,
I am reduced for the present to this graceless machinery, but I would rather use it "on" you than let your vivid letter pass, under stress of my state, and so establish a sad precedent: since you know I never let your letters pass. I have been down these seven weeks with an atrocious and apparently absolutely endless attack of "Shingles"—herpes zonalis, you see I know!—of the abominable nature of which, at their worst, you will be aware from your professional experience, even if you are not, as I devoutly hope, by your personal. I have been having a simple hell (saving Letitia's presence) of a time; for at its worst (and a mysterious providence has held me worthy only of that) the pain and the perpetual distress are to the last degree excruciating and wearing. The end, moreover, is not yet: I go on and on—and feel as if I might for the rest of my life—or would honestly so feel were it not that I have some hope of light or relief from an eminent specialist ... who has most kindly promised to come down from London and see me three days hence. My good "local practitioner" has quite thrown up the sponge—he can do nothing for me further and has welcomed a consultation with an alacrity that speaks volumes for his now at last quite voided state.
This is a dismal tale to regale you with—accustomed as even you are to dismal tales from me; but let it stand for attenuation of my [failure] to enter, with any lightness of step, upon the vast avenue of complacency over which you invite me to advance to some fonder contemplation of Mr. Roosevelt. I must simply state to you, my dear William, that I can't so much as think of Mr. Roosevelt for two consecutive moments: he has become to me, these last months, the mere monstrous embodiment of unprecedented resounding Noise; the steps he lately took toward that effect—of presenting himself as the noisiest figure, or agency of any kind, in the long, dire annals of the human race—having with me at least so consummately succeeded. I can but see him and hear him and feel him as raging sound and fury; and if ever a man was in a phase of his weary development, or stage of his persistent decline (as you will call it) or crisis of his afflicted nerves (which you will say I deserve), not to wish to roar with that Babel, or to be roared at by it, that worm-like creature is your irreconcileable friend. Let me say that I haven't yet read your Eulogy of the monster, as enclosed by you in the newspaper columns accompanying your letter—this being a bad, weak, oppressed and harassed moment for my doing so. You see the savagery of last summer, thundering upon our tympanums (pardon me, tympana) from over the sea, has left such scars, such a jangle of the auditive nerve (am I technically right?) as to make the least menace of another yell a thing of horror. I don't mean, dear William, that I suppose you yell—my auditive nerve cherishes in spite of everything the memory of your vocal sweetness; but your bristling protégé has but to peep at me from over your shoulder to make me clap my hands to my ears and bury my head in the deepest hollow of that pile of pillows amid which I am now passing so much of my life. However, I must now fall back upon them—and I rejoice meanwhile in those lines of your good letter in which you give so handsome an account of your own soundness and (physical) saneness. I take this, fondly, too, for the picture of Letitia's "form"—knowing as I do with what inveterate devotion she ever forms herself upon you. I embrace you both, my dear William—so far as you consent to my abasing you (and abasing Letitia, which is graver) to the pillows aforesaid, and am ever affectionately yours and hers,
HENRY JAMES.
To Edmund Gosse.
Mr. Gosse's volume was his Portraits and Sketches, just published.
Dictated.
Lamb House, Rye.
November 19th, 1912.