I wrote, very copiously, and I hope not worryingly at all (for I only meant to be reassuring) to your Mother yesterday, from whom I had had two beautiful unacknowledged letters within the last days or so: unacknowledged save for a cable, of a cheerful stamp, which I sent off to Irving Street about a week ago, and which will have been sent on to you. But all the while your most blest letter, written during your Christmas moment at Cambridge, has been for me a thing to be so grateful for that I must express to you something of it to-day—even at the risk of a glut of information. My long silence—since I came up to town, including, I mean, my pretty dismal weeks at that "Garlant's" of ill association—has had a great inevitability, from several causes; but into these I shall have gone to your Mother, whom I think I explicitly asked to send you on my letter, and I don't want to waste force in repetitions. It won't be repeating too much to say again what I said to her, even with extreme emphasis, that I feel singularly justified of this basis for my winter times in London; so much does it appear, now that the preliminary and just postliminary strain of it is over, the very best thing I could have done for myself. My southward position (as to the rooms I most use) immediately over the River is verily an "asset," and not even in the garden-room at L.H., of summer mornings, have I been better placed for work. With which, all the detail here is right and pleasant and workable; my servants extremely rejoice in it—but I am too much repeating!... Above all, my forenoons being by the mercy of the Powers, whoever or whatever they are, my best time, I have got back to work, and, with my uncanny interest in it and zeal for it still unimpaired, feel that it must "mean something" that I am thus reserved, after many troubles, for a productive relation with it. The proof-sheets of "A Small Boy and Others" have been coming in upon me rapidly—all but the very last; and it ought, by the end of next month at furthest, to burst upon the world. Of course I shall have advance copies sent promptly to you and to Irving Street; but, with this, I intensely want you to take into account that the Book was written through all these months of hampering and baffling illness. It went so haltingly and worriedly even last winter (as distinguished from anything I was able to do in the summer and could get at all during the last afflicted three or four months,) last winter having really been a much more difficult time than I could currently confess to, or than dear Bill and Alice probably got any sense of. The point is at any rate that the Book is now, under whatever disadvantages, wholly done, and that if it seems "good" in spite of these, the proof of my powers, when my powers have really worked off more of the heritage of woe of the last three years, will be but the more substantial. A very considerable lot of "Notes of a Son etc." is done, and I am now practically back at it with this appearance of a free little field in spite of everything.... I welcome immensely (what I didn't mention to your Mother—waiting to do it thus) the valuable and delightful little collection received from you of your Grandfather's correspondence with Emerson. What beautiful and characteristic things in it and how I hope to be able to use the best of these, on your Grandfather's part at least. As regards Emerson's side of the matter I doubt whether I can do enough (in the way of extracts from him) to make it even necessary for me to apply to Edward for licence. I think I can hope but at the most to summarise, or give the sense of, some of Emerson's passages; the reason of this being my absolute presumable want of space. The Book will have to be a longer one than "A Small Boy," but even with this there must be limits involving suppressions and omissions. My own text I can't help attaching enough sense and importance and value to, not to want to keep that too utterly under, and I am more and more moved to give all of your Grandfather, on his vivid and original side, that I possibly can. Add to this all the application, of an illustrative kind, that I can't but see myself making of your Dad's letters, and I see little room for any one else's; though what I most deplore my meagre provision of is those of your Aunt Alice, written to our parents mainly during her times, and especially her final time, in Europe. The poverty of this resource cuts from under my feet almost all ground for doing much, as I had rather hoped in a manner to do, with her....
Jan. 23rd, 1913. I have been unable to go on with this these several days, and yet also unwilling to let it go without saying a few more things I wanted—so the long letter I have got off to your Mother will precede it by longer than I meant. I still write, under my disabilities of damaged body, with difficulty (I mean perform the act of writing,) but this is diminishing substantially though slowly—and I mainly mention it to extenuate these clumsy characters.
My conditions (of situation etc.) here meanwhile (this winter)—I mean these admirable and ample two rooms southward over the River, so still and yet so animated—are ideal for work. Some other time I will explain it to you—so far as you won't have noted it for yourself—how and why it is that I come to be so little beforehand financially. My fatally interrupted production of fiction began it, six years or more ago—and that began, so utterly against my preconception of such an effect, when I addressed myself to the so much longer and more arduous and more fatal-to-everything-else preparation of my "edition" than had been measurable in advance. That long period cut dreadfully into current gains—through complete arrest of other current labour; and when it was at last ended I had only time to do two small books (The Finer Grain and The Outcry) before the disaster of my long illness of Jan. 1910 descended upon me and laid a paralysis on everything. This hideous Herpetic episode and its developments have been of the absolute continuity of that, as they now make it (I hope), dire but departing Climax; and they have represented an interminable arrest of literary income (to speak of.) Now that I can look to apparently again getting back to decent continuity of work it becomes vital for me to aim at returning to the production of the Novel, my departure from which, with its heart-breaking loss of time, was a catastrophe, a perversity and fatality, so little dreamed of by me or intended. I yearn for it intellectually, and with all the force of my "genius" and imagination—artistically in short—and only when this relation is renewed shall I be again on a normal basis. Only how I want to complete "Notes of a Son and Brother" with the last perfection first! Which is what I shall, I trust, during the next three or four months do, with far greater rapidity than I have done the first Book—for all last winter and spring my forenoon, my working hours, were my worst, and for long times so bad, and my later ones the better, whereas it is now the other way round.
Jan. 28th. I have had, alas, dearest Harry, to break this off and not take it up again—through blighted (bed-ridden) late afternoons and whole evenings—my only letter-writing time unless I steal precious dictation-hours from Miss Bosanquet and the Book.... My vitality, my still sufficient cluster of vital "assets," to say nothing of my will to live and to write, assert themselves in spite of everything. This is 5.15 on a dismal wet afternoon; I have been out, but I came in again on purpose to get this off by to-morrow's, Wednesday's post. This apartment grows in grace—nothing really could have been better for me. I went into that long account, just above, of the reasons why through the frustration of fond Fiction I have (so much illness so aiding) sunk to this momentary gêne, I wanted to tell you, as against the appearance of too squalid a helplessness—for an early return to fond fiction will alter everything.... But what an endless sordid, illegible appeal! Take it, dearest Harry, in all indulgence, from your lately so much-tried and perhaps a little nervously over-anxious (by the effect of so much suffering,) but all unconquered and devoted old Uncle,
HENRY JAMES.
P.S. A beautiful letter from your Mother of Jan. 13th (on receipt of my cable) has just come in. All tenderest love.
To Miss Grace Norton.
Dictated.
21 Carlyle Mansions,
Cheyne Walk, S.W.
Feb. 6th, 1913.
Dearest old friend!