Bass Harbor Marsh, Acadia National Park, Maine
Corvick, who had promised a review of it, had not even had time to read it; he had gone to pieces in consequence of news requiring - as on precipitate reflexion he judged - that he should catch the night-mail to Paris. He had had a telegram from Gwendolen Erme in answer to his letter offering to fly to her aid. I knew already about Gwendolen Erme; I had never seen her, but I had my ideas, which were mainly to the effect that Corvick would marry her if her mother would only die. That lady seemed now in a fair way to oblige him; after some dreadful mistake about a climate or a "cure" she had suddenly collapsed on the return from abroad. Her daughter, unsupported and alarmed, desiring to make a rush for home but hesitating at the risk, had accepted our friend`s assistance, and it was my secret belief that at sight of him Mrs. Erme would pull round. His own belief was scarcely to be called secret; it discernibly at any rate differed from mine. He had showed me Gwendolen`s photograph with the remark that she wasn`t pretty but was awfully interesting; she had published at the age of nineteen a novel in three volumes, "Deep Down," about which, in THE MIDDLE, he had been really splendid. He appreciated my present eagerness and undertook that the periodical in question should do no less; then at the last, with his hand on the door, he said to me: "Of course you`ll be all right, you know." Seeing I was a trifle vague he added: "I mean you won`t be silly."
"Silly - about Vereker! Why what do I ever find him but awfully clever?"
"Well, what`s that but silly? What on earth does `awfully clever` mean? For God`s sake try to get AT him. Don`t let him suffer by our arrangement. Speak of him, you know, if you can, as I should have spoken of him."
I wondered an instant. "You mean as far and away the biggest of the lot - that sort of thing?"
Corvick almost groaned. "Oh you know, I don`t put them back to back that way; it`s the infancy of art! But he gives me a pleasure so rare; the sense of" - he mused a little - "something or other."
I wondered again. "The sense, pray, of want?"
"My dear man, that`s just what I want YOU to say!"
Even before he had banged the door I had begun, book in hand, to prepare myself to say it. I sat up with Vereker half the night; Corvick couldn`t have done more than that. He was awfully clever - I stuck to that, but he wasn`t a bit the biggest of the lot. I didn`t allude to the lot, however; I flattered myself that I emerged on this occasion from the infancy of art. "It`s all right," they declared vividly at the office; and when the number appeared I felt there was a basis on which I could meet the great man. It gave me confidence for a day or two - then that confidence dropped. I had fancied him reading it with relish, but if Corvick wasn`t satisfied how could Vereker himself be? I reflected indeed that the heat of the admirer was sometimes grosser even than the appetite of the scribe. Corvick at all events wrote me from Paris a little ill-humouredly. Mrs. Erme was pulling round, and I hadn`t at all said what Vereker gave him the sense of.
THE effect of my visit to Bridges was to turn me out for more profundity. Hugh Vereker, as I saw him there, was of a contact so void of angles that I blushed for the poverty of imagination involved in my small precautions. If he was in spirits it wasn`t because he had read my review; in fact on the Sunday morning I felt sure he hadn`t read it, though THE MIDDLE had been out three days and bloomed, I assured myself, in the stiff garden of periodicals which gave one of the ormolu tables the air of a stand at a station. The impression he made on me personally was such that I wished him to read it, and I corrected to this end with a surreptitious hand what might be wanting in the careless conspicuity of the sheet. I`m afraid I even watched the result of my manoeuvre, but up to luncheon I watched in vain.
When afterwards, in the course of our gregarious walk, I found myself for half an hour, not perhaps without another manoeuvre, at the great man`s side, the result of his affability was a still livelier desire that he shouldn`t remain in ignorance of the peculiar justice I had done him. It wasn`t that he seemed to thirst for justice; on the contrary I hadn`t yet caught in his talk the faintest grunt of a grudge - a note for which my young experience had already given me an ear. Of late he had had more recognition, and it was pleasant, as we used to say in THE MIDDLE, to see how it drew him out. He wasn`t of course popular, but I judged one of the sources of his good humour to be precisely that his success was independent of that. He had none the less become in a manner the fashion; the critics at least had put on a spurt and caught up with him. We had found out at last how clever he was, and he had had to make the best of the loss of his mystery. I was strongly tempted, as I walked beside him, to let him know how much of that unveiling was my act; and there was a moment when I probably should have done so had not one of the ladies of our party, snatching a place at his other elbow, just then appealed to him in a spirit comparatively selfish. It was very discouraging: I almost felt the liberty had been taken with myself.
I had had on my tongue`s end, for my own part, a phrase or two about the right word at the right time; but later on I was glad not to have spoken, for when on our return we clustered at tea I perceived Lady Jane, who had not been out with us, brandishing THE MIDDLE with her longest arm. She had taken it up at her leisure; she was delighted with what she had found, and I saw that, as a mistake in a man may often be a felicity in a woman, she would practically do for me what I hadn`t been able to do for myself. "Some sweet little truths that needed to be spoken," I heard her declare, thrusting the paper at rather a bewildered couple by the fireplace. She grabbed it away from them again on the reappearance of Hugh Vereker, who after our walk had been upstairs to change something. "I know you don`t in general look at this kind of thing, but it`s an occasion really for doing so. You HAVEN`T seen it? Then you must. The man has actually got AT you, at what I always feel, you know." Lady Jane threw into her eyes a look evidently intended to give an idea of what she always felt; but she added that she couldn`t have expressed it. The man in the paper expressed it in a striking manner. "Just see there, and there, where I`ve dashed it, how he brings it out." She had literally marked for him the brightest patches of my prose, and if I was a little amused Vereker himself may well have been. He showed how much he was when before us all Lady Jane wanted to read something aloud. I liked at any rate the way he defeated her purpose by jerking the paper affectionately out of her clutch. He`d take it upstairs with him and look at it on going to dress. He did this half an hour later - I saw it in his hand when he repaired to his room. That was the moment at which, thinking to give her pleasure, I mentioned to Lady Jane that I was the author of the review. I did give her pleasure, I judged, but perhaps not quite so much as I had expected. If the author was "only me" the thing didn`t seem quite so remarkable. Hadn`t I had the effect rather of diminishing the lustre of the article than of adding to my own? Her ladyship was subject to the most extraordinary drops. It didn`t matter; the only effect I cared about was the one it would have on Vereker up there by his bedroom fire.
At dinner I watched for the signs of this impression, tried to fancy some happier light in his eyes; but to my disappointment Lady Jane gave me no chance to make sure. I had hoped she`d call triumphantly down the table, publicly demand if she hadn`t been right. The party was large - there were people from outside as well, but I had never seen a table long enough to deprive Lady Jane of a triumph. I was just reflecting in truth that this interminable board would deprive ME of one when the guest next me, dear woman - she was Miss Poyle, the vicar`s sister, a robust unmodulated person - had the happy inspiration and the unusual courage to address herself across it to Vereker, who was opposite, but not directly, so that when he replied they were both leaning forward. She enquired, artless body, what he thought of Lady Jane`s "panegyric," which she had read - not connecting it however with her right-hand neighbour; and while I strained my ear for his reply I heard him, to my stupefaction, call back gaily, his mouth full of bread: "Oh, it`s all right - the usual twaddle!"
I had caught Vereker`s glance as he spoke, but Miss Poyle`s surprise was a fortunate cover for my own. "You mean he doesn`t do you justice?" said the excellent woman.
Vereker laughed out, and I was happy to be able to do the same. "It`s a charming article," he tossed us.
Miss Poyle thrust her chin half across the cloth. "Oh, you`re so deep!" she drove home.
"As deep as the ocean! All I pretend is that the author doesn`t see - " But a dish was at this point passed over his shoulder, and we had to wait while he helped himself.
"Doesn`t see what?" my neighbour continued.
"Doesn`t see anything."
"Dear me - how very stupid!"
"Not a bit," Vereker laughed main. "Nobody does."
The lady on his further side appealed to him, and Miss Poyle sank back to myself. "Nobody sees anything!" she cheerfully announced; to which I replied that I had often thought so too, but had somehow taken the thought for a proof on my own part of a tremendous eye. I didn`t tell her the article was mine; and I observed that Lady Jane, occupied at the end of the table, had not caught Vereker`s words.
I rather avoided him after dinner, for I confess he struck me as cruelly conceited, and the revelation was a pain. "The usual twaddle" - my acute little study! That one`s admiration should have had a reserve or two could gall him to that point! I had thought him placid, and he was placid enough; such a surface was the hard polished glass that encased the bauble of his vanity. I was really ruffled, and the only comfort was that if nobody saw anything George Corvick was quite as much out of it as I. This comfort however was not sufficient, after the ladies had dispersed, to carry me in the proper manner - I mean in a spotted jacket and humming an air - into the smoking-room. I took my way in some dejection to bed; but in the passage I encountered Mr. Vereker, who had been up once more to change, coming out of his room. HE was humming an air and had on a spotted jacket, and as soon as he saw me his gaiety gave a start.
"My dear young man," he exclaimed, "I`m so glad to lay hands on you! I`m afraid I most unwittingly wounded you by those words of mine at dinner to Miss Poyle. I learned but half an hour ago from Lady Jane that you`re the author of the little notice in THE MIDDLE."
I protested that no bones were broken; but he moved with me to my own door, his hand, on my shoulder, kindly feeling for a fracture; and on hearing that I had come up to bed he asked leave to cross my threshold and just tell me in three words what his qualification of my remarks had represented. It was plain he really feared I was hurt, and the sense of his solicitude suddenly made all the difference to me. My cheap review fluttered off into space, and the best things I had said in it became flat enough beside the brilliancy of his being there. I can see him there still, on my rug, in the firelight and his spotted jacket, his fine clear face all bright with the desire to be tender to my youth. I don`t know what he had at first meant to say, but I think the sight of my relief touched him, excited him, brought up words to his lips from far within. It was so these words presently conveyed to me something that, as I afterwards knew, he had never uttered to any one. I`ve always done justice to the generous impulse that made him speak; it was simply compunction for a snub unconsciously administered to a man of letters in a position inferior to his own, a man of letters moreover in the very act of praising him. To make the thing right he talked to me exactly as an equal and on the ground of what we both loved best. The hour, the place, the unexpectedness deepened the impression: he couldn`t have done anything more intensely effective.
"I DON`T quite know how to explain it to you," he said, "but it was the very fact that your notice of my book had a spice of intelligence, it was just your exceptional sharpness, that produced the feeling - a very old story with me, I beg you to believe - under the momentary influence of which I used in speaking to that good lady the words you so naturally resent. I don`t read the things in the newspapers unless they`re thrust upon me as that one was - it`s always one`s best friend who does it! But I used to read them sometimes - ten years ago. I dare say they were in general rather stupider then; at any rate it always struck me they missed my little point with a perfection exactly as admirable when they patted me on the back as when they kicked me in the shins. Whenever since I`ve happened to have a glimpse of them they were still blazing away - still missing it, I mean, deliciously. , with inimitable assurance; the fact of your being awfully clever and your article`s being awfully nice doesn`t make a hair`s breadth of difference. It`s quite with you rising young men," Vereker laughed, "that I feel most what a failure I am!"
I listened with keen interest; it grew keener as he talked. "YOU a failure - heavens! What then may your `little point` happen to be?"
"Have I got to TELL you, after all these years and labours?" There was something in the friendly reproach of this - jocosely exaggerated - that made me, as an ardent young seeker for truth, blush to the roots of my hair. I`m as much in the dark as ever, though I`ve grown used in a sense to my obtuseness; at that moment, however, Vereker`s happy accent made me appear to myself, and probably to him, a rare dunce. I was on the point of exclaiming "Ah yes, don`t tell me: for my honour, for that of the craft, don`t!" when he went on in a manner that showed he had read my thought and had his own idea of the probability of our some day redeeming ourselves. "By my little point I mean - what shall I call it? - the particular thing I`ve written my books most FOR. Isn`t there for every writer a particular thing of that sort, the thing that most makes him apply himself, the thing without the effort to achieve which he wouldn`t write at all, the very passion of his passion, the part of the business in which, for him, the flame of art burns most intensely? Well, it`s THAT!"
I considered a moment - that is I followed at a respectful distance, rather gasping. I was fascinated - easily, you`ll say; but I wasn`t going after all to be put off my guard. "Your description`s certainly beautiful, but it doesn`t make what you describe very distinct."
"I promise you it would be distinct if it should dawn on you at all." I saw that the charm of our topic overflowed for my companion into an emotion as lively as my own. "At any rate," he went on, "I can speak for myself: there`s an idea in my work without which I wouldn`t have given a straw for the whole job. It`s the finest fullest intention of the lot, and the application of it has been, I think, a triumph of patience, of ingenuity. I ought to leave that to somebody else to say; but that nobody does say it is precisely what we`re talking about. It stretches, this little trick of mine, from book to book, and everything else, comparatively, plays over the surface of it. The order, the form, the texture of my books will perhaps some day constitute for the initiated a complete representation of it. So it`s naturally the thing for the critic to look for. It strikes me," my visitor added, smiling, "even as the thing for the critic to find."
This seemed a responsibility indeed. "You call it a little trick?"
"That`s only my little modesty. It`s really an exquisite scheme."
"And you hold that you`ve carried the scheme out?"
"The way I`ve carried it out is the thing in life I think a bit well of myself for."
I had a pause. "Don`t you think you ought - just a trifle - to assist the critic?"
"Assist him? What else have I done with every stroke of my pen? I`ve shouted my intention in his great blank face!" At this, laughing out again, Vereker laid his hand on my shoulder to show the allusion wasn`t to my personal appearance.
"But you talk about the initiated. There must therefore, you see, BE initiation."
"What else in heaven`s name is criticism supposed to be?" I`m afraid I coloured at this too; but I took refuge in repeating that his account of his silver lining was poor in something or other that a plain man knows things by. "That`s only because you`ve never had a glimpse of it," he returned. "If you had had one the element in question would soon have become practically all you`d see. To me it`s exactly as palpable as the marble of this chimney. Besides, the critic just ISN`T a plain man: if he were, pray, what would he be doing in his neighbour`s garden? You`re anything but a plain man yourself, and the very raison d`etre of you all is that you`re little demons of subtlety. If my great affair`s a secret, that`s only because it`s a secret in spite of itself - the amazing event has made it one. I not only never took the smallest precaution to keep it so, but never dreamed of any such accident. If I had I shouldn`t in advance have had the heart to go on. As it was, I only became aware little by little, and meanwhile I had done my work."
"And now you quite like it?" I risked.
"My work?"
"Your secret. It`s the same thing."
"Your guessing that," Vereker replied, "is a proof that you`re as clever as I say!" I was encouraged by this to remark that he would clearly be pained to part with it, and he confessed that it was indeed with him now the great amusement of life. "I live almost to see if it will ever be detected." He looked at me for a jesting challenge; something far within his eyes seemed to peep out. "But I needn`t worry - it won`t!"
"You fire me as I`ve never been fired," I declared; "you make me determined to do or die." Then I asked: "Is it a kind of esoteric message?"
His countenance fell at this - he put out his hand as if to bid me good-night. "Ah my dear fellow, it can`t be described in cheap journalese!"
I knew of course he`d be awfully fastidious, but our talk had made me feel how much his nerves were exposed. I was unsatisfied - I kept hold of his hand. "I won`t make use of the expression then," I said, "in the article in which I shall eventually announce my discovery, though I dare say I shall have hard work to do without it. But meanwhile, just to hasten that difficult birth, can`t you give a fellow a clue?" I felt much more at my ease.
"My whole lucid effort gives him the clue - every page and line and letter. The thing`s as concrete there as a bird in a cage, a bait on a hook, a piece of cheese in a mouse-trap. It`s stuck into every volume as your foot is stuck into your shoe. It governs every line, it chooses every word, it dots every i, it places every comma."
I scratched my head. "Is it something in the style or something in the thought? An element of form or an element of feeling?"
He indulgently shook my hand again, and I felt my questions to be crude and my distinctions pitiful. "Good-night, my dear boy - don`t bother about it. After all, you do like a fellow."
"And a little intelligence might spoil it?" I still detained him.
He hesitated. "Well, you`ve got a heart in your body. Is that an element of form or an element of feeling? What I contend that nobody has ever mentioned in my work is the organ of life."
"I see - it`s some idea ABOUT life, some sort of philosophy. Unless it be," I added with the eagerness of a thought perhaps still happier, "some kind of game you`re up to with your style, something you`re after in the language. Perhaps it`s a preference for the letter P!" I ventured profanely to break out. "Papa, potatoes, prunes - that sort of thing?" He was suitably indulgent: he only said I hadn`t got the right letter. But his amusement was over; I could see he was bored. There was nevertheless something else I had absolutely to learn. "Should you be able, pen in hand, to state it clearly yourself - to name it, phrase it, formulate it?"
"Oh," he almost passionately sighed, "if I were only, pen in hand, one of YOU chaps!"
"That would be a great chance for you of course. But why should you despise us chaps for not doing what you can`t do yourself?"
"Can`t do?" He opened his eyes. "Haven`t I done it in twenty volumes? I do it in my way," he continued. "Go YOU and don`t do it in yours."
"Ours is so devilish difficult," I weakly observed.
"So`s mine. We each choose our own. There`s no compulsion. You won`t come down and smoke?"
"No. I want to think this thing out."
"You`ll tell me then in the morning that you`ve laid me bare?"
"I`ll see what I can do; I`ll sleep on it. But just one word more," I added. We had left the room - I walked again with him a few steps along the passage. "This extraordinary `general intention,` as you call it - for that`s the most vivid description I can induce you to make of it - is then, generally, a sort of buried treasure?"
His face lighted. "Yes, call it that, though it`s perhaps not for me to do so."
"Nonsense!" I laughed. "You know you`re hugely proud of it."
"Well, I didn`t propose to tell you so; but it IS the joy of my soul!"
"You mean it`s a beauty so rare, so great?"
He waited a little again. "The loveliest thing in the world!" We had stopped, and on these words he left me; but at the end of the corridor, while I looked after him rather yearningly, he turned and caught sight of my puzzled face. It made him earnestly, indeed I thought quite anxiously, shake his head and wave his finger "Give it up - give it up!"
This wasn`t a challenge - it was fatherly advice. If I had had one of his books at hand I`d have repeated my recent act of faith - I`d have spent half the night with him. At three o`clock in the morning, not sleeping, remembering moreover how indispensable he was to Lady Jane, I stole down to the library with a candle. There wasn`t, so far as I could discover, a line of his writing in the house.
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The answer, refreshingly, at least in the first instalment of The Complete Letters, is hardly at all. 1855–1872, published in two volumes, edited by Pierre A. Walker and Greg W. Zacharias, covers the period from his twelfth birthday to his twenty-ninth. His letters have never before appeared in their entirety. The University of Nebraska Press is attempting, slowly, to make up for that fact in a scholarly edition that obviates the need for any other. They have included at the end of each letter, among very full explanations of every possible obscurity, a list of line breaks, elisions, misspellings, deletions and rewritings. The effect, sometimes, is to create the impression of a man not of flesh and blood but of footnotes, errata and abbreviations, though these in fact rarely get in the way of a full appreciation and often help it along. They allow us to see James in the process of rewriting himself. One sign of a great letter-writer may be that the chief interest of the letters does not lie in the way they expose their author. On these terms, the young James was far from a great correspondent.
The most interesting thing about the early letters is the clue they offer as to how he outgrew them. Martin Amis, in Experience, mentions Osric as the type of his adolescence – Hamlet’s fawning courtier is shown up by his pretensions. There are flashes of Osric in the young James, to such an extent that one suspects that he must have inherited a good deal from the shared banter of his extraordinary family. Dissatisfied with his children’s American education, Henry’s father moved the family to Geneva, in 1859. On arrival there, Henry wrote to a friend from home, Thomas Sergeant Perry, “It came to pass three weeks ago, and since then I have’n’t had the time to write – yes, for the first time in my life almost I can really say I have’nt had the time”. What is so characteristic about the line isn’t immediately obvious – something, perhaps, about the slightly particular insistence on an otherwise commonplace phrase. There is also the little boastful presumption of his experience: “for the first time in my life”. He was sixteen. But the true Jamesian touch may lie in the simple fact of the statement: three weeks at school seemed to him so great an event that it exhausted his own capacity to relate it.
But the Osric manner, far from suggesting a false note, is really the line James will eventually learn to stick to. He doesn’t much at first, and often shows himself capable of a touching straightforward simplicity. “Perhaps you would like to know about my school”, he writes to Perry a little later. And again: “Here are five pages all about myself, but the reason I have written so much is because I like nothing better than for you to write about your own manners + customs, and suppose that you have the same taste in regard to me”. Later, in a burst of un-Jamesian excitement, to the same friend, he writes, “I think I must fire off my biggest gun first. One—two—three! Bung Gerdee bang—bang . . . . . !!! What a noise! Our passages are taken in the Adriatic, for the 11th of September!!!!!”. After three years in Europe, the Jameses were coming home, and Henry was going to see his friend again.
His relations with Perry are both the occasion and the subject of his most interesting early letters, but his pen can sketch his feelings as well as he can write them: there is a charming little drawing of the way he intends to fly, hat and dog scattering in the burst, into Perry’s arms on their reunion. The manner in which he gives himself up to the friendship suggests, as much as anything else, the appetite of a younger and less prodigious son for pre-eminence in someone’s affections. But he fears at times that he cannot live up to it:
I pictured to myself in writing yesterday, your joy in hearing we were at last so near – but you frighten me by telling me that you think of me so much, sleeping and waking – I am not so white as your imagination paints me.
What, one wonders, was his great concealed sin, unless it was only the excuse for a kind of invitation? Still, there is something modest and pleasant in his deprecation, which seems at odds with the great confident unabashed subtleties of his later style.
Finding a style is, of course, one of the things these letters help him to accomplish; he begins, as he himself admits, by trying several on. “To no style am I a stranger”, he writes, with conscious pomp, to Perry (James was seventeen), “there is none which has not been adorned by the magic of my touch.” After the fact, we can begin to trace several of the tricks that will become characteristic: his quaint insistent dips into idiom, for example, “Travellers of all nations wish to ‘do’ a few Swiss Mountains”, or his wonderful bursts of brevity (“I delight in seeing you ferment. One day rich wine will come of it”). He reserves his most elegant flourishes, like many young writers, for the beauties of nature: these mark, amid the more casual prose of his letters, a notable break in tone, and one can occasionally see him gathering his forces to make it. William, the revered older brother, receives many of these poetical tributes. “The Spring arrives with little steps”, Henry writes, between gossip from home, and after a significant dash. (A “will” has been crossed out – his thoughts had outrun his pen.) “The grass is green but the air is almost as cold as March. Nothing has befallen us.” That last phrase is the great refrain of these volumes, and James gives the sentiment a constantly varied repetition. “This place is at the present moment as empty as this blank page + as silent withal . . . . You may imagine that existence has not been thrilling or exciting. To have seen no one and done nothing – unless it be read; which I have done to some extent”, he tells Perry some years later. By then he is twenty-four, and it is wonderful how time advances, by painless bounds, in someone’s correspondence. One feels, with James, that the gaps between letters are expressive of another kind of gap. How to fill the blank page, in both senses, without a conscious active striving after life or effect, is the difficult task he has set himself.
It is the tour of Europe, which he makes on his own at the age of twenty-six, that gives him the means. The subtlety of which he was capable, of which his style was capable, seems to have struck him, on landing in England, with something of the same astonishing force that it strikes many of his readers. It opened up for him, and us, a world of beautifully grained uneventfulness. One has the sense, almost, in reading his successive impressions, of London, of England and its countryside, of Geneva and the Swiss Alps, and then, after an initial reluctance, most magically of Italy, that we are watching someone in the process of getting dressed – into something very fine. James, it turns out, as a letter-writer, is more interesting clothed than naked; even if, as his style matures, he has learned to exercise a greater control over how much he gives away. Such control comes with its own problems; and in the course of his tour, these are expressed by an almost comically literal “objective correlative”. “Uneventfulness” is just what he suffers from, in the most painful way. The great drama of James’s European tour, which gives a point and plot to the scattershot narrative of the letters, is the story of his constipation – though we must wait for him to write to Willy, his beloved older brother, to hear the real progress of his condition:
I may actually say that I can’t get a passage. My “little squirt” has ceased to have more than a nominal use . . . . In fact, I don’t pretend to understand how I get on. When I reflect upon the utterly insignificant relation of what I get rid of to what I imbibe, I wonder that flesh + blood can stand it.
A series of pills prescribed by a doctor in Florence provide him with a temporary relief, sufficient to allow him to see Rome. England in general, and Malvern in particular, is the place that beckons to him when they begin to fail. The preference hardly flatters his adopted home, though it may go a little way to explaining why he settled there in the end instead of Italy: “In the midst of these false + beautiful Italians [the English] glow with the light of the great fact, that after all, they love a bath-tub + they hate a lie”. Plumbing matters as much as art.
The problem seems too perfectly Jamesian (he was, famously, the writer accused of chewing more than he could bite off), but it also reveals one of his most surprising strengths, both as a correspondent and a novelist. His subtlety and elegance are only the excuse for an unembarrassed frankness. Frankness is important to him. It doesn’t come easily, and much of his artfulness is really only a striving after it. “Thank Willy for his excellent letter”, he writes to his sister. “I feel at last, almost for the 1st time since my departure, as if some real speech had passed between us.” Real speech is what he turns to his family for; and it is touching to see how dependent the young James remains, not only on his parents’ money, but on their good opinion of his use of it. He insists from the first that his European tour is only a form of investment, from which they can expect in the future a very high rate of return. Money is another one of the dirty facts of life that he is willing to exploit as a metaphor for something less dirty: “I had far rather let Italy slumber in my mind untouched as a perpetual capital, whereof for my literary needs I shall draw simply the income . . . ”. The parents of feckless and spendthrift children can everywhere take heart: sometimes they do come good.
Nothing tests his capacity for “real speech” so much as the death from consumption of his dear cousin Minny Temple, at the age of twenty-four. Mourning generally stretches our talent for finding what Philip Larkin called “words . . . not untrue and not unkind”. What James makes of it also gives our sympathy for him its first real test. Minny became the model for Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady. James is surprisingly honest, as soon as he hears the news, about his desire to consider it from an aesthetic point of view. “A few short hours have amply sufficed to more than reconcile me to the event + to make it seem the most natural – the happiest, fact, almost in her whole career.” That seems a quick digestion of real life, even for a novelist; and it is wonderful and slightly chilling how soon he can turn it to real use:
You will all have felt by this time the novel delight of thinking of Minny without that lurking impulse of fond regret + uneasy conjecture so familiar to the minds of her friends . . . . There is nevertheless something so appealing in the pathos of her final weakness and decline that my heart keeps returning again + again to the scene, regardless of its pain. When I went to bid Minny farewell at Pelham before I sailed I asked her about her sleep. “Sleep,” she said: “Oh. I don’t sleep. I’ve given it up.” And I well remember the laugh with which she made this sad attempt at humor. And so she went on, sleeping less + less, waking wider + wider, until she awaked absolutely!
Of course, artfulness in a writer can also be an impulsive defensive gesture, and later James is frank enough, and subtle enough, to admit the fact: “While I sit spinning sentences she is dead: and I suppose it is partly to defend myself from too direct a sense of her death that I indulge in this fruitless attempt to transmute it from a hard fact into a soft idea”. That “suppose” deserves our admiration: he isn’t sure of the excuse, and neither are we.
By the end of these volumes, James is twenty-nine years old and about to set forth for Europe again. He has become more or less the writer we know him as – no longer in awe of father or brother, sufficiently convinced of his own extraordinary sensibilities to give them, in his letters, a free rein. The peculiar diffidence he suffered from has been transformed into a more positive and forceful quality: the public man has emerged from the private correspondent. Taken as a whole, these two volumes tell a terrific and sometimes terrifying story, of the effect on a personality of its own growing sense of the talent at its disposal. “Wherever we go we carry with us this heavy burden of our personal consciousness + wherever we stop we open it out over our heads like a great baleful cotton ombrella, to obstruct the prospect + obscure the light.” James’s umbrella was certainly large, but it let in a great deal of light, and on the whole, these letters show him in the best of it. The fact that we still like him as much in his confident maturity as we did in his hesitant youth may have something to do with the sweet, dull, generous, loving loneliness of the role he has been cast in here: a man on his own, thinking of others, and sitting down to write them a letter.
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Benjamin Markovits's third novel, Imposture, was published earlier this year.
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