Генри Джеймс - The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II стр 10.

I repeat that these things have made me want greatly to see you. Is it thinkable to you that you might come over at this ungenial season, for a nightsome time before Xmas? Could you, would you? I should immensely rejoice in it. I am here till Jan. 31stwhen I go up to London for three months. I go away, probably, for four or five days at Xmasand I go away for next Saturday-Tuesday. But apart from those dates I would await you with rapture.

And let me say just one word of attenuation of my (only apparent) meanness over the Golden Bowl. I was in America when that work appeared, and it was published there in 2 vols. and in very charming and readable form, each vol. but moderately thick and with a legible, handsome, large-typed page. But there came over to me a copy of the London issue, fat, vile, small-typed, horrific, prohibitive, that so broke my heart that I vowed I wouldn't, for very shame, disseminate it, and I haven't, with that feeling, had a copy in the house or sent one to a single friend. I wish I had an American one at your dispositionbut I have been again and again depleted of all ownership in respect to it. You are very welcome to the British brick if you, at this late day, will have it.

I greet Mrs Wells and the Third Party very cordially and am yours, my dear Wells, more than ever,

To William James

Dearest William,

I wrote not many days since to Aleck, and not very, very many before to Peggybut I can't, to-night, hideously further postpone acknowledging your so liberal letter of Oct. 22nd (the one in which you enclosed me Aleck's sweet one,) albeit I have been in the house all day without an outing, and very continuously writing, and it is now 11 p.m. and I am rather fagged.... However, I shall write to Alice for informationall the more that I deeply owe that dear eternal Heroine a letter. I am not "satisfied about her," please tell her with my tender love, and should have testified to this otherwise than by my long cold silence if only I hadn't been, for stress of composition, putting myself on very limited contribution to the post. The worst of these bad manners are now over, and please tell Alice that my very next letter shall be to her. Only she mustn't put pen to paper for me, not so much as dream of it, before she hears from me. I take a deep and rich and brooding comfort in the thought of how splendidly you are all "turning out" all the whileespecially Harry and Bill, and especially Peg, and above all, Aleckin addition to Alice and you. I turn you over (in my spiritual pocket,) collectively and individually, and make you chink and rattle and ring; getting from you the sense of a great, though too-much (for my use) tied-up fortune. I have great joy (tell him with my love) of the news of Bill's so superior work, and yearn to have some sort of a squint at it. Tell him, at any rate, how I await him, for his holidays, out hereon this spotand I wish I realized more richly Harry's present conditions. I await him here not less.

I mean (in response to what you write me of your having read the Golden B.) to try to produce some uncanny form of thing, in fiction, that will gratify you, as Brotherbut let me say, dear William, that I shall greatly be humiliated if you do like it, and thereby lump it, in your affection, with things, of the current age, that I have heard you express admiration for and that I would sooner descend to a dishonoured grave than have written. Still I will write you your book, on that two-and-two-make-four system on which all the awful truck that surrounds us is produced, and then descend to my dishonoured gravetaking up the art of the slate pencil instead of, longer, the art of the brush (vide my lecture on Balzac.) But it is, seriously, too late at night, and I am too tired, for me to express myself on this questionbeyond saying that I'm always sorry when I hear of your reading anything of mine, and always hope you won'tyou seem to me so constitutionally unable to "enjoy" it, and so condemned to look at it from a point of view remotely alien to mine in writing it, and to the conditions out of which, as mine, it has inevitably sprungso that all the intentions that have been its main reason for being (with me) appear never to have reached you at alland you appear even to assume that the life, the elements forming its subject-matter, deviate from felicity in not having an impossible analogy with the life of Cambridge. I see nowhere about me done or dreamed of the things that alone for me constitute the interest of the doing of the noveland yet it is in a sacrifice of them on their very own ground that the thing you suggest to me evidently consists. It shows how far apart and to what different ends we have had to work out (very naturally and properly!) our respective intellectual lives. And yet I can read you with rapturehaving three weeks ago spent three or four days with Manton Marble at Brighton and found in his hands ever so many of your recent papers and discourses, which, having margin of mornings in my room, through both breakfasting and lunching there (by the habit of the house,) I found time to read several ofwith the effect of asking you, earnestly, to address me some of those that I so often, in Irving St., saw you address to others who were not your brother. I had no time to read them there. Philosophically, in short, I am "with" you, almost completely, and you ought to take account of this and get me over altogether.There are two books by the way (one fictive) that I permit you to raffoler about as much as you like, for I have been doing so myselfH. G. Wells's Utopia and his Kipps. The Utopia seems to me even more remarkable for other things than for his characteristic cheek, and Kipps is quite magnificent. Read them both if you haven'tcertainly read Kipps.There's also another subject I'm too full of not to mention the good thing I've done for myselfthat is, for Lamb House and my gardenby moving the greenhouse away from the high old wall near the house (into the back garden, setting it up betteragainst the street wall) and thereby throwing the liberated space into the front garden to its immense apparent extension and beautification....

To W. E. Norris

My dear Norris,

It is my desire that this, which I shall post here to-morrow, shall be a tiny item in the hecatomb of friendship gracing your breakfast table on Christmas morning and mingling the smoke of (certain) aged and infirm victims with the finer and fresher fumes of the board. But the aged and infirm propose and the postman disposes and I can only hope I shall not be either disconcertingly previous or ineffectively subsequent. If my mind's eye loses you at sweet (yet sublime) Underbank, I still see you in a Devonshire mild light and feel your Torquay window letting in your Torquay airwhich, at this distance, in this sadly Southeasternized corner, suggests all sorts of enviable balm and beatitude. It was a real pang to me, some weeks ago, when you were coming up to town, to have to put behind me, with so ungracious and uncompromising a gesture, the question, and the great temptation, of being there for a little at the same moment. But there are hours and seasonsand I know the face of them wellwhen my need to mind my business here, and to mind nothing else, becomes absoluteLondon tending rather over-much, moreover, to set frequent and freshly-baited traps, at all times, for a still too susceptible and guileless old country mouse. All my consciousness centres, necessarily, just now, on a single small problem, that of managing to do an "American book" (or rather a couple of them,) that I had supposed myself, in advance, capable of doing on the spot, but that I had there, in fact, utterly to forsweartime, energy, opportunity to write, every possibility quite failing mewith the consequence of my material, my "documents" over here, quite failing me too and there being nothing left for me but to run a race with an illusion, the illusion of still seeing it, which is, as it recedes, so to speak, a thousand lengths ahead of me. I shall keep it up as a tour de force, and produce my copy somehow (I have indeed practically done one vol. of "Impressions"there are to be two, separate and differently-titled;) but I am unable, meanwhile, to dally by the waythe sweet wayside of Pall Mallor to turn either to the right or the left. (My subjectunless I grip it tightmelts awayRye, Sussex, is so little like it; and then where am I? And yet the thing interests me to do, though at the same time appalling me by its difficulty. But I didn't mean to tell you this long story about it.) I hope you are plashing yourself in more pellucid watersand I find I assume that there is in every way a great increase of the pellucid in your case by the fact of the neighbouring presence of your (as I again, and I trust not fallaciously assume) sympathetic collaterals. I should greatly like, here, a collateral or two myselfto find the advantage, across the sea, of the handful of those of mine who are sympathetic, makes me miss them, or the possibility of them, in this country of my adoption, which is more than kind, but less than kin.... I spend the month of January, further, in this placethen I do seek the metropolis for 12 or 14 weeks. I expect to hear from you that you have carried off some cup or other (sculling for preference) in your Bank Holiday Sportsso for heaven's sake don't disappoint me. You're my one link with the Athletic world, and I like to be able to talk about you. Therefore, àpropos of cups, all power to your elbow! I know none nowno cupbut the uninspiring cocoawhich I carry with a more and more doddering hand. But I am still, my dear Norris, very lustily and constantly yours,