Генри Джеймс - The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II стр 5.

To W. E. Norris

My dear Norris,

There is nothing to which I find my situation in this great country less favourable than to this order of communication; yet I greatly wish, 1st, to thank you for your beautiful letter of as long ago as Sept. 12th (from Malvern,) and 2nd, not to fail of having some decent word of greeting on your table for Xmas morning. The conditions of time and space, at this distance, are such as to make nice calculations difficult, and I shall probably be frustrated of the felicity of dropping on you by exactly the right post. But I send you my affectionate blessing and I aspire, at the most, to lurk modestly in the Heap. You were in exile (very elegant exile, I rather judge) when you last wrote, but you will now, I take it, be breathing again bland Torquay (bland, not blond)a process having, to my fancy, a certain analogy and consonance with that of quaffing bland Tokay. This is neither Tokay nor Torquaythis slightly arduous process, or adventure, of mine, though very nearly as expensive, on the whole, as both of those luxuries combined. I am just now amusing myself with bringing the expense up to the point of ruin by having come back to Boston, after an escape (temporary, to New York,) to conclude a terrible episode with the Dentistwhich is turning out an abyss of torture and tedium. I am promised (and shall probably enjoy) prodigious results from itbut the experience, the whole business, has been so fundamental and complicated that anguish and dismay only attend it while it goes onembellished at the most by an opportunity to admire the miracles of American expertness. These are truly a revelation and my tormentor a great artist, but he will have made a cruelly deep dark hole in my time (very precious for me here) and in my pocketthe latter of such a nature that I fear no patching of all my pockets to come will ever stop the leak. But meanwhile it has all made me feel quite domesticated, consciously assimilated to the system; I am losing the precious sense that everything is strange (which I began by hugging close,) and it is only when I know I am quite whiningly homesick en dessous, for L.H. and Pall Mall, that I remember I am but a creature of the surface. The surface, however, has its points; New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire; but Boston has quality and convenience, and now that one sees American life in the longer piece one profits by many of its ingenuities. The winter, as yet, is radiant and bell-like (in its frosty clearness;) the diffusion of warmth, indoors, is a signal comfort, extraordinarily comfortable in the travelling, by dayI don't go in for nights; and a marvel the perfect organisation of the universal telephone (with interviews and contacts that begin in 2 minutes and settle all things in them;) a marvel, I call it, for a person who hates notewriting as I dobut an exquisite curse when it isn't an exquisite blessing. I expect to be free to return to N.Y., the formidable in a few dayswhere I shall inevitably have to stay another month; after which I hope for sweeter thingsWashington, which is amusing, and the South, and eventually Californiawith, probably, Mexico. But many things are indefiniteonly I shall probably stay till the end of June. I suppose I am much interestedfor the time passes inordinately fast. Also the country is unlike any otherto one's sensation of it; those of Europe, from State to State, seem to me less different from each other than they are all different from thisor rather this from them. But forgive a fatigued and obscure scrawl. I am really done and demoralized with my interminable surgical (for it comes to that) ordeal. Yet I wish you heartily all peace and plenty and am yours, my dear Norris, very constantly,

To Edmund Gosse

My dear Gosse,

I seem to myself to be (under the disadvantage of this extraordinary process of "seeing" my native country) perpetually writing letters; and yet I blush with the consciousness of not having yet got round to you againsince the arrival of your so genial New Year's greeting. I have been lately in constant, or at least in very frequent, motion, on this large comprehensive scale, and the right hours of recueillement and meditation, of private communication, in short, are very hard to seize. And when one does seize them, as you know, one is almost crushed by the sense of accumulated and congested matter. So I won't attempt to remount the stream of time save the most sketchily in the world. It was from Lenox, Mass., I think, in the far-away prehistoric autumn, that I last wrote you. I reverted thence to Boston, or rather, mainly, to my brother's kindly roof at Cambridge, hard bywhere, alas, my five or six weeks were harrowed and ravaged by an appalling experience of American transcendent Dentistrya deep dark abyss, a trap of anguish and expense, into which I sank unwarily (though, I now begin to see, to my great profit in the short human hereafter,) of which I have not yet touched the fin fond. (I mention it as accounting for treasures of wrecked timeI could do nothing else whatever in the state into which I was put, while the long ordeal went on: and this has left me belated as to everything"work," correspondence, impressions, progress through the land.) But I was (temporarily) liberated at last, and fled to New York, where I passed three or four appalled midwinter weeks (Dec. and early Jan.;) appalled, mainly, I mean, by the ferocious discomfort this season of unprecedented snow and ice puts on in that altogether unspeakable cityfrom which I fled in turn to Philadelphia and Washington. (I am going back to N.Y. for three or four weeks of developed springI haven't yet (in a manner) seen it or cowardly "done" it.) Things and places southward have been more manageablesave that I lately spent a week of all but polar rigour at the high-perched Biltmore, in North Carolina, the extraordinary colossal French château of George Vanderbilt in the said N.C. mountainsthe house 2500 feet in air, and a thing of the high Rothschild manner, but of a size to contain two or three Mentmores and Waddesdons.... Philadelphia and Washington would yield me a wild range of anecdote for you were we face to facewill yield it me then; but I can only glance and passglance at the extraordinary and rather personally-fascinating Presidentwho was kind to me, as was dear J. Hay even more, and wondrous, blooming, aspiring little Jusserand, all pleasant welcome and hospitality. But I liked poor dear queer flat comfortable Philadelphia almost ridiculously (for what it isextraordinarily cossu and materially civilized,) and saw there a good deal of your friendas I think she isAgnes Repplier, whom I liked for her bravery and (almost) brilliancy. (You'll be glad to hear that she is extraordinarily better, up to now, these two years, of the malady by which her future appeared so compromised.) However, I am tracing my progress on a scale, and the hours melt awayand my letter mustn't grow out of my control. I have worked down here, yearningly, and for all too short a staybut ten days in all; but Florida, at this southernmost tip, or almost, does beguile and gratify megiving me my first and last (evidently) sense of the tropics, or à peu près, the subtropics, and revealing to me a blandness in nature of which I had no idea. This is an amazing winter-resortthe well-to-do in their tens, their hundreds, of thousands, from all over the land; the property of a single enlightened despot, the creator of two monster hotels, the extraordinary agrément of which (I mean of course the high pitch of mere monster-hotel amenity) marks for me [how] the rate at which, the way in which, things are done over here changes and changes. When I remember the hotels of twenty-five years ago even! It will give me brilliant chapters on hotel-civilization. Alas, however, with perpetual movement and perpetual people and very few concrete objects of nature or art to make use of for assimilation, my brilliant chapters don't get themselves writtenso little can they be notes of the current picturesquelike one's European notes. They can only be notes on a social order, of vast extent, and I see with a kind of despair that I shall be able to do here little more than get my saturation, soak my intellectual spongereserving the squeezing-out for the subsequent, ah, the so yearned-for peace of Lamb House. It's all interesting, but it isn't thrillingthough I gather everything is more really curious and vivid in the Westto which and California, and to Mexico if I can, I presently proceed. Cuba lies off here at but twelve hours of steamerand I am heartbroken at not having time for a snuff of that flamboyant flower.