Henry James, upon hearing of the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson’s suicide, went directly to her apartment in Venice, destroyed his many letters to her, and tried to drown her dresses in the lagoon, but they wouldn’t sink. Yash acts out this story with much élan, gripping the gondolier’s pole James used to push the gowns underwater and recreating his haunted face as they floated back up to the surface.
