Status Updates From Letters, Fictions, Lives: H...

Great; here’s my plan for reading a book like this: read the first one third, read the last one third backwards by letter, you can skip the middle third if you want...

That is bad grammar but sovereign truth.

I write and find greater happiness in writing than I ever did; and this, my dear old friend, is clumsily leading up to the hope and belief that you will soon begin writing again.

If that might have been she would have supported this pain better than I; women have more courage, more strength than men; she would have known what to do, and I do not yet.

Life still has both hands on your shoulders & will insist on showing you how much she is still concerned with you.

Boston is a beautiful town and Cambridge a wonder of leaves and grass -- but with graves under them everywhere."

I could not have believed that life still held an experience so sweet for me.

What he does is simply to show you those people mainly on the outside, as you mainly see people in the world, and to let you divine them and their ends from what they do and say.

As for social conditions, predicaments, orders of things, where shall we find the like of the wonders wrought in The Awkward Age?

I have a theory that it is not well to penetrate every recess of an author's meaning. It robs him of the charm of mystery, and the somewhat labyrinthine construction of Mr. James's later sentences lends itself to the practice of the self-denial necessary to the preservation of this charm. What I feel sure of is that he has a meaning in it all, and that by and by, perhaps when I least expect it, I shall surprise his

Why should he want to picture such life?"

"Perhaps because it exists."

"But that is just what does not happen in the case of Mr. James's people. They are merged in the background so that you never can get behind them, and fairly feel and see them all round. Europe doesn't detach them; nothing does. 'There they are,' as he keeps making his people say in all his late books, when they are not calling one another dear lady, and dear man, and prodigious and magnificent, and of a vagueness or

The feminine enmity to Mr. James is of as old a date as his discovery of the Daisy Miller type of American girl, which gave continental offence among her sisters. It would be hard to say why that type gave such continental offence, unless it was because it was held not honestly to have set down the traits which no one could but most potently and powerfully allow to be true.

But we live in a lonely age for literature or for any art but the mere visual. Illustrations, loud simplifications & grossissements,6 the big Building (good for John;) the "mounted" play, the prose that is careful to be in the tone of, & with the distinction of, a newspaper or bill-poster advertisement -- these, & these only, meseems "stand a chance."

That I'm going to write to you is always a delicious thought to me, which I hug & cherish even as the prospect of some joy, some social joy, to come: only I know not what social joy, in my battered age, casts so graceful a shadow before

It is not merely that Mr. James has supremely the gift of getting at himself, but that when he has got there he has arrived at a view of life such as no one else has framed; and his method of representing life, of making the reader share his view, is of a nature as delicate as it is peculiar.

I can understand your hunger for New England, in these later years. I feel it myself in New York, even, though it is not my country. It has a sort of strange, feminine fascination. It is like a girl, sometimes a young girl, and sometimes an old girl, but wild and shy and womanly sweet, always, with a sort of unitarian optimism in its air.

The "country scenes" in your books make me homesick for New England smells and even sounds

Once Howells's continued relation with Harper's was legally secure and his role as literary adviser to the reorganized firm established, he worked diligently to prevent the company from drifting in the direction James rightly had feared. Indeed, one of his first tasks was to break a logjam in the editorial department and commit the North American Review to serializing The Ambassadors, which had lain idle in Harper's

Sometimes," Howells admitted,

I have been vexed at its vicious pandering to passion, but I cannot think, after all,
of any great modern novel which has not been distinctly moral in effect. I am not
sorry to have had it go into the dark places of the soul, the filthy and squalid
places of society, high and low, and shed there its great light. Let us know with its
help what we are, and where we are.

Always a promoter of James, he continues his series of appreciative essays and endorsements, marveling at his friend's continued evolution of form and refinement of style. Knowing that the younger generation of writers looks not to him but to James for inspiration, Howells acknowledges that his own career may not effectively outlast the nineteenth century. In the dark night of the soul, he confesses to James,

I am glad your evil dream of the stage is past, and I wish now you might give yourself altogether to the novel; and don't abandon the international field, which you created, or at least cleared.

life is a mush of compromise even when it is not of concession

but life is a mush of compromise even when it is not of concession

but life is a mush of compromise even when it is not of concession

The round-up was once the necessary close of every novel, as it is of every season on a Western cattle ranch; and each personage was summoned to be distinctly branded with his appropriate destiny, so that the reader need be in no doubt about him evermore.

We don't know what people might give us that they don't -- the only thing is to take them on what they do & to allow them absolutely & utterly their conditions.

But at the bottom of our wicked hearts we all like New York, and I hope to use some of its vast, gay, shapeless life in my fiction.

You make me think for a moment that the public might be really a little less idiotic than it is -- though tomorrow, no doubt, I shall again perceive that it mightn't. It doesn't matter -- the idea is the only thing; on the whole it takes care of itself. One must write for that -- to write for the public is to follow the scent of a red herring.

You have washed me down deliciously with the tepid sponge of your intelligence.