Tales from a Master's Notebook
Page 22
fn2 James took a lease on a spacious fourth-floor flat at 34 De Vere Gardens, Kensington in November 1885, moving in the following March.
fn3 Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory née Persse (1852–1932), Irish playwright, translator, critic, and in 1899 co-founder with W. B. Yeats and others of the Irish National Theatre Society.
fn4 foyer: hearth, fireside
fn5 de part & d’autre: on both sides
fn6 recéler: contain
fn7 là-dedans: in the matter
fn8 cocotte: tart, harlot
fn9 Unidentified: seemingly none of James’s friends and acquaintances with these initials: Welbore St. Clair Baddeley, Wolcott Balestier (American), Walter Berry (American), William Wilberforce Baldwin (American), Walter Besant (happily married), William Blackwood (lived in Edinburgh), Sir Percy William Bunting (happily married), Witter Bynner (the dates don’t work) …
fn10 petite fantaisie: little fantasy
fn11 my entrée en matière: my introduction; where I come in
fn12 Klara, the widow of the Russian political exile Nikolai Turgenev (1789–1871), a distant relative of James’s friend the novelist Ivan Turgenev, lived in Paris with her daughter Fanny and two sons. The Florentine Count and his American wife may possibly be Alberto Guido della Gherardesca and Giuseppina (Josephine) Fisher, whom he married in 1873.
fn13 James signed a lease on Lamb House in Rye, Sussex, a Georgian house he had been admiring, in September 1897, and after renovations moved in the following summer. In 1889 he bought the freehold.
fn14 James’s friends Sir Garnet Wolseley (1833–1913), ‘victor of the Ashantees’ in the first Ashanti War of 1873–4, from 1895 to 1899 Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, and his pretty, sympathetic wife, the former Louisa Erskine (1843–1920), moved in 1898 into the Farm House, on the Glynde estate in Sussex – to which Lady Wolseley applied her resources of taste. The ‘landlord’ – proprietor of Glynde Place and the smaller Farm House a hundred yards away – was Rear Admiral the Honourable Thomas Brand, whom James had met, and who was evidently bemused by the success of their new arrangements. James visited the Farm House in 1900, he wrote to a friend, ‘with a good deal of envious & surprised perception, moreover, of the way the little house, originally so thankless, justifies itself when peopled with the proprietors and their treasures. She has a rare mind for things & the arrangement of them.’
fn15 James was staying, as he wrote to his brother William four days earlier, in what he called a ‘perfect … paradise’ – ‘Milton’s Vallombrosa, the original of his famous line, the site of the old mountain monastery which he visited and which stands still a few hundred feet below me as I write’. (Paradise Lost, I, ll. 302–4: ‘Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks / In Vallombrosa, where the Etrurian shades, / High overarched, embower …’)
fn16 The advanced French literary monthly, founded in Paris in 1829. In Ch. IV of his memoir Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), James says that ‘there could perhaps be no better sample of the effect of sharpness with which the forces of culture might emerge than, say, the fairly golden glow of romance investing the mere act of perusal of the Revue des Deux Mondes’.
fn17 de moeurs littéraires: of literary manners
fn18 débiné: pulled to pieces, picked apart.
fn19 éreintements: demolitions, eviscerations
fn20 rageusement: ragingly
fn21 Alice Howe Gibbens James (1849–1922), wife of James’s elder brother William James (1842–1910), the psychologist and philosopher, was born and mostly brought up in Weymouth, Massachusetts.