The Daily Henry James

by James, Henry

  The Daily Henry James

  THE DAILY

  HENRY JAMES

  A YEAR OF QUOTES FROM THE WORK OF THE MASTER

  Foreword by Michael Gorra

  The University of Chicago Press ✳ Chicago and London

  To My Mother

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  Foreword by Michael Gorra

  © 2016 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. Published 2016.

  Printed in the United States of America

  25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40854-5 (paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-40868-2 (e-book)

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226408682.001.0001

  This text is based on the original published in 1911; only obvious typographical errors and omissions have been corrected.

  I acknowledge, with many thanks, the courtesy of Messrs. Charles Scribner’s Sons, Messrs. Harper & Brothers, The Houghton Mifflin Company, The Macmillan Company and Duffield & Company in giving me their permission for the use of quotations from the writings of Mr. Henry James published by them and of which they have the copyright.

  Evelyn Garnaut Smalley

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016008496

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Introduction

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  Index

  Foreword

  This little charmer first appeared as The Henry James Yearbook in 1911, bound in a deep burgundy cloth and with a typeface that matched that of the great New York Edition of James’s works, an edition that had finished its run only two years before. It offers a quotation for each day of the year, many of them apposite to the season though none of them obvious, and taken from the full range of James’s production, the criticism and travel writing as well as the novels and tales.

  The book was put out by the Gorham Press, a Boston publisher that, as a Harvard website delicately puts it, produced its things “at their authors’ expense.” We’d probably call it a vanity press, but in James’s day such books were usually described as having been privately printed, a category that included not only the work of his own father but even such classics as The Education of Henry Adams. Not that the Henry James Yearbook stayed private. H. L. Mencken noticed it in The Smart Set, reviewing it alongside Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes, and in 1912 the English firm of J. M. Dent brought out a trade edition, using sheets imported from Boston.

  And then the book more or less vanished. A few older works of criticism list it in their bibliographies, and a small press in Pennsylvania reissued it in 1970. But no scholar has ever paid it much attention, and for decades it survived in the only way that forgotten books do survive: undisturbed in the stacks. Or at least a few of them did, a very few. Today the world’s libraries contain scarcely more than a hundred copies, all told, and it might seem little more than a collector’s item, a curiosity. Yet there are a number of reasons to look closely at this pocket-sized volume, and aside from the enduring power—the wit, the beauty, the play—of James’s own prose, the best of them is the identity of its editor.

  Evelyn Garnaut Smalley (1869–1938) was born to American parents in London. Her mother, Phoebe Smalley, was the adopted daughter of the abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Her father, George W. Smalley, had spent his twenties practicing law in Boston, but at the start of the Civil War he took a post on Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune and in 1862 made his reputation with a battlefield report from Antietam. Afterward he became the paper’s London correspondent, and in the 1870s the newly expatriated Henry James was a regular guest at the family’s table. Smalley was ten years the novelist’s senior; he helped him find a club and a publisher, and James was always grateful. At their house he first met Robert Browning, and learned more about the inside of British politics than he probably cared to. The Smalleys knew everybody, and James joked in a letter to his brother William that they were so worldly as to “dine out three times a day.”

  Their daughter doesn’t figure in James’s early letters, but at the turn of the century he told William Dean Howells that he was “very fond” of her, and in old age he wrote to Howells again of his concern over what seemed a difficult life. Evelyn Smalley never married and in middle age still lived with her parents; around 1909 she had some form of breakdown and was for a time institutionalized. “It has been communicated to me,” James wrote, “that her infinitely tragic case is one for which no recovery can be hoped.” Still, he had heard that her ongoing work on the Yearbook seemed therapeutic and wrote that he was eager ‘to do what I can’”; the brief prefaces that both he and Howells wrote for this volume should be seen in that light.

  But she did recover. I’ve found two photographs of her, and the first of them, from 1915, shows her on an ocean liner, standing next to her friend, the actress Ellen Terry. The second was taken in 1923 at Les Invalides in Paris. She’s wearing a flowing headdress that makes her look like a kind of lay nun and receiving the Legion of Honor from General Henri Gouraud. Evelyn Smalley arrived in France in 1917 with a group from the YMCA whose mission was to provide small comforts for the troops at the very front of the Allied lines. She was stationed at Bouy, to the southeast of Reims. In July 1918 her “hut” came under heavy bombardment, but she refused an order to evacuate and remained at her post until the end of the war; sources in both French and English describe her as appearing in the smoke of battle with a jug of cocoa for any soldier who needed something warm. She also received the Croix de Guerre and died in Pau in 1938.

  Smalley’s life was in a way very Jamesian, and the book she made pays homage to the figure she had known for the whole of that life. This volume stands as a material witness both to the reading practices of her era and to James’s presence in his time. Most of us have a few bits of poetry in our heads, but almost nobody now keeps a commonplace book, a personal anthology of the lines and sentences and paragraphs that have meant the most to us. In earlier ages, however, devoted readers often produced such albums, most of them handwritten and strictly private, though a few did find the fierce legibility of type. This one is a special case since its excerpts all come from the same writer, but it has a precedent in Alexander Main’s Wise, Witty, and Tender Sayings of George Eliot, first published in 1872. Main’s volume sold steadily until the end of the century, and Evelyn Smalley might have thought that this book would have a similar success. But James was never as popular as George Eliot, and in 1911 his fortunes were at their commercial nadir.

  Still, his name did stand as a cultural marker, one that even here connotes a fine-grained sense of taste and distinction. (Another such marker was an apartment building called the Henry James, of around the same date, which stood in New York on ground now owned by Columbia University.) And such literary ephemera are more widespread than one might think. Royal Doulton once made figurines of Dickens’s characters; in Germany you can buy something called a “Goethe barometer”; and wall calendars often feature quotations, usually of an “inspirational” nature, from this book or that. Yet the fact that James’s own ephemera takes the shape of a bound and paradoxically permanent volume suggests that he speaks to a different audience and that Evelyn Smalley aims to fulfill a different set of expectations.

  Her choice of passages h
as its idiosyncrasies. She quotes rather heavily from James’s essays on the American poet James Russell Lowell, an intimate family friend, and she’s especially drawn to The Princess Casamassima, James’s fullest account of London life. Yet those excerpts make me want to reread that novel, and indeed the passages she chooses often work to bring a whole book before me, to remind me in a sentence of its essential situation. They are so evocative, in fact, that I’ve tried in reading month by month to defamiliarize them instead, to forget what I already know and to read these little pieces of prose as though they were indeed freestanding.

  That effort has made two things clear. One is James’s epigrammatic force. The other, which can be easy to miss when caught by the flow of a narrative, is the extraordinary precision of his descriptive prose, his sheer ability to make you see. I have loved revisiting these passages and hope that in reading them you will find some of the same pleasure.

  With thanks to Anne Houston, Barbara Blumenthal, and Karen Kukil of the Smith College Libraries; Levi Stahl and Margaret Hivnor of the University of Chicago Press; and Michael Anesko.

  Michael Gorra

  November 2015, Northampton, MA

  Preface

  I hope it will be apparent that my work on this book has been a happiness to me. I have also been happy in the thought that it may bring pleasure to some of the many who share in the privilege of companion-ship with Mr. Henry James’s books, and who will understand that the task has been not so much what to select, as what to regretfully omit, and it has been my hope that it may lead some who have missed the precious opportunity of growing up with the books to turn to them. I should then feel I had done the little I actively could in acknowledgement of a life-long obligation; a debt which I am glad to think is constantly increasing. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to Mr. Henry James for the generous sympathy and the appreciation (given to me by him) of my share in the book, and for the gracious kindness that has done so much toward the furtherance of the accomplishment of my purpose. I can only feel both proud and humble and give him once more my deepest thanks.

  Evelyn Garnaut Smalley

  Introduction

  I

  The Author to the Public

  The Athenaeum,

  Pall Mall, S. W.

  London, June 16, 1910.

  I greatly desire to express to all who shall be interested my earnest approval of Miss Evelyn Smalley’s Henry James Year Book, of which I have seen considerable portions and which she has put together with my full assent and sympathy. To the use she has made of passages from my writings, I greatly and unreservedly subscribe and shall be very happy and must congratulate myself if the present attestation of this fortunately contributes to the publication of the book, and thus to the recognition and reward of so much friendly and discriminating and in every way gracious labour. I take the thing for a very charming and illuminating tribute to the literary performance of

  Henry James

  II

  One of the Public to the Author

  My Dear James:

  You could hardly have expected a response to your approval for this happily imagined selection before the appeal had reached any of your public in print; but I, who have been privileged to see it in manuscript together with the proofs of the book, make bold to forecast the general satisfaction which I know awaits it.

  After being so many years ago your eager editor, and ever since your applausive critic, I ought not to feel bound to insist now upon my delight in the charms of your manner, the depth of your thought, the beauty of your art, which the grouping of these passages freshly witnesses even to such a veteran lover of your work as I; and in fact I do not feel so bound. I do not so much fulfill a duty as indulge a pleasure in owning my surprise at the constant succession of your felicities here. In the relief which their detachment from the context gives them, they have not merely novelty; they seem to have added to their intrinsic value. I have kept asking myself, How came he to think of this or that? How came he to say it in such form that the words as well as the phrases appear of his invention? The delicate wit, the urbane humor, the quiet wisdom, the unfailing good temper—I am sure that the readers who have already affirmed their taste by liking these in your novels and essays will like them the more in an ordering which would be fatal to inferior performance.

  That this volume should send people to your books who do not yet know them, as it will surely send people back to them who have long known them, is something greatly to be wished in the interest of literature, and especially of American literature. We do not so abound in masterpieces that we can afford to ignore or neglect the finest of the few we have.

  Yours ever,

  W. D. Howell

  The Daily Henry James

  January

  The air, in its windless chill, seemed to tinkle like a crystal, the faintest gradations of tone were perceptible in the sky, the west became deep and delicate, everything grew doubly distinct before taking on the dimness of evening. There were pink flushes on snow, ‘tender’ reflections on patches of stiffened marsh, sounds of car-bells, no longer vulgar, but almost silvery, on the long bridge, lonely outlines of distant dusky undulations against the fading glow. These agreeable effects used to light up that end of the drawing-room, and Olive often sat at the window with her companion before it was time for the lamp. They admired the sunsets, they rejoiced in the ruddy spots projected upon the parlor-wall, they followed the darkening perspective in fanciful excursions. They watched the stellar points come out at last in a colder heaven, and then, shuddering a little, arm in arm, they turned away with a sense that the winter night was even more cruel than the tyranny of men—turned back to drawn curtains and a brighter fire and a glittering tea-tray and more and more talk.

  The Bostonians, 1886

  January 1

  Ivan Turgénieff, 1878

  His sadness has its element of error, but it has also its larger element of wisdom. Life is, in fact, a battle. On this point optimists and pessimists agree. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again forever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it. We can welcome experience as it comes, and give it what it demands, in exchange for something which is idle to pause to call much or little so long as it contributes to swell the volume of consciousness. In this there is mingled pain and delight, but over the mysterious mixture there hovers a visible rule, that bids us learn to will and seek to understand.

  January 2

  The Next Time, 1895

  When he went abroad to gather garlic he came home with heliotrope.

  January 3

  The Golden Bowl, 1904

  “You Americans are almost incredibly romantic.”

  “Of course we are. That’s just what makes everything so nice for us.”

  “Everything?”

  “Well, everything that’s nice at all—the world, the beautiful world, or everything in it that is beautiful. I mean we see so much.”

  January 4

  The Portrait of a Lady, 1881

  “Judge everyone and everything for yourself.”

  “That’s what I try to do,” said Isabel, “but when you do that people call you conceited.”

  “You’re not to mind them—that’s precisely my argument; not to mind what they say about yourself any more than what they say about your friend or your enemy.”

  —“I think you’re right; but there are some things I can’t help minding; for instance, when my friend is attacked, or when I myself am praised.”

  January 5

  The Marriages, 1892

  She was as undomestic as a shop-front and as out of tune as a parrot.

  January 6

  The Wings of the Dove, 1903

&
nbsp; I’ve often thought success comes to her by the spirit in her that dares and defies her idea not to prove the right one. One has seen it so again and again, in the face of everything, become the right one.

  January 7

  The Bundle of Letters, 1879

  I do love their way of speaking, and sometimes I feel almost as if it would be right to give up trying to learn French, and just try to learn to speak our own tongue as these English speak it. It isn’t the things they say so much, though these are often rather curious; but it is in the way they pronounce, and in the sweetness of their voice. It seems as if they must try a good deal to talk like that; but these English that are here don’t seem to try at all, either to speak or do anything else.

  January 8

  The Lesson of Balzac, 1905

  The English writer wants to make sure, first of all, of your moral judgment; the French is willing, while it waits a little, to risk, for the sake of his subject and your interest, your spiritual salvation.

  January 9

  An International Episode, 1879

  “You must take us as we come—with all our imperfections on our heads. Of course we haven’t your country life, and your old ruins, and your great estates, and your leisure-class and all that. But if we haven’t, I should think you might find it a pleasant change—I think any country is pleasant where they have pleasant manners.”