[Theodora Bosanquet was Henry James' secretary from 1907 until his death in 1916.]
He asked no questions about my speed on the typewriter or about anything else. The friend to whom he had applied for an amanuensis had told him I was sufficiently the right young woman for his purpose and he relied on her word. He had, at the best, little hope of any young woman beyond docility. We sat in armchairs on either side of a fireless grate while we observed each other. I suppose he found me harmless and I know that I found him overwhelming . He was much more massive than I had expected, much broader and stouter and stronger. I remembered that someone had told me he used to be taken for sea-captain when he wore a beard . . .After the interview I wondered what kind of impression one might have gained from a chance encounter in some such observation cell as a railway carriage. Would it have been possible to fit him into any single category? He had reacted with so much success against the American accent and the English manner that he seemed only doubly Anglo-Saxon. He might perhaps have been some species of disguised cardinal, or even a Roman nobleman amusing himself by playing the part of a Sussex squire. The observer could at least have guessed that any part he chose to assume would be finely conceived and generously played, for his features were all cast in the classical mold of greatness. He might very well have been a merciful Caesar or a benevolent Napoleon. . . .
If the interview was overwhelming, it had none of the usual awkwardness of such curious conversations. Instead of critical angles and disconcerting silences, there were only benign curves and ample reassurances. There was encouraging gaiety in an expanse of bright check waistcoat. He invited me to ask any question I liked, but I had none to ask. I wanted nothing but to be allowed to go to Rye and work his typewriter. He was prepared, however, with his statements and, once I was seated opposite him, the strong, slow stream of his deliberate speech played over me without ceasing. He had it on his mind to tell me the conditions of life and labor at Rye, and he unburdened himself fully, with number less amplifications and qualifications without any real break . . .
On summer days Henry James like to work in the large ‘garden room’ at Lamb House. I gave him a longer stretch for perambulation and a window overlooking the cobbled street that curved up a hill past his door. He liked to be able to relieve the tension of a difficult sentence by a glance down the street; he enjoyed hailing a passing friend or watching a motor-car pant up the sharp little slope. The sight of one of these vehicles could be counted on to draw from him a vigorous outburst of amazement, admiration, or horror for the complications of an age that produced such efficient monsters for gobbling protective distance.. . .
His practice of dictation was begun in the nineties. By 1907 it was a confirmed habit, its effects being easily recognizable in his style, which became more and more like free, involved, unanswered talk. ‘I know, he once said to me, ‘that I am too diffuse when I’m dictating.’ But he found dictation not only an easier and more inspiring method of composing than writing with his own hand, and he considered that the gain in expression more than compensated for any loss of concision. The spelling out of words, the indication of commas, were scarcely felt as a drag on the movement of his thought. ‘It all seems,’ he once explained, ‘to be much more effectively pulled out of me in speech than in writing.’ Indeed , at the time when I began to work for him, he had reached a stage at which the click of a Remington machine acted as a positive spur. He found it more difficult to compose to the music of any other make. During a fortnight when the Remington was out of order he dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident discomfort, and he found it almost impossibly disconcerting to speak to something that made no sound at all. . .
Once or twice when he was ill and in bed I took down a note or to by hand, but as a rule he liked to have the typewriter moved into the bedroom for even the shortest letters. Yet there were to the end certain kinds of work which he was obliged to do with a pen. Plays, if they were to be kept within the limits of possible performance, and short stories, if they were to remain within the bounds of publication in a monthly magazine, must be written by hand. . .to resist the temptation of dictation and embroidery. With the short stories he allowed himself a little more freedom, dictating them from his written draft and expanding them as he went which inevitably defeated his original purpose . . .
The method adopted for full-length novels was very different. With a clear run of 100,000 words or more before him, Henry James always cherished the elusive expectation of being able to fit his theme quite easily between the covers of a volume. It was not until he was more than half-way through that the problem of space became embarrassing. At the beginning he had no question of compression to attend to, and he ‘broke ground’, as he said, by talking to himself day by day about the characters and construction until the persons and their actions were vividly present to his inward eye. This soliloquy was of course recorded on the typewriter. He had from far back tended to dramatize all the material that life gave him and he more and more prefigured his novels as staged performances, arranged in acts and scenes, with the characters making their observed entrances and exits. These scenes he worked out until he felt him so thoroughly possessed of the action that he could begin the dictation of the book itself . . . the scenario dictated in advance containing practically none of the phrases used in the final work. The original draft was a framework set up for imagination to clothe with the spun web of life. But they were not a bare framework. They were elaborate and abundant. . .
For the volume of memories, A Small Boy and Others, Notes on a Son and Brother, and the uncompleted Middle Years, no preliminary work was needed . . .it was extraordinarily easy for him to recover the past. All he had to do was to render his sense of those records as adequately as he could. Each morning, after reading the pages written the day before, he would settle down in a chair for an hour or so of conscious effort. Then, lifted on a rising tide of inspiration, he would get up and pace up and down the room, sounding out the periods in tones of resonant assurance. At such times he was beyond reach of irrelevant sounds or sights. Hosts of cats – a tribe he usually routed with shouts of execration – might wail outside the window, phalanxes of motor-cars bearing dreaded visitors might hoot at the door. He heard nothing of them. The only thing that could arrest his progress was the escape of the word he wanted to use. When that had vanished he broke off the rhythmic pacing and made is way to a chimney-piece or book-case tall enough to support his elbows while her rested his head in his hands and audibly pursued the fugitive . . .
In the autumn of 1907, when I began to tap the Remington at Henry’s dictation, he was engaged in the arduous task of preparing his Novels and Tales for the definitive New York edition, published in 1909. Since it was only between breakfast and luncheon that he undertook what he called ’inventive’ work, he gave the hours from half-past ten to half-past one to the composition of the prefaces which are so interesting a feature of the edition. In the evenings he read over again the work of former years, treating the printed pages like so many proof-sheets of extremely corrupt text. The revision was a task he had seen in advance as formidable. He had cultivated the habit of forgetting past achievements almost to the pitch of a sincere conviction that nothing he had written before about 1890 could come with any credit through the ordeal of critical inspection . . .
From the moment he began to read over the earlier tales, he found himself involve in a highly practical examination of the scope and limits of possible revision. Poets, as he pointed out, have often revised their verse to good effect. Why should the novelist not have equal license? The only sound reason for not altering anything is a conviction that it could not be improved. It was Henry James’ profound conviction that he could improve his early writing in nearly every sentence. Not to revise would have been to confess to a loss of faith in himself, and it was not likely that the writer who had fasted for forty years in the wilderness of British and Americans misconceptions without yielding a scrap of intellectual integrity to editorial or publishing tempers should have lost faith in himself. . . .
Henry James’ familiar correspondence show him as unusually impervious to everything which is not an impression of visual images or a sense of a human situation. He was very little troubled by a number of ideas which press with an increasing weight upon the minds of he most educated persons. Not until the outbreak of the Great War was he moved to utter forcible ‘opinion’ about affairs outside his personal range. He’s delightedly free from the common delusion that by grouping individuals in arbitrary classes and by twisting harmless adjectives into abstract nouns it is possible for us to think of more than one thing at a time and to conceive of qualities apart from their manifestations. What he saw he possessed; what he understood he criticized, but he never reckoned it to be any part of his business to sit in judgment on the deeds of men working in alien material for inartistic ends, or to speculate about the nature of the universe or the conflict or to reconciliation of science with religion. . . .
To-day, with the complete record before us – the novels, criticisms, biographies, plays and letters – we can understands how little those international relations that engaged Henry James’ attention mattered to his genius. Wherever he might have lived and whatever human interactions he might have observed, he would in all probability have reached much the same conclusion that he arrived at by way of America, France, and England. When he walked out of the refuge of his study into the world and looked about him, he saw a place of torment, where creatures of prey perpetually thrust their claws into the quivering flesh of the doomed, defenseless children of light. He had an abiding comfort of an inner certainty (and perhaps he did bring that from New England) that the children of light had an eternal advantage; he was aware to the finest fiber of his being that the ‘poor sensitive gentleman’; he so numerously treated possessed a treasure that would outlast all the glittering paste of the world and the flesh; he knew that nothing in life mattered compared with spiritual decency.
We may conclude that the nationalities of his betrayed and triumphant victims are not an important factor. They may equally well be innocent Americans maltreated by odious Europeans, refined Europeans fleeced by unscrupulous Americans, or young children of any race exposed to evil influences. The essential fact is that wherever he looked Henry James saw fineness apparently sacrificed to grossness, beauty to avarice, truth to a bold front. He realized how constantly the tenderness of growing life is at the mercy of personal tyranny and he hated the tyranny of person overreach other. His novels are repeated exposure of this wickedness, a reiterated and passionate plea for the fullest freedom of development, unimperilled by reckless and barbarous stupidity.
He was himself scrupulously careful not to exercise any tyrannical power over other people. The only advice he ever permitted himself to offer a friend was a recommendation to ‘let your soul live.’ Towards the end of his days his horror of interfering, or seeming to interfere, with the freedom of others became so overpowering that it was a misery for him to suspect that the plans of his friends might be made with reference to himself. Much as he enjoyed seeing them, he so disliked to think that they were undergoing the discomfort of voyages and railway journeys in order to be near him that he would have gladly prevented their start if he could. His Utopia was an anarchy where nobody would be responsible for any other human being but only for his own civilized character. His circle of friends will easily recall how finely Henry James had fitted himself to be a citizen of this commonwealth.
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