ON SEPTEMBER 22, 1898, Henry James sat down to write to a friend that “Mrs. Fields & Miss Jewett did come—& Mrs. Fields took me back to my far-away youth & hers—when she was so pretty & I was so aspiring. Read, if you haven’t, Miss Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs (I will send it you if you possess it not) for the pleasure of something really exquisite.”
Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett had come to visit Henry James at his new home in Rye a week earlier, on September 13. James picked them up at the train station in a carriage that he sometimes hired for this purpose, and he drove them back through the Sussex countryside to Lamb House, where he and his belongings had moved in June.
Henry James’s house was a burden and a delight to him. He had spent the summer alternately furnishing it and sweltering in it (August had been exceptionally hot, and he was susceptible to heat), and it was really only in September, around the time of this visit, that the whole had begun to come together. The summer crowd went back to the city, the weather turned, and he began to feel at home and to really like his house and the countryside and the people who lived there year-round. He had a little fat dog named Tosca, with a very long leash, that he used to take for walks in the hedgerows. It was marshy country, near the sea, with salt grasses farther along, but he and his dog stayed mostly in the lanes and long-grassed meadows. He became known by the people who lived in Rye for talking as he walked with his dog and for tangling himself in the leash.
When Fields and Jewett came to spend the afternoon, James was in the midst of a flood of visitors—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had been staying and so had James’s nephew, also named Henry James. Though Uncle Henry James complained now and then that he had moved to the country for solitude and to work, he was glad, in his new isolation, of people to talk to, and he gave Fields and Jewett a royal welcome. “The dominating note,” Fields wrote in her journal that evening, “was dear Mr. James’s pleasure in having a home of his own to which he might ask us.”
Fields, as was her custom, kept a careful diary during their journey and wrote several pages about this visit. She noted the “green door with a brass knocker, wearing the air of impenetrable respectability which is so well known in England.” She remarked that the interior was “large enough for elegance, and simple enough to suit the severe taste of a scholar and private gentleman.” They went upstairs to leave their hats, and she approved of the “pretty balustrade and plain green drugget on the steps.” And when they came back down to the drawing room and began an earnest, awkward conversation, Fields smiled to see the bachelor James leap up “in a very responsible manner” to go into the kitchen to see if lunch was coming along. “Mr. James was intent on the largest hospitality.” Returning, he shifted the conversation to Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs. According to Fields’s diary, the conversation began:
“It is foolish to ask, I know,” said James to Miss Jewett, “but were you in just such a place as you describe in the Pointed Firs?”
“No,” replied Miss Jewett, “not precisely; the book was chiefly written before I visited the locality itself.”
This was in fact not true, but Jewett never liked it to seem that she had taken people and places too directly from life, as if that made her sketches a kind of tourism. James then said that Jewett’s character Mrs. Dennet was “admirable.” As there was no character by that name in her book—which took place in Dunnet Landing and was centered chiefly on a Mrs. Todd, with appearances by her mother, a Mrs. Blackett—Sarah Orne Jewett perhaps paused before replying. Fields noted that the unacknowledged mistake made Jewett easy with James and that they were “very much at home together after this.”
Perhaps Sarah Orne Jewett was relieved. She had heard so much about James from everyone in the Boston literary circle, which she had joined some years after his departure, that she was a touch anxious about actually meeting him. Jewett had begun her career at the Atlantic Monthly by sending drafts of stories first to James Fields and then to William Dean Howells, who sent back, as was his way, tactful, patient, brilliant letters of advice and appreciation. Jewett gradually found her own right material in the people and landscape of Maine. Her stories and sketches emerged out of the farms and fishing villages near South Berwick, where she grew up and resided, on and off, throughout her adult life. Jewett was always interested in the ways that people, especially women, lived in places. She was one of the first American authors to write of women characters whose stories did not end with their decision to marry. Jewett published nineteen books in her life and, unusual for a woman at the time, made her living writing. The Country of the Pointed Firs was serialized in four issues of the Atlantic Monthly in 1896 and then published as a book. Jewett received a torrent of admiring letters, including one from William James, who was a friend of hers, and another from Rudyard Kipling: “It’s immense—it is the very life . . . the reallest [sic] New England book ever given us.” Kipling added a postscript, “I don’t believe even you know how good that book is.”
Some fifteen years before the publication of The Country of the Pointed Firs, around the time of James Fields’s death, Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett had become friends and, as time went on, companions. Intimate relationships between women were then common enough in their city to be referred to even elsewhere as “Boston marriages.” Annie Adams Fields and Sarah Orne Jewett, who was about fifteen years Fields’s junior, lived together at 148 Charles Street and in New Hampshire, where the Fieldses had a summer house, and, more rarely, in South Berwick. They were often separated for long periods, as Fields’s work was in Boston and Jewett was very close to her family who were in Maine. They made four lengthy trips to Europe together: they went to Greece and Italy, to France and England and Scotland, and in 1898, on the third such journey, feeling keenly that they had not seen Henry James since the death of his sister Alice, they made a point of going to visit James at his new house in Rye.
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After lunch, James, not quite sure what to do with his guests, wondered if they would like to take a carriage ride along the coast to Winchelsea, where they might look in at the cottage of the great actress Ellen Terry, and then they might go on to the nearby town of Hastings, reputed to have a nice view of the sea. It was a happy suggestion—neither Annie Adams Fields nor Sarah Orne Jewett ever tired of looking at the sea—and in short order they were in a carriage. If the state of the world had not yet arisen in their conversation, by the ride it would have. In 1898, the later stages of the “affaire Dreyfus” were raging in France, and James was following it with great absorption, every day in the papers. James was a Dreyfusard, believing that Alfred Dreyfus had been unjustly accused of espionage because of his Jewish background. Emile Zola, Dreyfus’s greatest public defendant, had, in January of that year, published “J’accuse” on Dreyfus’s behalf. James later showed a casual anti-Semitism in The American Scene, but his lifelong allegiance to the French realists held firm in this instance. The three writers must have talked, too, of the war with Spain; the Maine had exploded in Havana that February, and the United States was in the midst of a war through which it would take Puerto Rico and Guam. All this was much to the dismay of Mark Twain, William James, and William Dean Howells, who thought the American reaction “wickedly wrong.” Later, Twain and William James and Howells would all join the American Anti-Imperialist League and act publicly to protest one of the outcomes of the war, American expansionism in the Philippines, where, William James wrote, “we are now simply pirates.” Fields and Jewett were very worried about the situation and wrote letters home hoping for peace.
On their small journey that day, James brought along his little dog, which, according to English law, he was supposed to muzzle. But he didn’t like the muzzle, he thought it cruel to the dog, and, as they talked, he kept putting it on and taking it off and somehow contrived to lose it, but then felt responsible and didn’t want to return without the muzzle, and so, when they arrived in Hastings, though they looked briefly at the seascape, which turned out not to be terribly fine after all, they spent the rest of the afternoon in the shops of the village, looking for a new muzzle. Then they drank tea and consumed a great many cakes. (James claimed to have eaten ten.) It was a pleasant and companionable afternoon, and at its end they parted at the Hastings station—Jewett and Fields went to London and James returned to Rye.
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Rye was soon to become quite a sociable place. James’s friend Edmund Gosse right away began making regular visits—James and Gosse went bicycle riding together—and a number of other writers later settled in the neighborhood: Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Stephen Crane, and Ford Madox Ford. They influenced one another’s work: James had already sent Conrad’s work to Howells; James wanted to collaborate with Wells; and a line in James’s The Other House was a direct inspiration for the opening of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. They put on amateur theatricals in one another’s houses and kept one another company in the winter. But when Fields and Jewett came to visit James that first September, the social circle was not yet so rich. He had been very glad to see them.
Annie Adams Fields was always delightful. In remembrance of her husband, and also out of her political conviction that it was not right to dress luxuriously when people were hungry, she always wore a long black mourning veil and a lavender widow’s dress, but, as James said of her, “all her implications were gay.” Sarah Orne Jewett was vivacious, amusing, and amused. He could see why people felt that the arrival of Jewett had made a fine change in Fields’s life. It was interesting that Jewett’s stories had a hint of sadness in them that wasn’t in her conversation. In person, James found her quite childlike. It had been her birthday the week before the visit, and she had turned forty-nine; James would have enjoyed knowing that on her birthday the previous year Jewett had written to a friend, “This is my birthday and I am always nine years old.”
It was perhaps not only their ebullience and pleasure in each other’s company but also the sense that the two women had their place that was encouraging and cheering to James, newly started on a difficult path. The early and middle 1890s had been excruciating for him. His dear sister Alice had been living near him in England with her companion in her own Boston marriage, Katherine Loring. James was not entirely pleased to share his sister, and the portrait he drew of a similar sort of relationship between Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant in his novel The Bostonians could have seemed to Alice James rather critical, but by and large the three of them had been glad in one another’s company for almost eight years. Toward the end of that time, Alice James developed cancer, from which she died in 1892. “The loss is absolute . . . ,” wrote Henry James. “It makes a great difference in my life—but I must live with the difference as long as I live at all.” Fields and Jewett would have found a quiet moment to mention to Henry that they missed Alice.
Katherine Loring had published, privately, Alice James’s diary, which Henry James recognized as “wondrous,” though it made him excessively anxious, as it referred to many living people by name. He worried that, should it ever reach a wider audience, it would compromise all of their reputations. Years later, perhaps inspired by a similar fear, James wrote a memorial essay on Mr. and Mrs. Fields, in which, with circumlocutory discretion, he referred to Jewett as “an adoptive daughter” to Mrs. Fields. This was not paranoia. James had recently watched in fascinated horror as the Oscar Wilde trial became the talk of London in 1895.
When Fields and Jewett came to visit, James was also recovering from the end of his career as a playwright. He had always, from childhood, been passionate about the stage, and in the early 1890s he had stopped writing novels altogether in order to concentrate on plays. But then, in 1895, after the opening performance of his Guy Domville, a flawed play that had been poorly performed, he walked out onto the stage to take his bow and was booed and hissed by a good part of the audience. The hissing went on for nearly fifteen minutes, during which time James seemed unable to get himself off the stage. In that evening, he experienced “the most horrible hours of my life.” And so he went back to fiction, productively, as always, writing among others: The Other House, What Maisie Knew, The Spoils of Poynton, “The Turn of the Screw,” and the novel upon which he was at work when Fields and Jewett visited, The Awkward Age. The first serial installment of The Awkward Age was to be published on October 1, just two weeks after the visit, and James was well along in the novel then. He probably did not discuss the new book in detail, as he was superstitious about revealing too much while in the process of working. But it was clear to James that certain of his methods and preoccupations were aligning: what he had learned in the theater of staging scenes, the sense of his childhood home, reawakened, in part, by his own new home, and the style he continued to develop—a style both conversational and elaborate—as he now dictated all his work to his typist, William MacAlpine. Henry James liked to have someone to talk to.
In this period of James’s work, conversations painfully sought meaning and fell just shy of it, and an immense straining was necessary to get at the most ephemeral nuances. The late novels were James’s best gift to modernism, and were of the utmost importance to the writers who made a careful study of his work—Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf (who, though she made fun of James’s laborious speaking style, was rather glad when she saw him to know that he thought of her as a writer). The Awkward Age moved James’s investigations of the ineffable forward, and led him almost without break to the mysterious detective work of The Sacred Fount and then to The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove. William Dean Howells, after a lifetime of admiration, wrote to say that, though he admired still, he didn’t quite understand what James was doing. James could only reply, “My stuff, such as it is, is inevitable—for me.” He had been feeling very close to Howells. What James called “the germ” of The Ambassadors was a story, told to him by Jonathan Sturges, about sitting in the garden of James McNeill Whistler with Howells. Howells, grieved by the loss of his daughter Winny and by the telegram he had just received announcing that his father was dying, had murmured to Sturges, according to James’s notebook, “Don’t, at any rate, make my mistake. Live!” James had given this scene and speech to Lambert Strether, for whom—as was true for Howells, and even once in a while for James—certain aspects of Europe continued to represent what he had not managed to do. “Live,” Strether said in a Parisian garden of his own, “all you can.”
One of Sarah Orne Jewett’s favorite James stories was “The Way It Came,” which she loved for being “so full of feeling and of a subtle knowledge of human nature, of the joyful hopes, and enlightenments and grey disappointments of life—the things we truly live by!” James felt that Jewett and Fields brought something of this life with them—years later he wrote gratefully of his visitors that he was surprised by “the stretch of wing that the spirit of Charles Street could bring off.”
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In the year after their visit, Sarah Orne Jewett sent Henry James several of her books, including the recently published The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories, in which he noted certain stories as “perfection!” and begged her, earnestly, to write about everything that occurred to her, “for I desire & require you with the revolving season.” When she received this letter, Jewett was at work on another book, The Tory Lover. Set in Maine and in England during the Revolutionary War, the novel was meant to reclaim a certain historical sense for her town in much the way that she and her sister, Mary, worked to restore their own old house and those of their neighbors in a newly preservationist time. Sarah Orne Jewett often felt that she was the landscape around their house, and in telling its history she felt she was telling her own. She sent the novel to Henry James.
Henry James responded to her, “as a fellow craftsman & a woman of genius & courage,” to say something difficult about her project:
The “historic” novel is, for me, condemned, even in cases of labor as delicate as yours, to a fatal cheapness. . . . You may multiply the little facts that can be got from pictures & documents, relics & prints, as much as you like—the real thing is almost impossible to do, & in its absence the whole effect is as nought; I mean the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world were non-existent. . . . Go back to the dear country of the Pointed Firs, come back to the palpable present intimate that throbs responsive, & that wants, misses, needs you, God knows, & that suffers woefully in your absence.
Henry James, though he liked his characters to have what he called “a sense of the past,” was one of the most contemporary novelists who ever lived. His novels were often set in the year in which they were written; even much later readers felt as if the stories were happening immediately in front of their eyes. Sarah Orne Jewett was a writer who looked backward, and she resolutely maintained her fondness for The Tory Lover. Still, in some part of her mind she may have known that the book was not a success, and James’s advice might have mattered a great deal to her had it not come too late. On her birthday in 1902, she was thrown from a carriage when out driving in Maine. Her vertebrae, head, and neck were injured, and, though she was able to write letters, she never wrote fiction again. She felt, she said, “like a dissected map with a few pieces gone.” Jewett’s illness had a dark effect on Annie Adams Fields, who, at a concert with another anchor of Boston social life, James’s great friend Isabella Stewart Gardner, fainted from worry about Jewett. Gardner wrote to Jewett that she had taken Fields home and stayed with her to be sure she was all right. Annie Adams Fields was grateful for the support of her friends when she was widowed a second time; Sarah Orne Jewett died in 1909.
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In the years before Jewett died, Henry James had been extensively revising his own early works, in preparation for the New York Edition, published from 1907 to 1909. During the course of this endeavor James became increasingly involved in photography, sending the young photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn to locations in London and Paris that James thought would provide good frontispieces for his novels. James recognized in photography an interest akin to his own, a capturing of people and scenes that kept them in “the palpable present intimate.”
William James died in 1910, and Henry James, having started to write a memoir of his brother, wrote instead his own autobiography in A Small Boy & Others and Notes of a Son & Brother. Making the final gesture in that long fraternal rivalry, Henry James laid claim to a certain primacy of inheritance by choosing as illustration the daguerreotype of himself and his father taken so long ago in Mathew Brady’s studio.
Henry James and Annie Adams Fields began to feel that they shared more and more of their dead. Fields brought out an edition of Sarah Orne Jewett’s letters, and James fully intended to write the preface. Illness prevented him, he wrote mournfully to Fields. But he kept kindled his affection for them both. With the outbreak of the Great War returned the specter of the Civil War. Along with the familiar piling of bodies came a different and terrible loneliness—that of facing the world without William and Alice. It was at this point that James, returning in mind to Whitman, began regularly visiting the boys in war hospitals.
In 1915, Annie Adams Fields died, and, in the last year of his own life, Henry James dictated an essay in tribute to “Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields” and to a whole period of culture and peace that he now felt, looking back with a “confusion between envy and pity,” was an illusion. “We really, we nobly, we insanely (as it can only now strike us) held ourselves comfortably clear of the worst horror that in the past had attended the life of nations.” In the alarming realization of this error it was of some solace to think of the continuous grace of Annie Adams Fields, for whom his admiration had never been greater than when she came to visit and brought along Sarah Orne Jewett.
James said that Jewett had come to Fields as “both a sharer and a sustainer” and added that “nothing could more have warmed” his “ancient faith . . . than the association of the elder and the younger lady.” “Their reach together,” he said, “was of the firmest and easiest.” And perhaps, when he said this, his ancient faith again wavering, he was thinking of their reach to him, the comfort they brought, laughing at him for having lost his dog’s muzzle, that day in the carriage, on the way to Hastings.