1863

~Today a colored “hall boy” from the Ocean came to the house with a note. Mother has just delivered it to me. She begs my pardon, says the envelope was addressed to Mr. Henry James, and that they had assumed it was meant for Mr. Henry James, Senior, but they could make neither “heads nor tails” of who had written it and what it proposed so had understood their error. She left hanging in the air an opportunity for me to explain myself, but I adopted an air of mystery and merely took the note from her.

It is from Mrs. Taylor, who writes that a party from the hotel will be taking the ferry to the war hospital at Portsmouth Grove. That she and her daughter, having wavered in their resolve of going the last time a party visited, have determined that this time they will do their duty to bring what comfort they may to the sick and wounded. Knowing that the James family is so intimately involved with the prosecution of the war, she asks whether I would like to accompany them. The party is for this Thursday. After which, it is expected Mr. Taylor will be joining them from Waterbury. She adds that the trip would not be suitable for young Harry and young Alice.

One must take care that one’s life does not begin to resemble the plot of a novel.

~We have had a letter from Wilky in his encampment somewhere in the Carolinas. How these letters upbraid me with their exploits! He eats hardtack and drinks coffee out of a tin dipper!

Is it possible for a man to discover himself in war? For Wilky, who was forever (and l’ingénieux petit Bob even more so!) in the shadow of his older brothers, has cohered as a young soldier, has effortlessly taken on qualities which were most certainly not learned at Geneva or at Father’s supper table, but were perhaps always there, cocooned within him and only awaiting this apt (if terrible!) moment of metamorphosis.

When I visited him this past spring at Camp Meigs in Readville, how struck I was at seeing the soft companion of my childhood hardened into a supple manhood and so at ease with the fellowship of soldiering! It was a bright breezy day, quite luminous and beautiful and radiant with the laughing, welcoming vivacity of the sunburnt young men. Whether it was a true revelation of their inner selves or a façade of handsome carelessness I know not, but they treated their circumstances almost as a frolic, with so little apparent consciousness of the desperate, momentous occasion that brought them together, and of the great test they were about to embark upon and which was the very cause, the impregnating origin as it were, of their brotherhood. I remember too my sense of exclusion, for I was reduced to watching, envying, applauding, and finally pitying (as I am now, reading again Wilky’s letter) all from the security of my Newport life, my Chateaubriand, the quiet insects here in our garden, and the golden sunshine.

A great action is expected for the Negro regiment. It is in all the papers, a cause célèbre, and the James family is paralyzed with worry.

~In my idleness I have reread my earlier entry detailing our hike to the breakwater, and I find that last impression of myself and Miss Taylor standing at the end of the jetty gazing out over the surging sea has acquired a radiance in my imagination. For I feel almost as if we are still there, as if (striking conceit!) we had been imprisoned there in our freedom by some unknown painter (La Farge on one of his plein air excursions!), painted and so forever caught, and even though we have still our free selves (Harry James here in his room and Miss Taylor on the veranda of the Ocean), yet are we forever unfree, varnished into a painting which the world will view and sigh: Young Love upon the Jetty.

So lovely is this vision of life as art (or rather the manner in which art traduces life!) that I hesitate to spoil it by recounting the conversation Miss Taylor and I had on our return hike. We were by then all very tired, and Miss Taylor was carrying her bonnet in her hand, and her face was flushed and her hair a little disheveled. I looked to amuse her and so told her I had a confession to make, namely that I had been engaged in duplicity as regards her person, for I had been surreptitiously observing her and taking notes on her behavior that I might use her—had she never guessed?—as a character in a story. But now that I knew her, now that she was my friend, I supposed I must give that over. But, I wondered aloud, if she was not to be used as a subject in a novel, what was I to do with her?

“Do?” she responded. “Do you need to do something with me?”

“Which would you prefer?” I gaily asked. “A light comedy? Or should I employ you in a fine tragedy?”

At this she let a mordant smile come upon her lips, but kept her face turned to the watery horizon. “Well, if you must do something with me,” she said finally with that light satiric air she has, “then I suppose you must marry me.”

“Marry you, my dear Miss Taylor?” I replied, trying to match her tone, but feeling the first adumbration of alarm.

“I believe,” she went on, “that is typically what young American gentlemen do to young American ladies.”

“Ah!”

“I’m led to believe it is something of a custom of the country,” she added.

“Ah!” I stupidly repeated, and then hurrying on: “But I expect you are already much besieged with talented, acclaimed, accomplished, marriageable young men back in Waterbury.”

She let loose then her lovely, renouncing laugh. “The talents of the marriageable young men of Waterbury are all inclined toward lathes and milling machines and the brass foundry. They can bat up a storm when the topic of discussion is bevel gears and escapement wheels.” And she let those terms lie between us a moment and then said in a voice more taut: “They do not interest me.”

“What does interest you?” I felt called upon to ask.

“Oh!” she said, as if this indeed were a question. But she did not at first go on, and we walked in silence for a time.

“I feel quite trapped there,” she said eventually.

I could think of nothing to say to this, so kept quiet.

“What interests me,” she took up finally, and there was now no touch of her characteristic satire, “is a life in which I am engaged in discovering what interests me. Not just now, as a young woman, but when I am a wife, and when I have children, and beyond. A life of imagination, and experience, and engagement, and commitment to something beyond myself.”

“And can you find none of those in the Brass Valley?” I asked.

“I do not know, perhaps I can,” she said, and then, turning back to where young Harry and Alice tramped behind us that she might cloak what she was about to say: “But I’ve found them here!”

Ah, my dear Miss Taylor, I beg of you: Do not attempt to remove the varnish from our painting. Do not take it down from off its wall and set its figures moving amidst the hurly-burly of the world. Do not mistake Art for Life!