Thinking of Henry James the other day I was led to wonder when I first went to the Antient Town of Rye. Rye is not a Cinque Port but one of the two antiquiora membra of that honourable Corporation, the other being Winchelsea. Thirty years ago or so Henry James lived at Rye. I had a house at Winchelsea.
Still thinking and walking up and down in the tall room of a friend in Greenwich Village I looked at a bookshelf, then took out a dullish-backed book at random. At the bottom of a page were the words: ‘So you see, darling, there is really no fear, because as long as I know you care for me and I care for you nothing can touch me.’
I had a singular emotion. I was eighteen when I first read those words. My train was running into Rye station and I had knocked out the ashes of my first pipe of shag tobacco. Shag was the very cheapest, blackest and strongest of tobaccos in England of those days. I was therefore economising. My first book had just been published. I was going courting. My book had earned ten pounds. I desired to be a subaltern in H.B.M.’s Army. The story was Mr Kipling’s Only a Subaltern. The next station would be Winchelsea where I was to descend. I had given nine of the ten pounds to my mother. If I was to marry and become a subaltern I must needs smoke shag. And in a short clay pipe to give the fullest effect to retrenchment! Briars were then eighteenpence, short clays two for a penny.
That is my oldest literary recollection.
It is one of my most vivid. More plainly than the long curtains of the room in which I am writing I see now the browning bowl of my pipe, the singularly fine grey ashes, the bright placards as the train runs into the old-fashioned station and the roughnesses of the paper on which there appeared the words…
So you see, darling, there is really no fear…
I suppose they are words that we all write one day or another. Perhaps they are the best we ever write.
The fascicle of Kipling stories had a blue-grey paper cover that shewed in black a fierce, whiskered and turbaned syce of the Indian Army. I suppose he was a syce, for he so comes back to me. At any rate that cover and that Mohammedan were the most familiar of objects in English homes of that day. You have no idea how exciting it was then to be eighteen and to be meditating writing for the first time ‘there is really no fear’ … And to know that those blue-grey booklets were pouring from the press and all England buzzing about them. Alas…
The whole of England has never since buzzed over a book or a writer. I daresay it never will. Those were proud times for England!
Years after – fifteen, I daresay – I was going up the narrow cobbled street that led to the Master’s house at the top of the pyramidal town when I met Mr and Mrs Kipling hurrying down. They appeared to be perturbed.
Conrad and I had gone in from Winchelsea to Rye to hire a motor-car. We must have sold something. In those days the automobile was a rapturous novelty and when we had any buckshee money at all it went in hiring cars. It would cost about £6 to go eighteen miles with seventeen breakdowns and ourselves pushing the car up most inclines.
Conrad had a passion for engineering details that I did not share and he had gone in search of a car as to which he had heard that it had some mechanical innovation which he desired to inspect. I knocked therefore on the door of Lamb House, alone.
Lamb House was a majestic Georgian building of the type that Henry James had gone to England more especially to seek. Its best front gave on to the garden. The garden had an immense smooth lawn and was shut in by grey stone walls against which grew perennial flowers. It contained also a massively built white-panelled pavilion. In that, during the summer at least, the Master usually sat and worked.
In Rye church you could see the remains of a criminal hung in chains. It was that of a murderer, a butcher, who set out to kill a Mr Lamb and killed a Mr Greville. Or it may have been the other way round. Rye Town was prouder of its murderer than of its two literary lights, Fletcher and Henry James, but he always seemed to me to have been a clumsy fellow. Lamb House had belonged to the family of the gentleman who was – or wasn’t– killed. But Henry James most gloated over the other legend according to which the house had been occupied by a mistress of George IV. The king, sailing down channel on a battleship, was said to have been rowed ashore to visit the lady in the garden pavilion. I always used to wonder at the prodigious number of caps, gloves, canes and hats that were arranged on a table – or it may have been a great chest – in the hall. How, I used to say to myself, can he need so prodigious a number of head-coverings? And I would wonder what thoughts revolved in his head whilst he selected the cap or the stick of the day. I never myself possessed more than one cloth cap at a time.
When I was admitted into his presence by the astonishingly ornate man-servant he said:
‘A writer who unites – if I may use the phrase – in his own person an enviable popularity to – as I am told – considerable literary gifts and whom I may say I like because he treats me’ – and here Mr James laid his hand over his heart, made the slightest of bows and, rather cruelly rolling his dark and liquid eyes and moving his lower jaw as if he were rolling in his mouth a piquant titbit, Mr James continued, ‘because he treats me – if again I may say any such thing – with proper respect’ – and there would be an immense humorous gasp before the word ‘respect’ – … ‘I refer of course to Mr Kipling… has just been to see me. And – such are the rewards of an enviable popularity! – a popularity such as I – or indeed you my young friend if you have any ambitions which I sometimes doubt – could dream of far less imagine to ourselves – such are the rewards of an enviable popularity that Mr Kipling is in the possession of a magnificent one thousand two hundred guinea motor car. And, in the course of conversation as to characteristics of motor cars in general and those of the particular one thousand two hundred guinea motor car in the possession of our friend… But what do I say? … Of our cynosure! Mr Kipling uttered words which have for himself no doubt a particular significance but which to me at least convey almost literally nothing beyond their immediate sound … Mr Kipling said that the motor car was calculated to make the Englishman …’ – and again came the humorous gasp and the roll of the eyes – ‘was calculated to make the Englishman … think.’ And Mr James abandoned himself for part of a second to low chuckling. ‘And,’ he continued, ‘the conversation dissolved itself, after digressions on the advantages attendant on the possession of such a vehicle, into what I believe are styled golden dreams – such as how the magnificent one thousand two hundred guinea motor car after having this evening conveyed its master and mistress to Batemans Burwash of which the proper pronunciation is Burridge would tomorrow devotedly return here and reaching here at twelve would convey me and my nephew William to Burridge in time to lunch and having partaken of that repast to return here in time to give tea to my friend Lady Maud Warrender who is honouring that humble meal with her presence tomorrow under my roof … And we were all indulging in – what is it? – delightful anticipations and dilating on the agreeableness of rapid – but not for fear of the police and consideration for one’s personal safety too rapid – speed over country roads and all, if I may use the expression, was gas and gingerbread when… There is a loud knocking on the door and – avec des yeux éffarés …’ and here Mr James really did make his prominent and noticeable eyes almost stick out of his head … ‘in rushes the chauffeur… And in short the chauffeur has omitted to lubricate the wheels of the magnificent one thousand two hundred guinea motor car with the result that its axles have become one piece of molten metal… The consequence is that its master and mistress will return to Burwash which should be pronounced Burridge by train, and the magnificent one thousand two hundred guinea motor car will not devotedly return here at noon and will not in time for lunch convey me and my nephew William to Burwash and will not return here in time for me to give tea to my friend Lady Maud Warrender who is honouring that humble meal with her presence tomorrow beneath my roof or if the weather is fine in the garden…’
‘Which,’ concluded the Master after subdued ‘ho, ho, ho’s’ of merriment, ‘is calculated to make Mr Kipling think.’
‘Rye,’ say the women of Kent, ‘is the sink-hole of Sussex and Sussex is the sink-hole of England.’ That is because Rye was once a great mercantile and naval port and Sussex a great maritime county. The men from adjacent Kent, as is the case with men from the hinterlands of Hongkong or San Francisco or Aden or Cardiff, would go into Rye and get among the bad gels, Saturday nights. They also say when counselling their daughters: ‘Ye see yon man, ’a cooms from Soossex, ’a sucked in silliness with his mother’s milk an ’s been silly ever since. But never you trust a man from the Sheeres!’ The Sheeres are the Shires – all the rest of England – Hampshire, Wiltshire, Devonshire, Buckinghamshire, Shropshire. So it is Kent and Sussex against the Rest, as cricketers say.
It is great attraction to strangers and foreign settlers when places have these prominent rivalries. You feel really settled when you can despise a neighbouring city, and James living at Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, was infinitely a Sussex man when he met that true Man of Kent, Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski, who lived at Pent Farm, Postling, Kent. In just the same way he was inordinately a Rye man two miles away in Winchelsea. I can still see his sturdy form as arrayed in a pea-jacket which nobly enhanced his bulk, wearing one of his innumerable cricket-caps, emphasising his steps and the cadences of his conversation by digging his cane into the road he stumped under the arch of the sea-gate up the hill into Winchelsea, lugging behind him on a ten yard leather lead his highly varnished dachshund, Maximilian. The dog would gyrate round his master. Mr James would roll his eyes: he would be slightly out of breath. There would be a gentle snifter of rain: he only, for reasons I will later explain, came to Winchelsea in the late autumn and winter. In the great square, round the great half fallen church the rain would run in light drifts. He would dig his cane point into the grass between the cobbles and exclaim: ‘A Winchelsea day, my dear lady. A true Winchelsea day … This is Winchelsea … Poor but proud.’ Waspishly patriotic we would point to the red-roofed pyramid across the Marsh and exclaim:
‘That’s your Rye. It’s pouring there …Rye…Not rich but dirty.’
These were the only occasions on which we stood up to the Master. And he never heard. He would scuttle off towards tea, dragged forward by Maximilian who scented the little hot buttered tea-cakes called fat rascals.
We would have tea in a frame house. It might have been Canaan, New Hampshire. The house had been built in 1782 by General Prescott, the first Governor-General of Canada … In exact imitation of a Canadian frame house, just as the fat rascals were exactly like the little hot biscuits you get in farmhouses, now, in Tennessee. The General had been homesick for Canada.
Winchelsea had that North American feature. It had others. The streets were all rectangular, like those of New York, and the houses in blocks. That was because it had been built all of a piece by Edward III in 1333. He had planned it, ruling squares on a sheet of vellum, after the sea had drowned Old Winchelsea on the flats below. It is exhilarating to stand in the heart of a town and gaze out into the country. I have felt the same exhilaration in both Winchelsea and New York. It is fascinating to be able, on Fifth Avenue, to see on the one side the Palisades and on the other the cross-street giving a view of the sky above the East River. In Winchelsea, standing in the heart of the town you could see on the one hand the green heights of Udimore, on the other the Marsh and the sea, and before your face, where the broad street ended in nothing, the red pyramid of Rye with its flashing weathercock a-top.
In the church were pews built of wood brought back from Plymouth by the Mayflower. That is the story. The wood was said to be tulip wood. Certainly it was no local wood and I found on seeing the tulip-wood panels of the offices of the S. S. McClure Co. in East Twenty Third Street, New York, that those panels much resembled the wood. That would be in 1906. Someone told me the other day that tulip wood is too soft for interior decorations, but in Sam McClure’s office it was very pretty. The softer body of the wood had, I believe, been burnt out, leaving hard, as it were, lace-patterns, like the fibres of skeleton leaves. The wood of the pews had the same lacey ridges. It is said that the mariners of the Mayflower had brought the timber back from the New England woods as souvenirs. When I lived in Winchelsea the wood was rapidly going back – to New England, Missouri, Wisconsin, Seattle, Spokane and Winchelsea, Mass. In addition a dim-sighted Early Victorian Rector – the same who had the fourteenth century stained glass broken out of the windows because it prevented his reading the words of ‘Lead Kindly Light’ – had had most of the pews removed from the chancel to make way for deal missionary-chairs. So between the purblind ecclesiastic and the sharp penknives of the souvenir hunters, remembrances of Plymouth were waning in the Antient Town.
There were, however, a number of Plymouth Brothers there. They used to pray for my conversion – from literary pursuits. It was queer, of a Sunday afternoon, to hear oneself prayed for by name.
I cannot now remember whether I met Henry James before Conrad but I think I did. I remember at any rate that I felt much younger when I at last went to see him than I did when Conrad first came to see me. I was in those days of an extreme shyness and the aspect of the Master, bearded as he was then and wearing, as he habitually did in those days, a great ulster and a square felt hat, was not one to dissipate that youthful attribute. I must have been seeing him in the streets of Rye on and off for eighteen months after Mrs W. K. Clifford had asked me to go and see him. The final pressure put on to do so had by then become considerable.
The adoration for Henry James amongst his relatively few admirers of those days was wonderful – and deserved. And I imagine that his most fervent adorers were the Garnett family of whom the best known member is today Mr Edward Garnett, the publisher’s reader who first advised a publisher to publish Conrad. In those days it was Dr Richard Garnett whose reputation as Principal Librarian of the British Museum was world wide. He had a number of sons and daughters and, for a long time, I was in and out of the Garnetts’ house in the Museum courtyard every day and all day long. Their hospitality was as boundless as it was beneficent.
The public opinion, as it were, of the younger Garnetts must have had a great effect in shaping my young mind. In one form or other it made for virtue always – in some members for virtue of an advanced and unconventional type, in others for the virtues that are inseparable from, let us say, the Anglican communion. The elder Garnetts at any rate had a strong aversion from Catholicism.
Mrs W. K. Clifford, a by no means unskilful novelist of those days, had put pressure upon me to go and see James. She was, I think, his most intimate friend. He corrected the manuscripts of almost all the books of Mrs Humphry Ward, an act of great generosity. Of Mrs Ward he always spoke as: ‘poor dear Mary’ with a slightly sardonic intonation. But I remember his saying several times that he had a respectful, if he might so call it, affection for Mrs Clifford. Therefore, when the Master, for reasons of a rather painful disillusionment, decided to leave London almost for good, Mrs Clifford was greatly concerned for his health and peace of mind. She urged me very frequently to go and see him so that she might be posted as to his well or ill-being. I remained too shy.
Then, hearing that James was almost permanently fixed at Rye, the young Garnetts who knew that I paid frequent visits to the next door town began to press me in their turn to call on their cynosure. Their admiration for him was so great that merely to know someone who knew the Master would, it appeared, ease their yearnings. They admired him above all for his virtue. None of his books so much as adumbrated an unworthy sentiment in their composer; every line breathed of comprehension and love for virtue.
For myself, I disliked virtue, particularly when it was pressed between the leaves of a book. I doubt if, at that date, when I was twenty-three or four, I had read anything of his, and the admiration that was wildly showered from Bloomsbury in the direction of Rye made me rather stubbornly determined not to do so for some time. I daresay I was not a very agreeable young man. But unbounded admiration quite frequently renders its object disagreeable to outsiders. Boswell must have alienated quite a number of persons from Johnson and I have known a great many distinguished figures that would have been better off without surroundings of awed disciples who hushed roomsful when the genius gave signs of desiring to speak. James suffered a great deal from his surroundings.
My resistance broke down eventually with some suddenness. James, who was always mindful of his health, had written a distressing letter to Mrs Clifford – about his eyes, I think. Mrs Clifford had influenza. She sent me three telegrams the same day begging me to go and see the Master and report to her. I sent him a note to ask if I could visit him, mentioning that Mrs Clifford desired it.
I do not imagine that Mr James had the least idea what I was, and I do not think that, till the end of his days, he regarded me as a serious writer. That in spite of the fact that subsequently during whole winters we met almost daily and he consulted me about his most intimate practical affairs with a touching trustfulness in my savoir faire and confidence in my discretion. He was however cognisant of my ancestry and of the members of my grandfather’s and father’s circles – whom he much disliked. He thought them Bohemian. I, on the other hand, considered myself as belonging, by right of birth, to the governing classes of the artistic and literary worlds. I have said that I was not an agreeable young man.
I don’t mean to say that I talked about my distinguished relatives, connections or family intimates. But I am now conscious that I acted and spoke to others as if my birth permitted me to meet them as equals. Except for the King and my colonel on parade I do not know that I ever spoke to anyone except on that basis. On the other hand I never spoke even to a charwoman on any other. I have, however, always had a great respect for age if accompanied with exceptional powers.
I certainly felt not infrequently something like awe in the presence of James. To anyone not a fool his must be a commanding figure. He had great virility, energy, persistence, dignity and an astonishing keenness of observation. And upon the whole he was the most masterful man I have ever met.
On that first occasion he was bearded, composed and magisterial. He had taken the house of the vicar furnished and had brought down his staff of servants from de Vere Gardens. At lunch he was waited on by his fantastic butler. The fellow had a rubicund face, a bulbous red nose, a considerable paunch and a cutaway. Subsequently he was to become matter for very serious perturbation to his master.
His methods of service were startling. He seemed to produce silver entree dishes from his coat-tails, wave them circularly in the air and arrest them within an inch of your top waistcoat button. At each such presentation James would exclaim with cold distaste: ‘I have told you not to do that!’ and the butler would retire to stand before the considerable array of plate that decorated the sideboard. His method of service was purely automatic. If he thought hard about it he could serve you without flourishes. But if his thoughts were elsewhere the flourishes would return. He had learnt so to serve at the table of Earl Somebody – Brownlow, I think.
At any rate James seemed singularly at home where he was. He was well-off for a bachelor of those days when £400 a year was sufficient for the luxurious support of a man about town. You might have thought that he was in his ancestral home, the home itself one of some elegance in the Chippendale-Sheraton-Gainsborough fashion. He had the air of one of the bearded elder-brother statesmen of the court of Victoria, his speech was slow and deliberate, his sentences hardly at all involved. I did not then gather anything about the state of his eyes.
He was magisterial in the manner of a police-magistrate, civil but determined to receive true answers to his questions. The whole meal was one long questionnaire. He demanded particulars as to my age, means of support, establishment, occupations, tastes in books, food, music, painting, scenery, politics. He sat sideways to me across the corner of the dining table, letting drop question after question. The answers he received with no show at all of either satisfaction or reproof.
After the meal he let himself go in a singularly vivid display of dislike for the persons rather than the works of my family’s circle. For my grandfather, Ford Madox Brown, and for my father he expressed a perhaps feigned deference. They were at least staid and sober men, much such as Mr James affected and believed himself to be. Then he let himself go as to D. G. Rossetti, William Morris, Swinburne, my uncle William Rossetti, Holman Hunt, the painter of the Light of the World, Watts Dunton and all the rest of the pre-Raphaelite circle. D. G. Rossetti he regarded with a sort of shuddering indignation much such as that he devoted, subsequently, to Flaubert – , and for much the same reason. When he had called on Rossetti the painter had received him in his studio wearing the garment in which he painted, which James took to be a dressing-gown. It was a long coat, without revers, like a clergyman’s, and had extremely deep vertical pockets. These Rossetti used for the keeping of his paint-rags.
For Mr James the wearing of a dressing-gown implied a moral obloquy that might end who knows where? And he deduced from the fact that Rossetti received him at tea-time in what he took to be such a garment that he was disgusting in his habits, never took baths, and was insupportably lecherous. He repeated George Meredith’s account of the masses of greasy ham and bleeding eggs which Rossetti devoured at breakfast.
He mimicked the voice and movements of Swinburne with gusto. He let his voice soar to a real falsetto and jerked his body sideways on his chair extending his hands rigidly towards the floor below his hips. He declared that Swinburne’s verse in its flood and noxiousness was only commensurate with the floods of bad chianti and gin that the poet consumed. He refused to believe that Swinburne in those days, under the surveillance of Watts Dunton, drank no more than two half pints of beer a day. And he particularly refused to believe that Swinburne could swim. Yet Swinburne was one of the strongest salt water swimmers of his day. One of Maupassant’s contes tells how Swinburne’s head with its features and hair of a Greek god rose from the sea beside the French writer’s boat three miles out in the Mediterranean and how it began gloriously to converse. And so conversing Swinburne had swum beside the boat to the shore. No doubt Maupassant had his share of a poet’s imagination. But Swinburne certainly could swim. He was also a remarkably expert skater.
My Uncle, William Rossetti, Mr James considered to be an unbelievable bore. He had once heard that Secretary to the Inland Revenue recount how he had seen George Eliot proposed to by Herbert Spencer on the leads of the terrace at Somerset House. The Inland Revenue headquarters is housed in that building and the philosopher and the novelist were permitted by the authorities there to walk as a special privilege.
‘You would think,’ Mr James exclaimed with indignation, his dark eyes really flashing, ‘that a man would make something out of a story like that: but the way he told it was like this’: and heightening and thinning his tones into a sort of querulous official organ Mr James quoted: ‘“I have as a matter of fact frequently meditated on the motives which induced the lady’s refusal of one so distinguished; and after mature consideration I have arrived at the conclusion that although Mr Spencer with correctness went down upon one knee and grasped the Lady’s hand he completely omitted the ceremony of removing his high hat, a proceeding which her sense of the occasion may have demanded…” Is that,’ Mr James concluded, ‘the way to tell that story?’
I did not again see Mr James, except in Mrs Clifford’s drawing room, for several years. Then, when I had settled into residence in General Prescott’s frame house, I went to see him with Conrad when we went to hire the automobile.