Henry James and Edith Wharton began writing to each other in 1900. Their correspondence marks one of the great literary friendships of the twentieth century. James took an interest in Wharton after the critics unanimously declared the two authors to share similarities in style. They became close friends, even as Wharton struggled to establish her literary identity in light of continuous comparisons to “The Master.” In the following letter James gives his first thoughts on The Reef, one of Wharton’s most subtle psychological dramas.
Lamb House, Rye. December 4th, 1912.
My dear E. W.
Your beautiful book has been my portion these several days, but as other matters, of a less ingratiating sort, have shared the fair harbourage, I fear I have left it a trifle bumped and bousculé in that at the best somewhat agitated basin. There it will gracefully ride the waves, however, long after every other temporarily floating object shall have sunk, as so much comparative “rot,” beneath them. This is a rude figure for my sense of the entire interest and charm, the supreme validity and distinction, of The Reef. I am even yet, alas, in anything but a good way—so abominably does my ailment drag itself out; but it has been a real lift to read you and taste and ponder you; the experience has literally worked, at its hours, in a medicating sense that neither my local nor my London Doctor (present here in his greatness for a night and a day) shall have come within miles and miles of. Let me mention at once, and have done with it, that the advent and the effect of the intenser London light can only be described as an anticlimax, in fact as a tragic farce, of the first water; in short one of those mauvais tours, as far as results are concerned, that make one wonder how a Patient ever survives any relation with a Doctor. My Visitor was charming, intelligent, kind, all visibly a great master of the question; but he prescribed me a remedy, to begin its action directly he had left, that simply and at a short notice sent me down into hell, where I lay sizzling (never such a sizzle before) for three days, and has since followed it up with another under the dire effect of which I languish even as I now write…. So much to express both what I owe you or have owed you at moments that at all lent themselves—in the way of pervading balm, and to explain at the same time how scantly I am able for the hour to make my right acknowledgment.
…there remains with me so strongly the impression of [The Reef’s] quality and of the unspeakably fouillée nature of the situation between the two principals…that I can’t but babble of it a little to you even with these weak lips…Each of these two figures is admirable for truth and justesse; the woman an exquisite thing, and with her characteristic finest, scarce differentiated notes…sounded with a wonder of delicacy. I’m not sure her oscillations are not beyond our notation; yet they are so held in your hand, so felt and known and shown, and everything seems so to come of itself. I suffer or worry a little from the fact that in the Prologue, as it were, we are admitted so much into the consciousness of the man, and that after the introduction of Anna (Anna so perfectly named) we see him almost only as she sees him—which gives our attention a different sort of work to do; yet this is really, I think, but a triumph of your method, for he remains of an absolute consistent verity, showing himself in that way better perhaps than in any other, and without a false note imputable, not a shadow of one, to his manner of so projecting himself. The beauty of it is that it is, for all it is worth, a Drama, and almost, as it seems to me, of the psychologic Racinian unity, intensity and gracility. Anna is really of Racine…which is why the whole thing, unrelated and unreferred save in the most superficial way to its milieu and background, and to any determining or qualifying entourage, takes place comme cela, and in a specified, localised way, in France—these non-French people “electing,” as it were, to have their story out there…your Racinian inspiration…absolutely prescribed a vague and elegant French colonnade or gallery, with a French river dimly gleaming through, as the harmonious fond you required. In the key of this, with all your reality, you have yet kept the whole thing: and, to deepen the harmony and accentuate the literary pitch, have never surpassed yourself for certain exquisite moments, certain images, analogies, metaphors, certain silver correspondences in your façon de dire…There used to be little notes in you that were like fine benevolent finger-marks of the good George Eliot—the echo of much reading of that excellent woman, here and there, that is, sounding through. But now you are like a lost and recovered “ancient” whom she might have got a reading of (especially were she a Greek) and of whom in her texture some weaker reflection were to show. For, dearest Edith, you are stronger and firmer and finer than all of them put together; you go further and you say mieux, and your only drawback is not having the homeliness and the inevitability and the happy limitation and the affluent poverty, of a Country of your Own (comme moi, par exemple!) It makes you, this does, as you exquisitely say of somebody or something at some moment, elegiac (what penetration, what delicacy in your use there of the term!)—makes you so, that is, for the Racinian-sérieux—but leaves you more in the desert (for everything else) that surrounds Apex City. But you will say that you’re content with your lot; that the desert surrounding Apex City is quite enough of a dense crush for you, and that with the colonnade and the gallery and the dim river you will always otherwise pull through. To which I can only assent—after such an example of pulling through as The Reef. Clearly you have only to pull, and everything will come.
These are tepid and vain remarks, for truly I am helpless. I have had all these last days a perfect hell of an exasperation of my dire complaint, the 11th week of which begins to-day, and have arrived at the point really—the weariness of pain so great—of not knowing à quel saint me vouer…Forgive too my muddled accents and believe me, through the whole bad business, not the less faithfully yours,
From The Letters of Henry James, Vol. II, Ed. by Percy Lubbock. New York: Scribner (1920).
FURTHER LINKS:
A portrait of James, commissioned by Wharton.
Americans in Paris: The scene of ex-patriot literary culture in Europe.
James’s first letter to Wharton.