HENRY JAMES

A.L.S. 14 pp. with envelope.

to W. E. Norris

from 34, Devere Gardens, W. Dec. 28, 1893

HENRY JAMES

A.L.S. 14 pp., with envelope.

to W. E. Norris

from Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, Feb. 26, 1899.

PLEASE HANDLE THIS MATERIAL CAREFULLY

1. Keep papers in present order.

2. Arrange papers neatly before returning them to the desk.

HENRY JAMES

A.L.S. 6 pp., with envelope.

to W. E. Norris

from Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, Dec. 23, 1905

Reprinted *Letters of H.J.* II, 45.

HENRY JAMES

A.L.S. 10 pp. with envelope

to W. E. Norris

from 16 Lewes Crescent, Brighton,

Dec. 23, 1906

Reprinted *Letters of H.J. II, 58*

HENRY JAMES

A.L.S. 2 pp., with envelope.

to W. E. Norris

from Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, Jan. 7th, 1907

HENRY JAMES

A.L.S. 12 pp. with envelope.

to W. E. Norris

from Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, Dec. 23, 1907

Reprinted *Letters of H.J. II, 84*

HENRY JAMES

A.L.S. 6 pp., with envelope.

to W. E. Norris

from Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, Jan. 30, 1908

HENRY JAMES

A.L.S. D pp., with envelope

to W. E. Norris

from Lamb House, Rye, Sussex, Dec. 23, 1909

HENRY JAMES

A.L.S. 12 pp., with envelope.

to W. E. Norris

from The Reform Club, London, Dec. 24, 1911.

Dictated.

TELEPHONE 51 RYE

LAMB HOUSE
RYE
SUSSEX

December 23rd., 1912.

Garlant's Hotel

Suffolk Street

Pall Mall

S.W.

My dear Norris.

I want this to reach you at something like the annual, the
usual, the genial mystic hour; but starting it on its way to you
requires really, in my conditions, such a world of courage that I
ask myself again whether I shan't break down before it sees me much
forrader. I say "again", because I made four or five weeks ago,
at Rye, the most earnest attempt to approach you by the aid of this
rude (or, speaking much more truly, this blessedly refined)
machinery — to which, almost ever since I last saw you, I have been
wholly restricted. But I did break down at the time I speak of
— though perhaps, in proof of my perfect exactitude here, I might
fish out from depths of luggage the two or three, the three or four,
loose, wrecked sheets that I have a vague sense of having kept just
that you should know — ! I can't plunge, though, into luggage
now, or very much into anything; for things have been very ill with

2

TELEPHONE 51 RYE

LAMB HOUSE
RYE
SUSSEX

me for weeks and weeks, not to say months and months, and my powers,
of every sort, such as they are, poor things, are very much in
eclipse. This makes, you see, a dismal burden for a Christmas
letter — even while I cling to the tradition and the lively desire
(the only approach to liveliness with me just now) not to let you
consciously lack — ! My great stumbling-block is that as always
after such long lapses, such graceless intervals, there is too much
to explain, too many dropped links of the argument to pick up.

That unanswered letter of yours, just after you left London and had
seen your occulist, is a crushing burden to my conscience; all the
more that I feel how anything I can now say will seem to you late
and cold and, even at its most pitiful, rather hideously irrelevant.

Here goes, none the less, with my sad and simple — or, much more
truly, my tragic, my complicated story. I wish to goodness I could
imagine you somehow knew it all, in some way or other, so that I
shouldn't have to take so many jaded steps!

3

TELEPHONE 51 RYE

LAMB HOUSE
RYE
SUSSEX

Well, in plain terms, I have been constantly and depressingly
and (for the last three months) quite intolerably ill — by way of
accounting for my silence. I have had to let everything go, and
my correspondence, above all, has been as a nightmare to me. I
put off acknowledging your brave and beautiful report (as I recall
it) about your occular state, during those last hustled and huddled
few days in town, when the shadow of what was to come was heavy
upon me; I said to myself that I would write you as soon as the
peace and comparative ease of Lamb House should again enfold me.
But in fact, my dear Morris, those blest aids to composition, even
of the most impulsive sort, never awaited me at all; I returned to
the country only to know the assault, afresh, and in a greatly
aggravated form, of a real ferocity of pectoral pain, of the an-
ginal order; of which, these 4 or 5 years, I have had many visita-
tions, but which had begun to set in during all that last time in
town with unprecedented sharpness. That unhappy condition devel-
oped

4

TELEPHONE 51 RYE

LAMB HOUSE
RYE
SUSSEX

at a most depressing rate during all July and August; and only
abated when I at last took it in hand myself, took it, that is,
all disgustedly and resentfully, out of the hands of my (local)
Doctor and had the courage, learnt the wisdom, of grasping the fact
that my Angina is of the nature of what is called a false or "simu-
lated" one, or in other words 49 fiftieths gastric and digestional,
to one fiftieth "heart"; and thereby controllable and dirigible by
a truly intelligent and competent dietary rule. I hadn't dared to
hope to believe that enough, and had let myself be treated (locally)
as if it were a definite heart-trouble — with almost fatal results.
From the moment I understood and began really and confidently to
practise, I got much better, I got during the 2 or 3 first weeks
of September virtually well; though with fearsome arrears of work,
of letters and of everything to make up. Then just as I was seeing
my way truly clearer, there pounced upon me the most violent and
vicious, the most virulent and malignant, visitation of Shingles

5

TELEPHONE 51 RYE

LAMB HOUSE
RYE
SUSSEX

that ever a man fell victim to. From this — and above all from a horrible aggravation of this, a deplorable gastric condition (again) grafted on this just as it was about at last to wane, I am still miserably suffering; to the extent of offering you this grotesquely mistimed exhibition. I have really had a most horrible experience — the pain of Herpes (about the body) when it is bad and persistent and determined, being, I should judge, at its worst, the most excruciating it is given us to enjoy. But it has been this second Edition, the embroidery of the ferocious digestive complaint over the poor already so compromised and lacerated tract, that has constituted my grimmest ordeal. I had early in the summer taken the lease of a small unfurnished flat in Chelsea, so as to have at last again a possible refuge in town for six months of the year; the

desolation and physical confinement of L.H. being no longer endurable, so, in addition to this, the Doctors lashing me up to the certain magic of the eternal winery circle & useful trend, I made a few days ago