I’ve been spending some time in the NYPL, reading old letters written to my godmother and namesake, author/editor/suffragist/ball-of-fire Elizabeth Garver Jordan.
Quite a few of these are from Henry James (1848 – 1913), whose books could not have been more different from her cheerful fictions. I transcribed for you, dear readers, one typed example (his penmanship is appalling) from Box 3, folder 14, labeled “James, Henry 1904 – 1905.”
I break it up here to give your eye some blessed white space, but his actual letter is one long breathless paragraph. James was on a lecture tour, and she had straightened out for him some problem about his reading at a convent school. I do not know the identity of Miss E. L. Cary, though an earlier letter from James thanks Elizabeth Jordan for introducing them. And “the whilom Parker”? Your guess is as good as mine.
95 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass., March 2, 1905
Dear Miss Jordan,
Forgive my again flying to you, in gratitude, on the wings of the great Remington. [Remington is a brand of typewriter.]
Your kind activity of yesterday, culminating in your second telegram, has given me the peace that passeth understanding. Tuesday fourteenth will beautifully do; by this I shall solemnly abide, and I am now writing to Sister M. Rita to this comfortable effect. I might have wired her directly yesterday — that came over me, to my confusion, ten minutes after I had wired you; but I lost, in my anguish and shame, all presence of mind, and just instinctively clutched at you. May the peace I just spoke of have been now completely brought to you! — with my renewed liveliest thanks.
Your letter is luminosity itself, and everything, I am sure, will go merrily forward. I don’t quite imagine what all those sequestered young souls will make of my profane lucubration; but that is their own affair, and I am fortunately not afraid of their being, as who should say, shocked or scandalized.
It interests me much to hear of your pleasant impression of the whilom Parker — so pathetic a figure as he had, these last months, appeared to the mind’s eye. If I had known you were to meet him, I would have asked you to kindly mention that I would have voted for him could I have voted for anyone — instead of being, through long absence, a poor practically disfranchised creature. But even that crumb of comfort I gather he doesn’t affect you as missing.
You must show me Mrs. Spencer Trask* on the first opportunity — for my curiosity is insatiable. Let me add, for your reassurance, that I have edged away from the “Pen and Brush” quite as gracefully, I think, as I have, with a fine discrimination, sunk into the arms (as it were) of Miss E. L. Cary — for a performance in Brooklyn, on the basis of the proper equivalent, on May tenth p.m.; so you see into what excellent “form” you have got me.
Yours most truly, Henry James.
*Footnote: Katrina Trask, author and wife of “millionaire banker” Spencer Trask. They created (much later) the artist colony Yaddo. Her writing is said to fit “easily with that of other society people with high literary talent.”