Читать книгу The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II - Генри Джеймс, Henry Foss James - Страница 10

Boston.

[Dec. 15, 1904.]

My dear Norris,

There is nothing to which I find my situation in this great country less favourable than to this order of communication; yet I greatly wish, 1st, to thank you for your beautiful letter of as long ago as Sept. 12th (from Malvern,) and 2nd, not to fail of having some decent word of greeting on your table for Xmas morning. The conditions of time and space, at this distance, are such as to make nice calculations difficult, and I shall probably be frustrated of the felicity of dropping on you by exactly the right post. But I send you my affectionate blessing and I aspire, at the most, to lurk modestly in the Heap. You were in exile (very elegant exile, I rather judge) when you last wrote, but you will now, I take it, be breathing again bland Torquay (bland, not blond)—a process having, to my fancy, a certain analogy and consonance with that of quaffing bland Tokay. This is neither Tokay nor Torquay—this slightly arduous process, or adventure, of mine, though very nearly as expensive, on the whole, as both of those luxuries combined. I am just now amusing myself with bringing the expense up to the point of ruin by having come back to Boston, after an escape (temporary, to New York,) to conclude a terrible episode with the Dentist—which is turning out an abyss of torture and tedium. I am promised (and shall probably enjoy) prodigious results from it—but the experience, the whole business, has been so fundamental and complicated that anguish and dismay only attend it while it goes on—embellished at the most by an opportunity to admire the miracles of American expertness. These are truly a revelation and my tormentor a great artist, but he will have made a cruelly deep dark hole in my time (very precious for me here) and in my pocket—the latter of such a nature that I fear no patching of all my pockets to come will ever stop the leak. But meanwhile it has all made me feel quite domesticated, consciously assimilated to the system; I am losing the precious sense that everything is strange (which I began by hugging close,) and it is only when I know I am quite whiningly homesick en dessous, for L.H. and Pall Mall, that I remember I am but a creature of the surface. The surface, however, has its points; New York is appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire; but Boston has quality and convenience, and now that one sees American life in the longer piece one profits by many of its ingenuities. The winter, as yet, is radiant and bell-like (in its frosty clearness;) the diffusion of warmth, indoors, is a signal comfort, extraordinarily comfortable in the travelling, by day—I don't go in for nights; and a marvel the perfect organisation of the universal telephone (with interviews and contacts that begin in 2 minutes and settle all things in them;) a marvel, I call it, for a person who hates notewriting as I do—but an exquisite curse when it isn't an exquisite blessing. I expect to be free to return to N.Y., the formidable in a few days—where I shall inevitably have to stay another month; after which I hope for sweeter things—Washington, which is amusing, and the South, and eventually California—with, probably, Mexico. But many things are indefinite—only I shall probably stay till the end of June. I suppose I am much interested—for the time passes inordinately fast. Also the country is unlike any other—to one's sensation of it; those of Europe, from State to State, seem to me less different from each other than they are all different from this—or rather this from them. But forgive a fatigued and obscure scrawl. I am really done and demoralized with my interminable surgical (for it comes to that) ordeal. Yet I wish you heartily all peace and plenty and am yours, my dear Norris, very constantly,

HENRY JAMES.