'Don’t Intermit – Don’t Languish'

“It is in fact almost Xmas Day – so late the night waxes & so still. Huddled on its hilltop under the winter stars, the little old black town sleeps.” 

Henry James is scene-setting in his Christmas Eve 1899 letter to Sarah Orne Jewett. It reads like the opening of an un-Jamesian tale, perhaps by his friend Robert Louis Stevenson. He writes from Lamb House in Rye and acknowledges Jewett having sent her latest book, The Queen’s Twin and Other Stories. James possessed the lost human art of mingling apology and gratitude in a manner charming and even witty, without groveling. Earlier in the year he had been in Italy and missed the arrival of the other books Jewett had mailed him. He continues:

 

“I snatch the small backwater of an hour – of a quarter of an hour, from complications & preoccupations. I recall, in the pitiless quietude that murmurs me no relief & stretches me no perch of excuse, my deep dark guilt in having had other volumes from you, last spring, all unacknowledged &, (save by fond perusal & reperusal,) much less honoured as they deserve.”

 

You and I, ever distracted and ungrateful, might have written, “Sorry I didn’t thank you for the books.” That gets us off the hook, at least internally, but we’ve learned to doubt the sincerity of rote public apologies. It’s easy to duck true admissions of failure and regret, especially in writing. James graciously avoids that ruse and goes on to encourage Jewett, who is his junior by just six years:

 

“Don’t intermit – don’t languish – don’t not do anything that ever occurs to you: for I desire & require you with the revolving season. I wish I had something, myself, to send you.”

 

 One hears a distant, imploring echo of Lambert Strether’s pep talk to Little Bilham in The Ambassadors (1903): “‘Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do in particular so long as you have your life. If you haven’t had that what have you had?”

 

At the time of James’ letter, Jewett had already published her masterpiece, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896). James would soon publish “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors, The Golden Bowl (1904) and The American Scene (1907), along with much else – a streak unmatched in American literature, an achievement that recalls Shakespeare and few others in any language.

 

[I just remembered that Willa Cather dedicated O Pioneers! (1913) to Jewett. The edition of James’ correspondence I rely on is Henry James: A Life in Letters (ed. Philip Horne, Viking, 1999).]