Beschreibung:

JAMES, Henry (1843-1916). Sixteen autograph letters signed and one letter signed to Edward Lee Childe, and three autograph letters signed to Marie Lee-Childe, London, Bologna, Lamb House and Cambridge, Massachussets, together 40 pages, 8vo, and 54 pages, 4to, in autograph, and 4 pages, 8vo, typescript , with one copy of a letter to Marie Lee-Childe, Lamb House, 25 October 1912, 4 pages, 4to . Provenance . Edward Lee Childe; and by descent. A correspondence of characteristically Jamesian amplitude. The earliest letter is an elegant condolence on the death of his correspondent's first wife, Blanche: 'Now that all is over I am almost tempted to express a certain congratulation - at the termination of her long suffering - and of yours'. Thereafter the pattern of the letters is composed of elegant apologies for not having written or for not coming to France ('Your happy home au fond de la province is indeed at an impossible angle to my cockneyfied garret'), of laments for his ill-health or for the increasingly impossible demands on his time, of affectionate enquiries about mutual friends, in particular the diplomat Paul Harvey, and, increasingly, half-humorous complaints of his solitude and lack of companionship. Ever-discursive, the letters are enriched by an unfailing supply of observations and bons mots, on the English summer ('when people put cruel moist plants into their fire-places'), 'the unspeakable Barings', tourism ('Venice ... is drenched, simply, with America. Cursed be the inventor of steam - or even the inventor of America'), on the vices of the age, the Boer War ('the ugliest war of our time'), his return to the United States, and on friendship - 'one always loses by a marriage - I mean the marriage of others. And it's not every one who, like you, gains by one's own'. Later letters make frequent reference to James's friendship with Edith Wharton: a letter of 19 July 1909 relates with mock-bombast the privileges of her society, which made him 'unfit for any occupation but to admire her and attend upon her. And she was here some time. I don't want to triumph over you too aggressively, but she was so good as to come down to this poor spot itself ... and even to whirl me off in her car of speed (yet of discretion) ... Has she done so much for you? Has she descended upon you at the Perthuis and whisked you off from under the nose of the lady of the ancient manor? I mean not - and thereby I do triumph ...'. James several times pays tribute to his brother William - 'a man of high philosophical distinction ... one of the most charming and delightful beings I have ever known'; a letter of 26 October 1910 describes in traumatised terms the death of William - 'a mutilation, a wound cutting deep'. After Childe's death in 1911 the correspondence continues to his second wife Marie Lee-Childe; the last letter speaks with delight of Sargent's portrait of him: 'Though I say it who shouldn't, it is absolutely ... Sargent's masterwork, and I scarce know what to make of my having been in my dilapidated antiquity the occasion of a thing of that importance'. Edward Lee Childe was a nephew and biographer of General Robert E. Lee. James met him in Paris in January 1876, and he immediately, as James wrote to his mother, 'struck me as a good fellow, and invited me to dine on Saturday'. Shortly afterwards James was describing the Childes to his brother as 'a trifle superfine and poseurs ', but it was clear that he took a great deal of delight in the company in particular of Blanche, and he accepted an invitation to their chateau for that summer: a letter from there to his mother gives a sense of almost orgiastic contentment - the Childes are 'perfect hosts and hospitality and prvenance incarnate ... Here, I am in clover of the deepest sort'. Extensive extracts from two letters to Edward Lee Childe, of 19 June 1904 and 8 January 1909 (neither of them in the present collection) appear in Percy Lubbock's edition of the letters of Henry James