12.1.
These new friendships, and many others, added much to my enjoyment of Paris; but the core of my life was under my own roof, among my books and my intimate friends. Above all it was in my work, which was growing and spreading, and absorbing more and more of my time and my imagination.
I had continued steadily at my story-telling, from which nothing could ever distract me for long, and during the busy happy Parisian years, and especially after the appearance of “The House of Mirth,” a growing sense of mastery made the work more and more absorbing. In 1908 I published “The Hermit and the Wild Woman,” a volume of short stories, in 1910 another, called “Tales of Men and Ghosts,” and between the two the record of some of our motor journeys in France.
But the book to the making of which I brought the greatest joy and the fullest ease was “Ethan Frome.” For years I had wanted to draw life as it really was in the derelict mountain villages of New England, a life even in my own time, and a thousandfold more a generation earlier, utterly unlike that seen through the rose-coloured spectacles of my predecessors, Mary Wilkins and Sarah Orne Jewett. In those days the snow-bound villages of Western Massachusetts were still grim places, morally and physically: insanity, incest and slow mental and moral starvation were hidden away behind the paintless wooden house-fronts of the long village street, or in the isolated farm-houses on the neighbouring hills; and Emily Bronte would have found as savage tragedies in our remoter valleys as on her Yorkshire moors. In this connection, I may mention that every detail about the colony of drunken mountain outlaws described in “Summer” was given to me by the rector of the church at Lenox (near which we lived), and that the lonely peak I have called “the Mountain” was in reality Bear Mountain, an isolated summit not more than twelve miles from our own home. The rector had been fetched there by one of the mountain outlaws to read the Burial Service over a woman of evil reputation; and when he arrived every one in the house of mourning was drunk, and the service was performed as I have related it. The rector’s predecessor in the fashionable parish of Lenox had, I believe, once been called for on a similar errand, but had prudently refused to go; my friend, however, thought it his duty to do so, and drove off alone with the outlaw — coming back with his eyes full of horror and his heart of anguish and pity. Needless to say, when “Summer” appeared, this chapter was received with indignant denial by many reviewers and readers; and not the least vociferous were the New Englanders who had for years sought the reflection of local life in the rose-and-lavender pages of their favourite authoresses — and had forgotten to look into Hawthorne’s.
“Ethan Frome” shocked my readers less than “Summer”; but it was frequently criticized as “painful,” and at first had much less success than my previous books. I have a clearer recollection of its beginnings than of those of my other tales, through the singular accident that its first pages were written — in French! I had determined, when we came to live in Paris, to polish and enlarge my French vocabulary; for though I had spoken the language since the age of four I had never had much occasion to talk it, for any length of time, with cultivated people, having usually, since my marriage, wandered through France as a tourist. The result was that I had kept up the language chiefly through reading, and the favourite French authors of my early youth being Bossuet, Racine, Corneille and Labruyere, most of my polite locutions dated from the seventeenth century, and Bourget used to laugh at me for speaking “the purest Louis Quatorze.” To bring my idioms up to date I asked Charles Du Bos to find, among his friends, a young professor who would come and talk with me two or three times a week. An amiable young man was found; but, being too amiable ever to correct my spoken mistakes, he finally hit on the expedient of asking me to prepare an “exercise” before each visit. The easiest thing for me was to write a story; and thus the French version of “Ethan Frome” was begun, and carried on for a few weeks. Then the lessons were given up, and the copy-book containing my “exercise” vanished forever. But a few years later, during one of our summer sojourns at the Mount, a distant glimpse of Bear Mountain brought Ethan back to my memory, and the following winter in Paris I wrote the tale as it now stands, reading my morning’s work aloud each evening to Walter Berry, who was as familiar as I was with the lives led in those half-deserted villages before the coming of motor and telephone. We talked the tale over page by page, so that its accuracy of “atmosphere” is doubly assured — and I mention this because not long since, in an article by an American literary critic, I saw “Ethan Frome” cited as an interesting example of a successful New England story written by some one who knew nothing of New England! “Ethan Frome” was written after I had spent ten years in the hill-region where the scene is laid, during which years I had come to know well the aspect, dialect, and mental and moral attitude of the hill-people. The fact that “Summer” deals with the same class and type as those portrayed in “Ethan Frome,” and has the same setting, might have sufficed to disprove the legend — but once such a legend is started it echoes on as long as its subject survives.
12.2.
Almost all my intimate friends from England and America used to come to stay with us in Paris; Walter Berry, whenever he could escape from his hard work as one of the Judges of the International Tribunal at Cairo; Henry James, Howard Sturgis, Percy Lubbock, Gaillard Lapsley, Robert Norton and John Hugh–Smith. I also continued to see a great deal of Egerton Winthrop, Robert Minturn, and many other old friends from America, who came annually to Paris; and usually, before going back to the Mount for the summer, or on my return from America in the autumn, I snatched a few weeks in England, dividing them between Lamb House, Queen’s Acre, and Hill Hall, Mrs. Charles Hunter’s place in Essex.
Mrs. Charles Hunter was so much a part of my annual English holiday, so much the centre of my picture of the English world, that when she died the other day, for me at least, almost the whole fabric went with her. Henry James, who was her devoted friend, had long wanted us to meet; but knowing of her only as a fashionable hostess and indefatigable entertainer, and not wishing to plunge again into the world of big house-parties and London “crushes,” I had evaded all suggestions and invitations. And then suddenly — I forgot when or where — we met, and became friends.
Sargent’s portrait (given by her to the Tate Gallery) renders Mary Hunter’s fair abundant beauty in all its harvest brightness; and it was thus that I first knew her — still beautiful, wealthy, hospitable and boundlessly generous, with no clear idea about money except that, if one had it, it was to be spent for the pleasure of others. Later, when her fortune, which was entirely in coal, dwindled to nothing with the other great English mining-fortunes, she bore the loss with dauntless good humour, a spirit of “the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away,” of which I know few finer examples; but her notion of money remained as hazy when every penny mattered as when wealth poured uncounted through her lavish hands. As one of her friends said: “Mary is a cornucopia”; and to the end of her life generosity, pity, eagerness to help and to make happy, kept spilling out of her in words and deeds when they could no longer be expressed in cheques.
A year or two before her death we were staying at the same house in the country, and having broken her motoring spectacles she asked me to take her to an opticians’s to buy another pair. She was already ruined, and living in such narrow circumstances that I thought it quite natural for her to consider the price. “How much do you suppose they’ll cost, my dear? Not above two or three pounds?” she asked anxiously. I burst out laughing. “Bless you, no! Not above two or three shillings.” I expected a sigh of relief; but she gave no sign of seeing any difference, and to the very end such shades of more-or-less remained too microscopic for her notice.
The golden waves of prosperity were rolling higher and higher about when our acquaintance began. Her husband, who adored her, wished her to enjoy every luxury; but he had always refused to give her a town house, fearing, as he said, that life in London would lead to extravagance beyond even his resources. He bestowed on her instead, Hill Hall, a William-and-Mary house of stately proportions, built about a great interior quadrangle, and dominating the blue distances of Essex; and for the London season she hired one of the ornate seventeenth century houses attached to the Burlington Hotel. This she furnished luxuriously, and lived in it exactly as if it were her own — save that the upkeep stopped when she was not in town.
At Hill no limits were set, but the house was not expensively furnished, though arranged with much taste, and containing a few good pictures. Life there was on a large scale, for there were many rooms, and in addition to the perpetual come-and-go of married daughters, grandchildren, and other relations, there was a succession of friends for a good part of the year, and a bit house-party for every week-end.
I used sometimes to wonder what Rosa de Fitz–James, with her careful sense of conformity, of selection, her French cult of the ce-qui-se-fait, would have thought of those happy-go-lucky week-ends, with friends tumbling in unexpectedly from everywhere, extra seats being hastily crowded into the long dining-room, fresh provisions hurried to the already groaning tea-table, spare-rooms prepared, messages telephoned, people passing in and out with a sort of smiling fatalism, no questions asked, no explanations expected, just a continuous surge of easy good-humoured life through the big house, the broad flagged terraces and the crowded tennis-courts. I was about to add “and the gardens” when I remembered that, oddly enough for an Englishwoman, Mary Hunter was congenitally incapable of interesting herself in horticulture, her only attempt in that line being a made-to-order rose-garden of which Percy Lubbock remarked that it looked “as if no one had ever said a kind word to it.”
Mary Hunter’s hospitality was more comprehensive than Madame de Fitz–James’, not only because her nature was larger and more impetuous, but because all the meticulous French discriminations would have been meaningless to her, and to her world, where numbers had a secret magic, and even to the intelligent the sense of being in a crowd was more stimulating than that of being too carefully shielded from it. Mrs. Hunter’s guests, however, were combined with unusual discrimination, for though she herself had — as far as I could see — no particular pleasure in good talk, she enjoyed it vicariously, as a good hostess, and, as a clever one, managed to get together the elements to create it. Even her most haphazard parties contained a nucleus of intimate friends with literary and artistic tastes, and this saved the weekends of Hill from the dullness usual in such assemblages. Moreover, Mrs. Hunter’s watchful solicitude made her combine her inner group with a view to the enjoyment of all its members, and when I went to Hill I usually found there some of my own friends, among whom Henry James, Percy Lubbock, and Howard Sturgis were the most frequent.
In earlier days she had gathered about her many painters and musicians, and more than once, especially among the painters, her generous encouragement gave the first impetus to a successful career. Sargent’s portrait of herself, and the famous one of her three daughters (now in the National Gallery), are known to every one; but she and her family were also repeatedly painted by Mancini, and by Mrs. Swinnerton; and she was the lifelong friend of Sargent, Walter Sickert, Rodin (who made a fine bust of her), Professor Tonks, Mr. Steer, Claude Monet and Jacques–Emile Blanche. As is usual with hostesses of her kind, the thought of the illustrious unsociable would not let her sleep, and she was determined not only to admire and help her celebrities (and help them she did, in every possible way) but to enjoy their society on her own terms; that is, in the crowd and tumult of the Hill week-ends. She had all the tenacity and inventiveness of the celebrity-collector, and there is a tale of her, already a legend when I heard it, but so characteristic that it may well be true. She was a great admirer of Mancini’s art, and hearing that he was staying in London she immediately introduced herself by telephone, and besought him to come down to Hill for the following Sunday. But he was poor, solitary-minded, and unable to speak English; and to excuse himself he enumerated all these objections. Go to stay with Mrs. Hunter — but he couldn’t possibly! Why, to begin with, he didn’t even own a dress-coat.
“Is that all? Nonsense! My husband’ll lend you one.”
“Oh, but that’s nothing, I don’t speak English — not more than two words. And I don’t understand anything that is said to me.”
“Well, that doesn’t matter either. So-and-so and so-and-so, who are coming, both speak Italian perfectly.”
“Ah, but you don’t understand. I couldn’t even buy my railway-ticket, or find my way from my hotel to the station.”
“My dear Signor Mancini, don’t worry about that. I have an Italian footman — a perfect genius of a footman. He’ll be at your hotel with a cab tomorrow afternoon at four; he’ll pack your things, take you to the train, bring you down, and wait on you while you’re here.”
There was a faint murmur of surrender from Mancini, and Mary Hunter instantly called up a London tailoring establishment and ordered a dress-suit (it is not recorded how she obtained the measures). She then telephoned to an employment agency for an Italian footman, and on being told that they had none on their list, and could not possibly engage to produce one at such short notice, replied calmly: “You MUST find me one at any price, and he must bring Signor Mancini down to Hill tomorrow afternoon.” And he was found, and brought Mancini down — with the dress-clothes smuggled into the latter’s suit-case.
When I first went to Hill those epic days were over. Most of the painter friends of my hostess’s youth were already middle-aged and illustrious, and except in two or three cases the intimacy, though not the friendship, had probably declined; or else Mrs. Hunter may have divided her friends into separate groups, for I seldom met any painters or musicians at Hill, and the “nucleus” in my time was usually literary. James was, of course, its central figure, welcomed and delighted in by all the family, and enveloped by the most discerning affection. The rival luminary, who hated and envied James, and missed no chance to belittle and sneer at him, was George Moore. I shall never forget a luncheon at Hill when John Hugh–Smith with seeming artlessness drew Moore out on his great contemporaries, and James, Conrad, Hardy, and all others of any worth, were swept away on a torrent of venom. It was the tone of “The Dunciad” without its wit. But that was George Moore’s way; and I recall another instance of it at the house of Jacques Blanche, one of his most devoted and long-suffering friends. My husband and I often went to the Blanches’ literary and artistic luncheons, and one day George Moore was of the party. When we returned to the big studio after luncheon, and coffee and cigarettes were served, Moore ostentatiously drew out his cigar-case, lit a big cigar, and offered one to my husband. The latter, though he loved a good cigar, declined, and Moore said in a loud voice: “If you haven’t brought any of your own you’d better take one of mine. They never give them here.” “I know,” replied my husband quietly; “that’s why I never bring one.”
Mary Hunter could not resist baiting her hospitable hook with a name like James’s. She loved and admired him so much that she wanted his glory to shine over as many of her parties as possible, and forgetting that its light, if intense, was not far-spread, she sometimes mentioned him as an inducement to guests who had never even heard his name. I was at Hill on one such occasion, when, on the arrival of a fashionable beauty, her hostess welcomed her with: “And tomorrow, you know, you’re going to see Henry James!”
The lady’s perplexity was great, but so also was her frankness. Who in the world, she asked, was Henry James, and why should she particularly want to see him? Mrs. Hunter was dumbfounded: was it possible that dear Lady —— really didn’t know? No; she really didn’t. But she was goodnaturedly ready to be enlightened, and having been told that Henry James was one of the greatest of living novelists, she suffered “The Wings of the Dove” and “The Golden Bowl” to be pressed into her submissive hands, and obediently agreed to read them both before the next afternoon!
When she came down the following day, just before luncheon, I was sitting in the hall. The four fat volumes were under her arm, and she thumped them down on the table, and turned her lovely smile on me. “Well — of all the TOSH!” she said gaily.
Knowing that Henry James, though he suffered acutely from the criticisms of the literary, would enjoy this fresh breeze out of Philistia, I told him the tale as soon as he arrived. He welcomed it with a joyful chuckle; and when he and the lady met that evening they at once became the best of friends.
This anecdote leads me to two others which I may as well insert at this point into my English picture. Once when James and I were staying together in the country our host suggested taking us to call on a charming neighbour, formerly, I think, a celebrated music-hall artist. James, I believe, had met the lady at a theatrical supper some twenty years earlier, and he declared himself delighted to renew the acquaintance. The lady, who also remembered the far-off supper, welcomed him cordially; and in the course of the visit, drawing me aside, she expressed her pleasure at seeing dear Mr. James again after so many years, and added; “I’ve so often wondered what had happened to him since. Do tell me — HAS HE KEPT UP HIS WRITING?”
My other tale concerns Lamb House, but at a much later time, when, after James’s death, it was tenanted for some years by Robert Norton, who had known James well, and treated the house and its contents with the same veneration as the guardian of “The Birthplace” treated that shrine in James’s story. Robert Norton happened one day to run across a London great lady, an old acquaintance of his, who was staying near Rye. She told him she had been longing for years to visit Lamb House, of which she had heard so much, and begged him to let her come to see it. She came, and he took her all over, showing each room, each piece of furniture, each relic, and explaining: “Here James dictated to his secretary every morning; under this weeping ash he used to sit in hot weather; this silver-point was done of him by Sargent before he shaved his beard; this is a replica of his bust by —— ,” till finally the great lady, grateful but bewildered, interrupted him to ask: “I’ve heard so much of Lamb House, as a particularly charming specimen of a small Georgian house — but WOULD you mind telling me who this Mr. Henry James is, who appears to have lived there?”
The keeper of the “Birthplace” remembered “The Death of the Lion,” and answered her question with a smile.
12.3.
Henry James’s visits to the rue de Varenne were always a busy time for me. He had been much in Paris in his youth, had frequented the great generation of the Goncourt “garret,” met Flaubert frequently, and been intimate with Turgeniev, and later with Alphonse Daudet, and of course with Bourget. His description of taking Daudet down to Box Hill to see Meredith, and of the two great writers, both stricken with the same fatal malady, advancing painfully towards each other across the platform of the little country station, was one of the most moving things I ever heard him relate. He also piloted Bourget about London and Oxford, on the latter’s first visit to England, when he was preparing the English impressions afterward included in “Etudes et Portraits”; and all these contacts had made James’s name familiar among French intellectuals long before they struggled to decipher his books.
James’s unusual social gifts, and keen enjoyment of society (once he had escaped from its tyrannous routine), lent a school-boy’s zest to his Paris visits. The first time he stayed with us there must have been in 1905, before the rue de Varenne days, when my brother Harry, who had a flat in Paris, lent it to us during a temporary absence. It was in that year, I think, that James, through my intervention, sat to Blanche for the admirable portrait which distressed the sitter because of the “Daniel Lambert” curve of the rather florid waistcoat; and during those sittings, and on other occasions at the Blanches’, he made many new acquaintances, and renewed some old friendships.
James’s simple cordiality would have made him welcome anywhere; but he was particularly popular among his French friends, not only on account of his quickness and adaptability, but because his youthful frequentations in the French world of letters, following on the school-years in Geneva, had so steeped him in continental culture that the cautious and inhospitable French intelligence felt at once at ease with him. This feeling was increased by his mastery of the language. French people have told me that they had never met an Anglo–Saxon who spoke French like James; not only correctly and fluently, but — well, just as they did themselves; avoiding alike platitudes and pomposity, and using the language as spontaneously as if it were his own.
It was no wonder therefore that James enjoyed his French holidays. He was invited out continually, and the only difficulty was to capture him now and then for an evening in the rue de Varenne. The contrast to the severe winter routine of Rye, the change of scene, of food, of point of view — the very differences in the houses and streets, in the mental attitude and the moral conventions — of all these nothing escaped him, nothing failed to amuse him. In the intervals between dining out he liked a dash in the motor; and among other jolly expeditions, I remember a visit to Nohant, when he saw for the first time George Sand’s house. I had been there before, and knew how to ingratiate myself with the tall impressive guardian of the shrine, a handsome Berrichonne who could remember, as a very little girl, helping “Madame” to dress Maurice’s marionettes, which still dangled wistfully from their hooks in the little theatre below stairs.
James, who shared my delight in the enchanting “Histoire de ma Vie” and the “Lettres d’un Voyageur,” had known personally a number of the illustrious pilgrims — Flaubert, Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas fils and others — who used to come to Nohant in the serene old age of its tumultuous chatelaine. He was therefore fascinated by every detail of the scene, deeply moved by the inscriptions on the family grave-stones under the wall of the tiny ancient church — especially in the tragic Solange’s: “La Mere de Jeanne” — and absorbed in the study of the family portraits, from the Elector of Saxony and the Mesdemoiselles Verrier to Maurice and his children. He lingered delightedly over the puppet theatre with Maurice’s grimacing dolls, and the gay costumes stitched by his mother; then we wandered out into the garden, and looking up at the plain old house, tried to guess behind which windows the various famous visitors had slept. James stood there a long time, gazing and brooding beneath the row of closed shutters. “And in which of those rooms, I wonder, did George herself sleep?” I heard him suddenly mutter. “Though in which, indeed — ” with a twinkle — “in which indeed, my dear, did she NOT?”
A vision especially dear to me is associated with one of James’s visits to the rue de Varenne. It is that of the exquisite picture of Paris by night in the tale — perhaps the most beautiful of his later short stories — called “The Velvet Glove.” He and I had often talked over the subject of this story, which was suggested by the fact that a very beautiful young Englishwoman of great position, and unappeased literary ambitions, had once tried to beguile him into contributing an introduction to a novel she was writing — or else into reviewing the book; I forget which. She had sought from him, at any rate, a literary “boost” which all his admiration and liking for her could not, he thought, justify his giving; and they parted, though still friends, with evidences on her part of visible disappointment — and surprise. The incident certainly gave him a theme “to his hand”; but it lay unused for lack of a setting, for he wanted to make of it, not a mere ironic anecdote — that was too easy — but a little episode steeped in wistfulness and poetry. And then, one soft spring evening, after we had dined somewhere out of town — possibly at Versailles, or at a restaurant in the Bois — knowing his love for motoring at night, I proposed a circuit in the environs, which finally brought us home by way of Saint Cloud; and as we hung there, high above the moonlit lamplit city and the gleaming curves of the Seine, he suddenly “held” his setting, as the painters say, and, though I knew nothing of it till long afterward, “The Velvet Glove” took shape that night.
The theatre was of course one of James’s great interests when he was in Paris; but he was so much invited out, and so much amused by his glimpses of a new and stimulating social scene, that he could seldom spare an evening. When he did, it was usually for the first night of some well-known dramatist, such as Paul Hervieu, or in later years Henry Bataille or Henry Bernstein. James’s interest in the theatre was sustained by the conviction (which it took so many bitter disappointments to eradicate) that he would one day achieve popular success as a playwright. It is an illusion often nursed by novelists, especially those who, like James, are gradually dominated by the sense of “situation,” the strictly scenic element, in their subjects. It is difficult to understand that there is little connection between the novelist’s sense of a situation and that of the playwright, and James was persuaded to the end that his constructive instinct ought to have served in play-building as well as in story-telling. Perhaps it might have, if he had not been so oddly enslaved by what might be called the Dumas-fils convention (a tradition from which the French have now so wholly emancipated themselves). The typical Dumas-fils play was a miracle of neat joinery, culminating in a “moral” of which all his characters were merely the subservient tools. It seems odd that James, whose conception of the novel was so independent and original, regarded these stage conventions as inevitable. He admired Ibsen, but seems never to have felt any incongruity between the two conceptions of the theatre, much less to have contemplated the possibility of creating a formula of his own for his plays, as he had for his novels.
James’s interest in the stage naturally included the world of the theatre, with its rivalries and scandals, its generosities and absurdities, and all its grandeurs et miseres. He was always particularly amused by anecdotes about theatrical people, and I remember a report of one conversation with a retired actress which delighted his listeners. The lady in question, in far-off days, had had a brief career on the London stage in classical tragedy, but long before James’s coming to England she had married a man who had given her a place in the most conservative circles of early Victorian London. Always irreproachable in conduct and reputation, she yet yearned now and then for an opportunity to speak of her theatrical years, and especially to dwell on the perils to which the virtuous actress is exposed. On one occasion she had been detailing these at some length to James, and after complacently enumerating the various forms of temptation she had successfully resisted, she added: “And would you believe it, Mr. James? ONE FIEND IN HUMAN SHAPE ACTUALLY OFFERED ME CAMEOS.”
There were many amusing incidents connected with Henry James’s visits to Paris. I was the object of much attention on the part of hostesses who wished to use him as a social “draw,” and of literary ladies who aspired to translate his novels; and among the advances made by the latter I remember two over which, when they were reported to him, his chuckles were particularly prolonged. In one case a fervent translatress besought me to recommend her to the Master as particularly qualified to translate “The Golden Bowl” because she had just dealt successfully with a work called “The Filigree Box”; while another tried to ingratiate herself by assuring me that her deep appreciation of my own great work, “The House of the Myrtles,” was surpassed only by her unbounded admiration for that supreme anatomical masterpiece, “The Golden Bowel.”
Ah, how we used to come back from those parties bearing our sheaves of laughter — and how the laughter still rings in my ears as I call up the scenes that provoked it!
12.4.
“Well, I am glad to welcome to the White House some one to whom I can quote ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ without being asked what I mean!”
Such was my first greeting from Theodore Roosevelt after his accession to the Presidency — a date so much earlier than that of my sojourn in Paris that I ought to have introduced it before, had it not seemed simpler to gather into one chapter the record of our too infrequent meetings. Though I had known Theodore Roosevelt since my first youth, and though his second wife is my distant cousin, I had met him only at long intervals — usually at my sister-in-law’s, in New York — and we had never “hooked” (in the French sense of the atomes crochus) until after the publication of “The Valley of Decision.” He had a great liking for the book, which he wanted, after his usual fashion, to rearrange in conformity with his theory of domestic morals and the strenuous life; but when I pointed out that these ideals did not happen to prevail in the decadent Italian principalities which Napoleon was so soon to wipe out or to remodel, he laughingly acknowledged the fact, and thereafter we became great friends. My intimacy with Bay Lodge, and with the Jusserands, with whom my friendship dated back to my childhood, created other links between the Roosevelts and myse............