Henry James (1843-1916) - photo 1
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Henry James (1843-1916)

Lot 111
15.12.2023 11:00UTC +00:00
Classic
Starting price
£ 100
AuctioneerCHRISTIE'S
Event locationUnited Kingdom, London
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ID 1108910
Lot 111 | Henry James (1843-1916)
Estimate value
£ 3 000 – 5 000
Henry James (1843-1916)
Typed letter signed ('Henry James') to Joseph Conrad, 21 Carlyle Mansions, London, 19 June 1913
2½ pages, 229 x 175mm; with a printed pamphlet, ‘Three letters from Henry James to Joseph Conrad’, London: First Edition Club, 1926. Provenance: The Scribner Book Store, New York (printed envelope, undated); collection of James Gilvarry – his sale, Christie's New York, 7 March 1986, lot 163.

'I merely lift the edge of this crimson veil of contrition to say to you, peeping, as it were, from under it ...'. A letter of almost comically Jamesian indirection in which he apologises for not being in touch, expresses a desire to see Conrad, pronounces himself in better health than recently, and hopes that as soon as he has returned to Rye Conrad will come down in his '(I won't say life-saving, but literally life-making) miraculous car' to see him.

I always knew you were a shining angel, and now, under this fresh exhibition of your dazzling moral radiance (to say nothing of the other sorts) my natural impulse, you see, is to take advantage of these sublime qualities in you up to the very hilt. Thus it is that I throw myself upon the use of this violent machinery for at last, and in all humility, approaching you; because I feel that you will feel how I must have some pretty abject personal reason for it. That reason, to deal with it in a word, is simply that, having so miserably, so helplessly failed to do what I was, during all the dreadful time, unspeakably yearning to – which was neither more nor less than to get again into nearer relation with you by some employment, however awkward, of hand or foot – I now leave each of these members as just damnably discredited and disgraced, and seek the aid of nimbler and younger and more vivid agents than my own compromised "personality" has proved itself able to set in motion ... For the moment I merely lift the edge of this crimson veil of contrition to say to you, peeping, as it were, from under it, that I don't despair of helping you to lift it almost altogether off me when once we shall really be within mutual reach ... I hear with fond awe of your possession of a (I won't say life-saving, but literally life-making) miraculous car, the most dazzling element for me in the whole of your rosy legend. Perhaps you will indeed again, some July afternoon, turn its head to Lamb House.

In his 1905 essay, 'Henry James: An Appreciation', Joseph Conrad had compared James's oeuvre to a 'majestic river', and in the present letter the waters are indeed in full flow.

Address of auction CHRISTIE'S
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United Kingdom
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