Gossip from Lamb House
Jonathan Mirsky
HENRY JAMES’S WAISTCOAT: LETTERS TO MRS FORD,
1907-1915
foreword by Philip Horne, edited by Rosalind Bleach Stone Trough Books, 38 Fossgate, York YO1 9TF, tel: 01904 670323, £18, pp. 79, ISBN 9780954454216, In 1999, Rosalind Bleach, whose mother had just died, opened for the first time her rosewood bureau with a swivel top and four drawers. She discovered 41 letters written between 1907 and 1915 by the Master — Henry James — to Mrs Ford, a now nearly forgotten upper-middle-class woman who lived at Budds, a country house six miles from James’s house at Rye.
Everything about these letters breathes another age. James wrote, with a Harrods stylograph pen, or dictated, up to 40,000 letters, which eventually will be published in perhaps 140 volumes. These letters to Mrs Ford have never been seen before. Rosalind Bleach doesn’t know how her mother — a beautiful, secretive Bletchley code-breaking veteran — got them, except that they may have been given to her by Mrs Ford’s son, Morton, a minor composer before the Great War. It is another sign of the age that Bleach and her sister knew as children that they must never peep into the bureau —and didn’t until their mother was dead.
James himself longed for fame but fearing the ‘postmortem exploiter’ he burned most of the letters he received — including those from Mrs Ford. Mrs Bleach, therefore, had to guess at many of the references, which are not really important anyway: London personalities, servants, dogs, plants, illnesses, tea parties and lunches. The letters are gossipy, health-obsessed (James was a depressive and suffered from gout and shingles) and, unless he was sad or very ill, are written in an elaborate, superaffectionate style. He thanks Mrs Ford in advance for the waistcoat she has promised to knit for him:
I regard it as simply celestial! I not only accept it with devout gratitude — I leap at it, I wildly clutch it — the lovely article — I snatch it from your hands almost before it’s begun!
I thought such effusion mere twaddle until I remembered that my mother and her three sisters, only a few decades younger than James and also Boston-reared, wrote to each other almost daily in the same terms.
I love James’s novels and in his letters some of the writing is characteristically dense but without the profound insights. There are flashes of his code words: ‘in fine,’ for to sum up, and ‘beautifully’ for exactly right. But here, too, we find James’s despair about the suffering (on the British side only) in the Great War, the ‘Nightmare,’ and his pride and sadness for the deaths in battle of his friends’ sons. ‘Let our stars only grant us Guns and Guns and Guns, and Men and Men and Men to work them.’ Also his snobbishness. He offered part of his house in Rye to some Belgian refugees but warned Mrs Ford to be careful about doing the same thing at Budds: they might be of ‘that class’ that is unwilling to break up a family ‘for whatever ghost of possible economy still may haunt them.’ Here we find, as well, his veiled erotic longing for Mrs Ford’s son, Morton, who had the letters before Rosalind Bleach’s mother.
His final letter, in 1915, to Mrs Ford (he always addressed her that way and signed with his full name), one of the very last he wrote to anyone, ends with, ‘I ask you to await with me a better day; which is just beginning, only just beginning, to glimmer on my sight.’ Bleach supplies a note that tells us about the Great War’s version of today’s anti-terrorist frenzy. In 1915, Henry James, who had lived in England for 40 years, many of them in Rye, was classified as ‘a foreigner and an alien’ and was forbidden from visiting Rye without police permission. He immediately became a British subject and, just before he died, in 1916, was awarded the OM.
This book is expensive for its length, but it is a limited edition and is beautifully bound and wrapped.
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