To W. D. Howells

The book already begun, and now "the greatest obsession of all," is evidently The Ambassadors.

Dictated.
Read P.S. (Aug. 14th) first!

Lamb House, Rye,
August 9, 1900.

My dear Howells,

I duly received and much pondered your second letter, charming and vivid, from Annisquam; the one, I mean, in reply to mine dispatched immediately on the receipt of your first. If I haven't since its arrival written to you, this is because, precisely, I needed to work out my question somewhat further first. My impulse was immediately to say that I wanted to do my little stuff at any rate, and was willing therefore to take any attendant risk, however, measured as the little stuff would be, at the worst, a thing I should see my way to dispose of in another manner. But the problem of the little stuff itself intrinsically worried me—to the extent, I mean, of my not feeling thoroughly sure I might make of it what I wanted and above all what your conditions of space required. The thing was therefore to try and satisfy myself practically—by threshing out my subject to as near an approach to certainty as possible. This I have been doing with much intensity—but with the result, I am sorry to say, of being still in the air. Let the present accordingly pass for a provisional communication—not to leave your last encompassed with too much silence. Lending myself as much as possible to your suggestion of a little "tale of terror" that should be also international, I took straight up again the idea I spoke to you of having already, some months ago, tackled and, for various reasons, laid aside. I have been attacking it again with intensity and on the basis of a simplification that would make it easier, and have done for it, thus, 110 pages of type. The upshot of this, alas, however, is that though this second start is, if I—or if you—like, magnificent, it seriously confronts me with the element of length; showing me, I fear, but too vividly, that, do what I will for compression, I shall not be able to squeeze my subject into 50,000 words. It will make, even if it doesn't, for difficulty, still beat me, 70,000 or 80,000—dreadful to say; and that faces me as an excessive addition to the ingredient of "risk" we speak of. On the other hand I am not sure that I can hope to substitute for this particular affair another affair of "terror" which will be expressible in the 50,000; and that for an especial reason. This reason is that, above all when one has done the thing, already, as I have rather repeatedly, it is not easy to concoct a "ghost" of any freshness. The want of ease is extremely marked, moreover, if the thing is to be done on a certain scale of length. One might still toss off a spook or two more if it were a question only of the "short-story" dimension; but prolongation and extension constitute a strain which the merely apparitional—discounted, also, as by my past dealings with it—doesn't do enough to mitigate. The beauty of this notion of "The Sense of the Past," of which I have again, as I tell you, been astride, is precisely that it involves without the stale effect of the mere bloated bugaboo, the presentation, for folk both in and out of the book, of such a sense of gruesome malaise as can only—success being assumed—make the fortune, in the "literary world," of every one concerned. I haven't, in it, really (that is save in one very partial preliminary and expository connection,) to make anything, or anybody, "appear" to anyone: what the case involves is, awfully interestingly and thrillingly, that the "central figure," the subject of the experience, has the terror of a particular ground for feeling and fearing that he himself is, or may at any moment become, a producer, an object, of this (for you and me) state of panic on the part of others. He lives in an air of malaise as to the malaise he may, woefully, more or less fatally, find himself creating—and that, roughly speaking, is the essence of what I have seen. It is less gross, much less banal and exploded, than the dear old familiar bugaboo; produces, I think, for the reader, an almost equal funk—or at any rate an equal suspense and unrest; and carries with it, as I have "fixed" it, a more truly curious and interesting drama—especially a more human one. But, as I say, there are the necessities of space, as to which I have a dread of deluding myself only to find that by trying to blink them I shall be grossly "sold," or by giving way to them shall positively spoil my form for your purpose. The hitch is that the thing involves a devil of a sort of prologue or preliminary action—interesting itself and indispensable for lucidity—which impinges too considerably (for brevity) on the core of the subject. My one chance is yet, I admit, to try to attack the same (the subject) from still another quarter, at still another angle, that I make out as a possible one and which may keep it squeezable and short. If this experiment fails, I fear I shall have to "chuck" the supernatural and the high fantastic. I have just finished, as it happens, a fine flight (of eighty thousand words) into the high fantastic, which has rather depleted me, or at any rate affected me as discharging my obligations in that quarter. But I believe I mentioned to you in my last "The Sacred Fount"—this has been "sold" to Methuen here, and by this time, probably, to somebody else in the U.S.—but, alas, not to be serialized (as to which indeed it is inapt)—as to the title of which kindly preserve silence. The vraie vérité, the fundamental truth lurking behind all the rest, is furthermore, no doubt, that preoccupied with half a dozen things of the altogether human order now fermenting in my brain, I don't care for "terror" (terror, that is, without "pity") so much as I otherwise might. This would seem to make it simple for me to say to you: "Hang it, if I can't pull off my Monster on any terms, I'll just do for you a neat little human—and not the less international—fifty-thousander consummately addressed to your more cheerful department; do for you, in other words, an admirable short novel of manners, thrilling too in its degree, but definitely ignoring the bugaboo." Well, this I don't positively despair of still sufficiently overtaking myself to be able to think of. That card one has always, thank God, up one's sleeve, and the production of it is only a question of a little shake of the arm. At the same time, here, to be frank—and above all, you will say, in this communication, to be interminable—that alternative is just a trifle compromised by the fact that I've two or three things begun ever so beautifully in such a key (and only awaiting the rush of the avid bidder!)—each affecting me with its particular obsession, and one, the most started, affecting me with the greatest obsession, for the time (till I can do it, work it off, get it out of the way and fall with still-accumulated intensity upon the others,) of all. But alas, if I don't say, bang off, that this is then the thing I will risk for you, it is because "this," like its companions, isn't, any way I can fix it, workable as a fifty-thousander. The scheme to which I am now alluding is lovely—human, dramatic, international, exquisitely "pure," exquisitely everything; only absolutely condemned, from the germ up, to be workable in not less than 100,000 words. If 100,000 were what you had asked me for, I would fall back upon it ("terror" failing) like a flash; and even send you, without delay, a detailed Scenario of it that I drew up a year ago; beginning then—a year ago—to do the thing—immediately afterwards; and then again pausing for reasons extraneous and economic.... It really constitutes, at any rate, the work I intimately want actually to be getting on with; and—if you are not overdone with the profusion of my confidence—I dare say I best put my case by declaring that, if you don't in another month or two hear from me either as a Terrorist or as a Cheerful Internationalist, it will be that intrinsic difficulties will in each case have mastered me; the difficulty in the one having been to keep my Terror down by any ingenuity to the 50,000; and the difficulty in the other form of Cheer than the above-mentioned obsessive hundred-thousander. I only wish you wanted him. But I have now in all probability a decent outlet for him.

Forgive my pouring into your lap this torrent of mingled uncertainties and superfluities. The latter indeed they are properly not, if only as showing you how our question does occupy me. I shall write you again—however vividly I see you wince at the prospect of it. I have it at heart not to fail to let you know how my alternatives settle themselves. Please believe meanwhile in my very hearty thanks for your intimation of what you might perhaps, your own quandary straightening out, see your way to do for me. It is a kind of intimation that I find, I confess, even at the worst, dazzling. All this, however, trips up my response to your charming picture of your whereabouts and present conditions—still discernible, in spite of the chill of years and absence, to my eye, and eke to my ear, of memory. We have had here a torrid, but not a wholly horrid, July; but are making it up with a brave August, so far as we have got, of fires and floods and storms and overcoats. Through everything, none the less, my purpose holds—my genius, I may even say, absolutely thrives—and I am unbrokenly yours,

HENRY JAMES.

14th August.

P.S. The hand of Providence guided me, after finishing the preceding, to which the present is postscriptal, to keep it over a few days instead of posting it directly: so possible I thought it that I might have something more definite to add—and I was a little nervous about the way I had left our question. Behold then I have then to add that I have just received your letter of August 4—which so simplifies our situation that this accompanying stuff becomes almost superfluous. But I have let it go for the sake of the interest, the almost top-heavy mass of response that it embodies. Let us put it then that all is for the moment for the best in this worst of possible worlds; all the more that had I not just now been writing you exactly as I am, I should probably—and thanks, precisely, to the lapse of days—be stammering to you the ungraceful truth that, after I wrote you, my tale of terror did, as I was so more than half fearing, give way beneath me. It has, in short, broken down for the present. I am laying it away on the shelf for the sake of something that is in it, but that I am now too embarrassed and preoccupied to devote more time to pulling out. I really shouldn't wonder if it be not still, in time and place, to make the world sit up; but the curtain is dropped for the present. All thanks for your full and prompt statement of how the scene has shifted for you. There is no harm done, and I don't regard the three weeks spent on my renewed wrestle as wasted—I have, within three or four days, rebounded from them with such relief, vaulting into another saddle and counting, D.V., on a straighter run. I have two begun novels: which will give me plenty to do for the present—they being of the type of the "serious" which I am too delighted to see you speak of as lifting again ... its downtrodden head. I mean, at any rate, I assure you, to lift mine! Your extremely, touchingly kind offer to find moments of your precious time for "handling" something I might send you is altogether too momentous for me to let me fail of feeling almost ashamed that I haven't something—the ghost or t'other stuff—in form, already, to enable me to respond to your generosity "as meant." But heaven only knows what may happen yet! For the moment, I must peg away at what I have in hand—biggish stuff, I fear, in bulk and possible unserialisability, to saddle you withal. But thanks, thanks thanks. Delighted to hear of one of your cold waves—the newspapers here invidiously mentioning none but your hot. We have them all, moreover, réchauffées, as soon as you have done with them; and we are just sitting down to one now. I dictate you this in my shirtsleeves and in a draught which fails of strength—chilling none of the pulses of yours gratefully and affectionately,

HENRY JAMES.