BIB_ID
397214
Accession number
MA 8732.60
Creator
James, Henry, 1843-1916.
Display Date
1896 Mar. 15.
Credit line
Gift of Mrs. Arthur Bliss Lane and Mrs. Stanley B. Hawks, 1968.
Description
1 item (8 pages) ; 17.7 x 11.2 cm + envelope
Notes
Part of a collection of letters from Henry James to Dr. William W. Baldwin between 1887 and 1900 (MA 8732.1-75). This collection is part of a much larger collection of letters to Dr. Baldwin from authors, English royalty and other luminaries of the period, including Samuel Clemens, William Dean Howells, Sarah Orne Jewett, Henry Cabot Lodge, Booth Tarkington, Edith Wharton and Constance Fenimore Woolson. See MA 3564 for more information on the complete Baldwin collection.
Written on stationery embossed "34, De Vere Gardens. / W."
Written on stationery embossed "34, De Vere Gardens. / W."
Provenance
Gift of Mrs. Arthur Bliss Lane and Mrs. Stanley B. Hawks, 1968.
Summary
Expressing relief on getting news from him; "...albeit the news is none of the most absolutely exhilarating - & is in fact a dash-down of the daydreams which had pictured you, these last months, in some impossible paradise of remedial rest. I hoped, in truth, that you were doing the right thing rather more than I believed it : & that I didn't positively hear either from the oasis of Biskrah or the island of Corfu seemed to me an ominous symptom. And what a history instead of that do you open up before me! The oasis of the tax gatherers & the island of measles & pneumonia! My dear Baldwin, you make me ashamed of my [illegible] & selfish state - of all the [illegible] open doors into weariness & woe that I might have - ought to have- don't have. You are evidently reserved for high destinies that you can so suffer & survive. You have at any rate my unbounded sympathy & I hope the chapter, that particular chapter, is closed. I gather that the incident of the tax people is still open, & I am distressed at what you tell me of the demands they make of you. How very hideous & horrible to hear you say that is a thing that may compel you [to] leave Florence! The sickening thing about any such [illegible] in Italy must be one's sense of the abysses of corruption & extortion under & behind it all. Better live in Turkey at once. And then to pour one's hard earned gold into the bottomless pit of Massowah, Adowah & Co! You must tell me more of this & how it ends. God send you this summer a real holiday of some sort. I heartily hope you will turn up here. I leave town on May 1st. I have taken a microscopic cottage down in Sussex - near Rye : but it is big enough to contain a room for you. This sufficiently expresses my inability to go this spring to Italy. I am much occupied with work & Florence & Venice with their shoals of compatriots & other distractions are fatal to the quiet hours & days that I need. But, I confess, it breaks my heart; & I shall probably next year have an accumulation of nostalgia which will send me flying over the Alps. I am very, very sorry to hear of Mrs. Bronson's being ill. But if she is so, I rejoice that she's near you. I'm afraid her daughter's marriage isn't any great comfort to her. However, she must have known that was sooner or later inevitable."
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