Reading the Language of Friendship in Henry James’s Letters to Edmund Gosse

Over the course of several decades of friendship Henry James wrote over 400 letters to Edmund Gosse, conversing on a multitude of topics ranging from the everyday banal to the literary exquisite and treating the entire range with the same care and elegance characteristic of his fiction. The subject of when to arrive for dinner, for example, is no less elegantly expressed than the topic of Gosse’s literary productions or William James’s death. On July 7, 1907, for example, James’s short note to Gosse regarding their evening arrangements opens with the graceful sentence: “This is delightful, & your bell-pull will on Thursday night next, 25^th, vibrate to my touch even as the neighbouring minster steeple vibrates, as usual, to the stroke of nine” (SL 227). The sentence winds itself around the statement of fact, inserting the easy “as usual” into the description of James’s proposed coming to neatly juxtapose the familiarity of his common arrival time at the Gosses with the humor and pleasure that his elegant expression of the same must give to a fellow writer. This eloquence is also the letter’s interest, and an important part of its content, for it is an implicit means of communication that both speaks to and generates intimacy between an author and a knowing reader.

In a letter to Ogden Heath from April 1932, Dorothy Richardson, as ardent a critic as she was an admirer of James, apologizes for her delayed reply, citing: “influenza & the resultant siege of more than the usual ‘arrears of all sorts of occupation’” (236). She goes on to explain:

That is quoted from some letter of Henry James. You perhaps know these letters, how full they are of excuses for delays, sometimes for a gap of as much as a year between receipt & response. But I scoff at these Jamesian barrages, assuring myself that the pampered dweller in a gilded ivory tower knew nothing of “all sorts of occupations,” had almost nothing to hold up his Occupation.

There are several ways of reading this comment on James’s letter writing, which Richardson loops into a critique of the author himself. The overall suggestion is that James’s letters prioritize form over substance. The capitalization of “Occupation” is perhaps a dig at James’s own tendency to assign importance by the same method, thereby dismissing the value of his activity here but linking his style with his authorial persona. The comment is humorous, biting, exaggerated for effect, but it demonstrates a familiarity with James’s letters that is intriguing. Already in 1932 they have been read and thought about by an author of the Modernist generation not personally known to James, suggesting an early and discerning audience that recognized his letters’ value as literary texts worth reading for their own sake. Richardson’s comment is equally suggestive of an emptiness found in the letters, in which substance gives way to “barrages” of style and genre-specific formulations. However, characteristic of her assessment of James’s writing elsewhere, this critique does as much to place his letters on a par with his other works as it does to undermine their interest.

Philip Horne makes a case for both the “eloquence and interest” of James’s letters, contending that it is this combination that means they “become not . . . ancillary to literature: they are literature” (69). While contradicting Richardson’s view, Horne’s assessment nonetheless confirms her insinuated evaluation of the predominance of style in James’s correspondence—style that is comparable with that of his fiction but which performs differently, as we shall see. Taking the lead from Horne’s definition of the letters as literature that can withstand critical as well as biographical evaluation, there is something important to be said for reading James’s style as content in these texts. In contrast to Richardson’s assumption that James’s eloquence betokens a superficial point of view—she refers to him, for example, as a “sophisticated octopus in a tank he mistook for the universe” (589)—I want to suggest that the “eloquence and interest...