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1 Introduction The Unspeakable Past Too Bleakly Stranded In the summer of 1914, from his sanctuary at Lamb House in Rye, England, Henry James wrote a small letter he addressed to “Mrs. Fields.” This was Annie Adams Fields, the widow of Boston publisher James Fields and, for nearly a quarter of a century, the intimate companion of another famed American writer, Sarah Orne Jewett, who had died in 1909. (Fields was herself to die, at age eighty, in January of 1915.) “Dear Mrs. Fields,” James begins, I have left so many days unacknowledged the so beautiful & touching letter prompted by your generous appreciation of my volume of Notes. The reason is largely that even still the high pressure London of June & July is always at some big interrupting assault on one’s time or one’s preferences, & that I have been but within a few days able to break away from it & get down into these quieter conditions. The arrears of my correspondence—a very desperate quantity—have had more than ever to wait. It is meanwhile the sympathy of all old friends from far back like yourself, of “those who know,” as Dante says, that is the reward of my attempt to reach back a little to the unspeakable past. I really like to think of those who know what I am talking about—& such readers are now of the fewest. We both have had friends all the way along, however; & I mustn’t speak as if we were too bleakly stranded today. The only thing is, none the less, that almost nobody understands what we mean, do they?—we can say that to each other (and to Mrs. Bell & to Miss Howe) even if we can’t say it to them. I think of you very faithfully & gratefully & tenderly, & am yours affectionately always Henry James1 Everything about this marks it as, distinctively, late James: the attenuated syntax, the gestures toward referents both obscure and strangely 2 Introduction intensified, and not least the circulation of an only possibly implicit erotic content (flickering up there in the strange paired reference to the Inferno and to one or another variety of the unspeakable). Some of the referents are easy enough to trace. When James mentions Fields’s “generous appreciation of my volume of Notes,” for instance, he is referring to his collection of criticism, Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes, published in 1914. More curiously, when James speaks of “those who know,” he is quoting Dante’s famous appellation for Aristotle (“Master of those who know”), which appears in Canto IV of the Inferno where Dante finds himself gazing, with mixed sorrow and reverence, upon the pre-Christian poets and philosophers, consigned to the outer edges of Hell but given there a place of sheltered honor. It is a beguiling, if somewhat elusive, little letter. Ought we to read it as an essentially tender avowal of friendship and devotion? Or as chiefly melancholy? Does James intend it to be comic? Or merely wistful? And what of the small undercurrent of something sharper—something genial but, glancingly, ominous? The matter seems to pivot on what James calls, with characteristically rich suggestiveness, “the unspeakable past.” A bit melancholically, he suggests to Mrs. Fields that he and she, now late in life, must labor against the impulse to think of themselves as “bleakly stranded,” suffering the isolation that comes of inhabiting a world, or a vision of the world, that is comprehensible now only to “the fewest,” and those numbers diminishing. And yet this is plainly also a kind of love letter, playful if mordant. James’s affection, so vivid in the letter’s companionable good-humor, travels too along the vein of James’s sense of his and Mrs. Fields’s mutual illegibility as citizens of the present, his winking insistence that they share in the possession of some now-occult, very possibly damning, knowledge. And if the wistfulness of James’s sentences is any indication, their intimacy refreshes itself as well in the “sympathy” kindled by their mutual vulnerability to an odd kind of loss. It is as if, with a great lightness of touch, James enjoins Mrs. Fields to mourn with him the loss of nothing less than an entire world, a world in whose terms and horizons of knowledge friends might find one another, and be found. Of course, James’s ambivalent relationship to legibility—or perhaps we should say, the pleasure he is able to wring from a legibility that is always tenuous, partial, and...

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