Celebrated American-born writer (1843–1916) who spent much of his literary career in England and who remains best known for his novels exploring Victorian manners and morals. Partial ALS, 12 pages on sets of adjoining sheets, 4.5 x 7, personal letterhead, no date but circa 1896. James comments on a stage adaptation of his novel The Other House in a letter to Frederic Myers, poet, classicist, and one of the founders for the Society for Psychical Research. In part: “…don’t take the O[ther] H[ouse] too seriously—it is the most commercially-concocted little dish I was ever guilty of. With its inferior origin…[it] was just away in a table-drawer, beheld of no human eye & wholly renounced. There it lay 2 years, till a ‘picture paper’ (The Ill[ustrated] Lond[on] News) asked me for a short novel with an action and girls.…I could do it only as a narrated play, & the absolute same service lines—as a piece of more or less ingenious theatricalism. That is all it is. I ‘go behind’ nothing—explain nothing, save in such scrupulously restricted proportions as may be the equivalent of what the art of the stage—the interpretation of the actor, might, if ideally good, have given the things. It was in a small way less of a failure than what I write usually is (I mean more of a ‘popular success’), because one’s worst products always square most with the greedy gross moyen taste. But it so behind me now that I doubt if I can justify it in any way or explain any anomalies it may present. I don’t see it again—I can’t live back into my reasons. All I can say is that I had them, in a very pondered manner, for everything, & that the whole drama was minutely figured out. I remember e.g., considering extremely the question of Rose’s, in Vol. 1, pressing Tony to engage not to marry again—must have made her do & as an illustration of a confused instinct stirring within her, the premonition of dangers to her (moral) appearance, as to the importance of her having positively protected herself as originally disinterested, &c….She can make him break his vow—but it will hold good—she watching over it—& against any other (as yet unimagined) woman.—So also, Gorham [Effie’s nurse] was hypnotized by Tony. The whole note of Tony is that Tony was a kind of irresistible personality. This w[oul]d have been a thing for the actor (and what actor great heaven!) to make him….Oh no, on p. 198 Vol. II, Paul’s [Paul Beever] ‘Every thing’ doesn’t mean that he would kill the child for her: I didn’t see them quite as such a pair of butchers!...I didn’t mean to inflict on you this interminability. It’s your own fault for giving me such a charming sense of being read with such attention.” One or two pages are absent from the beginning of the letter. In overall fine condition. James first published The Other House, which revolves around a murder, as a serial in 1896 in Illustrated London News. He had originally conceived it in 1893 as a play entitled The Promise, but theatre managers were not receptive to his idea so he turned to prose. In 1909, he converted the novel back into a play—again failing to find a producer. Authors rarely provide behind-the-scenes insight into their work, making this an enormously fascinating letter despite James’s difficult to decipher handwriting. Pre-certified PSA/DNA and RR Auction COA.
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