Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro Read online

  Henry James

  X

  To Isabella Stewart Gardner

  May 15th [1890]

  (I.S.G.M. Ms.)

  Milan1, H. de la Ville

  Dear Mrs. Gardner.

  Your truly attractive note which overtakes me at this place this morning, exercises its attraction unimpaired over channels and alps. I left London but three days ago, with unconscious and (to myself, injurious) perversity, at the very moment you were reaching it. But of course you are coming down here. By “down here” I mean to the sweetest land on earth—I care not with which you compare it. Don’t waste time—and your figure—on Mr. Worth2 and Paris, but come and feel with me—somehow and somewhere—the truth of the axiom just enunciated—Let your figure be reflected in the clear lagoon, say, sometime after June 1st. It will meet mine in the same soft element and perhaps condescend to be occasionally seen in juxtaposition with it. Before June 1st I move about—going to as many little brown cities as I can: but for June I hope to float. Therefore come, if you won’t sink me. At any rate I hope very much you’ll be in England the last half of the summer—for I return the 1st days of August, when the London season is over.

  Ever faithfully yours

  Henry James

  De Vere Gardens always follows me.

  NOTES

  1. The letterhead is “34, De Vere Gardens”, and this explains the post scriptum.

  2. The famous Parisian couturier.

  XI

  To Alice James

  June 6th [1890]

  (Edel III)

  [Venice], Palazzo Barbaro

  Dearest Sister,

  I am ravished by your letter after reading the play1 (keep it locked up, safe and secret, though there are three or four copies in existence) which quite makes me feel as if there had been a triumphant première and I had received overtures from every managerial quarter and had only to count my gold […] You might hint to W[illiam] that you have read the piece under seal of secrecy to me and think so-and-so of it—but are so bound (to me) not to give a sign that he must bury what you tell him in tenfold mystery. But I doubt if even this would be secure—it would be in the Transcript the next week—Venice continues adorable and the Curtises the soul of benevolence. Their upstairs apartment (empty and still unoffered—at forty pounds a year—to any one but me) beckons me so, as a foot-in-the-water here, that if my dramatic ship had begun to come in, I should probably be tempted to take it at a venture—for all it would matter. But for the present I resist perfectly—especially as Venice isn’t all advantageous. The great charm of such an idea is the having in Italy, a little cheap and private refuge independent of hotels etc., which every year grow more disagreeable and German and tiresome to face—not to say dearer too. But it won’t be for this year—and the Curtises won’t let it. What Pen Browning has done here, through his American wife’s dollars, with the splendid Palazzo Rezzonico, transcends description for the beauty, and, as Ruskin would say, “wisdom and Tightness” of it. It is altogether royal and imperial—but “Pen” isn’t kingly and the train de vie remains to be seen. Gondoliers ushering in friends from pensions won’t fill it out. The Rodgerses2 have turned up but are not oppressive—seeming mainly to be occupied with being constantly ill. That is Katie appears everywhere to collapse badly and expensively, and I judge she has something grave the matter with her. She has “doctors” at every place they go—is in bed for days etc.—and yet they go everywhere. I don’t encourage them (I have indeed seen them but once—when I took them on the water by moonlight), to talk about “the will”—as it’s disagreeable and they really know nothing about it. I am thinking, after all, of joining the Curtises in the evidently most beautiful drive (of upwards of a week, with rests), they are starting upon on the 14th, from a place called Vittorio3, in the Venetian Alps, two hours’ rail from there, through Cadore, Titian’s country, the Dolomites etc., toward Oberammergau. They offer me, pressingly, the fourth seat in the carriage that awaits them when they leave the train—and also an extra ticket they have taken for the play at Oberammergau if I choose to go so far. This I shall scarcely do, but I shall probably leave with them, drive four or five days and come back, via Verona, by rail—leaving my luggage here. Continue to address here—unless, before that, I give you one other address while I am gone. I shall find all letters here, on my return, if I do go, in the keeping of the excellent maestro di casa—the Venetian Smith. I should be back, at the latest, by the 25th—probably by the 20th. In this case I shall presumably go back to Florence to spend four or five days with Baldwin4 (going to Siena or Perugia); after which I have a dream of going up to Vallombrosa (nearly 4000 feet above the sea—but of a softness!) for two or three weeks—till I have to leave Italy on my way home. I am writing to Edith Peruzzi5 who has got a summer-lodge there, and is already there, for information about the inn. If I don’t go there I shall perhaps try Camaldoli or San Marcello—all high in the violet Appennines, within three or four hours; and mainly by a little carriage, of Florence. But I want to compass Vallombrosa, which I have never seen and have always dreamed of and which I am assured is divine—infinitely salubrious and softly cool. The idea of lingering in Italy a few weeks longer on these terms is very delightful to me—it does me, as yet, nothing but good. But I shall see. I put B.’s letter in another envelope. I rejoice in your eight gallops—they may be the dozen now. Ever your

  Henry

  NOTES

  1. The play from The American, staged in London on September 26, 1891, was not a success. From 1890 to 1994 James wrote for the theatre.

  2. Relatives on Henry’s mother’s side (Edel, Letters III, p.289).

  3. Vittorio Veneto, the former Ceneda. Titian’s country is Cadore, and more specifically Pieve di Cadore where he was born.

  4. William Wilberforce Baldwin (1850–1910), an American doctor living in Florence. James’s letters to him are full of sympathy for the doctor’s own children.

  5. Edith Story, the daughter of the sculptor and writer William Wetmore Story (1819–1895), permanently a resident of Italy from 1851. She married the Florentine marquis Ubaldo Peruzzi.

  XII

  To Isabella Stewart Gardner

  June 24th 1890

  (Edel III)

  Garmisch, Bavaria

  Dear Mrs. Gardner.

  There are many things I must ask you to excuse. One of them is this paper from the village grocer of an unsophisticated Bavarian valley. The others I will tell you when we next meet. Not that they matter much; for you won’t excuse them—you never do. But I have your commands to write and tell you “all about” something or other—I think it was Venice—and at any rate Venice will do. Venice always does. Therefore I won’t give you further grounds for rigour by failing to obey your behest on this point. I have just been (three days ago) to see the Passion Play at Oberammergau, and with my good friends and hosts the Curtises, with whom, twelve days ago, I left Venice to drive hither, delightfully, through the Venetian Alps, the Dolomites, Cadore, Cortina, the Ampezzo etc., I am resting, after that exploit, in this sweet recess among the mountains—which has been (it is but two hours away by carriage) our point de départ for the pilgrimage. Tomorrow we drive back to Innsbruck and separate—they to go to England and I back to Italy, for two or three weeks more. The Passion Play is curious, tedious, touching, intensely respectable and intensely German. I wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t been brought (by Mrs. Curtis and Miss Wormeley); and I shall never go again even if I am brought by syren hands. But all these Tyrolean countries are beyond praise—and the several days’ drive was magnificent. Venice was cool, empty, melancholy and delicious. They “sprang” upon me (the Curtises) the revelation that you are to have the Barbaro for August, torturing me thus with a vision of alternatives and preferences—the question of whether I would give up the happy actual (the secure fact of really being there in June) for the idea of a perhaps even happier possible or impossible, the romance of being there in August. I took what I had—I was there—a
fortnight. Now I am going back, to stay but a day or two, and then do some other things—go again for ten days to Florence and to two or three Tuscan excursions. Why are you so perverse?—Why do you come to London when I am away, and away from it just when I come back? Even your bright presence there does not make me repent having fled this year from the Savage Season. You wouldn’t have made it tame—so what good should I have got? I hope you have found it as wild as you like things. The Palazzo Barbaro is divine, and divinely still: don’t make it spin round. If I am in Italy still when you arrive je viendrai vous y voir. But I take it you have arranged your court. My clothes are there still (I only brought a necktie here). But I shall get them out of your way—you would perhaps pitch them into the Adriatic. I shall write to you again and am ever, dear Mrs. Gardner, most faithfully yours

  Henry James

  XIII

  To Grace Norton

  June 30th [1890]

  (Edel III)

  Venice, Palazzo Barbaro

  My dear Grace.

  I begin this grateful letter to you with vague ideas as to when I shall finish it—being at the present moment on a branch that sways beneath me: i.e. in Venice only for twenty-four hours, di passaggio, on my way to other parts. But the great thing is to begin—for after all I should never properly and justifiably end—telling you how I glow with genial appreciation of the two magnanimous letters I have received from you since I came to Italy, and more particularly with gratitude for the second one, on the subject of my latest “work” (date of June 12th), which I found here last evening on my return from an excursion (mainly driving), of fifteen days through the Dolomites and to the Oberammergau Passion Play. I came hither originally June 1st, to spend a fortnight with my old friends and entertainers the D-1 (you will say the d—d) Curtises, according to a promise made and renewed any time these three years. This promise I redeemed, very agreeably (to myself), and then unexpectedly started off with my hosts, who had made their plans—and mine (which I hadn’t) to proceed by carriage through the Venetian Alps, Cadore, Cortina, the Ampezzo, etc., to (by the aid of five further hours of rail) Innsbruck, and thence by carriage (forty miles) through the Bavarian Highlands and the pastoral valley of Garmisch, to the before-mentioned inevitable Ammergau—which is the “boom” this summer and every tenth year. To make a long story short, I started with them, to see Cadore etc., and then was wooed on by adorable scenery, genial society and lovely weather to do, from day to day, the whole thing—which I have gratefully survived but not allowed to cheat me out of a return to Italy, where I hope to remain till August 1st. I posted back to Innsbruck with my friends (after the curious, tedious, touching Ammergau episode—very honourable on the part of the earnest and practical peasants and artisans who act the play, but well nigh threatened with extinction by vulgarity and cocknification from Cook, Gaze, etc.—the entrepreneurs of British and American travel); and there we separated, the kind Curtises to betake themselves to England to see their younger son who dwells there in country-gentlemanliness (at least attempted), and matrimony, and I to come back and pick up my luggage and clothing—represented during our drive only by an exiguous wallet. I go with them tomorrow to Florence—and meanwhile I am spending this splendid summer day in this beautiful empty house, under the care of the suavest and most obsequious of old Venetian butlers. Such is a succinct account of my recent doings—to which let me add, that I go to Florence, first to stay four or five days with a good friend I have there—a dear little American physician of genius, W.W. Baldwin by name; who makes the rain and the fine weather there now; and then to go up (if I can find a perch at the inn) and spend the rest of July on the divine hilltop of Vallombrosa—which is high enough to be cool and lovely enough to be warm. After that, my holiday finished, I shall post back to London, where work awaits me and where I shall not scruple to spend, most contentedly and unfashionably, the rest of the summer.

  July 3rd (three days later): Via Palestro, Firenze. I take up my little story again here—having been interrupted just after those last words and transferred myself day before yesterday from Venice to this place. This is a delightful moment to be in Italy, and really nowadays, the only right one—for the herd of tourists has departed, the scramble at the stations is no more, and one seems alone with the dear old land, who at the same time, seems alone with herself. I am happy to say that I am as fond as ever of this tender little Florence, where it doesn’t seem a false note even to be staying with an “American doctor.” My friend Baldwin is a charming and glowing little man, who, coming here eight or ten years ago, has made himself a first place, and who seems to consider it a blessing to him that I should abide a few days in his house. I accept the oddity of the view, and perhaps even regard it as another oddity, all round, that on leaving him, I shall probably go up and spend a week with the Edith Peruzzis, née Story, at Vallombrosa. As to this I am temporizing—but I am distinctly pressed; or should say I was if my modesty permitted me to. I should have liked to tell you how fascinating I found the Italian Alps and the Tyrol—what a “revelation” they really struck me as being—revelation, I mean, of the sympathetic, and loveable in great mountain scenery. I never “sympathised” much with Switzerland—but I can with the Dolomites. When, three mornings ago, I rose early, to take the train for Florence, and in the cool, fresh 7 o’clock light, was rowed through the delicious half-stirred place and the imbroglio of little silent plashing waterways to the station, it was really heartbreaking to come away—to come out into the dust and banalité of the rest of the world. (Venice clings closer to one by its dustlessness than perhaps by any other one charm.) But already the sweetness of Florence tastes. I am, however, seriously thinking, or rather dreaming, of putting my hand on some little cheap permanent refuge in Venice—some little perch over the water, with a bed and a table in it, to call one’s own and come away to, without the interposition of luggage and hotels, whenever the weight of London, at certain times, is no longer to be borne. For the moment, however, I am just solicited back there by a local (or would be) Lorelei in the shape of Mrs. Jack Gardner, whom the absent Curtises have lent Palazzo Barbara to for the month of August and who requests the favour of my company (she seems to think I am “thrown in”) after the second or third. I have left to the end, my dear Grace, thanking you properly for the very “handsome” way in which you speak of the massive [Tragic] Muse. I am delighted that it strikes you as a success, for I tried so hard to make it one that if it hadn’t been it would have been a failure indeed. That’s all I can say about it—as I never have begun to understand how one can “justify” a work of art or imagination or take up anything said on the subject. One’s own saying is what one has tried to say in it. This is there or it’s absent, and when the thing is done nothing will make it better or worse. Thank you for reading. Good-bye: I wish you had a little change as they say in London.

  May this bring you a moment of such.

  Ever faithfully yours

  Henry James

  NOTE

  1. D for Daniel (Curtis).

  XIV

  To Ariana Curtis

  July 7th [1890]

  (Dartmouth Ms.)

  Florence, Villino Rubio

  1 Via Palestro

  Dear Mrs. Curtis

  I have delayed too long to write to you—but this has been not from any slackness of impulse, but from a sort of sense that I ought to have remarkable adventures to relate (to justify, in your eyes, my romantic return to Italy), whereas my adventures have been, in fact, though very pleasant, not in the least a challenge to admiration. It is, however, useless, to wait longer for the wonderful. I spent yesterday at Vallombrosa and I go this afternoon to Siena for three days—but everything happened, and doubtless will happen (absit omen!) in the most normal conditions. Quite the most thrilling of my experiences since we parted was to go back to the beautiful empty Barbaro and spend 36 hours there with a grand usurped sense of its being my own. For this is what I had the arrogance to do—I ought long since to ha
ve notified you of it. I arrived at 6 o’clock, with the intention of simply picking up my clothes and sleeping that night. But the next a.m. it was not in human nature to tear itself away! The day was delicious, Angelo and Elisa1 were even more so and your marble halls suffused with the “tender” note of your absence were most pleading and irresistible of all. I strutted about in them with a successful effort of self-deception and tasted for once the feelings of earthly greatness. To say that Angelo was hospitable and that the Tita waited upon me both on my arrival and on my departure, is but faintly to sketch the situation. I spent a good bit of the day with Mrs. Bronson, whom I caught just as she was starting for Greifenberg in Styria—of course with a Montalba.2 They have gone for bronchial waters and come back on the 20th. This she had revealed to me in advance by telegraph—so that Asolo had to drop out of my programme. I gave up the drive over the mountains thitherward in consequence, and did the whole thing from Innsbruck to Venice by rail—stopping however a day at Trent and a couple of days at Verona. Trent was somehow disappointing and drenched, absolutely reeking, with the electric light. En revanche there was no water—that is there was none at the hotel and I couldn’t have a bath! Surely Trent ought to become Italian. At Verona I collapsed upon my old hotel—which, however, this time I found excellent and not exceptionally dear. It was very hot, and the Colombo d’Oro is not on a square, but in a back street (near the Arena) and I found it. Edith Bronson was soon to start for Zoldo with the Edens,3 and her mother expects to join them, I believe, on her return from Greifenberg. I spent an hour at the Edens’ garden (whence I took Mme Wiel4 home in a sociable sandolo (or sandrolo?)5 and the question was there broached of my also joining them about August 1st. But I see little chance of that—in spite of Mrs. Jack6 having bespoken my company in your misappropriated (or at least disappropriated) home for any date that may suit me after the said 1st—an early date preferred. (I heard from her on this subject a week ago, but have not yet answered her.) This summer aspect of Italy is delightful to me; but my holiday is taking strides to its close—and my present prevision is that on August 1st I shall be jogging back to Reality over the Saint-Gothard. I have been in Florence for six days—where, even after 24 hours, the ache of quitting Venice that early morning, in the fresh, cool light, and being floated with such a heartbreaking, remonstrating plash—of your oars—down to the station was somewhat healed and assuaged. For Florence is empty now, and lovely, and “tender” too—and the impression of it is infinitely sweet. But it’s dusty—and Venice isn’t. I have seen Mrs. Huntington,7 who has been ill again and is on the point of departing, with Mme Wagnière, for Andorno, in the Piemontese Alps. On the 12th I start for a little tour in out of the way Tuscany (to three or four places, e.g. those I have never heard of—did you ever hear of the sovereign city of Torretta (the Towered,) with my friend Baldwin and an Italian friend of his who is both an impiegato in the Ferrovie8 and a man of culture, having his esoteric Tuscany at his fingers’ ends. He undertakes to give us, in 5 or 6 days, the inside views of ancient cities and wonderful corners untrodden by tourists and commemorated by Dante. We go to Volterra, Montepulciano and Chiusi, and I know not where else. The programme involves, I believe, a good bit of driving and an intimate acquaintance with railway connections. We are to see the Casentino and the Mugello—in short I quite thirst for it. But in the meanwhile I go, till the 12th, this afternoon, to Siena. I have, further, for the 17th a room (a rare prize) engaged at the divine Vallombrosa, where by rising at 5 (you go from here,) I got ever so many hours, yesterday, of a lovely day. It struck me as one of the loveliest spots on earth and as deliciously cool and salubrious. Unfortunately the “accommodation” is only limited, in quantity, though the small hotel, the only one, seemed excellent. Some day you might do worse than try it—the woods, the walks, the views, the excursions, the places to stroll in, and sit, and spend the day in the open air, all being, apparently, exquisite and extremely numerous. The only blot is that one has to make sure of quarters a long time in advance—unless one stays with Mme Peruzzi: a privilege that I am actually engaged in wriggling out of. But I am overwhelming you with egotism, and I only, or mainly, want news of your own late proceedings. If you kindly find time in the rush of London to write me a word (but don’t try for that—wait till you get into the country,) please address it to 34 De Vere Gardens, W. I hope that, after that last rather heated scramble at the Innsbruck station, you plunged into serene contemplation and that everything has gone well with you to this moment. I hope you made all your connections—but formed no new ones! I parted from Miss Wormeley that same day—after lunch—with her companions still somewhat in the vague … But I hope all that soon became definite and happy and that I shall see her in London. I shall be very keen about you and Mr. Daniel there. Please give him my love and all good wishes. Ever dear Mrs. Curtis, very faithfully