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On a bright Saturday afternoon two years ago, when I was close to completing a draft of my novel about Henry James, I went to visit Lamb House in Rye, which James leased in 1897 and bought a number of years later; he lived there until close to his death in 1916. The house, which was later inhabited by A. C. Benson, is owned by the National Trust. The downstairs rooms and the garden are open to the public on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.
This was the house of James's dreams. He had taken holidays in the area and passed the house many times, noting the weathered brick, the sense of rich history, the stateliness without too much grandeur. He had walked the streets of Rye asking its more friendly inhabitants if there was a house for rent. The local blacksmith took James's London address, promising that he would get in touch if he heard of any suitable properties. When he wrote saying that Lamb House could be had, James rushed down to Rye to make sure of it.
The summer house where James wrote in warm weather was bombed in the war. But the walled garden is still there in all its splendor. And the house itself is full of the atmosphere of James. The modest downstairs rooms that he decorated so lovingly were furnished with advice from his friend Lady Wolseley who believed that James had used her as the furniture-loving widow in The Spoils of Poynton. In the dining room the small bust of an Italian count made by Hendrik Andersen, whom James met in 1899, sits in the corner over the mantelpiece exactly where James put it when it arrived in a box from Rome. James's letters to the much younger and very handsome Andersen, which have recently been published (see Zorzi), are passionate about friendship, disappointed about Hendrik's lack of response to him, and withering about the young sculptor's overreaching ambition.
James's own ambition as a novelist was also enormous, but he understood the need for careful, slow, painstaking work, which is why he sought to leave London in his mid-fifties to find solitude in a town where there were no fashionable dinners or literary lunches.
Over the mantelpiece in...