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Show It never failed to give the owner pleasure to look out of this window at his charming English garden where he could watch his English gardener diggin~ the flowerbeds or mowing the lawn or sweepi"g up tallen leaves. There was another window for the aftemoon sun, looking towards Winchelsea and doubly glazed against the force of the westerly gales. Three high bookcases, two big writing-desks and an easy chair filled most of the space in the green room, but left enough clear floor for a restricted amount of the pacing exercise that was indispensable to literary composition. On summer days Henry James liked better to work in the large "garden room" which gave him a longer stretch for perambulation and a window overlooking the cobbled street that curved up the hill past his door. He liked to be able to relieve the tension of a difficult sentence by a glance down the street; he enjoyed hailing a passing friend or watching a motor-{:ar pant up the sharp little slope. The sight of one of these vehicles could be counted on to draw from him a vigorous outburst of amazement, admiration, or horror for the complications of an age that produced such efficient monsters for gobbling protective dista11ce. The business of acting as a medium between the spoken and the typewritten word was at first as alarming as it was fascinating. The most handsome and expensive typewriters exercise as vicious an influence as any others over the spelling of the operator, and the new pattern of a Remington machine which I follnd installed offered a few additional problems. But Henry James's patie11ce during my struggles with that batHing mechanism was unfailing-he watched me helplessly, for he was one of the few men without the smallest pretension to the understanding of a machine-and he was as ~asy to spell from as an open dictionary. The expenence of years had evidently taught him that it was 6 not safe to leave any word of more than one syllable to luck. He took pains to pronounct: every pronounceable letter, he always spelt out words which the ear might co_nfuse with others, and he never left a single punctuatwn mark unuttered, except sometimes that necessary point, the full stop. Occasionally, in a low "aside" he would interject a few words for the cnlightenm7nt of the amanuensis, adding, for instance, after spellmg out "The Newcomes", that the words were the title of a novel by one Thackeray. The practice of dictation was begun in the nineties. Ey I 907 it was a confirmed habit, its effects being easily recognisable in his style, which became more 2nd more }ike free, involved, unanswered talk. "l know," he once said to me, "that I'm too diffuse when I'm dictating." But he found dictation not only an easier but a _more inspiring method of composing than writing with h1s o~n hand, and he considered that tl1e gain in expressiOn more than compensated for any loss of concision. The spelling out of the words, the indication of commas, were scarcely felt as a drag on the movement of his thought. "It all seems," be once explained, "to be so much more effi:ctively and unceasingly pulled out of me in speech than in writing." lndeed, at the time when I began to work for him, he bad reached a stage at which the click of a Remington machine acted as a positive spur. He found it more difficult to compose to the music of any other make. During a fortnight when the Remington was out of order he dictated to an Oliver typewriter with evident discomfort, and .he found it almost impossibly disconcerting to speak to something that made no responsive som1d 2t all. Once or twice when he was ill and in bed 1 took down a no~e or two by hand, but as a rule he liked to have the typewriter moved into his bedroom for even the shortest letters. Yet there were to the end certain kinds of work 7 |