When I am not working I brood and hold close to Jane. It is a dreadful absorbedness, yet I can still work much of the time, and when I work I am absorbed in work.

So often in these connections I think of Henry James who wrote a beautiful short story, “The Middle Years,” that he published in Scribner’s Magazine the year he turned fifty. (When he wrote his autobiography in old age, The Middle Years became the title for the second volume.) How many times have I written about this story? A novelist, “poor Dencombe,” is dying in middle life—at about fifty, we might surmise. His new novel, called The Middle Years, arrives at the spa where he is resting, and he picks it up to read. To his pleasure he feels it is good—but soon he begins to weep: “he felt not so much that his last chance was going as that it was gone indeed. He had done all that he should ever do, and yet he had not done what he wanted.” It comes to Dencombe that he has, in this book, finally achieved his art; now he feels “as he had never felt before that diligence vincit omnia”. But if you do not live, you cannot be diligent. “As he turned the last leaves of his volume he murmured: ‘Ah for another go!—ah for a better chance!’” He knows with bitterness that he will not have a second chance.

In the story, poor Dencombe meets an intelligent admirer of his work—and eventually he is persuaded: “A second chance—that’s the delusion. There never was to be but one. We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

James loved to work, and like most workers he bragged about how hard he worked. Diligence vincit omnia was the legend he flew on his flag. In 1909, when he included “The Middle Years” in the New York Edition of his works, he spoke of “the number of times I had to do it over to make sure of it.” “I scarce perhaps recall another case … in which my struggle to keep compression rich, if not, better still, to keep accretions compressed, betrayed for me such community with the anxious effort of some warden of the insane engaged at a critical moment in making fast a victim’s strait-jacket. Every morning of his grown-up life James spent writing longhand, until rheumatism in his right wrist stopped him. While he made What Maisie Knew (1897; “The Middle Years” belongs to the longhand phase) he learned to dictate, and for the rest of his life he wrote his fiction out loud each morning while pacing up and down, with his amanuensis seated at a typewriter.