Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  In the fall of 1879, James published a short critical biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He thought his predecessor had been limited by his time and place, and yet he also valued him above all other American writers, and described The Scarlet Letter in particular as touched by the peculiar charm “which we find in an artist’s work the first time he has touched his highest mark—a sort of straightness and naturalness of execution.” That is the mark Henry James reached with The Portrait of a Lady.

  In the spring of 1906 he spent his mornings at work on the southern chapters of The American Scene, evoking the “swarming . . . pretty girls” of Savannah and the “vacancy” of Charleston, a city that seemed to him still exhausted by the battles of the Civil War. Almost every corner of Lamb House gave him a spot in which to write, but in warm weather James’s favorite was a place called the Garden Room. It was detached from the house itself, a studio that he entered from his acre of walled garden; indeed one end of it formed a part of that wall, and was lit by a bow window that overhung the street. Unfortunately it no longer stands. A German bomb took it out in 1940, and in visiting Lamb House today—it is now owned by the National Trust—I could only find its brick outline on the grass. Photographs show the room as uncluttered, almost cleared for action, with a couch pushed up under the window, and bookcases against the walls. It was big enough, and open enough, for James to pace, his left thumb tucked in his waistcoast armhole, his hesitant and at times stammering voice gaining in assurance as it rolled from sentence to sentence.

  As he talked, his words would be answered by the sputter and clack of a Remington typewriter. For he shared the room with a young woman from a London secretarial agency, whom he had hired, at 25s. per week, to take down his dictation. The particular young woman of 1906 did not stay long, and her name hasn’t come down to us; perhaps she didn’t like the work, or found the town too dull. James had been dictating for almost a decade, starting the practice somewhere in the middle of What Maisie Knew (1897). Thirty years of his own almost illegible penmanship had cramped his hand, and he now saved it as much as he could. Dictation made concision impossible, and the speaking voice led him into syntactic complications of which he had once been innocent. But he liked having a clean page on which to revise, and by now the typewriter’s noise provided an aid to concentration. So did the occasional cigarette.

  That was the morning, that gathering up of the American South—three disciplined hours that began around ten. Then lunch and a walk up and down Rye’s grassy cobbled streets, a few hours to cover a few miles, his way broken by the small talk of a small town, a chat with neighbors, a greeting to the fishmonger, sometimes a stop for tea at the local golf club; he didn’t play but had joined anyway. Everywhere one turns in Rye the beaky peal of gulls hangs in the air, and when James had first visited ten years before, the sound must have made him feel at home, a reminder of the Newport where he had spent his teens. He had rented Lamb House in 1897 and bought it two years later, moving back and forth between the coast and his South Kensington flat; eventually he let the flat go and made do with a room at his club. The house sat—sits—on a curve at the crest of what James called the town’s “mildly pyramidal hill,” with its front door facing down West Street to the churchyard of St. Mary the Virgin, a minute’s walk away; a turn to the left let him amble down to the shops of the High Street. It is a large place, three stories of worn brick with a wide entry hall, the kitchen in a wing off the back, and a set of servants’ bedrooms on the top floor; James might sometimes plead poverty but he kept five of them, his secretary not included. He could never have afforded such a place in central London, and he noted with pride that in an earlier age George II had once spent the night.

  He himself had few houseguests in the spring and summer of 1906, though in June he gave a bed to the Wisconsin-born Hamlin Garland, whose Main-Travelled Roads (1891) is even now read for its unsparing account of midwestern farm life. Garland remembered that they talked late about Hardy and Kipling; James was fond of the latter but suspected his “extraordinary precocity was perhaps at its real end.” Yet Garland also noted that James seemed “wistfully an American feeling his expatriation,” and his most substantial contacts with the outside world were indeed by letter, many of them still written by hand. He sent a note of congratulations to his friend A. C. Benson, a Cambridge don who had just published a book on the Victorian essayist Walter Pater, and wrote often to the sculptor Hendrik Andersen, on whom he lavished an unrequited longing. Other letters went to his brother William, who was lecturing at Stanford that spring when the San Francisco earthquake hit. The philosopher had been lying in bed when, as he wrote to Sussex, the “room began to sway . . . it went crescendo and reached fortissimo in about 20 seconds . . . bureau over, everything on the floor, crashing, crashing.” The novelist sent a feverish letter of thanksgiving for his brother’s safety, but William himself had enjoyed it all, and was surprised by his sibling’s concern.

  James’s most frequent correspondent, however, was his agent Pinker, a former magazine editor whose agency was one of London’s first; his other clients included both Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. James peppered him with short notes of thanks for royalty checks, and longer ones about the new edition. He did not, for example, like the idea of illustrations; he had never liked having his characters turned into pictures for the magazines. But he had just enjoyed two sessions with a young American photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and now began to warm to the idea of using a single image at the head of each volume. On June 10, he wrote of the progress he was making with the Portrait’s revisions—he was three-fifths of the way through, and wondered about sending what he’d finished to Scribner, so they could begin to set it in type. Still, it had all taken longer than he had expected; his revisions were so extensive that much of it needed to be typed. Yet it was worth it. He had “hugely improved the book—& I mean this not only for myself, but for the public.” James sent in a second and final batch of copy at the end of July, and the work’s great preface followed in the dry sunshine of mid-August.

  He wrote most of his letters at night and upstairs, in what was named the Green Room: a paneled study, its walls tight-packed with photographs, to which the Remington was moved each winter. Yet the time from five until eight can be a little eternity, and in those hours Henry James sat down to his revisions. We don’t know just where he would have done this, but the weather was warm and so let me place him in the Garden Room, in the slow care and pleasure of this new chance. A picture taken that year by a nephew shows him at a table there, wearing a bow tie and his invariable winged collar, and with a steel pen in his hand. There’s a tiled hearth behind him, and he has a bit of a pout, as though impatient at having to hold his pose. Take the photographer away, however, and then imagine the half-smile that comes over his face as he rolls the pen in his fingers. There is an hour before dinner, and the pen scratches and circles, each sheet marked by a delta of wavy lines, each stream attached to a small lake of new words. He is near the end, and he blackens out a phrase, allows his heroine a sentence of struggling comprehension, until at last he is pleased, and knows that the book has repaid his time and his trouble. He has mended some infelicities; he has stretched the fibers of his prose and rewoven the parts that seemed thin. But it had been well made from the start—not like The American, with its hidden murder and grand renunciations, a book whose lurid plot he wishes he could change.

  The Portrait of a Lady gave him no such difficulties. Yet once he had packed up its pages and begun to talk his way through its preface, James did find a sense of mystery in recovering the days of its origin. He would sit in thought while his amanuensis waited at her keys. Then he was on his feet and the past was in his hands. First came Florence in the spring, where he had worked in a room over the Arno, with the Ponte Vecchio virtually at his feet. The following year he went to Venice, and he remembered going to his waterfront window each time he was stalled for a phrase, as though the right word might l
ie in the waves outside. Even in Rye, James was drawn to the window, and sometimes paused in mid-sentence to speak to a friend on the sidewalk. In Venice he had brought the book near its close, and whole pages made him see its quays once more, and hear its voices calling across the water. He summoned ghosts as he walked, the ghosts of Ivan Turgenev and George Eliot, the great predecessors who appeared in his mind as sponsors. From the Russian he took a sense of the precedence of character over plot, a belief that story wasn’t an end in itself but instead a way to show his people. George Eliot gave him something else, an understanding of the particular characters to whom those plots might happen, and such figures as Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke had served as a model for his own.

  He paces, pauses, and a sentence floats on the air, a memory of the “single small cornerstone” with which he had begun, “the conception of a certain young woman affronting her destiny.” His heroine had stood there alone in his mind, unsupported at first by friends or family or any shred of a narrative. And then one morning he woke up in possession of his other characters, a suite of attendants with whom to surround her, and Henry James set himself to the job of “organising an ado about Isabel Archer.”

  PART ONE

  A PREPARATION FOR CULTURE

  The English Home. By Alvin Langdon Coburn, ca. 1907. Frontispiece to Vol. 1 of The Portrait of a Lady in the New York Edition. Gelatin silver print.

  (Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester, New York)

  1.

  THE GIRL IN THE DOORWAY

  SO THE YEARS dissolve and there she stands, a “tall girl in a black dress,” ready in the novel’s first pages to walk through a door and onto the lawn of an English country house. A door is a door, and we don’t need to see it symbolically to know that the act of walking through one can be momentous—a moment of passage, of transition. This particular door provides a frame in which the girl stands as if for her portrait indeed. It defines the space around her, it isolates her and makes her into a picture even as she pauses, before stepping onto the stage of her life, to look out at the scene before her, at the shade trees and the carpet of turf and the hill running down to the Thames. We look at her there, and we’re not the only ones to do so. For the curious thing about this book is that James doesn’t begin with his heroine. She first appears in the opening lines of the second chapter, and the novel itself starts with a conversation on that lawn between three men.

  One of them owns this house, the four-hundred-year-old Gardencourt. He is “a shrewd American banker” named Daniel Touchett: an old man who has spent his career in England and will die there, so old now that he hardly ever leaves his chair. One of the others is his invalid son, Ralph, a consumptive whom James will use as the reader’s friend, with his perceptions guiding our own. The last of them is a neighbor called Lord Warburton, a man of such brilliant fortune that he seems exempt from the normal conditions of life. The younger men pace the lawn and the old man sits, and they speak of the imminent arrival of the banker’s wife from America, of the cryptic telegram in which she has announced that she’s “discovered a niece” and is bringing the girl back with her. Mrs. Touchett has described the girl as “quite independent,” and yet what, Ralph wonders, does that mean? Is her independence financial, or moral, or does she simply like to have her own way? They continue to speculate, their curiosity piqued, and Mr. Touchett warns Lord Warburton against falling in love with her. And the effect of their interest is to make us interested too. Their questions become ours, and when Isabel Archer steps through that door, she will find a hum of expectation prepared for her.

  We could say, crudely, that they’re talking about girls, and that James invites us to go along with them, to let our gaze follow theirs. Such a reading can’t be the whole truth, however, for Isabel has been standing in the doorway for a few minutes before her cousin notices her. She arrives before they know it, she watches them before they can watch her, and her appearance takes them by surprise. That door may provide a frame, but it’s one into which she has put herself and that she can break at will, as she does in stepping forward to pick up Ralph’s little terrier, whose barks provide her first greeting. But her position suggests something else as well, and I can’t look at her there without recalling a few famous lines from James’s preface to the novel.

  Novelists love describing their own work with metaphors drawn from the building trades, and when in the summer of 1906 James set out to explore the origins of The Portrait of a Lady, he defined the book as a “square and spacious house,” a carefully proportioned affair of vaults and arches and brick piled upon brick. Such imagery is simple enough; so simple, in fact, that James didn’t stop with it. For in writing he also found that he wanted, if not precisely to justify his choice of a subject, then at least to explain how he had kept a long novel about a “mere slim shade” of a girl from seeming thin. That explanation has many parts, and I will return to it later in this book. What concerns us now is the extended architectural metaphor in which James defined the scope and ambition of fiction itself.

  In my father’s house there are many mansions. So at least the New Testament tells us, and James lifted that image to describe what he calls the house of fiction, a building that has “not one window, but a million—a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather,” from which one may peer out at the “spreading field, the human scene.” The individual novelist stands within that house as within a library, tight-packed with his fellows. All human life lies outside, and there’s no saying on what part of that varied landscape a particular window may open. All subjects are possible, all legitimate, and the whole trick is to find that subject’s appropriate form, the particular opening, whether “broad or balconied or slit-like” that will give the best view. Because there is only one right way to treat each of those subjects, and James himself was never shy about noting the places in his own work where the sash doesn’t fit or the panes are too small.

  In every window stands a watcher, “the consciousness of the artist” who must make some meaning from the scene outside, and we can imagine ourselves as reading that scene over the writer’s shoulder, our eyes following his. We might even think of Isabel as making up a story about the men she sees on the lawn, the world she is about to join; perhaps her very position is what gave her creator that metaphor in the first place. Of course, by the time she appears, James has already cut his window, given it shape and scale and definition, and done so with the book’s opening sentence: “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” First lines are always important, but they don’t always do the same job. One of the most famous beginnings in English fiction is that of Pride and Prejudice—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” The ironies of Austen’s sentence serve to announce both style and theme: a truth acknowledged by whom, and in what sense “in want?” James’s words establish a mood and make a world. “Under certain circumstances”—that is, under circumstances like these. The diction may be fussily discriminating, but that’s precisely why the sentence seems to make us step ourselves into this space of cultivated leisure, into the lovely middle of a summer afternoon.

  The details he chooses only work to increase that sense of leisure. Mr. Touchett may have been a banker, yet still the three men are separated by age and class and illness from the bustle of the commercial world; they have the time and freedom to enjoy the shadows on the grass. The lawn has been furnished with rugs and chairs, as though it were a room all hung around with landscapes, with pictures of garden and house and river. It is a place of comfort and ease, and the book itself seems as fully designed for the reader’s own comfort as the world in which its characters live. So Isabel can’t help herself when Ralph murmurs Warburton’s name to her as they walk across the lawn. “Oh, I hoped there wo
uld be a lord,” she says, “it’s just like a novel!” For she has now stepped inside her own story, one that comes with a lord and a country house, a ghost, and even a palace in Rome, with everything one wants a certain kind of novel to have. It’s a gesture that welds Isabel’s love of the props and furniture of fiction to her Anglophilia, a gesture that serves to license such guilty pleasures of our own.

  But the future will not be one of tea parties; not only. The men on the lawn talk of health, and money, and marriage. Then Mr. Touchett strikes a curious note—he announces his belief that “there will be great changes; and not all for the better.” It’s the kind of thing old men say, and not something in which we should try to find a social or political meaning. It does, however, tell us something about The Portrait of a Lady as a whole. Isabel may see herself as having stepped inside a novel, but not all novels end well.

  The girl is full of questions, her speech darting from dogs to the date of Gardencourt and on to old family quarrels. She settles on nothing except to declare her love of her own liberty, and though her spontaneity doesn’t precisely jar with this cozily accustomed world, it does at least refresh it. Whatever she says proves enough, though, and at the end of the book’s second chapter, Warburton will turn to Ralph and say that Isabel fits his idea—his ideal—of an interesting woman. Yet why? Many of the novel’s first reviewers complained that these opening chapters don’t give us a decided sense of Isabel’s character. It’s true that James does without the kind of clear omniscient statement that we find, for example, at the start of Middlemarch: “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” All Dorothea’s sensuous ascetism is in that sentence, but about Isabel we’re only told that at first she looks pretty; later, that “nineteen persons out of twenty” will find her older sister prettier. The twentieth will think the others all fools. Our initial impression isn’t of Isabel in herself, but rather of other people’s reactions to her, and James means for our interest to mimic Warburton’s, even before telling us anything much about her. Some readers resist this, young women in particular. Few young men do. Nevertheless, she will for many pages seem elusive, a figure not easy to sum up or to know.