Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  That country had a most irregular landscape. Henry remembered that they “breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions.” The enveloping clouds of parental concern hung heavy and low, but their father changed his mind so often that the children’s world sometimes seemed to shift its shape, and they might be told that the canyons suddenly at their feet had been put there in their own best interests. Not that that world looked the same to everyone who lived in it. Most observers thought Mary James was far more conventional than either her husband or their children; a benign but passive presence, and so fully subsumed by motherhood that no biographer has yet been able to separate her from that role. And the terrain that Alice had to negotiate looked especially trackless and strange. Her father believed that women had their lives in a separate and subordinate sphere, and she did not share her brothers’ education. She was taught instead at home, and spent her adult life as an invalid, the victim of indefinable ailments that kept her in bed for years at a time, apparently unable to walk. Yet she had a caustic tongue, which her brothers enjoyed, even if Henry also found himself disturbed, after her 1892 death from breast cancer, by the frank and intimate pain of the diary she left behind.

  Alice’s future would forever be on hold, but by the time the family came back to America in 1860, the question of a career had become pressing for her two oldest brothers. Their father rejected the idea of college—it was narrowing, a restriction of the mind’s free motion. He wanted his children to proceed by mistakes, to experiment with careers, not choose one; an interesting life was enough, it needn’t be “paying” as well. But his fortune wasn’t large enough to give his children the same freedom that he had had. Choice was required, and at this point a barrier fell between the older boys and their younger brothers. On their return the family settled in Newport, but Wilky and Bob were sent away to the new Concord Academy, whose curriculum stood for their father’s latest thing—a fusion of Abolition and Transcendentalism. William painted, and Henry looked on, reading quietly in a corner of Hunt’s studio, where the other pupils included John La Farge. The New York–born La Farge is now remembered for his stained glass above all, but his 1862 portrait of the writer is the best early one, and shows the young James in full-lipped and moody profile.

  Newport had by the middle of the century become the most stylish of summer resorts, though by the standards of the century’s end both the fortunes and the houses were modest. But the town with its shipyards and close-packed eighteenth-century streets had its own independent life as well. It had been a center of fine cabinetmaking and was the site of both the first synagogue and the oldest lending library in America; a port city with its own traditions, and its own old families. James’s best friend in town belonged to one of them. He was a boy named Thomas Sergeant Perry, whose grandfather Oliver Hazard Perry had been a hero of the War of 1812, defeating a British squadron in the Battle of Lake Erie. Perry would later teach at Harvard and become a noted critic, and in his teens he gave the young Henry James someone to talk to about novels; someone, moreover, who knew things that James didn’t. For Perry was a passionate reader of American literature, and introduced his friend to the works of Hawthorne.

  When the Civil War began, Henry Sr. did not at first support it. He had backed Lincoln in the 1860 election, yet thought the president’s initial war aims—restoration of the status quo ante—too limited to be worth dying for, and spoke of having to keep “a firm grasp upon the coat tails of my Willy and Henry, who both vituperate me” because he wouldn’t let them enlist. Perhaps they did not try very hard. William at this period began to suffer from eye strain. He left Hunt’s studio and persuaded his father to let him enter the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, where he worked with the Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz. He enrolled there in the fall of 1861, just a few months after the war’s start. Two years later he switched over to the medical school, and then interrupted that study as well to join Agassiz on an expedition in the Amazon. He finally earned his M.D. in 1869, though he never practiced, and years later wrote that civic life needed to find a sense of collective purpose in what he called the “moral equivalent of war.”

  His two youngest brothers did not need that equivalent. Wilky was bigger and more athletic than his elders, Bob had an inborn sense of aggression, and their school had made them militant. Wilky joined up at seventeen, and Bob was even younger. They each gained commissions in the Union’s new regiments of black soldiers, and Wilky was badly wounded in the 1863 assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina; the battle is commemorated in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bas-relief in honor of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, across the street from the State House in Boston. He never fully recovered from his wounds, and died in 1883, before he reached forty. His father shuddered at what he called the sight of “so much manhood so suddenly achieved.” But he was proud to have some sons in uniform, now that Abolition had become central to Lincoln’s purpose; and Bob would always believe that the two of them had been discarded.

  Henry had a peculiar war. In October 1861 he joined a volunteer crew in helping to put out a Newport fire. There were many hands on the pumps, men working in too-close quarters, and as James frantically tried to ensure the water’s steady flow, he found that “I had done myself, in the face of a shabby conflagration, a horrid even if an obscure hurt.” Yet this account has a number of uncertainties about it. In the later 1860s, Henry’s bad back became a family byword, and Edel speculates that he may have suffered a slipped disc. Immediately after the fire, however, he went up to Boston; whatever damage he had suffered was clearly not incapacitating. By the next year the pain had kicked up, although a doctor found no trace of physical injury. Edel adds, however, that the hurt was “exacerbated by the tensions” of the war, and in his autobiography James himself puts the trouble earlier, associating it with the start of combat “during the soft spring of ’61.” He writes there of a “passage of personal history” that seemed to have a close and yet inexpressible connection with the war itself, and other critics have seen that passage as a psychic and not a physical one: an instant of self-examination that revealed how fully he shrank from doing the expected masculine thing. His survival depended, and not just in a bodily sense, on accepting his place on the margins. Still, in 1863 he did appear before the Rhode Island Board of Enrolment; he received an exemption, apparently because of his back. His physical troubles were real, and they did get worse. In 1880 he told a friend that a “muscular weakness of his spine” meant that he had to lie down for several hours each day. Yet in thinking of him at the time of the Civil War it’s hard not to see those problems—it would have been hard for him not to see them—in the terms one of his characters uses to describe Ralph Touchett: “Fortunately he has got a consumption; I say fortunately, because it gives him something to do. His consumption is his career; it’s a kind of position.”

  In the fall of 1862, James made an attempt at another métier. Shortly after that September’s slaughter at Antietam he enrolled for a year at Harvard Law School, which then occupied but a single building at the edge of the Yard. His memoirs describe the place in metaphoric terms, as though attendance were an equivalent of military service, and he even suggests that for him the campus was “tented field enough.” At the end of his life he spoke with deep admiration of Walt Whitman, who spent the war as a nurse in military hospitals; James visited such hospitals in Rhode Island, but could offer only a helpless goodwill and a bit of pocket money. He mourned the death in battle of two cousins, and read and reread his brothers’ letters home, but his own record was one of “seeing, sharing, envying, applauding, pitying, all from too far-off.” He never had to prove himself as they did, and he never lost his “sense of what I missed.” There is more regret than guilt here, I think, but a regret that depends upon an awareness of his own limitations. In 1884 his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had received one of his three wounds at Antietam, gave a Memorial Day speech in which he claimed that “through our great good
fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire.” Henry had only worked the pump, and it wasn’t that kind of fire anyway; no metaphor could make it so. As the war ended, he and William each looked set for a career as an invalid, with their different troubles of backs and eyes, and in William’s case a species of depression. Henry’s health would be rescued by his travels and expatriation. William’s would take longer, and his recovery came only with the marriage he both wanted and resisted.

  And yet in these years James did make a start at something. In 1864 he knew the pleasure of holding in his hand a dozen greenbacks, payment for an essay in the North American Review—his first piece of professional writing.

  James began to write in his teens. The first record we have of it comes in an 1860 letter from Wilky to their Newport friend Perry, in which he noted that “Harry has become an author I believe, for he keeps his door locked all day long, & a little while ago I got a peep in his room, and saw some poetical looking manuscripts lying on the table.” James himself would soon claim that in these “secret employments” he was a stranger to no style, and we can imagine him as engaged in pastiche, training himself by imitating one kind of work after another; indeed, as late as 1878, and with half a dozen books behind him, he described himself as still going through a conscious process of evolution, one slow and deliberate step after another. He knew when he entered law school that he wanted a literary career, and spent as much time as he could reading Sainte-Beuve rather than Blackstone. In fact, as he wrote to Perry, his ambition then was to do for English literature what that shrewdly omnivorous French critic had done for his own. As indeed he would—no novelist, in any language, has left a more important body of criticism.

  In his autobiography James recalled a moment in childhood when he went with his father to an uncle’s estate on the Hudson. There was a cousin of his own age there, a girl named Marie who refused to go to bed when she was told. “Come now, my dear,” his aunt said, “don’t make a scene—I insist on your not making a scene.” Immediately the boy began to read a world into that phrase—to understand that life itself was a series of scenes, and “we could make them or not as we chose.” His aunt’s words stuck because they had made it a scene even without the little girl’s help, and in time James would himself develop what he called a “scenic method” of novelistic construction. His books never simply flow or meander, but are instead built around a series of carefully prepared dramatic incidents. Some of them are conversations for which his characters might themselves prepare, knowing that a scene in Marie’s sense is imminent. Others are moments of recognition, or else tableaux that James drew with an eye to their effect on the reader, as in the Portrait’s opening chapter.

  The scenes he himself made were largely on paper. But his life did have its episodes of understated drama, and an important one opened in North Conway, New Hampshire, in the summer of 1865; a scene whose central figure would influence the whole course of his future work. James’s favorite cousin was a young woman called Minny Temple, the daughter of his father’s sister. She was an orphan and lived with her paternal relations, but they too were in Newport and he saw her often. Henry found her full of a vivid life, playful and possessed of a rare intellectual grace. His sister Alice was reserved, as tightly wound as her own plaited hair; Minny’s temperament was in contrast as open as a window in summer, and “afraid of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder.” She believed that a distant chance of the best thing was preferable to a certainty of the second-best, she had a talent for uncomfortable questions, and the rest of Henry’s family weren’t sure they liked her. Minny was no respecter of persons. She was irritated by her uncle’s attitude toward women, and feared that he disliked her “for what he called my pride and conceit.” Alice was suspicious of any young woman of whom her brothers appeared fond, and though William’s most recent biographer suggests he was drawn to her, he also at times proved hostile. The truth is that Minny was very much like him, and in spite of her charm she yearned for a sense of certainty. She had an earnestness that was too full of doubt to be sanctimonious, and used her letters as an occasion for self-scrutiny in a way that her more guarded cousins did not. She was maybe a bit spiky, and certainly she could shock; a picture of 1861 shows her with hair cropped short like a boy’s.

  She spent the summer of 1865 in the White Mountains with her sisters, and Henry decided to join her there. He was twenty-two that year and Minny just twenty, but she drew others around her as well—two young army officers from Boston who were already on the way to eminence. One of them was a lawyer named John Gray, a man with an angular jaw and dark insistent eyes. He would found the most Brahminical of old Boston law firms, and eventually became the dean of Harvard Law School. The other was a family friend whom I have already mentioned, the twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Holmes—a tall man who later wore the handlebars of a matinee villain. Henry was slighter than either of them in both build and height; he had a characteristic way of tilting his head a bit to the left, and parted his hair in the middle. Picture them there: the windy hump of Mt. Washington sits in the distance, and on the lawn of a wood-framed New England house, the young people sit and talk. To the soldiers it must all seem strange, an atmosphere of lemonade and muslin after years of blood and bullets. But the summer breeze is pregnant with futurity, and James would remember that their conversation was full to the brim with freedom. They spoke as though they were all fresh-faced, and yet in a way that it would be crude to call innocent.

  Day passes day, the evenings begin to demand a shawl, and a few early leaves flush red. In James’s memory they form “the most delightful loose band conceivable,” but of course there are tensions. The future justice prefers girls who aren’t so intellectually demanding. Minny thinks he’s arrogant, and at first she finds Gray a bit stiff. Still, she appears to hold the young men hostage, and in James’s mind the summer’s drama lies in the fact that she cares nothing at all about the flutter around her. But there is another drama here too, and if in memory he made a scene around Minny, we ourselves can make one around him, one that lies in James’s own contemplation of the other men, in the contrast he cannot help drawing. They are men of mind and yet also men of action, with a kind of glitter “that I had no acquisition whatever to match.” He listens to their stories, but can’t join in them, and probably his own experience had best remain unspoken. The war has touched and tested them, they have survived the nation’s great questions, while he—he had published a few book reviews and two pieces of short fiction.

  One of them, true, had appeared that spring in the Atlantic Monthly; though only eight years old, the magazine already provided a mark of high-toned aspiration and achievement. Yet “The Story of a Year” defines the same limit to James’s knowledge as did that North Conway summer. It begins with the engagement of John Ford and Elizabeth Crowe, but when the young man’s regiment calls him up, the tale refuses to follow him into battle. Its concern lies instead with the girl Lieutenant Ford has left behind, with the period’s “unwritten history . . . the reverse of the picture,” and above all with the new relations she forms in his absence. It is not, in truth, a very good story. Nevertheless, its suggestion that life doesn’t stop when the hero goes away does point to the young author’s developing sense of realism.

  So would his conversations with an editor who joined the Atlantic in the following year. William Dean Howells was the son of an Ohio printer, and six years older than James. He was old enough to have helped in Lincoln’s 1860 campaign, and was rewarded with the job of American consul in Venice; an experience he turned into an open-hearted account of Italian manners called Venetian Life. When he returned to the States, he joined the staff of a new political weekly called The Nation, where James was already a contributor, before moving in 1866 to Cambridge and a position as the publisher J. T. Fields’s assistant on the Atlantic. Howells was portly, with a soup-strainer mustache, and self-consciously a family m
an. He saw the writer as a middle-class professional, a responsible citizen like a doctor or a lawyer, and would soon become a creature of tuition bills and summer vacations. Howells recognized James’s ability from the start, but what James remembered above all was that he had “published me at once—and paid me,” money less important in itself than as a promise of his own future independence.

  The James family had moved up from Newport to Boston in 1864, and then over the river to Cambridge in 1866. Henry Sr. took a large house in Quincy Street, just across from that of Harvard’s president, and on the site of what is today the university’s faculty club. He had many years left, but his own travels were over, and the address would hold until the death of Mary James in 1882. William’s long career at Harvard would probably not have been possible without that move; he may have drawn the family north in his path, but he didn’t start teaching until 1873 and remained largely under his parents’ roof until his marriage. From Henry’s point of view, however, the most important consequence of the move might well have been his growing friendship with Howells.

  Neither of them could remember when they first met, but it was probably just after the Atlantic had accepted another story about the war’s home front, this one called “Poor Richard.” Howells had told the reluctant Fields to take it, and everything else the author might produce, though he also believed that James’s very artfulness meant he would have to create his own audience. Of course, Howells himself would help with that. He took over from Fields in 1871, and as the Atlantic’s editor for the next decade published a number of James’s stories and five serialized novels, culminating with The Portrait of a Lady itself. About Howells’s own fiction James would for many years remain ambivalent. He liked his prose and yet thought he needed a larger subject, that he was too absorbed by his American world. But he admired the picture of city life and social unrest in the other writer’s best book, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), and recognized that he could not match its Balzacian range.