Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  Nor did he take much notice of American public life when, under a mix of financial and familial pressure, he returned in the late summer of 1874. He settled in New York, making an attempt at independence in a city to which he felt a sentimental attraction, drawn as he always was to the traces of his personal past. It was an era to which a sharp-edged new writer called Mark Twain had just given a name: the Gilded Age, an age of watered stock and bought elections, of Jay Gould and Boss Tweed. At first, James liked the “rattling big luxurious place,” though he also knew what he didn’t know, and left the subject of Wall Street alone. In his apartment on East 25th Street he wrote two articles a week, most of them for The Nation, notices of books and plays and paintings, and worked his way through the year-long serial of Roderick Hudson. After a decade of short stories it was time to move past his apprenticeship—not only to commit himself to a full-length novel, but also to come out in hardcovers. So in 1875, James read the proofs of his first three volumes: A Passionate Pilgrim, a collection of stories; a gathering of travel essays called Transatlantic Sketches; and the book version of his Atlantic serial. It was a smart professional move, but he had come home in part because he thought New York would be less expensive than Italy. It wasn’t, and by the time Roderick Hudson was moving through the press, he was gone. In October he left America once more, settling at first in Paris and then, after a year, crossing over to the London that would become his home. He would not return to America until after the 1881 publication of The Portrait of a Lady itself.

  He went for many reasons. He wanted to see paintings and old buildings, and he had found that in New York even a successful writer was an anomaly in a world given over to business. Literature was admired, and journalists had their narrow place, but the writer as such had little social purchase. He went because, though he had known periods of acute loneliness abroad, he was still his own man there, as he was not in America. But he also went because he knew that Europe was where his material lay.

  In 1879, James accepted a commission from his London publisher, Macmillan, to write a short book on Hawthorne for a series called “English Men of Letters”; it was their first volume on an American writer. The book he produced records a new generation’s attempt to understand its ancestors, and with the exception of The American Scene, it offers his most searching account of his native land. Yet though Hawthorne remains a founding document in the writing of American literary history, at home James was attacked for what his readers saw as condescension, a criticism inseparable from their knowledge of his decision to live abroad. One passage in particular drew attention. In the preface to The Marble Faun, his 1860 story about a pair of American artists in Italy, Hawthorne had noted the difficulty of writing about his homeland, a country in which he pretended to believe “there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity.” James lifted that thought, and then extended it in a passage of great comic brilliance, a list of everything that in Hawthorne’s day looked absent from the

  . . . texture of American life. . . . No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church . . . no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses . . . nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals . . . no Oxford . . . no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class . . . no Epsom nor Ascot!

  It’s wonderful fun to read Hawthorne’s list aloud, and James allows that his ingenuity has led him into overstatement. He admits, moreover, that a great deal remains even in a land without thatch or ivy, though just what is itself the American’s “secret, his joke, as one may say.” And the critic Robert Weisbuch has suggested taking this passage as an example of that joke. For most of James’s readers liked the fact that they didn’t have to live with those bits of an old European order. The absence of Ascot was for them a positive recommendation, and what was left seemed nothing less than America itself.

  That list did, however, give a warrant to those who saw James as dismissive of American life, and in reading we have to remember that no matter how perceptive his criticism is about other writers, it usually says more about his own ambition and practice. So let me shift the terms. It’s not simply that America lacks the things he lists, but rather that such institutions and practices provide the novelist with his fabric, or at least the kind of novelist that James himself wanted to be. They make up the world of Austen and Balzac—the buzz of implication, of half-expressed meanings, that both characters and readers alike must learn to hear. The limitations James found in American life were limitations above all in the material it offered for the novel. “It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,” and in America the deposit of that history was still so thin “that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature,” a place where the air itself looks new.

  Other kinds of fiction were possible. For much of the nineteenth century the country’s most important storytellers thought of themselves as writing not novels in the English sense of the term but rather what they called romances; as though the exceptionalism of the American condition operated even in the realm of prose. The difference is far from absolute, but still there is a distinction to make. One classic account suggests that while the novel sets its characters in some plausible and closely described relation to their world, the romance works in contrast to endow its people with a sense of mystery. The social background in such works may remain abstract, the characters are often flatly emblematic, and the writer’s emphasis falls instead upon an often astonishing plot that serves as the vehicle for an overarching symbolic truth. Hawthorne himself is the best example here. In James’s words, he had “asked but little of his milieu” and had used that very thinness to heighten his narratives. For once that Old World clutter was cleared away, his characters had accordingly appeared as giants, isolated on the granite platforms of their moral dramas. Often they were outcasts. Think of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, with her lonely hut at the edge of town; think too of Melville’s Ahab, or even of Huckleberry Finn. Then recall the busy village life of Austen’s Emma.

  James himself would always feel the pull of romance, with its appeal to an ideal essence, and it reasserted itself late in his career in such tales of the blighted heart as “The Beast in the Jungle.” Still, he needed the thickened air of history. He needed its baggage and furniture, he wanted its Louis Quinze, and in his own overvaluation of Europe he associated history itself with abroad, as something America couldn’t give him. Later he would wonder if that had been a mistake, and encouraged Edith Wharton to “do New York,” to take up the chance he had missed. Missed, perhaps, because of the way his father had removed his children from American life; the more rooted Howells found that Boston had texture enough. But this is too simple. It’s not just that James discovered his material in that furniture, but rather that he discovered it in the American encounter with a world of chestnut commodes and silver salvers. He found his material in dramatizing the collision of an American sensibility with all that made the Old World old.

  Some of that would come in travel writing—there was a market for essays with titles like “Roman Rides”—and some in criticism, presenting the works of European masters to an American audience. Most of it took the form of fiction, however, like the long story called “Travelling Companions” that James published in the Atlantic at the end of 1870, a tale of courtship conducted against a touristic experience of Italy. It wasn’t the first piece he had set in Europe, but it was the first he wrote about the adventures there of people like him, and on reading it his publisher’s wife, Annie Fields, noted in her diary that she wept as she finished it, “not from the sweet low pathos of the tale . . . but from the knowledge of the writer’s success.” Other stories followed. In “A Passionate Pilgrim,” an American claimant to an English estate learns that the Old World cannot give him a home, and
in “Madame de Mauves,” James offered his first sustained look at a transatlantic marriage, an account of an American woman’s recoil from her husband’s moral universe. He would eventually grow tired of what became known as the “international theme,” and in the years after the Portrait he even abandoned it for a while. Yet he came back to it in such late masterpieces as The Ambassadors, and his encounter with the world that Hawthorne’s shopping list so merrily evokes would prove decisive. It is what made him Henry James.

  James’s experiences in England, Paris, and Italy will carry much of this narrative, in its later chapters especially. We will watch as he learns, in the 1870s and early 1880s, to define the terms of a life that is both American and European at once. So rather than chronicle his movements here, I’ll instead offer a series of vignettes as a way to evoke his early years abroad. There are three of them—three sketches, three cities, and three encounters with minds as large as his own.

  Henry and William in Florence, November 1873. James had been in Tuscany for a month when his older brother came to join him; William had begun to teach physiology at Harvard that spring, but almost immediately asked for a leave. They stayed at the Hôtel d’Europe, a few steps away from the river at the foot of the via Tornabuoni—then as now the home of the city’s most fashionable shops—and bombarded Quincy Street with reports on each other’s well-being. Henry wrote that on some days his brother had “the appearance, the manner, and almost the activity of perfect health.” William was not so encouraging—he thought Henry seemed liverish. Their hotel was full of people they knew, but William found Florence itself rather dusky and small. He couldn’t quite shed the spirit of Cambridge, and admitted that the city’s dirt and slime filled him with horror. Still, he did recognize that Henry was very much at home—perhaps, indeed, too much so—and “could do more work than at any previous time.”

  They visited Fiesole, they walked through the galleries of the Palazzo Pitti, and one morning William sat over a letter to their sister Alice and wrote sadly about the “set of desultory years behind” him. He wanted some solid practical task, some work he might make his own, but he didn’t yet know just what it might be; and meanwhile his younger brother was across the room, driving his quill through the last pages of an article on Turgenev. William knew that Henry now lived for his work, but he was so impatient with his own inability to settle that he leaned on his brother to come home and take some job of editorial drudgery, telling him that a novelist’s life was abnormal “as a matter of mental hygiene.” He liked to impose his own uncertainties on everyone around him, and reveled in evoking the dreariness he saw as his brother’s necessary American fate. But his words, as always, had their power. Henry did come home, as we have seen. He tried New York—and left.

  With Ivan Turgenev in Paris, 1875–76. James’s article in praise of the Russian novelist appeared in the North American Review for April 1874, and the older man responded by inviting the American to call on him; they met in the late fall of 1875, soon after James had arrived in Paris. Turgenev was in his late fifties, and by now visited Russia only briefly each summer, splitting the rest of his time between France and Baden-Baden. He was tall and bearded and had once been a figure of enormous physical vigor, though now both his strength and his best work were behind him. The lyrical country scenes of A Nest of Gentlefolk had appeared in 1859, and Fathers and Sons in 1862, with its picture of the nihilist physician Bazarov; while the apparently artless Sportsman’s Sketches lay even further back. Still, that 1852 volume had done two great things. Its seemingly documentary account of the hardships of peasant life had established a new aesthetic for the short story, and it had played an important role in the change of hearts and minds that led to the 1861 emancipation of Russia’s serfs.

  To the young James, however, what mattered wasn’t Turgenev’s liberalism so much as the delicacy and finish of his work. They met in the house Turgenev shared with the opera singer Pauline Viardot and her husband in the rue de Douai, just below the Place Pigalle. At that first meeting they talked for two hours, and before the year was out the Russian gave the young man a rare mark of his esteem: he introduced him to the circle of French writers with whom he gathered on Sundays at the flat of Gustave Flaubert. There James met Émile Zola, flush with the success and the suppression alike of L’Assommoir, his frank, unsparing novel about the family of a Paris laundress; there too he met the then-unknown Guy de Maupassant. It wasn’t a world in which he felt entirely at home, and though he wasn’t shocked by the sexual license of their talk, he was by the fierceness of French literary quarrels. Nevertheless, the influence of Flaubert’s cénacle proved decisive, and James was moreover the only important writer in English to see it from within.

  In his essay James noted that Turgenev’s characters all seemed to be portraits, and one rainy afternoon in the rue de Douai the Russian told him that everything in his stories was indeed drawn from some particular person he had seen or known. He never consciously added anything to them, but instead tried only to offer a faithful picture, for he distrusted invention and believed that there was beauty and strangeness enough in the real. Thirty years later James put that conversation into his preface to the Portrait, remembering Turgenev’s inspiriting claim that his characters seemed to hover “before him, soliciting him . . . interesting him and appealing to him just as they were and by what they were.” Plot was to him an irrelevance—it got in the way of the truth, of the emotional logic that governed his people. The business of writing lay not in making his characters “do” anything, but rather in discovering a situation that would allow them to reveal themselves. For him, that was story enough; but as he ruefully told the younger writer, it might not be for one’s readers.

  The Two Henrys: London, February 1880. Henry Adams came over to London that winter, renewing his acquaintance with the city where his father had been the American minister during the Civil War, a diplomat charged with keeping Britain from recognizing the Confederacy. The young Adams had spent that war as his father’s private secretary and in the intervening years had split his time between Washington and Boston, where he both edited the North American Review and taught medieval history at Harvard. By now, however, he had given up on teaching, and in the summer of 1879 he crossed the Atlantic to gather materials for what would become his masterly nine-volume history of the United States in the early years of the nineteenth century. He went to France and to Spain; he hired copyists to transcribe state papers in Paris and Madrid. For Adams was a rich man, made so not only through inheritance but also by his marriage to the razor-tongued Clover Hooper.

  The two men had known each other for a decade, and in 1870, James had described his slightly older counterpart as a “youth of genius and enthusiasm—or at least of talent and energy.” Adams’s temperament was as dry as gin, and James did not at first like him. But he soon grew fond of the couple, and even in a London where he had known an enormous social success, he enjoyed having some American confidants. They saw each other regularly in Paris throughout the fall of 1879, and in that London winter Clover noted that the novelist came “in every day at dusk and sits chattering by our fire.” Sometimes he went so far as to invite himself to dinner. That season he was finishing his work on Washington Square, a short novel about a father’s thwarting of his daughter’s hopes. In February he sent off a review of Zola’s “unutterably filthy” novel about prostitution, Nana—a review in which he never quite names the source of that filth—and on the twenty-second he went to spend his Sunday afternoon at the Adamses’. They had taken a house just off St. James’s Park, on a little street halfway between Buckingham Palace and Parliament, and the novelist sat talking with Clover while his host wrote a letter to his former student Henry Cabot Lodge. Adams’s words are full of happy spleen on the subject of Paris, a city he thought “a fraud and a snare,” but he moved on to speculate about the coming presidential race, and then closed the page by looking up and noticing the other man in the room. “Harry
James,” he told Lodge, “is standing on the hearth-rug, with his hands under his coat-tails. . . . I am going out in five minutes to make some calls on perfectly uninteresting people.”

  Later that day James wrote to their mutual friend Lizzie Boott about his plans to take a working vacation in Italy; he expected to see her in Florence, where she lived with her father in a villa just outside the city gates. The Adamses, he reported, were “not at all crazy” about London, and yet thought him unnatural in wanting to leave it so soon after their own arrival; James thought they were a bit homesick. But he then switched subjects to note the fury with which the American press had greeted his book about Hawthorne. The reviews admired its handling of the fiction; they execrated its account of America. Probably he should have anticipated that reaction. He had argued in the book itself that his countrymen believed that every other nation was part of a “conspiracy to undervalue them,” and now it must have seemed to them as if an American had joined in that pact. Inaccurate, narrow, crude, sneering, and above all unpatriotic, a book that could only feed the English incomprehension of America—so it was described, and even Howells had had some reservations about it.

  It wasn’t the first controversy James’s work had caused, however, and probably Hawthorne wouldn’t have been so harshly received without the example of Daisy Miller the year before. That story of a New York girl’s indiscretions in Europe had also gotten its first publication in Britain. A Philadelphia monthly had earlier rejected it, finding it a libel on American femininity; for Daisy dies, in Rome, of malaria and a compromised reputation alike, after she is seen out walking with an Italian. Most readers loved it, though, and the behavior of the title character was discussed as though she were real. People took sides at the dinner table, either for or against her, and with her open pleasure in what she called “gentlemen’s society,” Daisy became a flashpoint for all that the bien élevé didn’t like about their own country. Yet how far should one go in criticizing her? Harper’s argued that Daisy wasn’t “fast,” but only ignorant. Any genuine reprobate would have known not to speak so frankly, and those who recognized the accuracy with which James had captured a particular American type should also recognize that their repudiation of her was unjust; they were indulging in the same kind of innuendo as the characters whose gossip had destroyed her good name.