Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  James himself eventually dismissed the tale as slight, and in a later story, “Pandora,” he even joked about making a German diplomat read it as a guide to American manners. Nevertheless, it gave him his first real taste of fame. What it didn’t provide was money, not directly. In those days before international copyright the tale was pirated in America, and James got almost nothing from its quickly sold 20,000 copies. Every reader of the major British and American magazines now knew his name, however, and he quickly established his brand by following Daisy Miller with such briskly written comedies about the social relations of America and Europe as “An International Episode” and “The Pension Beaurepas.” Still, that success brought its troubles. James might be too brilliant to ignore, but his strictures on the provinciality of American life made him suspect to a public that remained anxious about their country’s place in the world. In April 1880, Clover Adams wrote to her father that it was “high time Harry James was ordered home by his family. . . . He had better go to Cheyenne and run a hog ranch.” She knew the criticism of him was silly, but still he must have seemed in danger of losing the American tone. By that time, however, James himself was no longer in London. He had crossed the Channel at Folkestone, waiting five days for a calm sea, and then passed through Paris and Turin on his way to Florence, where he thought to rest for a few weeks before settling down to work on what he called a “big” novel.

  If the 1875 publication of his first books represented an end to his apprenticeship, then James’s plans for the novel he had decided to call The Portrait of a Lady were something else—a frank bid for mastery. We first hear of the project in an October 1876 letter to Howells. James was busy with The American, whose protagonist was the emblematically named Christopher Newman, but he recognized the financial necessity of always having a serial running somewhere, and he didn’t believe the Atlantic could handle them all. He was negotiating instead with Scribner’s, a magazine he did not like, to write a novel about what he called an Americana, whose adventures in Europe would be a counterpart to Newman’s. The Scribner’s plan fell through, however, and James then offered the book to Howells, noting early the next year that he was willing to wait until the Atlantic could give him the space he wanted. The project would be “the portrait of the character and recital of the adventures of a woman—a great swell, psychologically; a grand nature—accompanied with many developments.”

  James’s tone is ironic but the ambition is real, even if it would be another three years before he felt entirely free to pursue it. He did begin the story, that much is sure, and in April 1878 offered to show some of it to Macmillan. But nobody today knows just how far he then got, or just how closely this lost ur-Portrait resembles the opening moments of the book we now read. Those notes to Howells aside, his letters give no details of its narrative, but in May 1877 he wrote to his mother that he planned a novel “to which the American shall be as water unto wine.” Later he had to add that The Europeans, which William found thin, was not the book he meant. William was always his most formidable critic, though often his least accurate one. He had an uncanny ability to find the flaws in his brother’s earliest and most conventional stories, but his own belief that novels were no more than an amusement meant that he objected to what was most original about James’s later work. Still, the novelist recognized the logic of William’s demand for something larger, and with a clear sense of his own development, he now felt ready to work on a greater scale.

  In August 1879 he finally gave Howells the book’s title, and that summer he also contracted for the novel’s serial publication on both sides of the ocean. It would appear simultaneously, a few chapters each month, in Macmillan’s and the Atlantic. Yet still he delayed, even after the magazines had gone through the delicate business of adjusting their schedules around each other. Both Roderick Hudson and The American had been critical triumphs. Readers already saw him as one of the most esteemed of all American novelists, and certainly as the most challenging; a writer whose predilection for unhappy endings provoked discussions about just what a novel should be. Nevertheless, his books did not sell; Frederick Macmillan even apologized to him for the small size of his checks. So James felt at once in need of the success he thought his Americana would bring, and yet forced to delay because he could not yet afford the unbroken stretch of time he would need for it. He wrote both Hawthorne and a minor, six-month serial called Confidence; he wrote stories and art criticism, a piece on the Comédie Française, and another on the reopening of Parliament. He put off the big novel’s start, as he did a planned trip to Italy; it’s almost as though the two were inseparable, as though he could not imagine starting this particular book in any other place. Instead he worked to give himself as much room as he could, and in the winter of 1880 he quickly produced Washington Square, a book whose epigrammatic spark seems to me unmatched in his oeuvre.

  And then he had enough—a solid bank balance to see him through what he knew would be a long and careful piece of work. He could afford to take the time he needed. James reached Florence on March 28, and then paused once more, traveling south to Naples to visit a Russian friend, an acolyte of Richard Wagner’s named Paul Zhukovsky. But he soon came back to Florence, and there, in an unusually rainy spring, he took up his old beginning, and in an “open window overlooking the yellow Arno” started off on the book that would ensure his literary permanence.

  4.

  ALONG THE THAMES

  WITH NINE MONTHS of work on the Portrait behind him, James left London in December 1880 to spend the holidays in the West Country. Christmas Day found him at Plymouth, one of England’s largest military bases, where his host was the garrison’s commander, an Anglo-Irish general called Pakenham. He made the acquaintance of a naval captain, who invited him out for breakfast on an old-fashioned ship-of-the-line, and then on the twenty-seventh he moved further down the coast, into Cornwall. The air was mild and warm, and James enjoyed its “far-away-from-London quality.” Yet a steady rain kept him largely indoors, and one night when a gale set the windows awash, he sat down to write a letter to his Cambridge friend Grace Norton.

  She was nine years his senior, and had a talent for probing questions; as fits someone who would later become known for her own work on Montaigne. Much of her life was spent in the shadow of her widowed brother Charles, traveling with him and helping to care for his children at the family’s Shady Hill estate. She had the more penetrating mind, however, and James wrote to her with special frequency throughout the first decade of his expatriation; his letters to her are among the warmest and most confidential he ever sent to anyone outside his immediate family. That of December 28 is no exception. Their correspondence had lately turned on the issue of marriage. James’s friends and relatives in America were eager to settle him into family life, and he found himself having gently to deflect the question. He also thanked her, however, for her kind words about his new novel, whose opening chapters she had just read in the Atlantic, and the meat of his letter was a reply to a specific question. She was, James wrote, both right and wrong to take Minny Temple as the original of Isabel Archer. He admitted that he had had his cousin in mind, that he had given Isabel an “infusion . . . of her remarkable nature.” Still, he cautioned against taking the character as a direct portrait, for “Poor Minny was essentially incomplete, and I have tried to make my young woman more rounded, more finished.” Her tuberculosis had kept her from becoming the person she might have been, and yet for James her incompleteness wasn’t only that of early death, of a teleology that falsified her nature. For in life, as he added, we are all incomplete, and our days are a chaos of contingencies. They do not in themselves possess an intrinsic meaning, a necessary form, but must be made to mean, and it’s the writer’s job to fill his subjects out, “to justify them, as it were”: to depict some final state or being toward which the unimpeded self might tend.

  On the evening of Isabel’s arrival at Gardencourt, Ralph asks his mother what she means
to do with her. Mrs. Touchett has a ready answer: a Paris wardrobe, and Florence in the autumn. Of course, the question belongs to James as well. In the novel’s preface he depicts himself as asking what he will do with her, and his own answer at first resembles Mrs. Touchett’s. He’ll take her to Europe; that will be the starting point for her adventures. Ralph isn’t satisfied with his mother’s reply, though, and he soon modifies his question to ask what Isabel is “going to do with herself.” With most women, he thinks, that issue doesn’t arise; they simply wait for the man who will “furnish them with a destiny.” Isabel, however, gives him the impression that she has “intentions of her own.” She may be incomplete, but it doesn’t seem to him as if the ordinary terms of a woman’s life will be able to contain her. And yet what is it open for her to become?

  In his preface James writes that the germ of the novel lay in his sense of a single character, a young woman who “stood there in perfect isolation” and to whom everything else would need to be added: setting, plot, other people, the whole body of relations that would lead her to a full recognition of her own situation. I recognize the general truth of James’s belief that we are all of us unfinished, but still there’s a special charge in his sense of Minny’s torn-out page. He adds in the preface that he saw the character as “affronting her destiny,” and Isabel will indeed come to face her future. But that verb—not confront, but affront—gains an extra force if we see Minny as having provided a model, and James himself offers an affront to his cousin’s destiny, a slap across its face; an affront that consists of trying to imagine just who she might with Isabel’s chances have become. Indeed, it’s precisely because the character remains so closely tied to James’s memory that Isabel cannot be an exact portrait. Minny’s thread was cut so short that there is, paradoxically, more room for growth, for James’s own portrait to diverge from the figure Grace Norton remembered. The sumptuously dressed great lady of the book’s later chapters owes little to the hemorrhaging girl complaining about her sickroom regimen of “gruel and silence.”

  Still, James’s imagination of Isabel’s career is, in one sense, an extrapolation from Minny’s family circumstances. In 1906 he wrote to his agent, J. B. Pinker, suggesting a subject for the photographic frontispiece to the revised edition of the novel: “a view of the English country house (Hardwicke, near Pangbourne, on the Thames) which I had vaguely and approximately in mind, years ago, for the opening of the Portrait.” The place belonged to a Member of Parliament named Charles Rose, whom James had known since his early days in England; they were contemporaries, and in writing to Pinker, James remembered that he had once stayed there with him. An image of that house did indeed become the novel’s frontispiece, but the details of any trip that James himself made to Hardwick Court (without a final e) are now irrecoverable. No correspondence with Rose survives, and James nowhere else mentions the place. Still, let me posit a visit at some point in the second half of 1877. That was the year Rose took up residence, leasing the estate at first and then later buying it, and in a letter James mentions dining with him in London that June. He had been in Britain for only a few months and had had few country invitations as yet, but this one would be apt to follow, and the house was close enough to the city to let him go down for just a single night.

  It is a Tudor building, “a good deal bruised and defaced in Cromwell’s wars,” and some forty miles upstream from London; the words come from the novel, but the facts are confirmed by architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, and both writers note the irregularity of its bricks and gables. The house sits on a low rise above the water, with a steep hill rising directly behind, and its view across the river to the hedged fields beyond is little changed from what it would have been in James’s day. I spent a summer morning there, driving from Oxford though one impeccable village after another, swooping at last downhill into Whitchurch-on-Thames, and turning into a narrow lane just before I reached the river. The house was a mile on, and the fields along the way were filled not with sheep or cows but with hundreds of spitting long-necked llamas; a neighbor’s farm. Then a set of open gates, a parking space next to the manor office, a friendly greeting. Hardwick still belongs to the Rose family, though the current owner was absent, and the estate’s manager showed me over the house and grounds: the library with its elaborately plastered ceiling from the time of Elizabeth I, the spot where the Roundhead cannonballs had hit, the direction from which carriages would once have approached. The warm brick of the house itself is surrounded by graveled walks, avenues of old trees channel one’s vision down to the water, and there is indeed a great spread of lawn on which one can imagine having tea. The Thames runs placidly here, and in the novel’s early chapters James describes Ralph and Isabel as spending some of their time in a rowboat; a 1906 article in Country Life claims, in fact, that there is “no more beautiful reach of the river than that upon which the Hardwick terraces look down.”

  It isn’t a grand place—not a power house, not a place of lordly display. And yet it is a striking one, this substantial family home, with its thousand acres of mixed farming and timber, close to London but marked with an enduring sense of privacy. Other estates along the Thames have a description and a history that can match it, including the larger Mapledurham just downstream, whose grounds one can now rent for weddings. But James had a particular reason for drawing upon Hardwick, quite aside from the attractions of the house itself. Minny Temple’s mother had been a James, the sister of the novelist’s father. She was the writer’s first cousin on her mother’s side. And Charles Rose, a London banker turned country squire, was her first cousin on her father’s.

  Let me trace the geneology. The Temples came from Rutland, Vermont—Daniel Touchett’s hometown. Robert Temple married Catherine James; they had six children, Minny among them. In 1843, Robert’s sister Charlotte married a Scottish-born Montreal lawyer named John Rose, who over the next twenty years became one of Canada’s most successful financiers. Rose returned to Britain in 1869 and set up a merchant bank that specialized in railroads, the era’s most consistently lucrative investment; he also served as an unofficial representative of the Canadian government and was made a baronet in 1872. James liked the Rose children, but kept his distance from the formidable woman he called “Aunt Charlotte,” refusing several invitations to stay at Loseley Park, the much grander place in Surrey, closer to London and not on the water, that the Rose parents were then renting. He finally saw it only in July of 1880, as he was reading proof on the Portrait’s opening serial installments. Nevertheless, he knew Loseley by reputation already, and gave Gardencourt both its picture gallery and its ghost; Hardwick has neither.

  For our purposes, however, the real interest lies in the figure of Sir John—not the historical person, but the man seen in terms of his family position. He is the uncle by marriage whom Minny Temple would have visited if she had ever been well enough to travel. The situation into which Isabel steps has a much closer resemblance to that of James’s own extended family than most scholars have noted, even though, as people, the Roses have almost nothing in common with the Touchetts. Family tradition holds that Charles Rose served as the model for Mr. Toad in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), while the Dictionary of National Biography describes his father as dying of a “heart attack brought on by the excitement of shooting a stag.” It’s hard to imagine the shrewd but modest Daniel Touchett doing that, and the character owes less to Sir John Rose than to an American banker named Russell Sturgis, a member of an old Salem family who in Britain became a director of Barings Bank. The Sturgises did have a house on the river, albeit one closer to London, and Italianate rather than Tudor; James spent some of his Christmases with them, and their son Howard became one of his closest friends. The figure of Mr. Touchett isn’t so much a composite as a laminate, in which James has glued the temperament of one financier to the family of another. But it’s time to leave the parallels between Minny and Isabel behind us. Or rather to note that Is
abel also owes something to James himself, who in Europe had successfully affronted the invalid’s destiny that in his parents’ America had seemed to await him. She is both cousins made well, while all that was ill and infirm about both Minny and Henry too is placed in the novel on the frail shoulders of Ralph Touchett.

  Ralph finds himself after Harvard and Oxford sitting lazily upon a stool at his father’s bank. He is a spectator, devoted to the ironic appreciation of the world around him, and even before his disease sets in, it seems to the people he knows as if he will be “shut out from a career.” Then his lungs begin to go, and he resembles Minny in at first viewing his illness as that of “an uninteresting . . . person with whom he had nothing in common.” The picture of Ralph in the novel’s early chapters is almost as detailed as that of Isabel herself, and part of the impression she makes on us comes from Ralph’s sense that she has changed his own life. Let’s therefore ask the same question of him that he does of his mother: what will he do with her? Ralph is willing enough to fall in love, but he believes it must be a passive experience, and a silent one. Illness has confirmed his habit of watching, and the richest entertainment he can now imagine lies in the “conscious observation of a lovely woman.” So Isabel’s presence comes as a kind of gift—as though, he thinks, he had gotten a Titian in the mail, or had the key to some great building thrust into his hand. Still, he recognizes that so far he has only “looked in at the windows.” The door to her inner being remains locked, and perhaps the house isn’t yet ready for viewing, the furniture still being moved from place to place. The curious thing is that James also uses the language of architecture to define Isabel’s attitude toward Ralph. She wants to see the life hidden behind his joking façade, “to pass through the ante-room . . . and enter the private apartments.” Almost everyone who reads The Portrait of a Lady sees Ralph and Isabel as one of fiction’s great might-have-beens, and the consonance in the language with which they think of one another confirms their essential harmony.