Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  On the night of her arrival the two of them walk by candlelight through Gardencourt’s picture gallery, and when Isabel asks if the house has a ghost, Ralph replies that it does: a ghost that she will not be able to see. No “young, happy, innocent person” ever has, only those who have known misery; he himself saw it long ago and hopes she never will. Over the next weeks—the next chapters—they grow increasingly close, taking long drives through a countryside of hedgerows and common, parkland and thatched cottage, and she soon falls in love with Gardencourt’s sense of order and seclusion. It is a place where “in the thick mild air all shrillness dropped out of conversation.” Nothing much happens in the chapters that follow Isabel’s arrival in Britain. There are no major developments in the plot, and some readers complain that here the book moves slowly. But these chapters do allow us to learn our way around James’s characters, to form a sense of their habitual life, and they give the novel a sense of space that it will keep until the end.

  Or perhaps we could say that nothing much happens except talk. One afternoon Lord Warburton drives over for an impromptu overnight visit. Isabel had thought him pleasant on the day of her arrival, but now she finds him delightful, as though he quickened her sense of life’s pleasure. He stays on for a second night, when the party lingers in the drawing room until Mrs. Touchett rises and announces that it’s time to wish the gentlemen good night. Isabel is at first puzzled. She wonders aloud if she need go up, and that forces her aunt to be explicit. We are no longer in Albany, she says; you cannot, here, sit unchaperoned in the company of a man to whom you are not related. Ralph protests, but Isabel acquiesces, and when she follows her aunt upstairs tells her that she will “always want to know the things one shouldn’t do.” So as to do them? her aunt asks, uncertain of an American girl’s limits. Yet Isabel is not so simple: “So as to choose.”

  Those words end a chapter, and there is a sense of drama in their placement; there’s much more at stake in this conversation than bedtime. “Whoso would be a man must be a noncomformist,” Emerson writes in “Self-Reliance,” and adds that if you “always scorn appearances . . . you always may.” Isabel won’t go as far as either Emerson suggests or Mrs. Touchett fears, but this new kind of young woman does want the freedom to determine the degree of her own conformity. She needs to know the limits of propriety—needs to know other people’s rules in order to make her own. She reserves the right to shape her own life, and at this moment she more closely resembles the ambitious young men of the nineteenth-century novel than she does most other fictional members of her sex. Heroines are often rooted in the place where they grew up; George Eliot’s Dorothea provides an example. Those young men, however, have usually moved from the provinces to the city, stepping into a larger world in which they must carve their own path; so Rastignac in Balzac’s Père Goriot declares war on society, knowing that’s the best way to reach its top. The self for these characters is defined by ambition, which is often worldly enough—money, fame, power. Isabel’s own ambition is less violent and yet perhaps more daring. It isn’t just the freedom to name the terms on which she will meet the world. No, she wants the freedom, in Emerson’s words, to be self-sufficing, and her ambition will define itself in terms of a radical autonomy, a cultivation of individual identity in which her very sense of self comes to stand as the chief object of her own desire.

  At the same time, however, we need to look at the particular thing that prompts Isabel’s declaration of her freedom to choose. It is a social practice of the Old World, something unknown in Albany, and while she doesn’t reject it outright she does suggest that she has the liberty to observe it or not. In itself, it has no necessary hold upon her. Her ambition, that is, takes a peculiarly American form, and to understand it we will need to look at another character as well. Isabel’s best friend is a newspaper correspondent named Henrietta Stackpole, who specializes in chatty opinionated travel essays. Isabel sees her limitations—Henrietta has no sense of discretion, and remains so closely in step with her public as never to go beyond the obvious. Nevertheless, she admires her energy and assurance, taking her as “proof that a woman might suffice to herself and be happy.” Now Henrietta has come to England, and Isabel asks to invite her down. James thought he had botched his reporter, writing in his preface that her place in the book was greater than her purpose, and even in 1880 he admitted, in a letter to Howells, that most readers would find her true-blue patriotism a bit overdone. Yet Henrietta is more important than her creator himself seems to realize, and her arrival at Gardencourt allows James to qualify his sense of the particular strain in American identity that is reflected in Isabel’s desire to choose.

  Henrietta’s sense of self-reliance has one limit. Almost the first thing she says is that England makes her feel cramped, and she soon falls into an argument with Mrs. Touchett. We have different points of view, Isabel’s aunt says: “I like to be treated as an individual; you like to be treated as a ‘party.’” Henrietta denies this—she wants, she claims, to be treated as an American lady. Yet she has indeed spoken of traveling with a “party” she met on the steamer, a lovely group from Little Rock, and however comically handled, their dispute points to an ideological crack in the center of American life. For how can anyone be somebody in particular in a land of certain self-evident truths—how much can any one individual be allowed to stand out? On the one hand, we share a belief in a republican egalitarianism; we are all created equal. On the other, we each have the freedom to pursue our own individual happiness, a freedom that quickly produces both a fierce sense of competition and the social divisions that rise from it.

  Tocqueville among others had explored that tension, and in James’s day such issues were a staple of the magazines for which he wrote, with writers asking on what grounds, if any, a sense of individual distinction might rest. The historian Francis Parkman, for example, wondered in 1878 about the ever-uncertain role of the “cultivated” in a polity split between “an ignorant proletariat and a half-taught plutocracy.” Still, the implicit three-way debate between Isabel, Henrietta, and Mrs. Touchett cuts more sharply than that. It is, above all, a dispute about the nature and limits of desire. Tocqueville had warned that individualism might undercut any sense of a public good, and when pushed to an extreme, the pursuit of personal freedom that stands as an integral part of American identity does indeed end by putting one at odds with the nation as a whole. There’s nothing more American than wanting to choose, and the most American thing of all is to insist upon choice, upon one’s right to break the social compact. From that Henrietta draws back. Self-reliance cannot go unfettered and choice has its limits; limits that mark out one kind of American identity, sacrificing individual eminence to purchase a Main Street cohesion.

  James’s conception of Henrietta as a secondary figure here keeps him from engaging with these issues as fully as he might; later chapters have deeper things to say about the terms of American identity. But let me suggest one of the ways in which he tries to finesse them. Isabel thinks of Ralph as a “cosmopolitan,” someone marked by a culture that transcends linguistic and national borders. Henrietta merely calls him “alienated,” and asks if he thinks it right to give up his country—to live abroad, and with foreign manners. His answer is quite simple, and speaks, perhaps, for James as well. He tells her that he can no more give up his country “than one gives up one’s grandmother. It’s antecedent to choice.” He doesn’t stop being an American just because Oxford has swallowed up Harvard, and in one sense he might even be more of one. Isabel finds a deep appeal in Gardencourt’s sense of “well-ordered privacy,” but the pleasure she takes in it is conditioned by her national origin. Her own antecedents lie elsewhere, and so the Continent is indeed a choice, a background against which, as an American, she can move freely, a place that conduces to the sense—perhaps the illusion—of liberty on which she depends and by which she lives. James himself had spent a decade in making that place his own by the time he sat down to tell
her story in his hotel room overlooking the Arno. He had tested its attractions, and had even given his homeland one last try before making a final declaration of independence. In settling in the Old World he had, paradoxically, left his past behind, and for Isabel Archer, as indeed for James himself, the consummation of her utterly American desire to choose will be to elect a European home.

  PART TWO

  THE MARRIAGE PLOT

  A Vista. By Alvin Langdon Coburn, ca. 1913. Photogravure print.

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

  5.

  HER EMPTY CHAIR

  JAMES HAD BEEN at work on the Portrait for a month in the Tuscan spring of 1880 when he paused, on the 14th of May, to send a letter of congratulations to a friend in London, a banker named John Cross. “I have just heard of your marriage,” he wrote, and offered a “word of very friendly sympathy on the occasion—which I beg you to communicate, in the most deferential form, to your illustrious wife.” Sympathy and deference—the words may be ironic, but they still suggest that the forty-year-old Cross had done something startling, and maybe even scary. For his new wife was almost twenty years his senior, and illustrious indeed. She was the most learned imaginative writer in Britain and the country’s greatest living novelist, the woman known under the pen name of George Eliot.

  The James family had been reading George Eliot’s work ever since the 1859 publication of her first novel, Adam Bede, the story of a rural hierarchy disrupted by a love affair that cuts across the lines of class. Its author had shown them the parsonages and manor houses of Jane Austen, but she also depicted the broken-down cottages and farmhouse kitchens that Austen left out; and her calm meditative voice treated her characters with a sympathy that she made both an aesthetic principle and a moral duty. Nor was George Eliot content with making the English countryside her own. Both Adam Bede and its successor, The Mill on the Floss, were among the bestsellers of their day, but she then turned to the past, to Renaissance Florence, and in Romola had brought the city of Savonarola onto the page. It was the most brilliant if not the best of Victorian historical novels, and perhaps the most lucrative; her publishers had paid an astonishing £7,000 for the serial rights.

  Indeed, James ended his note to Cross with the wish that he could enclose a view of the Arno, “which your wife knows so well and which she has helped to make me know.” That was only the beginning of what he had learned from her, however, and in their letters both he and his brother William had argued about, and argued with, her later Middlemarch. William found himself “aghast at [its] tremenj’us intellectual power,” and Henry worried that his older sibling would find his own praise of it stingy. His admiration was never unmixed, and he published pointedly critical accounts of both Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, books that to him marked the limits of old-fashioned English storytelling. Nevertheless, he admired George Eliot above all other British novelists. He went to school on her as he did on Turgenev or Balzac, and as he did not on Dickens. Her work shaped his, and to understand him we need to understand both what he took from her and what he resisted.

  He knew her work intimately—her work, but not the woman herself. What he did know, what everybody knew, was her story. He knew that her marriage to Cross was in a sense her second one: in a sense, because she had never been legally joined to G. H. Lewes, the man with whom the then-little-known Mary Ann Evans began to live in 1854. She was born in 1819 in Warwickshire, where her father managed the estates of one of the county’s largest landowners. Robert Evans was proud of his clever daughter, and she received as good an education as possible in an age when women could not yet attend university. It gave her a command of modern languages, and her own hard study added the classical ones; her first books were translations from German. After her father’s death she moved to London and in 1851 took a job at the Westminster Review, a progressive quarterly where her own essays soon appeared alongside those by writers like John Stuart Mill. G. H. Lewes was another of the Review’s contributors, a man who could write anything from a successful play to works of popular science. He had separated from his unfaithful wife, but the peculiarities of Victorian family law kept him from obtaining a divorce. Evans was therefore inviting something more than notoriety when she decided to leave her past behind and to travel with him to Germany, where the man she now called her husband would work on a biography of Goethe. The sexual mores of Weimar were far from constricting, and they could live together openly in a city where such unions had a recognized place; a city where Goethe himself had in fact set the example. In England, though, she was at first cut off from almost everyone she had known before.

  Lewes kept his male friends, and many of them became hers as well. But most women now refused to know her, and her brother Isaac broke all contact. In daily life she was always called Mrs. Lewes, but she couldn’t publish under either that name or her own. So when she began to write the stories collected as Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), she decided to use a pseudonym, and a masculine one at that; at first not even her publisher, the Edinburgh firm of John Blackwood, knew the author’s real name. The success of her first books made that secret impossible to keep and in time “George Eliot’s” combination of rectitude and genius made the Leweses’ world accept them. Even princesses asked for introductions.

  Lewes had died in 1878, however, and now she had married a man whom she had until recently called “Nephew.” John Cross was not her nephew by blood. He was from a Liverpool banking family, and the Leweses initially knew him through their friendship with his widowed mother. They first met him in Rome, in 1869, and soon learned to rely on him in the practical details of life. He supervised their investments, increasing the already-large sums that her books had earned; he found them their country house in Surrey. John Cross was sternly handsome, and the novelist had turned to him as something like a son after Lewes’s death; while he had turned to her as something more than a mother when his own mother died soon thereafter.

  James’s letter to Cross wasn’t his only one about this unexpected union. On that same day he wrote to Quincy Steeet, and after settling some details of family business, he passed on the news. The last time he had seen the new couple, James told his father, Cross had been sitting next to the novelist and reading aloud from Chaucer; “I knew he adored her but I didn’t know he desired to unite his 40 years to her 58.” But he then added an image that explained the marriage, or at least her side of it. Since Lewes’s death she had been “shivering like a person who had had a wall of her house blown off.” Lewes had made her career possible. His love had helped her overcome her often crippling self-doubt and had given her the confidence she needed to work. He kept her from seeing any damaging reviews, he made her bargains with publishers, and he held a shield between her and the world, one that at first deflected scandal and later fended off the hazards of fame. Now he was dead, and she had simply “taken Johnny to make up the wall.” Later that summer James spoke of the marriage again, this time in a letter to Grace Norton. He had just sent his regrets for a house party to which the pair had also been invited; his monthly deadlines on the Portrait had begun to press, and he assumed there would be other opportunities in the future. “Aren’t you sorry?” he wrote, “so that I might tell you they were grotesque? I don’t think they are, but they are deemed to be.” Yet the marriage lasted only seven months. Her health had long been troubled, and weakened by both kidney failure and a throat infection, she died on December 22, 1880.

  She was buried on December 29 in London’s Highgate Cemetery; James was in the West Country for the holidays, as I noted in my last chapter, and did not go to the funeral. A few weeks later he did, however, pay a visit to Cross, and was invited to sit in the novelist’s “empty chair” as he listened to the banker’s account of her extraordinary mind, taking in his admission that he had been “a cart-horse yoked to a racer.” James’s private impression was that Cross would
have found the pace impossible to sustain. Nobody then knew just how difficult, though, and years later the story came out that on their honeymoon in Venice he had thrown himself from their hotel room into the Grand Canal; some gondoliers hauled him to safety, and they left the city as soon as he could travel. In his biography of her, Cross noted only that the city’s air had made him “thoroughly ill.” That book was described by William Gladstone as “a Reticence in three volumes”; nevertheless, the couple lived in apparent harmony for the few months left to them, and the episode remains a mystery.

  We don’t know if James and George Eliot ever wrote to one another. No letters between them have ever been found, though after her marriage she did tell a friend, and with evident pleasure, that “Johnnie had a graceful letter of congratulation from Mr. Henry James.” We have a somewhat firmer knowledge of their few recorded meetings. In his May 1880 letter to his father, James speaks of “the last time I went to see her,” and one to William from the spring of 1878 records his first Sunday afternoon visit to the Priory, her house in Regent’s Park. But we don’t know how long a sequence lies bracketed between those dates, how many times he took his cup of tea at the Leweses’ regular Sunday at-homes.