London became James’s elsewhere, a place that underwrote his existence. In his fifties he came to believe that loneliness itself was “the deepest thing about one. . . . Deeper about me, at any rate,” deeper even than his art. But those words were written in the relative isolation of Rye, and written as well to one of the young men in whom he was interested; in this case the journalist Morton Fullerton, a bisexual rake who later became Edith Wharton’s lover. During his early years in London, James enjoyed a life full of other people, dining out almost every night and with his weekends spent at house parties that sent him traveling from Scotland to Cornwall and back again. Such a life couldn’t supply his every need, but the city was indeed a good place to be a bachelor. Spare men were in demand, and then there was the sociable male world of the clubs—he very quickly became a member of the Reform, and then the Athenaeum. Some people find a kind of license in living abroad; for Christopher Isherwood a few decades later, the Berlin of the Weimar Republic meant boys. But for James it regularized the experience of not having. Living in England separated him from the expectations of his family. It marked him out and objectified his sense of isolation. It normalized his sense of being apart, and he was determined to keep that sustaining sense of difference, noting that though he had become “Londonized” he was not at all Anglicized.
Yet suppose he were to marry? Would he take an English bride, and go even further in giving up his country? Or if he found an American wife, would he not then come home? Such branching questions seem to place him inside one of his own stories, and in his first years abroad James faced a steady run of them. Nor did those questions all come from Quincy Street. In England he was widely viewed as eligible—a man old enough to be steady and yet still willing to dance. In 1878 he wrote to William that another guest at a house party had asked, upon seeing him alone, if “Mrs. James” was fond of London. “Is she? Ask mother.” Later that year he added that he believed in marriage almost as much for other people as he didn’t believe in it for himself, and announced that he rejoiced in William’s marriage “as if it were my own; or rather much more.” At other times he joked about his chances. In one letter to his mother he suggested that he might marry a widowed Marchioness—a dowager in her twenties, and pretty—while in another he claimed he had proposed to a woman of eighty, who appeared to think she could do better.
These letters to Quincy Street show us a man at ease with himself. He sees the comedy in other people’s assumptions that he must be in want of a wife, and it astonishes us now that they didn’t see it too. More than a hundred years later we share the sense of another American abroad, the diplomat E. S. Nadal, who wrote in a 1920 memoir that “of all the men I ever knew [James] was the man whom I could least imagine” as married. Nevertheless, he found himself called upon, in the last months of 1880, to quash the rumor of his own impending wedding. He had thought of going home that fall but canceled his passage under the pressure of work; he now planned to return to America the next year instead, after The Portrait of a Lady was finished. But some of his friends “supposed that I put off my journey because I had intentions of marriage here,” and there was also talk of a young woman from Bangor. “This last report,” as he told his mother, “is a slight mistake.”
James’s most detailed account of his situation comes in a letter he sent that November to Grace Norton, one written in reply to a letter of her own, now lost; presumably it was part of the great pile of correspondence that he burned at Rye in 1909. She too had heard the rumors, though apparently without crediting them, and James writes to her of his amusement at his world’s “generally felt (or expressed) desire” that he should get himself to the altar. But he found it impossible to imagine a conjugal future, though he added that if he were to describe the grounds of his conviction she would think him “dismally theoretic.” Isabel too is theoretic, but James’s reasons are not his character’s. Nor are they so fully developed. One’s attitude to marriage, he argues, is a part of one’s attitude toward life itself, and if he were to wed, he “should be guilty in my own eyes of an inconsistency—I should pretend to think just a little better of life than I really do.” On a first glance that statement looks wise, almost stoic in its elevation, and yet it explains less than it seems to. James doesn’t go on to specify the nature of his disenchantment, and instead throws up a distancing barrier of charm. His view of life is sanguine enough, and after all, an “amiable bachelor” has his social uses. Yet I can’t quite dismiss his words as a piece of pleasant blinding chatter, and one phrase stops me short. For he adds that his opinion of life, with all its consequences, “doesn’t involve any particular injustice to anyone, least of all to myself.”
It’s always dangerous to draw inferences about a writer’s life from his fiction, his fiction from his life. Still, a look at one of James’s tales can help us understand the choice he had made, and the possible nature of that injustice. Soon after finishing the Portrait he began a series of stories about the lives of writers and artists. Some dealt with the costs of fame, others examined the nature of artistic illusion, and still more probed the relation between life and art, asking how one’s actions in one sphere affect one’s fortunes in the other. Despite their individual variations, they comprise a unified body of work, and in the history of James’s short fiction they fill the years between the international stories of his early career and such late tales of the uncanny as “The Jolly Corner.” James may have been suspicious of George Eliot’s moralized fables, but he was far from immune to such fables himself, and these middle-period works all have a didactic streak. They draw pictures as a way to explore a set of propositions about art and life and the relation between them, and they have always been taken as parables about James’s own work and career. The 1888 “Lesson of the Master” has in particular been read as a tale about his own sense of dedication, for it turns on the advice an older writer gives to a younger one: don’t marry, not if you care for your art. And James himself colluded in giving the piece its explanatory force; he did not discourage the younger writers who at the start of the twentieth century began to call him “Master.”
For our purposes, however, the most suggestive of these stories is a tale that speaks to its author’s sense of a hidden sexual life. Though not necessarily his own; or not only. We will need the details of James’s own biography to turn the key of “The Author of ‘Beltraffio,’” but its anecdote can be put quickly. The story is told by the American disciple of a writer named Mark Ambient, a novelist whose works preach “the gospel of art . . . a kind of aesthetic war-cry.” Yet Ambient’s sermon isn’t devoted to the quest for formal perfection alone, for he also wants his books to have all the impudence of life itself, and a part of that is the willingness to shock. His models are classical, not Christian, and if his settings are modern, they are also Italian; his pages burn always with the hard gem of Mediterranean sensations. James’s narrator soon learns that Mrs. Ambient will not even read her husband’s work. She thinks it “most objectionable,” and she fears in particular the effect that Ambient might have on their little boy, whom they have nicknamed Dolcino. She tries to keep the child from his father, and calls him away whenever the novelist wants to hold or play with him. Then two things happen. Dolcino grows feverish, and the narrator persuades Mrs. Ambient to read the proofs of her husband’s new book. She takes the pages into the sickroom, and then locks the door behind her. For she is so shocked by what she reads that she decides it’s better to let the boy die than to be exposed to his father’s corrupting force.
James developed his plan for the story in a notebook entry for March 26, 1884, an entry that not only sketches the tale in its entirety, but also provides the bit of fact from which it grew. He got the idea from the critic Edmund Gosse, a new friend but already a confidant. Gosse was a tastemaker who would help bring Ibsen’s work to an English audience, and is today best known as the author of Father and Son (1907), a book about his break from his father’s evangelical bel
iefs that stands as one of the period’s best autobiographies. The anecdote he told James concerned a third writer, a historian of the Italian Renaissance named John Addington Symonds. They had touched on Symonds’s aestheticism, and also on his tubercular lungs, which had exiled him to the cold dry air of the Alps. Yet the worst of it, Gosse told him, was that “poor S.’s wife was in no sort of sympathy with what he wrote, disapproving of its tone, thinking his books immoral.” Mrs. Symonds did not let a child die, but their friends took the story as a family portrait, and scandalous; and all the more scandalous to those who knew the secret of her disapproval. James himself professed ignorance, and begged Gosse to enlighten him—just what had he divined about “the innermost cause of J.A.S.’s discomfort?” Even a postcard would help, he wrote—so long as its wording was “covert.” But both that word and the tone of the letter as a whole are so coy that it’s hard to believe he did not already know of Symonds’s homosexuality.
The terms in which homosexuality was understood changed radically over the course of James’s adult life. In 1895 a series of trials ended by sending Oscar Wilde to jail on a charge of “gross indecency.” The playwright had been at the peak of his success, with The Importance of Being Earnest running as the season’s great new hit, when he filed a suit for libel against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Queensberry had described him as a “somdomite” [sic] and Wilde was unsurprisingly unable to make his case. He was then arrested under a law that made homosexual acts between men illegal. His first criminal trial ended in a hung jury; the second sent him to jail for two years. Those trials are now sometimes taken as the point at which the “homosexual” began to be recognized as a type, a category of person—a category defined by the criminal law. Yet that definition has, paradoxically, proved an important station on the road to our contemporary understanding of homosexuality as an identity, something as central to one’s sense of self as one’s ethnic inheritance or biological sex; an intermediate stage medicalized the term, viewing it as a psychological disorder. In the early years of James’s life, however, homosexuality was seen in terms of practices, not persons: specific actions, in relation to which one might be defined as a “bugger” or a “sodomite.” It was understood as a taste, a preference for particular forms of friction, and like all tastes it involved an element of choice. Though as a taste it was also a habit, a craving, a vice; perhaps indeed an addiction, like opium or absinthe. The most common adjective in descriptions of such practices was, in fact, “vicious”; use that word and no more need be said.
Tastes can change, however, or be broken; so at least many people in James’s period believed, and in 1864 Symonds had married in the hopes that it might change his. It didn’t. On his many stays in Venice the historian later enjoyed a long affair with his gondolier, Angelo Fusato, and in recent years he has become an important figure in our developing understanding of Victorian homosexuality. At his death in 1893, Symonds left behind a frank memoir, unpublished until 1984, and two privately printed books. A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) examined same-sex relations in the ancient world that he took as a model, and was circulating from hand to hand in London by the time James wrote “The Author of ‘Beltraffio.’” The second book, A Problem in Modern Ethics (1891), provided both a rigorous account of current medical knowledge, and a refutation of popular prejudice against what he called “inverts.” There were only fifty copies printed, but Gosse had one and James read it almost immediately. He found it impressive, and admired Symonds’s bravery. Yet while his sympathy is clear, so too is his sense that he himself would not be joining any “band of the emulous.”
So far as we know, James met Symonds just once, during his first year in England, and described him in a letter to William as a “mild cultured man, with the Oxford perfume.” The perfume was that of aestheticism and the phrase should have been a giveaway; though not perhaps to William. They were both in Venice in the same spring of 1881—Symonds met Fusato that May—and possibly James heard talk of him then. We do have one letter from the novelist to the historian. James had sent him his own 1882 essay on that city, and in the winter of 1884, just a month before he planned out his story, he wrote in reply to Symonds’s (now lost) note of appreciation. He wanted to recognize Symonds’s position as one of the few “who love [Venice] as much as I do . . . . for it seemed to me that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.” The words sound astonishingly blunt. But to hear them that way we have to accept, first, that James knew all, about himself and Symonds too; and second, that he would admit to that knowledge in writing to someone he had met just once. This seems unlikely. James did, however, have a way of shutting his ears to his own double entendres, and one can imagine the bewilderment of the apparently humorless Symonds, a man free of cant and camp alike. There’s no record of his reply, and James usually kept his distance from that Oxford perfume, which as the century waned became ever more explicitly linked with homosexuality. He referred to Wilde as an “unclean beast” when they were both in Washington in the winter of 1882, and his later sympathy at the playwright’s arrest had a distinct edge. “He was never in the smallest degree interesting to me,” he told Gosse, “but this hideous human history has made him so—in a manner.” There is in all this a great deal of protective coloration from a man who told his friend Nadal that “a position in society is a legitimate object of ambition.”
Let me add one more detail before returning to “The Author of ‘Beltraffio.’” In his memoirs Symonds wrote that “being what I am, the great mistake—perhaps the greatest crime of my life, was my marriage.” Not that it was entirely a failure. They were happy in their children, and after a time his own sexuality left his wife free of appetites she thought ignoble. Nevertheless, it had been founded on deceit—and he had deceived himself as well as her, for in ignoring the truth of his own passions he had been willing “to accept the second best and to give the second best.” It’s hard to read those words without recalling something Isabel Archer says about another character near the end of the Portrait: “She made a convenience of me.” Both her words, and Symonds’s own, bring back James’s letter to Grace Norton about marriage. He was ever-cautious, he denied himself much, and he knew his world’s limits too well to be brave. But he did not commit that particular injustice.
We never learn just what Mark Ambient’s books are like. James gives us no quotations, no plot summaries, no details. There’s an obvious dramatic reason for that: how could any novel be so wicked as to make a child’s death seem the lesser evil? Better to tantalize us with the thought of what might be there, and indeed James teases us in similar ways in almost all of his stories about writers. “The Death of the Lion” concerns a missing manuscript, the eponymous letters of The Aspern Papers are burned unread, and every character who figures out “The Figure in the Carpet” dies before revealing its secret. Nor are these puzzles limited to James’s stories about artists. He refuses to tell us the source of Chad Newsome’s wealth in The Ambassadors, doesn’t specify the contents of In the Cage’s crucial telegram, and never lets us know if the ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are really there. Those are the easy examples. More difficult are the tales that depend upon an economy of knowledge, those about the impossibility of ever knowing what happens inside another person. What was she thinking?—we’ve all said those words, whether in outrage, frustration, or bemusement. But really it’s the question of James’s fiction as a whole. Knowledge in his world remains a scarce resource, and he almost never allows himself the novelist’s privilege of shuttling from mind to mind. Even in the third person he restricts himself to the point of view of a single character, a figure who understands as little about the other characters’ inner lives as we do of our neighbors’.
The French critic Tzvetan Todorov has suggested that such lacunae are themselves the figure in James’s own carpet, that his stories are “always based on the quest for an absolute and absent cause.” They
depend on the unspoken. In “The Beast in the Jungle,” John Marcher’s life-determining secret is the simple fact that he has one. It is there, and yet not, has shape but no substance. We call such haunting things “uncanny,” a term that Freud defines as the “name for everything that ought to have remained . . . hidden but has come to light.” Except with James that light throws shadows, a chiarascuro in which one’s hurt remains obscure, in which secrets are sensed but not shown. In “The Private Life” he imagines a great writer with a literally divided self, a man with two bodies. One of them goes about in public, he dines and talks and is merry. The other stays in his room—where he works. Only in the late “Jolly Corner” does the hidden step into sight, when Spencer Brydon finds himself staring at a ghostly figure who seems to be his own disfigured double, a figure at once like him and unlike, the same and yet different. Such a persistent pattern of the imagination runs deep, so deep that we should hesitate in giving it a name. Still, I think we must—must define it as James’s sense of his own buried life, though even then I would pause before limiting it either to or by the word “closet.”
That term does, admittedly, work for “The Author of ‘Beltraffio,’” a story that seems itself in the closet—the story, and not just its subject. The stakes for which its characters play go beyond the morality of books alone, and their urgency appears inexplicable in terms of the tale itself. Its absent cause isn’t Ambient’s work but rather Symonds’s own sexuality, and the story’s power depends upon its reticence, upon its inability to step forth and speak, to tell us what it means. I do not, however, think that we can extend this sense of the closet to James’s work as a whole, to say that in all cases its absent cause has that same narrow referent. Or at least not only. In postwar America John Cheever’s closeted bisexuality allowed him, in stories like “The Swimmer” and “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” to analyze the masks and deceptions of suburban life, to see its full measure of sorrow, and yet without making that sexuality in itself his subject. It pierced a window; it was not what he saw in looking through it. So too with Henry James. His own renunciations and solitude allowed him to understand the renunciations of others. It allowed him to portray the mix of anguish and rueful acceptance with which Ralph Touchett regards his invalid’s fate. But they are not, or not always, the same thing.
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