Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  In 1907, James hired a boyishly handsome young woman named Theodora Bosanquet as his typist. She came from a sprawling cultivated family, with links to the Darwins, and was herself a graduate of University College, London. She had also been reading James since her teens, and when the position came open, she abandoned a more remunerative career as an indexer and learned to take dictation; she stayed with him until his death in 1916. In Rye she found rooms near Lamb House but moved back to London during the winter months that James himself spent in town. Probably she knew him as well in his final years as anyone, and indeed she found him his last London home, around the corner from the Chelsea flat that she shared with another young woman. She never married and after James’s death worked in war-related ministries, for which she received an MBE; later she wrote a book about the French poet Paul Valéry and was an editor at the progressive weekly Time and Tide. Yet she is best remembered for an elegant pamphlet, published by Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, called Henry James at Work.

  That 1924 essay provides an indispensable account of his methods and character, and in it she notes that though James “loved his friends . . . he was condemned by the law of his being to keep clear of any really entangling net of human affection and exaction.” James was lonely, he wanted company and affection, wanted to open his arms wide and then fold them tight, and yet by the time he began to fall for younger men, his habits were so fixed that he could not have changed them if he wished. The first of them, in 1899, was the sculptor Hendrik Andersen. James met him in Rome and tried to advise him on his career, much as Rowland Mallet had done with the eponymous Roderick Hudson. He commissioned work from him, talked him up, wrote often, and invited him repeatedly to Lamb House; Andersen in turn hoped that James might provide some financial support for his own dream of a utopian community. Later there was, as I’ve said, the caddish Morton Fullerton, and an astonishingly handsome Anglo-Irishman called Jocelyn Persse; well connected and with an acquiline nose but entirely unintellectual, Persse later said he could never understand why James liked him. The last of them was the popular novelist Hugh Walpole, who years after claimed that he once offered himself to his mentor. But though James may have addressed him in letters as “darlingest Hugh!” he was also reported to have backed away, saying “I can’t! I can’t!” Another friend, a shrewd French scholar named Urbain Mengin, speculated that James would have had “a horror of the physical act.” His very way of grasping another man’s arm suggested that “he wasn’t capable of this kind of surrender . . . he would never have done this if these gestures had, for him, the slightest suggestion of a pursuit of physical love.”

  James’s life is as massively documented as that of any American writer, but still we find gaps—and have no way to tell if they are in the documents or in the life itself. The biographer Sheldon Novick has claimed that in 1865 James had a brief affair with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. But his argument depends upon a French phrase that James scribbled in his notebooks forty years later, and Novick’s interpretation seems, by any standards of evidence, uncertain. James speaks there of “L’initiation première,” but the initiation to which he refers is very clearly his entry into the life of letters. The phrase belongs to his memories of the Cambridge in which his career began, of the Norton family and the poet James Russell Lowell and of hearing Dickens read on his American tour of 1867. He only mentions Holmes some sentences later, and in a very different context, describing his envy on learning that his friend had left for England. Still, James did sometimes ask for news of the future jurist with a mix of avidity and asperity that he didn’t show in writing of others. Novick’s argument is unconvincing, but I wouldn’t rule out some one-sided and perhaps half-understood attachment. Nor would I insist upon it.

  In a 1913 letter to Walpole, James wrote that he didn’t “regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth—I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t embrace.” That language tells us little, however, about either the number or the nature of those excesses, and the scare quotes imply that nothing he did can quite rise to the emphasis of the sentence’s last word. Other young men on a European tour found that the Continent offered them the chance for a safely anonymous sexual life; Symonds knew that his gondolier had been kept by other men before him. James would have had such opportunities, but we will never learn if he took them. Yet we do know that he was no prude, however discreet and however abstemious. His fiction hangs upon sexual themes—sexual and not romantic—to a degree unusual for Anglo-American writers of his period. Both The Golden Bowl (1904) and What Maisie Knew (1897) depend upon adultery. The former describes Maggie Verver’s growing awareness of her husband’s affair with her own best friend; in the latter, a child of divorce serves as the conduit for a liaison between her stepparents. And The Awkward Age (1899) is just one of his many accounts of sexual education: of what, and at what age, one can both know and admit that one knows.

  James thought that English writers were often squeamish, the men in particular, and praised the Neapolitan realist Matilde Serao for her frank acknowledgment of physical passion. If he found Zola’s concentration on appetite too narrow, he also admired him, and viewed the descriptions of prostitution and lesbianism in Nana as both filthy and fascinating in equal measure. In Paris he listened without apparent embarassment to the conversation in Flaubert’s circle of disciples and enjoyed shocking Howells by repeating some of it. These are issues to which I’ll return. Still, about some parts of his own life we must accept a sense of bafflement. He has never been convincingly linked to another person, and his precise mixture of self-knowledge and self-control, of repression and sublimation, remains a formula that we do not know.

  Nevertheless, there is one moment in Gosse’s 1922 volume of literary memoirs that tantalizes us with a glimpse of something more. Most of James’s friends, Gosse wrote, “supposed that he was mainly a creature of observation and fancy,” whose senses remained untouched by the life around him. But he sometimes allowed the doors to open, and on a visit to Rye, as they walked in the garden amid the deepening twilight, Gosse suddenly found himself listening to a story. His host told him, “in profuse and enigmatic language,” that he had once stood at dusk on a city street, watching “for the lighting of a lamp in a window on the third storey. And the lamp blazed out, and through bursting tears he strained to see what was behind it, the unapproachable face.” James had stayed there for hours, wet from the rain and repeatedly jostled by the hurrying crowd, “and never from behind the lamp was for one moment visible the face.” The story ended, and from James’s voice Gosse knew that he could ask no questions about it. But for a long time the novelist stood there in silence beside him.

  That is all. There is no date, no city specified, no name to that face. The mix of rain and romance will make many readers link it to Paris, but we have no real warrant for doing so. Maybe we think of Paris because of the moment in The Ambassadors when Lambert Strether looks up at the window of Chad Newsome’s flat, or because Gosse’s description corresponds so neatly to the Parisian ending of The Age of Innocence; so neatly, in fact, that it makes me wonder if Edith Wharton might have heard the story as well. The most provocative account of this moment belongs to the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín in The Master, his superb 2004 fictional account of James’s life. Toibin both places that window in Paris and gives its hidden face a name: that of the Russian Paul Zhukovsky. No biographer would take that liberty, and yet the suggestion strikes me as plausible. James first met him in the spring of 1876. Russian émigré society was easy to penetrate, and he found it an “oasis . . . in the midst of this Parisian Babylon.” But no one in it drew him as did the rich and elegantly bearded Zhukovsky. He was an amateur painter who had grown up in the Russian imperial court, and his family was close to Turgenev; indeed the acquaintance began with James pumping him for stories about the older writer. The American’s letters that spring are full of him. To Quincy Street he wrote that they
had sworn an everlasting friendship, and though James suspected his friend was weak, he still found him “sweet and distingué.” He was fascinated by Zhukovsky’s tales of his months in Venice, but in writing home made sure to insist on his friend’s “extreme purity of life,” even if that life had been too picturesque to have “formed a positive character for him.”

  James was smitten enough to make excuses for what he himself saw as Zhukovsky’s limitations. The Russian was darkly sensuous and quite clearly homosexual; if ever the young writer was tempted to go beyond the conventional terms of romantic friendship, it was now. That summer, however, Zhukovsky went down to Bayreuth for the opening of Richard Wagner’s new Festspielhaus, where the first full production of the Ring cycle had its premiere that August. And when the two men met again that fall, something had changed. Zhukovsky now had a new passion, and that November James wrote to his father of a “musical séance” at his friend’s apartment, in which he sat from nine until two listening to Wagner transcriptions for piano. James never had much feeling for music, and though he recognized the pianist’s talent, he also found himself bored. In that same letter he reiterated a decision he had announced in an earlier note to Quincy Street. He now planned, as we will see in my next chapter, to make his home in London; and later that month he wrote that though Zhukovsky remained charming he was also “a lightweight and a perfect failure.”

  Maybe this was when James stood one night in that street, watching for that face, and yet knowing that even if he were to see it—even if he could overcome his own reticence and fear enough to come in, come out, of the rain—there would remain a gulf between them. It wasn’t just Wagner. It was James’s own sense of ambition and purpose. He admired Turgenev and yet soon outgrew the need to sit at his feet; Zhukovsky, in contrast, seemed to him but a dilettante and content to be a disciple. There was no break. James saw him for a few weeks in Paris the next year, and when in 1879 Zhukovsky took a villa at Posillipo on the Bay of Naples, he invited James for a visit. The novelist didn’t go to Italy that year but the next spring he went to Florence to begin his work on The Portrait of a Lady, and then continued on south to spend a few days with his “peculiar” friend before settling down to his desk. Yet James cut his visit short. Wagner had rented a villa nearby, and took up most of Zhukovsky’s time, so that the Russian seemed to be perpetually shuttling from house to house. And there was also his Neapolitan servant, Pepino—in Cosima Wagner’s words, a “sturdy, thickset, simple” fellow, whom Zhukovsky had “rescued . . . from the gutter.” Pepino had a good voice and the composer enjoyed singing duets with him, but his services weren’t limited to waiting at table, and when after two years Zhukovsky finally dismissed him, the Wagners sent him a note of congratulations.

  James could no longer insist upon his friend’s purity, and in fact wrote to Grace Norton that the mores of Zhukovsky’s new world were as “opposed to those of Cambridge as anything could well be—but to describe them would carry me too far.” He added that he had declined an invitation to meet the composer, “as I speak no intelligible German and he speaks nothing else.” James’s sense of the intelligible was high; for the purposes of reading, at least, his German had once approached fluency. To his sister he wrote more frankly. Naples had a “vileness” that took the edge off the beauty of her surroundings, Zhukovsky was a “ridiculous mixture of Nihilism and bric a brac,” and he himself had recoiled from the “fantastic immoralities” of the people around him. Both Naples and Bayreuth were bywords for license, and Kaplan suggests that James was appalled by the mix of homosexuality and adultery that characterized Wagner’s circle. There is, admittedly, a difference between hearing about other people’s liaisons and seeing them enacted before you, and even a Henry James who wasn’t celibate would always have preferred discretion to display. Still, I think James’s biographers have overplayed the degree of his shock. He may have objected to Zhukovsky’s choice of a lover, but professing his moral revulsion was a useful strategy in writing to Quincy Street; and especially useful for someone insisting that he would never marry. James was on the brink of fame. He left that villa because it was the place in which he could least afford to be seen; perhaps the place in which he could least afford to see himself.

  In Boston during the winter of 1881–82 James set down an account of his career to date. Composed with the new sense of mastery that the just-completed Portrait of a Lady had given him, this “American Journal” offers a mine of circumstantial details, defining the places he had visited, the people he had known, and what he had written where. It is in many ways more useful than his later memoirs: his clearest statement, in language at once colloquial and elevated, of his ambitions and dreams, of the myth he would make from his choice of the Old World. In summoning up the spring of 1876 he recalled his first meeting with Zhukovsky and then wrote this sentence: “Non ragioniam di lui—ma guarda e passa.” It is a line from the Inferno, with Dante’s plural adjusted to the singular, and the sentence stands as a pained memory and warning alike: “Let’s not talk about him—just look and move on.” Zhukovsky himself would move ever deeper into Wagner’s world and find there the sense of purpose that James thought he lacked. He did the production design for the 1882 premiere of Parsifal at Bayreuth, modeling the Grail Hall on the interior of Siena’s Duomo, and his sets were still being used in the 1930s. And James traveled on as well, back to Florence and his room at the Hôtel de l’Arno, back to the opening pages of what would become a great novel. There was new work and new friends. In the letter to Alice in which he wrote of Posillipo’s immorality, he also spoke of meeting an American writer named Constance Fenimore Woolson, an admirer who had brought him a letter of introduction from one of his many cousins. His relations with her in the years to come would be entirely different from those with Zhukovsky, and even more consequential.

  8.

  A LONDON LIFE

  THE MUSIC HAD bored him, the pianist’s fingers shimmering their way through hour after hour of the Ring cycle, and that boredom set him off from the other people gathered in Paul Zhukovsky’s drawing room. He didn’t share their enthusiasms, he wasn’t one of them, and perhaps his awareness of the gap between them extended to his sense of Paris itself. In the fall of 1876, James had reached another moment of decision. A year before, he had left America behind, had made his choice of a European life, and appeared to fix himself in France. Now Paris too had begun to seem unworkable. In later years his decision to quit the City of Light for the “murky metropolis” of London would come to have the look of a plan, as if he had simply needed a bit of finishing before settling down in the English capital. Yet though James would indeed write that he had wanted London all along, “and Paris was only a stopgap,” his decision was more sudden, and more contingent, than his words suggest.

  That July he had left Paris for the summer, traveling at first to Étretat on the Normandy coast. The town had once been a fishing village but had now found a second life as a resort, its visitors drawn by the high white cliffs and natural arches that flanked its little bay. Courbet had already painted them, and in the next decade Monet would make them into icons. James then went south to Biarritz, and crossed briefly into Spain on his first and only visit; he went to a bullfight, and of course turned the experience into an article, telling his readers that “if I sometimes shuddered, I never yawned.” Before leaving Paris, however, he had thought to economize by giving up his apartment just off the rue de Rivoli. He hoped to get it back in the fall, but somebody else had taken it in the meantime, and he soon suffered another blow as well. Since arriving in France he had written a biweekly column for the New York Tribune and counted on it to cover half his rent. The best of those pieces on French life still bear reading today, but they weren’t gossipy enough to satisfy his editor, and when James asked for a raise, the paper let him go.

  His friendship with Zhukovsky wasn’t now enough to hold him, and he also felt caught between two different kinds of provinciality. The soci
ety of the city’s American colony seemed tiresome, and as for the writers he knew? Turgenev excepted, they were the creatures of quarrels he didn’t share, of schools and groups and politics in which he remained an outsider. The full tale of his relations with them, with Zola and Flaubert among others, must wait until this book’s fourth part, when I’ll turn to what James learned from his reading of French fiction. But in 1876 he wrote that “I don’t like their wares, and they don’t like any others.” He thought them parochial, virtually ignorant of anything that wasn’t France. Not reading Henry James might still be excusable; not reading George Eliot wasn’t.

  It would, he thought, be ignoble to remain for the restaurants alone, but really there was nothing else to stay for. He wrote to his father that in imaginative terms Paris had ceased to pay—the language of mental investment was a constant in his letters to Quincy Street—but when he told William that he was thinking of moving to London, he also enjoined him to “say nothing about it until I decide” [italics in original]. He must have feared looking irresolute, someone to whom France was as unworkable as New York had been just the year before. James announced the move to Howells in the same letter in which he first mentioned his plans to write about an Americana, and he crossed the Channel on December 10. It was a choice he never regretted.