Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  James himself always had that independent life—which doesn’t mean that he plunged more deeply. Italy had been the goal of his first adult trip to Europe in 1869, a country that for him, as later for Isabel, had long stood as a promised land. He arrived in Florence on October 5, and the next day bought a two-week membership at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Piazza Santa Trinità. It was the city’s largest subscription library, and its reading room was as a center of expatriate life; the names inscribed over the decades in its register amount to a history of European culture, from Mikhail Bakunin to Isadora Duncan. James went there both to read the newspapers and in the hopes of finding a familiar face. He had been in Italy for six weeks already, with brief stays in Venice and Bologna among others, but he hadn’t yet found anyone to talk to.

  That would set a pattern, and in 1874 he wrote to Grace Norton that though he had been in Italy for a year he had “hardly spoken to an Italian creature save washerwomen and waiters.” He was once more in Florence and at work on a series of travel sketches that delighted in the city’s sense of an ever-visible past, but admitted that he sometimes found himself overwhelmed by the gap between Italy itself and the touristic rhapsodies he felt he had to provide. One evening he found himself gazing at a line of time-battered and almost mudlike houses along the Arno. Today those buildings contain some of Florence’s most expensively renovated flats, but James knew that in his native New York they would have been little more than a slum, and he could only explain his pleasure in them by supposing that Italy created its own standard of beauty. The simple fact that they weren’t brownstones had allowed the moonlight to refine their poverty away. At other times, however, those picturesque fictions seemed to explode in his hands. One day he stood at the gate of a hill town, with the road into the plain below winding down through chestnuts and olives, and watched as a young man came up toward him, his coat slung over his shoulder and his hat at a rakish angle. He was singing as he came, and James told himself that such a figure in the middle distance “had been exactly what was wanted to set off the landscape.” But when the man reached him and asked for a match, James quickly discovered that he was a brooding, angry young communist, “unhappy, underfed, [and] unemployed,” and very far from the operatic presence for which the novelist had taken him.

  James came to know what he didn’t know, what the traveler’s view doesn’t usually allow one to see, and he turned those limitations of knowledge into the material of his work itself. Only in a few apprentice stories does he allow himself the kind of detachable set pieces on which Howells relied in his own Florentine novel, Indian Summer, with its touristic accounts of an artist’s trattoria or of the drive up to Fiesole. He more often uses Italy as a way to explore his own overvaluation of Europe. In his early “Madonna of the Future” he describes an expatriate painter named Theobald, who lives in the hope of beating out Raphael, and has spent a lifetime in the Tuscan capital in preparing—in delaying and deferring—his one perfect painting. Yet in the process his model has aged out of recognition, his blackened canvas has become illegible, and in his dream of an earlier age he has entirely missed the crude but undeniable energy of the modern land around him. Theobald’s Madonna belongs to the past. It is not a place on which an American art can take its stand.

  Florence did not shape James’s imagination as powerfully as either Rome or Venice. But it made him happy, “a rounded pearl of cities,” and over the years he found that it was, above all, a good place to work. I have already mentioned his stay in the fall and winter of 1873–74, when he spent much of his time with William, and in the spring he remained in the city after his brother had left. He took an apartment on the corner of Piazza Santa Maria Novella, where he settled into the opening chapters of Roderick Hudson, and years later he wrote that the book’s first pages always recalled to him not the New England town of their setting but the Italian city of their composition. In his memory he could hear “the clatter of horse-pails” from a nearby cabstand and stood once more looking out at the dusty square through the slits of his shutters. That stay made the city seem a kind of refuge, and later James would sometimes go there as a way to avoid the invitations of London.

  So it was in 1880, when he wanted a few uninterrupted weeks in which to begin The Portrait of a Lady. Not that he played hermit. He was happy to see the Bootts, and at another gathering met the Crown-Princess of Prussia—daughter of Queen Victoria, mother of Wilhelm II—and wrote home that she was “easy, friendly, intelligent.” Still, he complained to his sister that “one is liable to tea-parties,” and noted that he was expected to call on an American writer who had been chasing him across the Continent with a letter of introduction.

  Contance Fenimore Woolson’s life had been nearly as peripatetic as James’s own. Born in 1840, she was the great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, but though her family origins lay in New Hampshire and New York, she had spent much of her childhood in Ohio and on the Great Lakes at a time when they were still seen as the “West.” In the 1870s she traveled through the South with her widowed mother, visiting battlefields and cemeteries and eventually settling in St. Augustine. She was, in the words of her biographer, Lyndall Gordon, both vulnerable and stubborn, someone who insisted upon “an unconventional course of action . . . it was odd to be a Northern woman living by choice in the ruined South,” and it was even odder for such a woman to explore the alligator swamps of the Florida wilderness, alone.

  Most of her fiction and travel sketches appeared in the New York–based and heavily illustrated Harper’s; James preferred the more austere Atlantic. Still, her work was in some ways the other side of his coin. If he wrote about Europe for what was at first an East Coast audience, then she wrote about the varied regions of America for that same audience; specializing in the “local color” stories that, in bringing the news of faraway places, paradoxically underlined her readers’ sense of their own cultural centrality. Such tales usually depicted provincial life through the eyes of a city-bred protagonist; the classic examples are Sarah Orne Jewett’s stories of coastal Maine. The self-conscious cosmopolitanism of James’s work carried a greater prestige. It gave his readers something to which they might aspire. But the local-color writers often had more readers. Woolson’s stories are both gimlet-eyed and affecting, and the best of them can stand comparison with Jewett’s. The most widely known is the 1877 “Rodman the Keeper,” which she based on a visit to the military graveyard at the Andersonville prison camp in Georgia. Soon afterward, however, her work changed, and changed in two ways. In 1879 she sailed for Europe, encouraged to do so by Howells among others, and she also began a series of tales about the lives of women artists.

  In each of these things Henry James was very much on her mind. She had already written about him for the Atlantic and later claimed that in his work she had found “my true country, my real home.” But he had begun to show up in her fiction even before they met, in a story called “Miss Grief” that is narrated by a parody version of James himself, an American writer in Rome. One evening he gets a visit from what can only be called a distressed gentlewoman, a shabbily-dressed figure named Aaronna Crief who has read his every word and wants him to look at her own work in turn. He tries to get rid of her, fails, reads, and finds to his surprise that her pages have force; later she tells him she would have killed herself “if your sentence had been against me.” Yet no editor will take her, and “Miss Grief” soon sickens and dies, killed not by her poverty so much as by the neglect of the literary world itself.

  The story seems almost naked in its sense of need; and in later years James might well have wondered if he should have read it as a warning. Still, in material terms Woolson had nothing like her character’s struggle. Her family connections had eased her way into print, and by 1880 her career was both settled and prosperous. She carried a letter of introduction from one of James’s relatives and had been in Florence for some ten days when he arrived. There’s no record of their initial meeting, but Jame
s first mentioned her in a letter to his sister Alice on April 25. He found her “amiable, but deaf,” and full of questions about his books to which she couldn’t quite hear his replies. A week later he wrote to his Aunt Kate that he had gone driving with an American “authoress,” but added that he didn’t know her work. Still, her manners were perfect, and though he found her “intense,” he liked her. Woolson’s own letters of the period describe James himself as a form of paradox. He was attentive and charming, and yet his self-presentation was both quiet and cold; a man who had driven all expression from his light gray eyes.

  James often called for her in the morning, retreating to his desk as the afternoon grew hot. One day they strolled in the Cascine, the large park at the city’s western edge; on another he took her to the vast empty Duomo and, as she wrote in a letter, tried to make her admire it. They went to Santa Croce, in whose sober Gothic majesty Florence’s most illustrious citizens are buried, and where Woolson thought the Giottos beyond her; then to San Lorenzo, where she couldn’t get herself to like nude statues. At times she thought James might need a break from her “horrible ignorance,” and yet there’s no doubt he enjoyed the company of this intelligent reader, a woman who admired his work in the same way that his friend Zhukovsky admired Wagner’s. After his visit to Naples he may have needed that salve, that perceptive but largely uncritical appreciation. James took very few colleagues into his confidence, but to Woolson he spoke about his books with an openness that at this time he extended only to Howells. One mark of their friendship can be found in the story she wrote about those months, “A Florentine Experiment,” which appeared in the Atlantic that October, a month before the Portrait started its own run. It’s a tale of expatriate life in which Woolson describes the places they had visited together, and it ends with Trafford Morgan, a man who “likes to be listened to,” confessing his love to Margaret Stowe. The wish embodied here needs no comment, and what matters isn’t simply the fact that Woolson wrote such a story, but that James didn’t object to it. A decade later the English writer Vernon Lee based one of her own characters upon him—and he broke with her.

  At first James saw Woolson with the same sense of fond amusement with which Isabel regards Henrietta’s intrepid naïveté. Later there was more, as he came to understand the shape of her loneliness and the place he had within it. Yet their friendship was not public. Two middle-aged writers might visit an Italian church without exciting speculation, but James had already needed to quell too many rumors of his own impending marriage, and when Woolson moved to England in 1883, he kept her apart from the main current of his life. Sometimes they went to the theater together, and in Florence she became increasingly close to Frank and Lizzie Boott, but to most of James’s friends she remained hidden, as hidden, in a way, as Zhukovsky, and for much the same reason. People might have talked about their anomalous friendship, and talked all the more because there was in fact nothing to say.

  Leon Edel writes that “the two destroyed each other’s letters by mutual agreement,” but four of hers do survive, two each from 1882 and 1883, years he spent partly in America and where he left some papers behind. They are extraordinary documents. They are extraordinary in her acute reading of his reputation and of the change in it that was made by The Portrait of a Lady itself; a reading to which I’ll return in a later chapter. They are extraordinary too in possessing a voice, richer and more flexible than that of her fiction, that claims all while appearing to claim so little. In their aggressive modesty, their seeming denial of desire, these letters recall such great novelistic characters as Dickens’s Esther Summerson from Bleak House, or the first-person narrator of Charlotte Brontë’s sublime Villette, the emotionally famished Lucy Snowe. At one point Woolson imagines building a cottage in Cooperstown, New York, and then suggests that James must come and stay with her there, bringing along “that sweet young American wife I want you to have—whom you must have. . . .” And these letters have an anecdotal value as well. They are the richest portrait we have of James in the confidence, indeed the swagger, of his first mastery.

  One example must do. From Leipzig she writes that she has been making a clean copy of her new novel. Her whole arm now ached, and the pain made her remember a morning in Florence when they sat on a bench, and

  . . . you said, in answer to a remark of mine, “Oh, I never copy.” And upon a mute gesture from me, you added, “Do you think, then, that my work has the air of having been copied, and perhaps more than once?” I think I made no direct reply, then. But I will now. The gesture was despair,—despair, that, added to your other perfections, was the gift of writing as you do, at the first draft!

  But sprezzatura is almost always a pose. James covered his proof sheets with corrections, and whatever his usual practice, with The Portrait of a Lady he did “copy,” he did revise. Nothing came on the first draft, and in reading Woolson’s letter I cannot help wondering just why he seemed so interested in impressing her, and perhaps so willing to deceive her as well.

  11.

  MR. OSMOND

  IN A VILLA on top of an olive-shrouded hill sits a man with a thin, sharp face. The ends of his mustache are twisted up, his grizzled beard has been shaped to a point, and he seems unmarked by any national origin; a man who might “pass for anything,” or nothing. The open door lets in the Tuscan spring; he flicks his eyes toward the young girl standing across the room, and then his hooded gaze drifts back to the two nuns who sit facing him. They have brought the girl home for the summer from her convent school in Rome, but though Pansy is now fifteen, her father still sees her as a child: an obedient child, fluent in three languages, and so timid that she wonders if she dares do anything so grown-up as to make a pot of tea.

  It will be some pages before James tells us the man’s name, and perhaps only the most attentive of the serialized novel’s first readers would have thought back a month, and remembered Madame Merle’s account of her friend Gilbert Osmond, a figure without the solidity of either Caspar Goodwood or Lord Warburton, a man who has nothing to declare but his own cultivation. His income is small, he knows that he lacks genius or even talent, and he thinks of himself as someone who has renounced ambition. He does admit to envying the pope, “for the consideration he enjoys,” but he has made up his mind to live quietly and “not to strive nor struggle.” He will do nothing to risk failure. In Florence he almost never comes down from the top of Bellosguardo—he wants the rest of the expatriate world to know both that he’s there and that he doesn’t want to see them. Osmond pays just two visits a year to the Palazzo Crescentini, Mrs. Touchett’s house in the city below, and dislikes Ralph, who returns the favor.

  Madame Merle had spoken of Osmond in England, when Isabel was poor, and she speaks of him again now that the girl is rich and has come to Florence with her aunt. It is early May in 1872. Mr. Touchett has been dead for six months, and later that year, in America, Ulysses S. Grant will be elected to a second term in the White House. None of James’s characters will notice, or care. His expatriates are not the kind who hang upon the news. They have more immediate concerns, and right now Madame Merle is occupied by the question of Isabel’s future. One shouldn’t live in Italy, the older woman tells her, without meeting Gilbert Osmond, who knows more about the peninsula than anyone but a few German professors. To Osmond himself she says something else—she tells him that Miss Archer has £70,000. Madame Merle arrives at the villa while the nuns are still there, and at the news of Osmond’s visitors she hesitates, as if there were some risk in entering. But though she seems shawled in caution she’s also an old family friend, someone who has visited Pansy in Rome, who has met these nuns before and can charm them. Osmond’s own manners are offhand. He recognizes that her visit means something, that Madame Merle wants something, and once the sisters have gone, his voice acquires a touch of vinegar. She in turn appears on edge, and James explains their shared but apparently unmotivated temper by noting that they usually “approached each other
obliquely, as it were, and addressed each other by implication.” Yet that only begs a further question, and one that the author leaves hanging.

  At first Osmond rejects the woman’s suggestion that he should meet her new friend. Effort is such a bore, and “I know plenty of dingy people.” Even the news of Isabel’s wealth and beauty hardly appears to interest him, though he sharpens his ears at the sum. But he finally agrees to call at the Palazzo Crescentini, and when he does, Isabel listens to him talk with Madame Merle and thinks herself dull by comparison. The young woman remains quiet, even subdued, and yet does so precisely because something about Osmond arrests her, and makes “it seem more important that she should get an impression of him than that she should produce one herself.” He speaks simply about complicated matters and appears delicate even as he invites Isabel to come up and visit his garden. On this second meeting her impression deepens, even though the villa itself scares her a bit; its blank façade makes it seem “as if, once you were in, it would not be easy to get out.” But she is delighted with Pansy, and she even enjoys Osmond’s sister, the Countess Gemini, a prattling scandalous creature of fashion, unhappily married to a local nobleman. Moreover, Osmond himself seems genuinely beguiling, as he speaks of Italy’s fusion of beauty and lassitude, of spending his life in a country that most other Americans only pass through.