Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  The essay’s most suggestive passage describes a church James doesn’t even name, though he offers precise directions as to how to find it. A little road cuts up the Palatine, running like a country lane between high walls, and then rounds a bend to a pocket-sized, barrel-vaulted church; any good map will give its name as San Bonaventura. Just five minutes’ walk—but it’s still enough, even now, for the city’s bustle to fade out. The church remains so untouristed as to seem forgotten, and on the day I visited, there was only one other person inside, a man sitting in prayer before the high altar. I circled around behind him, walking as softly as I could and trying to make out the paintings on the walls—Caravaggio knockoffs, but so darkened by candle smoke that I couldn’t really see them. On the day James discovered it, he too had found just a solitary worshiper. A young priest was visiting each of the church’s seven altars in turn, and the novelist thought he could hear in the silence the distant bustle of the Carnival itself. The young man’s pale face looked like a judgment on that merriment, and yet his piety came with privations so great that to the writer it appeared “a terrible game—a gaining one only if your zeal never falters; a hard fight when it does.” The language James uses here is so charged with both the sense of his own vocation and a knowledge of its price that it makes the priest seem a kind of stand-in, a figure on whom he can place the burden of his own choice. “I made no vows,” Wordsworth writes in The Prelude as he remembers the moment of his dedication to poetry, “but vows were then made for me,” and James here makes an altar of words before which to renew his own pledge.

  A few weeks later he hired one of Mr. Jarrett’s horses in the hope that riding would give him some much-needed exercise, and wrote to Quincy Street of his pleasure in keeping a “close seat.” He would leave the city from the Porta del Popolo, heading out across the Campagna, and though he usually rode in company, he depicts himself in “Roman Rides” as traveling alone. The essay stands as his most deliberate attempt to create a picturesque landscape. The remnants of the Claudian Aqueduct along which he rode spoke more of Claude Lorrain than they did of the emperor who built it, and its ruins felt to him as though they were themselves “the very source of the solitude in which they stand . . . [looming] with the same insubstantial vastness as if they rose out of Egyptian sands.” Such an image belongs to the mind as much as it does to the ground itself, the mind that produces the scenes it expects to find. James did indeed see the Campagna as landscape, not land, looking for the accustomed bits of broken column or a shepherd in the foreground, and his readers will once again think of the Romantics. Only not Wordsworth this time, but rather the Coleridge of “Kubla Khan” and the Shelley of “Ozymandias.”

  In Rome every moment chimes against the past, every moment has its echo, and in riding over the countryside, James knew that he was riding through history as well, as though space and time could be plotted with the same coordinates. Every step spoke of an “unbroken continuity,” and he found a paradoxical freedom in the humbling fact that everything he saw had already “suited some one else.” He couldn’t flatter himself that he had discovered it. Goethe had found in Rome a sense of the everlasting. The city outfaced any change of fashion, and the poet used it to underwrite his own claim to permanence. And what James took from the Eternal City was a national variation on that truth. Rome taught him that freedom depends upon accepting the bonds of history. These places have all been named before. As an American, he may be a new man but he isn’t an Adam, and what Europe offered was the chance to decline the burdens of the American condition. It allowed him to declare himself free of the need to make all things new, to strive and struggle in pursuit of some manifest destiny. “Roman Rides” attempts to define the relation between the modern self and the past, the American mind and the past. It is a more profound piece of writing than any of its author’s early fiction.

  13.

  AN UNCERTAIN TERRAIN

  IN FLORENCE, ISABEL and Osmond had talked about his joining her party in Rome; that is, he had proposed the idea while making it seem like hers. He gives her a few days’ start and then comes on, tracking her down at Sunday vespers at St. Peter’s, and James lets his readers know that Osmond is now as tense with desire as he has ever been for a painting. Isabel tells him, as they stand in the church’s incense-thickened air, that her other friends are somewhere in the crowd, but his answer is explicit: “I didn’t come for the others.” Those words make her color. They’re too close to what Warburton had said in beginning his own proposal, almost 200 pages earlier, and she blushes at both the burden of Osmond’s statement and at the fact that Warburton himself is standing nearby. He may even have heard, for a moment later the Englishman will walk away with Ralph and ask just who—and what—Osmond is. The reply isn’t comforting, and when Warburton asks if Osmond is a “good fellow,” Ralph pauses for as long as he can before answering: “No, he’s not.”

  James must have thought that answer too definitive. He retouched this moment in the New York Edition, and his changes shift its emphasis away from Osmond himself and onto the dramatic situation as a whole:

  “Does she like him?”

  “She’s trying to find out.”

  “And will she?”

  “Find out—?” Ralph asked.

  “Will she like him?”

  “Do you mean will she accept him?”

  And that, Warburton admits after a moment, is indeed what he “horribly” means. To understand this moment we need to look not only at what James says about Isabel, but also at what he has now, in revision, decided not to say about Osmond. In the novel’s 1881 version Ralph admits the man can sometimes seem delightful but that doesn’t shake his confident appraisal. Osmond’s not a good fellow, and if he makes a favorable impression, that’s merely a sign of his artfulness. The later version offers something more probingly tentative. Faulkner sometimes explained the discrepancies between the linked novels of his Yoknapatawpha cycle by claiming he had simply learned more about his characters since writing the first one, as if they had a continuing life outside his pages. James’s own revisions offer something similar. Reading the two versions of the Portrait alongside one another suggests that the gap between them has allowed him to see things he didn’t at first, to explore the possibilities latent within his initial conception. Backing away from Ralph’s earlier judgment lets him emphasize, not Osmond’s nature, but the drama of the young woman’s choice. The change underlines questions that any actual Isabel would have asked herself, and to Ralph she now looks like someone trying to crack the puzzle of her own emotions. Osmond is someone whom she cannot yet place, an unknown quantity, a figure she can’t sum up. And while we might have made up our own minds about him, the passage leaves us hanging as well; we may suspect the answer she’ll reach, but we can still hope she won’t act upon it. The paradox is that in withholding Ralph’s explicit judgment, these revisions make Osmond seem more dangerous than ever.

  Osmond quickly realizes that Warburton is a rejected suitor—which only increases his interest in Isabel. By turning down an English peer, this American girl has “qualified herself to figure in his collection of choice objects,” and a few evenings later he appears in her sitting room at the Hôtel de Paris. He knows she plans to travel, and claims to wonder if she’ll ever return to Italy. Isabel in turn thinks he’s laughing at her ignorance, at the blundering way she goes about as if the globe itself belonged to her. But Osmond is gentle and reminds her that in Florence he had told her that “one ought to make one’s life a work of art.” Those words had seemed to shock her, and yet he thinks that’s exactly what she’s now doing. Go everywhere, he says, be happy and triumphant too, and then some day when she feels tired—well, that will be the moment to come back to Italy. And perhaps, he adds, perhaps he should wait until then for something he wishes to say.

  Of course, he doesn’t wait, but what’s more important, and more determinative, is what he doesn’t say. He tells he
r “that I find I am in love with you,” but he doesn’t ask her to marry him. He speaks as though he expects nothing from the act. He speaks as if for his own relief only, and though Isabel asks him to keep those words for when she is tired indeed, her plea lacks the air of crisp decision with which she had refused both Warburton and Caspar Goodwood. For she has nothing here to refuse—a declaration has been made, but nothing has yet been asked of her. Maybe that’s why she remains willing to listen; why, in fact, she will accept him some months later. Yet though Isabel hears an “immense sweetness” in his words, she still retreats before him. Osmond would say more if she offered the barest shred of encouragement, but Isabel dreads the moment of decision. She knows here once more the kind of fear she had felt on her visit to Lockleigh, and that fear seems all the greater because she now knows what is in her heart.

  For Isabel remains in terror of surrendering herself to the very passion that “ought to have banished all dread,” the passion that stands as the greatest of threats to her sense of self-sufficiency. Once again James’s revisions are crucial. They provide both a retrospective gloss on her hopes and fears, and a suggestion of how much his own world had changed. The issues of his own affective life had been settled, for better or worse, for good or nil. The tacit censorship of the publishing world had loosened, the three novels of his “major phase”—The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl—had all turned on the question of sex outside marriage, and the older writer often employed an imagery of which the younger one was largely innocent. In both versions Osmond’s words produce a “pang” in which pleasure and pain have an equal part. In the New York Edition, however, James likens “the sharpness of the pang . . . [to] the slipping of a fine bolt, backward, forward, she couldn’t have said which.” The erotic charge is too obvious to miss, and yet let’s take that simile at face value. The crucial word has been a part of this book from the start. Isabel has always refused to keep her imagination “behind bolts,” as if in a locked room; the phrase appears in an early chapter of the 1881 edition and stands unrevised in the later one. Here, however, it’s not clear if that slipping bolt will open a door or close one, free her or bind her, protect or confine her.

  James borrowed the image from Matthew Arnold, who in his 1852 poem “The Buried Life” describes a world in which emotion must struggle for expression, struggle until the sound of a loved one’s voice makes us feel that “a bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,/And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.” For Isabel is indeed stirred by Osmond’s words, and knows that something has happened here that didn’t happen with the other men, even if she doesn’t yet know what she should do about it. Two things Osmond says before he goes are worth lingering on; they will help us understand both her eventual decision and the later course of her married life. He tells her that he likes the idea of her doing “everything that’s proper; I go in for that,” but when she asks if he is conventional, he denies it. “I am convention itself.” He hasn’t simply accepted convention. He has actively chosen it, and we will learn that the most important of those accustomed practices are the ones he’s defined for himself. The other thing Osmond does is to ask her to call on his daughter in Florence. Pansy has remained with a servant at the villa, where she seems something close to a prisoner, allowed to enter the garden but no more. She stands as the most expertly played of Osmond’s cards, a low trump that still allows him to make his bid—and Isabel’s visit with the girl will remind us that she too had lost her mother young.

  After Osmond leaves, Isabel finds herself in the emotional equivalent of an oxymoron, suffering from an “agitation” that is nevertheless “very still, very deep.” The man’s words aren’t entirely unexpected, but they nevertheless bring her imagination to a halt, as if she stood on the uncrossable brink of a “dusky, uncertain tract which looked ambiguous, and even slightly treacherous.” James’s phrasing recalls his evocation of the Campagna’s broken ground in “Roman Rides,” and it might also remind us of the murky borders of the Kantian sublime, with its sense of threat and loss, the loss of self-posssession. That indeed is what Isabel fears, that surrender to the buried life within. It makes her stop as at the edge of an undiscovered country. But it will not stay undiscovered for long.

  The Portrait of a Lady contains two significant gaps in time: ellipses in its narrative, holes in our knowledge, moments of undescribed action that nevertheless determine the shape of both Isabel’s life and that of the work itself. She stands on the rim of that uncertain terrain called marriage, her foot is raised, but her creator does not show her in the act of putting it down. When she visits Pansy in Florence, Isabel listens to the child speak of her father with an interest that it torments her to conceal, but she then leaves Italy with her aunt and travels north with the seasons. It is just a page, and yet almost a full year before we see her again, standing at the window of Mrs. Touchett’s Florentine palace: a year that begins with Osmond’s declaration and ends with Isabel’s reappearance as his fiancée. The second and even more significant rupture comes five chapters on. James skips not only his heroine’s wedding but also the next three years, and our first view of the Osmonds’ marriage will make it look damaged from the start.

  It’s as though the need to make Isabel cross that boundary has engendered a form of disturbance, a pair of cracks in the book’s sequence that stand as a version of James’s own figure in the carpet—absent causes, in Tzvetan Todorov’s phrase, unwritten moments of decision. For the novelist’s own imagination has been brought to a halt here as well. He too needs to cover that territory, and will do so without entirely meeting its difficulties. Isabel stands waiting for a visitor, and James tell us that she’s newly returned from another stay in Rome. What he doesn’t tell us is that she has come back engaged; that’s something we won’t learn until she herself announces it. She seems to have leaped over that terrain, and to have carried her author with her. Or maybe he’s the one who has jumped. He can show us Isabel in the act of refusal, but what he cannot or will not do is to show her in the moment of choice; the moment in which she accepts a role in a plot she had once rejected.

  James wrote in his autobiography that he had known since childhood that life consisted of “scenes.” But he also tells us that Isabel isn’t fond of them, and the Portrait suggests that there are a few he doesn’t much like either, scenes he would just as soon avoid doing. A novelist’s “individual technique,” in Graham Greene’s words, “is more than anything else a means of evading the personally impossible, of disguising a deficiency.” Lesser writers never recognize their limitations. Many great ones stumble over something a hack might do with ease. James has a preference for finished states and an unwillingness to dramatize the process of decision. Nevertheless, he needs to marry off his heroine and he needs to do it not at the end of the book but now. He needs to do it in the novel’s broad middle because he is not, paradoxically, all that interested in courtship. He needs to do it because he wants to give us the portrait of a lady, not a girl, and he has to do it now because he wants to avoid the teleology of the marriage plot, in which Isabel’s progress would be defined by the choice of a husband alone. And yet James also knows, again paradoxically, that marriage remains one of the most complicated destinies a woman might face. Some of his best early stories—tales like “Madame de Mauves” or “The Last of the Valerii”—depict the drama within marriage, the drama of those who are already locked together. But James was also known for his reluctance to end his books with a wedding, and his imagination is persistently drawn to the moment of refusal, to events that don’t happen. In his later work he would write about passion with a depth and precision that he could not as a young novelist command, but he would never be comfortable in showing us the drama of acceptance. Tolstoy could do that, and Trollope. Not James, and we don’t need a biographical explanation to see its effect on his work. Grant that he does not depict the moments in which Isabel persuades herself to discard her fears. What does h
e do instead—and what might he gain by not showing it to us?

  When the novel returns to Florence, we don’t at first know how Isabel has spent her year. We don’t know for whom she’s waiting, or if she’s been in contact with Osmond; and James will delay telling us for as long as he can. Still, he recognizes that we do need to be told something, and filling us in on her year of frenetic travel will both satisfy that desire and allow him an extra pause. So he tells us that she has gone to Switzerland and Paris with her sister Lily, who’s come over from New York; and then with Madame Merle to Italy, Egypt, and Greece. Isabel travels so restlessly because she has seen what she wants even if she can’t yet make herself take it; a literal displacement of desire. Yet the movement hardly satisfies her, and perhaps nothing on her itinerary proves so entirely rewarding as a November walk across London.