Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  She has just put her sister on a train for Liverpool and home, and turns away from the station into the brown fog of the city streets. It’s evening and the gaslight seems dim as she walks back from Euston to her Piccadilly hotel, delighting in the shops and stalls, in “the dark, shining dampness of everything,” delighting above all in the fact that nobody in the world knows where she is. The sidewalks are crowded and the streets full of fast-moving cabs, but she walks through the town as if she owns it, walks alone in a way that was then rare for women of her class, without a servant or a male protector, and loses her way in order to magnify her experience. She walks in the belief that she has taken possession of London itself, but what she’s really done is to take possession of her own life, and at this moment she truly thinks that “the world lay before her—she could do whatever she chose.” But so too “the world was all before” Adam and Eve on their expulsion from Paradise; James’s Miltonic echo is deliberate, and in this fallen world not even Isabel can have that freedom entire.

  On our first encounter with the novel we read about Isabel’s travels in the belief that James is simply preparing us for the next stage of her adventures. We read of London and Cairo without realizing that there’s been a gap of anything more than time. But Isabel has already taken her next step; taken it without our knowledge, without the knowledge of anyone but Osmond himself. Or no: she has told one other person. She has written a letter to Caspar Goodwood in America. He’s the one she is waiting for at the Palazzo Crescentini, and we first hear of her engagement when he says that “I would rather think of you as dead than as married to another man.” The words are like a slap—a slap not to her but to us—and even then James will make us wait for another page before he allows Goodwood to produce Osmond’s name, a page on which we ready ourselves for a second blow. For the news fills us with the same sense of surprise and dismay as it does the book’s other characters. It makes us feel that Isabel had better explain herself.

  James’s sleight-of-hand forces us to realize that we don’t know his heroine as well as we thought. “I had no idea . . . you were choosing,” Ralph will say a few pages on, “and your silence put me off my guard.” We know she finds Osmond attractive, even without the slipping bolt of those late revisions, but the moment has crept up on us, and James’s masterly delay makes it look as though she’s been hiding things. She seems more elusive now than ever, as if he had decided to smudge the carefully drawn lines of her face. Yet though he doesn’t dramatize the process of choice, James does allow her to justify her decision. To Goodwood, it’s true, she will refuse an explanation; the poor man crosses the ocean to protest for ten minutes, and returns to America at once. Ralph is different, however, and we can best understand Isabel by listening in on her conversation with him.

  “You are going to be put in a cage,” he says. Ralph arrives in Florence from a winter on Corfu, more helplessly ill than ever, and though Isabel believes that his mother has told him the news, he at first gives no sign of knowledge. But when she finally makes him speak, he speaks bluntly indeed. He had thought she would choose a man of “more importance.” Those words make her angry. The man, she says, is important enough to her, and her position seems credible to the precise degree that their conversation makes her realize that Ralph isn’t as disinterested as she had always thought. It will be many chapters yet before she learns what he’s done for her, but James does let him confess here that he has loved to think of her as “soaring . . . sailing in the bright light” above, that he has taken his pleasure in planning out her destiny. His shocked response to her choice doesn’t simply mark his belief that she’s making a mistake, but also the fact that the story she’s about to write for herself doesn’t match the one he had sketched out; it’s as though his character had gotten away from him.

  Ralph’s dismay prompts one of the novel’s great moments. His reaction forces Isabel to tell him what she sees in Osmond, to define what she wants in a husband, and her words echo her earlier conversation with Madame Merle about clothes: a definition of individual autonomy in which liberty itself is now couched in negative terms. Osmond isn’t important, no, he is instead “a man to whom importance is supremely indifferent,” a man who makes his own standards. She has already told Goodwood that the collector is a nonentity, and the industrialist has caught the sense of peculiar pride that makes such nothingness stand as a positive attraction. Osmond is what other men are not. He has refused the indignity of effort; at first, we remember, he did not even ask her to marry him. He hasn’t “scrambled nor struggled—he has cared for no worldly prize,” and to Ralph she even praises the dignity with which he carries his relative poverty, as though it were an infirmity about which he had had no choice. He is, she claims, a man with “no property, no title, no honours, no houses, nor lands, nor position, nor reputation, nor brilliant belongings of any sort,” and many readers have noted the resemblance of that list to Hawthorne’s catalogue of American absences. Defined by his residence abroad, by his loss of the distinguishing marks of origin, Osmond is nevertheless cast in an American mold. Isabel will say that he’s not a proprietor, but what she really means is that he isn’t a personage like Warburton. He is simply a private citizen, a privacy reinforced by his expatriate’s distance from any surrounding social fabric. He is Gilbert Osmond. He lives in Italy; he has chosen, she thinks, to rely upon himself alone.

  In the days before her marriage Isabel spends her mornings with Osmond in the Cascine, and as she walks through that Medici park, two things seem perfectly clear. First, she is deeply in love. And second, in choosing a husband she has picked out an idealized version of the unconfined self she wants to be, a self that appears to transcend its envelope of worldly circumstances. To Ralph, of course, she seems to love the man for “his very poverties dressed as honors,” and when he criticizes Osmond’s exacting taste, Isabel replies that “I hope it may never be my fortune to fail to gratify my husband’s.” Those words make him flinch. They sound like Osmond’s, not hers, as though she had begun to live at some remove from her own voice. And in fact she now feels “disjoined” from every previous tie—she believes that marriage itself must lead to some break with all her earlier friends. What she doesn’t yet know is that marrying this particular man will also entail a separation from herself, that her very aspirations will require her own negation. Osmond says that he wants a wife with a mind like a plate that he can heap with fruits of his own sensibility. Only they are his fruits, not hers, and Isabel will have to learn to hide her every independent thought away. The curious thing is that if she weren’t in love she would already have seen enough of Osmond to share Ralph’s judgment. She may claim that he cares for no earthly prize, but in Rome he describes Warburton as “detestably fortunate,” and Isabel teases him for the way he seems “to be always envying someone.” She may joke. Osmond never does, ironist though he is. He means what he says, and we can already see the barred shadow of his cage upon her face.

  14.

  A VENETIAN INTERLUDE

  JAMES WROTE OF England in Italy and of Italy in England, and then, in the winter of 1881, he took himself south once more. The weather that year was hard, a season of blizzard that on January 18 covered southern England in snow. Drifts of 10 feet mounded themselves over Gloucestershire, and though London itself was not so heavily hit, James wrote a week later that the snow remained high and “the temperature ferocious.” His work had gone smoothly, with the dark, short days given over to his account of Isabel’s first Italian spring. But he had also paid a too steady round of country visits, most recently to Lord Rosebery’s place at Epsom Downs, where he admired the Gainsboroughs and walked over the racecourse. James liked boasting about such invitations to Quincy Street and yet also felt impatient with the interruptions of his London life. He wanted the space and freedom in which to “quietly bring my novel to a close,” and on February 9 he left for the Continent; the weather reports for the day suggest he had a rough time in the Cha
nnel.

  Later in his career James would need both his secretary and her typewriter, but in these years he could write anywhere he found a table, and all his holidays were working ones. He was bent on Italy but traveled slowly from place to place, resting here and extending a stay there; everything about his journey was leisurely except the motion of his pen. He made his first stop in Paris, where he enjoyed three long talks with a gout-ridden Turgenev even as he found himself increasingly impatient with the city’s “Frenchified” American residents, whose cultural horizons were defined by the conservative newspaper Le Figaro. Then he moved down through France, pausing at both Avignon and Marseilles, and reporting from the latter that he eaten the “obligatory . . . mess of bouillabaisse, a formidable dish, demanding a French digestion.” Next, he settled for three weeks at San Remo on the Italian Riviera. He had used the place as one of Ralph Touchett’s winter refuges and now enjoyed a series of morning walks through the “dusky light” of the olive groves And it was from San Remo that on March 8 he sent the June and July installments of the Portrait to the Atlantic, where Howells had now been succeeded as editor by Thomas Bailey Aldrich; chapters that take Isabel through her engagement and into her marriage.

  He stopped at Genoa and then again at Milan, still unsure, after six weeks on the road, whether Venice or Rome would be his final destination. Venetian winters could be cold, and the Adriatic’s clammy fog made him think of choosing Rome’s sunshine. He worried, however, that the latter city would be too full of people he knew, and couldn’t stomach the idea of exchanging the English social season for an Italian one; the only thing he really liked about Milan was not having any calls to pay. In the end, he chose the surety of quiet, and left for Venice on March 25. He had been there twice before, but each stay had been brief; he knew the city only as a tourist and had already let his heroine pass through it in a phrase. Now he would stay until the end of June, working until The Portrait of a Lady was “virtually finished.” But there would be other consequences as well.

  The Venice of 1881 had reached a tipping point. It had joined the new nation of Italy in 1866, after fifty years of Austrian rule, and both its trade and its population had begun to increase. Neither of them approached the levels of 1797, however, when Napoleon put an end to the city’s thousand years of independence, and the Baedeker for 1879 notes that fully one-fourth of its 128,000 inhabitants were paupers. James was acutely aware of the city’s poverty, of the “painfully large” percentage of its citizens who appeared never to have enough to eat. It bothered him in a way that the poor did not in Florence or even Rome, and he was conscious too that the city’s buildings seemed all out of scale with present needs, buildings that could no longer “be lived in as they were intended to be.” Nor was he the only one to see the place as fundamentally at odds with modernity. There were even Venetians who wanted to fill in the canals as a way to bring the city up to date, and a few of them indeed were; the Strada Nuova got its name for a reason.

  A more realistic threat came from the introduction, in the year of James’s own visit, of the “awful” vaporetto. He thought the churning screws of those steam launches would both undermine the city’s foundations and threaten the livelihood of the gondoliers, who in fact went on strike at the boats’ first appearance. Yet the city’s greatest challenge came from precisely those forces that were to preserve it. James’s stay led to an essay, called simply “Venice,” that remains as interesting for its account of tourism as for its picture of the city itself. Venice had had more annual visitors than inhabitants since the 1840s, and by James’s day the place seemed to belong to them, to the tourists who wanted above all to confirm the impressions they had already formed from prints and paintings and now photographs, the mechanical reproductions that made this “battered peep show and bazaar” seem familiar even to those who hadn’t been there. The city had become a place about which it was impossible to say anything new; a decade later James added that it was now but “the most beautiful of tombs,” a monument to its own lost importance.

  He quickly became an expert at knowing when the masses of other foreigners would empty out of the galleries for lunch; still, the pressure of people he already knew was slight in comparison to Florence or Rome, and the expatriate colonies were small. An attempt, at the end of the decade, to raise monies for an Anglican church numbered the English population at just 50. He found lodgings on the Riva degli Schiavoni, the esplanade that runs east of the Piazza San Marco, where the Grand Canal spreads into what is called the Basin. The Riva is wide and in some ways uncharacteristic of the city as a whole, for it offers a long straight view and a sense of space and open water. Even now it seems in the early morning to provide that breadth; at midday, however, the crowds make it a gauntlet run between a line of vaporetto stops on the one hand and hotels on the other. The grandest of those hotels, the Danieli, was already in business then; its rooms went for four shillings a night. But the building where James himself stayed is today one of the more modest, a place called the Pensione Wildner. He took a room on the fourth floor, with a view across the water to the pink-walled church of San Giorgio Maggiore; a view he described as “una bellezza; the far shining lagoon . . . the movements of the quay, the gondolas in profile.”

  In London, James wrote in the mornings and went out into the city only after finishing his hours at the desk. In Italy he reversed that order. He took his morning coffee at Florian’s, in the Piazza, a café whose small, elegant rooms are even today defined by their rococo moldings and crimson upholstery, by bright gold leaf and slightly darkened mirrors. James described going there as one of life’s “simpler pleasure[s];” a phrase that will stun anyone who has ever picked up one of its checks. Afterward, he crossed the Grand Canal for a daily bath at the Stabilimento Chitarin, where salt water was piped in from the Lagoon and heated. He walked, he looked at pictures and churches, and returned to the Piazza for lunch at its other historic café, the Quadri. Then he strolled the few minutes home for an afternoon of work. If he quit early, he would float out in a gondola before dinner; they were still cheap, cheaper even than his bath or a London cab. In the evening he often went back to Florian’s, sitting outside and listening to the orchestra, and sometimes he took himself to the house of his old Newport friend Katharine de Kay Bronson, leaning on her balcony with a cigarette and watching the lamplight gleam upon the water below. Such hours were a kind of witchery, and the city itself possessed him so completely that he began to imagine a future of annual returns; he even went so far as to look for a pied à terre. At the same time, he knew that this spring was “one of those things that don’t repeat themselves.” Nevertheless, Venice did now begin to supplant Florence and Rome in both his affections and his imagination alike. There might be nothing left there to discover, but the rhythm of its life was a lotos and the city itself seemed “sentient.”

  James would have no need for a Venetian bolt-hole of his own. Mrs. Bronson’s small house on the Grand Canal would always have room for him, and so did the Boston-born Daniel Curtis and his English wife, Ariana, at their much grander Palazzo Barbaro, near the foot of the Accademia Bridge. Expatriate society in Venice had no intellectual pretensions to anything more than a gentlemanly good taste. That conventionality had irritated him in Paris. His expectations of an Italian holiday were different, however, and in Venice his mind was sustained by his eyes. The Curtises had a decided sense of their own social importance, but they also collected artists and writers, and by the time James returned in 1887, both the Portrait and Daisy Miller had made him into one of the most celebrated of his day; favored guests would later be given “his” room. Their other prizes included Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent, and they are now best remembered as the subjects of the painter’s masterful 1898 group portrait, An Interior in Venice.

  Sargent makes the Barbaro’s salon seem as shadowy as a Rembrandt, its walls a rusty black in which one can just pick out the faint gleam of a picture frame. The Curtises
sit in the foreground, aged and serene, and the gray of their clothing seems almost bright in contrast to their surroundings. But the real color lies off to one side, in the splashes of white that define their son and daughter-in-law, more elegantly dressed than the parents and with the son half-sitting on the edge of a table. Sargent’s brushwork is looser here than in his portraits of single figures, and the Curtises did not like it. They found the picture entirely too casual, almost deprecatory in the posing of its figures and its seemingly unfinished surface alike, and declined its offer as a gift. James thought them foolish; he had seen few of the painter’s works that he “craved more to possess.” Yet perhaps Mrs. Curtis’s eye was better than James knew, and she had seen an implicit criticism in Sargent’s rendering of the richly furnished chamber, a suggestion that their lives were not as large as their rooms.

  James’s account of this period in his American journal swells with detail, an invaluable record of dates and addresses and names. What seems more interesting in retrospect, however, are the names of the friends he didn’t make. John Addington Symonds was in Venice during these months, taken up with both his work on the history of the Renaissance and his affair with the gondolier Angelo Fusato. James had met him in England, and we have seen in an earlier chapter the interest the novelist took in him: the eagerness with which he questioned their mutual friend Edmund Gosse about Symonds’s domestic situation, and the fascination with which he read his books on homosexuality. More suggestive are the accidents of timing that kept James and the young Sargent from meeting one another. The painter came to the city in the fall of 1880 and spent six months there, leaving more or less as James arrived. The writer would certainly have noticed a young American with a sketchbook and a studio on the Grand Canal, an American who was already a fixture in the Paris Salon; while Sargent himself read everything and would surely have known the older man’s work. By this time they had spent the better part of a decade just missing one another in both France and Italy. They finally met in Paris during the winter of 1884, and James was then instrumental in persuading Sargent to base his career in London. In Britain they became friends though not intimates, something of which Sargent had even fewer than James himself; there is, in fact, just one extant letter between them, a brief 1915 note from the novelist.