Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  In recent years Marcher’s sense of a hidden self or fate has often been read in terms of sexual identity. It is “The Beast in the Closet,” as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick puts it, and the story has become a central text in queer readings of James’s work. Still, we should be wary of any interpretation that merely substitutes one secret for another, that sees either Marcher’s tale, or James’s work in writing it, in terms of a key that might unlock its door. Maybe only a gay man could have written “The Beast in the Jungle,” but though it’s now impossible to read this tale in terms of its heterosexual content alone, we must also recognize that it is not, or not only, about being gay as such. It is about both things at once, and like the other pieces with which I’ve grouped it, “The Beast in the Jungle” insists upon and yet disclaims an autobiographical reading: a parable of loss and regret whose uncanny power depends on an ever-unspoken dialectic between its two versions of the unlived life.

  With time, Constance Fenimore Woolson became one face of all James knew he had missed. He returned to Venice repeatedly, a city whose decrepitude served but to intensify its style; returned with pleasure but with an increasing sense that the place was a tomb indeed. The city appeared to linger on after its own end, and that coincidence of death and beauty made him chose a Venetian setting for The Wings of the Dove, his late novel about the relation of treachery and desire. Today, Venice seems more a tomb than ever, its population less than half of what it was in James’s day, and yet with more tourists each year. One morning there I went out looking for Woolson, hoping to find the house where she had died. James had stayed always in the open light of the Grand Canal, and as one steams by on a vaporetto, the Palazzo Barbaro looks today as ageless and fine as in the photographs from his own era. Its Gothic windows seem almost natural, a rock formation sculpted by the very water around it. But the Casa Semitecolo had looked away from such splendor. The streets on my way were narrow and close, and every turn a dead end, as though the city had curled in upon itself. There was an extraordinary force in the metaphoric relation of her spaces to James’s own, and in the end I could not find her, could not say for sure which had been the house or the window.

  I had better luck the next week in Rome, where Woolson lies, as she wished, in the city’s Protestant Cemetery. James visited her each time he returned to the capital, and perhaps in doing so he recognized that she rests near the spot where he had put his own Daisy Miller; Daisy, who would “have appreciated one’s esteem.” Keats is buried in the older and relatively open part of the graveyard, where the tombs are widely spaced, and the city’s cats can spread themselves on the warm rocks in the sun. Woolson can be found in the newer and more crowded section, its walkways laid out as precisely as a grid of city streets. But her company looks good. Shelley is close by—someone had left a spray of red roses on his monument—and her stone is but two steps away from that of John Addington Symonds, whose life had so curiously crossed both James’s and her own. William Wetmore Story lies near as well, and then many other names of the kind that provide the footnotes of nineteenth-century culture. Woolson’s grave consists of a marble coping with a Celtic cross inside. It was planted with ivy, and well-tended. I found a pebble to lay on it, and then made my way home.

  PART FOUR

  SEX AND SERIALS, THE

  CONTINENT AND THE CRITICS

  Paris, La Rue de Rivoli. Anonymous, undated. Albumen print.

  (Courtesy of Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts)

  16.

  MAUPASSANT AND THE MONKEY

  SHE LIES ON her side in a sparse patch of clover, her head pillowed upon a shawl, and stretched out from the loose curls of her light red hair to the flash of crimson at her shoe. She’s all red, in fact—the hair matches the lips matches the dress, a russety thing with a black collar and cuffs that speaks of a New England autumn. Her lips are pursed and her eyes intent on the book she holds before her, the book that occupies the space where her breasts should be. The New Novel is one of the many watercolors of young women that Winslow Homer made in the 1870s. Some of them show girls sewing or standing at a blackboard, and one is even called Portrait of a Lady, a painting of a white-robed woman in a garden. The New Novel differs from these other pictures both in its horizontality—the sheet is twice as wide as it is high—and in the degree to which it mixes sensuality with innocence. Homer has positioned his subject on a green-gray field, with a sheltering wall of rock rising behind her. And she herself lies in the middle, one long slash of red, a girl so entirely focused upon her book that she would not, one imagines, even hear an approaching footstep; as though her reading has made her vulnerable.

  James was no great admirer of Homer’s. He acknowledged the painter’s skill, but in an 1875 review he claimed that Homer’s subject matter was banal to the point of ugliness, “suggestive of a dish of rural doughnuts and pie.” He was living in New York then, his last attempt at an American life, and couldn’t quite forgive Homer’s success in making a world of “calico sun-bonnets” seem as picturesque as Capri or Tangier. The New Novel was painted after James had settled in England. He probably never saw it, but he would have recognized the problem it defines. The dangerously absorbing pull of fiction was itself one of the novel’s great themes; a subject at least as old as Cervantes, who warned his readers against placing their trust in other people’s books. In the nineteenth century those warnings were usually couched in terms of the particular perils that novels presented for young women. Jane Austen had gotten a comedy out of her heroine’s visit to the eponymous country house of Northanger Abbey, allowing the girl to imagine it in terms of the Gothic romances she loves to read; and Flaubert made something brutal from the same essential idea in Madame Bovary, whose heroine can’t accept the fact that her own life isn’t closer to the world of Balzac or George Sand.

  Novels gave one a false impression of the way the world works; that was a standard complaint against them. But they might also reveal things that young people like Homer’s Yankee maiden shouldn’t yet know, and their dangers were the subject of an active debate. Some Victorian commentators even believed that reading could have physiological consequences, that too many thrilling books could damage a girl’s physical health. For our purposes those fears matter because they affected what novelists felt themselves free to write. James thought that they had made the whole of English fiction into something diffident and shy, committed to caution on the questions of sexual life. The best-known example of those fears is Dickens’s satiric account, in Our Mutual Friend, of a character called Podsnap, who objects to anything that might “bring a blush into the cheek of [a] young person.” Such persons were inevitably female; what a son might be allowed to read was an entirely different question. The fact of that blush suggests, however, that by the time such a book got into the house it was already too late; one can’t blush at what one doesn’t know.

  Nor was Podsnap pure fiction. New novels were almost ruinously expensive to buy. A standard three-volume first edition cost 31s. 6d., a figure frequently cited as equivalent to the weekly wages of a skilled artisan. It was steep even for James, over half of what he paid each week for his Bolton Street flat. Most readers who didn’t want to wait for a book’s 6s. cheap edition got them from commercial lending libraries instead; James himself had joined the largest of them, Mudie’s, during his first days in London. Founded in 1842, Mudie’s had branches all over England and was as important to the success of a new novel as Amazon is today; it sometimes took a full third of a book’s first edition. I’ll look more closely at the firm’s relation to the structure of the British book trade in a later chapter, but for now it’s enough to say that its owner, Charles Edward Mudie, firmly believed in the Podsnap principle. He was reluctant to stock any novel that couldn’t be read aloud in the family, and his power in the marketplace meant that his own standards usually prevailed, an unofficial censorship that kept both novelists and publishers away from certain subjects. One who
slipped through was the Irish writer George Moore, who in 1883 published an unusually frank novel about the art world called A Modern Lover. Yet though Moore found a publisher, he did not find a market, for Mudie almost immediately told him that he would not carry it. “Two ladies from the country” had objected to the book on moral grounds, and despite its strong reviews, he felt bound to respect the wishes of his customers.

  Still, many readers kicked against those restrictions. James Fitzjames Stephen was a Cambridge-educated lawyer who supplemented his earnings with journalism, and in 1857 he took on a review of Madame Bovary. No English translation of the novel would appear until 1886, but Stephen’s French was good and the book was already notorious, in part because Flaubert and his publishers had been indicted for obscenity; a rap they beat after a one-day trial. Stephen found the novel repellent, yet while it had some passages that “no English author of reputation” would have published, he wasn’t troubled by the presence of sexual issues as such. What he objected to instead was the absence of any suggestion that Emma’s adultery was wrong in itself, and not simply because of its consequences. Nevertheless, he thought this French writer offered a lesson for his British peers. The English fiction of the day contained nothing “which a modest man might not, with satisfaction to himself, read aloud to a young lady.” But that in itself was the problem. Was it really desirable that the only fiction available should be that “fit for young ladies to read?” Stephen admitted that there were passages in Othello that he himself couldn’t read aloud to a woman. Still, that restriction would have blotted many of Shakespeare’s best lines, and he suggested, with an eye on London’s streets, that such prudery had done nothing to improve English conduct.

  Fitzjames Stephen’s brother Leslie would become the father of Virginia Woolf, who praised him for giving her unfettered access to his library. Few fathers let their daughters browse so freely, and there were even some novelists who agreed with Podsnap. The prolific and fiercely Christian Margaret Oliphant is now little read, but she was said to be Queen Victoria’s favorite novelist and was a formidable critic for the Scottish monthly Blackwood’s. In an 1867 essay there she worried about the corrupting spread of French ideas about fiction, and claimed that the special pride of the English novel lay in a “cleanliness” that made it “free to all classes and feared by none.” English writers had agreed to relegate certain issues to their appropriate place in a scholarly or scientific literature, and in consequence the nation’s children could pick up any novel that came into the house. Nothing was locked away; the “domestic Index Expurgatorius” had been abolished. Which only begs Stephen’s question—should all fiction be written as if for the young?

  Evidently not in France, where, in Oliphant’s words, a girl often found “the novels of her own language . . . rigorously tabooed,” Madame Bovary very much included. In fact, the prosecutor at Flaubert’s trial spoke of his fear that the book could fall “into the hands of young women, sometimes of married women,” to whom it might give ideas. Most of the young Emma’s own early reading is illicit, romantic tales smuggled into her convent school by a seamstress. In contrast, the young woman in Homer’s painting reads outdoors, unsupervised, and alone. Her position may present dangers, but it’s also a natural place in which to find her. Yet such readers were more free, as Oliphant’s argument suggests, only insofar as the novelist was less. Restrictions on content were in inverse proportion to restrictions on access, and James himself didn’t think that bargain a good one.

  He took up the issue repeatedly, most famously in “The Art of Fiction.” Both the English and the American novel were, he argued, far too scrupulous in observing the distinction “between that which people know, and that which they agree to admit that they know . . . between what they talk of in conversation and what they talk of in print.” Such reticence kept the work from anything like a full engagement with its material, and maybe he would have agreed with the popular writer Eliza Lynn Linton, who in an 1890 symposium on “Candour in Fiction” suggested that English literature would be all the better if parents did put a lock on the bookcase. For almost no one thought that adolescents should simply be allowed to read everything. One possible exception was Thomas Hardy, who in his own contribution to that symposium wrote that whether young people “should read unvarnished

  fiction . . . [is] a different question from whether the novel ought to be exclusively addressed” to them. He claimed to take on that second question only, but added that most of society’s ideas about “budding womanhood” were false; the young could use some more accurate information.

  Still, English fiction was a good bit more open than these accounts suggest, albeit in a peculiar way. Its surface remained varnished indeed, but so long as one already knew what to look for, the truth was there to see. Or at least a part of it. Today many first-time readers of George Eliot’s Adam Bede are startled to learn of the unmarried Hetty Sorrel’s pregnancy; the first definite word of it comes with her arrest for the murder of her newborn child. Few adult Victorians were so surprised. They knew what would come of her secret meetings with the young squire. Stories of illegitimacy were common, and so were novels about bigamy, which allowed a heroine to have a sex life that was both within and thrillingly outside of marriage at once. But “there is a terrible coercion in our deeds,” as George Eliot herself wrote, and for Hetty, as for the title characters of Gaskell’s Ruth or Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, every sexual act—no, her every act of any kind—will have its consequences. Flaubert gives us the endlessly rocking carriage in which Emma and Léon bounce around Rouen and winkingly invites us to imagine what’s going on inside. George Eliot, in contrast, doesn’t show us what happens when the girl meets the boy, not merely because of English silence but because she’s more interested in the consequences of that meeting than she is in the moment itself. There is no event in an English novel but that leads to something, and in Victorian fiction it seems that no unmarried heroine can lose her virginity without getting pregnant. Usually the very first time—a biological law that doesn’t operate in France.

  James too had ways of defining the things his characters were “rather shy” of admitting. Pansy Osmond has read little except Walter Scott, that model of innocuous virtue, but even Isabel’s more extensive reading hasn’t prepared her as well as it might. Just before her marriage she receives a visit from Osmond’s sister, the Countess Gemini, who wants to gossip about Florentine indiscretions, her own included. But first the Countess decides to send Pansy out of the room. Isabel is twenty-three and on the verge of marriage, but still she exclaims that “I would rather hear nothing that Pansy may not.” Those words imply that she knows full well what she’s about to hear. They speak less to innocence than to a knowledge she would rather not have; they suggest the fears with which this particular young person will enter her future life.

  Guy de Maupassant wrote hundreds of short stories, many of them so frank in their account of sexual life that few young persons in England would have been allowed to read them. But there were some stories that even he couldn’t publish, stories he had to tell instead, and one of the best was about the drunken Englishman who tried to go for a swim off the Norman fishing village of Étretat. Maupassant was still a student then, an oarsman known more for his athleticism than for his brains, and he dove in for a rescue. By the time he reached the drowning man, a lifeboat had already hauled him out, but the Englishman was grateful for the boy’s effort, and invited him to lunch. The drunk lived with another fellow named Powell, who was said to be an English lord, and they kept a large monkey, who moved freely around the dining room. And every so often Powell would reach out and try to masturbate the animal—the French verb is branler. The monkey didn’t like it, but whenever he managed to escape, he would in turn rub up against the back of Maupassant’s neck. Afterward, his host offered a spontaneous translation of his own verses, and gave the French youth a liqueur that almost knocked him out. Only on a second, and fi
nal, visit did he notice an inscription from the Marquis de Sade over the cottage door.

  Maupassant loved to tell this story of his 1868 encounter with Algernon Charles Swinburne, a poet whose reputation still owes more to his alleged taste for the whip than to his innovations with meter and rhyme. He had been only eighteen, and “Boule de Suif,” the tale of a Norman prostitute that would make his reputation, was still a dozen years in the future. But he did have a family friend with whom to talk about writing. His mother had known Flaubert since childhood, and in Paris, Maupassant soon became a regular at the Sunday afternoon gatherings of Flaubert’s cenacle in the rue du Fauborg Saint-Honoré, the circle of writers that included Turgenev and Zola among others. “Le petit Maupassant” told his story on the 28th of February 1875 to a group that included Edmond de Goncourt, who set it down in his diary. At some point during the next winter he told it again, to a gathering that now included Henry James, who kept no diary but remembered everything. And over thirty years later James pulled the anecdote up in a pair of letters to Edmund Gosse and noted with bemusement just how little of the “right mental preparation” he could have had for it.

  As we have seen, James had come to Paris in November 1875, determined to settle in Europe at last. He found a two-bedroom flat in the rue de Luxembourg, a residential street in the center of the Right Bank’s opulent charms, with the Tuileries to one side and the Madeleine to the other. (Now renamed the rue Cambon, it’s best known as the site of Coco Chanel’s first boutique; her house there is today a museum.) The Opéra, the Louvre, the Palais Royal and the Comédie Française—all of them were within a short walk, a world whose splendor seemed to increase by the week. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 lay but a few years in the past. The civil conflict of the Paris Commune was even more recent, when in the aftermath of that war a popular uprising had been viciously suppressed, with thousands put before the firing squads. Yet to James the city appeared to have recovered so quickly that it looked “as if her sky had never known a cloud.” The shops offered anything one might desire, and the confectionery seemed as delicate as the work of a Renaissance goldsmith. In the Portrait of a Lady, James would send Isabel to Paris during the winter of 1872, just a few months after the Commune was put down; but really the majestic city of her visit belongs to the year of his own residence.