Stevenson offered what he called “A Humble Remonstrance” to James’s argument, but he would lose the debate, and forty years later E. M. Forster started his Aspects of the Novel by worrying over the fact that the novel tells a story. “That is the highest factor common to all novels, and I wish that it was not so, that it could be something different—melody, or perception of the truth, not this low atavastic form.” The modernist suspicion of story itself—Woolf had it too—dates to James, and to “The Art of Fiction” in particular. His aesthetic is predicated on the belief that we have the freedom to act and to choose, that character in the nonliterary sense makes fate. Other writers would develop a different model of the relation between character and incident; Hardy’s people, for example, often seem pursued by some external fate, by circumstances against which they are helpless. James did, however, recognize one particular challenge to his own ideas. He ended “The Art of Fiction” with the briefest of bows toward France in general and Zola in particular. James could not quite get himself to walk in the naturalist’s path, and thought that his peer’s great effort suffered from its overriding pessimism. He nevertheless preferred it to the “shallow optimism” of the English, and in the winter of 1884 he found in Paris what he told Howells was the only kind of new work he could respect.
That February, James gave himself a working vacation, crossing over to the French capital “on the principle that anything is quieter than London,” and taking a room for the month at the Hôtel de Hollande near the Palais Royal. It was the easiest of strolls to both the Louvre and his beloved Comédie Française, but on this trip he was concerned above all with his memories. Turgenev had died at the end of the previous summer, and Flaubert in 1880; James couldn’t walk the city’s streets without remembering them, and without recalling as well that earlier self who had come there almost a decade before. The young man had stayed on the edge of Flaubert’s group, listening more than talking, but he now decided to renew his acquaintance with its survivors. He had just written for the Century about Alphonse Daudet, the Provençal author of Lettres de mon Moulin, and he now asked a mutual friend, a journalist named Theodore Child, to arrange a meeting. Daudet invited the two of them for tea at his apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens and asked Zola and Edmond de Goncourt among others to meet the now-famous American. Child wrote about the meeting for the Atlantic’s Contributors’ Club, referring to James as “Mr X,” and in the telling describes these remnants of Flaubert’s cenacle as surprised to discover just who their guest was. “‘Why, I have known you a hundred and fifty years!’ exclaimed Daudet.” But while the French writers all remembered his face from those long-ago Sundays, they had none of them connected the face and the name.
Even in 1884, James’s books remained little-known in France. Few of his colleagues there read English, and though The American came out in French in 1880 and Daisy Miller in 1883, James later discouraged the translation of his work. He thought the process would make his very style “evaporate,” and in fact the Portrait would not have a French edition until 1933. But it was of style that he spoke with Daudet and the others, of the toil and torment with which they fought their way to the one right word. They thought everything that could be said in French had been said already, and Daudet talked enviously of Turgenev, working in a language that “had as yet so few foot-prints.” James thought they looked exhausted by it all, like “galley-slaves”; though Daudet’s own beautifully wasted face was also the product of syphilis. He himself had never struggled for a word—his difficulty lay in choosing from among the many that so readily came to him. Still, he respected their effort. They too saw the act of writing as one guided by conscious intention, and he admired the passion they brought to their job; most English fiction was a vomit of “tepid soap and water” in comparison.
That intelligence must have seemed especially appealing in the months after his immolation in the British magazines. None of the French writers believed that books should be as edible as puddings, and James drew on their sense of vocation in writing “The Art of Fiction” later that year. What he got from French fiction is a quality that Mario Vargas Llosa has defined as the double legacy of Madame Bovary. The Peruvian novelist argues that two distinct schools of fiction trace their descent from Flaubert. One finds its inspiration in such things as Flaubert’s account of the little drops of sweat on Emma Bovary’s shoulders. It dedicates itself to an almost photographic realism, trying always to extend the range of material with which the novel can deal. Zola worked in this spirit, and Maupassant in his stories of prostitutes, and most writers about war: an unflinching look at the represented subject. The other limb of Flaubert’s tree takes on his obsession with form, his hostility to cliché, and his awareness of the sounds and the colors of the language itself. Vargas Llosa links that to Proust and then to the nouveau roman, and also indeed to James. But I am not so sure, and for the American the two appear almost as inseparable as they were for Flaubert himself. Certainly, James saw the naturalists as engaged by questions of form; and certainly he too worried over the question of what could and could not be represented on the page. “The Art of Fiction” may speak of the novel as a finely balanced and organic whole; but it also bemoans the reticence of English fiction, its substitution of a moral qualm for a “moral passion.”
James told Howells that he saw him as “the great American naturalist.” The words must have made Howells shudder, and yet his 1882 A Modern Instance had offered a vision of marital dissolution that, physical questions aside, was very nearly as bleak as that of his Gallic contemporaries. Of course, James added, he still had “a tendency to fictitious glosses; but you are in the right path.” Howells would always pull himself up short, and two years later, in writing about Dostoevsky, he tried to say why. He admired Crime and Punishment, which he read in French translation, but thought it would be a mistake to imitate its relentlessness. Any novelist who wanted to give a true picture of American society would have to acknowledge what he called “the more smiling aspects of life.” Realism itself required him to register the possibility of happiness, and while Howells did recognize the Dostoevskian tragedy of American slavery, he also believed that in the 1880s his countrymen could hardly draw upon it in fiction. Someday they might; but in the Gilded Age the troubles most readily available to the American writer seemed to him those of private life, not public wrong.
Nor would James himself go far enough, albeit for different reasons. In 1876 he had thought Zola a writer of “brutal indecency,” but in 1903 he wrote that the battle scenes in La Débâcle, Zola’s 1892 novel about the Franco-Prussian War, were fully as rich as Tolstoy’s, and suggested that L’Assommoir in particular would have been destroyed by any shred of “timidity.” Its greatness depended on Zola’s willingness to soak himself in a world gone rank. He did, however, have one final reservation about the French fiction of his age. He was willing to grant Zola and Maupassant their subjects, and knew that the day of “hard and fast rules, a priori restrictions” was over. But he also thought that their concentration on the “carnal side of man” had limited their sense of human possibility. They saw all life in terms of lust, a matter of compulsion and desire, a struggle for existence in which people were at the mercy of forces they could neither resist nor control. That determinism was entirely at odds with his belief in the shaping force of character, in the freedom of conscious choice. He remained skeptical of the young Isabel Archer’s faith in Emersonian self-fashioning, but he was too much of an American not to feel the seductions of that faith himself. Those other Victorians named Freud and Nietzsche would tell us that Zola was the more nearly right of the two, but James always maintained that there was both a drama and a liberty in resisting desire, and that other things mattered as well.
James was right that the age of a priori restrictions was over. In an earlier chapter I touched on the challenge to Mudie’s de facto censorship of British fiction that was presented by cheap one-volume editions of the nove
ls the library refused to handle. Those novels included books by the Irish writer George Moore along with English translations of Zola. Both writers were published by the firm of Henry Viztelly, but other companies soon saw the advantage of a 6s. price, and the single-volume format also suited the wildly popular and relatively short adventure novels by writers like Stevenson or H. Rider Haggard that began to appear in the 1880s. The lag time between a novel’s first edition and its cheap reprint began to dwindle, the number of public libraries grew, and Mudie’s profits shrank. In 1894 the firm announced it would pay no more than 4s. for any volume of fiction, no matter its length, and that decision changed the whole structure of British publishing. It killed the triple-decker. At that price the three-volume novel, with its wide margins and heavy paper, could no longer turn a profit, and soon everything came out in a single inexpensive volume instead. Book sales boomed, and though Mudie’s lasted for decades more, it had in effect destroyed its own power. Zola’s challenge was not in itself sufficient to change that system. But it was necessary. In England the contents of his work required a change in the physical form of the novel itself, and that change made further experiments possible. The pornographic bookshop in which Conrad’s Secret Agent begins could not have been written about in Mudie’s era; nor could Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers.
The first British editions of James’s late novels appeared in a single volume. And he continued to think about the issues his reading of French had presented, above all in an 1899 essay called “The Future of the Novel.” English fiction had long insisted upon innocence and avoided any but the most cautious treatment of what he called, elliptically, “the constant world-renewal.” But the young were older than they used to be, and that omission could no longer stand. James imagined, however, that Anglo-American fiction would deal with sexual questions in a different way than the French had. Great changes were taking place in the condition of women, and though the New Woman of the nineties was not yet a suffragette, James still saw things shifting “deeply in the quiet.” Such women didn’t want to be protected from knowledge, and he thought they would use their own elbows to smash the windows of discretion. He suggested, moreover, that in doing so they wouldn’t show much consideration for the modesty of their erstwhile protectors. A generation later Virginia Woolf would echo that sentiment in her “Professions for Women,” noting that one of her difficulties in writing honestly about her own physical experience was the fact that men would be shocked; she felt “impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex.” James was not shocked. He was reticent, and he believed that an emphasis on passion alone would “falsify the total show.” But he looked forward to a fiction that might say the unsayable, a novel in which the truth could be told.
PART FIVE
PUTTING OUT THE LIGHTS
Henry James. By Katherine McClellan. 1905.
(Courtesy of Smith College Archives, Northampton, Massachusetts)
20.
THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD
ON THE LAST day of 1882, Henry James went out to the Cambridge Cemetery, along the Charles at the city’s western edge, and stood over a freshly filled grave. The air on that New Year’s Eve morning was sharp and clear, a sky of bright winter sunshine, and the novelist stayed there for a long time, muffled against the cold and holding a letter in his hands. The letter was dated from Bolton Street, but he had not written it. It was in his brother William’s hand instead, and James had carried it with him from London on a final voyage of filial duty. Now he opened it and began to read his brother’s sentences aloud, each phrase forming a puff of vapor in the empty space above a modest headstone, and then vanishing. “Darling old father,” he began, and as he read, it seemed as though the two sons were united in the communion of words, and united as well with the parent whose last illness had brought them no true sense of shock. Henry Sr. was old enough, and had written enough; he would not be forgotten. Death in such circumstances could not be “inharmonious.” There was another reason why their father’s death now seemed fitting, however, and it wasn’t the first time that James had stood in the graveyard that year.
As I have already noted, James left England a few days before the Portrait had concluded its serial run, and arrived in Boston on the first of November 1881. He had delayed his homecoming by a full year, having first planned to cross the Atlantic the summer before, only to decide that he could not travel with his novel half-done. Or at least he couldn’t go to America; Venice was another matter, but then he didn’t have a family there. Once finished, though, he could indeed return, and return as one who has known success. Still, the Quincy Street to which he came back was a very different place than the one he had left in the fall of 1875. William had married and had taken his wife and son to live on Beacon Hill, but James had shown him around London the year before. His sister Alice had visited him in England just that summer. Yet he had not seen his parents in six years, and no matter how many letters had gone over the ocean, he wasn’t prepared for the changes he now found in his mother. Mary James seemed “worn and shrunken,” and in time he would recognize the depth of her weariness.
He planned an American stay of five months, and wrote that he felt glad to have come, glad to have seen his family, though not simply for the pleasure of it. Renewing his relations with them was also a form of measurement. It allowed him to define both who he was, and who he had become, and one of the things that measurement immediately showed him was that he could not stay in Quincy Street. His hours and habits were different now, he was too used to an independent life; he could not simply turn himself into a son again. After just a few days he moved across the river to Boston, and took a room at the Brunswick Hotel on the corner of Clarendon and Boylston streets. The city’s Back Bay was still in the course of development, with trainloads of gravel arriving by the hour, but many of the finest buildings in this suddenly opulent neighborhood were already up. Henry and Clover Adams had a house nearby on the narrow, elegant Marlborough Street, and at his hotel James had for a neighbor the city’s most majestic temple, H. H. Richardson’s newly finished and neo-Romanesque Trinity Church.
One morning he sat in his hotel room over a notebook that he had bought at a stationer’s in Piccadilly and began to compose the résumé of his European life that is paradoxically known as the “American Journal” of 1881–82, the journal on which I’ve drawn throughout this book. The notebook offers a roster of the country houses he had visited and the clubs that had welcomed him, and it describes his books in terms of the places in which they were written: Paris, Florence, Venice, and above all the Bolton Street apartment that “ought to be sacred to me” as the place in which he had thought and learned and above all produced. James wrote in that hotel room with a quick and unerring fluency—the manuscript is without the scratchings of revision—and his pages are elegiac and anticipatory at once. They mark the beginning of the self-mythologizing that so colors the autobiographical writing of his later years; pages that define a narrative about the shape and nature of his own career, and in which his new sense of triumph reaches back a “hand to its younger brother, desire.”
James had kept occasional notes before, but this journal signals the beginning of a regular practice, not a diary but a cache of anecdotes on which his fiction would draw in the years to come. He was at the end of his thirties and told himself that he had no time to waste, or rather no impressions to waste; it was too late for him not to turn his every perception into usable material. Among those impressions, however, was the sense that, his family connections aside, the trip had not been necessary. Nothing he had yet seen in America had surprised him, and after a just a few weeks he already missed his London life. For he had long ago made his choice of the “old world—my choice, my need, my life. . . . My work lies there.” It lay there precisely because he was an American. James believed, at the very moment when the Gilded Age was beginning to assert its own self-sufficient power, that no American who wanted to take the ear
th’s full measure could avoid the burden of coming to terms with Europe. He wouldn’t have put it this way, but his country needed to know the world it was about to swallow.
But James’s notebook contains something more than a meditation on his own career. At the New Year he moved south, to Washington, where he spent much of his time with the Adamses. He met and liked the new president, Chester A. Arthur, who had succeeded to the office after the assassination of the Civil War hero James Garfield, and he also liked the city itself, a place where social life and conversation alike seemed more varied than in either Boston or New York. And he was in Washington when he got the news that sent him scrambling for the first train to the north. At the end of January his mother fell ill with a bronchial infection, and on the 29th he wrote her a tender note in which he described her as someone who had always hovered around other people’s sickbeds. It was hard for him to imagine her as sick herself, and he hoped that by the time she received his letter she would “have ceased to suffer as you must have been doing.” Indeed she had, though she never read those lines. Mary James seemed to rally, and then sank. She died that very day, and while a telegram had already gotten her favorite son en route to Boston, he arrived too late to see her.
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