Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  Only once before had James known such a deep sense of personal loss—almost a dozen years earlier, when Minny Temple had died. Then his words had confirmed an absence; Minny was dead, and all he could do was write about it. His mother’s death said something else, and when he returned to his journal on February 9 it was to evoke everything he thought he had lost. He believed it impossible to describe “all that has gone down into the grave with her. She was our life, she was the house, she was the keystone of the arch. She held us together, and without her we are scattered reeds. She was patience, she was wisdom, she was exquisite maternity.” Yet in that loss he also felt himself possessed by a memory so powerful that it amounted to a sense of her presence, and he could not believe that death alone might bring an end to her love. Her being was immanent still. Henry James had nothing like an orthodox religious faith; no child of his father did, or could. But as William would write about the belief in an unseen world in his Varieties of Religious Experience and test the claims of psychics in a way that grew steadily less skeptical, so with the years the novelist defined his own sense of the numinous in a series of extraordinary ghost stories. The dead may exist only in the psychology of the living; that doesn’t make them any less real.

  We could tell a different story about Mary James. The novelist felt in retrospect that he had been blind to her “sweetness and beneficence” in the few short weeks he had spent in Boston; those few weeks after an absence of six years. Leon Edel writes, however, that James could only create that image of maternal solicitude in memory; in his fiction the mothers are “neither ideal nor ethereal.” Often they seem as dry and forbidding as the Portrait’s Mrs. Touchett, and Edel’s own bent makes him take that fiction as an always more faithful record of the writer’s emotions than either his letters or his journals. This seems a simplistic version of the relation between the life and the work. Yet many of her contemporaries did think of Mary James as stiff and conventional, an unlikely mother to such brilliant children, and the younger ones were indeed crushed by the internal contradictions of their family life.

  She was buried in the Cambridge Cemetery, in what then became the family plot; today the novelist lies there as well, as does his sister and William’s family too. Her funeral on February 1 was the last time that her children were all in the same place together. The ground was frozen and the snow high; they laid her in a temporary vault until spring. Wilky arrived from Milwaukee just a few hours before the service, crippled by both arthritis and his wounds; he died the next year of heart failure. Bob’s wife had enough money to allow him a peripatetic life, and the novelist once returned from abroad to find him staying, uninvited, in Bolton Street. He lived until 1910—waspishly funny, alchoholic, and unfaithful—having found in the end some satisfaction as a painter. And Alice has a story of her own, one of undiagnosable illness and long bedridden years spent trying, as she put it, to get herself dead. She passed her whole adult life as though waiting for the cancer that a decade later would kill her, and when she knew that it was coming at last, she wrote that death appeared to her as “the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact, when living seems life.”

  None of the James children escaped the irrationalities of their immediate milieu, and yet it’s mistaken to attribute their problems, in Edel’s words, to the “tensions and emotions generated by the mother which played against the easy compliance of the father.” It’s much more likely to have been the other way around. Mary James certainly aided and abetted the oddities of her husband. She was a pliant wife, and acceded far too easily to his peculiar ways of educating their children. But she probably gave her children whatever stability they knew, and their emotional turbulence can be more readily laid at their father’s door: the father with his sudden changes of direction and his own susceptibility to depression, to those moods in which, in his own best phrase, the “obscene bird of night” stood gibbering at his side.

  Two weeks after his mother’s death James wrote to Isabella Stewart Gardner that losing her had produced a sense of suffering utterly unlike anything he had ever experienced; he felt thankful that it could only happen but once. He added that he wished for the time to stay near his father, and told his other friends that he would probably remain in America for the rest of that year. He took rooms on Beacon Hill, and after working through the day he often crossed the Charles for dinner in Quincy Street. The February air felt solemn and still, and he always kept the memory of walking back in the starlight on the cold and empty roads. James had expected that his sister and father would need his care, but they now appeared to live in a “beneficent hush,” and as the weeks went by, they each seemed to grow in tranquility, convinced that there was some meaning in even the greatest loss. Alice looked stronger than she had in years; running her father’s house had given her some long-needed sense of purpose. And as for that father—well, he had “a way of his own in taking the sorrows of life.” He was physically feeble but at peace, and the novelist soon knew that he could count on returning to England that May.

  Henry Sr. did indeed have a way of his own. In early December the word came to Bolton Street that he was dying. William was on sabbatical in Paris that fall and, at the news, came over to England, where the brothers decided that Henry would be the one to go, carrying with him William’s note of farewell. He sailed from Southampton on December 12, his second voyage home in little more than a year, but the boat took nine days and as he stepped onto the dock in New York, he was given a letter from his sister. Henry Sr. had died three days before; William had already seen the news in the London papers, a notice sent through the transatlantic cable. Once again James had missed a parent’s deathbed, and this time he wouldn’t even make the funeral, which was scheduled for that very morning. Henry Sr. had asked that the entire ceremony consist of these words: “Here lies a man who has thought all his life, that the ceremonies attending birth, marriage and death were all damned nonsense.” The family could find no clergyman willing to pronounce them, and Alice arranged for a Unitarian service instead.

  James learned on his arrival that his father’s death was not due to any medical crisis as such, even though his doctors talked of a “softening of the brain.” Or perhaps a hardening, a hardening of purpose. One speaks of losing the will to live, but the old man willed himself to die, through what James described as a form of self-starvation. He simply refused to eat, and yet never appeared to suffer. Instead he held court at his sickbed, welcoming his friends, talking even as his strength faded, explaining that he was about to enter into a spiritual existence and did not wish to maintain the “mere form” of bodily life. James wrote to William that to many people this would all seem strange, and yet “taking father as he was—almost natural.” Years before, in one of her deepest depressions, Alice had asked her father whether the desire to kill herself was sinful. He had told her it wasn’t, and knowing that it was not forbidden had robbed the idea of its attraction, and calmed her. Now he himself had chosen death, and though none of his children called it suicide, the novelist recognized that Henry Sr. had indeed prayed and wished for that death. He prayed for it because he did not recognize it as an ending—because he believed he was traveling to a reunion with his wife, whom he claimed with his last words to see.

  Once in Boston the novelist collapsed and spent the next week in bed with what was probably a migraine. But on the year’s last day he was finally able to go out to the Cambridge Cemetery, stand by his parents’ graves, and read William’s letter aloud in the cold of the dying year. He stood there for a long time, remaining on after his voice had fallen into silence, and he later told William that he was sure their father had “heard somewhere” that message of farewell. And yet just where is somewhere? William himself had written to the dying man about the afterlife with a mix of hope and open doubt, while to Henry standing there in Cambridge it was “difficult not to believe that [their parents] were not united again in some consciousness of my belief.” But tha
t sentence claims less than it seems. Even leaving its double negative aside, it suggests that it is only his own mind that calls his parents’ departed selves into being.

  Their father’s death left his children, in William’s words, “feeling somewhat unprotected, old as we are.” Not that they all reacted in the same way, and perhaps that statement best describes William himself, the son who had stayed near home. At Harvard he had taught physiology, psychology, and philosophy in succession without being able to choose between them or—as yet—to combine them. His achievement lay still in the future, while his younger brother was publishing two books a year. That brother, meanwhile, quickly moved to drop the last vestige of parental protection. Out of habit he still sometimes signed his letters as “Henry James, Jr.” but that spring he asked his publishers to remove the “Jr.” from the title page of any new books, and he never published under that name again. Each of the James children inherited a capital of around $19,000, more than they had expected and most of it invested in real estate that they continued to hold in common. The novelist made his share over to Alice; only after she died did he receive an independent income, one that eventually amounted to about £600 a year.

  His parents’ deaths had bookended the year, and though it didn’t leave him feeling so vulnerable as William, it did make him see himself as a solitary figure. Nothing James wrote about his parents is so effusive as the letters he sent home in 1870 when he learned of Minny Temple’s death. Indeed, he did not write about them at all, his letters and journal aside, until he himself was old: A Small Boy and Others, the first volume of his autobiography, appeared only in 1913, the year he turned seventy. Once their funerals were over, he did not mourn in public. But over the next few years he did often write about the deaths of others, working his way through a series of extraordinary obituary essays about his literary forebears. Flaubert had died in 1880, as I noted in the last chapter; he went in May, when James was still at work upon the Portrait’s first chapters. George Eliot died that December, then Emerson in April 1882 and Trollope just a few weeks before Henry Sr.; and finally Turgenev in September 1883, the first great writer whom he had been able to count as a friend. James had known them all, and he wrote about them all in the years immediately following Henry Sr.’s death. Some of these pieces may have begun with an editor’s request, and their sheer number doubtless owes something to the accidents of death itself. Still, James usually chose his own subjects, and what he chose, at this moment, was to mark the passing of his parents’ generation.

  Over the years he became an expert undertaker, fixing the terms and sealing the vault of one reputation after another. Later essays looked at both Zola and Robert Browning, and one of his later stories even begins with the writing of an obituary. In “Greville Fane” a journalist assigned to come up with a bit on the death of a popular novelist finds it hard to fulfill his editor’s charge that he “let her off easy, but not too easy.” That’s exactly what James himself did in his 1883 essay on Trollope; he got many things wrong about the most prolific of the great Victorians, but in praising his “complete appreciation of the usual,” he nevertheless set the terms of debate for the next century. James wrote the piece that spring in Boston, in the house to which Alice and Henry Sr. had moved after his mother’s death; wrote it, indeed, while living in his father’s own room. So too was his study of Emerson, one that found its occasion in an edition of the Transcendentalist’s correspondence with Thomas Carlyle. In writing, James suggested that their letters belonged not only to a vanished generation, but also to a vanished world. The people and things that concerned them had faded into “a past which is already remote,” and those two difficult minds were now for the ages. Which meant, in a way, that they weren’t for his, and James thought that Emerson’s optimism in particular was unsustainable, the voice of an earlier America, unmarked by civil war.

  The most interesting of these essays is that on Turgenev. Written immediately after his death, it appeared in the January 1884 issue of the Atlantic, and begins on a rhetorical note that even for James seems high: “When the mortal remains of Ivan Turgenieff . . .” The piece differs from James’s other obituaries in saying almost nothing about the writer’s work. Its details are instead personal, and evoke such things as the look of Turgenev’s green sitting room in the rue de Douai, or his physical appearance, tall and broad-shouldered but with “an air of neglected strength.” James recalls fragments of conversation, the raciness of Turgenev’s spoken French, and their Sunday afternoons at Flaubert’s; and he remembers too that the Russian had a reservoir of experience into which neither a young American nor their French colleagues could enter. The article is fond, but it’s something more as well, and ends with his memory of their last meeting, in November 1882, when they shared a ride into Paris from the countryside. The older man was wracked by gout, and yet despite his suffering his talk kept up its accustomed flow of brilliance. The coach dropped James on an outer boulevard, and he could hear the sounds of a Punch and Judy show nearby. Then “I bade him good-bye at the carriage window, and never saw him again.” At that moment the essay becomes filial.

  A dozen years later James published a tale called “The Altar of the Dead,” in which the main character, Stransom, remains ever full of the memory of his long-dead fiancée, “ruled by a pale ghost . . . ordered by a sovereign presence.” Stransom isn’t a believing Christian, but he still arranges to take charge of a chapel in an out-of-the-way church, and makes its altar into a burning forest of candles, tapers that in his mind are numbered and named for each of his lost friends, “a silent roll-call of his Dead.” The tale is usually counted among James’s ghost stories, but it differs from such pieces as “The Friends of the Friends” or “The Real Right Thing” in that there’s never any question of an apparition. Its ghosts are those of memory alone. James had suffered two more great losses by then: his sister Alice in 1892 and Constance Fenimore Woolson in 1894. He was fifty-two, he was beginning to think of himself as old, and had already begun to build an altar of his own. Only he built it in words, and with time he came to speak of his own dead in increasingly hallowed terms. He conjured the presence of those he had lost with a retrospective tenderness that became in itself a part of the myth he made about his own life. Indeed that summoning of the past would dominate the final years of his career, whether in the prefaces to the New York Edition or in the memories that he at last set down as he himself prepared to cross the bar.

  To the younger James, however, those dead writers, his predecessors, might well have suggested something else. That on Turgenev aside, his obituary essays don’t speak with any special reverence. Even his 1885 piece on George Eliot offers a sharp account of her limitations, and, taken as a group, his articles of the 1880s depict an era that in its passing has left him not so much unprotected as alone. The deaths of such figures as Trollope and Flaubert meant that there was no longer a great and still-present older generation to whom he could compare himself, and against whom he might be judged. He himself now set the standard, and the English critics who thought the claims of the American school presumptuous could only point to the past by way of contrast; they had no living alternative whom they might praise instead.

  James was still a young writer when he began the Portrait, a book intended to be his masterpiece in the old sense of the term, an announcement that he had arrived and was open for business. Then suddenly the competition was gone. He had some space, he could swing his arm freely, and one result of that was the voice of confident mastery in every sentence of his 1884 “Art of Fiction.” Years before, he had used his expatriation to rescue himself. He had broken away, and the deaths of his different elders in the early 1880s now underlined that sense of independence. Hard work made him feel happy and strong, and in his “American Journal” he wrote that he now expected himself to “do something great.” He already had. But not even The Portrait of a Lady was an achievement on which he would choose to rest.

  21.
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br />   “I WAS PERFECTLY FREE”

  SOMETHING GREAT. ISABEL’S vigil by the fireplace had ended with her memory of the moment she had interrupted, of the tableau in which “her husband and Madame Merle . . . [are] grouped unconsciously and familiarly.” But she cannot yet puzzle it out, and having left both her and us with that constituted scene, James then does something surprising. He puts the image behind him. He doesn’t allow Isabel to think about it for some 80 pages, as though it were all forgotten, and masks that omission by making the novel itself grow busy with the exits and entrances of its different characters, walking both Henrietta and Caspar Goodwood on and off the stage, and sending Warburton back to an English future and, eventually, an English bride.

  In all this, the novel seems to pause, as though waiting for its narrative yeast to work, and the chapters that follow Isabel’s night before the fire paradoxically contain some of the finest comic writing of James’s entire career. A lot of the laughter depends on Osmond’s sister, the Countess Gemini, who is said to have had fifteen lovers and to have given her heart away “in small pieces, like a wedding cake.” Bored in Florence, she is delighted when Osmond invites her down to the Palazzo Roccanera. She knows she’s not as intellectual as Isabel but still believes she has mind “enough to do justice to Rome—not the ruins and the catacombs, not even perhaps the church-ceremonies and the scenery; but certainly to all the rest.” That semicolon is beautifully timed, and James’s use of the Countess recalls the appearance of the drunken porter in Macbeth, just after the murder of the king. The sharp lowering of tone makes us realize how tense everything around her has become. Still, Amy Osmond’s presence isn’t as trivial as it seems. Nor is the whole business of Pansy’s prospective marriage simply a detour. On a first reading it may look as inconsequential as the girl herself, and yet it’s precisely what James will use to bring us back to that riddling tableau.