Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  One more thing happened as he wrote What Maisie Knew. Thirty years of his ceaseless scrawl had had their effect, and by the summer of 1896 the physical act of writing had become a torture. The pain shot through his arm and hand, it put him on the edge of missed deadlines, and the printers “denounced” him for holding them up. He called it writer’s cramp. We would describe it as a repetitive motion injury, but the result was the same, and his daily work became ever more debilitating. He hired a shorthand specialist and typist named William MacAlpine and began to dictate, employing him at first for letters only. However, at some point in the composition of What Maisie Knew he also began to use MacAlpine for his fiction, and the process exaggerated the development of his increasingly elaborate late style. A few of his friends even thought they could spot the chapter in which he had begun to speak the novel out. I wouldn’t claim so much myself, but something does change just over halfway through, as the chapters lengthen and the dialogue begins to lose its speed. The novel quickens again at the finish, and yet in allowing James to reproduce the stretched cadences of his spoken voice, the typewriter was to mark him to the end.

  There were other movements in James’s life as he approached the new century. London had always satisfied and sustained him, it had always seemed to contain more of human complexity than anywhere else he had lived. But it exhausted him too. In his teens he had wandered Newport’s beaches and coves, and in the summer of 1895 he had searched out the ocean once more, staying on into the fall in the resort town of Torquay, on the mild Devonshire coast, and learning to ride a bicycle while his London flat was wired for electricity. The next summer he went to the coast again, this time taking a Sussex cottage that overlooked the ancient port of Rye. That stay changed his life, and in the years after his theatrical failure the quiet cobblestoned town would fill what he described as his “long-unassuaged desire” for a refuge from the city’s summer heat and social requirements alike. Rye might be sleepily unsophisticated, but in the season it was lively enough: not so small as to be wary of newcomers and yet sufficiently tight to have the air of an extended family. It was a place in which he might know and be known by everyone.

  Before the summer was over James began to think about finding something permanent in the area. It took a year, but then the news came that the owner of Rye’s best house had died and his heirs wanted a tenant. James grabbed it at once, a long lease at £70 a year, scarcely more than half of what he had paid in Bolton Street, and began to furnish it in “not too-delusive Chippendale and Sheraton.” Two years later he bought it outright. Rye sits on a hill and Lamb House sits at its top, on the outer corner of a right-angled street. A minute’s walk in one direction took him to the town’s high-towered church; a pew came with the house, by custom, though he hardly ever used it. On the other the pavement fell away, down to the shops of the High Street below. The house had a high Georgian doorway, a wide imposing hall, and a garden shut in by a wall that looked heavy with espaliered fruit trees. There were two guest bedrooms and an upstairs study, and in that garden was the studio in which he would pace out the great work of his later career.

  James did not abandon London. He kept his flat in De Vere Gardens for a while, and afterward had a bedroom at the Reform Club, a pied-à-terre that he took by the year. He spent most of the winter in the city, in fact, for in the rain and cold Rye often felt too far from a world of ready conversation. Nevertheless his move to Lamb House in the summer of 1898 did signal an enormous change in his habits. His travels had never before interrupted his work, but by now his fiction was dependent on MacAlpine and the sound of his heavy Remington typewriter. He couldn’t really write in hotels anymore, or even while staying with friends, and it’s no accident that his decision to make himself a home came after he had begun to dictate, after he had recognized that he couldn’t wander as freely as before. The Continent had once been a retreat from the distracting pace of the capital, and James had often left the city to finish a book in quiet, as he had done with the Portrait in 1881. Now from the concentrated solitude of home he would instead retire to the excitement of London itself; the home without which his late books would not have been possible. MacAlpine found rooms in Rye, as did all of James’s later typists, and the two men enjoyed bicycling together through the “wide, sheep-studded greenness” of the marshland that surrounded it. And James himself soon found a new vocation as a fussily benevolent host, welcoming guests and issuing elaborate instructions about the trains from Charing Cross.

  Still, he did continue to cross the Channel, and it was on a trip to Rome in the spring of 1899 that Henry James was surprised by one change more. Hendrik Andersen had a long straight nose and shadowed, penetrating eyes. He had been born in Norway but grew up in Newport, blond and lean and hauntingly handsome, and had come to Italy to learn the sculptor’s trade. Andersen dreamed of using his art to create a new “World-City” of peace and harmony, but the ambition he put into his monumental nudes would always outrun his talent. He was, however, good at attracting the interest of older male artists, and in Rome had found a sponsor in a Scottish aristocrat called Lord Ronald Gower, a fellow sculptor and friend of Oscar Wilde’s.

  He was twenty-seven when James met him, and the novelist felt such an immediate and unprecedented bolt of longing that it has to be called love. But his only way of acting upon it was to buy a piece of the young man’s work, a portrait bust of an Italian boy for which he paid £50, some 70 percent of his annual rent for Lamb House. He put the statue on a sideboard in the dining room, where it still rests today; he could see it from the table, and looked forward to Andersen’s promised visit. The sculptor stayed for only three days, however, and when James wrote to him that September, he sounded an atypically importunate note, asking him to “come back next summer and let me put you up for as long as you can possibly stay. There, mind you—it’s an engagement.”

  James had just turned fifty-six when he found himself so suddenly vulnerable to emotion, so open in his need for another person. He was acutely aware of the thirty years between them, and had an increasing awareness of his own mortality, one spurred by the shock of his professional crises; he also had a new and ever-more-settled sense of domesticity, and perhaps too the belief that age had brought safety. He offered to help his protégé set up a studio in Rye, and so fondly remembered a bicycle ride together that he couldn’t pass a particular corner “without thinking ever so tenderly of our charming spin homeward in the twilight and feeling again the strange perversity it made of that sort of thing being so soon over.” Andersen did visit again, playing the role of a coddled nephew, but though James’s heart rose at every prospect of seeing him, each stay was brief. He acknowledged the novelist’s kindness, but he was even more self-absorbed than most artists and thought of the older man chiefly in terms of the boost their friendship might give his career. As for James himself, if he ever recognized that his life had begun to imitate his art, that he had now stepped into his own first novel and taken on the role of the ever-encouraging patron Rowland Mallet to Andersen’s impetuous Roderick Hudson, he never admitted it. In time he lost his faith in the prospect of Andersen’s achievement, and cared less each year for the way his statues flaunted “their bellies and bottoms.” The “Beloved Boy!” of his early letters became simply “Dearest old Hendrik”; yet he kept his interest in the sculptor to the end.

  There would be other young men in James’s future, other crushes, other loves, and many letters written with a similarly eager tenderness. Some of those to whom he wrote did have an active sex life with other men. The journalist Morton Fullerton was one of them, and so were the minor novelists Howard Sturgis and Hugh Walpole. And in certain cautious and ambivalent ways James now began to admit both the presence and the nature of his own desire, though he always held himself apart from the world-within-a-world of London’s homosexual life, with its secret addresses and all but open bits of code, like the green carnations that Wilde had made famous. Indeed, Wilde hims
elf was much on James’s mind, and he wrote to William that the “squalid violence” of his fall had given him “an interest (of misery) that he never had for me—in any degree—before.” The arresting detail here is that interjected “in any degree.” It suggests an allusion to something the letter itself can’t say, as though Cambridge needed reassurance. Yet while James remained careful, he did increasingly allow a passionate if largely metaphoric physicality to enter the language with which he wrote to his male friends. When, for example, Fullerton told him of a troubled love affair in the fall of 1900, James offered to give him whatever help he needed, “absolutely holding out the assurance of it. Hold me then you with any squeeze; grip me with any grip; press me with any pressure; trust me with any trust.”

  With its faint echoes of John Donne, James’s imagery attempts to conjure up being, to create an impossible presence through words alone. The novelist lards his other correspondence with effusive compliments on the recipient’s bounty or beauty or benevolence or talent. In writing to Andersen and his successors, however, he did something that he hadn’t done in any extant earlier letters. He gave physical expression to emotion in a moment of physical absence, and expressed an active wish for the other person’s bodily presence. Not in bed. A bicycle ride will do, a squeeze of the hand, a seat across the dinner table, and he writes as often as not in the expectation that such things will be withheld. But he never wished for his brother’s company in these terms, or for that of any of his female correspondents. He didn’t write in these words to anyone of his own age, and if at times with these younger men he wore an avuncular mask, we need to remember that he was also an uncle in fact, and he did not sound this way with William’s adult children. Whether James ever knew anything more than this must remain an open question. But there can be no doubt that from the moment he met Hendrik Andersen he felt himself free to describe the gasping force of desire itself.

  The essayist and cartoonist Max Beerbohm is best remembered for the parodies he collected under the title of A Christmas Garland (1912), a book that snares every stylistic excess of such contemporaries as Conrad and Kipling, and above all those of James himself. In “The Mote in the Middle Distance” two children in their nursery look at the “pendulous” shapes hanging by the foot of their beds, and speculate about the treats Santa Claus has left “so blatantly suspended in the silhouettes of the two stockings.” But Beerbohm also did several caricature sketches of the novelist, and the most interesting of them shows him on one knee, bent to examine two pairs of shoes outside a hotel room door. The door remains shut, and James can only—we can only—infer what’s going on behind it from the simple presence of the shoes themselves, asking ourselves if they’re where they should be, the right shoes in front of the right room and the right people in that room. We peer down at those boots, and wonder about the connection between the private self and the public life, the life that’s left out in the hallway for everyone to see. We ask ourselves, indeed, if we can draw any conclusions at all, and Beerbohm’s 1904 sketch has a special relevance to the three long novels that James wrote in the early years of the new century.

  James had worked well in both What Maisie Knew and the short fiction of the fin de siècle, but these books amount to a break in scale as sharply dramatic as that which had led to The Portrait of a Lady itself. At once austere and grandiloquent, they are both modern and modernist in the pointillism with which they catch the human mind in the second-by-second act of perception, and modernist too in the symbolic force and weight of their language. Different readers will have their preferences among them. James himself thought The Ambassadors the most perfect of all, and to me The Golden Bowl captures the sublime terror of the inner life in a way that remains unmatched in American fiction. Still, the three are sufficiently alike to be dealt with as a group, and in each of them James returns to the international theme that, after finishing the Portrait, he had virtually surrendered as a novelistic subject. The books of his splendid last manner all hang on the question of Americans in Europe, and it’s no coincidence that in doing so they also concentrate on the great drama of an expanding consciousness.

  Each of them describes the encounter of innocence with a wider world, an access of understanding that proves punishing and liberating at once. But perhaps it is time to listen:

  It wasn’t till many days had passed that the Princess began to accept the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing, or indeed that of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense above all that she had made at a particular hour, made by the mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long present to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been occupying for months and months the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange tall tower of ivory, or perhaps some wonderful beautiful but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned at the overhanging eaves with silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly when stirred by chance airs.

  The Princess is named Maggie Verver, the last of James’s American girls, a dollar princess now married to an actual prince, an Italian whose family history fills whole rooms in the Vatican library. James will go on, in the rest of this long paragraph from the middle of The Golden Bowl, to describe Maggie’s walk around that imaginary pagoda, a walk in which its “great decorated surface” remains impenetrable. Some readers will take that as a description of the novelist’s own late style, and those of us who love it had better admit that. For it can look here as if James has given up on his audience. Or rather he’s stopped worrying about it, stopped trying to please it. He writes now as if he wants only to please himself, and to the degree that he’s concerned with his readers at all, it’s to pay the fit and the few the compliment of assuming that they’ll be able to follow. He is not, to my mind, as difficult as Joyce, not a creature of fragmentary allusions and broken syntax. Nor is he as elliptical as Faulkner or Woolf, in whom time itself can fall through the floor. But his doubly compounded sentences are indeed hard, and it’s worth taking a moment to ask why.

  Look at the words that James’s free indirect discourse assigns to the Princess: idea, something, postponement, recognition, situation. He doesn’t define any of them, but lets them stand instead as her mental shorthand for the family problem that’s developed in the book’s earlier chapters. Whatever the Princess may have done, the nouns that define it remain abstract, without any “solidity of specification.” Though “define” is the wrong word. Undefined, rather, and undefined not only because she herself knows to what those words refer, but also because she doesn’t, because she isn’t quite sure what she’s done. Maggie too is groping, as we are, or indeed as James himself is, walking the length of his studio and hunting for the next phrase as his typist sits at the keys. The Princess wants a name to put to her experience, something more precise than “situation.” She tries to take in a set of facts that she also wants to resist, and in staying close to her consciousness James must also stay close to the imprecision of her understanding. Paradoxically, however, he does so by becoming very precise indeed. He turns that situation into an extended architectural metaphor, in which Maggie scans that unreal pagoda’s elevation for “apertures and outlooks,” and looks for a door on which to knock. He uses such metaphors, both here and in all his late work, to give physical form to the disembodied perceptions of his characters’ moral and intellectual lives; and in reading, it’s sometimes hard to remember that Maggie’s hand has in fact touched nothing. For James’s reliance on such metaphors creates in turn a further abstraction, a further set of difficulties. His description isn’t tethered to a particular moment, but evokes instead a habitual practice, with whole weeks of Maggie’s inner life collapsed in a phrase. Yet no matter how often she walks around it, the pagoda still l
acks a door, and like the novelist himself in Beerbohm’s caricature, the Princess will need all her imagination to understand what’s inside, to understand what lies behind the eyes of that stranger, her husband.

  Many critics of an earlier generation found the late James to be the best of all, as some of their titles suggest—The Major Phase, The Ordeal of Consciousness, The Expense of Vision. I understand their claims, and yet rather than concentrate on James’s depiction of consciousness as such, I want to look instead at just who in these books perceives what. The anecdotal germs of The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors each concerned Americans in Europe, and as James worked over his idea for The Wings of the Dove, it too developed an international thrust. In The Ambassadors a man from Massachusetts tries to rescue a friend’s son from an affair with a married woman in Paris. James had a sly awareness of cliché, and knew his countrymen’s belief that “people’s moral scheme does break down” in France, but rather than resist that convention he decided to play with it. Lambert Strether refuses at the start to admit that Chad Newsome’s relation with Madame de Vionnet is above all a sexual one. He sees that she’s charming and that the boy has grown up, and insists that their attachment is “virtuous”; but at the end his own moral scheme cracks, and he recognizes that Chad’s affair has been both adulterous and virtuous. In The Wings of the Dove, sex becomes an instrument of power, the ground on which two of the book’s main characters meet to seal a pact against the third. The Golden Bowl depends on Maggie’s growing knowledge that her husband has betrayed her. At first the young woman recoils. Then she begins to understand just how much she needs and wants him, even as she realizes that in fighting to keep him the one thing she cannot do is to admit what she knows.