The Golden Bowl never uses the word “adultery,” and yet it remains as central to that book’s concerns as it does to Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina. But there is one crucial difference between them, as the cultural historian Barbara Leckie has argued. The European novels concern themselves with passion, the passion that starts an affair and sustains it, and whose waning brings despair. Their concern lies, that is, with the guilty. James gives his interest to the wronged spouse instead—to Isabel in the Portrait, and above all to Maggie. He’s drawn not to the sex as such, but rather to the process of finding out about it, to a mental act of discovery and not a bodily one. He is interested, finally, in epistemology, in how his characters know what they come, in the end, to know. Or at least Isabel’s knowledge comes at the end. Maggie’s in contrast arrives early, and James gives her many more pages in which to discover how to live with it, pages in which she learns not to shy away from what she has learned but rather to move toward it.
For these late novels don’t simply depict a developing consciousness. They also take sex itself as the focal point of that development. Each of them catches its breath at its power and its mystery, catches it and then finds it again in a newly powerful understanding of the knowledge it brings of the world, the other, and above all of the self. In a way, that had always been James’s subject, in Daisy Miller or What Maisie Knew or even in the Portrait. He had always been fascinated by the struggle to acknowledge the facts of sexual life, by characters who no more possess a language in which to admit what they know than did English fiction itself. But something had changed by the time he began to write The Ambassadors. Both Strether and Maggie can take in those facts in a way that neither Isabel nor Winterbourne can ever quite manage. They meet their difficulty, and are far from powerless in the face of it; Maggie in particular finds a personal force that she could never before have imagined. Probably some of that change came from the fact that 1901 wasn’t 1881, that the intervening years had seen the work of Hardy and the translation of Zola; and they had seen too the waning power of the circulating libraries. James had always argued on behalf of a greater frankness, hoping to close the gap between what people might say in private and what they could say in print. There would be many battles to come over the question of candor in fiction; nevertheless the range of admissible knowledge had grown. Still, that change in what James’s characters are capable of must also have had a source in the author’s own life. Probably we can attribute it, in some unquantifiable and unspecified way, to what his own knee-trembling love for Hendrik Andersen had taught him.
So make a Venn diagram, with four circles called Europe, America, sex, and consciousness. The Portrait of a Lady lies at their overlap, so does Daisy Miller, and so do these late books; not all of James’s great work, but enough of it, enough to call it his most characteristic terrain. It was a place to which he had returned after twenty years—returned when he found he had something new to say about it. For now the moral shading on the map has changed. In The Ambassadors the people who stay at home in New England see Europe as a trap. They know its inveigling ways, these cultivated descendents of the Puritans, readers of the Atlantic and even perhaps of Henry James. They know its iniquitous sophistication—they know all about Madame Merle, an American who has, as it were, gone native. That’s what Strether expects to find in Paris and yet doesn’t, as his soul expands beyond his own earlier standards; grows even as he recognizes that his own liberation has come too late. But Maggie Verver will rewrite Isabel’s history. She learns of the past that her husband and her best friend have shared between them. She learns of it, and suffers from it, and she will survive it too, as she moves on with him into a new life. Europe may have done a job on her mind, but it has also made her grow up.
Once before, James had marked his own sense of accomplishment with a voyage, sailing back to America on the eve of the Portrait’s 1881 publication. He had gone to see what he called les miens, and gone with full hands, believing that he had something to show for his time abroad. Now he heard that inner note of achievement once more. He knew as he worked upon The Golden Bowl that in these last years he had written at a pace and a pitch he had never before been able to sustain. He had a renewed conviction of his own force, and confessed in a letter that his native land had begun to look romantic in a way that England itself had “hugely and ingeniously ceased to be.” Time and change and absence had made his old country seem exotic, and the trip now appeared as if it might be the one true adventure left to him. He was, admittedly, afraid that at sixty his habits had become too rigid for even a little “molehill” of a six-month visit. But he got rid of his fears, found a tenant for Lamb House, and sailed on August 24, 1904, for what he thought would be his last visit to America. It was twenty-one years, almost to the day, since he had seen his birthplace.
Everywhere he found himself surprised by the country’s size: not only by the physical stretch of the land, but also by the changed scale of the things he had once known. The Washington Square of his childhood had spoken of a smaller and slower world, one now overpainted by a modernity that seemed interchangeable with energy itself. New York Harbor throbbed with whistles and explosions, it rushed and shrieked in an intricate dance, a “steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws.” The bridges looked like pistons, and the skyscrapers told him of a New York that never meant to be old. Such buildings were all “expensively provisional,” and each individual one of them would survive only until the city’s money had invented something bigger and better, more profitable and doubtless more temporary. Indeed, everything everywhere was bigger—hotels, and Harvard, and the summer houses of Newport, where the seacoast of his early manhood had been conquered by the whited sepulchres of the new American plutocracy, by the “distressful, inevitable waste” of a wealth so grand that it could dispense with history or taste.
In their imitation of European splendor those houses paradoxically reminded him of his own deliberate alienation. So did his visit to a Yiddish theater in New York. His brother William had warned that American speech and manners might shock him, but James was less startled than fascinated by his evening on the Lower East Side. The families he saw there had kept the customs of their origins in Danzig or Budapest. Yet if they spoke Yiddish, they also spoke a fluent New Yorkese, and their very ease and carriage owed less to “the moral identity of German or Slav” than it did to the spirit of 1776. James confessed himself puzzled here, and an earlier visit to Ellis Island had made him uncomfortable. Even in living abroad he had assumed that America was his, but he now had a haunting awareness of his own dispossession, a sense that the country belonged to somebody else. These immigrants had assimilated “our heritage and point of view” in a way that made him feel as though he himself were the foreigner, and he wondered what such new citizens might make of the older New York and New England from which he had come. Long before, he had written that it was a complex fate to be an American, but as he traveled throughout his old homeland, he began to see more whorls and layers in that complexity than the young man had ever dreamed of.
James had thought that his two countries might merge into one English-speaking culture; it had been the wager of his career. Now he began to understand that the ocean between them wasn’t so much a girdle as a gap. The eleven months of his American tour showed him both that he had become more English than he knew, and that his birthplace had made a culture of its own, albeit one about which he would always be ambivalent. He visited William’s summer house in the White Mountains, and saw old friends wherever he went; he traveled down through the south to Florida, and then as far west as San Diego. Yet each mile made him fear that the land’s very spread and bounty might lead to the permanent “triumph of the superficial and the apotheosis of the raw,” and it was out of that fear, that ambivalence, that he wrote The American Scene, a book that on its best pages is as brilliant as, if less systematic than, Alexis de Tocqueville’s similarly unea
sy journey.
His trip had other results, however, and among them was the depth of his new friendship with Edith Wharton, at whose house in the Berkshires he stayed in the fall of 1904. The two had met the year before in England, and James had already issued his famous command that she should “Do New York!” She should take him as a negative example and stick to an American subject, “the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for,” the opportunity that was uniquely hers. Wharton would accept that advice in The House of Mirth and its many successors, while doing much else besides, and their friendship—their letters and visits, their excursions in Wharton’s chauffeur-driven Panhard—would be one of the great pleasures of James’s last years.
The other great consequence of his American journey took the form of a publisher’s contract. James appeared under many imprints over the course of his career, but his relations with the long-established firm of Scribner were recent. Nevertheless the house had released both The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl, and their books were as handsomely made as their Beaux-Arts office building on Fifth Avenue. As early as 1900 the company had cabled James’s agent, J. B. Pinker, to ask “Would You Care on any terms to arrange for Collected Edition Henry James,” and negotiating such an edition was a secondary motive in his American voyage. James let the issue hang through the fall, but in the spring of 1905 he asked Pinker to come settle the terms of an agreement in person, and in July he himself wrote the publisher to describe his plans and desires. He had loved the elegance of their job on The Golden Bowl and hoped for something similar. He planned to sift out his lesser pieces and to revise his work where necessary “as to expression, turn of sentence, and the question of surface generally.” He promised to write a preface for each book and suggested that the whole be called the “New York Edition” in honor of his “native city.” James would spend the next four years at work on it. He had had his second act, he had found his late manner, and his long shelf of books now had the coherence and the sense of teleology that it lacked a decade before. The New York Edition would stand as the final glory of his long career, and perhaps its last disaster too.
24.
ENDGAME
THE OLD MAN in Rye drew his pen through a line and wrote two in its place; he gave a colloquial twist to a moment of dialogue and eliminated a demonstrative pronoun. He set aside a scribbled-over sheet for his typist and refined his sense of a character with a newly vivid image. James spent his mornings in that Edwardian spring of 1906 at work on The American Scene, recounting his impressions of such things as the “rushing hotels” of a Pullman train and the “hot-looking stars” of a Florida sky. He stopped for lunch at half past one, and then went out into the town’s quiet streets; perhaps delivering an order to the butcher as he went or pausing on a corner to chat with another of its 3,900 inhabitants. Then in the late afternoon he returned to a desk spread with the pasted-up sheets of The Portrait of a Lady, each of them with a wide margin in which he could scrawl around the set type of the book’s early self.
On that desk James hoped to build himself a monument. Other novelists had revised their published work; others had written introductions. No one had yet done so on this scale; no one has done so since. James wanted to smooth down his career’s rough edges, and he used the New York Edition to suggest that his oeuvre had some overarching shape. He threw his emphasis upon the international theme, eliminating a few purely American works like Washington Square, and in doing so both underlined the power of his final manner and cast its retrospective majesty over his earlier work. He told his friends, moreover, that he was always astonished at how “filthily” he used to write, and his secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, noted that he believed his first books all needed to be redone before they were “fit for appearance in the company” of his later ones. That was true even of the Portrait, successful though it had been. Every page of the novel now had its changes, every page differed from the version his readers had known for a quarter of a century. Yet those revisions were meant to do something more than kick his early style into line. For he also wanted, in Bosanquet’s words, to uncover the “values implicit in his early works, the retrieval of neglected opportunities,” and her two statements point in effect to different things. Both suggest James’s sense of the inadequacies of that work, but the one stresses its problems and the other its potentialities, the things he might do that his younger self could not.
Some of those problems would remain insoluble; he couldn’t alter what he now saw as The American’s false and melodramatic conclusion. Other changes came at a cost, and many readers prefer the initial versions of his early tales, where his relatively lean narrative prose better suits the comic bubble of his dialogue. With the Portrait, however, his revisions speak to his sense of its potential. Its style was already rich enough to sustain the black brocade of his later manner; the novel’s foundations were sound and its windows in all the right places. Many of his revisions seem inconsequential, substituting a proper name for a pronoun, or making a character “hint” instead of “intimate.” Others are substantial, and James took an additional care in establishing his people. So his opening description of Madame Merle now gives her an eye “incapable of stupidity,” adding an early note of danger to a character who was at first simply enigmatic.
But of course the largest changes occur in his account of Isabel, and they will have a special importance in the last pages of the novel’s last chapter. For the moment, however, I’ll simply look at one of them, unimportant in itself, as a way to illustrate their burden. It comes after Isabel has left Rome and Osmond to sit at Ralph Touchett’s deathbed; after she has crossed the Channel to fall into Henrietta Stackpole’s arms at Charing Cross; after she has gone down to Gardencourt, where Ralph’s new servants don’t recognize her and she has to wait while her name is brought up to her aunt. She waits a long time, in this place where her story began, and in the book’s first version James had written that “she grew impatient at last; she grew nervous and even frightened.” The words say enough, but by 1906 he wanted to say something more, and now Isabel grows “nervous and scared—as scared as if the objects about her had begun to show for conscious things, watching her trouble with grotesque grimaces.”
Those grimaces recall the terrors that had crowded in at the start of her fireside vigil, and James’s revision does two things. He shows us the shape of Isabel’s fears in a way that takes us far more deeply into her mind, and he figures that interior plunge in physical terms. The very furniture of these “wide brown rooms” now glows with malicious life, as though the material world were responsive to the terms of her inner being; as if thought itself had all the flex and thrust of a body. In 1944 the Harvard critic F. O. Matthiessen noted, in the first systematic study of these revisions, that many of the changes stress the presence of Isabel’s own consciousness as such, and indeed often substitute that word for others. When she first meets Osmond, for example, she’s no longer merely “entertained,” but has a “private thrill [in] the consciousness of a new relation.” Few of these small changes will register upon even a careful reader as he or she moves from line to line. Nevertheless, they have great cumulative force, and that additional access of interiority does make the 1906 Portrait more closely resemble James’s last books. It reminds us that the novel isn’t finally about a young woman’s choice of a husband, or even about Americans in Europe. It is instead a drama of the perceiving mind, and one that, like The Ambassadors, hangs upon the point of view of its protagonist.
That might suggest James has simply revised the book in the light of his own later interests. But there’s something more complicated here, and we can best understand it by looking at the different ways in which his prefaces define the act of revision. Sometimes he saw his books in organic terms, as living things that were necessarily capable of growth and change. They were his children, and could be trained up into a presentable maturity. More often he accounted for them in pict
orial terms, as if he were putting each story back up on the easel and asking himself what “time and the weather” had done to it. Some had faded, and no varnish could bring them back. Other seemed to contain “a few buried secrets,” and as he went to work with his brush and his sponge, they began to flush into color. An expression could be heightened, a pose adjusted, but he saw himself as working on what was already implicitly present, allowing the “latent” aspects of an old work to vibrate into life. This is what Bosanquet meant in speaking of the New York Edition as a recovery of the chances he’d missed. By particularizing Isabel’s fears at Gardencourt, by giving an expressive power to the room itself, James recalls not only her own midnight thoughts, but also the link she makes between her suffering and Rome’s long record of misery. It tells us how much has happened to her since she first stepped onto that English lawn; tells us that even in returning to it she has not managed to escape her own life.
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