But James says other things about revision as well, and in his preface to The Golden Bowl suggests that in going back over his early books he has indeed tried to close the gap between “the march of my present attention . . . [and] the march of my original expression.” To some readers that statement suggests he has done more than simply retouch his work, that the concerns of his later career are now dominant. I myself see the Portrait’s second version as a fulfillment of its first; as though the book, like a person, had grown up while remaining in essence the same. Others find the changes so great as to make Isabel a different character in each edition, and in an influential essay the critic Nina Baym has even suggested that we have in effect two novels. That of 1906 is the work I’ve described as an interior drama, a modernist look at the question of Isabel’s “awareness.” The novel of 1881 is in contrast concerned with her “independence,” and written against the background of an ever-increasing discussion of women’s rights and opportunities. It is the product of its historical moment, and explores the questions James had once asked about his cousin Minny Temple; questions about the kind of life available to a spirited and intelligent girl in a world where her fate still largely depends upon marriage. In this account of the 1881 version, “the inner life is only one aspect of character, which is defined by behavior in a social context.”
That argument might hold if the novel had gone on as it had begun, if it had remained a book about a young woman’s progress through that social world. It might hold if it were not for Isabel’s night before the fire. But at the moment James set her there, in motionless activity, he discovered both the formal and the thematic preoccupations of his later career. His revisions to The Portrait of a Lady don’t change the novel so much as they make its opening chapters fit the book that it had by its last chapters become.
One of the first things James makes Isabel say is that she wants to know the things she shouldn’t do: not so she can do them, but so she may at least have the power to choose. And now the question of choice returns to the novel. Isabel doesn’t believe that she consciously chose to return to England. Her need to see Ralph was instantaneous; the obstacles came later. At Gardencourt, however, she has both the time and the distance she needs for reflection, and if she weren’t herself aware that she faces the forking paths of a decision, the book’s other characters are determined to remind her of it. Henrietta bluntly tells her not to return to Rome, and though Ralph can barely talk, he will stammer out the question to which we all want an answer: “Are you going back to him?” But Isabel hardly knows. She has promised little Pansy that she will return, though she cannot now remember just why she made that pledge. She tells Ralph that “I don’t think anything is over,” and yet her statement doesn’t lead us to any one conclusion. It suggests that if she does go back, Osmond will make her “a scene that will last always.” It also points, however, to the moment of strange exhilaration she feels on the train across Europe, when she recognizes that “life would be her business for a long time to come” and understands that she will someday be happy once more.
The last serial installment of the Portrait was a short one, just three tightly packed chapters. James uses the first of them to take his heroine from the train to Gardencourt, raising the question of choice in a series of oddly comic conversations with Henrietta. Yet the mood changes once he gets Isabel off into the country, and the novel’s penultimate chapter contains two of the most searching moments in all his work. The first of them comes in a conversation with Mrs. Touchett and is so brief that many readers might miss its importance. The old woman asks after Madame Merle, and Isabel admits they are no longer friends, that indeed she has done something “very bad.” When Mrs. Touchett asks what it was, however, all Isabel says is that “she made a convenience of me.” She has earlier recognized, during their meeting at the convent, that the woman has employed her as though she were a piece of hardware, an instrument or tool. She’s been used. Her money—her means—have made Serena Merle see her as a means, and one whose only purpose is to serve Pansy’s future. Isabel realizes that now, and recognizes that in treating her as a convenience her erstwhile friend has also treated her as something less than a person.
Scholars have often glossed this moment in terms of Kant’s idea of the categorical imperative. The philosopher writes that we must act so “as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.” Probably James himself didn’t know those words. He had an unmatched grasp of fiction in both English and French, and read widely in poetry, drama, and the literature of travel; he had as well a special fondness for memoirs of court and military life in the Napoleonic period. He did not, however, often turn to works of politics or philosophy, and had little interest in any form of German culture. William James would have known Kant’s 1785 argument, and so would George Eliot. Henry James didn’t need to, for Kant’s ethic is in many ways at one with the ethic of the realistic novel itself. Of course, James does employ some of his imaginary people in the service of others, using such figures as Henrietta to illuminate Isabel’s story. But he also and always suggests that his secondary characters have a case and a claim of their own; they are valuable in themselves, and not for what one can get out of them. People are an ends, not a means, and the novel as a form explores the gap between that ideal state in which they are not to be used and a world in which they always are. James would have gotten some of that from George Eliot, but it also characterizes the less grounded work of Balzac, in whose books the sinners are those who eat up the lives of others, consuming first their money, then their hearts, and sometimes even their souls. That ethic is present in Dickens’s anger against utilitarianism. It figures for Hawthorne in stories, like “The Birthmark,” of those who force their own vision upon others, and in Turgenev it carries a political meaning. His insistence upon starting with an individual character was itself a blow against autocracy, and in briefly exiling him to his estate after the 1852 publication of A Sportsman’s Sketches the Russian government showed that it knew it.
In James the great crime remains that of imposing your will upon another person, of using him or her to implement your own desires. The stern father of Washington Square, so determined to be right that he wrecks his daughter’s faint chance for happiness; the revolutionary cell of The Princess Casamassima, for whom Hyacinth Robinson is but an instrument; the parents and stepparents of What Maisie Knew, who treat the girl as a shuttlecock: all these have broken Kant’s law. Or look at The Turn of the Screw. If the ghosts in that famously problematic story are really there, then their wickedness lies in trying to control the fate of the tale’s children; if they aren’t, then its madwoman of a governess wants that same control. In either case the work carries the same weight. And finally there is “The Beast in the Jungle,” in which John Marcher grows so used to thinking of May Bertram as the repository of his secret that he never recognizes either her love or her own autonomous being. James worked that theme for the whole of his career, and his insistence on showing how people consume one another has made his biographers especially sensitive to the ways in which he might have done so himself. This, certainly, is the argument of Lyndall Gordon’s Private Life of Henry James, with its close examination of his relations with Minny Temple and Constance Fenimore Woolson alike.
Madame Merle is an easy case; Osmond too. Their desire comes unmixed with any pretense that what they want is for Isabel’s benefit too, and for them we may use the word “evil.” It is a quality that James thought his optimistic fellow-Americans had trouble recognizing. Isabel remains blind to it for years, and in her creator’s eyes the Emerson who stands behind her self-conception never overcame his own obliviousness of its very existence. Yet insofar as Pansy’s parents present us, for once, with something simple, they cannot hold the same disturbing interest as do James’s more ambiguous pictures, and in the Portrait the most troubling of those images is that of Ralph Touch
ett himself. For how else can we understand his desire to make Isabel rich—his attempt to gratify his own imagination by watching what she’ll do?
Ralph is generous indeed and yet he also wants to see his cousin going before the breeze. He thinks of himself as having bought a ticket for a show, and though he’s right in warning her about Osmond, his objections grow in part from his hope that she will, for his sake, do something better and more. When Isabel arrives at Gardencourt, he is too weak to say anything, and she sits with him for hours in silence. Only on the third day does he find the strength to speak, and when Isabel encourages him to be quiet, he murmurs that he will soon “have all eternity to rest.” Now is the moment for one final effort; and we recall that on his own deathbed, old Mr. Touchett had said much the same thing. At first, however, all that Isabel herself can do is cry, and yet in that wet face she finds a new resolution, finds that she has “lost all her shame, all wish to hide things.” For she wants Ralph to know that she has finally learned what he did for her, and so she sobs out an apology. “I never thanked you,” she moans, “I never spoke—I never was what I should be!”
Those words make Ralph turn away. He knows what he has done for her, what he has done to her. He has made her rich but “that was not happy,” and when he turns to face her once more, he tells Isabel that he believes he “ruined” her. The verb is deliberately chosen. It’s one most often attached to a seducer—a rake may ruin a girl for his pleasure—and by making him choose it James suggests Ralph’s awareness of what he has done. He has made Isabel vulnerable, someone attractive enough to be a victim, and he understands the blight that has flowed from his good intentions. Few readers will find it hard to distinguish Ralph’s use of Isabel from Osmond’s, and yet his own generosity has made him commit a weak version of the same crime: by amusing himself with his thoughts of her future he has failed to recognize the complexity of her own individual being. He has failed to feel the whole weight of his relations to her. Yet nobody could accuse him more than he accuses himself, and Isabel wants now only to admit to her own weakness and vanity. So the walls between them fall, and they see each other fully. They recognize each other as “an end withal,” and speak of ignorance and knowledge, of death and pain and the question of Isabel’s future; and finally they also speak about love. For pain will pass but love remains, and Ralph believes that in her heart “I shall be nearer to you than I have ever been.” On the last pages of his life the two of them can admit to each other what every reader has always known, and as they speak of what will last beyond his death, something odd seems to happen—something wonderful, uncanny, sublime. James no more invokes the idea of God or an afterlife than he did at Mr. Touchett’s deathbed. Nevertheless, the two of them seem, in confessing all, to float for a second beyond their bodies, unbound by any sense of self and with their minds moving at the end as one. It is as if their souls stood naked to one another, a flash so powerful—so rare, so brief—that it makes all the suffering needed to produce it seem worthwhile.
I cannot read this scene without tears.
The New York Edition took almost four years of steady work. The two volumes containing the Portrait appeared early in 1908, and Scribner issued the rest of the set over the next year and half, finishing up with The Golden Bowl in the summer of 1909. As physical objects, they fulfilled James’s hopes, substantial but not heavy in the hand, the paper deckle-edged and creamily thick, and the typeface of an elegant sobriety. Yet sticking to his publisher’s schedule became first a slog and then a nightmare, and the work had a cost beyond the moment. It finished him as a novelist. James was sixty-six when the edition’s final books came out, but though he continued to write stories, The Golden Bowl was the last long piece of fiction he managed to complete. The remainder of his writing life would be devoted to the retrospection that began with his biography of William Wetmore Story and continued with The American Scene and the edition’s own prefaces.
Still, most readers would rather have those eighteen prefaces than another long novel. James left some work in fragments at his death, but neither The Ivory Tower nor The Sense of the Past would have added to his achievement. These essays do. Sly, demanding, rigorous, and playful, they give us both our most vivid sense of their author’s mind at work and a newly rich vocabulary with which to think about the art of fiction. James’s description of how to handle a protagonist, his instructions on the shaping of narrative endings or the management of point of view, his strictures on the inadequacies of the first-person: all of it remains quotable, provocative, and useful. Before he was done with them, he realized that they could be gathered into a volume of their own, “a sort of comprehensive manual or vade-mecum,” though he shrank from the idea of writing a preface to his prefaces; such a collection finally appeared only in 1934, edited by R. P. Blackmur and called The Art of the Novel. James’s acolytes in succeeding generations would often go too far in systematizing his principles, trying to make his practice into a set of laws for fiction as a whole. But no novelist has left a more sustained account of his own creative process.
Not everyone liked them. A Cambridge friend found them too “self-occupied,” and believed that James’s attempt to show how he had managed it all destroyed any sense of fictional reality. Some reviewers used his criticism of his own work to club him down; look, even he had said that The Princess Casamassima wasn’t what it should be. Many readers thought, moreover, that in revising so heavily James had committed a kind of crime, and resented any alteration to the books they had known and loved for years. Yet the New York Edition soon presented him with another and bigger problem. Its separate volumes sold for $2 apiece, the same price as the 1881 American edition of the Portrait, but committing oneself to the series as a whole did make it expensive, and many potential customers already had his work on their shelves; the prefaces alone weren’t enough to tempt them. Scribner printed 1,500 copies of the first volumes, and hoped to sell them as a set. By the end of 1908, however, the American sales were still below 600, and Macmillan took just 100 for distribution in England. Nor were those figures his only trouble. James had as always hoped for a good market, and had worked so hard and so exclusively on the edition that his income from periodicals had virtually disappeared. Now he learned that his proceeds would be eaten up by Scribner’s obligation to pay his other publishers for the use of their copyrights, and in October 1908 his first royalty statement showed that he was due a derisory £7 14s 2d. Even a year later and with the edition complete, he was owed only $600. He told Pinker that the news delighted him; but by that time the damage had been done.
There are many explanations for the depression into which James fell at the end of 1909. He had long practiced an odd, faddish way of eating called “Fletcherizing” in which he chewed his food into liquid, but it now left him feeling undernourished and exhausted. He was periodically lamed by gout and believed he had begun to suffer from a heart condition like the one that would soon kill his brother William. And he had a family history as well, from his father’s “vastation” of the 1840s on to William’s own periods of despair in the years after the Civil War and Alice’s sense of perpetual dusk. Those things all contributed, but we cannot discount what he saw as his own professional disaster, a catastrophe that struck him even more powerfully than his earlier one in the theater. Then he had believed that he could go back to the novel, that he had in fiction a retreat and a future, but it now seemed that the years he had spent on his great edition had led only to the utter absence of an audience. James was in no danger of poverty; the income from the family properties in Syracuse would take care of his needs. Nevertheless, his royalty figures mattered as a mark of the value, in the broadest sense of the term, that readers placed upon his work: a mark of attention, esteem, and permanence, and one that counted all the more now that he could only manage the occasional story. Like many people suffering from depression, he persisted in denying it and claimed that his illness had a purely physical cause. In October he
wrote to William that he believed himself over the trials of his recent months, but at the New Year he could no longer get out of bed, and knew that he had entered a “black and heavy time.”
It was so black, indeed, that William James sent his oldest son, the novelist’s namesake, across the Atlantic to look after him. “Harry” James had trained as a lawyer and became both a successful businessman and a trustee of the American Academy in his uncle’s beloved Rome. And it is this third Henry James who has left the most affecting record of the novelist’s illness. For one night in March 1910 the old man simply broke, sobbing and stammering for hour after despairing hour while his nephew held his hand. He spoke of his own death, and of his sister Alice’s lingering illness, an illness that he feared might be his own fate as well. And he spoke too of his own failure, believing that he had lived to see “the frustration of all his hopes and ambitions.” The future could only grow worse.
The young man’s report was so alarming that his father decided that he must go over himself, ill though he was. The years since the turn of the century had brought William an unbroken chain of intellectual success, even as his heart grew ever more fluttery and weak. In 1900 he went for his first course of treatment at Bad Nauheim, the German spa that specialized in cardiac cases. He had needed regular injections of digitalis to get through the series of Edinburgh lectures that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, and yet his retirement from teaching only seemed to increase his pace. He filled lecture halls at one university after another, he turned his essays into such crucial volumes in American thought as Pragmatism and A Pluralistic Universe, and he enjoyed every minute of this belated flowering. But by the beginning of 1910 his disease kept him from his desk and made him plan another stay at Nauheim, though there was little that the period’s doctors could do for him. His son’s report was disturbing enough to make him sail early, however, and a note his wife wrote in Rye that June speaks to the family’s condition: “William cannot walk and Henry cannot smile.”
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