Portrait of A Novel
Page 40
CS—Henry James, Complete Stories. 5 vols. New York: Library of America, 1996–99. Reference given with number added (e.g. CS1) to indicate volume.
CTW—Henry James, Collected Travel Writing. Vol. 1: Great Britain and America. Vol. 2: The Continent. New York: Library of America, 1993.
E—Leon Edel, Henry James. 5 vols. New York: Lippincott, 1953–72.
LC—Henry James, Literary Criticism. Vol. 1: Essays, American and English Writers. Vol. 2: European Writers and The Prefaces. New York: Library of America, 1984.
LFL—Michael Anesko, Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
N—Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers, The Complete Notebooks of Henry James. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.
P—The Portrait of a Lady (1st American ed.), in Henry James, Novels, 1881–1886. New York: Library of America, 1985.
PLHJ—Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and his Art. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.
PNY—The Portrait of a Lady (New York Edition; revised 1906, published 1908) Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.
WJL—The Correspondence of William James. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. 12 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004.
PROLOGUE: AN OLD MAN IN RYE
xiv—He blotted: These pages do not survive in their entirety; those that do can be found at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The best study of them is in Philip Horne, Henry James and Revision (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
xiv—“last manner”: CS4, 350.
xv—“would pretend to date”: Virginia Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950), 305.
xv—“curiosity and fastidiousness”: P, 242.
xvi—“selective as well as collective”: To J. B. Pinker, 6 June 1905, unpublished.
xvi—“frank critical”: To Charles Scribner’s Sons, 30 July 1905.
xvi—“delicate vessels”: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ch. 11.
xvi—“the surprise of a caravan”: PNY, 16.
xvi—“an American writing”: To William James, 29 October 1888.
xviii—“that which people know”: LC1, 63
xix—“a wedge of brown stone”: PNY, 43.
xx—“the British maiden”: To Alice James, 5 January 1880, unpublished.
xx—“which we find”: LC1, 401–2.
xx—“swarming . . . pretty girls”: CTW1, 707.
xx—“vacancy”: CTW1, 698.
xxi—“mildly pyramidal hill”: To Mrs. William James, 1 December 1897.
xxii—“extraordinary precocity”: See B. R. McElderry, Jr., “Hamlin Garland and Henry James,” American Literature 23.4 (January 1952), esp. 442–43.
xxii—“wistfully an American”: Ibid.
xxii—“room began to sway”: WJL3, 311–12.
xxiii—“hugely improved”: To J. B. Pinker, 10 June 1906, unpublished.
xxiv—“single small” . . . “her destiny”: PNY, 9.
xxiv—“organizing an ado”: Ibid.
PART ONE: A PREPARATION FOR CULTURE
CHAPTER 1: THE GIRL IN THE DOORWAY
3—“tall girl”: P, 204.
3—“a shrewd American”: P, 194.
4—“discovered” . . . “independent”: P, 201.
4—“square and spacious” . . . “shade”: PNY, 9.
5—“not one” . . . “slit-like”: PNY, 7–8.
5—“the consciousness”: Ibid.
5—“Under certain circumstances”: P, 193.
5—“It is a truth”: Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ch. 1 (1813).
6—“Oh, I hoped”: P, 205.
6—“there will be”: P, 200.
7—“Miss Brooke had”: George Eliot, Middlemarch, ch. 1 (1871–72).
7—“nineteen persons”: P, 224.
7—“many oddities” . . . “accident”: P, 211.
7—“You must be”: P, 216.
8—“no mark”: New York Sun, 27 November 1881. The review appeared under the initials MWH, since identified as Mayo Williamson Hazeltine; it can most easily be found in Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
8—“taken up her niece”: P, 212.
8—“continuity between”: P, 225.
8—“so entertaining”: P, 218.
8—“so held her”: PNY, 42.
8—“glimpse of contemporary aesthetics”: P, 225.
9—“with her theory”: P, 214.
9—“almost anything”: P, 218.
9—“physiognomy had an air”: P, 226.
9—“general air”: P, 232.
CHAPTER 2: A NATIVE OF NO COUNTRY
12—A manifest handed: Information about the China can be found at www.immigrantships.net/v7/1800v7/china18680508.html.
12—“always round the corner”: A, 8.
14—“divorced from you”: To William James, 15 July 1878.
14—“Leisured for life”: Quoted in R. W. B. Lewis, The James Family (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 30.
14—“vastation” . . . “room”: Lewis, 51–53.
15—“Say I’m a philosopher”: A, 278.
15—“opportunities had been”: P, 223.
16—“interested in almost”: A, 36.
16—“a native of the James family”: In a letter to their sister Alice, WJL6, 517.
16—“breathed inconsistency”: A, 124.
17—“paying”: A, 126.
17—“a firm grasp”: Quoted in E1, 171.
18—“moral equivalent”: The title of a 1906 speech, most readily found in William James, Writings, 1902–1910 (New York: Library of America, 1988).
18—“so much manhood”: Quoted in Alfred Habegger, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), 422.
18—“I had done”: A, 415.
18—“exacerbated by”: E1, 183
18—“during” . . . “history”: A, 414–15. Edel’s biography offers as close a reconstruction of the event as possible; the most suggestive interpretation is that of John Halperin in “Henry James’s Civil War,” Henry James Review 17.1 (1996).
19—“muscular weakness”: Edmund Gosse, Aspects and Impressions (London: Cassell, 1922), 27.
19—“Fortunately he has”: P, 392.
19—“tented field enough”: A, 417.
19—“seeing, sharing”: A, 461.
19—“sense of what”: A, 460.
19—“through our great”: Quoted in Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 268.
20—“Harry has become”: Quoted in Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry, 249.
20—“secret employments”: To Thomas Sergeant Perry, 18 April 1864.
20—“Come now” . . . “chose”: A, 107.
21—“scenic method”: N, 167; the notebook entry is for 21 December 1896.
21—“afraid of nothing”: A, 509.
21—“for what he called”: Habegger, 137.
21—William’s most recent biographer: Robert D. Richardson, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).
22—“the most delightful”: A, 508.
22—“that I had no”: A, 508.
23—“unwritten history”: CS1, 34.
23—“published me”: LC1, 507.
24—“we seem” . . . “other”: LFL, 471–73.
26—“smiling aspects”: From an 1886 essay on Dostoevsky. See Howells, Selected Literary Criticism, 1886–1897 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 35.
26—“he joined us�
��: LFL, 472. See also Carol Holly’s essay in David McWhirter, ed., Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
27—“of pulmonary weakness”: PLHJ, 377.
28—“I wish I were”: Minnie’s surviving letters to James appear in Robert Le Clair, “Henry James and Minnie Temple,” American Literature 21 (March 1949), 35–48.
28—“reeling & moaning”: To William James, 30 October 1869.
28—“somehow too much”: To Henry James, Sr., 19 March 1870.
29—“more strange” . . . “painfully?”: To Mary James, 26 March 1870.
29—“reach & quality” . . . “dead”: To William James, 29 March 1870.
29—“the death of”: Edgar Allen Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846).
CHAPTER 3: A SUPERSTITIOUS VALUATION
31—“the more I see”: To Thomas Sergeant Perry, 18 July 1860.
31—“is obliged to deal”: N, 214.
31—“we can deal” . . . “culture”: To Thomas Sergeant Perry, 20 September 1867.
32—“Wendell” . . . “moonshiny”: To Charles Eliot Norton, 4 Febuary 1872.
33—“neatness and coquetry”: To William James, 22 September 1872.
34—“rattling big”: To Elizabeth Boott, 27 January 1875.
35—“there is no shadow”: Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Marble Faun (1860), preface.
35—“texture of American life” . . . “one may say”: LC1, 351–52.
35—critic Robert Weisbuch: My argument in this chapter is indebted to Robert Weisbuch’s Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). See also his “Dickens, Melville, and a Tale of Two Countries” in the Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Deirdre David (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
36—“It takes a great deal”: LC1, 320.
36—“that we very soon”: LC1, 327.
36—One classic account: See “Novel and Romance” in Richard Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957).
36—“asked but little”: LC1, 341.
36—“do New York”: To Edith Wharton, 17 August 1902.
37—“not from the sweet”: In M. A. De Wolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922), p. 120.
38—“the appearance, the manner”: To his parents, 16 November 1873.
38—“could do more work”: WJL4, 452.
38—“set of desultory”: WJL4, 458.
38—“as a matter”: WJL1, 230.
40—“before him, soliciting”: PNY, 5.
40—“youth of genius”: To Grace Norton, 26 September 1870.
40—“in every day at dusk”: The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, ed. George Monteiro (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 4.
40—“unutterably filthy”: To Theodore Child, 17 February 1880.
41—“a fraud” . . . “people”: The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson et al., vol. 2 (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982), 392–93.
41—“not at all crazy”: To Elizabeth Boott, 22 February 1880, unpublished.
41—“conspiracy to undervalue them”: LC1, 435.
42—“gentlemen’s society”: CS2, 246.
42—“high time Harry James”: Monteiro, Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, 5.
42—“big”: To Henry James, Sr., 30 March 1880.
42—“the portrait of the character”: To William Dean Howells, 2 February 1877.
42—“to which the American”: To Mary James, 4 May 1877, unpublished.
44—“open window”: To Henry James, 30 March 1880.
CHAPTER 4: ALONG THE THAMES
45—“far-away-from-London”: To Mary James, 10 January 1881.
46—“infusion” . . . “as it were”: To Grace Norton, 28 December 1880.
46—“going to do” . . . “her own”: P, 254–55.
46—“stood there” . . . “her destiny”: PNY, 9.
47—“gruel and silence”: A, 525.
47—“a view”: To J. B. Pinker, 14 June 1906.
47—“a good deal bruised”: P, 194. See also the entry for Hardwick in Nikolaus Pevsner and Jennifer Sherwood, The Buildings of England: Oxfordshire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).
48—“no more beautiful”: Country Life, 21 July 1906.
49—Family tradition. See the family entry in Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage; but note too that the biographies of Grahame himself do not confirm this identification.
50—“shut out”: P, 228.
50—“an uninteresting”: P, 229.
50—“conscious observation”: P, 231.
50—“looked in at”: P, 254.
50—“to pass through”: P, 251.
51—“young, happy”: P, 238.
51—“in the thick, mild air”: P, 245.
51—“always want” . . . “choose”: P, 259.
52—“Whoso” . . . “always may”: Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1841).
52—“proof that a woman”: P, 243.
53—“I like to be treated”: P, 288.
53—“cultivated”: Quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982), 153. Parkman’s article, “The Failure of Universal Suffrage,” originally appeared in the North American Review (July–August 1878).
54—“alienated”: P, 278.
54—“than one gives up”: P, 282.
54—“well-ordered privacy”: P, 245.
PART TWO: THE MARRIAGE PLOT
CHAPTER 5: HER EMPTY CHAIR
57—“I have just heard”: To John W. Cross, 14 May 1880.
58—“which your wife”: Ibid.
58—“aghast at”: WJL1, 183
59—“I knew he” . . . “the wall”: To Henry James, Sr., 14 May 1880, unpublished.
60—“Aren’t you sorry?”: To Grace Norton, 19 August 1880, unpublished.
60—“empty chair”: To Alice James, 30 January 1881.
60—“thoroughly ill”: Quoted in Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 544.
60—“a Reticence”: Quoted in John Rignall, ed., The Oxford Reader’s Companion to George Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 26.
61—“Johnnie had”: Gordon S. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78), vol. 7 (1878–80), 285.
61—“I had my turn”: To William James, 1 May 1878.
61—“to attend service”: In Haight, George Eliot: A Biography, 454.
62—“underlying world”: To Henry James, Sr., 10 May 1869.
62—“take them . . . visitor”: A, 583–84.
63—“we of the . . . comparison”: A, 573–74.
63—“‘Middlemarch . . . whole”: LC1, 958.
63—“two suns”: LC1, 962.
64—“without loss . . . monsters”: LC2, 1107–8.
64—“deep-breathing economy”: Ibid.
64—“sets a limit”: LC1, 965.
65—“marriages and rescue” . . . “happy art”: LC1, 1004.
65—“aesthetic teaching”: The statement comes in a letter to the Positivist thinker Frederic Harrison and can be most readily found in George Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings, ed. A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren (London: Penguin, 1990), p 248.
65—“commissioned herself”: LC1, 965.
66—“special case”: LC1, 1003.
66—“generalizing instinct”: LC1, 965.
66—“In these frail”: PNY, 10.
66—“mind and millinery”: In George Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems, and Other Writings, 140.
66—“scientific criticism”: P, 242.
CHAPTER 6: PROPOSALS
68—“husbands, wives”: LC1, 48.
69—“Millions of”: PNY, 9.
69—“all-in-all”: PNY, 11.
69—“We women”: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876), ch. 13.
69—“flood and field”: PNY, 15.
69—“the centre”: PNY, 11.
70—“must not fall”: P, 201.
70—Isabel’s resistance to the plot: My argument in this chapter is indebted to Millicent Bell’s indispensable account of The Portrait of a Lady in her Meaning in Henry James (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).
70—“a woman ought” . . . “completely”: P, 243–44.
70—“It’s just like”: P, 205.
71—“a most formidable . . . fear”: P, 272–73.
71—“cold and dry”: PNY, 65.
71—an alternate line of criticism: See esp. Nina Baym’s “Revision and Thematic Change in The Portrait of a Lady,” which locates the character in her historical moment. (Modern Fiction Studies 22.2, Summer 1976; repr., in 2nd Norton Critical Edition of the novel, ed. Robert D. Bamberg [New York: W. W. Norton, 1995].)
72—“May I not”: P, 293.
73—“such a thumper”: P, 300.
73—“some people”: P, 304.
73—“it cost her”: Ibid.
73—“I’m afraid”: P, 301.
73—“personage”: P, 295.
73—“what one liked”: P, 296.
74—“Imagine one’s belonging”: P, 248.
74—“old-fashioned distinction” . . . “certain way”: LC1, 54–55.
75—“psychological reasons”: LC1, 60.
75—“few things”: LC1, 61.
75—“she could do better”: P, 296.
75—“Who was she”: P, 304.
76—“Do you know . . . lord!”: P, 303.
CHAPTER 7: AN UNMARRIED MAN
77—some representative titles: Van Wyck Brooks, The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925); Marius Bewley, The Complex Fate: Hawthorne, Henry James, and Some Other American Writers (1952); Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870–1881 (1962).