Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  160—“individual technique”: Graham Greene, “The Dark Backward,” in Collected Essays (1964; repr., Penguin, 1970), 56.

  161—“the dark shining” . . . “she chose”: P, 522.

  162—“I would rather”: P, 528.

  162—“I had no idea”: P, 543.

  162—“You are going”: P, 543.

  162—“more importance”: P, 545.

  162—“soaring . . . sailing”: P, 546.

  163—“a man to whom” . . . “of any sort”: P, 548–49.

  163—“his very poverties”: P, 550.

  164—“I hope it may never”: P, 547.

  164—“disjoined”: P, 551.

  164—“detestably fortunate” . . . “envying someone”: P, 498–99.

  CHAPTER 14: A VENETIAN INTERLUDE

  165—“the temperature ferocious”: To Thomas Sergeant Perry, 24 January 1881.

  165—“quietly bring my”: N, 220.

  165—“Frenchified” . . . “digestion”: To Fanny Kemble, 24 February 1881.

  166—“dusky light”: N, 220.

  166—“virtually finished”: N, 221.

  166—Baedeker for 1879: Venice then had 128,000 inhabitants.

  166—“painfully large”: CTW2, 289.

  167—“be lived in”: CTW2, 329.

  167—“awful”: CTW2, 330. For the gondoliers’ strike, along with much else about the nineteenth-century city, see Margaret Plant, Venice: Fragile City, 1797–1997 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

  167—“battered peep show”: CTW2, 292.

  167—“the most beautiful”: CTW2, 314.

  168—“una bellezza”: N, 221.

  168—“simpler pleasure[s]”: CTW2, 289.

  168—“one of those things”: N, 221.

  168—“sentient”: CTW2, 291.

  169—“craved more to possess”: Quoted in Rosella Mamoli Zorzi et al., Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004), 255.

  171—“like a camel’s back”: CTW2, 297. On this point see Zorzi’s “A Knock-Down Insolence of Talent,” in Sargent’s Venice, ed. Warren Adelson et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

  171—“in the fruitless”: NPY, 3.

  171—“even the brightest”: CTW2, 298.

  171—“The creature varies”: CTW2, 291.

  172—“between the niece”: CTW2, 296.

  172—“be a sad day”: CTW2, 287.

  172—“you renounce all”: CTW2, 305.

  CHAPTER 15: FENIMORE

  174—“sky-parlor”: Henry James Letters, vol. 3, 557.

  175—“Poor Isabel!”: Ibid., 533.

  175—“I suppose there”: Ibid., 540.

  175—“a woman”: Ibid., 352.

  176—“immense power”: To Elizabeth Boott, 18 October 1886.

  176—“thought the carriage”: PLHJ, 199.

  176—“hide”: To Francis Boott, 26 November 1886.

  176—“promiscuous polyglot”: To Sarah Butler Wister, 27 February 1887.

  176—“making love to Italy”: To Edmund Gosse, 24 April 1887.

  178—“local tone”: LC1, 664.

  178—“that the old lady”: N, 33.

  178—“in obscurity”: CS3, 228.

  179—“publishing scoundrel”: CS3, 303.

  179—“an out-of-the-way canal”: CS3, 228.

  179—“make love”: CS3, 235.

  179—“get out of it”: CS3, 314.

  180—“Henry is somewhere”: PLHJ, 231.

  181—“giving up being”: PLHJ, 248.

  182—“to Miss Woolson”: To Ariana Curtis, 14 July 1893.

  182—“whether the end”: Henry James Letters, vol. 3, 550.

  182—“alone and unfriended”: To William W. Baldwin, 26 January 1894.

  182—“sudden dementia”: To Francis Boott, 31 January 1894.

  182—“sills overlooking”: PLHJ, 276.

  183—“After such an event”: To Francis Boott, 31 January 1894.

  183—“too many and too private”: To William W. Baldwin, 2 February 1894.

  184—“all her precious things”: PLHJ, 286.

  185—“and they came up like balloons”: PLHJ, 289. This is the most readily available source for the anecdote; one can also find it in Gondola Day, 145. Gordon draws the story from a 1956 radio interview with Mercedes Huntington, whose words are quoted here. Her family owned the Villa Castellani, and she claimed to have heard it as a young woman from James himself; a transcript of the interview is available at Harvard’s Houghton Library. But sources closer to the period attest to it as well; see Gondola Days.

  185—“never failed” . . . “behaviour”: CS3, 230.

  185—“If her depression”: Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius, 383.

  187—“to whom nothing”: CS5, 540.

  187—“The Beast in the Closet”: See the chapter of that title in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

  188—“have appreciated”: CS2, 295.

  PART FOUR: SEX AND SERIALS, THE CONTINENT AND THE CRITICS

  CHAPTER 16: MAUPASSANT AND THE MONKEY

  191—“suggestive of” . . . “sun-bonnets”: The piece originally ran in the Galaxy for June 1875. It’s reprinted in Henry James, The Painter’s Eye, ed. John L Sweeney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 96–97.

  192—Some Victorian commentators: See Kate Flint’s analysis in The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), ch. 4.

  192—“bring a blush”: Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ch. 11. On blushing, see Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Fictions of Modesty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), ch. 5.

  193—“Two ladies from the country”: From George Moore, “A New Censorship of Literature,” Pall Mall Gazette, 10 December 1884.

  193—after a one-day trial: See the trial transcript, “The Ministry of Justice Against Gustave Flaubert,” trans. Bregtje Hartendorf Wallach in the Norton Critical Edition of Madame Bovary, ed. Margaret Cohen, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

  193—“no English author” . . . “to read?”: James Fitzjames Stephen, “Madame Bovary,” Saturday Review, 11 July 1857.

  194—“cleanliness” . . . “Expurgatorius”: Margaret Oliphant, “Novels,” Blackwood’s, September 1867.

  194—“the novels of her”: Ibid.

  194—“into the hands”: See Cohen, ed. “Madame Bovary,” 333.

  195—“between that which”: LC1, 63.

  195—“Candour in Fiction”: New Review, January 1890. Hardy’s comments are on p. 20.

  195—“there is a terrible coercion”: Adam Bede, ch. 29.

  196—“rather shy”: LC1, 63.

  196—“I would rather”: P, 558.

  196—French verb is branler: See any complete edition of the Goncourt diary; this section is available in an English translation by Robert Baldick, Pages from the Goncourt Journal (1962; repr., New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2006), 212–14.

  197—“Le petit Maupassant”: Ibid.

  197—“right mental preparation”: To Edmund Gosse, 17 October 1912.

  197—“as if her sky”: From Henry James, Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune, 1875–1876, ed. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), 40. This passage comes from a piece itself called “Parisian Sketches,” his letter for December 28, 1875.

  198—“rather embarrassed”: To Henry James, Sr., 20 December 1875. On James’s Parisian experiences, see Peter Brooks, Henry James Goes to Paris.

  199—“editor of the austere Atlantic”: To William Dean Howells, 3 February 1876. James records Howells’s reply in a letter of 4 A
pril, and the Goncourt Diary lets us date the conversation to Sunday, 30 January; see Baldick, 220.

  200—“with astronomy” . . . “well-written”: LC2, 1014.

  201—“the subscriber”: Ibid.

  201—“more totally” . . . “or catches”: LC2, 892–93.

  201—“misery, vice” . . . “disagreeable”. LC2, 861–62.

  202—“nature . . . as a combination”: LC2, 866.

  202—“poverty of . . . consciousness”: LC2, 327–28.

  202—“English system”: LC2, 869.

  202—“than the effort”: To William Dean Howells, 21 February 1884.

  202—“I have to hide”: Howells, Selected Letters, 1882–1891 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 12. The letter is to John Hay.

  202—“when Nana raised”: Émile Zola, Nana, trans. George Holden (London: Penguin, 1972), 44.

  203—“foulness”: LC2, 867.

  203—“her sexual parts”: Nana, 385.

  203—Henry Viztelly: On his editions of Zola, and the novelist’s reception in England, see Anthony Cummins, “Émile Zola’s Cheap English Dress: The Viztelly Translations, Late-Victorian Print Culture, and the Crisis of Literary Value,” Review of English Studies 60 (2008), 108–32.

  203—“l’âge ingrat”: The phrase comes two pages in to Nana’s third chapter; Holden (75) translates it as “awkward.”

  204—“‘good’ talk?”: LC2, 1125.

  204—“old castles” . . . “ancient monuments”: CS2, 247.

  205—“a great deal”: CS2, 246.

  205—“clever little reprobate”: CS2, 291.

  205—“old enough” . . . “should like it”: CS2, 275.

  206—“portrait of a gentleman”: Wharton, The Age of Innocence, ch. 14. Elizabeth Ammons’s “Cool Diana and Blood Red Muse” points out the nominal relation between Wharton’s protagonist and James’s own. See the Norton Critical Edition of the novel, ed. Candace Waid (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

  207—“mustn’t think”: Ibid., ch 16.

  207—“at Florence with”: Ibid., ch 20.

  CHAPTER 17: THE MAGAZINES

  208—“stifling calidarium”: N, 223.

  208—“I am afraid”: To Houghton, Mifflin & Co, 13 July 1881.

  208—“probably not less”: To William Dean Howells, 23 August 1879.

  209—The two were: See George J. Worth, Macmillan’s Magazine, 1859–1907 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2003); and Ellery Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). On the economic necessity of serialization, see Howells, “The Man of Letters as Man of Business” (1893).

  211—“next long story” . . . “remember this”: To William Dean Howells, 14–15 July 1879.

  213—“devoured in the American papers”: To Frederick Macmillan, 28 December 1880.

  213—“stretch of months”: To William Dean Howells, 5 December 1880.

  213—“been explicit as”: To William Dean Howells, 11 November 1880.

  213—“strangely vague”: To William Dean Howells, 5 December 1880.

  213—“after Isabel’s marriage”: N, 13–14.

  214—“to be settled later”: Ibid.

  214—“process and progress”: Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991), 243.

  215—“steady development”: Ibid., 275.

  218—“no magazine”: Joseph Conrad, 6 January 1908. In Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 4: 1908–1911, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 9–10.

  219—“slow, sure growth” . . . “whole”: Hughes and Lund, 230.

  219—James’s income: See Michael Anesko’s meticulous “Friction with the Market”: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), Appendix B.

  220—“nothing can be”: The Spectator, 6 November 1880.

  220—“considerably the most important”: The Nation, 24 March 1881.

  220—“the reader feels”: The Nation, 18 November 1880.

  220—“quite too lifelike”: The Examiner, November 6 1880.

  221—“the author evidently”: Ibid., December 4, 1880.

  221—“One afternoon, toward dusk”: P, 559.

  CHAPTER 18: THE ROCCANERA

  222—“will perhaps”: P, 559.

  223—“if her husband”: P, 562.

  223—“who died two”: P, 564–65.

  224—“years had touched”: P, 570.

  225—“these people”: P, 567.

  225—“genius for upholstery”: P, 588.

  225—“high house”: Ibid. P, 566.

  225—“stern old Roman”: Ibid.

  225—Palazzo Antici-Mattei: See Charles S. Anderson, Person, Place, and Thing in Henry James’s Novels (Durham, NC: Duke University Pres, 1977), 292. See also Harry Brewster, A Cosmopolite’s Journey (London: Radcliffe Press, 1998), 182, a memoir by an expatriate of another generation who spent a part of his childhood there.

  225—Mattei family: On their ownership of work by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, see Jonathan Harr, The Lost Painting (New York: Random House, 2005).

  226—“a row of”: P, 566–67.

  226—“traditionary”: P, 425.

  227—“reflective reader”: P, 592.

  228—“there’s the difference” . . . “leading one?”: P, 603–4.

  228—“received an impression”: P, 611.

  228—“make him the reparation”: P, 617.

  228—“play the part”: P, 618.

  229—“The moment you”: P, 625.

  229—“It lies in”: P, 626.

  229—“has all the vivacity”: PNY, 16.

  230—“service her husband had” . . . “terrors”: P, 628.

  230—“he could change”: P, 630.

  230—“stream of consciousness”: William James, Writings, 1878–1899, 152.

  231—“make-believe” . . . “no retrospect”: Daniel Deronda, ch. 1.

  232—“oblique view” . . . “impression of it”: LC2, 1322.

  232—“He had told her”: P, 633–34.

  233—free indirect discourse: See, for starters, Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); Franco Moretti, “Serious Century,” in The Novel, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).

  233—“dark, narrow alley” . . . “one by one”: P, 629.

  234—“everlasting weight”: P, 638.

  234—her life go undramatized: See Bell, Meaning in Henry James, 116–17.

  234—“solidity of specification”: LC1, 53.

  235—“the different pace”: William James, Writings 1878–1899, 987.

  235—“like one who should say”: Ibid., 164.

  235—“defeated”: To William James, 21 April 1884.

  235—“chamber”: LC1, 52.

  236—“luminous halo”: Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” in The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 154.

  236—“It is obviously”: PNY, 16.

  237—“anxiously and yet ardently”: PNY, 423.

  238—“was not a daughter” . . . “at all”: P, 636.

  238—“indecent”: P, 637.

  238—“her husband and Madame Merle”: P, 639.

  Chapter 19: The Art of Fiction

  239—Macmillan released: For these bibliographical details, see Leon Edel and Dan Laurence, A Bibliography of Henry James, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), and David J. Supino, Henry James: A Bibliographical Catalogue of a Collection of Editions to 1921 (Liverpool: Liverpool Unive
rsity Press, 2006). The Robert Frost Library at Amherst College made its copy of the Macmillan edition available to me; for the Houghton, Mifflin, I used the copy belonging to the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College.

  240—Mudie’s: The standard work remains Guinevere L. Griest, Mudie’s Circulating Library and the Victorian Novel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), to which I am indebted throughout this chapter.

  241—“gains in its”: W. C. Brownell, The Nation, 2 February 1882.

  241—The New York Sun: 27 November, 1881; Californian, January 1882; both in Hayes, Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews. Horace Scudder’s review appeared in the Atlantic for January 1882, and Margaret Oliphant’s in Blackwood’s for March 1882. Both appear in Bamberg.

  242—Lippincott’s: See The Contemporary Reviews.

  243—“your talent, your style” . . . “like it”: Henry James Letters, vol. 3, 528–35.

  244—“new school” . . . “Thackeray”: Reprinted in Gard, 126–35.

  244—“at the exploits”: Margaret Oliphant, “American Literature in England.” Blackwood’s, January 1883, 137.

  244—“principle that”: L. L. Jennings, “American Novels,” Quarterly Review (January 1883), 225.

  245—“The indictment”: To William Dean Howells, 27 November 1882.

  245—“as thick as blackberries”: To William Dean Howells, 20 March 1883.

  245—“bright, troubled” . . . “conscience”: Robert Louis Stevenson, “A Gossip on Romance,” Longman’s Magazine (November 1882), 189–90.

  246—“Boston Mutual Admiration Society”: Jennings, 251.

  246—“to edge in” . . . “extent opened”: LC1, 44. James’s essay first appeared in Longman’s Magazine for September 1884. Besant’s own lecture was published together with James’s in 1884 (Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co.) and appeared separately in 1902 (London: Chatto.) It is excerpted in Stephen Regan, The Nineteenth-Century Novel: A Critical Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).

  247—“course of dessert” . . . “impossible”: LC1, 48.

  247—“psychological”: LC1, 61.

  248—“a living thing”: LC1, 54–55.

  248—“What is character”: Ibid.

  248—“A Humble Remonstrance”: Longman’s Magazine, December 1884.