by David Lodge
‘It offends your American notions of decency?’ he asked.
‘No, I’m not offended. I’m not a prude, I hope,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sufficiently familiar with the undraped human form to know when representations of it are beautiful and when they are not.’
‘Not even the Birth of Venus in the Uffizi?’ Botticelli was one of his favourite painters.
‘Well, I see that she is beautiful, of course, but her nakedness is . . . distracting. I think she would be just as beautiful wearing a robe. Perhaps more so.’
‘People are not usually born wearing robes, I believe,’ he said sardonically.
‘Well, for that matter, they are not usually born fully grown,’ she retorted.
Henry had no ready answer to this riposte. ‘The only way to remedy your condition is to look at more pictures,’ he said.
His own aesthetic approach to the nude had been formed by an experience in early youth. One of the several careers his brother William had essayed and abandoned was that of artist. When Henry returned from a spell of study in Germany in 1860, and rejoined the family in Newport, Rhode Island, William was studying there under the painter William Hunt, and Henry, having nothing better to do, and driven by the competitiveness which had always characterised relations between the two brothers, occupied himself by drawing the plaster casts stored on the ground floor of Hunt’s studio. One day, bored and dissatisfied with his efforts to copy Michelangelo’s The Captive, he wandered upstairs to the studio proper and found William and another student drawing their cousin, Gus Barker, who was visiting the family at the time, and had volunteered for the task. Gus was standing on a dais, completely naked, in the attitude of a discus thrower. He grinned briefly at Henry, without relaxing his posture. Henry had never seen a completely naked adult human being before. In the bright northern light of the studio the young man’s white, muscular limbs, and the proud heavy mass of his genitals, much bigger than Henry’s own, or any he had seen on statues in art galleries, made an unforgettable impression. He watched his brother for a while, marvelling at the assurance and dispassion with which he reproduced the outline of his cousin’s loins in charcoal, and he knew that he himself could never do it. The image of the naked Gus haunted him for days afterwards, with disturbing effects that were physical as well as mental. To be an artist, clearly, you had to have the courage to break the taboo on seeing another’s nakedness, the detachment to contemplate it calmly, and the skill to release the abstract, ideal beauty that was concealed within it. He gave Miss Woolson the benefit of this theory in their discussions of the nude, without relating the personal experience on which it was based.
She was forty, just a few years older than Henry, but tended to exaggerate the age difference between them in the way she jocularly referred to herself as ‘an old maid’, or described her relationship to him as ‘a kind of literary aunt’. At first he thought this was a strategy to reduce the risk of any perceived indecorum in their going about together, but later he wondered if it might not also be a way of reassuring him that she wasn’t, as they said, ‘after’ him. She was capable of such sensitivity, and such subtlety, and his appreciation of these qualities was enhanced rather than diminished by his suspicion that, beneath her calm, spinsterly exterior there was a heart that beat a little faster when he was near. She was not beautiful, which was all to the good as regards not encouraging gossip, but neither was she plain. She had pleasing, regular features, smooth plump cheeks, and glossy dark brown hair drawn back above the ears and braided behind. Her womanly figure was always clothed with unostentatious good taste, and she showed remarkable stamina for walking and sightseeing. Her deafness was a slight impediment to easy conversation, but she appreciated the clarity of Henry’s diction all the more. He enjoyed her company, and spent some hours with her almost every day.
He had of course read her article about himself in the Atlantic, with its gratifying opening statement, ‘Mr James always offers an intellectual treat to appreciative readers,’ and even if she had been unnecessarily emphatic in denying him ‘the genuine story-telling gift’, the general tenor of her remarks was both positive and discriminating. He had read some of her own work, and although it was limited by a typically feminine concentration on the themes of love and marriage, he found it full of happy touches, acute observation of people and places, and the marks of a genuine artistic integrity. She favoured tales of heroic renunciation and self-sacrifice by women in matters of the heart, and if there was sometimes a sense of strain in the emotional conflicts she contrived for her heroines, this was infinitely preferable to the trivial obstacles and facile resolutions of the usual ‘love story’. In short, she was on the side of the angels – that is to say his side – in the great aesthetic war in which Henry considered himself to be engaged: the effort to make truth to life, to life as experienced on the pulses and in the consciousnesses of individual human beings, the main criterion of value in the English and American novel, as it was in the best French and Russian fiction. Constance (within a few weeks they were on first-name terms) was much more confident of her taste in literature than in art and Henry developed a great respect for her critical judgement. When it was time for him to return to England, he expressed a sincere hope that they would meet again.
A few months later he was startled to read, in the pages of the Atlantic, a short story by Constance called ‘A Florentine Experiment’ that was plainly inspired by their perambulations of the churches and galleries of Florence. In this piece a young American woman called Margaret Stowe, with a coiffure closely resembling her creator’s and a similar dry wit, met in Florence a fellow expatriate called Trafford Morgan who was the same age as Henry and had the same superior knowledge of Italian art. As he escorted her around the artistic sites of Florence, they developed a half-contentious, half-flirtatious relationship, in which each at different times pretended to be ‘experimentally’ paying attention to the other in order to overcome a disappointment in love, when in fact they were all the time really in love with each other. In a climactic scene, set rather effectively in the shadows of the Duomo’s interior on a damp autumn day, they confessed their real feelings and formed a permanent attachment. Henry read this story with some alarm, recognising not only aspects of himself and Constance in the characters, but whole sentences from their conversations. But as time passed, and nobody in his acquaintance seemed to connect the tale with himself (he had covered his tracks very skilfully, making little or no reference to Constance in his letters from Florence), he felt easier, and even allowed himself to admire the author’s skilful blending of fact and fiction. However, when he returned to Italy the following January he based himself in Venice rather than Rome, where Constance, after much wandering around Europe, had temporarily settled, and where, he knew, she eagerly awaited their reunion. He held off for some months, partly to avoid distraction from his work on The Portrait of a Lady, and partly to punish Constance a little for her cheek in writing ‘A Florentine Experiment’. But in early May he relented and went to Rome.
Constance was living alone in a fourth-floor apartment with exclusive use of a glazed loggia on the roof which she referred to as her ‘sky-parlour’. In this sunny retreat, adorned with potted plants and shaded by trailing vines, she gave him tea and listened sympathetically to his anxieties about the progress of his novel. He did not show her any part of his manuscript, but he told her enough about the story to explain his doubts: was he giving too much importance to Madame Merle at the beginning? Would his readers ‘see’ the full devious depths of Gilbert Osmond’s character? She reassured him, making deft reference to his success with comparable characters and situations in earlier stories. Henry had other female acquaintances who claimed to hold his work in high esteem, but none who had Constance’s understanding of what was involved in the creative process. He asked what she was working on herself.
‘I’m revising Anne for the book publication.’
‘Ah, a delightful occupation,’ Henry said. ‘C
reation is always such an agonising effort, but revision is pure pleasure. If only one could revise without having to write first!’
‘Well, it’s something you can do even when you’re depressed,’ said Constance, smiling. ‘It has that to be said for it.’
‘Are you depressed, then?’ Henry enquired, with concern.
‘I have been,’ she said. She confessed to being prone to periods of deep depression. It was in the hope of overcoming this affliction that she was experimenting with an expatriate life in Europe, but wherever she settled it seemed to catch up with her sooner or later.
‘I sympathise,’ Henry said.
‘You suffer yourself?’
‘Of course. It’s the occupational disease of artists. We’re always striving to imagine and think what has not been thought before, and so always risking defeat and disappointment.’
‘But isn’t it temperamental too?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so,’ he sighed. ‘And probably inherited. My whole family are connoisseurs of melancholia – apart from my mother. It’s something that runs in the Jameses, evidently. My father found relief in the teaching of Swedenborg, but none of his offspring has found it answered.’
In spite of this exchange of confidences, neither of them made any reference to ‘A Florentine Experiment’ that afternoon, or on the two or three other occasions when they met during his short stay in Rome. He could feel the pressure of Constance’s curiosity, about whether he had read the story and what he made of it, like a palpable presence in the air between them, but she evidently intuited that he would have fled from Rome if she had openly questioned him about it.
On the day before his arranged departure, they visited the Colosseum, which inevitably evoked memories of Daisy Miller – ‘Your masterpiece, I think,’ Constance said, adding hastily, ‘to date.’
‘Well, it’s certainly my most popular work – but I made very little money out of it. It was pirated in America, you know – they sold twenty thousand copies, and I didn’t get a sou.’
‘But that’s shocking!’ Constance exclaimed.
‘I do feel bitter about it,’ said Henry. ‘But it was my own fault. I forgot to secure the American copyright until it was too late.’
They were sitting in the shady side of the arena, on one of the crumbling terraces, looking down at the dusty oval which had so often been soaked in blood in the infamous past, and where Daisy Miller, recklessly defying decorum and common sense, had walked at midnight with her Italian escort, observed by the jealous and disapproving Winterbourne, and fatally contracted malaria.
‘Poor Daisy,’ Constance sighed. ‘Why didn’t Winterbourne marry her?’
‘It would have been a much less interesting story. Your own tales are not notable for glib happy endings of that sort.’
‘I know,’ said Constance.
‘Winterbourne is not the marrying kind,’ said Henry.
‘Yes, you can tell that from his name,’ said Constance.
They did not meet for another two years, during which Henry made two trips to America, and suffered the double blow of losing both his parents, his mother dying at the beginning of 1882, and his father in December of the same year. Meanwhile Constance roved restlessly around Italy, Germany and Switzerland, writing a new novel and soaking up the historical and artistic heritage of Europe. They did not meet, but they corresponded. Detained in America by family obligations, Henry wrote to Constance begging for her news. He was, as she shrewdly observed, homesick for Europe. She obliged with long, stylishly written, gently teasing epistles, full of praise and encouragement for his literary projects. The Portrait of a Lady she pronounced a masterpiece – more ambitious and therefore greater than Daisy Miller – and Isabel Archer was a triumph of insight into a particular type of imaginative, idealising girl doomed to be unhappy.
Only once did she put a foot wrong in this correspondence, when she made reference to the success of her own novel, Anne. It had been so popular as a serial that the publishers, Harper, had voluntarily doubled her fee and promised her a generous royalty on the forthcoming book even though this had been explicitly excluded from the original contract. Henry thought she was glancing at the comparatively modest sales of The Portrait, and made a wry comment to this effect in his next letter, but it was evident from her prompt reply that she was innocent of any such intention. ‘Of course you understood that what was a great success to me, would be nothing to you,’ she wrote, ‘and even if a story of mine should have a large “popular” sale (which I do not expect) that could not alter the fact that the utmost of my best work cannot touch the hem of your first or poorest. My work is coarse besides yours. Of entirely another grade. The two should not be mentioned on the same day.’ The near-blasphemous extravagance but obvious sincerity of this tribute suffused Henry, as he read it, with a creamy satisfaction that was almost physical.
Constance, or ‘Constanza’ as he sometimes apostrophised her, by association with the country where they had first met, complained with some justice that her letters were far longer and more comprehensive than the condensed and allusive reports of his doings, scrawled in a large hand on small sheets of notepaper, which she received in return; and that he was forever holding out the vague prospect of their meeting again without doing anything to bring it about. When she mentioned that she was wondering whether to return to America, and he replied that he would like to talk it over with her against an Italian church wall, she commented tartly, ‘there has never been but that one short time (three years ago – in Florence) when you seemed disposed for that sort of thing. How many times have I seen you, in the long months that make up three years? I don’t complain, for there is no reason in the world why I should expect to see you; only don’t put in these decorative sentences about “Italian Church walls”.’ Henry blushed a little when he read this reproof: she had caught him indulging in a bit of sentimental rhetoric which he had no intention of acting out. The only reason why she might ‘expect’ to see him would be if he were in love with her, and he was not. But was she in love with him? When she asked apropos of the three long novels he planned to write, ‘why not give us a woman for whom we can feel a real love? Perhaps let someone love her very much; but at any rate let her love, and let us see that she does’ – was this a coded message about herself and her feelings for him? He went back to ‘A Florentine Experiment’ and read it more carefully. When Trafford Morgan first proposed to Margaret, she turned on him with scorn: ‘With the deeply-rooted egotism of a man you believe that I love you, you have believed it from the beginning. It was because I knew this that I allowed the experiment to go on: to make you stand convicted of your dense and vast mistake.’ But this devastating rejection turned out later to be a lie, or at least a self-deception. Did Constance truly consider him to be a selfish egotist, or was thinking it the only way she could control her feelings for him? The application of the story to their relationship was deeply ambiguous, but equally uncomfortable whichever way one interpreted it.
When Constance announced that she was moving to London in the autumn of 1883, Henry’s first reaction was panic, fearing that she was coming in pursuit of him. But although she took lodgings very near his own in Bolton Street, she quickly made it clear that she did not wish to embarrass him. She seemed perfectly happy to see him alone, discreetly, when it suited him, while she occupied herself in the intervals with her literary work and the exploration of London, retracing the topography of favourite novels by Dickens and Thackeray. He relaxed, and began to enjoy her company again. They were seen occasionally together at the theatre, but as far as Henry’s other friends were concerned Constance, if they were aware of her existence at all, was someone on the rim of his large circle of acquaintance. He encouraged this view by the way he referred to her conversationally as ‘an old maid’, ‘an excellent little woman’, whose company he valued for the sake of her intelligence and good sense. He began to address her familiarly as ‘Fenimore’, which had the effect of de-feminising her and
stressing her literary credentials. It helped this social performance that her hearing had deteriorated further and she was now obliged to use an ear-trumpet in the theatre: who could suspect Henry of carrying on an intrigue with a lady through an ear-trumpet? Not that he was carrying on an intrigue, but their unchaperoned meetings and excursions might have excited comment if they had been observed. When Fenimore stayed in Salisbury for a period he visited her there and they went to see Stonehenge together, in a carriage that was nearly blown over by the gale-force autumn wind, dining cosily afterwards on a Michaelmas goose at her lodgings in the Cathedral Close. When he went to a hotel in Dover for a few weeks in August to write, away from the distractions of London, Fenimore took rooms in the same town for the same purpose. They went for walks along the white cliffs in the intervals of work. Nothing amorous or improper happened on this and similar occasions. Their relationship was one of platonic companionship and informed conversation about subjects of common interest. Nevertheless Henry enjoyed the spice of secrecy and concealment that was inseparable from these meetings. He felt something of the excitement and sense of risk that he imagined must attend real assignations, and stored up the experience for future literary use.
The only person who had any idea of the extent of Henry’s association with Fenimore was his sister Alice. The baby of the family, five years younger than Henry, she had been subject to devastating prostrations and long periods of invalidism from the age of seventeen. Her impressive catalogue of symptoms – facial neuralgia, stomach pains, paralysis of the legs, palpitations, fainting fits and hysterics – had baffled members of the American medical profession, who were unable to find anything organically wrong with her; so in 1884 she came to England to see if she would fare any better there. It was clear to Henry that she could hardly fare worse. After the death of their mother she had rallied remarkably, apparently finding fulfilment, and unsuspected reserves of energy, in looking after her widowed father; but when the old man died in turn less than a year later – a peaceful, almost self-willed death – Alice collapsed again. William, now deeply absorbed in his academic career at Harvard, and with a wife and young family to attend to, had scant time to give to Alice. In any case Henry suspected that William’s domestic happiness, much as she rejoiced in it publicly, was painful for Alice to contemplate at close quarters – hadn’t her near-suicidal depression of ’78 coincided with his engagement to another Alice? With her parents and one brother dead (Wilky, after a short, unhappy post-war life, had succumbed to heart disease in 1883), with her beloved oldest brother married, and her youngest, Bob, struggling with massive problems of his own (he was unhappily married, and an alcoholic who periodically committed himself to an asylum), there was nothing for her in Boston. It would do her good to get away from a place associated with so many painful emotions and experiences for six months. Her friend Katharine Loring had an ailing sister, Louisa, whom she proposed to take to Europe for her health late in 1884, and was ready to escort Alice to England at the same time.
