Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  The crisis in the story comes when her son, who has survived and grown into adulthood, comes to her, penniless and dying. She does all in her power to care for him secretly. The real revelation comes near the end when, after the major no longer recognizes his wife, she is finally able to give up her performance. She stops curling her hair and pulls it back to reveal the crow’s feet around her eyes and the tiny wrinkles crisscrossing her face. She stops wearing pink-bowed gowns and dons plain black dresses. She also stops affecting “all the changing inflections and gestures, the pretty little manner and attitudes” that had made her seem the ideal southern lady.45 She can now, with relief, simply be herself.

  Read in light of the stories Woolson had written in the preceding two years, For the Major provides a rather startling exposé of the duplicities that marriage demanded of women. In Woolson’s fiction, women realize that they must play the roles men want to see them in, if they are to win men’s affection. Katharine Winthrop in “Château” states this explicitly when she taunts John Ford, telling him that she “had only to pretend a little, to pretend to be the acquiescent creature you admire, and I could have turned you round my little finger.”46

  Although Woolson began For the Major while still mourning the loss of her mother, when she came to complete the novel two and a half years later, the masks she adopted in her own friendship with James must have occurred to her as well. The letters she wrote to him in the first three years of their friendship suggest in a myriad of ways that she was diminishing herself for him—repeatedly referring to her work as “small” or “little”—just as Isabel Archer did when she first met Osmond: “She had effaced herself when he first knew her; she made herself small, pretending there was less of her than there really was.”47 Isabel regrets her unwitting deception, for when Osmond finds out how big her ideas and sense of self are, he hates her for it. Woolson had to wonder what would happen if she allowed James to see all of her.

  Above all, she worried that he would ridicule or rebuff her the way he had other women writers. “[Y]ou do not want to know the little literary women,” she told him. “Only the great ones—like George Eliot.” Where did that leave her? She tried to assure him that she did “not come in as a literary woman at all.” Instead, she wanted him to think of her “as a sort of—of admiring aunt,” despite being only three years older. Her hesitation conveys her uncertainty about how to define their relationship. He had been extremely kind to her in Florence, had singled her out for a private visit in Rome when he avoided meeting another woman writer, and had become a rather faithful correspondent, sending her his photo and a copy of Portrait inscribed “Constance Fenimore Woolson from her friend and servant. Henry James.”48 But she doubted his ability to accept both the woman and the writer.

  Was writing a small novel as her follow-up to Anne also a way of making herself appear less ambitious and therefore more acceptable? Perhaps. Her choice of an American setting—which she would use for the rest of her novels, although she continued to live in Europe—was a result of seeing the old scenes in her memory more vividly than the new ones in Europe, she once claimed. But it may also have been a way of bowing out of competition with James in the field of the international novel and asserting her own identity as a quintessentially American writer. By claiming a separate sphere in which to pursue her ambitions, she could keep them alive.

  9

  The Expatriate’s Life

  ONE DAY in the summer of 1882, Constance came upon a beaver in the Dresden Zoological Gardens who had pulled together a few branches in a futile attempt to make a dam. She stopped and stared at him for a while. He reminded her very much of herself—an American exile yearning for home and rather pathetically attempting to re-create it. “I suppose there never was a woman so ill-fitted to do without a home as I am,” she wrote to Henry James. “I am constantly trying to make temporary homes out of the impossible rooms at hotels & pensions.”1 Her wandering life had become its own kind of cage.

  As the Benedicts planned their return to the United States, there was some talk of Constance returning as well. Instead, she accompanied them only as far as London. With their departure began a new period in her life. After so much time alone in Rome, Engelberg, and Sorrento, she entered more fully into expatriate society. “Everybody I knew, or have ever heard of, seems to be [in London] now!” she declared to Sam.2 John and Clara Hay, William Dean Howells and his wife, as well as various friends from Cleveland were all in town.

  When everyone left for the winter, Constance followed the Hays to Paris, where James had just arrived from the countryside. Constance found “a quiet little place” where she could take meals in her own parlor. It was her first real glimpse of Paris, and although the weather was dreary, she enjoyed herself immensely.3 Whatever time she spent with James appears to have been brief. However, the trip was memorable for another reason. It was her first encounter with Hay’s close friend, the American geologist Clarence King.

  By all accounts, everyone—from miners to royalty—fell under King’s spell. He was often described in superlatives. James called him “the most delightful man in the world,” and Hay dubbed him an “exquisite wit, . . . one of the greatest savants of his time.”4 King’s book Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada, published in 1872, combined the soul of a poet with the bravado of a mountain climber and made him a national icon. He was the first director of the U.S. Geological Survey and the foremost explorer of the mountainous West. (He named Mount Whitney, the highest peak in the continental United States.) King was strikingly handsome as well, with a brown beard, close-cut hair, and sharp hazel eyes. He was not tall—only five feet six—but had a commanding presence.

  Woolson shared many mutual friends with King, among them Hay, Howells, Stedman, and James. Hay hoped to find the inveterate bachelor a wife and appears to have set his hopes on Woolson. They certainly had a lot in common: a fondness for grand mountains and wild places, a love of rowing, a peripatetic lifestyle, a preference for realism in literature and art, and, sadly, struggles with depression. Constance, however, wasn’t King’s type. He was notorious for pursuing women untainted by education or the trappings of Western civilization, such as the barmaids of London or the native women of Hawaii. He once wrote, “Woman, I am ashamed to say, I like best in the primitive state. Paradise, for me, is still a garden and a primaeval woman.” He would soon secretly marry an African-American woman and have a family with her, a fact his friends did not learn about until after his death.5

  Constance met King in Paris one December evening and would many years later remember him as “one of the most agreeable men I have ever known.” He was “exquisitely kind,” she recalled. “He took me to the Comedie Francaise, with the Hays, & his sister, & I was much touched by his thoughtfulness.” Constance loved the theater, but it made her uncomfortable. She could find herself stranded on an island of silence as the audience erupted in laughter. King, with his characteristic attentiveness, sat next to her and repeated the actors’ words. After that night, Hay wrote to his friend Henry Adams that Woolson, “that very clever person, to whom men are a vain show—loved [King] at sight and talks of nothing else.”6 She had joined the band of the smitten.

  King had promised to take Woolson to the Louvre, but she lost sight of him. Her feelings were “divided between liking and disappointment.”7 King no doubt reminded Woolson of Zeph Spalding and the adventuring male characters in her stories of the 1870s. He was a bracing wind all the way from the mythical American West. She would soon find herself caught up in a much stronger current, however.

  THE WHIRL OF SOCIETY

  After Paris, Constance returned to Florence and her old pension, the Casa Molini. Settling again into her writing routine and taking most of her meals in her room, she felt “at home.” She declined most invitations. She didn’t feel “strong enough to take much part in Society, or go out much, and do writing-work at the same time,” so she saved the “best” of herself for her writing.8

  Her pea
ceful seclusion did not last, however, due to the arrival of William Dean Howells and his family. Whatever reservations she had about Howells were put aside as she came to know him well for the first time. As one of America’s foremost novelists, Howells received many invitations and was pursued mercilessly by the city’s “lion-hunters.” Soon the invitations started arriving for Woolson as well. She later explained to James, with her tendency to trivialize, “The same fate that befell the great masculine Lion, befell the very little feminine one—though on a much smaller scale.”9

  William Dean Howells, novelist and editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Woolson became close to him and his family during their visit to Italy in 1882–83. Photograph circa 1880.

  (Courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University)

  Before long, Woolson’s days were full of visits and parties. She had so many friends in town and made so many new acquaintances that she set her own day to accept calls. Besides Howells and his wife and daughter, with whom she became very friendly, there were also the Hays, King’s sister, and her old friends from Rome, Lieutenant Commander Caspar Goodrich and his wife, who asked Constance to be godmother to their new son, Wolseley. He was a nice boy, she told Sam, but she regretted “wandering about the world, standing godmother to strange children” when Sam had a new baby in Cleveland.10

  Florentine society was also full of expatriate artists and writers whom Woolson befriended. There was Violet Paget (pen name Vernon Lee), whom James thought “a most astounding female” with “a prodigious cerebration,” and her friend, the poet Agnes Mary Robinson. She also befriended Mrs. Launt Thompson, a writer and the wife of an American sculptor, and Eleanor Poynter, an English novelist and sister of the painter Sir Edward Poynter. Woolson was particularly fond of Miss Poynter, finding her “very quiet” and “appreciative.” Most of society overwhelmed her, however, generally reminding her of a “picture of wraiths & shades being swept round in a great, misty, crowded circle, by some bewildering & never-ceasing wind.”11

  Constance was more at home with a group of men and women she met three times a week for six-to-eight-mile hikes in the hills surrounding Florence. On one of those hills, Bellosguardo, Constance met Miss Louisa Greenough (a sister of the sculptor Horatio), who lived next to friends of Henry James in the Villa Castellani, the model for Osmond’s home in The Portrait of a Lady. Astonishingly, Louisa Greenough, born around 1809, had known James Fenimore Cooper during his brief residence in a neighboring villa in the 1820s and was delighted to meet his relation. Frequent invitations addressed to Miss Fenimore Woolson made their way down the hill.12

  However much Constance complained about Florentine “society,” it was not entirely disagreeable to her. She found that her age and occupation as a writer made her much respected, a rather novel experience for her. Women seemingly past their prime were not “shelved” as they were at home but were “important, considered.” Society, however, threatened to consume all of her time. She simply could not “be going out to lunches, & dinners, and evening-companies” and continue her writing.13 The “best” of herself was being siphoned off gradually but surely.

  In the spring, Constance fled to Venice, where she was sure to have “no ‘calls.’ ” Although Howells and his family were also there and the dinner parties continued, she considered the smaller Venetian society much more manageable than that in Florence. Ever since a brief visit to Venice in 1881, she had longed to return. She had discovered then that “the perfection of earthly motion is a gondola” and decided that the “Floating City” was her ideal place.14

  Woolson found rooms in the Palazzo Gritti-Swift, just above the English art historian John Addington Symonds, where she could see from her arched windows the busy Grand Canal, the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, the pink-hued campanile of San Giorgio, and the boats docked at the Riva Degli Schiavone. In the late afternoons she floated on the canals or enjoyed losing her way in the winding streets. She was starting to wonder, she wrote to James, “whether the end of the riddle of my existence may not be, after all, to live here, & die here.”15

  Shortly after she arrived in Venice, she received a letter from James, who had gone to America after the death of his father. “[Y]ou have added much to the pleasure of my summer by writing as you have,” she replied. He had envisioned between them more talks “against an Italian church-wall,” but she asked him to leave out such images in the future, complaining that “there has never been but that one short time (three years ago—in Florence) when you seem disposed for that sort of thing. How many times have I seen you, in the long months that make up three long years?” He had as yet no plans for a return to Europe. He asked her to give him “ ‘a picture’—to keep [him] ‘going.’ ”16

  She happily obliged, setting in front of him sumptuous visions of Venice and then inviting him mentally into her apartment, where she would make him a cup of weak tea, as he liked it, and invite him to sit on the plush sofa from which he could see out beyond the Grand Canal to the lagoon. She offered him her “infinite” “charity,” as he had called it. She preferred to name it “gratitude,” not for him personally, but for his writings, which “voice for me—as nothing else ever has—my own feelings; those that are so deep—so a part of me, that I can not express them, & do not try to.” She was reminded of how Hay had said in Florence that wherever his friend King was, “there is my true country, my real home.” She had said the same thing once to Stedman about Rome. If she could not have a literal home, she found it instead in James’s books, in which she felt her innermost self uncannily reflected. A few lines later, she implicitly contrasted herself to the wives of their friends Hay and Howells. Mrs. Hay, James had complained, “expressed herself with a singular lack of cultivation.” Now Constance commented on how Mrs. Howells was consumed by “[s]mall feminine malice, & everlasting little jealousies.”17 Constance was a very different sort of woman, she subtly conveyed to him, one who could appreciate his work and enter into his plans for future writing with full comprehension.

  This letter also suggests a growing appreciation for James the man. She admired his decision to remain in America after his father’s death for the sake of his sister, who was “now, save for you, left alone.” Such a gesture meant a lot to her, also single and alone in the world. “That you are doing this only confirmed my idea of you—that you are, really, the kindest hearted man I know,—though this is not, perhaps, the outside opinion about you.” He was starting to look less like the self-centered author she had first glimpsed. The two letters Woolson wrote to James during her stay in Venice clearly show her venturing into a deeper intimacy, one that the tone of his letter from America had called forth. Although the common perception of James is that he was reserved and aloof, in reality he could be very warm and affectionate. Clearly he had swept away the embarrassment Woolson felt over telling him of her success with Anne. Her last letter to him from Venice concludes, “The lagoons, the Piazzetta, & the little still canals all send their love to you. They wish you were here. And so do I.”18

  As the summer approached and the visitors began to pack their bags, Constance wrote in Winnie Howells’s autograph book “[Venice] is my ‘Xanadu.’—But not for always; Xanadu never lasts, you know!”19 She stayed on until the seventh of July, leaving finally after a slight illness made her seek out cooler climes and fresher air. Her final weeks in Venice were also tainted by the recent death of her godson, Wolseley Goodrich, whose parents had been staying there as well. Her story “In Venice,” published the year before, had presciently portrayed a child’s death in the water city. As magically beautiful as Venice was, for Woolson it was already associated with death.

  SUFFERING SO PITEOUS

  After leaving Venice, Constance made her way first to Engelberg and then back to Baden-Baden, where she met her old friend Jane Carter and her children, Mary, Grace, and Averell. Constance was delighted to renew their old closeness. Mary was now twenty-one, Grace nineteen, and Averell, another godson to
Constance, fourteen. Jane had brought her children to Europe in the hopes of breaking off Mary’s engagement to a man who reminded Jane of her own ill-fated marriage to Lawson Carter, which had ended with his suicide in 1869. Constance became quite attached to the emotionally fragile Mary, perhaps recognizing some of her own moodiness and sensitivity in her. After the family left Baden-Baden, Constance wrote to Mary of the final gaieties of “the season,” recalling all they had done together: the musical evenings, races, walks up the hills to the ruins of Hohenbaden Castle, and royalty-watching.20

  Constance was virtually alone in Baden-Baden when news arrived of a family tragedy. Her brother Charlie had died on August 20, 1883, in Los Angeles. According to county records, the cause of death was “suicide by poison.”21 Constance collapsed from the shock.

  Charlie had seemed to be doing better. Afraid of another breakdown from working too hard in a cramped office, he had bought some farmland the year before with the help of the Mathers and possibly Connie and Clara. At the beginning of 1883, Constance reported that Charlie had been writing to her regularly. He was disheartened by the dreary winter, and she was concerned about how well the farm would do in the next season.22 But there was no cause for alarm. When summer came, he sank further, despite the California sunshine and promise of the coming harvest.

  This time Charlie did not reach out to Constance. Instead, he kept “a sort of diary” over the summer. It appears that as he prepared to take his life, he mailed it to her. Charlie’s diary, she told Sam, “showed suffering so piteous that it broke my heart. I cannot imagine any suffering greater than his was, at the last.”23 After reading the diary, she destroyed it, as he had wished. But his agony imprinted itself on her mind. It would find its way at times into her writing, mingling with her own silent suffering.