Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  Her letters show that she had given up on being able to write and support herself. She was too weak to tolerate the dosage of opiates that would help her sleep through the night. She had endured months of financial worries and declining health, not to mention sleeplessness and great pain. Yet her final decision appears to have been an impulsive one. She may have been unable to restrain the longing for death that had been with her since her youth. Death was not terrible to her. It would mean, at last, peace.8

  HER PRINCIPAL MOURNER

  When Clara first received the news of her sister’s death, she cabled James in London to let him know and to ask him to rush to Venice to attend to the necessary matters. He was, in her eyes, more or less family. The shock of Constance’s death hit him like “a bolt out of the blue.” He immediately made preparations to leave but soon received another cable informing him that Grace Carter was already there. He seemed relieved but also felt usurped. In his first letter to Grace, on January 26, he pleaded with her for information. “I write you in the midst of much bewilderment & uncertainty. . . . I am so utterly in the dark about everything that I am reduced to mere conjecture & supposition as to what has taken place & as to how Miss Woolson died. I had not even heard a word of her being ill.” This is what puzzled and angered him. Woolson had never told him she was unwell. As he would write to Baldwin on the same day, “To me it is all ghastly amazement and distress. . . . Hadn’t she sent for you? I have a dismal, dreadful image of her being alone and unfriended at the last.”9

  When the news of Woolson’s suicide was reported in the London Standard the next day, James’s bewilderment turned to horrible certainty. Unlike her family, he was immediately convinced of the accuracy of the reports and collapsed from the devastating blow. Traveling to Rome for the funeral was now impossible. All he could do was write letters to just about everyone he knew about her death. Once so secretive about their friendship, he poured out his grief to anyone who would listen. A New York newspaper three years later would call him Woolson’s “principal mourner,” and in many ways he was.10

  Woolson’s choice to be alone at the end was inconceivable to James. He wrote to Baldwin a week later, “Miss Woolson’s evident determination not to send for you seems to me insane—just as her silence to me does. . . . She kept us both ignorant—with a perversity that was diseased.”11 Underneath his evident willingness to paint Constance as insane, and thus beyond his ability to help her, is also the sting of rejection and immense anger and guilt at not being able to prevent her death.

  The final image of their friendship, then, is one of James left behind—left in the dark, in fact, about his friend’s deepest thoughts and feelings. Sixteen years later, when he in turn would suffer a severe depression and teetered toward suicide, he would not shut out his closest friends. After a visit to him, Edith Wharton wrote movingly to their mutual friend Morton Fullerton about the shock of his self-revelation: “I, who have always seen him so serene, so completely the master of his wonderful emotional instrument—who thought of him . . . as so sensitive to human contacts & yet so secure from them; I could hardly believe it was the same James who cried out to me in his fear, his despair, his craving for the ‘cessation of consciousness,’ & all his unspeakable loneliness & need of comfort, & inability to be comforted!”12 By contrast, Woolson’s inner anguish at the end—her buried life—remained hers alone.

  Yet by taking her own life she had made her pain vociferously apparent. James could not, at first, reconcile this outward declaration with the woman he had known. He explained to Boott, “The event seems to me absolutely to demand the hypothesis of sudden dementia.” He also wrote to Hay of “some misery of insomnia pushed to nervous momentary frenzy.” He wrote to Katherine Bronson, “this publicity of misery, this outward horror and chiasso [uproar] round her death, was the thing in the world most alien to her and most inconceivable of her—therefore, to my mind, most conclusive as to her having undergone some violent cerebral derangement.” Alice James, who had thought much about suicide, would have understood it differently. As she once wrote in her diary, “It’s bad that it [suicide] is so untidy, there is no denying that, for one bespatters one’s friends morally as well as physically, taking them so much more into one’s secret than they want to be taken.”13 Rather than admit he now understood her secret pain, James looked instead for evidence of sudden mental instability.

  However, James also remembered his friend’s tendency toward depression, suggesting that he began to understand the persistent nature of her condition. At the time, he used the same phrase—“victim of chronic melancholia”—with slight variation, in letters to three people. Two months after Woolson’s death, he explained to his brother William that she had a “predisposition which sprang in its turn from a constitutional, an essentially, tragic and latently insane difficulty in living.” He also believed that her melancholy was caused by having been “so shut up to solitude by her extreme deafness.”14

  He could not understand, however, what particular reason, save her deafness, she had for being so miserable: “[S]he was free, independent, successful—very successful indeed as a writer—and liked, peculiarly, by people who knew her.” He seems unaware of her worries about money, her fears about being able to write another novel, her difficulties sleeping and dealing with pain, and her growing conviction that she would never be able to find a permanent home and to retire. Undoubtedly, these circumstances exacerbated an underlying predisposition to severe depression. But by focusing on what he called “the fact that a beneficent providence had elaborately constructed her to suffer,” James tried to absolve himself from responsibility. For if her collapse had been caused by her circumstances, he might have been able to ameliorate them.15 He also reduced her life to one of endless pain and suffering, overlooking her great capacity for joy in her friends as well as children, dogs, art, literature, landscape, and nature. Although her depression may have consumed her in the end, it did not define her life.

  James may have wondered if the loss of his company when she moved to Italy contributed to her depression. That she experienced their separation as a great loss is very probable. Although she had many friends and acquaintances, she was close to few people. In these last years, she seemed to be most attached to him, Boott, and Baldwin. However, the separation from James alone was not sufficient to plunge Woolson into such deep darkness.16 Their separation may have revived the pain of many losses over the course of her life, most linked to her loss of a stable home. In the final months of her life she seemed to be wandering almost aimlessly in search of a place to call home, which she grew increasingly convinced she would not be able to afford.

  By the time the Benedicts came in April to unseal Constance’s apartment, James was ready to confront with them the ghost of his dead friend. He even stayed in her old rooms at the Casa Biondetti. At her apartment in the Casa Semitecolo, every book and pen lay just where Constance had left them. There were some papers—finished manuscripts of the Italian stories to be collected, which were ready for the Harpers, and unanswered letters. Those that James had written to her were returned to him. He also was given as mementos the Meacci painting and some of her books, among which he chose her copies of Anne and Rodman the Keeper with her notations.17

  It took a month for the Benedict women to empty the apartment. James’s role appears to have been largely supportive. As Clara described it, James “came every day to see and help us—we could not have gone through it without him. Clare and I did all the personal packing ourselves; a box of pictures and a trunk to be sent to the Mathers, a large box to Mrs. Phillips, and little things to Miss Poynter, Dr. Baldwin, Mrs. Curtis and Miss Bronson. . . . We worked every day until tea time, when Mr. James would come and we would go out in the gondola for two hours; and then, almost every night, he would dine with us.”18 The little dog, Tello, was a source of much concern. They ultimately put him in the gondolier Tito’s care until they were able to return for him.

  There was also a deat
h mask, whose origin is unknown. Those who attended to Woolson’s body after her death must have felt that the family would want a last look at her. Perhaps they also believed that, as a famous author, she needed to be memorialized in this way. However, the Benedicts and James found it morbid and must have realized that the woman who so resented the circulation of her image in life would not want it preserved in death. Clara took on the painful responsibility of destroying the mask herself.19

  The question of what to do with some of Woolson’s papers and her dresses must have vexed them, for it appears that James may have been asked to dispose of them. Many years later, Zina Hulton, Constance’s friend from Venice, reported that James told her “that when he had sorted out a few manuscripts of hers which were complete, there remained a great mass of works & commencements & other worthless fragments. After thinking the question over, he decided to destroy all these by drowning them in the lagoon. So he went far out in a gondola & committed them to the water where it was really deep.” The image is eerily reminiscent of the narrator of “ ‘Miss Grief’ ” burying Aaronna’s works with her. However, many scraps and notes were saved, which Clare would publish decades later. A much older James also reportedly told a young girl the story about being charged with drowning in a Venetian lagoon a famous woman’s dresses, which rose like black balloons all around him and would not go down without a struggle, a fitting metaphor for the way her memory continued to haunt his imagination in the years to come.20 This story may or may not be true. In any case, there is no evidence that James destroyed anyhing without Clara’s permission.

  The Benedicts were forever grateful to James for helping them through those trying weeks in Venice, and they remained friends with him for the rest of their lives. They corresponded often, and the two women visited “Cousin Henry” whenever they passed through England on their way to the Continent, which they continued to visit regularly until the First World War broke out.

  Before leaving Italy, James went to Rome to attend to a matter for Clara concerning the grave and “largely just to stand beside that grave 5 minutes myself,” he wrote to Baldwin. Years later, he wrote to Clare of standing again at “that very particular spot—below the grey wall, the cypresses and the time-silvered Pyramid. It is tremendously, inexhaustibly touching—its effect never fails to overwhelm.”21

  Even after returning to England, during the fall of 1894, James was still seeking out places associated with Woolson. While visiting some friends in Oxford, he stayed in Woolson’s rooms at 15 Beaumont St. “[D]istressing as it was to enter the house,” he wrote to Clare, it was a moving experience to meet and commiserate with Mrs. Phillips, her devoted landlady. Woolson just the year before had been drawn to the idea that “houses in which persons have lived, become after a time, permeated with their thoughts.” She must have shared this theory with James, for he seemed to hope to communicate with her one last time. While staying in her rooms, he conceived of a story titled “The Altar of the Dead”: “I imagine a man whose noble and beautiful religion is the worship of the Dead,” he wrote in his notebooks. “He cherishes for the silent, for the patient, the unreproaching dead, a tenderness in which all his private need of something, not of this world, to cherish, to be pious to, to make the object of a donation, finds a sacred, and almost a secret, expression. He is struck with the way they are forgotten, are unhallowed—unhonoured, neglected, shoved out of sight.”22

  In the coming years, James would write many more works that scholars have suspected were inspired at least in part by his complicated friendship with Woolson. The most fully realized is “The Beast in the Jungle,” published nine years after her death. He took as the germ of his story an idea in Woolson’s notebooks, which he read during those weeks cleaning out the Casa Semitecolo: “To imagine a man spending his life looking for and waiting for his ‘splendid moment.’ . . . But the moment never comes.”23 James’s tale, a kind of posthumous collaboration, was a tribute not only to the memory of his friend but also to her conception of literature. It is one of his most moving tales precisely because it acknowledges the power of a great love, something she first encouraged him to do in his writing over twenty years earlier.

  The story centers on John Marcher, who spends his life waiting for something prodigious to happen to him. He is convinced that it will alter his life irrevocably, but he has no conception of what it will be. The one person he tells his secret to is May Bartram, a woman of great sympathy, who at first wonders if what he describes might be “falling in love.” He says he has loved but that it hasn’t been “overwhelming.” She responds, just as Woolson would have, “Then it hasn’t been love.”24

  Over the ensuing years, the two become very close and Marcher realizes that he should marry her, but he decides that he can’t ask a woman to share in his obsession, to make her watch with him through the years for what waited for him “like a crouching beast in a jungle.” This is, however, precisely what May does. He feels great relief in being able to share his secret life with her and realizes that she looks out with him from the mask he wears for the world. She shares intimately in his thoughts and views, just as Woolson did in James’s, but in the process she hides herself: “Beneath her forms as well detachment has learned to sit, and behavior had become for her, in the social sense, a false account of herself. There was but one account of her that would have been true all the while and that she could give straight to nobody, least of all to John Marcher.”25 This account, we are led to believe, is that she loves him. He remains, however, obtuse, looking anywhere else for his great moment but at her. She finally tells him that she has realized he will never know his fate because he is blind to it. What James realized in the years after Woolson’s death was that Woolson had seen him but that he had not seen her. Like May, she “was a sphinx.” Moreover, he realized that her powers of perception had been in some regards more penetrating than his. Women, John Marcher comes to believe, “made things out, where people were concerned, that the people often couldn’t have made out for themselves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were conductors and revealers.”26 James had come to appreciate Woolson’s great empathy, it seems, as a woman and as a writer.

  As May lies fatally ill and John contemplates her death, he feels “abandoned” and wonders if their long waiting hasn’t been in vain. She tells him, “The door isn’t shut. The door’s open. . . . It’s never too late.”27 When she is finally dying he feels cruelly locked out: “[A]ccess to her chamber of pain, rigidly guarded, was almost wholly forbidden him.” He realizes that the “stupidest fourth cousin” has more right to be near her than he does, just as James must have felt when Grace Carter, a distant relation, was the person upon whom Woolson called in her final hours. John reflects, “A woman might have been, as it were, everything to him, and it might yet present him in no connexion that any one seemed held to recognise.” His last recourse is to visit her grave, but he is unable to penetrate the mystery of death—“no palest light broke.”28

  A year later, however, when Marcher returns to May’s grave, he finds there his past as well as her continued attendance, watching and waiting with him still. Thus begins a ritual of visiting her grave that is interrupted one day by a face “with an expression like the cut of a blade.” It was that of another mourner, a man who presented “the image of a scarred passion.” Then it suddenly flashes upon Marcher: “No passion had ever touched him, for this is what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage? . . . He had seen outside of his life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself.” He had “missed” it after all, the great thing that was to happen to him—“she was what he had missed.” Now, he discovers that his true fate was to be the man “to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.” If he had “love[d] her, . . . he would have lived. She had lived—who could say now with what passion?—since she had loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it huge
ly glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use.” The story ends with John Marcher throwing himself onto her tomb to avoid the “lurking Beast” then about to lunge at him.29

  Angel of Grief, sculpted by William Wetmore Story, on Evelyn Story’s grave near Woolson’s in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome.

  It inspired the final scene in “The Beast of the Jungle.”

  (Photograph by the author)

  The articulate silence of Woolson’s life and death had finally spoken to James. What she taught him was that to love deeply was the great thing, the only thing perhaps. Without it, one has not really lived at all. Even though Woolson expertly veiled her deeper feelings, which surely were a kind of love, she had lived nonetheless. Now he had to carry on with the sinking feeling that he had not.

  Six years after her death, James reflected on his good fortune, living in Rye, England, where he enjoyed financial independence and the comfort of owning his own home, conditions which enabled him to return to writing the novels that would secure his reputation as the “Master.” After a visit from Grace Carter, he wrote to her, “You give me great pleasure—more than I can say—by expressing to me your sense of our common memory of, & common affection for, our C. F. W. But how she (in spite of Venetian lures & spells of illusions) would have liked this particular little corner of England, & perhaps found peace in it.”30 He couldn’t help but imagine her there as well, living in the atmosphere of settled tranquility she had craved.

  Two years before his own death, he was thinking of her still. On January 29, 1914, he miswrote the year as 1894. It was twenty years since her death, almost to the day.31

  EPILOGUE