In his many tales of writers and painters, James was adamant in separating the deliberate and always sacral space of art from the vagaries, contingencies, and frustrations of the artist’s life. He did not often speak in his own voice of this demarcation—but once, in the autumn of 1904, during a visit to America (from England, where he had long ago settled), he submitted to a journalist’s interview. It was, she reported in the New York Herald, the first interview he had ever agreed to—“the marvel is how he has escaped”—and in her description of the “kindly if bewildered welcome from this man who is called intensely shy,” we can glimpse him again looking to escape, or at least to elude his interlocutor’s more intimate inquiries. “One’s craft, one’s art, is in his expression,” he warned her, “not one’s person, as that of some great actress or singer is hers. After you have heard a Patti sing why should you care to hear the small private voice of the woman?”
A credo can be a covert defense of a position not fully admitted to; and in this instance James’s credo, despite its vocal flourish, was unmistakably a defense of covertness. He guarded his privacy with a ferocity that could sometimes startle, or even injure. When the invalided Alice James, his gifted and acerbic sister, died in England of breast cancer in 1892, leaving behind an extraordinary diary, Katharine Loring, her companion and caretaker, saw to the printing of four copies: two for herself, one for William—the renowned elder brother—and another for James. James read his copy, grew alarmed at his own role in it, and threw it in the fire; he was peremptory in forbidding publication. (The diary was published only in the following century.) And in 1909, when James was sixty-six, he made what he called a “gigantic bonfire” in the garden behind his house in Sussex and incinerated a lifetime’s collection of letters. “I have been easier in my mind ever since,” he announced. In an essay on George Sand composed a dozen years before this back-yard conflagration, he wrote with hot sympathy of the subversion of “the cunning of the inquirer” by “the pale forewarned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt.” What could be plainer than that? In 1915, a year before his death, he burned more papers; it took him a week. James intended to disappoint posterity, and to keep his secrets, whatever they were, from exposure.
His secrets, whatever they were, are consequently left to conjecture, whether ideological in the form of a definitive thesis (e.g., queer theory), or psychological in the way of an inspired hunch. Leon Edel fashioned James as a kind of sweeping literary conquistador (“The Conquest of London” is one of his rubrics)—except when Henry was in the presence of William, the brother who was older by two years and a luminary in his own right. Edel’s disclosure of the fraternal tension—William superior and high-handedly critical, Henry subordinate and resentful, still struggling to assert against the favored first-born his own power and prestige—is far more the product of Edel’s insight than of his research, though there is documentary force behind it. But Edel, in his warmly interpretive narrative of a generous and generously deserving James, did not venture much beyond this. Edel’s psychological forays generally follow an outward chronology (his speculations, for example, about the “obscure hurt,” James’s youthful back injury) and the more modest path of conventional literary criticism; he resists tampering with, or too zealously reconstructing, James’s inmost psyche. In the expansive course of those magisterial five volumes, Edel remains a traditional biographer, not an infiltrator. Yet the restrained biographer had second thoughts. In a new preface prepared for an abridged and somewhat revised single-volume edition issued in 1985, he confessed that he was obliged “to keep constantly in mind the changes that have occurred in biographical writing and in social attitudes toward privacy and our sexual lives. These changes are profound.… We are able to offer a more forthright record of personal relations, of deeper emotions and sexual fantasies.” He added that though he continued to believe in James’s lifelong celibacy, he would no longer hesitate to speak of the “homoerotic component.” (The societal changes Edel alludes to are acute enough for Lionel Trilling to have acknowledged—looking back in late middle age on his early study of E. M. Forster—that at the time of writing he was entirely ignorant of Forster’s homosexuality. It was not, he said, an issue in the culture.)
Eleven years after Edel gave the nod to sex, Sheldon Novick, author of a life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., brought out his controversial Henry James: The Young Master. Taking full advantage of those altered attitudes toward privacy, he challenged the celibacy premise with a spectacular claim. James, he noted, explicitly disapproved of celibacy: after a visit to a Shaker community in 1875, he condemned the Shakers’ programmatic asexuality as a “lurking … asceticism” characterized by “the capacity for taking a grim satisfaction in dreariness.” A comment on a social movement may or may not be personally revelatory; nevertheless Novick is persuaded of James’s sexual activism. “I have taken it for granted,” he writes, “that Henry James underwent the ordinary experiences of life,” one of which he defines as “realized passion.” And: “I have not made any discoveries about James’s sexuality; James’s sexual orientation, as we now say, has been an open secret for a hundred years.” Even so, no biographer before Novick had ever suggested that Henry James and Oliver Wendell Holmes, the future Chief Justice of the United States, went to bed together. Nor is this offered as speculation. “In that epochal spring, in a rooming house in Cambridge and in his own shuttered bedroom in Ashburton Place,” Novick states, “Henry performed his first acts of love.” James himself, reminiscing in his journal about those Cambridge days decades later, declared that “I knew there, had there … l’initiation première (the divine, the unique) there and in Ashburton Place.… Ah, the ‘epoch-making’ weeks of the spring of 1865!” But whether this cry of remembered delight refers to first-time gay sex, or rather to the rapture of early literary success—James’s first published story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in March of that very spring—not even the most intuitive biographer can confirm.
James’s bonfire is a blaze of aggressive reticence; it announces—and defends—the borders of the private life. And his admonition to his New York Herald interviewer (one imagines her as a type of Henrietta Stackpole, the peppy American journalist in The Portrait of a Lady) is a firmly shut gate: do not intrude on the small private life; the large coloratura of the diva’s art is sufficient. In “The Private Life,” a quasi-ghost story published in 1892, James closets his perpetually dedicated writer-protagonist alone in a room with his pen, while a double—a light-minded social simulacrum—carries out the obligations of the public man. The tale is said to be based on Robert Browning, whose sequestered genius was never evident in his parlor manner; but it also describes James’s impatience with “the twaddle of mere graciousness”—his term for the spirit and tone of much of his social correspondence.
T. S. Eliot, who consciously took James as his model in his own conquest of London, elevated Jamesian reticence to intractable dogma. His formulation of the objective correlative, which dominated an era with the unarguability of a papal bull, denied to poetry the presence or influence of any grain of autobiographical matter. Eliot issued a trinity of unassailable declarations: “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”; “Emotion … has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet”; “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.” What all this ideational superstructure actually meant, it turned out, was that Eliot the man had plenty to hide: an anguished personality, desolate emotions, and (especially) years of psychological suffering. The continual extinction of personality was not so much the artist’s vaunted self-sacrifice as it was Eliot’s attempt to escape from being truly known. A generation passed before his well-made bastion of secrecy was breached; Eliot’s lofty strictures, reinforced by an unquestioned authority, held. Like some holy statue, he appeared to his public to have no private life at all; or, at least,
nobody dared to inquire after one. It was not until Lyndall Gordon undertook to examine Eliot’s experience—going beyond his career as a poet—that various half-concealed poisons (betrayal, misogyny, desertion, racism, anti-Semitism even post-Holocaust) began to spill out of the history of the man who suffered. Eliot’s Early Years (1977) and Eliot’s New Life (1988) are now combined, with additions, in Gordon’s freshly issued one-volume T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. Though she is unfailingly sympathetic to Eliot as an artist, to have read Gordon ten or even twenty years ago was (for those who once worshiped Eliot as literarily inviolable) akin to seeing the bronze monuments of Lenin pulled down after the demise of Communism in Russia. “Hatred is common; perfection rare. In him, the two were interfused” is Gordon’s ultimate judgment on Eliot; but on the negative side she suppresses nothing. If others have followed her in forcing the inscrutable Eliot into the light, she was the first—the first relentless excavator into his private life.
In A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art, she is again first. It is possible—it has always been possible—to fall in love with Edel’s tender James, and with the equally admirable genius in the biographies of R. W. B. Lewis, Frederick Kaplan, and Sheldon Novick. It is not possible to sink quite so gratifyingly into the private James (or, rather, the secret one) whom Gordon scrupulously deduces. “The deeper the silence, the more intently it speaks,” she affirms; but unlike her predecessors, she is not drawn to “the homoerotic component.” Her own project is more discriminating, and more labyrinthine in the tracing; it lies along the fault line between ambition and feeling. And in moving from Eliot to James, she turns from moral storm to moral nuance: where the private Eliot can be fiercely pitiless (after his first wife’s permanent incarceration in a mental asylum, he never once went to see her—one instance among many), the private James is only selfish. Relying on Edel, and despite his candid account of James’s defeats and depressions, we are made familiar with sweetness of temperament, courtliness, affection, humor, the benevolent beaming of a reserved figure who has learned the ways of an aristocrat. This is James as Edith Wharton knew him, according to Edel—close and warm as the drawing room hearth, yet significantly distant; and all the same beloved. Yet the cause of art inevitably favors—promotes, urges—selfishness. James himself underlines this idea in tale after tale, where the artist is either shackled or doomed by “attachments.” In “The Madonna of the Future,” the attachment notably overwhelms the art, and the canvas remains blank. Elsewhere artists strain to break free of the claims of the natural. “One has no business to have children,” the Master (who has them) declares in “The Lesson of the Master”; “I mean if one wants to do something good.” Wife and offspring, he laments, are “an incentive to damnation, artistically speaking.” And, as Gordon will take pains to show, so are friends and relations.
2.
A parenthetical reflection, for the moment, on writer’s selfishness. From the very beginning James was what even in his own period was called a freelance; he wrote for a living, and when he was not bringing out novels he was voluminously filling the magazines with long essays and stories. Between 1864 and 1910, one hundred and twelve tales—many of them, by our lights, actually novellas or short novels—appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, the North American Review, the Century, the Cornhill, and numerous other periodicals. The novels themselves ran as serials. He lived in a magazine world, was tied to it, and had deadlines to meet and length requirements to abide by (which he habitually renegotiated and habitually exceeded). He worked, as we say, like a demon; and he was demonically driven by an ambition Balzacian in its appetite for majesty and abundance. One of the marvels of Edel’s treatment—and the reason writers especially are magnetized—is its power to excite the reader with the sensation of single-minded literary ambition at its grandest, at the same time defining that sensation as an act of moral radiance. With the exception of James’s comedic response to episodes of invasion by Edith Wharton, Edel has little to report about his subject’s aversion to interruption. Wharton in her newfangled motor too often descended on James with her “eagle pounce,” a terrifying firebird: “the whirr and wind of [her] great pinions is already cold on my foredoomed brow!” he cried. But he complained more gravely of his “inward ache” at the prospect of being swooped up and away from his work table. Edel supplies no further glimpse into that inward ache and what it might imply for an understanding of James’s character in general. The fence James erected against intrusion into his private life was itself circumscribed by a second fence—or defense: an instinct to barricade against any distraction from the unrelenting pursuit of his life’s appointed task. It made him into a secret monster—a monster on art’s behalf; but he encased the monster in so many folds and ribbons and windings that this dissembling webwork of the creature’s costume veiled him from easy recognition. As in the terrible metaphor of “The Private Life,” the insatiable artist clung frenziedly to his desk, while Wharton and her chauffeur took the friendly gentleman, draped in his elaborate nineteenth-century manners, for a spin in her car. With writer’s plentifulness comes writer’s selfishness, James’s sacred barrier against intrusion and distraction; the pairing of art and defense is ineluctable. For James, the barrier itself partook of the sacral because the exercise of art was acknowledged as holy: in his notebooks he invokes Balzac and Maupassant with what can only be described as petitionary prayers to household gods.
James’s age was submerged in a sea of letters. Literature mattered acutely, centrally, and was prized as a fundament of civilization. Even forty years ago we lived in the residue of that notion, and a new novel by a commanding writer galvanized the culture. All that has been eclipsed by film, TV, and dot-com, to say the obvious, and small note is taken nowadays of literary ambition, whether unobtrusively cloaked or savagely naked. Magazines—those with a reasonable circulation—commonly resist, and probably despise, stories; no more than a handful remain faithful, to a degree, to the old ideal of imaginative prose. Story may still retain its power in print, but only if (as in the name and nature of a long-ago pulp) it is True Story. The tales James published in his forties, saturated in the furiously free force and flow of language, patiently or impatiently sealing brick to telltale brick in the structure of character, above all heedlessly liberated to liberality—how to imagine narratives like these in our own magazines, which no longer welcome such imperiousness? Current editorial inhibition is not so much a question of contemporary taste—the crucial changes of style, attitude, and attention since the pre-modern eighteen-eighties—as it is a revolutionary repudiation of the magazine as an arena for writer’s sovereignty. In 1884, at forty-one—the same year he published “The Art of Fiction”—James brought to light, in serial form, two little-known tales, “Georgina’s Reasons” and “A New England Winter.” The first is an amazing human conundrum (postmodern, in our lingo); the second weaves an ingenious tissue of high comedy. Both display ambition metamorphosed into conscious sovereignty, the writer unimpeded, in full command, a thing inconceivable in popular late-twentieth-century periodicals. (Or, for that matter, in the late-twentieth-century academy, where writer’s autonomy has long been undone by politics and deconstruction.) A comparable genius of our own time, if there were one, would not sail so easily with the wind. And since literary fiction is more and more unwanted, and the few writers who embrace it with old-fashioned lust grow more and more irrelevant, the issue of selfishness-for-the-sake-of-art begins to drift, more and more, into the fastness of a superannuated foreign psychology. The past: that alien bourne to which no traveler can return.
3.
Except the canny biographer. It is precisely James’s selfishness that Lyndall Gordon meticulously teases out of the archive of extant letters, and out of her own insightful talent for making revelatory connections. As literary detective, she shuns the mischief that is motivated beforehand by what the excavator intends to find; it seems clear that she did not set out to uncover this aspect o
f James’s character, and came upon it as a surprise. (It is certainly a surprise to the Edel-oriented.) Gordon’s purpose was to learn more, much more, about two women in James’s life—“female partners, posthumous partners,” she calls them, “in that unseen space in which life is transformed into art.” The two were Mary Temple, known as Minny, James’s lively cousin, dead of tuberculosis at twenty-four, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, three years older than James, a successful novelist whose friendship with him was terminated by her suicide in Venice. Both figures have long been staples in all biographies of James. And while Woolson has had the status of a somewhat eccentric walk-on, Minny Temple has been granted the role of a pervasive minor goddess whose luminous influences touched several of James’s American heroines. She can be traced most incisively in the dying Milly Theale of The Wings of the Dove, and even earlier in the dying Milly Theory of “Georgina’s Reasons.” Her living spirit animates the independent Daisy Miller, who succumbs to Roman fever, and also the freedom-claiming Isabel Archer of The Portrait of a Lady. Such intimations are hardly new; yet Gordon adds richly to what we already know of Minny Temple’s variegated and enduring presence in James’s imagination. (In the case of Woolson, much of what Gordon has to tell is altogether fresh disclosure.) But even if we are sufficiently informed of Minny Temple’s phantomlike immanence, we have until now been in the dark about what the real Minny hoped for—and what she expected of—her cousin Harry.
There were six Temple cousins; four were girls. Minny was the youngest, James’s junior by two years. Their parents had died of tuberculosis within months of each other, and the orphaned children were sent to live with the Edmund Tweedys, relatives of Henry James, Sr., who was their uncle. Minny was unconventional for her time; she might be unconventional for ours: once, on an impulse, she cut off all her hair. She had the recklessness of unfettered individuality; she was spontaneous, original, thoughtful, witty, passionate—“the amateur priestess of rash speculation,” as James put it. In her teens she cultivated a fervent bond with Helena de Kay, a fellow school rebel (and future portraitist). At twenty, with the Civil War just over, she was surrounded by a body of intellectual young veterans who were drawn to her exuberance, among them Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Chipman Gray (a future professor of law whose correspondence with Minny was put to use by James in his late memoir). Though James’s two younger brothers, Bob and Wilky, at sixteen and seventeen had been thrown into the fury of battle—Wilky with the first black regiment, led by Colonel Robert Shaw—James contrived to sit the war out at home. On the basis of a bad back (the legendary “obscure hurt,” dismissed by a specialist as a temporary strain), he managed to dodge the draft, trying out an unsuccessful term or two at Harvard Law School, and devoting himself to turning out stories which he sent, unsigned, to magazines. William James, too, avoided army service, but Minny lost a brother to the war, and Bob and Wilky were permanently broken by it. When Wilky, severely wounded and hospitalized, pleaded for “a visit of 2 or 3 weeks” from James, he declined; he was preoccupied with the composition of a tale about murder. And there it was, the beginning of the deliberately blinding discipline of obsession: if a just war summoned, he would write tales; if a needy brother called out, he would write tales. It was not that he placed writing above life—he used life—but rather that he placed writing above compassion, and surely above danger. Compassion interrupts, danger interrupts absolutely.
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