by Colm Toibin
Henry had imagined that Andersen’s art would be exquisite and finely wrought, made slowly and deliberately, but now, as the sculptor stood up from lunch, his cheeks flushed, it struck Henry that his work might just as easily be distinguished by its lack of discipline. He had no means by which to judge him. Although the Storys and the Elliotts included Andersen in their gatherings, they had not spoken of him privately. As he went up to Andersen’s studio, Henry remembered when he came to this city first, when he visited the studios of so many artists who had failed or prospered as the years went by. Now all these years later he was here again, led by a young sculptor who was full of protean innocence, who was so tentative in some ways and so overbearing in others, so full of mixtures and so mysterious. He watched Andersen ascend the stairs ahead of him, studying his strong white hand holding the banisters, the wonderful open agility of his movements, and dreamed that he could stay in Rome for a while longer than he had planned and come here every day to the studio of his new young friend.
There was a sense of frantic work in the large studio, a great deal of it half-finished by an artist in love with the classical tradition, the classical body, a sense of work done for public and triumphant display. He wondered if this was merely how Andersen’s work began, full of roaring and rhetorical disproportion, and then if the sculptor set out, with subtlety and an eye for telling detail, to refine it. As he moved from piece to piece, he expressed his opinion that his friend had a large talent and expressed also his awe at so many figures and torsos, asking himself if Andersen now planned to work on the faces, or if he would choose to leave them blank and anodyne. He was led to the work which seemed most in progress, a large statue of a naked man and woman holding hands. He marvelled out loud at its scale and ambition as Andersen stood proudly beside it as though he were going to be photographed.
As the day wore on, Henry learned much about Hendrik Andersen. Some of it astonished him, especially the news that the Andersen family had, on arriving in America, settled in Newport in a house a few streets away from where the Jameses had lived, and that the sculptor still viewed Newport as his American home. When Andersen began to speak of his older brother and the burden of being a second son, Henry informed him that he, too, had spent his youth in the shadow of his brother William. Andersen seemed to know this already and wondered aloud if this had brought him and Henry together, asking many questions about Henry and William and, often before Henry had finished responding, comparing the answers with his own experience with his brother Andreas. As the conversation went on, Henry discovered that Andersen knew a lot about Henry’s family. He mentioned that his own father had the same love for alcohol that Henry’s father had shown in his youth, a matter which was never discussed in the James family but which must have been trumpeted in Newport loudly enough for it to have reached the ears of Hendrik Andersen.
‘We are brothers,’ Hendrik laughed, ‘because we have older brothers and drunken fathers.’
Henry watched him with interest, observing the livid colours of his cheeks, his nervous talking and the way he moved from one subject to another, paying no attention to the response or lack of one. Henry’s suggestion that he should take leave of the sculptor was met with an insistence that he stay, making Henry agree that they stroll together through the old city and find a place where they could perhaps take some refreshment. Before they left, Andersen took him through the studio again. On seeing the figures once more, Henry wondered if Andersen was not interested in creating a single, individual likeness. The bodies done in marble and stone had a fleshy presence, the generic bottoms and bellies and haunches sculpted with enormous confidence and zeal. He expressed once more his admiration and his hope that he would return to the studio to see each piece completed.
HE SAW Hendrik Andersen almost daily, meeting him alone or in the company of others, and as he learned more about him, he was struck by how close the sculptor was, in his background and his temperament, to the eponymous hero of his own novel Roderick Hudson, which he had published more than twenty years earlier. While the American colony in Rome knew him as the author of Daisy Miller, the more serious among them, including Maud Elliott and her husband, had also read The Portrait of a Lady. They knew the difference between the former, a popular tale light in its tone and impact, and the latter, more subtle and daring in its construction and its texture. None of them, however, as far as he could make out, had ever read Roderick Hudson, even though it portrayed a young impoverished American sculptor in Rome, with all of Andersen’s talents and indiscretions, with his passionate and impetuous nature. Both Hudson and Andersen made clear to anyone who knew them their ambitions and dreams. Both of them were doted on by a worried mother back at home, and both, once installed in Rome, were watched over by an older man, a lone visitor, who appreciated beauty and took an interest in human behaviour and kept passion firmly in check. As Henry saw Andersen and tried to make sense of him, it was as though one of his own characters had come alive, ready to intrigue him and puzzle him and hold his affections, forcing him to suspend judgement, subtly refusing to allow him to control what might now unfold. Andersen had been taken up, much as Roderick Hudson had, by people with money who believed in him, and thus he had never compromised his art or flirted with commerce. His work was a set of large, energetic gestures, commensurate with his dreams. The slow, sly systems used to write a novel, the building of character and plot through action and description and suggestion were of no interest to him, just as he did not seek, through careful observation and calm effort, to sculpt a living face. Had he been a poet, he would have written Homeric epics, and now, as a sculptor, he talked to Henry about his plans for large monuments.
Henry listened with interest most of the time, having prolonged his stay in the city, and managed to think about Andersen’s charm and his shortcomings in equal measure when he was alone in a way which offered a golden tinge to those hours and that solitude. He wondered what would become of Andersen. In wanting, like his Mallet in Roderick Hudson, to help him and advise him, to take the measure of who he was and what he would amount to, he managed, he hoped, to disguise longings which he did not entertain with much ease or equanimity.
The idea that he had published certain books which no one had read now, and which no one saw reason to allude to, added to a feeling that he belonged somehow to history, just as Andersen and his associates gave their loyalty to the future. It was this feeling that, in the end, made him prepare with a heavy heart to go home, but he also felt, as soon as he made his plans, a tenderness for Andersen and a longing to see him in England. This tenderness arose also from an impression which grew in him the more he saw Andersen – and sometimes in these weeks he saw him twice a day – that the young sculptor’s silences and his intense conversation both seemed to spring from a desperate need for approval and a loneliness which the creation of monumental sculpture could do nothing to assuage. He knew also that his own involvement with Andersen, the way he listened and studied the sculptor’s words and movements, had interested Andersen enormously, but that Andersen, in turn, had watched Henry hardly at all, had chosen to believe him as not in need of close observation. He had never, for example, alluded to the scene in the Protestant cemetery and had seemed to presume that the novelist’s solitude was an essential aspect of his art. What he had taken from Henry was Henry’s interest in him; he had opened himself for regular scrutiny, as a church opens its doors for prayer. He was both puzzled and fascinated by himself. His prodigious talent and his grandiose ambitions, his origins, his fears and his daily tribulations emerged as subjects for conversation, innocent and unguarded and undisciplined and endearing. He talked but did not listen; he grew silent, Henry noticed, because he knew the effect his silences had on others. And he was deeply and instinctively alert, Henry saw, to how these changes in himself – how soft his eyes could become in their expression, for example, or how strong and imposing he could seem in other circumstances – drew people towards him as they drew Henry now. And
then,when they were close, Andersen did not know what to do with people save that he did not want to lose them. He wanted their full attention, their reverence, and perhaps their love, and when he was sure he had these, he was gently indifferent to them.
Once winning fame as a sculptor came into question, however, he was like a wild animal searching for food; he was ruthless, and he cared more than anything for the chaotic hunting ground of his studio, working on his huge figures, showing them off, smoothing out their haunches and loins and torsos, but never allowing them a face, having no interest, none at all, in what a face might conceal or disclose, just as his own face managed most of the time a wonderful blankness, a pure, bland beauty which made Henry interested all the more in gazing at him and being in his company and made his efforts to picture the face, when he was away from him, all the more intriguing and time-consuming and exasperating.
He wondered, as he prepared to leave the city, if he had placed too much emphasis on the dullness and provinciality of his life at Lamb House. Andersen had nodded in approval when he explained his need for such a life and his wish to return to it, but Andersen, he knew, had not left Newport and come to Rome in search of dullness and provinciality. He was actively admired in their circle in a manner which would not be part of daily life in Newport or Rye. This, he felt, would be the challenge for the sculptor in the years ahead – the possibility of failure and neglect and solitude. The idea of how he might rise to this challenge charged Henry’s imagination. He imagined Andersen’s face become haunted by the slow concentration of work, his eyes more inward-looking, his conversation more hesitant and subtle, and his sculpture smaller in scale and more intricate and delicate, more worked on and worried over. And in the years when this transformation took place, he believed, it might not finally matter to Andersen who admired him or where he lived.
On one of the nights before Henry’s departure there was a gathering at the Elliotts’ of twenty or more people, all of whom were known to Henry. He was careful to arrive and depart on his own, and enter into general discussion with many of those present while keeping a distant eye on Andersen. He eventually found time alone with him but they were interrupted by the arrival of Maud Elliott who began to allude to the friendship between them. She came from a distinguished family of alluders, he thought; her mother and her aunt and her uncle the novelist usually succeeded in breaking silence on most matters and did not have many unspoken thoughts. The raised eyebrow and the pointed remark ran in their family, he thought, as Maud Elliott drove Andersen away by asking him if he had ever had a friend as attentive as Mr James. Now that she had Henry in a corner, she made clear that he was hers until she had finished.
‘I’m sure his mother wants him back in Newport, in fact I know she does, but we intend to keep him here. Everybody wants him. That is what is so lovely about him. I believe you have been a daily visitor to his studio.’
‘Yes,’ Henry said, ‘I rather admire his industry.’
‘And what we might call his genius perhaps? You must have known about him before you came to Rome. I believe his fame has spread.’
‘No, I met him in your house for the first time.’
‘But you had heard about him? He certainly had heard about you.’
‘No, I had not heard about him.’
‘Oh I thought you would have heard about him from Lord Gower who so admired him when he visited Rome.’
‘Lord Gower remains unknown to me to this day,’ Henry said.
‘Well, he is a writer on many subjects and an enthusiastic collector. So enthusiastic indeed that he adored our young sculptor, saw him every day and wished to keep him.’
Her voice became confiding and conspiratorial.
‘I’m told he wished to adopt him and make him his heir. He is tremendously rich. But Andersen would not have him, or did not wish to be adopted, or both, so he will not be inheriting all Lord Gower’s money. Perhaps he is waiting for a better offer, or a more interesting one. He has not a penny of his own. Like one of your heroines, he is more interesting, perhaps, because he has turned down a lord. But I think in the end, if he is not careful, we will have to compare him to Daisy Miller. He flirts, does he not? In any case I cannot see him returning to New England.’
‘Perhaps a spell there would improve us all,’ Henry said. He smiled.
‘Mr Andersen says,’ Maud Elliott went on, ‘that you have invited him to Rye.’
‘Perhaps, since you have been so kind,’ Henry replied, ‘I should extend the invitation to you as well.’
THE NEXT DAY he called at Andersen’s studio to find that another large piece was in production, a set of naked garlanded figures, both male and female, to represent the spring. Andersen was at his happiest under such conditions, sure that the work would shortly find a sponsor, and fresh from the physical exertion of the morning. As Henry walked around, his eye was caught by a small bust which he had not noticed before, it was rather more placid and modest in its style than the surrounding work. It was, Andersen told him, a bust of the young Count Bevilacqua and had been much admired. There was, Henry saw, something raw and clumsy about the piece, but also, perhaps because of the quality of the stone and its size, it could easily have been a piece of archaeology, something buried under one of the streets on which they walked. Immediately, he wished to take it with him and pay handsomely for it as a token of these weeks with his new friend. Once Andersen understood that he not only admired it but planned to buy it, he noticed him quicken with pride and ambition. Selling his work, making his mark on the world, Henry understood, seemed to mean more to him than any number of friendships. He darted about the studio in excitement and embraced Henry warmly once a price had been agreed, holding him with strong affection. He promised that he would come to England as soon as he could. He discussed how the piece would be packaged and sent and how soon it might arrive. What Henry noticed more than anything was how unable he was to conceal his pure delight.
They had supper together that evening in Andersen’s local restaurant to celebrate Henry’s purchase. Andersen, he saw, had dressed almost formally for the occasion and as soon as they sat down and a candle was lit at their table he adopted a tone which was new. His expression became interested and deeply involved as he asked questions and listened with care to the answers about how Henry lived, why he was in England and why he travelled less as the years went on. Henry was almost amused at the seriousness of his manner as he put the same boyish energy into his interrogations as he had put into his previous silences and monologues. It was only when Andersen attempted to draw out from Henry things about his father and mother that Henry ceased to be amused and wished instead to turn the conversation back to less intimate matters. As the sculptor began to rail against his own father, after a slight provocation from Henry, Henry was almost pleased although he viewed the sculptor’s tone as too personal now and too petulant and too ready to discuss freely what Henry believed were deeply private matters.When they left the restaurant he was happy that Andersen would accompany him as far as his hotel, the night being warm and the streets of old Rome at their most seductive. This would be their last evening alone with one another, as both had agreed to attend a large gathering at the Storys’ apartment on Henry’s last night, which would fall on the morrow.
It struck him that he had not himself changed in the twenty-five or thirty years since he had strolled like this in Rome at night. He had never discussed his parents or his ambitions with anyone; his talk in all the years had been finely balanced and controlled; he approached his work even then with consistency and care. Andersen was not like that, and now, it occurred to him that Andersen would not change either. He would remain all his life innocent and confusing, charming and open. As they grew silent, Henry wanted to turn to his friend to say that he should take as much from life as it would offer him, that he was young still and should want everything and live as much as he could. As they reached the foot of the Spanish Steps, he was inclined for a second to point out to hi
m the window of the room where the poet Keats had died, but he knew that such an invocation of death and suffering would break the spell of now. When Andersen, at the door of the hotel, stood back having embraced him, he could not help watching his smile intensely, trying to hold it in his mind, knowing how much he would need to remember it when he returned to England.
WHEN HE ARRIVED at Rye, being met by a cheerful Burgess Noakes, complete with wheelbarrow, he saw the town as if through Andersen’s eyes. He realized how very small it would seem and how drained the colours. The spaces in Lamb House seemed like hallways or ante-rooms compared with the living quarters in Roman apartments, and even the garden, which he had spoken of so proudly to his new friend, seemed reduced, confined. He watched Burgess unpack as he set about repossessing his own house, wondering what it would seem like to Hendrik Andersen.
He did not write to Andersen until the small bust arrived, although he composed many letters to him in his mind, telling him how fresh he remained in his thoughts, and how satisfying, now that both he and the weather had settled, the English afternoon could be, and how magnificent, now that he had become accustomed to its proportions, was his own private, walled garden. He knew that none of this would interest Andersen very much, but he had difficulty finding a tone and a subject matter both warm and restrained.
When the bust was unpacked, however, and a broad base for it was constructed in the corner of the room at the chimney piece, and it rested there happily and easily, he could write to Andersen expressing his delight with the piece and praising its charm, knowing that such praise would interest his friend, being able to picture Andersen as he hungrily took in the words. For his own part, speaking to Andersen from such a distance about his work being tenderly unpacked and lifted and laid bare and having it constantly before him as an admirable and much-loved companion and friend gave him pleasure. Telling Andersen that his piece of sculpture was so living and human, sympathetic and sociable, adding that it would be a lifelong attachment, was easier than telling Andersen that he himself was in Henry’s thoughts all day, that sometimes when he worked he would pause, wondering what the cause was of a strange glow of happiness or warm expectation which came over him, and realizing it was the afterglow of his time in Rome and his hope that Andersen would come to visit him in Rye.