Within two days he had found the serviced flat in Bolton Street, just yards from Piccadilly, where he would live for the next decade. James was careful with money. He could draw on his father’s letter-of-credit, but he knew his siblings had cut into the family’s capital, and he now did without his parents’ help. London’s prices seemed a bargain after Paris, though at two and a half guineas a week—a bit more than twelve dollars—his apartment can’t be called cheap. He was paying over fifty shillings at a time when many skilled workmen had a weekly wage of just thirty, and twenty years later he took Lamb House for little more than half of what his few rooms had cost. On the other hand, he could afford it: his income for 1876, almost all of it from magazine sales, has been estimated at a bit under $2,800. Moreover the place came furnished, and with breakfast provided; he had no need for a servant of his own.
From one window he could see a narrow wedge of the then-almost-treeless Green Park, and in the entire city there were few more convenient addresses for a man of James’s habits. To the north Bolton Street opened after a block into the land of hostesses and dinner parties, into Mayfair and the more bourgeois quarter of Marylebone beyond it. To the south he had the shops of Piccadilly, some of them surviving still, like the epicurean grocer Fortnum & Mason; off it ran the more exclusive Bond Street, with its galleries and goldsmiths. A further walk along Piccadilly carried him past the Royal Academy, at whose annual exhibitions he soon became a regular, and then on toward the National Gallery and the theaters of London’s West End. Crossing it from Bolton Street took him by the site of the present-day Ritz and into the gentlemen’s world of the clubs in Pall Mall.
Not that that world was yet his. In later years James would have more invitations than he could accept, but he spent his first Christmas in London alone and wrote to reassure his mother that his spirits were high. The weather was “beyond expression vile—a drizzle of sleet upon a background of absolutely glutinous fog,” but his fire was warm and he delighted in his new subscription to Mudie’s, England’s largest commercial lending library, from which he could for a nominal sum borrow as many novels as he wished. Though he would not need Mudie’s for long. None of his work had yet appeared in Britain, and while he had many acquaintances there, he had as yet no friends. But within two months he would write to his father from the library of the Athenaeum. It was London’s most distinguished club—a fat archbishop was reading in a nearby chair—and frankly intellectual. Nobody got in on birth alone, but James had already become a temporary member, and in 1882, with The Portrait of a Lady behind him, he became a permanent one.
In 1948 the critic Lionel Trilling wrote an introduction to James’s 1886 The Princess Casamassima in which he argued that many nineteenth-century novels work by tracing the career of the “Young Man from the Provinces,” an ingénu who is both enthralled and disillusioned by the great capital whose life he seeks to enter. Most of Trilling’s examples are French—Balzac’s Père Goriot, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black—but he also cites both Great Expectations and James’s own novel. Despite its title, the protagonist of The Princess Casamassima is a London bookbinder named Hyacinth Robinson, the illegitimate son of a woman who has murdered her aristocratic seducer. He stands as a provincial in social though not geographic terms and joins an anarchist cell whose leader charges him to commit a political crime. It’s unlikely material for James, however brilliantly handled, and yet despite the advantages of his own upbringing, he too had once been such a young man himself. America might have given him an excellent preparation for culture, but it was a preparation only; and like Hyacinth, he soon found himself in thrall to the glitter and charm of his new world.
It’s not my purpose here to chronicle James’s progress through London life. He later claimed he could barely remember how he “came to know people, to dine out. . . it came rather of itself.” He knew some Americans in London and had letters of introduction from others, Henry Adams included. He paid a call and it led to a dinner, and then one meal began to roll into another. His manners were impeccable, but he still seemed a breath of fresh American air; he was the new thing and yet not a juvenile lead, a man who had come upon the city full-grown. The Atlantic had many English readers, and James also had a backlist of stories and novels that had never appeared in Britain. He published two books in London in 1878, both of them with Macmillan, who became his regular publisher, and the next year he brought out six more. His name was suddenly everywhere, and once Daisy Miller made him famous, the invitations arrived from people he didn’t even know; during the winter of 1878–79 he dined out 107 times. Those invitations all came from what he would call the “better sort,” but that category is a loose one, and what strikes us today is their heterogeneity. Some of them were literary, but he also sat down with generals and lawyers and bankers. One evening found him “conversing affably” with the former—and future—prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, a flinty mutton-chopped Liberal whose political life still left him the energy to write about Homer and theology alike. And James made a specialty of old ladies with long memories. His favorite was the great actress Fanny Kemble. She had starred at Covent Garden fifty years before and, after marrying and divorcing an American slaveholder, had become a voice of Abolition; she gave him the plots of several stories, Washington Square among them.
In his “American Journal” of 1882–82, James described his new home as neither “agreeable, or cheerful, or easy. . . . It is only magnificent.” He drew up a list of the reasons why London should seem awful, beginning with the fog and the smoke and moving on to the city’s brutal inhuman size. He felt all the ways in which it was both “vulgar at heart and tiresome in form,” all the ways in which it was so entirely unlike Paris, but still it seemed to him “the most possible form of life”; most possibly precisely because of what made it so difficult, because there was simply more of it. He never lost his sense of excited fascination with his adopted city, and one of the last books he planned, though he didn’t get beyond a few notes, was a volume called “London Town.” Every corner appeared to have its bit of story, and to walk in London was to walk through time, to sense the arresting hand of the past on one’s sleeve. So in an 1888 essay he remembered moving down Fleet Street with some lines of Thackeray in his head and his eyes full of scenes almost two centuries gone, as though the time of Queen Anne had come alive and he himself were part of it.
James especially liked to evoke the city of Dickens, the city only then just gone, and in time his successors would recall the London of Henry James, a city on the brink of modernity, with the men in black and the women as if dressed by Sargent. We can see that London in some of the frontispieces to the New York Edition. The one to The Golden Bowl shows a hansom cab, in sharp-edged silhouette, wheeling through the fog along an almost empty Portland Place, the street wide and the buildings grand, and with an automobile shadowy in the distance. But James did not live in a disembodied Jamesian world; look closely and you’ll see that the street is muddy and spotted with manure.
“You can do low life,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, with some surprise, as The Princess Casamassima began its Atlantic serialization; the novel opens in Millbank Prison, where the young Hyacinth Robinson has gone to see his mother. Stevenson admired the book’s sense of grime, and James had visited the prison himself to work up its details. Nor should this surprise us. Grime was unavoidable, and James walked with his eyes open to a city in which many of the poor bore on their face “the traces . . . of alchoholic action.” If he did not penetrate to the worst of its slums, he was entirely familiar with its miles of dreariness. He knew how much of London had to be left out by anyone who wanted to draw a genial picture; knew that the stark glare of a corner gin shop could make the city seem even more brutal than darkness itself. He could describe the smell of close-packed bodies, and an article in The Nation allowed him to play sportswriter in a report on the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race, standing on a bridge over the Thames amid “the d
ingy, British mob, with coal-smoke ground into its pores,” and waiting for the eights to flash by.
James learned his London by writing about it, and throughout the spring and summer of 1877 he sent a string of travel articles back to America, making copy out of a walk through Green Park or a visit to Westminster Abbey. He turned some of his first country visits into pieces for popular magazines, bringing his readers into a house built upon the ruins of an abbey, a place with a ghost where a Gothic past and “modern conversation . . . have melted together.” The English didn’t notice such apparent anomalies, but James could not yet take them for granted, and in this he was more like Henrietta Stackpole than we usually recognize. In fact, he showed in those early years what now appears a surprising journalistic range. Books and travel, pictures and theater: that much is familiar to us, and yet James also wrote about the stinginess of the British taxpayer and even about the imperial politics that in the later 1870s brought the country into brief though bloody wars in Afghanistan and southern Africa. In Henry James at Work, Theodora Bosanquet noted that the world of “cabinets and parties and politics . . . remained outside the pale of his sensibility.” But that absence of interest had to be learned, and in writing to Quincy Street this new Londoner was often astute in his reading of the world’s headlines. In that sense, at least, his success would prove narrowing.
Perhaps that process had begun by the time James set to work on The Portrait of a Lady, for his letters make no reference to that spring’s general election, a Liberal victory that put Gladstone back in Downing Street. He had six weeks of steady work in the wet Florentine spring, yet he still found himself asking Howells to put off the start of the novel’s Atlantic run. The first installment was scheduled for August, yet now James wanted to bump it back to October. Italy had been “insidious, perfidious, fertile in pretexts” for doing anything but work. What he didn’t say was that his visit to Zhukovsky had made him fall behind. But James was as expert as ever in rationalizating the delay. Washington Square would now complete most of its own serialization before the new book began to appear; he wouldn’t be competing with himself. Moreover it would give him the chance “to get forward a good deal,” a running start that would allow him to give this big novel the care he thought it would need.
He got back to England at the beginning of June and had at once to prepare for a visit from his brother William. Harvard’s assistant professor of physiology planned to divide his summer between England and the Alps, and had left his wife and infant son in Cambridge as soon as his classes were over. James put him in the flat beneath his own, and immediately wrote to Quincy Street with a report on his health, noting that William still took “himself . . . too hard and too consciously.” It was the first time they had seen each other since Henry’s emigration five years before, and William’s reaction to his brother’s life provides a measure of just how far the novelist had come. The two of them often breakfasted together, and sometimes dined at the Reform Club in a comfort that William described as a “tremendous material bribe.” Most of their days they spent apart, with the younger of them at work and the older mixing tourism with a series of professional calls. So William took himself to the National Gallery, where he found the Turners baffling, and dined with the Adamses, at whose table the talk was of Daisy Miller and another guest at first mistook him for Henry. He met Robert Browning at a reception, but couldn’t get the poet to talk to him; Henry had no such difficulty.
William found England expensive and thought that if Henry weren’t covering his lodging he would have had to run off to somewhere cheaper. In time his own books would pay him handsomely, but the profitable Principles of Psychology was still a decade off, and for now Henry’s earnings far outstripped his brother’s salary. Indeed, William’s letters to Cambridge suggest a mixture of surprise and pique at his “inscrutable” sibling’s worldly success. The younger man seemed utterly at home, and his very ease made William realize that his expatriation would be permanent. Yet the philosopher was also surprised by how busy he kept himself with “dinners and parties . . . especially as he was all the time cursing them for so frustrating his work.” It was his old criticism once more, but envy gave it a new edge. Henry was superficial, preferring a glancing contact with many things to a “deeper one at a few points,” and William thought it would only get worse with age.
About one thing William was right. Henry did complain about the pressures of social life, and especially about all the “transitory Americans” who insisted upon seeing him. Distant cousins, the friends of friends—they all left their cards and hoped for an attention that he had “neither time nor means to show them.” All he cared about was the book on his desk. He resented anything that pulled him away from it, and that included Quincy Street itself. On 20 July he wrote to his parents that he would have to put off the visit to America on which they had begun to count. He wanted to go home, he told them—have no doubt about that. But he wouldn’t sail with the Portrait only half-done and could not envision working in Cambridge under the schedule to which serialization would keep him. That same day he sent the book’s first pages to Howells and apologized for the lateness of his copy. He sometimes suffered from crippling headaches when he had to deal with family questions, and he had just spent three days in bed, unable to hold a pen.
The 48 pages he mailed to Boston included the novel’s opening serial installment and much of the second, and James promised the rest of it and “the whole of the third” within a few days, chapters that would take Isabel up past Warburton’s proposal. They had been put in type by his British publisher, Macmillan, who both serialized the novel in its eponymous magazine and published its three-volume version; in America the book appeared in a single volume from Houghton, Mifflin. Macmillan pulled two sets of proofs for James to correct, with the second one crossing the ocean to Howells. That initial installment was a long one—it contained the book’s first five chapters—and James thought that the later pieces might be shorter. Yet when he sent the fourth part in September, he noted that every part would be long, and the novel he had originally planned in eight installments was starting to look as though it would run for twelve; in the end, it took fourteen. The book was growing. Isabel’s “many developments” were taking their space and time, and though he knew how it all would end, the road to that ending did indeed have its unexpected dips and turns. In later years he sometimes found, and inevitably to his surprise, that a story he had projected at 5,000 words seemed barely finished in twelve.
All that summer and fall he worked in a way he described as “tant bien que mal.” He spent most of his time in town, though he did go to Brighton for a few days in August; he enjoyed the breeze after the stilled air of London, but then had to flee the glare of the sun. In early autumn he wrote to his sister that though he felt homesick “for a sniff of an American October,” he was nevertheless happy to be alone in London. The city still seemed to him empty, he had few dinners to attend, and “unadulterated leisure to work.” The phrasing is interesting—the work of writing was a form of luxury, but an evening out was simply work itself. One distraction he did allow himself was a visit at the end of November to the Bedfordshire house of Lord Rosebery, a future prime minister who had married a Rothschild but wore his millions “with such tact and bonhomie, that you almost forgive him.” Though James was becoming blasé, or at least enjoyed pretending he was. His invitations may have been smarter than ever, but he told Quincy Street that the party included “no one very important”—just a former viceroy of India and the great House of Commons orator John Bright.
And each day the Portrait grew, grew “steadily, but very slowly.” The opening chapters came out in the October issue of Macmillan’s Magazine, published on the first of that month; two weeks later they appeared in the November Atlantic. He sent Howells the fifth installment on November 11, pages that would run that February; by that time he presumably had the sixth part ready to be set, and a seventh under way. He does
not appear to have struggled with a single deadline, and wrote to Alice of his pleasure in the success that had made it possible for him to take his time, to work deliberately and without haste. James usually had—he needed to have—several pieces on his desk at once, writing stories and essays alongside his novels. But now he kept the magazines waiting. The Nation and the Cornhill, Scribner’s, and the North American Review—they all had to do without him. During the year and more that he spent on The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James wrote nothing else except a single piece on the London theater, working throughout with a single-mindedness he had never known before and would never have again.
9.
THE ENVELOPE OF CIRCUMSTANCES
OVER 10,000 LETTERS by Henry James survive today in libraries and private collections. Thousands more have been lost. Some of those were bread-and-butter notes or two-line responses to invitations, but others were likely as playful and newsy and wise as any now extant, letters thrown away upon receipt, left behind in a hotel room, or even burned as the older James asked his friends to do. Only a fraction of the surviving ones have been published, and though a complete edition is now under way, it will be many years before the full record is in print. Still, one thing seems clear: in all those many thousands of pages James rarely says anything substantive about his work. He might discuss its financial details with his father, or warn a friend against reading something in a magazine, telling her to wait for the book instead. He eventually warned William against reading him at all, so little was the pragmatist in sympathy with his late style. To publishers he sometimes sketched out a proposed work, but most of his letters to them remained pure business. Nor did he seek a reading from other writers, however much they might want—and fear—one from him.
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