Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  Madame Merle speaks for the kind of self that Isabel had rejected in rejecting Warburton: the self as defined by its appurtenances, by a trailing penumbra of houses and history; the self as both person and personage. She speaks for age, for the things our young lady will need another twenty years to learn, and she also speaks as a “lady”; speaks for the social category to which both women belong and whose shaping force is so completely naturalized that Isabel can’t even see it. But above all she speaks for Europe. And Isabel is the voice of American exceptionalism, a woman who sings of herself, and only herself; who believes her possessions are arbitrary, a limit imposed on her freedom, and who cannot accept the idea of merging that self in some other identity, in a moat or a name or a cotton mill. She likes instead to see herself as a version of what the critic R. W. B. Lewis called the American Adam, heroine “of a new adventure, an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritance of family and race.” Isabel is an orphan, and even as her Aunt Touchett pays the bills, she speaks of the girl as being her own mistress; someone who wants, as James tells us, “to leave the past behind her.” The paradox is that she finds her clean start in coming to Europe, to an Old World in which she appears newborn. Yet her very desire to discard the past tells us that she has one. No “lady” is without a social inheritance. No one with Caspar Goodwood behind her—no one with a sudden £70,000 of family money—is quite so pleasantly bereft.

  James historicized such ambitions in his study of Hawthorne, writing that the idea of “the supremacy of the individual to himself . . . must have had a great charm for people” whose society seemed bare of other amusements. The words come from his account of Hawthorne’s relations with New England’s reforming class in general and Emerson in particular, and this moment in the novel is in fact often read in terms of Emerson. Many critics cite a line from “The Transcendentalist,” in which he writes that “you think me the child of my circumstances. I make my circumstances,” and suggests that the thought “which is called I” has the power to mold the world into the form of its own desire. In truth, there’s nothing easier than to find Emersonian tags for Isabel’s self-conception. We may pluck a line from “Self-Reliance,” in which he describes the human soul as defined by a continuous process of becoming, “self-sufficing, and . . . self-relying,” and goes on to treat one’s possessions as a form of accident, scorning a world in which people measure each other by what one has rather than what one is. We may look at “History,” in which Emerson tells us that the self is greater than all geography, that history matters only because it allows us to make metaphors for our souls. But we also need to remember that the Portrait itself is larger than Isabel’s own consciousness. It knows from the start some things that she will only gradually discover, and we must remember too that James thought Emerson’s own great weakness was his “ripe unconsciousness of evil.”

  Isabel believes in her own autonomy, her own enabling isolation: a belief, and a dream, that all her later experience will challenge, as she learns what the Old World has to teach; a folly at whose cost she will purchase wisdom. For in the words of John Adams, there is “no special providence for Americans, and their nature is the same with that of others.” The same, except in ideology, in our fixed belief that we aren’t; a belief that makes us the perpetual victims of our own born-again innocence, lost one year and renewed the next. James asks us here to define our relation to the world outside, to the life beyond our borders. Do we need it? Can we stand alone? The stakes in this delicate talk about clothes are enormous, and his characters’ words address not only the nature and limits of the individual self, but also that of our own country’s relation to other lands; the relation that James’s own expatriation had put into question. And that account of the limits of self-sufficiency is what, above all, makes The Portrait of a Lady stand as a great American novel.

  We cannot, however, take the full measure of those limits until the very end of the book, and there are other things to say about this moment. Look again at Madame Merle’s claim that “one’s self—for other people—is one’s expression of one’s self.” The qualification is important. It allows for a distinction between public and private, between the self in its social definition and the self in itself. Isabel herself doesn’t hear that distinction, but we should, and we can gloss it by looking at some words from William James’s Principles of Psychology (1890). In his chapter on the self the older brother writes that “a man’s Me is the sum total of all that he CAN call his, not only his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house, his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his reputation and works, his lands and horses, and yacht and bank-account.” Henry wasn’t the only member of his family to enjoy lists, and it’s hard not to be swept away by the charm and force of this one; and hard as well to believe William didn’t have his brother’s novel in mind when he wrote it, so closely does it track Madame Merle’s account of our defining “envelope of circumstances.” Yet William’s conception of the self isn’t limited to that envelope. For he splits that self into two parts, into a “me” and an “I.” Me is “the self as known”: not only as known by other people, but also as perceived by what he calls I, “the self as knower.” The I is fully aware of that me, of its expression through one’s hat and shoes and tone of voice, its “empirical aggregate of things objectively known.” That aggregate is what the I knows of itself, how it describes itself to itself. William adds, however, that “the I which knows them cannot itself be an aggregate.” I is irreducible.

  William James speaks to both of his brothers’ characters here, the Me of Madame Merle and the I of Isabel Archer; the Isabel who insists that the self remains separate from the sum of what she can call hers. Except that she’s wrong. “Whatever I may be thinking of,” William writes, “I am always at the same time more or less aware of myself, of my personal existence,” and over the course of the novel Isabel’s growing self-awareness becomes inseparable from the increasing complexity of that existence. She would not come to perceive so much if the shell around her did not so press, if she weren’t forced to think her way through the circumstances that wrap her tight. And the knowing instrument of her I will take some part of its shape from the things that do indeed belong to her, as she does to them. At this point, however, Isabel speaks for an identity of I and Me—for an I that subsumes its Me. She speaks as though she has had some existence prior to or separate from her circumstances, and perhaps in a sense she has.

  “She stood there in perfect isolation,” James wrote in his preface, recalling the way in which, at first, this slim shade of an untethered girl was all he had to build on. He had nothing else, not at the start, no plans or materials or tools. He had to find them. He had to learn what destiny she would affront; had to invent a clutch of possibilities for her, a story, other people. That makes James’s own creative dilemma as one with Isabel’s situation, and that dilemma is what determines the structure of his plot. He needs to envision the appurtenances of which she wants no part; must imagine a way to bring her into some full contact with the world around her. As we will see in this book’s next part, the business of The Portrait of a Lady lies in discovering a set of possible actions and relations for a character who begins by standing alone.

  PART THREE

  ITALIAN JOURNEYS

  Rome, Outdoor Market in Piazza Navona.

  By Giuseppe Ninci, ca. 1870s. Albumen print.

  (Courtesy of Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts)

  10.

  BELLOSGUARDO HOURS

  AT THE FOOT of the Ponte Vecchio, I paused and looked back, turning away from its narrow shop-lined path for a view of the buildings behind me. Faceless buildings, now, and with their ground floors given over to tourist shops: gelato and postcards and a couple of ATMs. But one of them had been the Hôtel de l’Arno—“well spoken of” in Baedeker’s words—where James had sat i
n an upstairs window making Isabel walk onto her English lawn. Much had been rebuilt here, and I had no way to determine which window had been his, or to find the door he would have taken from the street. Shrug, and walk on. It was early still, with the bridge’s jewelry stores unshuttering for the day, and I walked over its crabbed arch in the milky light of an April morning, and then up the via Guicciardini toward the Palazzo Pitti. Every step here took me through a different bit of history. There was the palace itself, its dun-colored walls an exercise in brooding symmetry. It had been the massy home of the Medici dukes and was already a museum in James’s time; he found its collection more sumptuous than interesting, and the place had given William a headache. There was Machiavelli’s house, and then the many-windowed front of the Brownings’ Casa Guidi. There were the Boboli Gardens, with their fountains and terraces and lanes cut like tunnels through the greenery. My business was elsewhere, though, and I kept to the busy street until I had passed through the old Porta Romana.

  Florence began to undergo a partial modernization in the 1860s, during its brief period as the Italian capital, with its town planners copying the precedent of Paris’s Baron Haussmann, and slicing wide avenues through some quarters of the city. In James’s time, however, the defensive walls on the south side of the Arno had remained in place. Today only the gates are left, and the Porta Romana itself was pierced by four lanes of traffic. Still, after a minute I was able to get away from the cars, leaving the main road and beginning to climb. Here the city’s fabric loosened. There were spaces between the buildings now, though the high walls that lined my way were almost continuous, with small green lizards running along them at shoulder height. Through heavy gates I had an occasional view of a villa, of mustard-colored buildings set back in a garden of umbrella pines and olives, and as the hill grew steeper, the villas got larger and security more elaborate. Signs warned about dogs, barbed wire ran above the concealing walls, and the tops of the walls themselves were a bristle of broken glass.

  “If you’re an aching alien,” James wrote, “half the talk is about villas. This one has a story; that one has another,” and today many of those stories have an American twist. James Fenimore Cooper had lived behind these roadside walls for almost a year at the end of the 1820s, and in 1858, Hawthorne rented the battlemented Torre di Montauto on top of Bellosguardo, the hill I was now approaching. For $28 a month he got a place that he described as “big enough to quarter a regiment,” and he later used it as a setting in The Marble Faun. The road leveled out and a man jogged toward me, in Italy an unusual sight. But as he approached, I saw he was carrying a copy of the Herald Tribune; a part of this hill has stayed American. My own destination was a place James had described as “a little grassy, empty, rural piazza,” no more, really, than a swelling at the juncture of two roads, and bounded upon one side by a villa with a “long, rather blank-looking . . . front.” The grass was gone now, though that didn’t stop a boy from kicking a soccer ball against a gate. But the villa itself remained.

  Like many such places it has carried several names. For much of its life it was called the Belvedere al Saracino, but in the twentieth century it became known as the Villa Mercedes, and did time as a finishing school for American girls. James knew it, however, as the Villa Castellani, and some family friends of his kept an apartment there. I say “family friends” advisedly. The novelist made his own way in London, but almost everyone he saw in Italy was someone with whom he could claim an American acquaintance. They had dined with his parents, or he had gone to school with their cousins; a world composed of the friends of one’s friends. James had met the widowed Frank Boott and his daughter Elizabeth in Newport and Cambridge, but their real home was in Italy, where Boott had first gone at mid-century, soon after the death of his wife. There he lived on the profits of a Lowell textile mill and gave himself over to the education of his daughter. Lizzie Boott had also been a friend of the dead Minny Temple, and in his autobiography James remembered her as almost too civilized, a girl varnished to perfection. Yet her letters show a lively wit, and her colloquial French could match his own.

  James wrote about the Villa Castellani in three different works: in Roderick Hudson, in an 1878 essay called “Italy Revisited,” and finally in The Portrait of a Lady itself. In the first of those he moves his characters into a place he calls the Villa Pandolfini, a building whose low façade is “colored a dull, dark yellow, and pierced with windows of various sizes.” Inside, its rooms seem cool and still, while the garden behind offers his characters a prospect of the river valley below. The essay describes the house as a place he couldn’t help coveting, and he loved both the tall cypresses outside and the sense, within, of a life dedicated to art and beauty.

  Today the building is still painted an ochre-yellow. Its façade is modest, almost anonymous, and it sits directly on the street—no broken glass. And on this spring morning the house was unprotected in another way: its high, brass-studded doors stood open in the sunlight, and the caretaker waved me in for a look. There was a well in one corner of its lichen-covered courtyard and a Vespa in another, while the pavement was set with the gravestones of pets—“Bubeli, 1913.” I noted the names on the mailboxes of the dozen flats into which the building was divided: a German, a Scandinavian, and then a lot of Italians, including somebody called Corleone. There was also an English name, a place belonging to a “Lawrence of Florence.” In one of his Italian essays James describes himself as “peeping up [the] stately staircases” of one historic house after another, and wishing he could climb up for a view of the life within. So I paused with my finger over Lawrence’s button, wondering just who might appear. In the end, however, I had no more courage than James himself, and left that bell unrung.

  Instead, I must rely on his own account of the interior, and of the garden that from the street I could see stretched out behind. The description comes a few chapters after Mr. Touchett’s death, when The Portrait of a Lady jumps in both time and space. James throws the action six months forward and rather suddenly moves us to Italy, where almost all of its remaining scenes take place. Here the villa goes nameless, and the language he uses for it has a new figurative power. The building seems “incommunicative,” and the irregular windows of its façade reveal not its face, but its “mask. . . . It had heavy lids, but no eyes.” The house isn’t what it seems—it doesn’t really show itself. Its different apartments are occupied by the citizens of this nation or that, foreigners long resident in Italy, and in one of them James shows us a room in which daily life itself has become a fine art. There are bits of tapestry and cabinets of age-polished oak, a scatter of books and modern chairs to read them in, oddments of medieval brassware and a wall of early masters. In this apartment lives an American widower, a man of forty with a daughter in her teens named Pansy.

  We first hear of this man from Madame Merle, who at Gardencourt uses him to define the limitations of expatriate life. “We are a wretched set of people,” she tells Isabel with a certain complacency: parasites who have left their roots in one continent and haven’t managed to stick themselves into the soil of the other. Ralph is a good example, though his illness lends him a substitute for the occupation he otherwise lacks. Women have it easier, she claims, if only because they have “no natural place anywhere,” and so one land is as good as another. Yet men need an identity. Mr. Touchett’s bank has given him a rather weighty one, but as for the others she knows . . . well, the more cultivated they are, the more pitiful. The worst of them is one of the most delightful men she has ever met, someone whose charm seems inseparable from his irrelevance. “He is Gilbert Osmond—he lives in Italy; that is all one can say about him.” At home he might have become distinguished, and yet in living abroad he has made for himself “no name, no position, no fortune . . . no anything.” Osmond paints, albeit as an amateur only; the rest of him is indolence and taste.

  No anything—words that for Isabel will eventually stand as a form of recommendation. The surfac
e truth of Madame Merle’s account does, however, stay with her during a brief Parisian interlude, after she learns of her inheritance, when in looking over Mrs. Touchett’s collection of “American absentees” she says that their way of being “doesn’t seem to lead to anything.” It may be extremely pleasant, and yet there must, she thinks, be more to life than dinner at the Café Anglais. Her aunt’s circle isn’t so sure, but one of its members does at least try to give her an answer. Ned Rosier is a childhood friend, a polite young man with a fondness for old china, and what it all leads to, he tells her, is shopping. Where else but in Paris “can you get such things?” But to most people that isn’t enough. John Singer Sargent’s parents came abroad before his birth in 1856, for what they thought was their health. For the next thirty years, while the future painter’s mother moved with the seasons from one place to the next, his father dreamed of returning to his Philadelphia medical practice and seized upon every American newspaper he could find. They neither went home nor struck deep into Europe, and until John entered a studio in Paris, they knew only people like themselves.

  For Dr. Sargent they were years with no purpose; Daniel Touchett did better. The young Sargent did of course develop that purpose, and so, to a lesser degree, did the generation of half-forgotten artists who formed the first American expatriate community in Italy. Such figures as the sculptors Harriet Hosmer and William Wetmore Story had gone to Rome in search of the training they couldn’t yet find in the States. They formed a link between Hawthorne’s generation and James’s own; indeed James would later write Story’s biography. And Hawthorne stands as the shrewdest of commentators on the issue that Madame Merle defines. He spent sixteen months in Italy, from January 1858 until May of the following year, and in his notebooks recorded a meeting in Florence with the sculptor Hiram Powers, whose Greek Slave had become a totem of the Abolitionist cause. Hawthorne told him that he hoped he would soon take up the place, and the fame, that his work had earned him at home, and yet added that Powers seemed without any plans for a return. To the writer it looked like an “unsatisfactory life, thus to spend all the bulk of it in exile; in such a case we are always deferring the reality of life till a future moment, and, by and by, we have deferred it till there are no future moments.” The next day he added that a shy, thoughtful man might find a home in a small city like Siena, and discover there a “sombre kind of happiness . . . but it would be terrible without an independent life in one’s own mind.”