Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  James delighted in what he called the “palpable imaginable visitable past—in the nearer distances” of a recently departed era. Such a period seemed close enough to reach, as by the long stretch of a mental arm, and for Cheever—for me—one face of that past now belongs to James himself. But the ghosts he usually saw were those of people still present, and in Rome he reserved a special fascination for the earlier lives of his expatriated elders, the lives they had led just before his own arrival. They were the relicts of the city he called old Rome: a quiet town, and underpopulated, a place in which the pope was both the secular and the spiritual ruler, and where all modern opinion was censored. James had known that city for just a few months at the end of 1869, on his own first excited visit, and could never quite shed his sense of it. But the next year the Papal States were annexed by the new kingdom of Italy, and by the time he returned, in the winter of 1872–73, the city seemed to him to have lost a part of its color and style. The pope’s carriage no longer passed in the street; old Rome had vanished just when he got there, a fact that only increased his own sense of belatedness. America was a young nation, but even among other Americans he had come too late.

  In 1903, James published one of his most curious books, a two-volume biography, in the accepted life-and-letters mode, called William Wetmore Story and His Friends. Its subject was the Salem-born son of a Supreme Court justice, and a bit of a prodigy; a man who in his twenties had produced treatises on contracts and personal property. But the law bored him. Story liked poetry more, and was also interested in the visual arts, an interest confirmed by his first visit to Italy in 1847. A decade later he took his family abroad for good. Money went far in Rome, and Story had plenty of it; his place in the Barberini seemed cheap. It was on an upper floor of a sprawling seventeenth-century palace, a building that made James meditate on “what the grand style for the few involved in the way of a small style for the many.” The owners had kept the best rooms for themselves, including the one with the Cortona ceiling that celebrated Urban VII, the family’s pope, and James sometimes caught a glimpse of history as he climbed the stairs to his American friends: the sight of the old Cardinal Barberini himself playing cards with his priests, whose resigned smiles announced that they had, once more, managed to let His Eminence win.

  Story’s smoothly classicizing sculpture has little interest for us now, but it was famous in its time; a fame helped by his friendship with Hawthorne, who described some of it in The Marble Faun. By the time James knew him, however, the sculptor’s best work all lay in the past. He had settled into life as a host, and though the novelist admitted in an 1873 letter that the man’s “cleverness” was great, he added that “the world’s good nature to him is greater.” James liked some of Story’s travel sketches, but he thought the rest of it—the poetry and the marbles alike—nothing more than the work of a charming amateur. So he hesitated when, after his 1895 death, Story’s family asked him to do the biography; accepting only because he needed the advance to furnish Lamb House. Still, James kept putting it off, believing that the materials were too thin, that neither the man’s life nor his work contained enough to fill the project out. The money had been spent, though, and when he finally began, he discovered that he did have the makings of a book: not a biography per se, but a portrait of Story’s generation, in which the narrative is carried by the letters the sculptor had written to and received from larger figures.

  In that excursion into the visitable past Story appears as one of James’s own “precursors”: those Americans who went to Europe when the going was not yet easy. Writing in an age when America had become one of the world’s Great Powers, James found himself fascinated by his nation’s early but ever-growing “consciousness of the complicated world it was so persistently to annex.” He himself belonged to a generation that had gone well supplied with guidebooks and photographs and letters of introduction. His elders had had no such luxuries, and especially the artists among them. They had had no one to tell them what and where and how to study, and James recognized that his own easy cosmopolitanism depended on the fact that his predecessors had cut the road before him. He knew that Story’s or even Hawthorne’s understanding of Europe appeared quaint in comparison to that of his own era; the era as well of Sargent and Whistler, no longer the Old World’s students, but counted among its masters. Nevertheless, he saw them with a filial piety, for those precursors included not only Story, or his parents, but also his own earliest characters. They had made his world, his fiction—had made him—possible.

  In Italy the Americans and the English often formed a single community, and James couldn’t resist noting that during the fall of 1849 Elizabeth Barrett Browning read Jane Eyre in a copy she had borrowed from the Storys. But such homespun details should make us pause. The picture James’s fiction gives us of expatriate life has become so emblematic a part of our culture that we need to ask just how many people lived and moved in the world he described. Or rather how few. The 1872 Murray’s Handbook of Rome notes that in 1870 there were just 457 permanently resident Protestants in a city where the total population approached 250,000; given Italy’s own religious homogeneity, the term functions as a proxy for “foreign.” The Italian census for 1871 offers a rather different figure, however, and puts the number of Protestants at 3,798. The historian John Pemble explains the discrepancy as reflecting, first, a sharp increase in the scale of both business and diplomacy after Rome became the capital of the united Italy; and second, the possible inclusion in that figure of the temporary population in hotels and lodgings. The latter suggestion seems confirmed by the travel writer Bayard Taylor, who wrote in March 1868 that there were then 1,200 Americans in the city; most of them left immediately after Easter. Such transients were Rome’s equivalent of summer—that is, winter—people, those who came for the “season,” as James himself did in 1872–73. But the fixed population remained small. An 1894 survey of “Americans Abroad” in Lippincott’s notes that while Rome then received 30,000 of James’s countrymen as visitors each year, there were still just 200 permanent American inhabitants. Paris had 2,500.

  That number would, however, have included many people who did not figure in James’s world. The young seminarians from the Vatican’s new American College were not likely to appear at the Storys’ Sunday evening at-homes. Nor were the city’s English tradesmen, to whom Murray and Baedeker provide something like a gazetteer. A Mr. Shea arranged the lease of furnished apartments from his office in the Piazza di Spagna, and was also recommended as a trustworthy agent for those wishing to ship luggage or artwork to England and America. A “depot of London saddlery” could be found at Barfoot’s in the via del Babuino, and G. Baker owned a pharmacy. There were no English booksellers as such, but the German-run Spithöver’s stocked English publications and got the newspapers too. An erstwhile drawing master named Arthur Strutt had become a noted distributor of Italian wines, and the eponymous Ice Company made its wares from “Trevi water.” A Miss Black is listed in Murray’s as a “daily governess,” an American dentist practiced in the via Nazionale, and a man called Jarrett kept a livery stable in the Piazza del Popolo. Thomas Cook had its office in the Piazza di Spagna, and an English company ran the city’s gasworks from a plant at the Circus Maximus.

  These businesses allowed visitors, or indeed the city’s resident Anglophones, to arrange their lives without the need to know Italian or even any Italians. And certainly those tourists were needed to fill the Church of England Chapel, which seated 800; the American Episcopal church was even bigger. But the Storys’ tea-parties would in any case have drawn upon a different population. Murray recommended three English doctors and one American. There were several English bankers, though James himself used the Italian house of Spada, Flamini. There were the embassies, and above all there were artists. The 1872 edition of Murray’s lists 36 studios run by American or English sculptors and painters, while noting that the roster includes only established figures—not students, not
beginners. Few of them have a reputation today. The real talent had begun to go instead to Paris, where one could study the painting of modern life, and of the permanent residents the most interesting was the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, a friend of Hawthorne’s whom James described as looking like a “remarkably ugly little grey-haired boy.” Her work has more tactile play than Story’s; and she had also helped import a pack of hounds for the newly established Roman hunt.

  The smaller Roman world-within-a-world in which James moved and of which he wrote contained just a few hundred people. I count some fifty names in the letters he sent to Cambridge in the winter and spring of 1873, and many of them belong to fellow transients. The Bootts fell into this category, down for the winter from Florence. So did a new friend, Sara Butler Wister, from Philadelphia. She was the daughter of the English actress Fanny Kemble, at whose London fireside James would later sit, and the mother of Owen Wister, the future author of The Virginian (1902). James admired her beautiful hair, but insisted to Quincy Street that he didn’t “at all regret that I’m not Dr. Wister.” He had other meetings with old friends and acquaintances who were, like Lord Warburton, simply passing through. Early in March he met up with a rather feeble Ralph Waldo Emerson; a few weeks later he saw the newly married Mr. and Mrs. Henry Adams on their way back from an Egyptian honeymoon. But such encounters were just hometown gossip, and James wrote to William that though he supposed Rome was full of interesting people, “I doubt that there is any very edifying society.”

  Nevertheless, he decided in these months to surrender himself to the entanglements of expatriate life. He complained about it, but he put his work on hold in order to absorb the sights and sounds of this rarefied milieu. He went to three weekly receptions, he lunched and dined and called, and in the floating world of the Roman spring this spare man soon found himself “in the position of a creature with five women offering to ride with him.” His companions on horseback included both Mrs. Wister and Alice Mason, the divorced wife of the Massachusetts politican Charles Sumner; but his favorite companion remained Lizzie Boott. With such a routine it is perhaps no wonder that the emphasis of his Italian fiction would soon begin to change. Most nineteenth-century American novels about Italy—The Marble Faun, James’s own Roderick Hudson, to some degree Howells’s Indian Summer—devoted themselves to the lives of artists, providing a sanitized version of la vie bohème in which the pursuit of culture is entirely compatible with bourgeois propriety. As such, they offered a conventional account of what their authors believed their countrymen wanted from the Old World. One of the things that separates The Portrait of a Lady from those books is its indifference to the world of the studios. Its representative American in Rome is Madame Merle, who keeps a smart third-floor pied-à-terre, not Hawthorne’s Puritan painter Hilda, with her home in an airy tower. James wrote to his brother that he hoped his winter of relentless socializing had given him “more impressions” than it seemed, and one of the things he got, which now makes Roderick Hudson look dated, was the sense that America’s Italy was no longer what it had been in his precursors’ age. It was no longer the site of artistic devotion, but had instead become a fashionable playground, a stopping point for an international society that moved from place to place and crossed the oceans with the seasons. If Gilbert Osmond were real, he would in his younger days have known such American artists as Story or Hiram Powers; he would have shared his side of the Arno with the Brownings. But not a trace of that appears in Isabel’s world, a world that contains nobody remotely like James himself.

  James wrote to Quincy Street in January that the American society he found in Rome seemed “without relations with the place, or much serious appreciation of it.” To say that, however, is to beg the question of James’s own relations with the place, and indeed with Europe itself. After he read the Story biography, Henry Adams told him that the book had exposed the ignorance of the world from which they both came, making him “curl up, like a trodden-on worm. Improvised Europeans, we were, and—Lord God!—How thin.” Adams took some consolation in the thought that almost nobody would recognize the truth, but James’s own characters had said similar things. The historian’s phrases, however pungent, are simply a version of the standard complaint about “cosmopolites”—the usual thing said about them, said even or especially by themselves. As Ellen Olenska in Wharton’s Age of Innocence would later argue, “It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.”

  Of course, Adams’s claim also points to a great paradox. His generation had gone to Europe in search of what they couldn’t find at home, and yet in doing so they were also making a past, a heritage, for us; and at the turn of the twentieth century the intellectual life of Boston and Cambridge, which improvised upon that European legacy, was richer than that of Rome itself. As James himself knew. He knew that America would control the future by annexing the past. It would make its culture by exploiting its freedom to choose, to draw upon the heritage of different lands and centuries, taking a painting here and a philosophy there. Such, at any rate, is the burden of his last great novel, The Golden Bowl, which among other things explores the classical motif of the translatio studii et imperii, the movement of learning and power from one civilization to another.

  Still, the Europe that draws that novel’s ironically named art collector, Adam Verver, isn’t that of the present day. He buys old things, not new; that was what America wanted, what it both lacked and desired. James recognized that his countrymen’s fascination with the past made them ignore Italy’s own preoccupation “with its economical and political future,” and yet he too resisted seeing it as a modern state. Some English expatriates, like the Brownings, had identified themselves with the Risorgimento. Most Americans abroad did not, and modernity was precisely what they had come to escape. James came to speak good Italian and to read it with some ease, but he had few Italian friends, and though he had once thought of settling in Italy, his season in Rome persuaded him otherwise. Those months taught him that it was hard to write about a picturesque subject in a picturesque country. The city gave too much. The most intelligent conversation seemed unable to compete with the spectacle of its streets, and James wondered if even so limited an artist as Story might have worked with a “finer rage” in the unfriendlier air of Boston or London. He himself would write better of Italy—would have deeper imaginative relations to it—for not being there, and the most interesting question raised by his January letter to Quincy Street isn’t about any particular place, about Rome or even all of Italy. It is instead the question of the place in his work of place itself.

  During her first days in Rome, Isabel finds that the city seems to speak of her own future, and she will later see it as embodying her own psychic state: a place in which people have suffered, and in which “the ruins of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe.” Such passages should make us ask if Europe ever stands for James as something more or other than a backdrop against which the dramas of his American characters might play. In what way is it integral, and in what mere scenery? One of the things that fascinated him about Hawthorne was what he called the “imported” nature of his sense of sin. Hawthorne certainly knew the world of his Puritan ancestors, but to James he didn’t appear haunted by it. His relation to its almost mystical darkness was an intellectual rather than a moral one, and to James he seemed but to play with its shadows. On this reading, sin becomes an aspect of the picturesque, and indeed James’s language takes on a geographic tinge; he speaks of the “rugged prominence of moral responsibility.” Sin is atmosphere, it is contour and relief. It intensifies the drama, just as Isabel’s sense of her own sadness gains from her awareness of the ever-present Roman past.

  Let’s say, then, that James uses Europe in the way he thinks Hawthorne does sin—as color or background, a way to ratchet up the stakes, but not as a part of his work’s deepest being. Yet that claim in itself begs a central question about America’s relation to the
rest of the world. In many ways Europe provides as fresh a start for James’s characters as it did for their creator. It lets them appear as though cut off from their pasts. Madame Merle’s native Brooklyn no longer appears to matter, nor Osmond’s Baltimore, and even Isabel’s more significant antecedents dwindle by the page. But in stepping out of America she doesn’t quite step into Europe either, and the bubble life of the expatriate becomes as one with her belief in her own exceptional fate. Her very disconnection from the world around her reinforces her claim that “nothing that belongs to me is any measure of me,” and the American girl’s Europe becomes a place in which one can explore the limits of the self in itself, unbound by the fetters of national origin. It stands as a paradox, offering liberty and history at once; a place in which one’s exemption from history seems to provide a warrant for that liberty. But James’s own Europe is very different from that of his characters, and never more central than when it seems mere background, than when it fosters the illusion of freedom on which Isabel depends.

  James drew on his Roman winter for years to come; it gave him both Roderick Hudson and the later chapters of the Portrait along with a number of short stories. Its most immediate results, however, were the two travel essays he published in the summer of 1873. “A Roman Holiday” purports to offer an account of the annual pre-Lenten Carnival, an event that provides a set piece in almost all touristic descriptions of the city. It is there in Goethe, in Dickens, in Hawthorne—and what’s also there in each of them is an almost ritual sense of disappointment. This sorry show is the Carnival, this tired display of masks and confetti and forced hilarity? The festival began that year on the fifteenth of February. It was a Saturday, and James was at his desk in the Hôtel de Rome when a sudden intensification of noise pulled him to his window. He had formed his own idea of Carnival from a children’s book that featured an elegant masked lady on a balcony, but the ladies on the balconies now were all shoveling lime and flour down on to the heads of the pedestrians below, and when he went out himself, James immediately got a pailful dumped upon him. Nothing in this “dingy drollery” could match his childhood fantasies, but once he had shaken the flour from his ears, he had a vision of just how empty the rest of the city must be. So he took a holiday from the holiday, wandering away from the festival’s compulsory pleasures and out to the Forum and Santa Maria Maggiore—familiar places, but made fresh by his own sense of escape.