Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  The two have so often been spoken of as artistic counterparts that it’s easy to forget the differences between them. The painter kept into his last years a sense of ease and immediacy that James did not, especially when working in watercolor; and within their privileged world he depicted a wider range of social types, industrialists and politicians among them. Yet few of his subjects can be described as caught in the act of thinking, as James’s are, and we still say that his pictures serve as an illustration of the writer’s world, and not the other way around. Sargent is a great painter, but his work isn’t an event in the history of his medium; he concludes a period but doesn’t begin the next one. James does. In other ways, though, they do seem similar, and not only in crude biographical terms as expatriate bachelors from monied families. Each had an acute sense of the artistic past on which he drew. Each was conscious that he both depicted and appealed to a rarefied audience, and in consequence longed for a large popular or public success; while in chasing that success each of them spent years on mistakes. James’s 1890s fascination with the theater finds its match in the dead end of the painter’s religious murals for the Boston Public Library, a grandly inert attempt to revive the spirit if not the technique of Renaissance fresco. Moreover, in Venice these two reticent artists liked the same things, so much so that one wants to imagine an early meeting between them, when they were each alone and working in a city they both loved. They saw the same place, saw the city in the same terms, and James’s impressionistic 1882 account of its hidden interior, of a young girl crossing over a bridge arched “like a camel’s back, with an old shawl on her head” finds a precise equivalent in Sargent’s Venetian pictures of the period, with their bead-stringers and water carriers and narrow closed-in streets.

  In his preface to the Portrait James wrote that he seemed always drawn to the window, “in the fruitless fidget of composition, as if to see whether, out in the blue channel, the ship of some right suggestion, of some better phrase . . . mightn’t come into sight.” The pen drops and leaves perhaps a smeared drop of ink on an almost illegible line; the bearded man in shirtsleeves walks to the window that stretches from his knees to the ceiling and looks out, his arms grasping its frame. Maybe he wishes for a room on the floor below, with its little balcony; here he has only a window box. Though the view is distraction enough, and he raises an opera glass to look across half a mile of water at the campanile of San Giorgio, and then sweeps right to the low long line of the Giudecca, the sleepy, narrow island that from here seems like the city’s southern boundary. He is, he knows, on the verge of losing his concentration and remembers with thanks that his first month had been wild with rain. It had been easy then to sit down to his work, but in this city “even the brightest page of MS. looks dull beside the brilliancy of your milieu,” and now half an hour passes before he knows it. Boats jostle at the landing below, and voices drift up from the quay. Sunset hits the water and the lagoon begins to shimmer, as if streaked by a giant’s finger; and some pages in his novel will always make him see again the city’s bridges and hear once more the distinctive Venetian footstep of heels striking upon a hollow pavement.

  Indeed, James must have had Isabel in mind when, in his 1882 “Venice,” he adopted one of the standard tropes of touristic description and presented the city in gendered terms: “The creature varies like a nervous woman, whom you know only when you know all the aspects of her beauty. She has high spirits or low, she is pale or red . . . fresh or wan, according to the weather or the hour. She is always interesting and almost always sad.” The novel’s later chapters will indeed give us a heroine whose sensibility appears stretched and taut, and the sadness and the fascination belong to her as well. She too remains as difficult to know as this Adriatic city itself. Yet if his window over the lagoon showed him an ever-changing and elusive beauty, James’s lodgings presented him with a woman who seemed all too easy to understand. What, he coyly asked in his essay, was the exact connection “between the niece of the landlady and the occupancy of the fourth floor?” She was a dancer at La Fenice, the city’s famed opera house, and seemed always to be loitering nearby, dressed in velvet and her face heavy with powder. Byron had come to Venice sixty years before, where among other things he began to write Don Juan. He would have known what to do with the opportunity put so transparently in his way. But James was not that kind of straniero, and perhaps his landlady found him a less remunerative tenant than she hoped.

  In Italy, James was always conscious that he himself came from a new nation, but he was even more aware of it in Venice than elsewhere, where the city’s very obsolescence gave some special point to his own sense of novelty. Rome, in contrast, wanted so much to be modern itself, but James thought it would “be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to say” about La Serenissima. Such newness would mean the place was no longer the city of one’s dreams, and James’s sense of his own belatedness makes his essays about it seem densely allusive, in a way that can’t be entirely explained by his belief that his readers already knew it. None of his other travel pieces relies so heavily on the second person, putting the reader into the scene and then showering him with a Baedeker’s worth of names. The darkness of Venetian churches means that “you renounce all hope . . . of approaching the magnificent Cima da Conegliano in San Giovanni in Bragora,” and as for his beloved Tintoretto, you may admire and adore him, “but in the great majority of cases your eyes fail to deal with him.” Paintings, churches, palaces—James describes none of them in detail but instead evokes them with a phrase, compares them, reminds us of what we’ve already seen, plumps the mental furniture that he suggests we have always had. Or should have had, for James’s own love of Venice had come late, long after he had taken possession of Florence and Rome, and perhaps he had a sense of lost time. Perhaps too the author of The Portrait of a Lady could afford simply to gesture in a way the young writer could not. Nevertheless, the casual familiarity with which he presents it all appears hard-won; the learning is real but the names look to be dropped.

  When James left Venice, his work on the Portrait was very nearly finished. He reached his London home on July 12, 1881, and the next day sent Aldrich the copy for the Atlantic’s October issue, working as always with Macmillan’s proof sheets. November’s penultimate installment followed on August 8, and by that time he was already waiting for the concluding chapters of Isabel’s story to come back from the typesetter. Those dates suggest that the book did get its final polish in England, but James’s letters give no hint as to where he first drafted its last pages, and so maybe we have warrant enough to imagine him as trying, for a few more hours, to ignore that view from his fourth-floor room. No part of The Portrait of a Lady is set in Venice, and yet something of the city’s color and space—of its amplitude—did enter the novel as he worked. And so maybe did the city’s reputation for treachery, as Isabel Archer’s life turns grim; some whiff of its closed-in streets, in which one can seem lost without hope of escape.

  15.

  FENIMORE

  JAMES WAS RIGHT in believing that his Venetian spring of 1881 would not repeat itself, with its doubled sense of discovery, its fusion of the great book and the great city. But he could and did return to Venice itself. He revisited it six times between 1887 and 1907, and its splendid decay would determine two of his greatest works of fiction, The Aspern Papers and The Wings of the Dove. To understand the full importance that the city would have for him, however, we not only need to look ahead a few years, but must also go back to Florence and to Constance Fenimore Woolson, whom James had first met there in the spring of 1880.

  Woolson’s travels after those opening weeks of their friendship appear to echo James’s own earlier experience. She moved up to Venice, and then to Switzerland for the summer and fall; the winter of 1880–81 brought her back to Italy, where she settled into an apartment in Rome. Her biographer Lyndall Gordon suggests she might have been among the crowd of acquaintances that James hoped to av
oid in choosing Venice over Rome that year. Yet James craved both solitude and society, and at the end of April he broke his stay in Venice for a visit to the capital. One afternoon he went to tea in what Woolson called the “sky-parlor” of her fourth-floor apartment, and she remembered their conversation in a letter she wrote him the next year. The chapters describing Isabel’s first visit to Rome had just appeared in Macmillan’s, and James was uneasy about his handling of both Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond. The one was developed all out of proportion, he thought, and the other wasn’t clearly enough depicted. Writing with the whole novel before her, Woolson felt sure his judgment had been mistaken, and her readings of those characters are as penetrating as any in the criticism of the period. About Isabel she was less firmly analytical: “Poor Isabel! Poor idealizing imaginative girls the world over—sure, absolutely sure to be terribly unhappy.”

  In a second letter of 1882, Woolson wrote that she had had no fixed home since the death of her father in 1869, even though “I suppose there never was a woman so ill fitted to do without a home as I am.” She always tried to create a sense of domesticity in the temporary spaces of hotels and pensions, and professed to dream of a lakeside house at Cooperstown. But she never tried to buy or build one and, once in Europe, made no attempt to rejoin the American family she claimed to miss. Instead, she saw herself as cut off from the life she craved, a woman who had to do without the things she wanted. And chief among them was Henry James. It is too simple to see her desire in sexual terms alone. She also craved his imaginative freedom. James had the liberty to go anywhere and to think anything; a woman did not, and in consequence, she wrote, “a woman . . . can never be a complete artist.” She wanted him, but she also wanted his independence and his life: the independence that she was just conventional enough to believe her sex denied her; the life behind those works in which she thought she had found her true home. She knew he wouldn’t marry, and knew as well that the demands on his time were ever-increasing. Her books sold well and she had friends enough if only she would draw on them; she was deaf in one ear but her loss of hearing was not in itself responsible for her sense of isolation. Her commitment to James, or to her idea of James, seems rather to have defined in her some prior space of loneliness. She settled for the limited attention he might give her, a suspended life in which, with the years, she seemed always to be searching for some place to be.

  At first that place was London, where in 1883 she took an apartment in Sloane Street. They knew few people in common and, as I have already noted, James did not introduce her to his London world, where their friendship could not have passed without comment. One who did know about it was Lizzie Boott, in Florence; in writing to Bellosguardo, James referred to Woolson as the “Costanza” and spoke in amused though affectionate terms of her “immense power of devotion (to H.J.!).” Woolson in turn noted an excursion to Stonehenge in 1884; she had taken lodgings in Salisbury, and James came down on a day so blustery she “thought the carriage would be overturned.” Soon, however, she found herself pulled to Italy once more, and here James worked to cement her relations with the Bootts, who in the fall of 1886 found her an apartment in the Villa Castellani. Her lease ran for just a few months, but Florence suited her and she almost immediately took a house of her own just a hundred yards down the hill. It was called the Villa Brichieri-Colombi, and it provided the setting for one of the most curious episodes in James’s life.

  He too went to Italy that fall, arriving in Florence on December 8. He planned to stay a month, but in fact he did not return to England until the following July. That year James had seen both The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima through the press. He felt exhausted and wanted to “hide” for a time; and he meant that literally, writing to the Bootts that they shouldn’t mention his arrival to anyone. He planned to see only them and the woman he now called “Fenimore,” and his lodgings would make that easy enough. For Woolson had taken the Brichieri a month before she needed it and now offered it to him, complete with a cook and a maid; on Christmas Eve, James wrote to their mutual friend, John Hay, that the two of them often dined together. At the beginning of the year he took a hotel room in the city’s center, where he was caught by the same “promiscuous polyglot” society that he claimed he wished to avoid, and in February he went on to Venice for six weeks. But James came back to Tuscany in April 1887—and moved into the Brichieri once more, occupying a ground-floor apartment while Woolson herself had one on the piano nobile above. It is the closest he ever came to living with someone who was neither a servant nor a member of his immediate family. During that second visit James wrote to Edmund Gosse that he felt as though he were “making love to Italy” and inhabiting a house all “supercelestial, whence the most beautiful view on earth hangs before me wherever I lift my head.” Yet no letter from this period refers to the woman upstairs, and no biographer has learned very much about their lives together.

  What we can know is the house itself. The Brichieri is walled and gated, with a curving walkway that runs uphill from the gate to the house, a building with a classical pediment and with a main floor that opens onto a balcony. I visited it one winter afternoon when the mist obscured my view, but even on fine days it is just high enough, and just far enough, for the air to soften the lines and color of the city below. My hostess buzzed me in to the grounds, but at first I couldn’t find the stairs that led to her—to “Fenimore’s”—apartment. Instead, I stumbled into a wide ground-floor hallway, cool and comfortable and with a file of rooms running back on each side. This space had been James’s own, but now it belonged to somebody else and I was expected for tea; the stairs I wanted were outside and around a corner. James sometimes wrote of not wanting to betray hospitality with a description, but in truth there is little enough to say. My hostess was an elderly descendent of the Florentine-American world that James had described, and while the walls were hung with abstractions from the 1950s, the rest of the apartment spoke to an earlier generation. I remember heavy draperies and tables covered with photographs in small silver frames, and a conversation sprinkled with the kinds of names I know only from the labels on bottles of Chianti. When I left, she gave me some oil pressed from the fruit of her own trees.

  Biographers are properly wary of imagining a time for which we have few records. Presumably, James and Woolson shared the servants, but we don’t know how often they also shared a table, and in May he wrote to his brother William that most evenings he went down into the city for dinner. Was that a blind, a touch of cover for a position he recognized as equivocal? We know they took pains to mask the details of their arrangement, and know too that James enjoyed the Brichieri’s few acres of garden, a foretaste of the pleasure he later took in his bit of ground in Rye. The weather was cold on the day I visited, and we didn’t step out onto the balcony. Yet let us imagine that step. Let us walk with Fenimore onto her terrace and look down at Henry James as he sits with his morning coffee; each of them wondering, for the brief time that these walls concealed them, if they might have somehow been different.

  James had already written an essay about Woolson’s work for Harper’s; he admired her ability to evoke a “local tone,” but the compliments all carry a sting. And the piece he now wrote is sometimes taken as a peculiar reflection on their weeks together. He had heard a curious story in Florence that winter, a bit of gossip about a woman named Claire Clairmont, the last survivor of the circle around Byron and Shelley. She had been Mary Shelley’s stepsister and Byron’s mistress, the mother of his daughter Allegra, and she survived into old age, dying at eighty in 1879. In her last years she lived with a niece in Florence; rather poor, but guarding a trove of letters and other memorabilia. Then an American appeared, a sea captain from Boston named Silsbee. He asked to rent a few rooms in her house, but he really wanted the papers and hoped, in James’s words, “that the old lady in view of her great age and failing condition would die while he was there, so that he might then put his hand upon the documents
, which she hugged close in life.” She did die, though Silsbee failed to get his treasure, and James used the anecdote to seed one of his most perfect tales, The Aspern Papers.

  In writing he switched the scene from Florence to Venice. The change hid the story’s origins in the chitchat of a small expatriate community, and Venice did have more associations with Byron in particular. There were other reasons as well. James had already described Venice as the most splendid of tombs—a relic, as indeed is his character Juliana Bordereau, the aged mistress of the long-dead poet Jeffrey Aspern. The Florence of the 1880s was, however, the very reverse of a relic. It had briefly been the capital of the united Italy, and had since become a builder’s site, a place of newfangled trams and boulevards; subject to a process of modernization that exposed and made legible the mysteries of its crooked medieval streets. Moreover, James himself saw the city as though from Bellosguardo—an image of human felicity nestled in its splendid bowl of hills. Venice, in contrast, was a place for secrets, a city in which it was easy to get lost, and maybe even to lose yourself. So he put his Juliana there, a woman living “in obscurity, on very small means, unvisited, unapproachable, in a dilapidated old palace.” Jame’s syntax here twists and turns, a prose that serves, with all its commas and pauses, its addition of one nugget of information to another, to evoke the experience of Venice itself. One walks on, trying to find one’s way in a world of dead ends, to penetrate the city’s hidden spaces; and yet its secrets persist. In Venice it remains hard to find answers, and its very stones may seem the creatures of duplicity.