Some readers might wonder—I certainly did, at eighteen—just why a nighttime walk in the Colosseum was so much worse than a walk anywhere else. For the story itself refuses to explain. It preserves both its young readers’ modesty and its own; and as for the Colosseum, that was just one of the things that adults were supposed to know about. It would take Edith Wharton to make it all explicit, in her great story “Roman Fever” (1934), a story about a different kind of heat than that from which Daisy suffers. On a visit to Rome two American women, old friends and rivals, watch their daughters chat up some Italian aviators. As the day passes, the women remember their own early visits to the city, at the turn of the twentieth century, and even those of their mothers, in Daisy’s day; young women of the 1870s who had in their turn to be carefully protected from the city’s dangers by their mothers. So Wharton evokes four generations of American women in Europe, the generations whose history both James and she herself had chronicled. Then she ends with a kill shot, a few sentences in which one woman tells the other the truth about the past, sentences that provide the best gloss of all on Daisy Miller in showing us just what, with all those massive arches to hide behind, the Colosseum was so famously for.
That wasn’t the only time Wharton used her work to comment on that of her predecessor and friend. After all, the hero of her greatest novel, The Age of Innocence, is named Newland Archer, a lawyer who seems the very “portrait of a gentleman,” as if he were indeed related to that girl from Albany. Wharton set the novel in New York during the early 1870s, in the world of the Knickerbocker cousinage that Isabel has left behind her, and the book opens at the city’s old Academy of Music on 14th Street, not far from James’s own birthplace off Washington Square. The performance that night is of Faust, and as Newland watches his fiancée, May Welland, he fondly allows himself to believe that she hasn’t a clue as to what the opera’s seduction scene is about. Though in fact she does, and just before their wedding she tells him that he “mustn’t think that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine.” On every page the novel reminds us of the gap between its 1920 publication and the date of its setting, showing us a New York in which telephones are the latest thing and the trains from the south don’t yet cross the Hudson. And among the historical changes it tracks are those in fiction itself, registering all that the novels of Isabel’s day were not allowed to say, and that Wharton now can. Everyone here knows and talks about a corrupt financier and his mistress, and some of them worry that their children will marry his “bastards”; while late in the novel May will lie about her own pregnancy as a way to keep her husband faithful. The gap between what people know and what they’ve agreed to admit they know has gotten a bit smaller, as James foresaw that it would. But such moments aren’t the only echoes Wharton offers of the Portrait. For Newland also remembers having spent a few weeks “at Florence with a band of queer Europeanized Americans,” with rakes and dandies and strange deracinated women who insist on telling him about their love affairs. One imagines a fling with the Countess Gemini; and one imagines as well just how Newland Archer’s own innocence would have been caught and pinned by Gilbert Osmond’s cold and ancient eyes.
17.
THE MAGAZINES
MIDSUMMER, 1881. HENRY James has had his Venetian spring and brought The Portrait of a Lady to within a shout of its close. But an Italian July is another matter, and at the start of the month he left the peninsula’s “stifling calidarium,” and went north. James never traveled quickly, but on this journey he paused for only a week, at the Swiss resort of Engelberg near Lucerne. He crossed the Channel on July 12 and, as soon as he was back in Bolton Street, sat down to an awkward bit of correspondence.
He had another part of his serial ready, as he wrote to Houghton, Mifflin, and would send it to Aldrich at the Atlantic the next day. But his publishers expected that afterward there would be just a single installment left and so, he wrote, “I am afraid you will be a little alarmed to learn that I have had to ask from Messrs Macmillan one additional month of their magazine, and I shall have therefore to beg the same favour of you.” James had no doubt they would grant his request. Nevertheless, he apologized for stretching out what was already a long novel and, as if in compensation, noted that the last three installments would be short; each filled about twenty of the magazine’s pages, while the usual ones took twenty-five or more. Still, he would need that extra month, and what two years before he had described, in writing to Howells, as a serial of “probably not less than six, & more than eight” months’ duration would instead take fourteen.
Most of the Victorian novels we read today were serialized in one form or another. The important exceptions are the Brontës in England and Hawthorne and Melville in America, all of whom worked before the age of the great monthly magazines like the Cornhill or the Century or indeed the Atlantic itself. James often told friends to wait for the finished volume, but serialization was an unavoidable fact of almost every writer’s economic life. Nor was there anything odd in the book’s beginning its run before he had completed it. Nearly everyone did that, and Dickens in particular sometimes had to fight his way to a deadline. But serialization took several forms, and the kind of story a novelist told depended in part on the medium in which the work initially appeared. James’s request opens a window on the publishing practices of his day. We need to consider it carefully, and can start by looking at the magazines in which the Portrait first came out.
The two were surprisingly alike. They had begun publication within a few years of each other, the Atlantic in 1857 and Macmillan’s in 1859, and they shared the same politics. The American journal spoke for a progressive humanism, and the British one for what was called Christian socialism, a movement that played a role in the early history of Britain’s Labour Party. Each was pro-Darwin, and in their early years each took an antislavery line; the latter was taken for granted in Abolitionist Boston, but not in a Britain whose textile industry relied on American cotton. Neither had pictures, and instead used double-columned pages of unbroken type. That would later hurt the Atlantic’s circulation figures in particular, and despite the magazine’s influence, its sales never threatened those of the lavishly illustrated and New York–based Harper’s. In 1880–81 it sold just 12,000 copies a month, while Harper’s topped 100,000. Both magazines suggested that culture was serious business and served as high-toned apostles to an aspiring middle-class; James himself made fun of the Atlantic’s sobriety. Even their prices were virtually identical. Macmillan’s cost a shilling and the American magazine 25¢ at a time when the pound fetched a bit under $5. Though the Americans got more for their money—an issue usually ran 144 pages, as opposed to Macmillan’s 80.
James wasn’t the only writer to put the same piece in both journals. Harriet Beecher Stowe had done it with an 1869 article that provided the first hint of Byron’s incest with his half-sister Augusta, but nothing so scandalous appeared in either magazine during the year of the Portrait’s run. The novel began in the October Macmillan’s, an issue that also included a piece on the ancient town of Glastonbury, then as now associated with King Arthur. Over the next months the readers got an essay by Matthew Arnold and a poem by George Meredith alongside Isabel’s story, and articles on public libraries, the prevention of floods, and “Political Somnambulism” by J. R. Seeley, the historian who later argued that the British Empire had been acquired “in a fit of absence of mind.” In the Atlantic the first installment came out in November along with a piece on weather forecasting. Early the next year there was an essay by the naturalist John Burroughs, and James’s own father offered his recollections of the recently deceased Thomas Carlyle. Nothing in these issues looks so frivolous or, the Portrait aside, so purely pleasurable as a piece Harper’s ran at the same time about going “Down the Thames in a Birch-Bark Canoe.” Later in 1881 the Atlantic published stories by Sarah Orne Jewett and an anonymous review of Twain’s Prince and the Pauper; while one continuing feature was the back-of-t
he-book “Contributors’ Club,” a section of unsigned pieces on books or manners or travel. Often these brief notices responded to those of an earlier month, producing the sense of an ongoing conversation; “club” is indeed the right word.
There were some differences. The Atlantic was hospitable to women writers; Macmillan’s went further and pushed women’s issues, education in particular. In terms of daily operations, however, their biggest difference lay in the relations of owner and editor. The American magazine had been started by a clutch of Boston intellectuals, the poets James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., among them, and changed hands several times before it was bought, in 1874, by the printer H. O. Houghton. The new owner would build the greatest of Boston publishing houses; he kept a strict eye on expenses but didn’t often interfere with editorial questions. The Atlantic’s editors became public figures in themselves, and while Houghton, Mifflin often took a book from its pages, the Portrait among them, the monthly never functioned as a house organ. Macmillan’s was very different. It bore the name of its publisher, and no matter who edited it, the magazine was controlled by Alexander Macmillan, a Scotsman who began his career with a London bookshop in 1843. In 1880 the editor was George Grove, whose own monument is his eponymous Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Grove himself had reservations about James’s work, but almost all the novelist’s dealings were with the firm’s junior partner, Alexander Macmillan’s nephew Frederick. The novelist approached him soon after settling in London, and they quickly became friends. Over the years he placed work with several other firms as well, but Macmillan’s was his most important English publisher, handling virtually all of his books up through The Tragic Muse and later holding the British rights for the New York Edition. Or to put it another way, James was a Macmillan author who, with the exception of the Portrait itself, did not often publish in Macmillan’s. He was an Atlantic writer who did little business with Houghton, Mifflin as such. In Britain he made his deal for the Portrait with the publishing house; in America with the magazine.
James discussed the book with Frederick Macmillan in the spring of 1878, but though he noted his plans in letters to both Howells and Quincy Street, his surviving correspondence with the publisher doesn’t mention it again until the next year. Clearly they had been talking about it, however, for in July 1879, James wrote to canvass the possible dates for starting. Nevertheless, there were difficulties. The Macmillans had him committed to a serial, and yet James had also agreed to write something for Howells and told his Boston editor that he wanted to make the “next long story I write . . . really a long one.” Doing that would mean pushing the Macmillan’s piece back beyond a point that they were willing to accept. James found a solution by flexing the biceps that the popular success of Daisy Miller had given him. The Atlantic usually objected to simultaneous publication in England. It wanted to be the exclusive home of the things it ran and didn’t want to look, even with James, as if it were in the business of importing culture. But the competition at Harper’s made no such objection, and James reminded Howells that if he lost the chance to “double my profits . . . I shall have, to a certain extent, to remember this.” The editor recognized the threat, and by late August, James had arranged to publish the same novel in both magazines at once. On Macmillan’s part there was no difficulty; the firm offered £250 for the serial, and half the profits on its book form. Howells grumbled, but he wanted a similar arrangement for his own novels, and once he accepted the deal in principle James worked him hard on the price, asking for $250 each month; he had gotten only $150 for each piece of The American. Still, the Portrait’s installments were to be longer, and the page rate came to about $10, the Atlantic’s standard payment to established writers; the success of the Portrait would drive James’s fee to fifteen.
The novel’s serialization also involved a second balancing act. Until 1891 there was no reciprocal copyright agreement between Britain and the United States, and publishers on either side of the Atlantic often pirated the other nation’s books, paying little or nothing to the writers themselves. English copyright depended on the book having first appeared in Britain, but American citizens could assert their copyright in the United States by registering the work with the Library of Congress, whether they were in the country or not. There was, however, some danger that a pirated edition might appear before that registration took place, as indeed happened with Daisy Miller after its appearance in the English Cornhill. British writers could not file for copyright in Washington from abroad, and could only tap the U.S. market by selling advance sheets to an American publisher, giving the chosen house a chance to get ahead of any competition. That is what George Eliot did with Middlemarch, but because it could only delay and not prevent privacy, her American earnings were small in comparison to her English ones.
James got two copies of his proof sheets from Macmillan’s and, after correcting them, sent one to each publisher; the Atlantic then reset the text to fit its slightly larger page. The arrangement depended on a fast and regular mail service—letters took ten or twelve days to make the crossing—and yet that service could also be too fast. Macmillan’s published on the first of each month, and the opening installment of the Portrait appeared in England at the start of October; the same chapters came out in the Atlantic’s November issue, released on October 15. The two week gap seems nicely calculated both to ensure James’s English copyright and to keep off the pirates at home. But Macmillan’s had many subscribers in the States, and at Christmas, James wrote Frederick Macmillan a plaintive note. The mails were too fast, the presses too slow, and he had heard that the Portrait was “devoured in the American papers before [it] appears in the Atlantic.” Couldn’t Macmillan find some way to stop this? James had already put out a dozen books; but then no author, however experienced, can quite believe that his publisher has done everything possible.
With most writers Howells didn’t hesitate to offer suggestions, and in his early stories James took a number of them. But we have no record of any editorial work on the Portrait; the only revisions appear to have been James’s own. Still, Howells was surprised by the scale on which his friend had begun to build. He knew from the start that the book’s installments would be longer than those of either Roderick Hudson or The American, but he also remembered James’s first proposal, and almost as soon as the serial began, he announced that it would end in the spring of 1881. Which in turn startled James himself. Whatever his initial plans, he now saw that the Portrait would cover a “stretch of months or years” in its characters’ lives, and he thought he had “been explicit as to its longitude—twelve months.” It would live and breathe through its sense of duration, and in doing so would strain his own ambition to the limits; a novel that would justify and fulfill his many years of preparation. Still, he did acknowledge that he had been “strangely vague” about its length. To Macmillan’s he had first suggested a run of eight or nine months, but by December his projected twelve were already becoming thirteen. At the start of the year he sat down to block out the remainder of the book’s plot and noted that “after Isabel’s marriage there are five more instalments.” The italics suggest a moment of revision, as if he were underlining an additional change in the book’s longitude. The wedding scene is itself unwritten—it takes place in the gap between the novel’s eighth and ninth installments. But the novel continued to grow. Those five became six, thirteen stretched itself to fourteen, and in July of 1881, James asked for that extra month.
He was not, however, asking for more time in which to work. There’s no suggestion that he hadn’t been able to cover his pages, that he would need that month just to finish off. Nor is it simply a plea for more space. Printing the book’s last chapters in just two parts would, admittedly, have made for long installments. But it could have been done, and at roughly 30 pages they would have been only a few columns longer than those for several earlier months. Nor, finally, can James be accused of wanting that month for the sake of an ext
ra month’s check. His fees were important to him and we know he could be a shrewd negotiator. But in terms of pace and balance the book’s nine concluding chapters do indeed work better in three pieces rather than two, and each of these late installments forms a discrete dramatic unit.
That’s especially true of the book’s final part, three extraordinary chapters that begin by moving Isabel back from Italy to England, back to Ralph and the novel’s opening scenes at Gardencourt. I suspect that what made James ask for the extra month was the discovery, as he worked in Venice’s brilliant light, that he needed to prepare that conclusion more fully. In roughing out the novel’s later stages he admitted to himself that its early portion was “too exclusively psychological,” but he thought the installments after Isabel’s marriage could make up for that. They would be crowded, perhaps too crowded, with incident. Yet though he knew what those incidents would be, he wasn’t yet sure how to handle them all, and wrote that certain issues of motive and crucial moments of revelation were “to be settled later.” It’s easy to imagine how that might have made the book grow, especially because James characteristically found a way to cover all the possibilities he had sketched.
Of course, he was hardly the first novelist to ask for more time. Margaret Oliphant was a regular contributor to Macmillan’s, and one of her own serials there makes James looks like a model of exactitude; A Son of the Soil (1866) was projected at four parts, and came in at seventeen. Other writers were told after a few months to tie things off as quickly as they could, and even Elizabeth Gaskell, in working for the popular Household Words, was made to shorten up the concluding parts of North and South (1855). In extending the Portrait’s run, James presumed on his status as both Howells’s friend and one of the Atlantic’s most valued contributors. He also knew that the pages of a monthly magazine were within certain limits fungible. Articles, poems, and even the start of a new novel could be delayed from month to month; short pieces and long ones could be switched around as needed to make an issue fit its appointed size. But that wasn’t true of all kinds of serial publication, and especially not of the particular form that had given the nineteenth century its taste for long-running novels.
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