Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  Serials had a particular job of cultural work to do in the ever-expanding Victorian world; a world in which all things seemed to grow, and literacy among them. Such works, as the critics Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund have argued, fostered a belief in “process and progress,” a sense of “steady development in installments over time, seeds planted in spring leading to harvest in distant autumn.” They required, from both their readers and their writers, an ability to hold disparate things together, to make a mental link between the first month and the last, and yet they weren’t really exercises in delayed gratification. Instead, one lived in the moment while also anticipating the future. Pleasure and peril in the present, and fulfillment in the months to come—that was what they offered, and no one more regularly satisfied that desire than Dickens. Books like David Copperfield and Bleak House were first published in monthly parts that sold for a shilling and contained exactly two illustrations and 32 pages of text. There was no other editorial material, though the pamphlet did include many pages of advertisements, some for books but others for laxatives, opera glasses, and the “London General Mourning Warehouse.” The finished novel took up twenty such parts, each containing three or four chapters, though the last two installments appeared together in a single booklet, producing a sense of acceleration at the end.

  Thackeray, among others, often worked in this form as well, and the writer who chose it needed to keep two structures in mind—that of the book as a whole and that of each separate month, which readers expected to end with a satisfying climax. In consequence, the novelist often set three or four different plots going at once; plots that at first might appear loosely connected but which are far more tightly linked than they seem. Dickens usually managed to touch on most of his different story lines in every installment, building up and tamping down his readers’ expectations that one of them might resolve itself. At the same time, he had to ensure that some piece of his narrative was ready each month to produce a moment of crisis or change. So he ends a chapter of Bleak House with the news that its heroine has been blinded by smallpox, and then finishes the installment by turning to other material, another climax, making us wait until the last pages of the following month before we learn that she can see once more. But that example is too easy. Dickens’s greatest long novels can seem terribly episodic—and yet try to unpick them! Try to dispense with any single character or point in the narrative, and the whole begins to unravel at once.

  Publication in monthly parts created the multiplot novel that is often taken as the Victorian norm. Only by keeping several story lines going at once could the writer develop enough plausible moments of climax to give his readers a reason to buy the next issue. The weekly serials of Dickens’s later years—books like Great Expectations or A Tale of Two Cities—required something different. Their installments were shorter, and that relative brevity necessitated a tighter focus. A good comparison is that between the first-person narratives of David Copperfield and Great Expectations. The former appears to meander, and David himself often seems a mere witness to other people’s stories. The short weekly installments of the latter may twist and turn, but they never mark time. Nor do we ever doubt its central concern—our eyes are always upon its narrator, Pip. Neither book could have been successfully serialized in the other one’s form.

  The period’s most complicated case of serial publication is that of Middlemarch. George Eliot didn’t like working ahead of herself in the way serialization required, and she released both Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss as three-volume novels, without the benefit of any prior magazine appearance. In Middlemarch, however, she wanted to write on a very large scale, and eventually decided to publish in a bimonthly series of eight short books, each about the size of three of Dickens’s monthly parts. They had soft green covers, sold for 5s., and fit comfortably in a coat pocket. The volumes vary slightly in length—that flexibility was part of the form’s attraction—and their scope allowed for a more complicated interplay of the novel’s different plot lines than do even Dickens’s monthly installments. George Eliot begins with the story of Dorothea Brooke, and at first holds it apart from the rest of the novel’s concerns; we stay with Dorothea for 80 pages, but when George Eliot switches focus, she is banished for another 80. Then slowly, gradually, symphonically, the novel’s different sets of characters begin to entwine themselves with one another. The multiple plots start to merge; and by the end of the book they are all one. Yet even this form reflected the material realities of the novelist’s working life. For Middlemarch is a fusion of what George Eliot had originally imagined as two separate stories, and we owe its long initial account of Dorothea to the fact that she had already written it before she began to splice.

  Weekly serials allowed a bit of room for the writer’s improvisation and uncertainty, a week or two to swell or shrink. Freestanding volumes or pamphlets had none. There could not be more of them, or less; with Dickens, indeed, the very page count was fixed. They couldn’t stretch out their time, as James did, and for all their seeming looseness, they required that the narrative be defined in advance; a model made, and stuck to. There is a paradox here. The Portrait seems to discover its final shape as it grows, as though it were unplanned; but its action appears as a taut and single motion. Dickens looks rough in comparison, and yet his books were rigorously planned, their outlines carefully developed before he began to write. James never worked in such monthly parts. The form had begun to die by the time his career began, supplanted by the journals for which he himself worked. Those magazines offered a different set of possibilities, however, and reading a serial there was a fundamentally different activity from reading one in separate parts.

  The Portrait of a Lady was the main attraction in both Macmillan’s and the Atlantic, but it was still just one attraction among many, and not even the only novel. Most of a magazine’s readers were regular subscribers. No one story had much power to make the monthly circulation rise or fall, and readers came to the journal for many reasons; an Atlantic reader who didn’t like James wouldn’t necessarily stop receiving it, not so long as he enjoyed the “Contributors’ Club” or the poetry. An installment of Bleak House, however slender, could seem to become the world. That illusion wasn’t possible for a reader who held a monthly magazine in his hands, and might open to a different piece each time. In consequence, the expectations for an Atlantic serial were different than those for a novel published in monthly parts; and different again than they would be in a more popular periodical. And in some ways those expectations were less.

  Unlike Dickens, James did not have to keep the customers coming back. He didn’t have the same need for a regular monthly crisis and often chose to avoid the obvious high notes, to end an installment off the beat. Warburton’s proposal falls in the middle of a part; Mr. Touchett’s death at the start of one. Osmond’s declaration does indeed conclude a month, but then so does Isabel’s statement that she would “rather hear nothing that Pansy may not.” That’s the last thing we hear her say before her marriage, and her words don’t signal a change so much as they serve to reinforce our impression of her fears. It is a curiously understated ending and suggests that James had a very different sense than Dickens or even George Eliot of what constitutes a turning point in a narrative. It suggests that though The Portrait of a Lady may have been serialized, it is not, when seen against its Victorian predecessors, a serial novel.

  A generation later Joseph Conrad was at work, and desperate, upon one of his greatest books, the story of Russian guilt and terrorism that he called Under Western Eyes, and a part of that desperation came from his fear that “no magazine will touch it.” For though one finally did—the English Review, with a circulation of just 1,000—the kinds of books Conrad wrote were increasingly difficult to publish in parts, and his ambitions were at odds with the progressive thrust of serial form. Dickens’s world had possessed something close to a pure linearity. The story unspooled month by month or week by week, and
the order of events in his characters’ lives was virtually identical with the order of their narration. In contrast, Conrad’s books were full of flashbacks, of great looping motions in time and sudden shifts in point of view; they would skip into the future and then back up to plug the chronological hole. But then many narratives of the fin de siècle were at odds with what Hughes and Lund describe as the serial’s emphasis on “slow, sure growth and development.” Instead, they offered a world of disorder and even chaos, a world best contained in the “autonomous whole” of a single volume.

  James played his part in that change. Nevertheless, serialization remained a financial necessity even for those, like Conrad, whose work was unsuited to it. Most nineteenth-century novelists made their money from magazine publication rather than the sale of finished books. Advances against royalties were not yet common, and in England those royalities might amount to nothing at all. Macmillan issued just 750 copies of the Portrait’s first, three-volume edition, and many of those went at a discount to Mudie’s or its competitors. James’s income from books in 1881 was under $1,000, a figure that includes both American and British sales; though to be fair, he got more than that the next year in the States alone, as the Portrait went into a series of reprintings. At the same time, he received a bit over $5,000 for the novel’s serial rights. His earnings fluctuated over the course of his career, and with time his income from books increased. But in the first twenty-five years of his European residence, he often made four or five times more from magazine sales than from books.

  Five thousand dollars was indeed a substantial figure; Henry Sr. had supported a large family in comfort on an income that never exceeded $10,000. Five thousand dollars was what Howells got for editing the Atlantic, a job he left only when he felt he could make as much from his fiction. It did not, however, put James among the top earners of his period. Anthony Trollope kept scrupulous records and listed his takings at the end of his autobiography, at great cost to his reputation. Other writers, James among them, resented the way that the older man’s balance sheet made him seem like a tradesman rather than an artist, though James himself maintained a comparable but private ledger. Trollope made £3,200 from Phineas Finn, over $15,000. George Eliot did even better; by the time Middlemarch was finished, she had earned over £4,000 from its serial sales alone.

  Middlemarch’s commercial success owed a great deal to the idiosyncracies of its first edition; those eight little volumes were an encouragement to buy, not borrow. Moreover, George Eliot watched the response to the novel’s opening installment and used it in shaping the later ones. For serials were often reviewed, and several of Middlemarch’s separate parts got full write-ups in both the Spectator and the Athenaeum. Those first reviews were so entirely engaged by Dorothea that at the last minute her creator swapped a few chapters from one volume to another in order to bring her back more quickly. The Portrait didn’t receive such extensive coverage, and most of it came in the roundups of periodicals that many newspapers and magazines then featured. The Atlanta Constitution reviewed most issues of the Atlantic, and so did the Detroit Free Press; but neither paper much liked the story. The Spectator gave it an occasional line in its monthly “Some Papers from the Magazines,” writing of the first installment that “nothing can be more delicate,” and after that took the serial’s quality for granted. In America the richest commentary came in The Nation, where James had been a contributor since its 1865 founding. In March 1881 the magazine thought the book “considerably the most important” he had yet written; in August it foresaw some coming catastrophe to the characters, but was agreeably unable to predict its shape. But its most interesting account of the novel came early, in response to the second installment, when the paper’s anonymous critic spotted what even now remains, for some people, a source of James’s appeal. His every sentence is so nuanced and full that “the reader feels irresistibly flattered at the homage paid to his perceptive powers.”

  In Britain the novel received its most regular coverage in the Examiner, a weekly that ceased publication in the late winter of 1881. Its critic usually concentrated on James’s introduction of new characters; Henrietta Stackpole was “quite too lifelike,” and Madame Merle exquisite. One comment, however, looked directly at the question of serial form, and suggested that James presumed just a bit too much. None of the magazines he wrote for offered a way to fill one in on the story thus far, and the Examiner thought that “the author evidently counts on the strong interest of his readers when he commences a monthly instalment with ‘He took a resolve after this not to misinterpret her words.’” That’s the opening line of the novel’s third part, and any reader coming to it cold can be forgiven for wondering about the antecedents of those pronouns; for the record, they refer to Ralph and Henrietta. James did count on that interest. Or rather that sentence shows why he usually told his friends to wait for the finished book. In that form there’s no difficulty in simply turning the page and moving from chapter to chapter. We know where we are and what’s going on, we know to whom those pronouns refer, and the transition is seamless. Serialization may have been necessary, and yet James often did his best to ignore its requirements. He wrote instead with his eyes on the book—on the novel’s permanent form.

  He did, however, begin one installment in a way that even the most old-fashioned of readers would have found unexceptionable. He sent his letter asking for more space in July 1881, and in that month’s Atlantic the serial’s ninth part started with this sentence: “One afternoon, toward dusk, in the autumn of 1876, a young man of pleasing appearance rang at the door of a small apartment on the third floor of an old Roman house.” It is the only date James ever gives us, and it signals a change: a shift in point of view, and a disruption of chronology. Isabel has gotten married—in the space between the lines, one might say—and we have moved forward by more than three years. That’s long enough for the marriage to have grown unhappy, as we are almost immediately told, and we will at first see “Mrs. Osmond” from outside, from that young man’s point of view. But James will eventually take us within, and the way he tells us about those missing months will make a revolution in the history of fiction itself.

  18.

  The Roccanera

  THE DOOR BELONGS to Madame Merle, and the young man with his finger on the bell is named Edward Rosier. James writes that we “will perhaps not have forgotten” him, but we have met this character just once before and readers of the Atlantic would have had four months in which to lose track of him. He is a childhood friend of Isabel’s, with an inherited income of £1,600 a year, and so thoroughly Frenchified that he sometimes has to hunt for the right English word. He hunts, and fails to find it; referring to Isabel, for example, not as Pansy’s stepmother, but as her belle-mère. For that is how he sees her now, as the stepmother of the perfect young girl he has met that summer in Switzerland. Ned Rosier has never in his life done anything indiscreet, but he does follow the Osmonds down to Rome, where they have lived since their marriage, and after a month he has learned two things. He knows that Osmond doesn’t think he’s rich enough, and that Madame Merle has some unexplained pull with Pansy’s family. So he rings, and hopes she’ll help him.

  This is the second of the novel’s great ellipses. The first, as we have seen, came just before Isabel’s marriage, when James skipped over the year that ended with Osmond’s successful proposal, and presented us with a fait accompli. We didn’t even know she was engaged until the novelist made Caspar Goodwood cross the ocean simply to express his outrage. Now he has jumped again, a gap in time that corresponds to a gap in our knowledge of his heroine, and new readers inevitably find it disorienting; they may even feel cheated. We have not been to Isabel’s wedding; we have not witnessed the start of her life in marriage; all we know is that she has settled in Rome and that her stepdaughter has met a boy. We don’t even know how much time has passed, and then James knocks the wind out of us. Madame Merle tells Rosier that Isabel will probably fa
vor his suit “if her husband does not.” Nothing more, not yet, but it’s enough to show us that the marriage has broken down even before we have seen it begin. We may not have trusted Osmond, but we knew that Isabel did and hoped that Ralph was wrong about him. Instead, we have gone from promise to ruin in the space of three pages, and it is as if our hopes have been drowned.

  Three pages, and three years. We can work out the time from something else Madame Merle tells us. Isabel has had a son, “who died two years ago, six months after his birth.” Those details allow us to date the novel’s every scene. We will be told that her wedding was in June, and Rosier appears at the door at the start of December 1876. So we can place the marriage in 1873, and can even say that she conceived later that summer. But the child is dead, and in truth it’s hard to make very much of him. James does not connect that death to whatever has blighted the Osmonds’ marriage, and when Isabel later thinks back over its failure she will not spare the infant a thought. James gives her a child because it’s both the most efficient and least explicit way he has of telling us that the marriage has been consummated, and yet motherhood itself has no part in his conception of Isabel’s future. She believes that in marrying Osmond she has acted freely, and at the end of the novel she will need that liberty once more. She will need to choose with a freedom that she would not have in a child’s presence.