Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  That baby aside, James refuses here to give us any direct knowledge of the inner life of Isabel’s marriage, and as a reader I’m split between my frustration at his refusal to take us over the brink and my admiration at the skill with which he switches his lens and approaches her through a hitherto-forgotten character. Still, that change does signal a larger change in mood, and perhaps a loss of brio. No scene after Isabel’s marriage offers the expansive delight of the book’s early chapters, the feeling of enchanted discovery with which she enters her European life. She no longer has decisions to make but must learn to live with the one she did, and the book shifts to a minor key, less exhilarating but with a new gravity and indeed nobility, whose force increases with each chapter.

  At first, however, James’s decision to present Isabel indirectly can seem bewildering. He shows her through Rosier’s eyes and Rosier’s story, shows us only her social self, and it will take him sixty pages to open the closed door of her private life. We need something to do while we wait, however, and he uses the question of Pansy’s suitors and possible marriage to delay and distract us. Another American girl will have to choose. Madame Merle promises to help Rosier as much she can, and then she immediately tells Osmond. The news is disturbing—so disturbing, in fact, that Osmond signals his disapproval by offering the young man his left hand at the next of Isabel’s regular Thursday evening receptions. Rosier has no choice. He has to take it, but he turns away as soon as he can, and then finds himself face-to-face with Isabel once more.

  She stands framed in a doorway, as at Gardencourt, and again she is dressed in black. The repetition is unobtrusive, but James means us to notice it and it serves to mark a difference; almost as if her story were starting over. She no longer wears the traveling dress of a girl in mourning, but is gowned in black velvet instead, and we don’t need to imagine the clinging stuff of Sargent’s scandalous and contemporaneous Madame X to see her as bare-armed and décolleté. At Gardencourt she had stood in the door of an ivy-covered house, gazing onto a green lawn, and then stepped out into the world before her. Here, however, the door that encloses her is smothered in gold leaf, and she looks only from one interior space to another, a receding vista of rooms enfilade. Isabel waits for others to approach, a hostess who appears to Rosier as the very picture of a lady, a woman whom the “years had touched . . . only to enrich.” But Rosier has never been to Gardencourt, and the reader will see a greater change. This portrait allows for a fourth dimension.

  We need to pause over that doorway, over the setting that James has provided for her. Money went far in Rome. Servants and food, horses and houses—all of them were cheaper in Italy than in London, and with the painted ceilings thrown in for free. Isabel lives with a magnificence that even her substantial fortune would not have allowed in Britain, and as he walks through her rooms, Rosier finds himself admitting that “these people were very strong in bibelots,” in the beautiful decorative objects that he himself most covets. But the sensibility behind it all belongs to Osmond alone. Isabel has had nothing to do with furnishing their house and claims to have no taste of her own; her husband, in contrast, has what she calls a “genius for upholstery.” The place is his, an assertion of his will, of the self he wants to project. It is an old “high house in the very heart of Rome; a dark and massive structure overlooking a sunny piazzetta in the neighbourhood of the Farnese Palace.” Rome may be bright, but the building itself is called the Palazzo Roccanera, the Black Rock, and to Rosier its darkness matters. For it seems to him as if Pansy’s home is a kind of fortress, a place in which she might easily be locked up.

  James describes it as marked with a “stern old Roman name, which smelt . . . of crime and craft and violence,” a place mentioned in guidebooks and visited by tourists. It has been most reliably identified with the Palazzo Antici-Mattei, a complex of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings whose austere façade was built to designs by Carlo Maderno, and where the rooms on the piano nobile have ceilings by Domenichino and Pietro da Cortona among others. James masked the original just a bit by giving it some frescoes by Caravaggio instead. That makes one start. The Victorians did not admire the painter we call by that name, and he gets just two one-line references in Italian Hours; nor is he known to have worked in fresco. Still, the Mattei family did own a few of his canvases. They had made their fortune buying up real estate after the city was sacked in 1527, and quickly became one of the most powerful clans in Rome; three centuries later they were still turning out cardinals. The building now houses the Centro Studi Americani, and many visiting lecturers have found themselves in the rooms that were in some sense once Isabel’s. Nevertheless, the palazzo remains forbidding indeed, darkened by age and with barred windows on the ground floor. Inside, the courtyard walls are encrusted with fragments of ancient statuary, and the loggia overlooking it is lined with “a row of mutilated statues and dusty urns,” just as James described it. But there are many palaces in Rome, and I suspect that what drew him to this one wasn’t just its architecture or its atmospheric history, but rather its particular location in the city itself.

  It lies indeed in the heart of the town, and not that far from the Palazzo Farnese. It is closer, however, to both the church of the Gesù and the Capitol, and closer still to the Palazzo Cenci, itself associated with crime and craft and violence. Every literate Victorian knew Shelley’s play about Beatrice Cenci, who at the end of the sixteenth century was executed for killing the father who had raped her. It is closest of all to the Ghetto, whose walls lay just a few paces off and which was abolished only with the final unification of Italy in 1870. The quarter is ancient and aristocratic, and was in Osmond’s period decayed; a neighborhood beyond all question of fashion, a place of squalid streets and private interior splendor. Which makes it a very good address indeed—a good Roman address, and about as far as possible from the American colony that gathered around the Spanish Steps. That’s where Madame Merle lives, but Osmond detests the modern city of hotels and English bankers. Not everyone is invited to their Thursday evenings, and even those who are might discover that the house isn’t easy to find, buried as it is in the narrow twisting streets of history itself. Its location stands as both a sign of his originality and a mark of his “traditionary” pose. This part of Rome may lie on level ground, but so far as the stranieri are concerned, the Roccanera is a Roman equivalent of Osmond’s Tuscan hilltop.

  One unexpected caller does, however, find his way to them, an Englishman whom Osmond doesn’t at first recognize. Lord Warburton has come south with Ralph, whose consumption has grown worse each year and who now thinks of wintering in Sicily. But the journey has worn him out. He cannot move from their hotel, and one reason for Warburton’s visit is simply to announce their arrival. For Isabel has had no advance word, and to us that’s the truly startling thing: the cousins have fallen so far apart that they’re no longer in regular touch. James writes that the “reflective reader” shouldn’t find this surprising, given Ralph’s view of Isabel’s marriage, and we are told something similar about each of her old friends. Mrs. Touchett has faded from her life, and even Madame Merle has grown distant. Until this winter she has preferred England to Rome, and she now tells Isabel, a bit too often, that she doesn’t want to presume on the fact that she’s known Osmond for so long. Marriage often does attenuate old friendships, and yet the novel insists that we notice it, reminding us of it each time that the author brings back an old name.

  James has a difficult task here. The chapters after Isabel’s marriage do not introduce a single new character, and he needs instead, as the novel starts over again, to catch us up on all his old ones after a gap in years if not in pages. He keeps both Henrietta Stackpole and Caspar Goodwood alive in our minds by bringing them down to Rome, and there is a special brilliance in his retrospective account of Ralph in particular. Ralph has come to Rome only once since Isabel’s marriage and quickly realized that his very presence made Osmond so unaccountably nervous that
he in turn made it uncomfortable for his wife. Now he has returned, close to death and yet kept alive by his belief that his cousin’s story isn’t yet over, and James dives down into the character’s memory and then swims up to breast the novel’s present. It fuses these years into a single image of Ralph’s estrangement from her, a verbal equivalent of a medieval miniature in which several incidents share the same space. But let me put it a different way. There is a prismatic quality to these chapters. James doesn’t let us look at the white light of Isabel’s being directly, but instead refracts it through the differently shaded impressions of his other characters. Once he has done that, however, once he has reintroduced his cast, James needs to move forward into the new relations created by her marriage, and at this point the novel becomes thick with plot in every sense of the word.

  The most important element in that plotting concerns Warburton’s surprising interest in Pansy. He finds her charming, at once polished and ingenuous, and comes repeatedly to sit with her at the Roccanera, even as he worries that Isabel won’t be pleased by his interest. For of course, as he tells Ralph, “there’s the difference in our ages.” It’s the most roundabout way to suggest that he’s thinking of marriage, and the idea so startles the invalid that it makes him risk Warburton’s anger. “I hope,” Ralph says, “you are sure that among Miss Osmond’s merits her being a—so near her stepmother isn’t a leading one?” Nor is Ralph the only one who has noticed Warburton’s attentions. Rosier has, and grown jealous. And Osmond has seen it too, and seen deep. He has seen what Ralph fears, and decided he can use it.

  Isabel herself has seen something else. James hasn’t yet defined the precise contours of her marital troubles, but one day she returns home from a drive and stops short at the entrance to the drawing room. For she has, James writes, “received an impression,” and must pause to take it in. She has found Madame Merle standing while Osmond remains sunk in his chair, two old friends caught in a moment of ruminant silence. There’s nothing particularly unusual in that silence, but the image does offer her a flicker of perception, albeit one that’s gone before she can read it. What catches her is their physical posture—the gentleman sitting while the lady, his guest, stands. In fact, Madame Merle herself recognizes its oddity, and after Osmond leaves the room, explains that she herself was just about to go away. Now she stays to talk, however, to muse over Rosier’s jealousy and the odd fact that Warburton seems to have fallen in love with Pansy. Isabel too has spotted the Englishman’s interest but hasn’t discussed it with her husband, and the subject makes her impatient. So their conversation grows snappish, and becomes only more so when Madame Merle alludes to something that Isabel has never told her. For the older woman knows of Warburton’s proposal at Gardencourt, and hopes that she will now “make him the reparation of helping him to marry some one else.”

  Indeed, Isabel wants to—wants anyway to try. She believes that to give her husband this personage as a son-in-law would be to “play the part of a good wife. She wanted to be that; she wanted to be able to believe, sincerely, that she had been that.” Still, she finds Warburton’s attachment strange. Pansy seems to her so small, so limited, but she does try to talk herself into it; then she remembers Rosier and admits that the girl prefers the young American. That night Isabel is sitting by herself in the drawing room when her husband comes in. It’s the first time James has shown them together and alone since their marriage, and Osmond now tells her that he wants their visitor to declare his intentions. That admission costs him something. He’s so used to acting as if none of the world’s prizes are ever worth an effort, and his words make Isabel recognize how intensely he wants to see his daughter at Lockleigh. Still, the girl can’t make it happen on her own; any proposal will depend upon Isabel’s willingness to use the influence he knows she still has. “The moment you really wish it, you can bring him to the point,” he says, and his words mean exactly what Ralph had earlier suggested. Osmond may speak of loving his daughter, but he knows that her chief merit in Warburton’s eyes can only be her nearness to her stepmother.

  “It lies in your hands,” he tells her, and then walks out, while Isabel remains by the fire. What she sees as she sits there will produce a moment of reverie that lasts the full length of a night, a chapter that stands as one of James’s greatest achievements and a turning point in the history of the novel.

  Isabel will sit long that night, until the oil lamps have burned out and the candles have guttered down to their sockets. She will sit and think, motionless, while her mind moves over the whole history of her married life. Nothing happens in the Portrait’s famous forty-second chapter, and yet her meditation “has all the vivacity of incident,” as James put it in the novel’s preface, a reverie that throws the novel’s action forward by returning her to her past. And she begins by working through the situation that Osmond’s words have put before her. Those words make her see that Warburton does indeed want to please her, and she wonders if he believes even now that she might be something more to him than a friend. Still, she cannot quite square the idea with the evident sincerity of his fondness for Pansy. That fondness may be a delusion, but she immediately acquits him of pretending to be in love with the girl as a way of pursuing her instead. In fact, Warburton himself has been genuinely startled by Ralph’s earlier suggestion; a few chapters on he will look at it squarely and take himself back to England. But to acquit Warburton is not to acquit Osmond, and with each minute the “service her husband had asked of her” seems more and more repugnant. He wants her to flirt—but that puts it too mildly. He wants her to use what sexual hold she has over Warburton as a means to her stepdaughter’s marriage; as though she were bait. He’s pimping her, and she knows it. So her recognition of the Englishman’s innocence brings her no peace, and as she sits through the night, she finds herself “haunted with terrors,” among them the curious sensation of seeing her friend and her husband together.

  On this night Isabel will think, more than ever before, about just why she married, and what made it go wrong. She—we—will feel the continued power of Osmond’s charm, and we will understand just how her distrust of her husband has grown. Neither of them is the partner the other one expected, though at first he had believed “he could change her, and she had done her best to be what he would like.” We will get the explanation that James refused us when the novel resumed after Isabel’s marriage and at the end of these dozen pages will know almost everything of importance about the early years of their union. That ellipsis will be closed. James’s work here offers a new way of presenting the interior life, a new kind of fiction, and yet the chapter gives us more than an early example of what William James would soon name the “stream of consciousness.” It will of course give us that, and in a moment we will see how. But it also has a structural task to perform in the novel as a whole.

  James either could not or chose not to dramatize the week-by-week dissolution of trust that is the Osmond’s marriage. He offers us Isabel’s retrospective understanding of its failure but doesn’t depict the process of that failure itself, and I do not think it possible to define with any precision the complex of psychological and technical reasons that made him refuse such scenes. So let’s presume instead that such a depiction was never his purpose, that his interest lies elsewhere, in Isabel’s understanding of the consequences of her marital choice. Still, we do need to know why it’s the wrong choice, and at this point George Eliot can help us. Though not in the obvious way. She writes brilliantly about marriages going wrong in both Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda, and that of Gwendolen Harleth and Henleigh Grandcourt in the latter novel is in some ways a model for Isabel’s own. Another aspect of Daniel Deronda seems to me equally important, however, and far less often remarked upon.

  We’re now accustomed to novels marked by narrative disjunctions, books predicated on flashbacks or memory that seem to glide back and forth in time; books in which the order of events and the order of their telling are at odds. We
have read Conrad and Faulkner, Proust and Woolf, and know how to piece a chronology out of a story’s discontinuous shards. But the readers of James’s day were not nearly so used to such structures. Most novels of the period relied on a linear narrative, and though they might allow themselves brief moments of retrospection, the story thrust always forward. Daniel Deronda is different. George Eliot liked the opportunities that the massive serial parts of Middlemarch had given her, and she returned to that form in the later book, once more dividing it in to eight parts of about 100 pages each. This time, however, she did something more than use that architecture as a way to ease her movement from plot to plot. She also used those large blocks of narrative to disrupt chronology in a way that a more conventional serial novelist like Dickens could not. The epigraph to her first chapter suggests that any such opening is but the “make-believe of a beginning”; all starting points are arbitrary, and “no retrospect” ever takes us back to the true origin of things. Narrative form isn’t given by the calendar, but must instead be made, and so, after a dramatic opening scene at a German casino, George Eliot falls back in time for 200 pages in order to show how her characters got there. The opening chapters hold us—an English girl losing at roulette. We want to know why she plays with such abandon. And what about the man who returns the necklace she pawns?