Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

  Both editions used British spelling. The type was set by the firm of Clay & Taylor, Macmillan’s regular compositors, and two sets of stereotyped plates were made from it, one for Boston and one for the cheap impression the English firm assumed it would eventually need. Then the set type was leaded out for the three-volume edition: adjusted, that is, so that there was more space between the lines and fewer lines per page, though the type itself remained small. James read proof in the summer and early fall of 1881, but he made few significant changes from the serial version. For the one-volume edition he numbered the Portrait’s chapters consecutively, and the novel appeared without any other internal divisions; the first English edition, in contrast, starts a new sequence with each volume. Yet while the first of them does end with the death of Mr. Touchett, the second concludes without any such turning point. That separation serves no consistent dramatic purpose, and in that the Portrait differs from many other Victorian novels, such as Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, where each volume defines a different stage in the heroine’s progress. All later editions number the Portrait’s chapters consecutively throughout, including the two books of the New York Edition, in which the break merely reflects the novel’s midpoint. These volume markers mean less than they seem, confirming the sense that James wanted his readers to see the work as a single and continuous whole.

  That, in fact, was the argument of one of the novel’s first reviewers. A generation later W. C. Brownell would become Edith Wharton’s editor at Scribner, but in the early 1880s he was one of The Nation’s leading critics, and wrote there that the novel “gains in its complete presentation . . . the whole is equal to no fewer than all of its parts,” and one that wasn’t entirely apparent in serial form. Not that Brownell was entirely smitten. He missed some quality of “fervor” in the book’s second half and thought its pleasures were too purely intellectual. James wasn’t for everyone. Howells had said that from the start, and the Portrait’s reviewers, faced with what Brownell admitted was a masterpiece, struggled with the meaning of that restricted appeal. Dickens had been for everyone, famously so, and there was a lingering belief that a great novelist ought to be. Even George Eliot had drawn a wide, if not universal, audience. Some American newspapers connected the polish of James’s art to the rarefied world of his characters. The New York Sun thought the distinguishing marks of “good society” were so precise that in writing about it James could only use “pencils of the finest point”; the Californian of San Francisco admired the book’s finish but thought its material barren. Even the Atlantic’s critic, Horace Scudder, argued that James’s imagination seemed cold, while in Blackwood’s, Margaret Oliphant claimed the book’s dazzle could fatigue. Everyone admired James’s workmanship, and yet most of the book’s critics felt some impatience as well. Ought novels to be so finely made?

  Oliphant had a more particular charge. Many of James’s readers at home found him insufficiently patriotic, but she saw him instead as the voice of American triumphalism, a writer who depicted the Old World as though it were arranged for his pleasure. Some of her animus was, admittedly, directed not at James so much as his countrymen as a whole, who loved nothing more than to “inspect our antiquities . . . [and] patronize our institutions.” But though her tone was priggish, her eye was deadly, and in his last books James would indeed depict his homeland, however ironically, as what she called the “heir of time.” Oliphant offered other objections as well, in which she was joined by the equally conservative critic of the Spectator, R. H. Hutton. James may have provided portraits of his secondary characters, but the “one thing which the book is not, is what it calls itself.” Isabel herself lacked definition, and Hutton added that her character remained “nothing but haze, a laborious riddle.” Both of them were troubled by the book’s open ending, by the fact that James finished without letting his readers know his heroine’s fate. The last chapter seemed to imply a catastrophe that it wouldn’t allow itself to dramatize, and Hutton was troubled by the absence of anything like a religious sense; it was an “agnostic” book, and its conclusion a “sign-post into the abyss.”

  A book’s initial reception often sets the terms of later discussion, fingering the issues that will continue to matter; this is no exception. My own account of that open ending will have to wait until we get there, and for now it’s enough to say that it puzzled most readers at the time and still puzzles some of them now; Lippincott’s claimed that James couldn’t “bring himself to the vulgarity of a regular dénouement.” Still, his best critics were already used to that, and Scudder argued that it was now time to accept James’s method. He used his own review to distinguish the novelist’s approach from that of such predecessors as Thackeray or George Eliot. Those writers had often stopped the flow of their narratives to generalize about “all sorts and conditions of men.” James limited himself to his own characters, at whose motives he worried and tugged, as though he were pulling his own people apart. Such a minute dissection had a name. It was called the “analytical” method of characterization, and though the term isn’t used now, it figured heavily in the criticism of the next few decades. Most English critics didn’t like it and thought that approach an American peculiarity; but Conrad later described Proust in those terms, and they apply to his own work as well.

  The shrewdest early appraisal of the Portrait belongs to Constance Fenimore Woolson, who in an 1882 letter offered James a perceptive reading of individual scenes and characters, and singled out Isabel’s vigil by the fire; none of the book’s reviewers had especially marked it. The crux of her letter lies, however, in her account of the difference the book would make to his reputation. She thought the critics had now taken a new and probably permanent tone about him. They had enjoyed anticipating his future—had thought “your talent, your style, your this and that . . . marvelous in a young fellow.” But he had gone by them and they knew it; he was no longer the coming man, and other writers were prepared to be jealous. Woolson thought the Portrait’s reviews remarkably bad-tempered for all their praise; praise that was almost always hedged, even in recognizing it as an advance on his earlier work. For with the Portrait, the future had “become the present. They see it and cannot deny it. They don’t like it.” The Portrait of a Lady got the kind of mixed reviews that are only given to a writer who matters. Henry James had become inescapable, and to be ambivalent about him was, from this point on, to be ambivalent about the direction of fiction itself.

  Woolson believed the attack would come from other Americans. Instead it found its origins in what should have been a moment of triumph. The Century was the glossiest New York monthly of its period, its circulation high and its slick pages sprinkled with illustrations. The issue for November 1882 included a story by Frank Stockton whose title—“The Lady, or the Tiger?”—survives though the tale itself does not, and an obituary essay on Victor Hugo by Alphonse Daudet. But James led the magazine with “Venice,” one of his best travel sketches, and the piece was followed by both his engraved portrait and a tribute from Howells called simply, “Henry James, Jr.”

  This amounted to the period’s equivalent of a media blitz, but Howells’s essay wasn’t a puff piece. Or at least it doesn’t seem so now. He touched on Daisy Miller and a number of other international tales, but he always circled back to the Portrait, and assumed a knowing audience; he wrote as if even minor characters needed no introduction. His tone was measured, but the claims he made were still large enough to cause trouble. He thought that only George Eliot could match James’s analytic bent and suggested that they had created the two noblest heroines in contemporary fiction. Howells also argued, however, that Isabel was more subtly depicted than Middlemarch’s Dorothea and thought that James himself stood at the head of a “new school” in the writing of fiction. That school avoided the often sensational plots of the past, the catastrophes and coincidences, on which even George Eliot had sometimes depended. Instead it found its material in the everyday world, and in a way that—the dep
iction of sexual life aside—one might even be tempted to call French. Howells wasn’t sure that readers would be content with “an analytic study rather than a story,” with books in which nothing much might seem to happen and the narrative shoelaces were left untied. But about one thing he was certain. The art of fiction had in these latter days become a much finer one “than it was with Dickens and Thackeray.”

  Fighting words, red flags to John Bull. By “fine” Howells meant “refined,” but the evaluative note was inescapable, and the British reaction against what critics called the American school was both immediate and fierce. By January, Oliphant had a piece in Blackwood’s that depicted American literature as engaged in a hostile takeover of the English language. Howell’s own novels had just come out in London, and she admitted to begrudging the praise a British audience had given him. Yet why should that audience defer to America on any question of taste whatsoever? It wasn’t so long ago, as she reminded her readers, that American culture had been defined by the spittoon. Still, she preached tolerance—the tolerance of parents who are inclined both to applaud and to laugh “at the exploits of the little one.” In the Quarterly Review, L. J. Jennings took on the Portrait along with Henry Adams’s anonymously published Democracy and books by both Howells and George Washington Cable: all of them written on the oddly modish “principle that the best novelist is he who has no story to tell.” Jennings admitted that James himself occasionally betrayed his own aesthetic and produced something that looked like a plot. Howells never did, and as for the Portrait, its many hundreds of pages of small type followed that principle so relentlessly as to make it the most tedious book of the year.

  Howells’s argument was fatally easy to caricature. British critics saw him as claiming that not only the methods but also the pleasures of Dickens and Thackeray were obsolete, that there was something wrong about liking a story that was a story, densely plotted and thrilling, and with a last chapter that told us what happened to everyone when it was over. “The indictment is rubbish,” James wrote in a letter, but it stuck, and a few months later he added that articles about the two of them were still “as thick as blackberries—we are daily immolated on the altar” of the English classics. The most interesting of those articles came out simultaneously with Howells’s own, however, and it anticipated rather than responded to the argument. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Gossip on Romance” suggested that though it might be clever to write a book without a story, that cleverness remained at odds with what drew us to fiction in the first place. He had just finished writing Treasure Island, and the essay is the most sophisticated defense of simple delight imaginable. Stevenson believed that no books are so passionately read and loved as those we discover in the “bright, troubled period” of childhood. At that age we read for “incident” above all, pulled on by our need to know what happens, and he wasn’t embarrassed to admit that he still felt a primeval pleasure in turning the pages. Such pleasures weren’t everything, he acknowledged, and yet the novelist who forgot them in concentrating on the “slips and hesitations of the conscience” was also apt to forget whole sides of the human experience.

  Together, Stevenson and Howells inaugurated a period of competing manifestoes of a kind more familiar in France than in Britain. But the energy of that debate depended on the fact that the English novel had reached a moment of generational change. Both George Eliot and Trollope had just died, the last great novelists of the century’s middle years. Their chairs were empty, while the newcomer Thomas Hardy was still on the cusp of his own major work. The English critics wrote in fear that the best things lay behind them, while the Americans were bouncingly confident, in everything from what Jennings called the “Boston Mutual Admiration Society” to the vigorous regionalism of Bret Harte. “Henry James, Jr” stood as a tribute both to its subject and to Howells himself. He had been James’s editor, he had a stake in his success, and the essay played a major role in his own career as a maker of taste, marking the start of what have been called the “Realism Wars” of the 1880s. The Atlantic had made Howells a powerful figure in American culture. But he became even more influential in the second half of the decade, when he used a new column in Harper’s to map the connections between fiction and the social realities of a sprawling, diverse, and increasingly urban nation; a debate that would shape the work and reception of Theodore Dreiser and Stephen Crane among others.

  James kept his distance from those wars; or rather he entered them through his interest in such French writers of the period as Zola and Maupassant. Still, he did respond to the furor Howells’s essay had created, and did so in the one piece from the battle that continues to be read on its own merits. In April 1884 the journeyman novelist Walter Besant gave a lecture called “The Art of Fiction” in which he argued that fiction was indeed a fine art, something comparable to and as worthy of respect as music or poetry or sculpture. The claim is uncontroversial now and even at the time was less remarkable than most writers pretended; though Trollope, it’s true, had compared the novelist to a shoemaker, a skilled craftsman, and nothing more. Besant offered younger writers some advice of the kind that’s still given about keeping a notebook and writing from experience, and the piece as a whole is both inoffensive and dull. It would be entirely forgotten if James hadn’t taken it as the occasion for the playfully magisterial essay he published under the same title later that year. I’ve drawn on his own “Art of Fiction” throughout this book, using it for the light it casts on his career as a whole. But we also need to consider it as the product of a particular moment in that career.

  James begins with disarming modesty. He wants merely “to edge in a few words under cover” of Besant’s “encouraging” work, encouraging because until recently he had had no idea that the English novel was

  . . . what the French call discutable. It had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it—of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison. I do not say it was necessarily the worse for that: it would take much more courage than I possess to intimate that the form of the novel as Dickens and Thackeray (for instance) saw it had any taint of incompleteness. It was, however, naïf (if I may help myself out with another French word); and . . . . there was a comfortable, good-humoured feeling abroad that a novel is a novel, as a pudding is a pudding, and that our only business with it could be to swallow it. But within a year or two, for some reason or other, there have been signs of returning animation—the era of discussion would appear to have been to a certain extent opened.

  James never mentions Howells, but he chooses his examples deliberately, his use of French looks mischievous, and he knows but does not allude to the reasons for that “returning animation.” What he does say is that the discussion looks worth having. British criticism will be better for having to define and defend its tastes, for having to say what the pudding is made of. James admits that nothing will ever take the place of “liking” a book, though he still wonders why so many of them have to end with the fictional equivalent of a “course of dessert and ices,” a doling out of the appropriate rewards and punishments. He acknowledges that readers like a good ending, and yet argues that in some cases the truer course might “render any ending at all impossible.” And as for those books in which nothing seems to happen—well, doesn’t a “psychological” motivation stand as an adventure in itself?

  At point after point James offers a tacit reply both to Howells’s critics and his own, and it’s possible to read the piece as an elaborate series of coded references, in-jokes accessible only to those who sit at a groaning board of the period’s magazines. The essay offers far more than that, however, and what has made it last is its sense of joy. James’s prose here is as buoyant as a Mozart serenade, sly and generous and, above all, confident, the voice of a writer who knows the worth of his own achievement. If he writes for those dining off the magazines, he also writes with a zest and a clarity that endures today, and one
that doesn’t need the benefit of footnotes. What he offers—what “The Art of Fiction” gave me as a student and what it gives still—is a sense of the exhilarating complexity of form itself. Usually we talk about books in pieces: plot and character, language and theme. We pull them apart because it’s easier that way, and if we’re lucky, we manage to put them back together again. James won’t let us do that. He insists that we take it whole. The critics of his day usually distinguished between a work’s “subject” and its “treatment,” but to him a novel was “a living thing, all one and continuous . . . and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts.”

  One aspect of that claim seems worth an extra degree of consideration, and worth it precisely because it points to the limits of James’s own assumptions. He praises Treasure Island, but he also has Stevenson’s essay on his mind, and as I noted in an earlier chapter, he rejects the period’s customary distinction between the novel of character and the novel of incident. The only distinction he recognizes is that between good novels and bad. For “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” It’s an incident, James writes, for a woman to give you a particular look. At the same time, the way in which she looks will also provide a glimpse of her character. Plot and character in this economy are interchangeable and transitive, an equation that will forever balance. A closer examination suggests, however, that for James character always takes precedence. Character creates incident; incident merely illustrates some already-existing way of being. Events reveal character, but they do not make or mold it, and the force of circumstance alone is never determinative. Most of the novelists James admired would have agreed with him, Turgenev in particular. Start with a character—with a girl in a doorway—and then look for the incidents that will best display her essence. Yet James claims too much. This method may work for his own kind of fiction, but he won’t allow that there might be other kinds, that under certain circumstances one could begin and begin better with incident instead.