Portrait of A Novel

by MICHAEL GORRA

To me James’s refusal to acknowledge the truth in advance stands as one of the greatest things about this book; and it functions in a number of ways quite aside from giving us a melodramatic thrill. Let me suggest two of them, one concerned with the drama of Isabel’s situation and the other with the drama of our own reading. The precise nature of Osmond’s secret matters. He hasn’t stolen his Italian primitives; he hasn’t robbed a church or forged a will or stabbed someone in a brawl. His sin is a sexual one, and it requires Isabel to recognize the kind of knowledge that both she and the English novel itself most firmly resist. Daisy Miller had refused to know what she was suspected of, and James had finessed the issue by killing her off. But Isabel is a married woman. The fabric of her ignorance must be rent, and so must that of any fiction that claims to address itself to grown-ups. The book must have its own i’s dotted, and in this the novel and its protagonist stand as one; they reach maturity together. But there’s another reason why James has kept his secret until we are near the end, a reason that has to do with our own relation to Isabel’s dream of freedom. He may at times present her ironically, in his opening chapters in particular, but he does not want us to believe as we read that she is simply a dupe. He wants us to share her illusions and therefore to experience their loss, and so we can’t know, not at first, the precise nature of the cage into which she’s been put. There will be time enough for that on our second reading, in the pity with which we then watch the bars close round.

  What we learn with Isabel here goes beyond the simple fact that other people have shaped her fate, that she hasn’t had the freedom she thought. The critic Arnold Kettle once called the Portrait a nineteenth-century version of Paradise Lost, a book about the end of a dream, about the loss of faith in the idea of individual autonomy; and the novel’s last pages will give that comparison some point. But many, indeed most, of the great nineteenth-century novels are concerned with the limits of that autonomy. They work to fix the border between social order and tradition on the one hand, and individual desire on the other; it is the great question of the age even in those countries, like Russia, where the ancien régime has not yet died. Isabel has something else at stake and maybe something more, something that makes the novel into a peculiarly American version of that shattered dream. For what she now learns is simply what the Old World has always had to teach us. She learns that her own life has been determined by things that happened before she was thought of, by a past of which she was ignorant and that she only understands when it’s already too late. What Isabel learns in talking with Amy Osmond is nothing less than the fact that America itself has had no separate or special creation. No fresh start, no city on a hill, no truly new world; no exception to or exemption from history itself. She learns what Hawthorne had realized already, and what almost fifty years later Fitzgerald would understand too, dreaming of a green light whose promise he knows is illusory; learns a truth so at odds with the American imaginary that it must be repeated again and again, an innocence lost in each generation.

  This is the real drama of The Portrait of Lady; this, and not the mere decay of Isabel’s marriage. And in that drama one lesson still remains for her, one last fact that may prove the worst of all. The Countess’s tale breaks her impasse. There is a train for the north that evening, and Isabel will be on it, for her new knowledge makes her see that her marriage bonds can have no force. Or rather they have only the force that she herself might give them. She does, however, have a promise to keep before she goes, and late that afternoon she rings the bell at “a high door in a narrow street in the quarter of the Piazza Navona.” The convent’s portress shows her in, but as she waits to be taken to Pansy’s room, she discovers that there is another visitor just leaving: the friend of whose mendacity she has been thinking all day, her mind aflood with the woman’s lies, and yet kind enough still to think of her as suffering too. The meeting makes Isabel feel so faint that she can hardly speak as the older woman fills the air with this excuse and that scruple, with praise of the nuns and of Pansy’s clothing alike. Then Madame Merle sees. She sees that Isabel has learned something new, and her voice fractures as she recognizes the change in the younger woman’s attitude. For the briefest of moments Isabel enjoys the power of her knowledge, enjoys the fact that Madame Merle has recognized it, and then her whole being swells with bitterness at the thought that she has been this woman’s “dull un-reverenced tool.” She can taste the bile on her lips, and wants to use her anger like a whip, to find the words that can sting and lash and wound. Then the hiss in her mind dies away, and her only revenge is to remain silent; to leave Madame Merle searching for something to say.

  Isabel’s conversation with Pansy need not detain us, though it is one of the most affecting scenes in the novel. She gives the child the chance to leave the convent at once, to come away with her to England, yet what little spirit Pansy ever possessed has been crushed. The girl does, however, exact a promise, and with her last words Isabel pledges herself to come back. But when she goes to leave, she finds that Madame Merle has waited and now has something to say. The woman has guessed something with which she can punish Isabel for her new knowledge, a punishment that lies in telling the young woman the one fact she doesn’t yet know about her own past and position. “Your cousin once did you a great service,” she says. “He made you a rich woman.” It was his idea to give her the one thing “required to make you a brilliant match,” and Isabel should thank him; without that money Osmond would not have thought of her twice. Madame Merle speaks in a blandly feigned innocence, as if imparting good news; speaks with a sense of triumph that reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s claim that a gentleman never hurts another person unintentionally. Isabel herself may hesitate to use what weapons she has, but this lady knows just where her knives will do their deepest and yet least visible harm.

  22.

  WORKING IN THE DARK

  HENRY JAMES WAS just thirty-eight when The Portrait of a Lady appeared. He had written something permanent, but he had a long career ahead of him, and now had to ask himself just what to do next. It wasn’t an easy question, and though he would know many kinds of success in the Portrait’s aftermath, James’s story in the remaining years of the nineteenth century is in some ways one of failure. He failed to exceed its achievement on the one hand or to extend his audience on the other, and yet that failure grew from his persistent attempts to expand the range of things he could do. Some writers go dead when they finish a book; Joseph Conrad collapsed whenever he completed an important novel, and might take months to recover. James was not one of them. Nor did the deaths of his parents appear to slow his pen, even if his father’s did make him spend nine unexpected months in America. He wrote tales and essays, he put out a book of French travels; the pages came as quickly as ever. Nevertheless, he sometimes accused himself of sloth, and resisted the temptation to begin another long serial, “despite the constant solicitation that presses upon me, both from within and from without.” For James was now bored with his stock-in-trade, with the kinds of things he already knew how to write. He had vowed in his journal to do something great, but the Portrait had said everything he then wanted to say about the international theme, and in consequence he seemed to himself to pause, to tap his foot as though waiting for what might happen.

  He was in search of a second act—and in the spring of 1883 he looked for a moment to have found one. James spent that season in the small brick house on Boston’s Mount Vernon Street to which his sister and their father had moved the year before. It was in a quiet neighborhood just to the west of Charles Street, where Beacon Hill flattens out toward Back Bay, and James kept house there with Alice in the months after their father’s death. Only a year earlier he had told himself that his work lay in the Old World, the world he had chosen and to which he longed to return. Now he seemed to go back on those words, and in his first sketch of the brilliant, abrasive, and finally unsatisfying Bostonians (1886), he wrote that he wanted to try himself on a novel as “loca
l . . . as possible . . . an attempt to show that I can write an American story.” Those italics suggest a reply to his critics, but James’s way of meeting that criticism must to many readers have looked odd. For his attempt to do America depended upon examining the intense “friendships between women which are so common in New England,” friendships for which he had a model in his own family, in Alice’s connection with a woman from the Boston’s North Shore named Katherine Loring.

  I don’t intend here to pace out each step of James’s career, or to trace his every relation with the same sense of detail as a full biography. Alice James has her own chroniclers, and they have persuasively shown that her “case” is every bit as interesting as the ones Freud would describe just a few years later: her periods of hysteria and nervous collapse, the inexplicable paralysis of her legs, the diary she began in her last years and in which she recorded, among other things, her memories of the summer in which William was married and she seemed to herself to go “down to the deep sea, its dark waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace.” Only in illness could Alice suffice unto herself; only in illness could she make her world take full note of her presence. For my purposes, however, it is enough to chart the ways in which she affected her brother’s work. Without those months together on Mount Vernon Street, he would not have written The Bostonians; without those months, his oeuvre in the rest of the decade would not have taken the shape that it did.

  Katherine Loring came from an old and monied family with interests in shipping and the law. She had a rigorous mind and a talent for organization, and wore pince-nez that suggest the dean or college president that in a later generation she would have become; indeed, she worked with other women from similar backgrounds in starting what was then called the Harvard Annex, and later known as Radcliffe. She and Alice became close friends in the late 1870s, and when Henry Sr. died, Alice fled for a few weeks to the Lorings’ estate on the ocean in Pride’s Crossing. They would make their lives together, living in the kind of relationship that came to be called a “Boston marriage,” a term used to describe the shared households and often tacit lesbian partnerships of two educated women. None of Alice’s brothers were happy with this arrangement, and William’s wife, herself named Alice, was open in her dislike and fear of it. But James himself accepted its necessity.

  In writing The Bostonians he could not, however, approach the question of sexual identity directly; no more, perhaps, than he could approach the question of his own. Instead he defined the friendship between his two female protagonists in terms of the struggle for women’s rights, the right not just to vote, but also to a full place in public life. In consequence the book seems to quiver with the unspoken, and though James was at least as hard on his male lead as he is on his women, the effect was to make the whole of New England’s hallowed reforming impulse seem a type of quackery. Attacks on the novel began with the appearance of its first installments in the Century at the start of 1885. Its readers skirted the question of sexuality even more widely than had James himself, but Boston wasn’t prepared to be laughed at, and the book’s American reviews were among the worst of his career. They implied, as though still prickly over Hawthorne, that the expatriate had lost his right to criticize; that like one of his own characters he had become “dishabituated to the American tone.”

  James never again wrote a purely American novel, and yet The Bostonians did set the pattern for the very different books he wrote after it. He placed The Princess Casamassima in a working-class district of London, just a few steps up from a slum, and moved out from there into an account of the period’s revolutionary movements. The Tragic Muse (1890) has not a single American character, and James splits its action between the world of Parliament and that of the theater. Yet like The Bostonians, they each study the effects of milieu upon character, of the way in whch ideology and environment intersect to shape one’s choices. None of these books allows the reader to entertain Isabel’s illusion of perfect freedom. Not one of their characters believes in that freedom. All of them know that choice is always constrained and individual liberty something for which they must fight, and together these novels stand as James’s answer to the naturalism of Zola; works designed to test the determinative force of ideas or environment or even heredity. Yet among the things he tests is the explanatory power of naturalism itself, of a method he continues to doubt, and that’s why these books, though more intellectually provocative than Zola’s, are never so entirely absorbing.

  What James tried to do with The Bostonians and its successors was to show both his readers and himself that work wasn’t limited to the international theme. He wrote a long American novel, and then two English ones. He set himself a challenge, abandoning his accustomed mid-Atlantic pose, and in some ways he met it. Certainly no other writer of his time could have managed both settings with an equal authority, and yet even the most partial reader must admit that they lack the Portrait’s sense of equipoise. In my Prologue I quoted from an 1888 letter to his brother William, in which James wrote that he wanted to make it impossible for his readers to know “whether I am, at a given moment, an American writing about England, or an Englishman writing about America.” He saw the two countries as melting together in a common culture, though he also complained about the awkward straddle of trying to stand in both places at the same time. The truth is, however, that both his hold on the public and his work in itself was most secure when he did stand that way, when he didn’t seem to be either English or American, but rather each of them at once.

  In the middle years of the twentieth century, The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima found an audience among those interested in the relations between politics and the private life, and The Bostonians remains essential for anyone interested in the problems of gender in nineteenth-century America. At the time, however, neither book seemed to have any appeal at all, and in January 1888, James wrote to Howells that he felt staggered by the “inexplicable injury wrought . . . upon my situation by my last two

  novels. . . . They have reduced the desire, and the demand, for my productions to zero.” James put things too strongly; within a few months he would publish a string of great stories, The Aspern Papers among them. Nevertheless, his income fluctuated wildly, and in 1887 he made less—only $1,320—than at any time since his apprentice days. The sales of his books remained small, and the advance of £250 that Macmillan reluctantly offered for The Tragic Muse did not earn out. Fortunately there was still the Atlantic, where he got more for the novel’s serial version than he had for the Portrait itself. But editors had whims, and now even that magazine had begun to reject some of his stories: to reject him at a time when he was almost entirely dependent on periodical publication; at a time when he thought, more than ever, that he needed to worry about money.

  Constance Fenimore Woolson had been right about the change that the Portrait would make in the way people looked at him. He was no longer the coming man; he had arrived, and at once became worth taking down. At the same time, however, he had become a kind of celebrity, someone other people wanted to see, someone to boast about knowing. Woolson was certainly prejudiced on his behalf, but there’s some truth to her claim in an 1887 letter to John Hay, that she had never known “anyone to be so run-after” as James was that winter in Florence. Indeed, the attacks only served to increase his fame. He was talked about all the more for being disapproved of, whether as an example of the “American school” or as someone whose recent books lacked the old charm of Daisy Miller. But celebrity itself brought neither the large readership he craved nor what he thought was an adequate financial reward. James was always more secure than he believed. Nevertheless, we need to look at his bank balance if we are to understand the decisions he made at the end of the 1880s; we need to consider his fear that he had not held the place his great book had won for him.

  James had always written stories about the lives of artists, but in his earlier days he usually gave a starring role to
the work itself, like the scandalous novel of “The Author of ‘Beltraffio.’” Now his emphasis changed, and his new sense of the precariousness of his own position made him concentrate instead on a series of tales about the difficulties of establishing and maintaining a literary career. “The Lesson of the Master” issued an injunction against the money pit of marriage, “The Death of the Lion” imagined a famous novelist whom everybody knows but nobody reads, and “The Next Time” depicts a writer who keeps on trying to produce bestsellers, only to find that he’s written a series of unremunerative masterpieces. These fables of the creative life seem at once ironic and transparent in defining the perplexities of his own situation, and the most suggestive of them is “The Middle Years,” in which the protagonist Dencombe suffers from an artistic failure detected by nobody but himself. I mentioned the piece in this book’s Prologue, but it’s worth recalling its central situation. At fifty, and ill, Dencombe lives with the thoughts of his own “shrinking opportunity.” He has achieved much but doesn’t believe he has yet done anything great, and only in his latest book has he finally glimpsed his own potential. He now hopes that he might hold off death for just long enough to achieve the splendid “last manner” of which he knows himself capable. But Dencombe will have no “second chance,” and on his deathbed he recognizes that the very dream of one has been a delusion. Even the most conscious of artists must struggle blindly. “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

  We do what we can, and one of the things James himself did in his own middle years was to settle more deeply into his London life. So long as his parents were alive, his native land had had a claim on him; a place that might somehow compel his presence. Now that string was cut and, unmoored by any sense of home, he had no sooner returned to Britain from his stay on Beacon Hill than he began to see his furnished rooms in Bolton Street as dingily provisional. He found something more permanent in a tall white block of flats just south of Kensington Gardens, and today a blue plaque by the door of 34 De Vere Gardens commemorates his residence there. His own apartment was on the fourth floor, and “flooded with light like a photographer’s studio.” He took it on a twenty-one-year lease, he bought furniture and hired servants; he even got a dog, the first in a series of dachshunds. In middle age he joined fewer house parties, and his letters became less heavily studded with the names of peers and cabinet ministers. His new friends were often other writers or artists. He loved talking with Robert Louis Stevenson and also loved his work; James suffered keenly from the loss of a rare and growing friendship between equals when the tubercular Scotsman moved for his health to Samoa. Edmund Gosse became ever more a confidant, and he spent many Sundays in Hampstead with the illustrator George Du Maurier, who sometimes gave him the germ of a tale.