Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  A FLORENTINE EXPERIMENT

  After four months of soaking up the sun in Menton, Woolson and the Benedicts packed up their trunks and made their way to Florence, where they arrived on March 18, 1880. From that date Constance would finally begin to live again. She could not escape the past completely, as she told Sam: “I find that . . . the skies change when we cross the sea, but not our own minds; they remain the same. And if we were anxious there, we are anxious here. Pictures and Campanile cannot change that!” However, she had begun, as she wrote in a poem about Menton, to leave behind “[t]he care and sorrow, / Sad memory’s haunting pain that would not cease.” Charlie’s latest letters from California showed him coming out of his depression and making plans for the future, soothing her worry. Slowly, she allowed Florence’s glorious sites to fill her mind. She began to gush in her letters: “[H]ere I have attained that old-world feeling I used to dream about, a sort of enthusiasm made up of history, mythology, old churches, pictures, statues, vineyards, the Italian sky, . . . the whole thing having I think taken me pretty well off my feet!”23

  For the next two and a half months, Constance, her sister, and her niece made their home at the exclusive Casa Molini pension on the banks of the Arno near the Carraja Bridge. The courtyard below Constance’s window was pleasantly adorned with statues of ancient gods and goddesses, but the labyrinthine interior of the former Medici palace, carved up to house sixty or more guests, had a rather “slip-shod air” with its worn rugs and battered furniture. The clientele was exclusive—no other Americans, mostly English, several of them titled. And fortunately it was cheaper than their lodgings in Menton.24

  Constance spent her first month in Florence writing all morning and visiting churches in the afternoons with John Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence as her guide. She was determined to learn all she could about European art, attempting to rectify what she considered a serious deficiency in her knowledge. Hours were devoted to the chapels at Santa Croce, in particular, as she patiently tried to see what he found to admire in “the hideous wooden Byzantine style, . . . Cimabue, Giotto and the rest.”25 She found Ruskin helpful but rather pedantic. Fortunately she would soon have a much more agreeable guide.

  Henry James must have been visiting one of his English friends at the Casa Molini when Constance and Clara met him.26 It seems Clara and Plum quickly excused themselves, having so many other acquaintances in Florence, leaving the two writers to head out on their own.

  James had planned to work on The Portrait of a Lady, which was to begin serialization in the Atlantic Monthly in August, but on April 18 he asked Howells, his friend and editor, for a two-month extension. He had found Italy “fertile in pretexts for one’s haunting its lovely sights and scenes rather than one’s writing-table.” One of those pretexts was Woolson, an independent-minded American woman seeing those sights for the first time. She reminded him too much of his heroine Isabel Archer to forgo the chance to tour Florence with her.27

  On the third of May James wrote to his aunt, Catharine Walsh, “This morning I took an American authoress [on] a drive—Constance Fenimore Woolson, whose productions you may know, though I don’t & who was presented to me (by letter) by Henrietta Temple. Constance is old-maidish, deaf, & ‘intense’; but a good little woman & a perfect lady.” He had the week before written to his sister, Alice, in much less flattering terms, describing Woolson as “amiable, but deaf” and as having been “pursuing me through Europe with a letter of introduction.” Her deafness was a source of some amusement—she “asks me questions about my works to which she can’t hear the answers,” he told his sometimes caustic sister, who could be jealous of her brother’s female friends.28 Yet, whatever his initial impressions of Woolson, it is clear that he quickly grew fond of her.

  James called at the Casa Molini often. Woolson couldn’t help noticing that despite his “many acquaintances in Florence . . . he found time to come in the mornings and take me out; sometimes to the galleries or churches, and sometimes just for a walk in the beautiful green Cascine.” Walking beside her, hearing her impressions, seeing everything through her fresh eyes allowed James to ignore the “detested fellow sight-seer[s]” who crowded Florence with their Baedekers in hand. He waxed poetic about the Raphaels and Michelangelos to which he had grown so accustomed, and Woolson enjoyed having a guide who was so knowledgeable about art.29

  She thought he had peculiar tastes, however, and often did not agree with him. About Michelangelo’s statues in the New Sacristy of the San Lorenzo Basilica, they held widely divergent views. He thought the reclining nude figures Night and Day, Dusk and Dawn admirable, but she found them “distracted.” Her opinion apparently struck him speechless, and he wandered off to examine another artwork. She confessed to a friend back in Cleveland that she could not judge the much-revered statues because she was so unacquainted with the human form. Their blank faces, however, dismayed her. By contrast, the statue of a clothed Lorenzo Medici moved her deeply, particularly the face: “The whole expression of the figure is musing and sad, but it is the sadness of the strongest kind of a human mind,—almost the sadness of a God. He seems omniscient. To my idea, he seems to represent the whole human race; remembering all the past; conscious of all the future; and waiting. Nothing in the way of marble has ever impressed me so much, and I only wish it was where I could step in and look at it every day.” She was determined to learn to appreciate art, but even after James’s tutelage she felt she had a long way to go. “Some day you will see it,” James told her as she confessed her continued confusion over what he saw in Giotto. “May be,” she admitted, but she wasn’t sure.30

  James felt remarkably at ease with Woolson and seemed to enjoy having an admirer. He had been recently in Naples, where he had decided once and for all to distance himself from his friend Paul Zhukovsky, who had been an ardent disciple until he decided to take up with Richard Wagner and his wife. Woolson’s attention must have helped to heal that emotional breach. He was also relieved to discover that Woolson was nothing like other women writers he had met. She was less forward and obtrusive than the “literary spinster, sailing-into-your-intimacy-American-hotel-piazza type” whom he had previously regretted encountering. James quickly abandoned his usual reserve. While others could find him formal and somber, Woolson thought him “a delightful companion.” In fact, it was not only Florence that had swept her off her feet. “Perhaps I ought to add Henry James,” she wrote. “He has been perfectly charming to me for the last three weeks.”31

  If she did not conform to his expectations for women writers, he was an equally novel type to her: a cosmopolitan, Europeanized American man who represented the authority not of money or physical power, as the men back home did, but the authority of culture, which earned her esteem much more readily. She must have been disappointed that he did not know her writings and had apparently never heard her name before. The mutual understanding she had envisioned in “ ‘Miss Grief’ ” was not to be, at least not yet. But she found instead an immensely interesting figure whom she began to observe carefully, watching his lips closely to catch each word and storing up impressions to imagine how she could adapt him to the page.

  The thirty-seven-year-old James, three years her junior, was nothing like Stedman, who had been so full of questions about her work and gave offers of advice. He reminded her somewhat of John Hay in bearing, although taller and broader. Portraits from the period show that he wore a thick beard and that his close-cut dark brown hair had receded significantly, revealing a high, rounded forehead. Constance thought his profile very fine. His penetrating light-gray eyes also gave him a commanding appearance, although she noticed how he erased all expression from them. He stammered a bit, but his voice was sonorous, the kind Woolson could hear better than others. His manner was rather English, “extremely unpretending and unobtrusive.” He could seem cool and detached and then suddenly surprise you with a keen observation.32

  Woolson observed Henry James closely upon their first meeting in Floren
ce. Portrait by Abbott Handerson Thayer, 1881.

  (Collection of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City)

  For three or four weeks during the spring of 1880 in Florence, the two authors were intrigued but not quite sure what to make of each other. Woolson’s story “A Florentine Experiment”—about an American man and woman meeting in Florence, carefully negotiating the boundaries of their relationship, and trying unsuccessfully to read each other—captures the pleasures and tensions of their initial meeting.

  Upon Trafford Morgan’s and Margaret Stowe’s first meeting, she thinks him not especially handsome and too cynical; he thinks her too dark for his taste and too ironical. Margaret has read Trafford’s writing before—in this case, an ardent love letter to her friend Beatrice, whose beauty has led many men to profess love to her, while she skates easily over the feelings of others. When Margaret discovers he is the author of the letter, she begins to study him, searching for signs of the man who was capable of such deep feelings. Trafford is startled by Margaret’s sudden attention and assumes she must have designs upon him, but he “did not think it probable . . . being that he was neither an Apollo, an Endymion, nor a military man.” Indeed, “[s]he showed no sign of having troublesomely impulsive feelings.” So he decides she must be playing some sort of game, perhaps trying to make someone else jealous.33

  Margaret and Trafford visit together the places Woolson and James did: the Academy, the Pitti Palace, and the monastery of San Marco. They voice the opinions and preferences of Woolson and James as well—she is partial to the beauty of nature; he prefers the human beauty of art; she loves walking in the cloisters; he waxes poetic on the virtues of Giotto and Botticelli. He tries to lure her into a flirtation, but she does not follow him. When Trafford pierces the façade of their friendship by confessing his love for another, Margaret fumes that she had no genuine interest in him but has only been conducting an “experiment” to see if she could forget her love for a man who had recently married another, knowing that Trafford was unlikely to be affected because he was deeply in love with her friend.

  The following spring, Trafford returns to Florence and decides to conduct a similar experiment with Margaret to see if he can get over Beatrice, who has become engaged to another man. At the end of the season, Margaret meets Trafford in the Boboli Gardens to learn the result of his experiment. Professing “satisfied contentment” but not love, he nonetheless asks her to marry him. She is puzzled. “You do not love me; I am not beautiful; I have no fortune. What, then, do you gain?” He confesses that he would gain “the greatest gift that can be given to a man on this earth, a gift I long for,—a wife who really and deeply loves me.” She erupts with resentment: “I was but waiting for this. . . . With the deeply-rooted egotism of a man you believe that I love you.” She says she had allowed his experiment to proceed, hoping she would get this chance to enact her “revenge” by proving him wrong.34 Woolson knew only too well that a single woman approaching a man was assumed to be after the offer of his hand in marriage. In “ ‘Miss Grief’ ” the message was subtle; here it is more direct.

  Whether or not Woolson was conducting an emotional experiment of her own—perhaps trying to distract herself from her grief by interesting herself in art and Henry James—she was most certainly conducting a literary experiment in writing this story. She had taken a departure by penning a slice of society life heavy on dialogue and light on plot. She had heard so often that this sort of writing “is much the most ‘refined,’ ‘superior,’ ‘cultivated’ style. And that my own [writing] needs just what that style excels in.—I have been told . . . that there should be next to no ‘plot’; that the ‘manner’ should be more than the ‘matter’; and that the best ‘art’ left a certain vagueness over all the details. I have been especially warned against anything that looked ‘dramatic.’ ”35 In other words, she had been expressly told that she should write more like James.

  Woolson continued the experiment by sending the story to Howells at the Atlantic to see if he would take the bait. He did, eagerly, declaring it “an immense advance in manner and arrangement over anything you have hitherto written.” With this story, she gained the approbation of the highest rung of the male literary elite by writing in the style it preferred. But she was not pleased with Howells’s enthusiastic response, which she found rather “depressing.” It made her doubt herself and worry all the more about her novel, Anne, scheduled to finally appear in two months. How would Howells, James, and the admirers of this mannered style respond to the work into which she had poured so much of herself and her literary ambitions? She admired “the skill displayed” in James’s work and enjoyed reading it, but she also believed “there are other ways of writing,” and substance would always be more important than style, “though the skies fall.”36

  Fiction should appeal first and foremost to the heart and the soul, she felt, and only secondly to the head and the ear. Dramatic power and emotional response would always be to her the most vital elements of literature, making her a bit of an outsider in an era that was growing increasingly distrustful of literature that made one feel. But for now Woolson was happy to know that she still had allies, chief among them Henry Mills Alden, editor of Harper’s magazine. She sent him “A Florentine Experiment” for his opinion and was relieved to find that he agreed with her. Alden encouraged her to go back to her own style, and she would for the most part, although she also could not ignore the growing fame of James’s and Howells’s writings.37

  With “A Florentine Experiment” Woolson had also issued James a challenge. He may have read it, as it appeared in the Atlantic in October 1880, one month before the first installment of his new novel, The Portrait of a Lady. It showed him that Woolson could meet him on his own turf—in his magazine and in his style—and that she could scrutinize him carefully. Surely he recognized aspects of himself in Trafford, perhaps also Trafford’s most conspicuous quality: his egotism. Woolson wrote to her nephew, Sam, that she thought “men like ‘Trafford’ generally are conceited. But that is not the worst of it; the worst is that they are generally, also, so charming (in other ways) that one has to accept the ‘conceit’ to get the rest!”38

  Such was her initial reading of James. Beneath the gallantly amiable surface she detected a well of certainty and self-importance that would make it difficult, she saw, to gain his esteem. She would have to tread carefully around his ego (which was actually more fragile than she at first realized). But she was willing to accept this blemish to enjoy the more delightful parts of his personality. That James was equally charmed and intrigued by Woolson is evidenced by the steady growth of their friendship over the next few years. In his eyes, however, she was still not much more than an interesting, independent, genteel American woman with decided opinions and a keen wit. She would play the part for now.

  8

  The Artist’s Life

  HAVING LEFT Florence the first week of June, Constance and the Benedicts meandered through Venice, Milan, and Como before heading to the cool Swiss Alps for the summer. Traveling the St. Gotthard Pass by stagecoach was a dizzying experience, trekking up the precipice-hugging road and then racing down the other side of the Alps until they reached Lucerne.1

  When they arrived, letters from Charlie and the Mathers were waiting for them. Charlie, then working in an office in Los Angeles, was hoping to buy some land in Riverside, and Constance was willing to give him five hundred dollars for it, if he would settle down and regain his health. She was finally regaining hers and was happy to report to her brother-in-law that she was growing fat on the alpine milk. She also wasn’t getting much exercise. No one would hike with her into the mountains, so she stayed close to her pension, finishing “A Florentine Experiment” and “The Old Palace Keeper,” also set in Florence.2

  One day a package arrived from James in London. Constance was surprised to find inside it a recent issue of the Spectator, the most influential of the elite London weeklies, containing a review of her j
ust-released collection of stories, Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches. The review lauded her “quite remarkable power” and called for the book to be published in England. She had never, as she wrote to Sam, “received attention in a paper of that stamp.”3 James must have been rather surprised himself to stumble across the review. If he had thought his new friend a rather obscure writer, the Spectator corrected his mistake. It was the first of many such items he would send Woolson over the years—books, magazines, or clippings that he thought would interest her.

  Meanwhile, Woolson’s literary reputation was soaring back at home with the publication of Rodman the Keeper by D. Appleton & Company. In addition to the title story, the collection included “Felipa,” “Old Gardiston,” “In the Cotton Country,” and “King David,” as well as an Asheville story, “Up in the Blue Ridge,” and a South Carolina story, “ ‘Bro.’ ” There were also three more Florida stories: “Miss Elisabetha” (about the northern guardian of a Spanish orphan who tries unsuccessfully to import civilization to a Florida backwater), “Sister St. Luke” (the story of a timid nun who is nursed back to health by northern visitors and daringly rescues them from a tornado before happily returning to her repressive convent), and “The South Devil” (a highly evocative portrayal of a Florida swamp that is both sublime and deadly, luring a musician in search of its harmonies to his death).