Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  12

  Arcadia Lost

  DURING HER first year at Bellosguardo, Woolson’s health prevented her from beginning her new novel. She complained that her right arm was seriously damaged from too much writing. At times, it seemed as if the muscles and nerves held “a witches’ dance together” that sent her to bed incapacitated. Electrotherapy had helped, but picking up the pen could bring back the pain. After recovering from her cold in May, during the Duomo unveiling, she tentatively resumed work. But upon returning from Geneva, where she spent the hottest weeks of the summer, she found herself virtually unable to walk and, after many months of immobility, decided that sitting at a desk for long hours was the culprit. From then on she always wrote at a stand-up desk, sometimes for ten or more hours a day when working on a deadline.1

  During the long periods when she could not write, she read voraciously. Many of her surviving books are marked “Florence, 1887.” She carried on conversations with authors in the margins, a compensation for the actual discussions she could no longer hear. She chided Augustine Birrell for arguing in Obiter Dicta that a man could be respected even if he were “untruthful, unfaithful, unkind,” so long as he wasn’t a drunk. “But these are just the things drunkards do!” she protested in the margin. Obiter Dicta was a gift from James, who understood her frustration at not being able to write. He also sent her Shelley’s poems, a novel by the English writer Margaret Louisa Woods, and a set of Emerson’s works. That year she also read Thoreau and Turgenev. Every evening, as the sun set, she took a book of John Hay’s poems out onto the terrace, settled into her large Vienna rocking chair, and read until dark, when she put down her book and watched the great expanse of stars overhead. Then she went inside, prepared for bed, and read a few poems by Matthew Arnold before falling asleep. “They are somewhat melancholy,” she admitted to Hay. “But I am melancholy, too.”2

  Woolson’s blue moods were not helped by the fact that Boott was in Boston that summer. He was feeling “very supererogatory since Lizzie’s marriage,” James informed his sister-in-law, and probably even more so now that the baby had been born. Lizzie and Frank remained at the Villa Castellani, happier than ever “and more and more Bohemian.” James reported that little Francis, named after his grandfather, had “quite overtaken himself and is enormous, promising.”3

  Woolson visited her godson and his contented parents often. She sat with them in the garden of the Villa Castellani and “talked till Frank said his brain whirled,” Lizzie wrote to her father in Boston. On that lovely July evening, Woolson was “very nice & very amusing,” relating how Boott had absentmindedly returned to her books that she had given him, even after writing his name in them. On the evenings she spent alone, Woolson sat in her red salon at the piano and played tunes by her now favorite composer, Francis Boott, straining to hear “a little ghostly echo of the music which once was the best thing in life.”4

  In November, after Boott’s return from the United States, the entire family moved to Paris for the winter. Woolson missed them deeply and eagerly awaited their return. In the meantime, she enjoyed the company of a number of women writers, including her old Florentine friend, the novelist Eleanor Poynter; Rhoda Broughton, an English novelist and friend of James; Miss Horner, one of the sister coauthors of the guidebook Walks in Florence, who lived nearby and had become “one of [her] particular friends”; and Frances Hodgson Burnett. During Burnett’s earlier career, before Little Lord Fauntleroy had made her a famous children’s author, Woolson had given one of her adult novels a largely favorable review in the Atlantic’s “Contributors’ Club.” Burnett came on Tuesday afternoons, when Woolson received visitors, but stayed long after everyone else had left. Burnett found Woolson “delightful—that best and dearest type of American women—sweet and sincere and deliciously amusing.” They would talk in front of the fire until the sun went down. As they commiserated over the strain of writing, Burnett told Woolson she was often confined to bed for six months after each novel, her mind and speech confused, making Woolson feel that her troubles with her arm paled in comparison.5

  By January 1888 Woolson was finally feeling better, and she began to write her new novel in earnest. She couldn’t put the Harpers off much longer. James complained to Lizzie that “Fenimore appears to be really better of her dreary autumn illness & to be driving the pen for the public benefit, or [so] I judge—for she doesn’t drive it for mine. I have heard she is not ill, but I haven’t heard much more.”6 At the same time she was warning other correspondents that she wouldn’t be able to write many letters in the coming year. In fact, there are no surviving letters from February to August. But there was also another reason for her silence.

  THE END OF A DREAM

  Near the end of March, an urgent message from Paris arrived announcing Lizzie’s sudden death. Although Frank had thrived among his old artist friends in Paris, she had struggled to maintain a household, care for a teething baby, manage her husband’s career, and serve as his model, standing hours every day for a portrait that was to be exhibited at the Salon in May. She worked in watercolors, an easier medium to manage than oils with her busy life, producing a large painting of the Villa Castellani that would also be shown at the Salon. But before she could enjoy her success, in the midst of a severe, snowy winter, Lizzie contracted pneumonia and declined rapidly. She died on March 23.7

  Woolson’s initial reaction to the news has not survived, but it must have been, as James’s was, “unspeakable shock.” “I shall miss her greatly,” he wrote to a mutual friend. “She was a dear little quiet, gentle, intelligent laborious lady. And the future looks dark for poor F.B.” James was particularly worried about how father and husband would manage, “those two poor uncongenial men [now] tied together by that helpless baby.” Boott and Duveneck brought the fifteen-month-old boy back to Bellosguardo, where Woolson was waiting for them, ready to “hold out her hand . . . in all sorts of soothing ways,” as James imagined in a letter to Boott. James regretted that he could not be there as well and had to content himself with Woolson’s description of the funeral: “Many people and mountains of flowers. Boott absolutely calm—& Duveneck sobbing.”8

  As distressed as Woolson must have been, she quickly became the grief-stricken Boott’s main emotional support. According to her niece, he veritably clung to her. He came to the Villa Brichieri almost every night, believing that Woolson had the power to draw Lizzie’s spirit nearer. Months later Woolson was still dispensing comfort to him, writing in September, “In all your grief and loneliness it must still be a pleasure to you to remember how happy her life was during those last 2 yrs; a woman understands a woman & I think she was one of the happiest wives I have ever known. Her whole life was unusually happy,—first with you,—& then with you & her husband.”9

  Boott and James blamed Lizzie’s death on her marriage to Duveneck, convinced that Lizzie “had undertaken an effort beyond her strength, that she staggered under it and was broken down by it.”10 Woolson didn’t blame Frank for loving her. Lizzie’s brave attempt to combine love and art had been a beacon in the midst of her own darkness. When Lizzie died, Woolson’s fragile faith in happiness flickered out. Yet as long as Duveneck, Boott, and her godson needed her, she put on a brave face.

  The motherless baby particularly needed a new mother. As godmother, Woolson could have been the one to step in, and she may have wanted to. Her later letters to Boott show how deeply attached she was to the child, and in her new novel, an unmarried woman seeks to adopt her young nephew, possessing a profound yearning to become the child’s mother. But Woolson could not properly replace the baby Francis’s mother without becoming an actual member of the family. The proposal James had joked about to Boott two years earlier may have recurred to the grieving grandfather, but he did not act on it. He decided to bring his namesake to his relatives back in Massachusetts. Duveneck agreed, and preparations were made to sail in August. Thus the family Woolson had joined was no more.

  During the depressing t
ask of packing up the apartment in the Villa Castellani, in which Francis and his daughter had lived off and on for nearly forty years, Woolson assisted in every way she could. She stored much of the furniture in the Villa Brichieri, along with paintings and treasures the Bootts had accumulated over the years. Duveneck left her many mementoes, including a chair that had belonged to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He also gave her a lovely etching he had done of Venice.11 By August, nothing remained of her friends but the objects they had left behind. Woolson couldn’t help feeling like another remnant of their abandoned life.

  It was at this point that her correspondence with Boott began. It would carry on to the end of her life. Although she always addressed him as “Mr. Boott,” the letters were quite personal, relating her moods and struggles in a way no other surviving letters do. She didn’t take on the role of daughter or female companion, worrying over his health or advising him. She was simply herself. In every letter she mentioned her godson, sending him gifts and asking for a new picture. Her desire for news of “Baby” was insatiable. She often mentioned how much she missed them all. In the first letter, dated August 7, she confessed that she didn’t look toward the Villa Castellani anymore “because it makes me too sad—the closed silent house.” The baby’s chair stood “desolately under the carved table.” She had intended to put it away in a trunk but now thought of making a new cover for it and leaving it out to keep his memory fresh.12

  In subtle ways, Woolson also conveyed her deep affection for Boott and intimated that she considered the age difference between them trivial. In her first letter she enclosed a cartoon about a duchess who had married a much younger man and mentioned similar famous examples, including a baroness who shocked English society when she married her nearly thirty-years-younger secretary. These examples implied that only when the woman was older were such relationships fodder for the newspapers. In later years, she protested his talk of “going” and insisted, “I shall very likely go before you do.”13

  She was not shy of telling Boott how bereft she was of his companionship: “I had a lonely (that is not LOVELY; but LONELY) turkey last Sunday, with your excellent & highly-prized cranberries.” Everywhere she looked were reminders of him: “I read your books; & write at your table; & sit in your chairs; I admire your marbles & bronzes, & your hanging lamp.” She installed his bedroom furniture in the ground-floor apartment of the Villa Brichieri to “be ready for you, when you come over to pay me a visit.” In the meantime, she had the key to his garden and walked in it often. As she read the books he had left behind, she enjoyed discovering his comments. “I sit & laugh,” she told him. “Irving’s ‘Washington,’ emended by you, is as good as ‘Punch.’ ”14

  If Boott seems like a ghost in these letters, Lizzie was even more literally haunting her. Woolson went to the cemetery every week with fresh flowers for her grave. She assured Boott, “I still think constantly of Lizzie; often she seems very near. I fancy it will be so as long as I live here, so near her old home, & with so many of her possessions about me; I like to think so. She was always sweet & serene to me in life. And she remains the same in death.”15 By communing with the only other member of their charmed circle who remained, if only in spirit, she held on to their Bellosguardo past.

  Meanwhile, Woolson’s new serial novel was due to the Harpers in October. James wrote to Dr. Baldwin, “I take for granted she is overworking—but her powers to keep that up have long mystified me.” There may be some jealousy in his mystification, but there was also genuine, if ominous, concern. “Every thing beyond three hours a day (with continuity) in the sort of work she does is a nail in her coffin—but she appears to desire that her coffin shall have many! Please don’t repeat this to her—I have bored her half to death with my warnings.” In fact, Woolson was working at her stand-up desk from about seven in the morning until seven at night with only a half hour’s break at noon. Her work was once again taking complete possession of her.16

  RENDEZVOUS IN GENEVA

  James said he still hoped to return to Bellosguardo often, presumably to visit Woolson, but he was “literally afraid” of confronting the ghosts of the past there. He also told Boott that he found himself tied to England because of his sister, whom he visited regularly in Leamington. By the fall, however, Alice had improved enough that he could plan a short trip. He left London rather suddenly, having told Alice of his plans only a few days before. He apparently revealed to no one where he was really going—to Geneva to meet Woolson, who was taking a much-needed break after sending her novel off to New York. One of the few surviving clues of their rendezvous is a copy of his recently published The Aspern Papers, Louisa Pallant, The Modern Warning, inscribed, “Constance Fenimore Woolson from the author. Geneva, Oct. 16th, 1888.”17

  The only other clues are to be found in their letters to Boott. “[Y]our ‘ears must have burned’ a good deal lately,” James wrote to him on the twenty-ninth, “for you have been a daily theme of conversation with me for the past ten days, with Fenimore. That excellent and obliging woman is plying her pen hard on the other side of this lake and I am doing the same on this one.” (Her deadline for the serial met, however, Woolson was probably taking a break from writing.) Their hotels were a mile apart, a distance quickly traversed by boat. Every evening they met for dinner, over which she repeated, without him minding, the details of their friends’ final months at Bellosguardo. James particularly enjoyed discussing Lizzie “with one who had entered so much into her life in so short a time.” Woolson wrote to Boott that it was James who “talked a great deal of Lizzie; and of you.” Either way, James relived with Woolson the emotionally draining events of the past six months. Sensing the depth of her sorrow, he was “particularly good-natured.” (He wasn’t always. As she told Boott in a later letter, James “is very changeable as to mood” and “sometimes depressed.” How well they understood each other in their moods.) While James looked back fondly on the “golden days,” as he called them, of Bellosguardo, Woolson realized that “he meant a time before I even knew the place.” She had arrived too late.18 Such an Arcadia, of which she had caught only the twilight, was now forever beyond her reach.

  James had told Alice he would be gone only “a few weeks,” but his stay in Geneva stretched into November, making Alice peevish. She knew now of his rendezvous with Woolson and resented having to share her brother’s attention. “Henry is somewhere on the continent flirting with Constance,” she complained to William. When Alice protested to Henry, he told her “he thought it a ‘mild excess.’ ”19

  Near the end of November, Woolson and James left Geneva. Back in the Villa Brichieri, Woolson shut herself up to work on the book revisions of the new novel, except during her receiving day, when she typically received upwards of sixty-five calls. Eleanor Poynter helped her entertain the crowds, who “came early and remained late, drank quarts of tea and ate platefuls of cake.” Although it was exhausting, Clara insisted that she enjoyed “the bringing up to see her of every distinguished stranger that came to Florence.”20

  Such noisy gatherings were trying for Woolson, however. She longed for conversation with one particular friend. Just then it was the retired Cornell professor Daniel Willard Fiske, whom she had known since her return to Florence in 1886. She invited him to dinner and assured him no one would be there but herself. She was feeling lonely, as she had written to Boott about this time. No wonder she was growing ever fonder of this bookish bachelor, nine years her senior, who sent her gifts—books, maple sugar, fruit, roses, and a coffee set from Egypt. He was just the kind of “simple and trustful, ardent [and] generous” person who appealed to her, a suitable, although temporary, substitute for Boott and James.21

  Otherwise, she was completely absorbed in her work. As she explained to Fiske, it was hardly a fib when her servants told callers she was out because she was “indeed out . . . as far away as Lake Superior, where certain tiresome people, of no consequence, are at present disporting themselves, & dragging me with them.”22 Even
though her new novel was set in America, she didn’t leave Bellosguardo entirely behind. Jupiter Lights was full of the baby Francis and Frank and Lizzie, into whose lives she had so completely entered.

  JUPITER LIGHTS

  Just before the new novel began its run in Harper’s, Woolson published two stories there that prepared readers for the longer work they would soon encounter. “A Pink Villa,” set in Sorrento, where Woolson had spent the winter of 1882, so closely mirrors Lizzie Boott and Frank Duveneck’s romance that Francis suspected the rough, manly David Rod was modeled on Frank. Woolson strongly objected: “All I can say is—‘Never in the World.’ . . . I never describe persons I know. That is, not in a way which could be detected by those who are not writers themselves.” Nonetheless, the basic situation resembles that of Lizzie and Frank. The young American woman Eva was raised on the European model by one parent, her mother, who has kept her secluded from the world. She is supposed to marry a Belgian count, but instead falls in love with David Rod, who is seeking Italian laborers for his sugar plantation in Florida (a nod to Constance’s old flame Zeph Spalding, then growing sugar in Hawaii). Eva’s mother is as bewildered as Boott was by his daughter’s fascination for a man so out of place in their cosmopolitan world. In the end, however, Eva’s mother has to accept their marriage. As a friend of the family comments, “She won’t mind being poor . . . she won’t mind anything with him. It is one of those sudden, overwhelming loves that one sometimes sees.”23

  “Neptune’s Shore,” set in Salerno and Paestum, which Woolson visited during her stay in Sorrento, looks at the dark side of such overpowering love. It is, in fact, her most disturbing story, foreshadowing the dark themes of Jupiter Lights. A jealous lover becomes possessive and threatening as the object of his affection, a young, free-spirited widow, pulls away from him. His pitiable mother has spent her life watching him as if he were a ticking time bomb. When he finally goes off, he attempts to murder the man who has replaced him in the widow’s affections and then kills himself, creating a shocking dissonance with the bucolic setting filled with sojourning expatriates. Glimpses of such violence in Woolson’s past—Lawson Carter’s and her brother’s suicides—suggest where such themes, which reemerge in her novel, may have come from.