Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  Everywhere she went in Cairo, she was accompanied by her guide and interpreter. As a Western woman, she was exempt from the strict rules regarding the seclusion of women. She noted that the locals, who “consider all strangers more or less mad,” did not object to her prying eyes. When she had the opportunity to go inside a building housing local university students, she and her companion moved from room to room, peering inside at men praying, washing, playing chess. One young man smiled back at them and bowed.17

  Constance was also a frequent visitor at El Azhar University of Cairo, where instruction was grounded in the Koran. She learned as much as she could about the curriculum and customs of the students. The persistence of medieval rituals deeply interested her; she described the university as “a living relic, a survival in the nineteenth century of the university of the fourteenth and fifteenth.” The fatalist in her predicted that it would not survive much longer, however, in the face of Western expansion. The romantic side of her lamented the loss of old traditions in the face of so-called modern progress. She was horrified, for instance, by the Western hotel at the foot of the pyramids, where guests played lawn tennis in the shadow of the ancient tombs.18

  Nonetheless, Woolson was very much a product of her age’s aestheticism, which coveted the oriental splendors of Egyptian architecture, tapestries, and mosaics. For her readers she cataloged the sensory delights of the bazaars: “the sumptuousness of the prayer carpets, the gold embroideries, the gleaming silks, the Oriental brass-work with sentences from the Koran, the ivory, the ostrich plumes, . . . the turquoises and pearls . . . [and] the far-penetrating mystic sweetness” of the perfumes. A particularly popular souvenir was the scarab, an ancient amulet in the shape of a beetle that signified renewal and resurrection. Constance left Cairo with three of them, as well as a bronze figure of a praying Arab, given to her by Clara.19

  But Woolson did not simply satisfy her readers’ aesthetic desires. She also invited them to look beyond their own customs and beliefs and follow the local men who waited on tourists like themselves into the cafés where they loafed, sipping coffee and smoking pipes. Their behavior might seem decadent to American and English eyes, but it was probably the only sustenance the poor men had all day. Woolson strived to understand Egyptian men’s custom of a daily rest in cafés, baths, or the streets from their perspective, quoting lines from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by the twelfth-century Persian poet:

  I sent my soul through the invisible,

  Some letter of that after-life to spell;

  And by-and-by my soul returned to me,

  And answered, “I myself am heaven and hell!”

  Such was the motto of the coffeehouse where one heard the poem recited in Arabic. She reflected, “[F]or if the heaven or hell of each person is simply the condition of his own mind, then if he is able every day to reduce his mind, even for a half-hour only, to a happy tranquility which has forgotten all its troubles, has he not gained that amount of paradise?”20

  “An Arab Café.”

  (From “Cairo in 1890,” Mentone, Cairo, and Corfu)

  Lest her readers miss her larger point, Woolson concludes “Cairo in 1890” with an argument against “the habit of judging the East from the standpoint of one’s home customs.” The hurried traveler does not have the time to do anything but “observ[e] from the outside alone, which is sure to be founded upon misapprehension.” By staying for a while, as she had done in the American South and as she did in Cairo, one becomes “familiar with their traditions, their temperament, their history, and, above all, with the language which they speak.” What she found there filled her with wonder. “The East is the land of mystery. If one cares for it at all, one loves it; there is no half-way.” She felt a kinship, even, with Egypt that she expressed in a letter to Hay: “[A]t last I know my own land; it is Egypt. There must be Egyptian blood in me somehow.”21

  Constance’s impressions from her trip would remain vivid for quite some time. Months later she wrote to Dr. Baldwin of “the great winter of my life. Nothing has ever so much impressed me as Egypt; even now I am still excited about it. I feel like another person—so broadened in mind by an actual look into the strange life of the East.” Referring to her adventures, James called her, in a letter to Boott, “our modern Fenimore.”22

  DEADLY DULL CHELTENHAM

  Constance sailed from Egypt for England on April 19, 1890. She withdrew into herself and spoke to no one on board. Her only companion was the recently published book God in His World by Henry Mills Alden. It was a lengthy argument for the presence of a Christian God in the modern world and a harbinger of the coming social gospel movement that sought to counter laissez-faire capitalism with the creation of a more perfect society. For Constance it had a more personal message. It broadened the spiritual quest that had begun on her trip to the East and would continue for the rest of her life.

  Ultimately, she found it difficult to accept Alden’s perfect faith that God’s purpose would ultimately be revealed, that all of this world’s sufferings were part of His plan. “The trouble with me,” she confessed,

  is that I am constantly knocked down—as it were—by a horror of the cruelties of life; did you ever see a small insect, trying to climb a wall, and always, sooner or later, falling to the floor—only to begin again? That is I. If the cruelties do not happen to me personally (though many of them have happened, and continue to do so), they happen to some one within my sight; and then down I go again mentally, overwhelmed by the view of so much dreadful, & helpless, & often innocent (or comparatively innocent), suffering. I ca’nt get over it.

  It seems her time in the East had been merely a reprieve. The old killing griefs were returning. Next to a passage in Alden’s book that read “The ultimate and only possible blessedness must be the extinction of existence,” she wrote simply, “yes.”23

  Overall, however, Alden’s book lifted her up when so much of contemporary literature confined itself to the colorless, ordinary life of the day. She found the book full of beautiful maxims. The line “In loving one another, we find God” she found lovely and true. Love was, she confessed, “almost the only real pleasure one can have in this existence.”24

  On arrival in England, Constance settled in the spa town of Cheltenham. Three hours from London and located between the cathedral towns of Gloucester and Worcester, Cheltenham promised healthy air, low prices, and few diversions. She found a second-floor apartment on the Promenade Terrace, a grand, tree-lined boulevard. As soon as she unpacked, she began to write for nine hours a day to “exorcise the ghosts of Cairo and Corfu,” shaping the notes of her impressions into two articles.25

  The seclusion and quiet of Cheltenham soon became tiresome. She pined for company. In July, Boott made a short visit while she was in the midst of feverish work, but he was soon on his way to the Continent. If she had known he would leave so quickly, she would have dropped everything, she complained to him. In September, Dr. Baldwin took the train from London, where he was staying with James, who had recently returned from Italy. Woolson relished recounting her adventures to him. James came for a visit the following week. In a letter to Boott, Woolson indicated that James seemed well but anxious about Alice, who had had another breakdown. Woolson tried to cheer him up. They took the train to Worcester and enjoyed the summer-like weather. As they sat on a bench next to the Severn River and looked up at the towering cathedral, they talked about his trip to Italy, where he had visited Bellosguardo for the first time since Lizzie’s death. To Baldwin James wrote, “Miss Woolson, who seemed in very good care, regaled me with anecdotes of your visit, all calculated to make me try to walk in your footsteps & be not less remunerative a guest. I thought her refuge pleasant & comfortable enough for a time; but only for a time. And I left her more than ever struck with her capacity for solitude & concentration.”26

  These visits did little to allay her loneliness. Only two days after James’s departure, Constance asked Katharine Loring for a visit of two or three days. She
may actually have been fishing for an invitation to London, knowing that Alice’s poor health would keep Katharine close to her. Alice and Katharine had been intimate companions since 1879. Alice was greatly dependent on her care and love, but the illnesses of Katharine’s consumptive sister had often pulled her away from Alice’s side. Beginning in 1890, Katharine was able to live with Alice full time in what many have called a Boston marriage. Katharine had been a teacher and was a staunch advocate of women’s education, the kind of protofeminist Henry had mocked in The Bostonians. Shortly after penning her letter to Katharine, Constance went to London, no doubt for a visit with her friends. That fall Professor Peirce also came from London to dine with her and to talk about Egypt, while Eleanor Poynter, who was in London for the winter, came for ten days. They talked of Boott and played his songs on the piano. In November, when Alice was doing better, Katharine was finally able to come. Constance felt “ten years younger” after her visit.27

  Most of the time, however, Constance’s companions were books. She riled herself up with Ruskin, whose pedantry she had grown to hate, and made her way through some popular books by authors such as Edna Lyall and Marie Corelli, which she found “very edifying.” Her reading also included the correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, lives of Charles Darwin and Muhammad, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, and Rudyard Kipling’s Eastern stories. She became particularly absorbed in reading reports from the London-based Psychical Research Society, which investigated paranormal phenomena. During his visit, Professor Peirce dismissed them as illusions, but she was more willing to side with the society’s advocates, which included William James. At a meeting of the society in late October, Henry read his brother’s account of a medium who had helped him and his wife contact their deceased son. In 1894, William would become the society’s president. Telepathy particularly interested Constance. She confessed to Boott, “I sometimes almost believe I have a power of some sort; but I don’t know what sort.—Such odd things now & then happen. It may be nothing but a vivid imagination, & easily roused sympathy.”28 It may also have been an increasing eagerness to connect with a world beyond this one.

  In spite of Cheltenham’s dullness, it served its purpose. The writing was going well. She wrote to Boott in September, “The way to be tranquil is to produce (for a writer, or for any artist). If he (or she) does his work well, that is sufficient; or ought to be. I have laid out several pieces of work, & I have enough to occupy me for two years. I feel very hopeful, & all is going smoothly.” Her aching wrist was still a bother, though. She feared she had worn it out and wished she could dictate to a typist, but she didn’t believe she could ever adjust to that method of composition.29

  In October she received news of the death of her brother-in-law, Samuel L. Mather, severing one of the last remaining links to her American past. To his son Sam she wrote, “The tie that bound me to him was (with the one exception of Clara) the oldest I had left.” Samuel had “remained a real brother” to her, even though her sister Georgiana, his wife, had died thirty-seven years earlier. She was glad to learn that he had received the note she had sent telling him she had “always loved him dearly.” Samuel had presciently written to her the previous summer that he feared he would never see her again because she was now “wedded to Europe.”30 So she seemed to be. Yet she still talked of going back to see Sam and Flora and their boys, now joined by a little girl whom they had named Constance, after her. Constance was overcome with the tribute and yearned more than ever for at least a brief visit to what had once been her home.

  HIBERNATING

  As the season turned to winter, Constance’s contentment evaporated. James, unaware of her growing discontent, assumed she was happily tucked away with her writing, but the frigid weather and increasing darkness were taking their toll. By Christmas, she complained that daylight lasted for only three hours a day. She bought a new copy of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which reminded her of past celebrations when her family lived in Cleveland. Declining an invitation to London, she stayed home with her “plum pudding as large as a tea-cup” and the ghosts of Christmases past.31

  As the new year arrived and the freezing weather continued, Constance could no longer hide her low spirits. She wrote to Sam, “[L]et the air grow really cold, and down I go toward the gates of death.” Her rooms were warm and her throat was fine, but she felt lifeless and depressed. She thought of getting a dog to keep her company. She missed Pax, the dachshund from Bellosguardo, and lingered over the latest photo of the Mather children, writing to Sam and Flora that family “is the best thing in life; it’s the only thing worth living for; this is the sincere belief—& the result of the observations—of one who has never had it!”32

  While the bitter wind blew outside, Constance lived on her memories, writing a new story, “Dorothy,” set at the Villa Castellani and Villa Montauto. It was her “farewell to Bellosguardo,” filled with American and British exiles wandering up the hill from Florence for entertainment in the evenings. An unusually high number of widows and older unmarried women find in the art, scenery, and society of Florence compensations for their solo lives in exile. “For the detached American ladies, who haven’t yet come to calling themselves old—for the cultivated superfluous and the intelligent remainders—there is nothing like Europe!” one character declares.33

  Constance put something of herself into an older, single British woman, Felicia, who takes long, aimless walks simply to wear herself out, and sings Francis Boott’s “Through the Long Days” with deep emotion, which she struggles to hide from the assembled guests. Felicia meanders home to her lonely apartment in Florence while the man she loves, Alan Mackenzie, celebrates his marriage to a “flighty little creature,” nineteen-year-old Dorothy.34

  To everyone’s surprise, Dorothy is not as shallow as she seems. Only Mrs. Charlotte Tracy, a widow of fifty who is a keen observer of others’ concealed feelings, sees the grief underneath her stoic exterior when Alan dies suddenly of Roman fever. Everyone else assumes Dorothy was too young to love deeply and looks forward to her excellent “career” now that she has inherited his money. But Dorothy shows signs of restlessness and melancholy, singing “Through the Long Days” in a soft, low voice.35

  Like Alice James, Dorothy has simply lost the will to live. When she confesses her deep unhappiness, her stepmother sends for the doctor. He can find nothing to treat. All he can do is sedate her. “Has science no resources for such a case?” Dorothy’s friends ask him. But just as Alice James had found, Victorian medical science had no understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body and the power of grief to kill. After Dorothy dies, the women are furious that “[t]he doctors did not tell us.” But, the narrator concludes, “the doctors did not know.”36

  Woolson assured Boott that the story was “wholly fiction,” not about anyone he knew, but based on a young woman she had known in the United States who had similarly wasted away and died of grief after the loss of her older, wealthy husband.37 That may be. Yet “Dorothy” also expresses Constance’s own grief over losing Boott and her life at Bellosguardo, which had come rushing back to her during the introspective months at Cheltenham. She would never fully recover from the loss.

  Constance also began to look even farther back to other losses, writing to Sam of her father and their trips to Zoar and the Tuscawaras Valley in Ohio and summers on Mackinac Island. Her thoughts also returned to Zeph Spalding, whom she had heard was in Italy with his family. She revealed to her nephew that she had once “cared” for the colonel, but she held no ill will. She saw now that her feelings had not been deep; they had only been aroused by the excitement of the war. She was happy for him in his good fortune.38

  About this time, James reentered Woolson’s life. Her trip to the East and his to Italy had kept them apart for most of 1890, and since his return they had seen each other only once as they were both preoccupied with work. With the opening of his play The American, their friendship strengthened. After the premiere i
n Southport, on January 3, 1891, he stopped in Cheltenham on his way back to London to share with Woolson the story of his “splendid success.”39

  A few days later, Woolson met James and Katharine Loring in Stratford-upon-Avon for a performance of The American. She knew the play well, having read it “act by act, as it was written.” Unfortunately, however, she was unable to hear a single line of dialogue. Her deafness made her feel, in the packed theater, more alone than ever. Only when Boott pressed her on the details of the performance did she relate to him the demoralizing experience in the most revealing letter to have survived on how her hearing loss was plunging her into a silent world. “Yes, I went over to Stratford,” she wrote. “I did’nt speak of it, because, while there, & for a good while afterwards, I was, at heart, greatly depressed. To be sitting between K. Loring and H.J., to be unable to hear either a word they were saying, or a word that was uttered on the stage, was hard.” Her father’s old lesson of fortitude failed her. “Generally, I do not mind the hardships of my lot in life much,” she explained, “having been prepared for them very carefully by dear father, who was himself always brave and cheerful.” She expected no response from Boott about it. “What ca’nt be cured, must be endured. And endured in silence.” Only to him did she reveal her belief, echoing Epictetus, that “[w]hen suffering becomes too great, we are always at liberty to leave life altogether.”40

  What Boott wrote in return has not survived. In her next letter she thanked him for his sympathetic words. “[Y]ou know how to say the things that comfort me. . . . In the ten years I have spent abroad, no one has said so much. . . . [P]erhaps they think I do not need that sort of thing. They are much mistaken.” Others understandably missed signs of her depression, which she carefully concealed. Her father had taught her “that a person who was bitter, depressed, downhearted, one or all, became at last unsupportable; a burden to everybody.” She dreaded being a millstone around anyone’s neck and so carefully hid her despair from James and Loring. They had enough to worry about with Alice, who had seemed to be “in a dying condition for months,” which was “a great depression” to her brother.41