Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  COLLABORATION IN ART AND LIFE

  Henry often came up to Oxford for dinner in May, while the Benedicts were visiting. Constance brought her sister and niece to garden and tea parties at Trinity and Balliol Colleges as well as to the races, or “Eights,” during Boat Week, when they were invited to sit on the Trinity barge. They spent much time with Margaret Woods, who invited Constance to meet the novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward, who was also a friend of James’s. Mrs. Ward had “an estate in Surrey, with a park & deer” that she had purchased with the earnings of one novel, Robert Elsmere, which Woolson thought a rather poor book.24

  Constance was growing weary of working so hard and not being able to afford an apartment in Venice or a cottage in Florida. Her investments were bringing in about $500 per year (about $13,000 in today’s money). Her royalties in 1890, after the publication of Jupiter Lights, had been about $560; in 1891, about $220. Her plans of saving for retirement had not materialized over the past two winters. She had not been able to get by on the interest her bonds earned in order to invest her earnings, as she had hoped. Moreover, she was already a year late turning in the manuscript of her new novel. She needed an infusion of cash that only serial rights would bring. Finally, the Harpers sent her an advance that would enable her to complete her novel “with a mind freed from anxiety.”25

  Woolson’s painstaking method of writing her books and her desire to stay with Harper & Brothers were putting her at a tremendous disadvantage in the increasingly diversified literary marketplace. And she resented watching others—like Ward, Oliphant, or Howells—thrive within it. Earlier that year she had complained to Boott, “To have a hunger for fame is one of the greatest of miseries. And especially for the artist, whether painter, sculptor, poet, author, or musician. And yet how can we help feeling it, when we are neglected, especially when those who are (artistically speaking) less worthy, reap the richest harvests, while we are left with nothing! An artist, of course, ought to find happiness in his art; his soul should live in a serene empyrean, far above the madding (and ignorant) crowd. But it isn’t always easy to do this!”26 No doubt she and James had been commiserating. For years he had been frustrated by the poor sales of his books. Although he was much more prolific than Woolson, producing potboilers alongside his more serious work, he also lived more lavishly than she did. The theater was not turning out to be the gold mine he had hoped for, but he hadn’t given up on it yet. The tug between his desires for greatness and monetary success—his fury, in fact, over not being able to have both—was the leitmotif of his career. Constance was more than sympathetic. She had not been able to duplicate the success of Anne, nor had she tried. She had been after a more elusive prey: artistic achievement, which required a patient labor not conducive to high productivity.

  After the departure of Clara and Clare, Constance fell into her old routine, rising at six, working for eight hours, walking for three hours through the countryside, then dining and going to bed. She left letters unanswered and tried to avoid visitors. In July, Boott came to see her. She downplayed the significance of it to Sam, mentioning only that her friend from Bellosguardo was now over eighty.27 No other record of their visit has survived. It was the last time they would meet in person.

  In June 1892, in the midst of her novel writing, Woolson also published a new story, which she may have written earlier. That she dusted it off now is no surprise. “In Sloane Street,” her only story set in England, seems to probe the thorny question of what she meant to James and what role she could play in his life, obliquely approaching the possibility that art might be better created in some kind of collaboration rather than in solitude. After Alice’s death, that possibility seemed to virtually hover in the air.

  James had first considered this question after staying with Woolson at Bellosguardo in 1887. Upon his return to London, he had written “The Lesson of the Master,” which was published in 1888, when Woolson was hard at work on Jupiter Lights. She may not have read it, in fact, until it was published in book form in February 1892. In the story an older, successful male writer advises a protégée against marrying because it would mean, as it had in his own case, the death of serious ambition. A married man must write for money to satisfy his wife’s social and material ambitions. When the young writer meets a woman who appears capable of inspiring rather than inhibiting his art, the “master,” who believes no woman can truly sympathize with a man’s work, convinces him she would be more concerned for her children’s comforts and advantages than for the realization of his great idea. An artist must be, above all, free, he counsels. Ironically, when the older writer is later widowed, he turns around and marries the sympathetic young woman. The young writer feels duped, and the question of whether or not the former “master” will again become a great writer now that he is married to the right woman is left open at the end of the story.

  It was as if James himself could not decide. For he had found in Woolson precisely the kind of woman capable of a “full interchange” of ideas about art and literature. Like his hero, he must have felt that “[h]e couldn’t get used to her interest in the arts he cared for: it seemed too good to be real—it was so unlikely an adventure to tumble into such a well of sympathy.” Constance wrote to Sam in 1889 that it was “dangerous to ask a writer of novels about novels! He may swamp you with the ocean of his words. The truth is, that, to a writer, the subject is so vast,—really his whole life’s interest—that if he is to tell you what he really thinks, he will almost never get through. He can go on for days. This is the reason, I think, why writers like to be with writers, painters with painters, & so on; the subject of their art is to them really inexhaustible, & they never tire of it.”28 She was speaking of herself and, surely, James, who had noticed as early as 1883, during their first days together in London, how carefully she listened and how much she understood. What a rarity such comprehension was, he had written to Howells.

  Woolson’s “In Sloane Street” harkens back to that earlier time, the winter of 1883–1884, when she lived in Sloane Street in London and was receiving frequent visits from James for the first time. It portrays the consequences of a male writer’s choice to marry a beauty who cares nothing for his work instead of a close friend who supports and comprehends his art, who in fact has the potential to be a co-creator. The story can be read as a response to “The Lesson of the Master,” written from the intelligent woman’s point of view. It may also be Woolson’s suggestion to James of what he would lose if he chose a simple wife. However, she published it in Harper’s Bazar, a women’s magazine, where James was unlikely to see it.29

  The protagonist of “In Sloane Street” is the American spinster Gertrude Remington, “[a] tall thin woman,” bookish, stiff, and straight, with her hair pulled tightly back—no wonder “all men are afraid of her,” another character remarks. She has accompanied the Moore family abroad, having been a friend of the husband, Philip, since childhood. He is a well-regarded writer who has difficulty supporting his family in the manner his “little . . . golden haired, blue-eyed” wife, Amy, would wish. She cares nothing for her husband’s literary career, while Gertrude reads every word he writes and is his “chief incense burner.” She wants to discuss his works, but he dislikes being dragged back to them after he has already moved on, something Woolson did to both James and Stedman. Philip goes so far as to profess that he would like Gertrude much better if she “had never read a word of them.”30

  Philip’s disregard for Gertrude’s attention is palpable. He has, moreover, little interest in the minds of women. He insists, in a conversation about George Eliot, to whose grave Gertrude is planning a visit, that “[w]omen can’t write. And they ought not to try.” When Gertrude presses him he admits, “Children’s stories—yes; they can write for children, and for young girls, extremely well. And they can write little sketches and episodes if they will confine themselves rigidly to the things they thoroughly know, such as love stories, and so forth. But the great questions of life, the important matter
s, they cannot render in the least.” Women, he concludes, are too ignorant of life to write anything of value. Noticing the surprise on Gertrude’s face, he says, “You need not be troubled, you have never tried.” She assents but hesitates before saying, “My ambition is all for other people”—him, of course.31

  As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Gertrude could have been a writer herself. She is an avid and serious reader, defending the analytical novel against the more entertaining types that Amy prefers. She reads French literature, of which Amy also complains, and is currently reading the journals of Marie Bashkirtseff, which caused a sensation when they were published in English in 1888 for their frank self-exposure of a young artist who possessed the egotism of a Napoleon and the artistic ambitions of a Henry James. (In one entry Bashkirtseff wrote, “Outside of my art . . . outside of this passion . . . there is nothing, or only the most atrocious existence.”) Amy is horrified not only that a young woman has recorded such thoughts but that she has had them at all. Gertrude admits that it may be abnormal to write them down, especially for publication, but that the ideas themselves seem to her perfectly normal. Imagine, she tells Amy, “[i]f some invisible power should reproduce with exact truthfulness each one of our secret thoughts, do you think we should come out of it so infinitely better than Marie Bashkirtseff?”32 Gertrude, it seems, has her own secret thoughts, although she doesn’t show them, repressing her jealousy of both Amy (for her marriage) and Philip (for his career), as well as her anger at Philip for choosing such a vapid woman over herself.

  At the end of the story, after a scare in which one of the Moore children is believed to have been injured in the Underground, Philip embraces Amy and pets her like a child. He gives in to her demands for a more social life in Washington, which will necessitate their return to the United States and his writing for popularity rather than esteem. He is finally ready to accept offers from the syndicates that have been hounding him. “You would not wish to see him descend to a lower grade of work, would you?” Gertrude had naively asked Amy, who responds that to her a “higher grade” would be providing “a nice home in Washington.” A novel has value to her when it is easy to read and amusing. Why can’t he simply write more of this kind of novel, which sells by the tens of thousands? Gertrude is baffled by her simplicity. “It isn’t purely mechanical work, you know,” she responds. Gertrude knows as well as if she were the writer herself. In the final lines of the story, we learn that Gertrude, now home in America, “does not keep a diary” but that she has jotted down a note in her almanac about the Moores moving to Washington.33

  Gertrude is an obviously autobiographical character—she dresses plainly, hates Ruskin, yearns for the pine barrens of Florida, and is a keen observer of character. She is also an image of the superfluous, discarded spinster Woolson feared she had become. She resented the superiority of married women who looked down on spinsters, as Amy does, calling them “queer” and “prudish” because of their inexperience.34 She felt excluded from the unique bonds of spouses and children that everyone but she—and James—seemed to have. Gertrude, however, is forty-two and more closely resembles Woolson at that age, when she had lived in Sloane Street. Now, at fifty-two, Woolson faced another kind of superfluity—old age. Although hardly old, she had begun to fear the inevitable decline that she believed was fast approaching.

  The publication of “In Sloane Street” three months after Alice’s death suggests that Woolson wondered what it would be like to find a home not only in James’s work but also in his life, for he had not married the sweet American wife she had thought he would. She was glad not to have been marginalized, as Gertrude was, but “In Sloane Street” still contains traces of the rejection she felt. She never got over feeling that she was undesirable as a woman, that men preferred the Amys of the world over the Gertrudes like her. What she didn’t realize, it seems, is that James’s lack of attraction to her was something altogether different. He was as good at hiding his desire for men as she was at hiding her desire to be loved.

  We cannot know definitively Constance’s and Henry’s true feelings for each other. About this time, he told a friend who had remarked about his large circle of friends and acquaintances that he had “but five real friends, and she is one of them!” referring to Constance. Several of his biographers believe that he loved her—“in his way,” writes one; “without loving her as a woman,” writes another. She was his “other self,” yet another has suggested.35 She undoubtedly loved him as well, but her feelings for him had always been mixed with anxieties about ambition and art, as well as fears of losing her independence and identity. As she felt more vulnerable—in finances and in health—she may have begun to feel less ambivalent about the prospect of a union with him. Still committed to her art, she was nonetheless unsure how much longer she could continue to write. If she ever desired a life with James, she may have now when marriage would have seemed less threatening and more stabilizing. Rather than meaning the death of the artist, it could have signaled a rebirth of sorts, a merging of minds that would have allowed her to unite her ambitions with his, as so many wives of “great men” had done. In fact, Alice’s message could have planted that seed in her mind.

  Henry may have considered the possibility himself, especially if Alice also shared her message with him. He cared deeply for Constance and marriage could have provided a cover for his sexuality, as it did for many gay men of the time. He also was struggling just then with own fears of having failed to achieve greatness. Like Dencombe in his story “The Middle Years,” which James wrote in the coming year, he seemed to be convinced that “[h]e should never again, as at one or two great moments of the past, be better than himself.” He feared most of all being deprived of his second chance.36 That Woolson could help James achieve that must have at least vaguely occurred to him.

  However, other serious obstacles also stood in the way. He was wedded to England while she was increasingly anxious to return to Italy. Two horrific winters had cured her of her attachment to England, and she never talked of settling there. The fact also remained that James was still wary of intimacies that could siphon off his creative energies. A wife had always seemed to him a burden rather than a help. Woolson’s fierce pride and independence would prevent her from even intimating an interest in marriage. Instead, they began to speak about collaborating on a play.37 That plan would never come to fruition. Yet they had both come closer to collaboration in life or art than they ever would again.

  HORACE CHASE

  Finishing her novel proved to be a herculean task. The physical toll of writing was beginning to leave its mark. Woolson’s hand wouldn’t always do what her brain commanded, and the whole right side of her body felt “distorted.” She could sometimes continue writing by holding the pen between different fingers. Such complications were common among writers. Within a few years James would employ a typist to take dictation, the method by which he wrote all of his later works. Woolson didn’t think she could ever learn to write that way, but she did begin to employ others to copy her final drafts.38

  Woolson realized that her laborious writing process was unusual. “I take my work hard,” she wrote to Sam. “But we must all do as we can, & the only way I can write at all, is to do my very best. Something in me makes me take these enormous pains.” Even as she felt the pressure to earn greater sums for her writing, she seemed less concerned with sales and more with craft. Fiction as an art form interested her immensely. She had no desire to sell out or write hastily. She increasingly set her sights on posterity. For her new novel, she moved well beyond James and his influences, looking to her contemporaries who were gaining recognition and copying ideas and mottoes into a notebook to guide her as she was planning and writing:

  The plot must be a riddle, so as to excite curiosity. My idea is that there should be a riddle; and exciting adventures. And growth of at least several of the characters, so that we will not be sure beforehand what they will do. An intense realism of description, & d
ramatic action like Kipling. Places described very & intensely actually—like some of Hardy. And there shall be nobility! . . . “One must either move sympathy, stir imagination, or raise hope.” I will do all 3. . . . “Style alone will never confer fame. One must place one’s self in accord with the permanent emotions of the whole race.” . . . Have all the scenes as distinctly American as S. Jewett, & Miss Wilkins. . . . like [Mary] Murfree, but more realistic.

  Kipling had made a great impression on her, as had Mary Wilkins (not yet Freeman), whose stories she thought “masterpieces.” But she found them as yet rather “limited, . . . always the same local New England dialect, & country-people; principally old maids. But of their kind; I think them inimitable.”39

  Although Woolson wanted her book Horace Chase, which began its run in Harper’s in January 1893, to be “intensely modern,” for the setting she looked back twenty years to the time she had spent in Asheville and St. Augustine, when both towns were on the verge of development. Inspired by Henry Flagler’s transformation of St. Augustine into a fashionable resort, she wrote a Gilded Age novel whose main character was the driving force of the modern era—the American businessman. Horace Chase, she told Alden, was “a careful study from actual life.” She had observed plenty of such men growing up in Cleveland and later in Europe as they conquered the Old World with their new wealth. But she didn’t want the novel named after him. She had always thought it presumptuous for women to claim to know “the masculine mind” well enough to call their novels Adam Bede or Robert Elsmere. The Harpers had suggested For Better, For Worse, but the title had already been used, so they went back to Horace Chase. Woolson was mortified.40

  In spite of her objections, it is not surprising that she chose a man as her central character, considering that she had written many stories from a male character’s point of view. She may have been spurred on by Wolcott Balestier’s praise of her portrayal of a minor male character in Jupiter Lights. Like him, Horace is a rather rough type, a prototypical self-made man, relatively uneducated but hardly illiterate. A “daring, keen, man of business,” he enjoys the chase for money as much as the wealth itself. He has made his fortune many times over, first in baking soda, then in a silver mine (as the geologist Clarence King had), in lumber, and in an unspecified speculation in California.41 Always on the lookout for new opportunities, Horace is drawn to Asheville, which he envisions as a future Swiss-style mountain resort or an American Baden-Baden with its nearby sulfur springs. Ironically, the development of the resort and the building of the railroad threaten the very wilderness that is the site’s main attraction.