Quarrel & Quandary

by Cynthia Ozick

  With Minny, during and after the war, he walked, joked, talked seriously or playfully, meanwhile pursuing his “long and secret apprenticeship,” as Gordon terms it, hiding his neophyte efforts from his family. In 1861 the Temple sisters settled with their guardians in Newport, an outpost of high-minded Boston. Julia Ward Howe was there, together with artists, historians, and assorted bluebloods and utopians; some, like the Jameses, came only for a season. It was here that James took in, for all the future, the quicksilver shimmer that was Minny—the ease, the freedom, the candor, the generous stride and the generous mind. James in old age remembered her, in the “pure Newport time,” the “formative, tentative, imaginative Newport time,” as “absolutely afraid of nothing.” She, for her part, confided to Helena de Kay that her cousin Harry was “as lovely as ever, verily the goodness of that boy passeth human comprehension.” Each discovered enchantment in the other, James in a sympathetic recognition of daring unbound by social constraint, Minny through sensing affectionate approval, as she had failed to feel it in the other Jameses. Minny reported that William, in fact, thought her “a bad thing.” James relied on Minny to see as he saw, through the imagination; and Minny trusted Harry to be kind.

  He was seventeen, she fifteen, when they began to roam the Newport landscape together; then he was twenty, she eighteen; and then he was twenty-six, ready to escape family and country for a life of autonomy—after which they never again met. He was on his way to London, with valuable letters of introduction in his pocket. He lunched with Leslie Stephen, and called on George Eliot, William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Charles Darwin; he was inching into the great world of letters. From England he went on to France, Switzerland, and Italy, heading for Rome. Minny, left behind, was compelled to exercise her own large ideas of autonomy within the walls of a society that confined young women to certain clear limits; pushing against commonly accepted restraints, she seemed oddball, a bad thing. She was restrained in still another way: she had contracted tuberculosis. Her sister Kitty, at twenty-five, had married Richard Stockton Emmet, a wealthy man of forty-seven. Minny, thin and ailing, went to live with the Emmets in Pelham, New York, where she was isolated and without real support. The Tweedys, her guardians, had in effect cast her off. As for her James relations, William, Alice, and Mrs. James openly disdained her, while the self-absorbed Henry, Sr., charged her with pride and conceit, and advised her to practice Christian humility. With her lungs hemorrhaging, it was plain to Minny (and to the medical wisdom of the period) that her only chance for improvement lay in a warm climate: “Rome, with its dry winter and cloudless skies, was the common hope of consumptives,” Gordon explains. “Another winter in Pelham,” Minny wrote to her cousin Harry in Rome, “might go far to finishing me up.” In both social and medical terms, she was unable to travel alone, and the Tweedys, who went often to Italy, and who had reared the orphaned girl from the age of nine, never once invited her to go with them. A family proposal that would have taken her to the warmth of California in the company of her sister Elly fell through when Elly’s husband, a railroad magnate, decided that remaining in the East was better for business. “The grand plan for Minny’s recovery was incidental,” Gordon concludes. Minny’s recovery, it appeared, was incidental to nearly everyone close to her.

  She did not believe it was incidental to cousin Harry. Rome was her coveted goal, and not only for the curative powers of its climate. Rome signified civilization, beauty, the American girl’s dream of an idealized Europe; and Harry was there. “I am not very strong nowadays, altho’ it is summer,” she wrote to James. “I would give anything to have a winter in Italy.” “I want to go abroad,” she had pressed him earlier, “and I mean to think deeply about it, and try to get there.” She went so far as to arrange for a chaperon to accompany and care for her, but soon withdrew from this scheme: she was not well enough. But there was a deeper obstacle. She was slowly growing aware of James’s resistance to any tendril of a notion of dependence on him. Even relieved of physical responsibility for his cousin, he did not welcome her presence. He was at this time in a struggle with serious constipation and low spirits; he had fallen into a kind of invalidism. “To think that you should be ill and depressed so far away,” she sympathized, “just when I was congratulating myself that you, at all events, were well and happy, even if nobody else was.” “Nobody else” was Minny herself, but James was not responsive to this appeal or any other. The true blow came when he left Rome and returned to the dampness of England. She understood then—despite the old consolations of their longstanding intimacy—that she had no part at all in the principle that governed his being; her letters ceased. To William he confided his intention “to write as good a novel one of these days” as The House of the Seven Gables; his passions were overridingly directed to literary dominion. He may have cherished what he saw as Minny’s “intellectual grace” and “moral spontaneity,” but if she threatened, even at a distance, to distract his concentration and his will, he fled. Intellectual grace and moral spontaneity were not to intrude on his siege of the citadel of art—until, after Minny’s death, they, and she, became the brightest stuff of his novels and tales.

  4.

  He had, then, the capacity to disappoint—to disappoint even the tenderest relation of his life. The tenderness, with Minny, was of a purity and a clarity; there might be a skein of romance thrown over their old walks and talks, but there was no question of marriage, no teasing sexuality. And James was still Harry.

  Ten years later, at thirty-six, he had become Henry James, acclaimed man of letters, lionized author of the hugely popular Daisy Miller. It was at this time that he found himself pursued—at least he felt pursued—by Constance Fenimore Woolson, herself an American expatriate, who had traveled to London to present him with a letter of introduction. The letter wove together certain interesting connections. It had been given to Woolson by Henrietta, another of Minny Temple’s sisters, who was now living in Cooperstown, New York—a village named for Woolson’s great-uncle, James Fenimore Cooper, the famed novelist of the American frontier. Northern-born, Woolson moved South after the Civil War, visiting battlefields and military cemeteries, interviewing freed slaves, and publishing well-received fiction grounded in these explorations. When her mother died, she began a wandering Continental life, mainly in Italy, in hotels, pensions, or rented flats, industriously bringing out novels and stories. Her reputation grew sufficiently for the Nation to charge her, in a swipe at literary women, with “infesting the magazines.” She was, in short, a serious professional in an age when women who wrote were ferociously disparaged. “Women aren’t literary in any substantial sense of the term,” James complained, and produced the mocking tale of “Greville Fane” to prove the point. He called female reviewers “the hen-sex,” and fumed at being seated at dinner with “a third-rate female novelist.” Gordon slyly notes that even the monumental George Eliot did not escape diminishment: if she had seen and known more of life, James said, “she would have done greater things.” This from a man who had avoided battle at home, frequented country houses abroad, and charted his characters’ secret meditations when they were mostly indoors and sitting still.

  Woolson and her letter of introduction missed James in London—he had already left for Paris—and caught him in Florence. It was a friendship that was destined to be unequal. She came to him as an adulator, defining herself—suitably—as the lesser writer; but he made her out to be less than she was. On one occasion he wounded her bitterly when he described her in a letter as “amiable,” the kind of blandishment he applied to the generality of ladies whom he was an old hand at charming. She knew she was fiercer than that, and darker, and a hundred times more ambitious. He had met, Gordon tells us, “a writer absorbed in writing even more completely than himself.” In their early acquaintance in Florence they made the rounds together of churches and galleries, paintings and sculptures, James leading and discoursing, Woolson rapturously attending. He had begun by thinking of her as a
neatly dressed spinster, deaf in one ear, “a good little woman,” “a perfect lady,” “Miss Woolson.” When her intellect and dedication showed themselves indefeasibly, he chose to call her Fenimore: an open recognition of sorts, which led to his talking over with her his current work. “I see her at discreet intervals,” he admitted to William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic, who published both Woolson and James. “She is a very intelligent woman, and understands when she is spoken to.” He had advanced, cautiously, to an appreciation of her—but she was always subordinate. She was, in his phrase, a “resource.” He sent her his dramatization of Daisy Miller (it rankled him that it was never staged); she read and responded during an intense period when she was laboring thirteen hours a day to complete a manuscript of her own. One of her novels, serialized in Harper’s, was so successful that she felt obligated to apologize to James. “Even if a story of mine should have a large ‘popular’ sale,” she told him, she of course recognized that “the utmost best of my work cannot touch the hem of your first or poorest.” And if he exploited her admiration and the usefulness of her literary scrutiny, she did not protest.

  Nor did she protest that he hid their friendship; she colluded in his project of secrecy. Ten years of association were suppressed. “None of his London circle knew of her presence in his life,” Gordon reveals. He rarely spoke or wrote of Woolson, and then only obliquely, masking the quality of their relationship. In 1886, on a visit to Florence, where she was then residing, he spent three weeks in rooms literally next door to hers, in a house she had rented. It had all the comforts of a private domesticity. A similar arrangement was undertaken the following year; again they divided the house, she on an upper floor, he on a lower. These prolonged occasions, with their meals and talks and inevitable familiarity, were kept carefully screened from James’s usual society. And still he could disappear from her ken for eighteen months at a time. She may now and then have been a solace to him, but he dreaded being linked with her—he feared the publicity of an “attachment.” As for Woolson, she not only understood when she was spoken to; she understood far more. A character in an 1882 story, “The Street of the Hyacinth,” intimates her sense of James: “He was an excellent evader when he chose to exert himself, and he finally got away from the little high-up apartment … without any positive promise as to the exact date of his next visit.” “My plans are uncertain,” the Jamesian persona asserts. “I have a habit of not assuming responsibility, I suppose I have grown selfish.”

  James evaded Woolson whenever it pleased him. In January of 1894 she evaded him, and horribly: she threw herself from the window of her “little high-up apartment,” this one in Venice, recently let. Like James himself (and like William and Alice), she was subject to periods of black depression. When the report of her death arrived, James at first thought it was from influenza, and prepared to go to the funeral. But when he learned she was a suicide, he recoiled, pronounced her “deranged,” and insisted that she “was not, she was never, wholly sane.” According to Gordon, this “slur of uncontrollable dementia” had a self-protective aim. “The coded message is plain: no one,” she argues, “not the best of friends, could have prevented this death.” The publicity James had always feared did, after all, explode around him. As long as three years after the event, the New York Herald was identifying him as “the principal mourner,” and offering as “the truth about Mr. James’s bachelorhood” his having been “this other author’s devoted slave.… Miss Woolson was not to be won.”

  Three months after Woolson’s death, James committed himself to an extraordinarily uncharacteristic task. Woolson’s sister and niece, Clara and Clare Benedict, were sailing from America to Venice to dismantle the little high-up apartment and all its accumulated treasures. James left London and eagerly joined them in the work of sorting and clearing—sacrificing five full weeks to manual drudgery in Woolson’s memory. This seemingly charitable act had a deeply self-serving purpose. The continuing wet weather called for a daily fire, and into it—either trusted or unnoticed by his companions—James tossed every scrap that touched on himself or revealed anything that might cause him uneasiness.

  Woolson served James ever afterward. A version of her turns up as the unnamed woman writer in “The Altar of the Dead”; as May Bartram in “The Beast in the Jungle”; as Miss Gostrey in The Ambassadors; and as Miss Staverton in “The Jolly Corner,” a title derived from “Cheerful Corner,” Woolson’s childhood home. It was from a story of Woolson’s that James took the phrase, and the metaphor, of “The Figure in the Carpet.” Three times he visited her grave in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. And, most mysteriously, in the autumn of 1894, in Oxford, he sought out the furnished flat she had occupied for the two preceding years and briefly let it; he slept in her bed.

  Lyndall Gordon begins her remarkable study—intuitive, scholarly, novel-like, bold—with an amazing image. In 1956, four decades after James’s death, a BBC program in his honor recorded, from Florence, the voice of an elderly woman who as a young girl had known James. She was remembering snatches of a scene he had related, all the while oddly laughing, about the death of “some very famous person” in Venice, about having to “do certain things,” and about dresses, and a lagoon, and “horrible black balloons.” Gordon opens her history with a reconstruction of this fantastic (and perhaps fantasized) memory, drawing also from a passage in “The Aspern Papers.” A gentleman in a gondola in the middle of a Venetian lake is in the act of heaving into the water a bundle of lady’s garments, all dark-colored and nicely tailored:

  The gondolier’s pole would have been useful for pushing them under the still water. But the dresses refused to drown. One by one they rose to the surface, their busts and sleeves swelling like black balloons. Purposefully, the gentleman pushed them under, but silent, reproachful, they rose before his eyes.

  It seems unlikely that James, with or without the Benedicts’ leave, would have contrived so strange an expedition to dispose of Woolson’s clothes. And yet the unlikely, the driven, the weird, were never foreign to his imagination. Gordon’s picture of swollen sleeves and torsos resisting drowning, stubbornly bobbing, is as suggestive as she means it to be: a woman returning, a woman refusing to vanish. The two women, Minny Temple and Constance Woolson, whose phantoms took hold of James’s vision, fevering and inflaming it, again and again replenish Gordon’s thesis. Posthumously, they fed his genius. But when they were alive, his genius beat them off, defending itself with the isolating fortifications that alone sustain literary obsession. Before Harry turned his back on her, Minny believed her cousin’s goodness passed comprehension. Woolson, older and worldlier, had a more sardonic view of what to expect. In a story about a literary lion, published a year after the start of her problematic friendship with James, she wrote: “Let us see a man of genius who is ‘good’ as well.” The skeptical quotation marks emphasize her discernment: the ruthless sovereignty of the Master, the defensive selfishness of art.

  Cinematic James

  There appears to be no record of Henry James’s ever having seen a movie. He died in London in 1916, at the age of seventy-three, a dozen years before the introduction of sound. The highbrow term “film” was decades in the future; what people went to was the picture show. And if Charlie Chaplin was deemed an artist by the discerning few, James was assuredly not among them. No one distinguished more stringently between High and Low than this acclaimed literary Master, author of matchless tales and architecturally resplendent novels. And wouldn’t he think of movies as Low?

  But James was enraptured by drama, and all his life tried to succeed in the theater, the only medium available to his era. “The dramatic form,” he wrote in 1882, “seems to me the most beautiful thing possible.” And another time: “An acted play is a novel intensified.” He was single-mindedly obsessed by the notion of the scene. As a novelist, he explained, he worked on “absolutely scenic lines,” and developed dialogue as it might be employed in a script, “with the loose end as gross an impe
rtinence on its surface, and as grave a dishonor, as the dangle of a snippet of silk or wool on the right side of a tapestry.”