Portrait of A Novel (11 page)

The terms in which homosexuality was understood changed radically over the course of James’s adult life. In 1895 a series of trials ended by sending Oscar Wilde to jail on a charge of “gross indecency.” The playwright had been at the peak of his success, with
The Importance of Being Earnest
running as the season’s great new hit, when he filed a suit for libel against the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas. Queensberry had described him as a
“somdomite”
[
sic
] and Wilde was unsurprisingly unable to make his case. He was then arrested under a law that made homosexual acts between men illegal. His first criminal trial ended in a hung jury; the second sent him to jail for two years. Those trials are now sometimes taken as the point at which the “homosexual” began to be recognized as a type, a category of person—a category defined by the criminal law. Yet that definition has, paradoxically, proved an important station on the road to our contemporary understanding of homosexuality as an identity, something as central to one’s sense of self as one’s ethnic inheritance or biological sex; an intermediate stage medicalized the term, viewing it as a psychological disorder. In the early years of James’s life, however, homosexuality was seen in terms of practices, not persons: specific actions, in relation to which one might be defined as a “bugger” or a “sodomite.” It was understood as a taste, a preference for particular forms of friction, and like all tastes it involved an element of choice. Though
as
a taste it was also a habit, a craving, a vice; perhaps indeed an addiction, like opium or absinthe. The most common adjective in descriptions of such practices was, in fact, “vicious”; use that word and no more need be said.

Tastes can change, however, or be broken; so at least many people in James’s period believed, and in 1864 Symonds had married in the hopes that it might change his. It didn’t. On his many stays in Venice the historian later enjoyed a long affair with his gondolier, Angelo Fusato, and in recent years he has become an important figure in our developing understanding of Victorian homosexuality. At his death in 1893, Symonds left behind a frank memoir, unpublished until 1984, and two privately printed books.
A Problem in Greek Ethics
(1883) examined same-sex relations in the ancient world that he took as a model, and was circulating from hand to hand in London by the time James wrote “The Author of ‘Beltraffio.’” The second book,
A Problem in Modern Ethics
(1891), provided both a rigorous account of current medical knowledge, and a refutation of popular prejudice against what he called “inverts.” There were only fifty copies printed, but Gosse had one and James read it almost immediately. He found it impressive, and admired Symonds’s bravery. Yet while his sympathy is clear, so too is his sense that he himself would not be joining any
“band of the emulous.”

So far as we know, James met Symonds just once, during his first year in England, and described him in a letter to William as a
“mild cultured man, with the Oxford perfume.”
The perfume was that of aestheticism and the phrase should have been a giveaway; though not perhaps to William. They were both in Venice in the same spring of 1881—Symonds met Fusato that May—and possibly James heard talk of him then. We do have one letter from the novelist to the historian. James had sent him his own 1882 essay on that city, and in the winter of 1884, just a month before he planned out his story, he wrote in reply to Symonds’s (now lost) note of appreciation. He wanted to recognize Symonds’s position as one of the few
“who love [Venice] as much as I do . . . . for it seemed to me that the victims of a common passion should sometimes exchange a look.”
The words sound astonishingly blunt. But to hear them that way we have to accept, first, that James knew all, about himself and Symonds too; and second, that he would admit to that knowledge in writing to someone he had met just once. This seems unlikely. James did, however, have a way of shutting his ears to his own double entendres, and one can imagine the bewilderment of the apparently humorless Symonds, a man free of cant and camp alike. There’s no record of his reply, and James usually kept his distance from that Oxford perfume, which as the century waned became ever more explicitly linked with homosexuality. He referred to Wilde as an
“unclean beast”
when they were both in Washington in the winter of 1882, and his later sympathy at the playwright’s arrest had a distinct edge.
“He was never in the smallest degree interesting to me,”
he told Gosse, “but this hideous human history has made him so—in a manner.” There is in all this a great deal of protective coloration from a man who told his friend Nadal that
“a position in society is a legitimate object of ambition.”

Let me add one more detail before returning to “The Author of ‘Beltraffio.’” In his memoirs Symonds wrote that
“being what I am, the great mistake—perhaps the greatest crime of my life, was my marriage.”
Not that it was entirely a failure. They were happy in their children, and after a time his own sexuality left his wife free of appetites she thought ignoble. Nevertheless, it had been founded on deceit—and he had deceived himself as well as her, for in ignoring the truth of his own passions he had been willing “to accept the second best and to give the second best.” It’s hard to read those words without recalling something Isabel Archer says about another character near the end of the
Portrait:
“She made a convenience of me.”
Both her words, and Symonds’s own, bring back James’s letter to Grace Norton about marriage. He was ever-cautious, he denied himself much, and he knew his world’s limits too well to be brave. But he did not commit that particular injustice.

W
e never learn just what Mark Ambient’s books are like. James gives us no quotations, no plot summaries, no details. There’s an obvious dramatic reason for that: how could any novel be so wicked as to make a child’s death seem the lesser evil? Better to tantalize us with the thought of what
might
be there, and indeed James teases us in similar ways in almost all of his stories about writers. “The Death of the Lion” concerns a missing manuscript, the eponymous letters of
The Aspern Papers
are burned unread, and every character who figures out “The Figure in the Carpet” dies before revealing its secret. Nor are these puzzles limited to James’s stories about artists. He refuses to tell us the source of Chad Newsome’s wealth in
The Ambassadors
, doesn’t specify the contents of
In the Cage
’s crucial telegram, and never lets us know if the ghosts in
The Turn of the Screw
are really there. Those are the easy examples. More difficult are the tales that depend upon an economy of knowledge, those about the impossibility of ever knowing what happens inside another person.
What was she thinking?
—we’ve all said those words, whether in outrage, frustration, or bemusement. But really it’s the question of James’s fiction as a whole. Knowledge in his world remains a scarce resource, and he almost never allows himself the novelist’s privilege of shuttling from mind to mind. Even in the third person he restricts himself to the point of view of a single character, a figure who understands as little about the other characters’ inner lives as we do of our neighbors’.

The French critic Tzvetan Todorov has suggested that such lacunae are themselves the figure in James’s own carpet, that his stories are
“always based on the
quest for an absolute and absent cause
.”
They depend on the unspoken. In “The Beast in the Jungle,” John Marcher’s life-determining secret is the simple fact that he has one. It is there, and yet not, has shape but no substance. We call such haunting things “uncanny,” a term that Freud defines as the
“name for everything that ought to have remained . . . hidden but has come to light.”
Except with James that light throws shadows, a chiarascuro in which one’s hurt remains obscure, in which secrets are sensed but not shown. In “The Private Life” he imagines a great writer with a literally divided self, a man with two bodies. One of them goes about in public, he dines and talks and is merry. The other stays in his room—where he works. Only in the late “Jolly Corner” does the hidden step into sight, when Spencer Brydon finds himself staring at a ghostly figure who seems to be his own disfigured double, a figure at once like him and unlike, the same and yet different. Such a persistent pattern of the imagination runs deep, so deep that we should hesitate in giving it a name. Still, I think we must—must define it as James’s sense of his own buried life, though even then I would pause before limiting it either to or by the word “closet.”

That term does, admittedly, work for “The Author of ‘Beltraffio,’” a story that seems itself in the closet—the story, and not just its subject. The stakes for which its characters play go beyond the morality of books alone, and their urgency appears inexplicable in terms of the tale itself. Its absent cause isn’t Ambient’s work but rather Symonds’s own sexuality, and the story’s power depends upon its reticence, upon its inability to step forth and speak, to tell us what it means. I do not, however, think that we can extend this sense of the closet to James’s work as a whole, to say that in all cases its absent cause has that same narrow referent. Or at least not only. In postwar America John Cheever’s closeted bisexuality allowed him, in stories like “The Swimmer” and “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” to analyze the masks and deceptions of suburban life, to see its full measure of sorrow, and yet without making that sexuality in itself his subject. It pierced a window; it was not what he saw in looking through it. So too with Henry James. His own renunciations and solitude allowed him to understand the renunciations of others. It allowed him to portray the mix of anguish and rueful acceptance with which Ralph Touchett regards his invalid’s fate. But they are not, or not always, the same thing.

I
n 1907, James hired a boyishly handsome young woman named Theodora Bosanquet as his typist. She came from a sprawling cultivated family, with links to the Darwins, and was herself a graduate of University College, London. She had also been reading James since her teens, and when the position came open, she abandoned a more remunerative career as an indexer and learned to take dictation; she stayed with him until his death in 1916. In Rye she found rooms near Lamb House but moved back to London during the winter months that James himself spent in town. Probably she knew him as well in his final years as anyone, and indeed she found him his last London home, around the corner from the Chelsea flat that she shared with another young woman. She never married and after James’s death worked in war-related ministries, for which she received an MBE; later she wrote a book about the French poet Paul Valéry and was an editor at the progressive weekly
Time and Tide
. Yet she is best remembered for an elegant pamphlet, published by Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, called
Henry James at Work
.

That 1924 essay provides an indispensable account of his methods and character, and in it she notes that though James
“loved his friends . . . he was condemned by the law of his being to keep clear of any really entangling net of human affection and exaction.”
James was lonely, he wanted company and affection, wanted to open his arms wide and then fold them tight, and yet by the time he began to fall for younger men, his habits were so fixed that he could not have changed them if he wished. The first of them, in 1899, was the sculptor Hendrik Andersen. James met him in Rome and tried to advise him on his career, much as Rowland Mallet had done with the eponymous Roderick Hudson. He commissioned work from him, talked him up, wrote often, and invited him repeatedly to Lamb House; Andersen in turn hoped that James might provide some financial support for his own dream of a utopian community. Later there was, as I’ve said, the caddish Morton Fullerton, and an astonishingly handsome Anglo-Irishman called Jocelyn Persse; well connected and with an acquiline nose but entirely unintellectual, Persse later said he could never understand why James liked him. The last of them was the popular novelist Hugh Walpole, who years after claimed that he once offered himself to his mentor. But though James may have addressed him in letters as
“darlingest Hugh!”
he was also reported to have backed away, saying
“I can’t! I can’t!”
Another friend, a shrewd French scholar named Urbain Mengin, speculated that James would have had
“a horror of the physical act.”
His very way of grasping another man’s arm suggested that “he wasn’t capable of this kind of surrender . . . he would never have done this if these gestures had, for him, the slightest suggestion of a pursuit of physical love.”

James’s life is as massively documented as that of any American writer, but still we find gaps—and have no way to tell if they are in the documents or in the life itself. The
biographer Sheldon Novick
has claimed that in 1865 James had a brief affair with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. But his argument depends upon a French phrase that James scribbled in his notebooks forty years later, and Novick’s interpretation seems, by any standards of evidence, uncertain. James speaks there of “
L’initiation première
,” but the initiation to which he refers is very clearly his entry into the life of letters. The phrase belongs to his memories of the Cambridge in which his career began, of the Norton family and the poet James Russell Lowell and of hearing Dickens read on his American tour of 1867. He only mentions Holmes some sentences later, and in a very different context, describing his envy on learning that his friend had left for England. Still, James did sometimes ask for news of the future jurist with a mix of avidity and asperity that he didn’t show in writing of others. Novick’s argument is unconvincing, but I wouldn’t rule out some one-sided and perhaps half-understood attachment. Nor would I insist upon it.

In a 1913 letter to Walpole, James wrote that he didn’t
“regret a single ‘excess’ of my responsive youth—I only regret, in my chilled age, certain occasions and possibilities I didn’t
embrace
.”
That language tells us little, however, about either the number or the nature of those excesses, and the scare quotes imply that nothing he did can quite rise to the emphasis of the sentence’s last word. Other young men on a European tour found that the Continent offered them the chance for a safely anonymous sexual life; Symonds knew that his gondolier had been kept by other men before him. James would have had such opportunities, but we will never learn if he took them. Yet we do know that he was no prude, however discreet and however abstemious. His fiction hangs upon sexual themes—sexual and not romantic—to a degree unusual for Anglo-American writers of his period. Both
The Golden Bowl
(1904) and
What Maisie Knew
(1897) depend upon adultery. The former describes Maggie Verver’s growing awareness of her husband’s affair with her own best friend; in the latter, a child of divorce serves as the conduit for a liaison between her stepparents. And
The Awkward Age
(1899) is just one of his many accounts of sexual education: of what, and at what age, one can both know and admit that one knows.