Portrait of A Novel (13 page)

He got back to England at the beginning of June and had at once to prepare for a visit from his brother William. Harvard’s assistant professor of physiology planned to divide his summer between England and the Alps, and had left his wife and infant son in Cambridge as soon as his classes were over. James put him in the flat beneath his own, and immediately wrote to Quincy Street with a report on his health, noting that William still took “
himself . . . too hard
and too consciously.” It was the first time they had seen each other since Henry’s emigration five years before, and William’s reaction to his brother’s life provides a measure of just how far the novelist had come. The two of them often breakfasted together, and sometimes dined at the Reform Club in a comfort that William described as a
“tremendous material bribe.”
Most of their days they spent apart, with the younger of them at work and the older mixing tourism with a series of professional calls. So William took himself to the National Gallery, where he found the Turners baffling, and dined with the Adamses, at whose table the talk was of
Daisy Miller
and another guest at first mistook him for Henry. He met Robert Browning at a reception, but couldn’t get the poet to talk to him; Henry had no such difficulty.

William found England expensive and thought that if Henry weren’t covering his lodging he would have had to run off to somewhere cheaper. In time his own books would pay him handsomely, but the profitable
Principles of Psychology
was still a decade off, and for now Henry’s earnings far outstripped his brother’s salary. Indeed, William’s letters to Cambridge suggest a mixture of surprise and pique at his
“inscrutable”
sibling’s worldly success. The younger man seemed utterly at home, and his very ease made William realize that his expatriation would be permanent. Yet the philosopher was also surprised by how busy he kept himself with
“dinners and parties . . . especially as he was all the time cursing them for so frustrating his work.”
It was his old criticism once more, but envy gave it a new edge. Henry was superficial, preferring a glancing contact with many things to a “deeper one at a few points,” and William thought it would only get worse with age.

About one thing William was right. Henry did complain about the pressures of social life, and especially about all the
“transitory Americans”
who insisted upon seeing him. Distant cousins, the friends of friends—they all left their cards and hoped for an attention that he had “neither time nor means to show them.” All he cared about was the book on his desk. He resented anything that pulled him away from it, and that included Quincy Street itself. On 20 July he wrote to his parents that he would have to put off the visit to America on which they had begun to count. He
wanted
to go home, he told them—have no doubt about that. But he wouldn’t sail with the
Portrait
only half-done and could not envision working in Cambridge under the schedule to which serialization would keep him. That same day he sent the book’s first pages to Howells and apologized for the lateness of his copy. He sometimes suffered from crippling headaches when he had to deal with family questions, and he had just spent three days in bed, unable to hold a pen.

The 48 pages he mailed to Boston included the novel’s opening serial installment and much of the second, and James promised the rest of it and
“the whole of the third”
within a few days, chapters that would take Isabel up past Warburton’s proposal. They had been put in type by his British publisher, Macmillan, who both serialized the novel in its eponymous magazine and published its three-volume version; in America the book appeared in a single volume from Houghton, Mifflin. Macmillan pulled two sets of proofs for James to correct, with the second one crossing the ocean to Howells. That initial installment was a long one—it contained the book’s first five chapters—and James thought that the later pieces might be shorter. Yet when he sent the fourth part in September, he noted that every part would be long, and the novel he had originally planned in eight installments was starting to look as though it would run for twelve; in the end, it took fourteen. The book was growing. Isabel’s “many developments” were taking their space and time, and though he knew how it all would end, the road to that ending did indeed have its unexpected dips and turns. In later years he sometimes found, and inevitably to his surprise, that a story he had projected at 5,000 words seemed barely finished in twelve.

All that summer and fall he worked in a way he described as
“
tant bien que mal
.”
He spent most of his time in town, though he did go to Brighton for a few days in August; he enjoyed the breeze after the stilled air of London, but then had to flee the glare of the sun. In early autumn he wrote to his sister that though he felt homesick
“for a sniff of an American October,”
he was nevertheless happy to be alone in London. The city still seemed to him empty, he had few dinners to attend, and “unadulterated leisure to work.” The phrasing is interesting—the work of writing was a form of luxury, but an evening out was simply work itself. One distraction he did allow himself was a visit at the end of November to the Bedfordshire house of Lord Rosebery, a future prime minister who had married a Rothschild but wore his millions
“with such tact and bonhomie, that you almost forgive him.”
Though James was becoming blasé, or at least enjoyed pretending he was. His invitations may have been smarter than ever, but he told Quincy Street that the party included “no one very important”—just a former viceroy of India and the great House of Commons orator John Bright.

And each day the
Portrait
grew, grew
“steadily, but very slowly.”
The opening chapters came out in the October issue of
Macmillan’s Maga
z
ine
, published on the first of that month; two weeks later they appeared in the November
Atlantic
. He sent Howells the fifth installment on November 11, pages that would run that February; by that time he presumably had the sixth part ready to be set, and a seventh under way. He does not appear to have struggled with a single deadline, and wrote to Alice of his pleasure in the success that had made it possible for him to take his time, to work deliberately and without haste. James usually had—he needed to have—several pieces on his desk at once, writing stories and essays alongside his novels. But now he kept the magazines waiting.
The
Nation
and the
Cornhill
,
Scribner’s
, and the
North American Review
—they all had to do without him. During the year and more that he spent on
The Portrait of a Lady
, Henry James wrote nothing else except a single piece on the London theater, working throughout with a single-mindedness he had never known before and would never have again.

9.

THE ENVELOPE OF CIRCUMSTANCES

O
VER 10,000 LETTERS
by Henry James survive today in libraries and private collections. Thousands more have been lost. Some of those were bread-and-butter notes or two-line responses to invitations, but others were likely as playful and newsy and wise as any now extant, letters thrown away upon receipt, left behind in a hotel room, or even burned as the older James asked his friends to do. Only a fraction of the surviving ones have been published, and though a complete edition is now under way, it will be many years before the full record is in print. Still, one thing seems clear: in all those many thousands of pages James rarely says anything substantive about his work. He might discuss its financial details with his father, or warn a friend against reading something in a magazine, telling her to wait for the book instead. He eventually warned William against reading him at all, so little was the pragmatist in sympathy with his late style. To publishers he sometimes sketched out a proposed work, but most of his letters to them remained pure business. Nor did he seek a reading from other writers, however much they might want—and fear—one from him.

His exchange with Howells provides a partial exception to all this, and in December 1880 he wrote the editor that his
“strictures on [the
Portrait
] seem . . . well-founded.”
Howells thought Isabel overanalyzed and Henrietta overdrawn, and while James believed that the journalist was less of a caricature than she appeared, he also admitted that most American readers wouldn’t see it that way. The problem with Isabel was more complicated. He had drawn her at full length before he had made her do anything, and now could only offer a note of reassurance, writing that after the opening chapters she wouldn’t “turn herself inside out quite so much.” That was a partial truth, and late in the novel Isabel would pull herself to pieces once more. Still, that lay months in the future, and much of the intervening drama is conducted in dialogue.

James could write Mozartean ensembles of three or more characters all talking together, voices that remain clear and distinct even as they step upon one another’s lines. But most of this novel’s crucial scenes are two-handers. Isabel goes up to London soon after she rejects Lord Warburton, taking rooms with Henrietta at a Picadilly hotel, while Ralph, their nominal protector, camps out at his father’s unused London house. And on her last day in the capital, she is made to suffer through three chapters of strenuous talk, in which she doesn’t turn herself inside out so much as watch other people do it for her. First comes Ralph, who knows about Warburton’s proposal and wants to learn her reasons for refusing him. Not that he’s sorry. Her marriage would have finished off the story, but now he can have the same thing that we do: the pleasure of the next installment, the
“entertainment of seeing what a young lady does who won’t marry Lord Warburton.”
Watching Isabel has become his compensation for a spectator’s life, but Ralph also takes a curious satisfaction in characterizing the terms of her actions and tells her that she exacts a great deal from other people simply by seeming to ask so little of them. She withholds herself, she refuses to take what the world offers; and by this he means something more than just Warburton’s hand. She worries too much about
“whether this or that is good for you,”
but the truth is that she thinks nothing in the world too perfect for her, and the corollary is that this bird of paradox will refuse to take anything less.

That evening she hears a knock at her door, and the hotel’s servant shows in the stern-jawed Caspar Goodwood. Isabel doesn’t expect him—she hasn’t even answered his letter, and his visit is made with Henrietta’s connivance. He knows he displeases her, and yet upbraids her as a way of pleading his cause; his very presence seems a form of assault. Nevertheless, he remains a part of her past and the
“stubbornest fact she knows,”
a fact that requires an answer. So Isabel puts into speech everything she has told herself in justifying her rejection of Warburton, and ends by saying, with self-conscious grandeur, that if he ever hears a rumor of her marriage,
“remember what I have told you . . . and venture to doubt it.”
She is agitated, and exhilarated, and once alone she drops to her knees as if in prayer. For Isabel has a sense of victory. James writes in his opening pages that her love of liberty is as yet almost entirely theoretical, but she has now tested it twice by saying no, and the pleasure Isabel takes from it is every bit as important as the end it gains for her.
“She had done what she preferred,”
and when Henrietta returns, the two of them quarrel.

“You are drifting to some great mistake,”
the reporter tells her, and many of the things Isabel’s friends say in these chapters will echo throughout, an encircling web of voices, of partial views that overlap enough to make us question her own sense of herself. For Isabel is all too liable to trip over her own imagination, a young woman who has no sense of what her freedom might be
for
. She knows what she doesn’t want, not what she does, and has no other plot with which to affront what still seems her inevitable destiny. What she does have, though, is both courage and a sense of adventure, and she replies to Henrietta’s words about drift by defining her own idea of happiness: “a swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see.” Risk and speed and an open road into the unknown: the picture is enticing, even if Henrietta thinks it better suited to “an immoral novel,” and in fact it’s a close paraphrase of a line from
Madame Bovary
. Yet though Isabel sees herself as making her own life, the image she chooses undercuts her desire. For her language suggests that she herself sits inside that coach—and somebody else holds the reins.

In the morning Ralph has news. His father’s health has been precarious for years, and a new attack has put him beyond recovery. Daniel Touchett will linger for weeks, as the autumn defines itself in rain, but he will not get up again. Isabel will take her turn in the Gardencourt sickroom, and so of course does Ralph, who is watching there alone one day when the old man finds the energy to talk. Save your strength, the son says, but Mr. Touchett refuses;
“I shall have a long rest. I want to talk about you.”
The banker wants his son to find a new interest, something to help keep him alive. He should marry—should marry Isabel. And Ralph does admit that
“if certain things were different,”
he would indeed be in love with his cousin. But he is dissembling here, and his father catches him. They have
“never prevaricated before,”
and a deathbed isn’t the place to start.

Mr. Touchett will not die on this day, but these pages are the last in which we see him. James would write other memorable deathbed scenes, including one later in this novel, but this was his first. No reader forgets it, and yet our interest changes from one reading to the next. Its point of fascination alters as we do ourselves. These pages know heartbreak, but not that of Mr. Touchett’s death per se. What spikes an older reader to his seat is the way that the banker continues to worry about his son. He stays a father still, and attempts to guide and protect his boy even as his own breath fades. He is conscious of all that his son cannot do, and Ralph calls him
“Daddy”
even yet. He has remained dependent, and says that if his father dies “I shall do nothing but miss you.” That, however, is precisely what Mr. Touchett doesn’t want, and the two of them reach here beyond the temporizing of ordinary life. They speak as if the barriers that divide one person from another were down, and anything, everything, can be said.

What makes that clarity possible is the Touchetts’ focus on this world, and not some possible next one. There are many deathbeds in Victorian fiction, some full of prayer, and others concerned with the dying person’s attempt to make the world still feel his weight. Many of them show us characters sunk in fear, and others hit a high note of hope. But I have read no such scene so entirely untroubled by the hereafter as this one; its originality lies in what James feels himself free to leave out. Neither Ralph nor his father speaks of God, and they do not call a clergyman at the last. Isabel learns that Mr. Touchett has died only when she sees the doctor stand in the doorway and slowly draw on his gloves. In his ghost stories James did entertain the sense of some otherworldly life, but the characters in his major novels all live in a secular world. They may go to church as a social duty, though Isabel herself doesn’t seem to. (In this she is unlike Minny Temple, who took religious questions seriously and enjoyed listening to the day’s popular preachers.) They may go as tourists, as Isabel later will in Rome. But they lack any kind of formal belief, and neither God nor the institution of a church is present here even as something to fight against. That isn’t the only reason why the
Spectator
described this novel as marked by the
“cloven foot”
of agnosticism—but it will do as a start.

Nevertheless, these pages
are
about the future, about money and a will.
“I take a great interest in my cousin,”
Ralph says, though not the kind his father wishes, and he now tells the dying man that he wants “to put a little wind in her sails.” Isabel is not a dollar princess, not one of the American heiresses who in the decades after the Civil War went hunting for husbands among the often improvident members of Europe’s various aristocracies. The best known is Consuelo Vanderbilt, whose parents in essence sold her to the Duke of Marlborough. James would create such characters in both
The Wings of the Dove
and
The Golden Bowl
, but Isabel’s father has spent down his own relatively modest fortune, and she has almost no money of her own. Ralph has thought of a way to change that, however, and as he explains, a “veiled acuteness” steals into his father’s face. It is the last business proposition to which he will ever listen. Cut my own inheritance in half, Ralph says. Call it your own idea, let the lawyers think we have argued, and make Isabel rich. Let that money make her free—free to explore the life around her, to reach the limits of her own imagination, free of the need
“to marry for a support.”
The old man has questions; a banker still, he wants to know if it’s a good investment. What about the fortune hunters? That is indeed a risk, Ralph answers, a risk small but appreciable, and one he is prepared to take. The reply satisfies his father; whether it satisfies us is a different question.

Still, Mr. Touchett is rock-ribbed enough to suspect that this whole procedure is
“immoral”
; even an Isabel shouldn’t have everything made so easy. But what really makes us pause is another of his judgments. Ralph says that he wants to
“see her going before the breeze,”
and his father answers that he speaks as though it were all for his own amusement. He speaks, in fact, as if he were a novelist himself; as if, in the words of James’s preface, Isabel
“hovered before him . . . interesting him and appealing to him”
by the simple virtue of what and who she is. For Ralph sees his own job as that of creating possibilities for her, piecing together the situations that will show her to the best and most brilliant advantage. The more money in her purse, the more wind in her sails; the faster she will fly, the longer she will take to reach her narrative fulfillment. Hers—and his, and James’s own, and ours. For we too want to see what she’ll do in these new circumstances. James criticized his contemporaries for dropping fortunes upon their characters in a book’s last chapters, as though money were the resolution and reward of action. For him it is action’s very cause, and by thrusting fortune upon her in the middle, he has created a new set of conditions against which Isabel might prove herself.

Yet it’s one thing for James to do that for us, and another for Ralph to do it to her. A novel may have many ends in mind, but surely entertainment is one of them. What Ralph does, in contrast, is to use Isabel as a means to fulfill his own desires. I put the case strongly, because we need to see the crooked timber of self-interest in the most altruistic of intentions and the most likable of human subjects. I also put it strongly so that I may qualify it. For Ralph doesn’t envision any particular scene as developing from his gift. He wants—he says he wants—only to
“to see what she does with herself”
, to intervene just once, and then watch without taking further action. His father has a last question: what good will Ralph himself get from it all? But Ralph’s own good will be precisely the one he wants to give Isabel, that of a fully gratified imagination. He sinks his life in hers; his identification with his character, her character, is complete.

J
ames worked on this scene with the most confident of hands, and barely touched its dialogue in his 1906 revision. Isabel will inherit £70,000. It’s impossible to say with any certainty just how large an income that gives her, but James tells us that the money will remain in the affairs of the bank,
and bank stock
in that period often returned upward of 8 percent. Let’s say, conservatively, that she can spend £5,000 a year. The decision the Touchetts make about her will shape her life far more profoundly than any choice she has yet made for herself, and what Isabel calls her liberty is increasingly defined by what, in Ralph’s words to his mother, other people want to “do with her.” The girl is left alone when they first return from London, and in searching through the house she hears an unexpected ripple of music from Gardencourt’s vast drawing room. She recognizes Beethoven, though in the New York Edition James would change it to Schubert: to nineteenth-century ears a figure not of stormy passion but of the social arts, and a better choice for this particular pianist. She plays with unusual skill, and Isabel is immediately intrigued by the fact that this new guest, though an American,
“should so strongly resemble a foreign woman.”
And in fact her name is foreign.
“I am Madame Merle,”
she says, as though “referring to a person of tolerably distinct identity.”