Portrait of A Novel (22 page)

We know that they spent their days at their desks. Woolson had her deadlines to make on
Jupiter Lights
, a love story set in the American South, while James struggled with his long novel of artistic vocation,
The Tragic Muse
. But we know almost nothing else about those three weeks. One of its few records survives in a copy of
The Aspern Papers
that James gave to her there on October 16, adding the place and the date to his signature. It was, however, to be their last long period together, and the next year Woolson began a new course of restlessness, one that took her to Athens and Cairo before it dropped her down again in England. She settled briefly in Cheltenham, and then Oxford; she spoke of going back to America, but also of sending for the silver and linen she had left there a decade before. Each winter brought depression, a term to which she gave the meaning it has today; most people in her period called it neurasthenia instead. Yet she cherished her isolation and complained about the invitations that threatened it. She complained unless they were from James himself. He saw her with some regularity in England, but the letters that mention her are careful to place her at some rhetorical distance, as though hiding from both his correspondents and himself just how important Woolson had become to him. He clearly found something in her that he didn’t in his friendships with other women—and yet she never filled as large a space in his life as he did in hers.

What do we owe our friends? Each writer’s biographers have suggested that she moved to England to be near him. Was he then bound to repay that decision with the same attention he had showed in Florence and Geneva? I fall back upon rhetorical questions because there are no absolutes here, and there is so little that we can know for sure. Some writers finish a book with a sense of exhilaration; Woolson always ended her own in a state of nervous collapse. In the spring of 1893 she pushed through a draft of her fourth novel,
Horace Chase
, and then forced herself to make one last move, to Venice. She knew it was a sacrifice; as she wrote to a nephew, it meant “
giving up being
near my kind friend Mr. James.” But she added that the novelist had promised to come to Italy each year. At first she found rooms in a house with some other American women, and then in the fall she gained a sense of privacy and space by taking the top floors of the Casa Semitecolo, near what is now the Guggenheim Collection. The house backs onto the Grand Canal but nevertheless faces away from it, looking onto one of the smaller and darker of the city’s interior streets or
calle
. She hired a gondolier, and curiously enough the man recommended to her was Angelo Fusato, the lover of the now-dead John Addington Symonds.

Each month she grew ever more expectant of the visit James had promised for that fall—even as he himself made no firm plans for the journey. James’s sales had crashed at the end of the 1880s, for reasons I’ll describe in a later chapter, and he had now spent four years in trying to turn himself into a playwright, dreaming of a popular success he had rarely known in fiction. He was exasperated by the theater’s world of meetings and rehearsals and provincial tryouts, by the days of discussion with agents and managers that seemed never to have a result. But he was absorbed by it too, and all that fall the stage seemed to hold him tight. Perhaps he might manage a trip in the winter—though he also wrote to Ariana Curtis at the Palazzo Barbaro that he was afraid he had clumsily suggested “
to Miss Woolson
. . . that I was coming [to Venice] to ‘live.’”

He did not come. With whatever excuses or justifications, that was still the end of it. He did not come, and as winter set in, the city itself seemed to empty, with many of Woolson’s acquaintances running from its raw damp air. On her first visit to Venice ten years before, she had wondered “
whether the end
of the riddle of my existence may not be, after all, to live here, and die here. . . . This prospect doesn’t make me sad at all.” In the middle of January she fell sick, and her days became a routine of vomiting and fevers, doctors and laudanum. Woolson wasn’t alone—she had a nurse and a secretary, but no one for whose services she had not paid. She got worse, and then better. She gathered herself and found one final bit of strength. Soon after midnight on January 24 her nurse discovered that her bed was empty and the window open. Angelo Fusato found her body on the pavement below.

James got the news in a telegram, learning the fact of her death but not its manner, and prepared to go to Rome for the funeral, where she had asked to be buried in the city’s Protestant Cemetery. Then he received a newspaper clipping that referred to the death as a suicide and canceled his plans. He had thought she was merely “
alone and unfriended
at the last,” but now a more dreadful image seemed to hang in his eyes, and he felt himself collapse at its horror; the very power of his emotions made him see the journey as impossible. He wrote to John Hay that Woolson’s enduring melancholy meant that half one’s fondness for her took the form of anxiety, though he also believed that she hid her depression so successfully that only those who knew her well could have perceived her suffering. To Frank Boott he claimed that nothing short of a “
sudden
dementia
” could explain her action, and yet he also began to think that she had never been entirely sane.

We need here to parse both James’s reactions and the different interpretations that have been put upon Woolson’s death. Her family wanted to believe that in the delirium of fever she had simply fallen from the window. But the “
sills overlooking
the
calle
,” in Gordon’s words, “are not low.” One would have to climb over them, not simply topple out. A more common reading of her death is James’s own. Her action was the result of some frenzy or fit; suicide, yes, but not planned, not consciously willed or chosen. The most convincing interpretation, however, belongs to Gordon herself. Her careful examination of the surviving evidence, including a precisely circumstantial account by Woolson’s secretary, suggests a deliberate purpose, and suggests too that she was entirely lucid in the days immediately before her death. I would part from Gordon, though, in her reading of James’s own actions. She is troubled by his decision not to travel to the funeral, and views his hypotheses as self-exculpatory: if Woolson was both the victim of “sudden
dementia
” and also already disturbed, then no visit of his own could have prevented her action. Yet I think we must allow that even Henry James could feel so confused, so uncomprehending and distraught, that he would need to grope for an explanation. Even he could know grief’s alternating moments of incapacity and anger.

Suicide imposes a teleology. “
After
such an event
,” as James wrote to Frank Boott, “one sees symptoms, indications in the past.” One of Woolson’s doctors was the New York–born and Florence-based William Baldwin, who at different times had also treated both James and his siblings. James wrote to him soon after learning of Woolson’s death that two years earlier he had finally made up his mind as to the depths of her mental illness. The reasons for that judgment were “
too many and too private
” to put in a letter, and he suggested they might talk it through at their next meeting. Two years before would have been around the time she moved to Oxford, and his sense of her troubles might have made him both reluctant to join in her Venetian experiment, and hesitant about saying so. Delay seemed the soft option; but he could not have imagined the end.

Over the next few months, however, he would imagine it again and again. In April, James went to Venice, where he met Woolson’s sister and niece, and joined them in breaking the seal that the city authorities had placed on her apartment. What happened then is less easy to justify than his earlier reluctance to go either to Venice in the fall or to the funeral in Rome. Woolson carried her life wherever she went, accompanied always by the heavy trunks that contained her possessions—her clothes and mementoes and above all her papers. Her relatives had come to see the place where she died, and to take charge of those trunks. James stayed with them for weeks, helping them to sort and to sift until, as her niece wrote, “
all her precious things
were packed and boxed and sent to America.” Those things did not, however, include any of the letters James wrote to her, and the supposition has always been that in Venice he burned them.

Yet what was there to hide? Gordon writes that it was during the years of his friendship with Woolson that the idea of secrecy became central to James’s art. Todorov makes no reference to the author of “Miss Grief,” but he too defines this period as that in which an absent cause, an unnamed referent, came to stand as James’s own figure in the carpet. We may picture him before the fireplace, dropping one sheet after another into the flames, and yet can presume nothing about the contents of those letters from the simple fact that he burned them. Years later, at Lamb House, he made a pyre of the ones he himself had received, Woolson’s presumably among them. He asked his friends to destroy the letters they’d gotten from him and hoped he would have no biographer. It’s unlikely that the papers he destroyed in Venice contained any particular confession or scandal. To believe that they did, we would have to believe that their friendship had become an affair. Or we would need to believe he had told Woolson of his own hidden figure, offering some fuller explanation for his own refusal to marry, perhaps in response to a pointed question of her own. This too seems unlikely. Certainly her expectation that he would travel down to Italy each year does not suggest that she knew, while her pained realization that he wouldn’t come that winter speaks of some final defeat of hope. Perhaps those letters referred to uncertainties he hadn’t yet surmounted; perhaps he let the veil of familial piety drop and wrote more frankly to her than to others about his parents or siblings. The content of the secret matters less than the fact that there was one. They had met without telling others, and with all the limitations I have described above, she had still meant more to him than anyone knew.

Woolson’s relatives asked one last service of him. They wanted his help in disposing of her dresses, and rather than ask such friends as Katharine Bronson—she would have known the right charities for such things—James decided to drown them in the Lagoon. He hired a gondola one day toward dusk, and told the boatman to row far, far out, where the water was deep and they might presumably remain alone and unwatched. He took each piece of her clothing up from the deck and threw it into the water, but the sleeves puffed up from the trapped air inside, and the wide skirts spread out over the waves. The dresses would not sink, “
and they came up like balloons
all around him . . . horrible black balloons” that he tried again and again to beat down into the sea, only to find them swimming up to the surface and surrounding him. The scene has long provided one of the set pieces of Jamesian biography: a transparent image of psychic trauma, of the haunting return of the figure whose love he had denied. Both horrible and comic at once, the anecdote seems almost too good to be true, but the story did figure in the expatriate gossip of the period, a tear in the careful fabric of privacy that the two writers had tried to maintain. And perhaps it figured all the more because it recalls one of James’s own early ghost stories, “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes.” In that tale a woman opens a trunk containing the dresses and jewels of her dead sister, whose life she had destroyed—and is strangled by what lies inside.

The duplicitous narrator of
The Aspern Papers
writes that he had “
never failed
to acquit” his subject, that he was always able to justify anything that looked like “shabby behaviour.” James’s own chroniclers stand warned. Woolson’s death left him with questions that, in Fred Kaplan’s words, can be summed up like this: “
If her depression
had external coordinates, might he have been one of them?” She might have lived if he had come to Venice. She might have lived if he had been able to give more of himself; if, that is, he had been someone entirely different. Or, indeed, if she had. Her illness began early, long before their first meeting, and James’s presence in her life may well have helped more than his absence hurt. And finally, any reckoning must consider his own sexuality and the limits it placed upon their relationship; not just the physical ones, but those of knowledge too. I do not think we can blame him for what his century would not allow him to say, or her to recognize. When Woolson killed herself, she had known thirteen years of his defensive charm. In another age she would have known other things too, he would have spoken, she would have understood. That would not have made things simple, but it would have made them easier.

N
ot all of James’s readers will acquit him here. What matters more is that he did not acquit himself. The letters he sent immediately after Woolson’s death do, admittedly, try to push the thought of his own responsibility away. But the tales he now began to write seem to offer a different answer. In the fall of 1894, James started to work on a long and extraordinary series of ghost stories,
nouvelles
in which the protagonist finds himself haunted by a sense of missed opportunities. “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Beast in the Jungle,” “The Jolly Corner”—they are among his most perfect works, but there are other crucial stories from this time as well, like “The Friends of the Friends,” in which a man falls in love with the ghost of a woman he never met. None of them tracks his biographical situation directly, and yet we cannot minimize the effect of Woolson’s suicide on these pieces about love and responsibility, mourning and forgiveness. For these tales don’t use their ghosts to convey the experience of evil, as James does in
The Turn of the Screw
, which also belongs to this period. What they offer instead is the troubling sense of an alternate life. A solitary man, a sympathetic woman: it’s as though James were shaking the dice of character, and rolling them again and again; different combinations of the same two pieces, chronicles of could-haves and should-haves and even second chances.