Portrait of A Novel (29 page)

Except that Henry had gotten there first. His 1906 preface to the
Portrait
is the product of memory, and maybe we should be skeptical when he depicts his younger self as saying that he wanted to focus upon “the young woman’s own consiousness,” that he would make the story one of “her relation to herself.” But if any single chapter of the
Portrait
does embody those ambitions, it is this one, and it stands as an ever more central part of his
oeuvre
. He wrote to William in the spring of 1884 that the essay in
Mind
had “
defeated
” him, and yet some lines in that year’s “Art of Fiction” do seem to echo it. For him consciousness isn’t a stream but a “
chamber
,” and our sensibilities are like a spider’s web suspended within it, capturing everything that comes within reach of its filaments. Forty years later Virginia Woolf—he had known her from birth, he had dined with her parents—would describe that consciousness as a “
luminous halo
, a semi-transparent envelope.” The metaphor changes but the phenomenon remains, and what James does in this chapter is much closer to Woolf’s own achievement in
To the Lighthouse
than it is to Eliot’s
Middlemarch
. Of course, Woolf’s very sentences gave her contemporaries trouble, as at this period James’s own did not. In some ways the
Portrait
’s might seem but to extend what other writers had already done, to differ from them only in degree. Yet in his avoidance of buckets, in the inconclusive and associative flow of Isabel’s thoughts, and even in his sheer ability to sustain his account of those thoughts, James here goes so much further than his predecessors that it amounts to a difference in kind. No writer in English had yet offered so full an account of the inner life, and in remembering this chapter for his preface he allowed himself, for once, to make an unqualified judgement—“
It is obviously
the best thing in the book.”

Probably it is; but best or not, it is clearly the most important. Yet nothing in James’s plans for the novel seemed to anticipate it. The notes in which he blocked out the book’s last stages make no mention of Isabel’s motionless vigil, and though he does write of needing to characterize her estrangement from Osmond, he gives himself no suggestions as to how he might do it. I suspect that the idea for this chapter came to him late. Only when he was at last upon it did he discover the technique that would allow him to handle her revulsion. Only then did James find a method, at once expansive and abbreviated, with which to define Isabel’s marriage. Whatever the history of its composition, however, there is no doubt that this chapter marks a turning point. James’s earlier work had often substituted a character’s impression of an event for the event itself. These pages do more—they change our very sense of what counts as an event in fiction. Sitting still counts; thinking, doing nothing, not moving. Emotions count, and the activity of perception as well. James would write many kinds of fiction over the next twenty-five years, but from this point on the central events of his characters’ lives increasingly take place, not in the social world, but within; interior acts of interpretation or understanding. Chapter 42 marks the point at which James stopped being just an important American writer with a special knowledge of Europe on the one hand and the predicament of young women on the other. It marks the point at which his own work became Jamesian: the point at which he began to shape the future, a writer whose books made other books possible, a central figure in the history of the novel itself.

J
ames closes the gap in his story only when it becomes dramatically necessary to do so. Osmond has left the Warburton business in Isabel’s hands, and at this point we can’t fully understand either that request or her reaction to it without some fuller understanding of their marriage. So the requirements of the present produce a return to the past, a break in sequence in which both Isabel’s mind and the novel itself rove back in time, working to fill the hole in our knowledge. Later writers would take this further, would violate chronology with a recklessness that James himself could not imagine. Conrad would make a career out of retrospection; Faulkner would seem to freeze time itself in its place. In some ways James remained a Victorian, and when in
The Golden Bowl
Maggie Verver brings Isabel’s kind of freely moving intelligence to bear on her own marriage, she directs it toward the present and not the past. She thinks her way through a situation that she wants not simply to understand but to shape. By that time James was willing and able to write about the inner life of a marriage, indeed about passion itself. And perhaps both the
Portrait
’s great ellipsis and the idea of consciousness that he developed to deal with it did indeed allow him to evade a difficulty.

That indirection is inseparable from the fact that he asks us to see the failure of that marriage in broadly sexual terms: to remember Isabel’s earlier fears of surrendering her very self, and to think of them now as realized. Not in any crude or even precisely physical way. James made few substantive revisions to this chapter for the New York Edition, but one of them does suggest the nature and presence of Isabel’s own desire. There may indeed be things she doesn’t want to hear, forms of knowledge from which she wants to protect herself, but where in 1881 she had merely “loved” Osmond, in the later version she “
anxiously and yet ardently
” gave herself to him. That shift clarifies; it lets us know that what’s gone wrong isn’t some insurmountable reticence or dysfunction. James also tells us—and in the first edition—that Isabel “
was not a daughter
of the Puritans” and writes too that Osmond has committed no crime, no moment of violence or cruelty. What’s gone wrong isn’t a question of some particular action, and perhaps it isn’t even sex itself but rather some aspect of Osmond’s being for which James finds a sexual language. For we cannot miss the charge with which he writes that at a certain point the man’s “personality, touched as it never had been, stepped forth and stood erect.” It stands up, makes itself visible, its presence felt. The image is there in 1881 and unchanged in the later edition, and though the metaphor could if necessary be disowned, it does define Osmond’s threat, the force with which he assaults her very sense of self. Her “real offence . . . was her having a mind of her own at all,” and he wants to knock it out of her. He wants to treat her mind as an annex of his, and furnished only with his tastes and opinions. He has not counted on her resistance, however, and at every obstacle his hatred grows.

Isabel resists both because she must and because she finds Osmond’s own beliefs so entirely repugnant; above all, his claim that life is a matter of prescribed forms and not freedoms. We will learn much more as she thinks through the night, will learn everything we need to know. She will meditate on Osmond’s contempt for everyone in the world except the handful of people he envies instead, and of his desire to extract from the world some acknowledgment of his own superiority. She will contemplate his claim that it’s somehow “
indecent
” for her to visit Ralph at his hotel. And in thinking about Ralph’s invalid life Isabel will at last understand his attempt to warn her off this marriage. She will recognize that his generosity is in itself a form of intelligence and one her husband lacks. So she sits quietly on as the candles burn down, her mind a cauldron of activity. But at last she rises, and then stops, her memory caught, in the chapter’s last words, by that afternoon’s impression of “
her husband and Madame Merle
, grouped unconsciously and familiarly.”

19.

THE ART OF FICTION

M
ACMILLAN RELEASED
THE
first book edition of
The Portrait of a Lady
at the start of November 1881, immediately after it finished its serial run. Houghton, Mifflin followed two weeks later with the first American issue, and anyone looking at them together will find it hard to resist an obvious joke: their difference says volumes about the differences between the British and the American book trade. The English edition appeared as a standard triple-decker, albeit one whose 750 pages were more closely printed than the norm. In America it came out as a single volume, and its 520 pages were even more tightly packed. Macmillan observed the standard pricing as well—retail customers paid 31s.6d. or 10s.6d a volume. The Boston firm sold the book for $2, or just a bit more than the 6s. the English one-volume cheap edition would fetch the next year. And that difference in price forecasts a difference in sales as well. The first English edition of 750 copies did sell out, and Macmillan ordered a small second printing in the new year, before releasing their cheap edition that summer. But Houghton, Mifflin ran through six printings by August 1882, after an initial impression of 1,500 copies, for total sales of just over 6,000. These figures are small in comparison to those of Twain or even Howells, and yet for James it was a major success; indeed, the
Portrait
would prove both the most popular and the most lucrative of his full-length novels.

That difference in sales is worth noting, and can’t be explained by assuming that even an expatriated American would inevitably sell better at home. Most novels published in London had even smaller runs, and what matters here is the structure of the industry itself. English publishers could produce cheap books. They chose not to. Prices remained what they were in the days of Walter Scott, and ignored the technological developments in both printing and papermaking that had brought the real costs of publishing down. What kept those prices artificially high was the existence of such commercial libraries as
Mudie’s
; Macmillan’s ads for the
Portrait
announced not that the book was in the shops, but rather that it was “now ready, at all the Libraries.” I’ve already described how such businesses worked from a customer’s point of view. An annual fee—Mudie’s standard was a guinea, or 21s.—allowed subscribers to take out the first volume of as many works as they chose, with subsequent volumes costing a shilling a throw. That wasn’t cheap; a subscriber’s ticket was itself a mark of middle-class respectability. But it
was
economical, and the system accustomed the public to borrowing instead of buying. The libraries needed the three-volume novel to make their money, and because they invariably took a large percentage of any first edition, albeit at a steeply discounted price, the publishers gave them what they wanted. That collusion ensured both that the libraries remained lucrative and publishing had few risks, but its consequence was to keep the retail price of new books so high as to discourage purchase. American libraries didn’t exercise the same power in the marketplace; for one thing, they tended to be free. Prices therefore remained closer to the actual cost of manufacture, reflecting what a buying public was willing to pay, and there was no incentive to spread a book over several volumes.

Both editions used British spelling. The type was set by the firm of Clay & Taylor, Macmillan’s regular compositors, and two sets of stereotyped plates were made from it, one for Boston and one for the cheap impression the English firm assumed it would eventually need. Then the set type was leaded out for the three-volume edition: adjusted, that is, so that there was more space between the lines and fewer lines per page, though the type itself remained small. James read proof in the summer and early fall of 1881, but he made few significant changes from the serial version. For the one-volume edition he numbered the
Portrait
’s chapters consecutively, and the novel appeared without any other internal divisions; the first English edition, in contrast, starts a new sequence with each volume. Yet while the first of them does end with the death of Mr. Touchett, the second concludes without any such turning point. That separation serves no consistent dramatic purpose, and in that the
Portrait
differs from many other Victorian novels, such as Charlotte Bronte’s
Villette
, where each volume defines a different stage in the heroine’s progress. All later editions number the
Portrait
’s chapters consecutively throughout, including the two books of the New York Edition, in which the break merely reflects the novel’s midpoint. These volume markers mean less than they seem, confirming the sense that James wanted his readers to see the work as a single and continuous whole.

That, in fact, was the argument of one of the novel’s first reviewers. A generation later W. C. Brownell would become Edith Wharton’s editor at Scribner, but in the early 1880s he was one of
The Nation
’s leading critics, and wrote there that the novel
“gains in its complete presentation . . . the whole is equal to no fewer than all of its parts,”
and one that wasn’t entirely apparent in serial form. Not that Brownell was entirely smitten. He missed some quality of “fervor” in the book’s second half and thought its pleasures were too purely intellectual. James wasn’t for everyone. Howells had said that from the start, and the
Portrait
’s reviewers, faced with what Brownell admitted was a masterpiece, struggled with the meaning of that restricted appeal. Dickens
had
been for everyone, famously so, and there was a lingering belief that a great novelist ought to be. Even George Eliot had drawn a wide, if not universal, audience. Some American newspapers connected the polish of James’s art to the rarefied world of his characters.
The
New York Sun
thought the distinguishing marks of “good society” were so precise that in writing about it James could only use “pencils of the finest point”; the
Californian
of San Francisco admired the book’s finish but thought its material barren. Even the
Atlantic
’s critic, Horace Scudder, argued that James’s imagination seemed cold, while in
Blackwood’s
, Margaret Oliphant claimed the book’s dazzle could fatigue. Everyone admired James’s workmanship, and yet most of the book’s critics felt some impatience as well. Ought novels to be so finely made?

Oliphant had a more particular charge. Many of James’s readers at home found him insufficiently patriotic, but she saw him instead as the voice of American triumphalism, a writer who depicted the Old World as though it were arranged for his pleasure. Some of her animus was, admittedly, directed not at James so much as his countrymen as a whole, who loved nothing more than to “inspect our antiquities . . . [and] patronize our institutions.” But though her tone was priggish, her eye was deadly, and in his last books James would indeed depict his homeland, however ironically, as what she called the “heir of time.” Oliphant offered other objections as well, in which she was joined by the equally conservative critic of the
Spectator
, R. H. Hutton. James may have provided portraits of his secondary characters, but the “one thing which the book is not, is what it calls itself.” Isabel herself lacked definition, and Hutton added that her character remained “nothing but haze, a laborious riddle.” Both of them were troubled by the book’s open ending, by the fact that James finished without letting his readers know his heroine’s fate. The last chapter seemed to imply a catastrophe that it wouldn’t allow itself to dramatize, and Hutton was troubled by the absence of anything like a religious sense; it was an “agnostic” book, and its conclusion a “sign-post into the abyss.”

A book’s initial reception often sets the terms of later discussion, fingering the issues that will continue to matter; this is no exception. My own account of that open ending will have to wait until we get there, and for now it’s enough to say that it puzzled most readers at the time and still puzzles some of them now;
Lippincott’s
claimed that James couldn’t “bring himself to the vulgarity of a regular
dénouement
.” Still, his best critics were already used to that, and Scudder argued that it was now time to accept James’s method. He used his own review to distinguish the novelist’s approach from that of such predecessors as Thackeray or George Eliot. Those writers had often stopped the flow of their narratives to generalize about “all sorts and conditions of men.” James limited himself to his own characters, at whose motives he worried and tugged, as though he were pulling his own people apart. Such a minute dissection had a name. It was called the “analytical” method of characterization, and though the term isn’t used now, it figured heavily in the criticism of the next few decades. Most English critics didn’t like it and thought that approach an American peculiarity; but Conrad later described Proust in those terms, and they apply to his own work as well.

The shrewdest early appraisal of the
Portrait
belongs to Constance Fenimore Woolson, who in an 1882 letter offered James a perceptive reading of individual scenes and characters, and singled out Isabel’s vigil by the fire; none of the book’s reviewers had especially marked it. The crux of her letter lies, however, in her account of the difference the book would make to his reputation. She thought the critics had now taken a new and probably permanent tone about him. They had enjoyed anticipating his future—had thought
“your talent, your style, your this and that . . . marvelous
in
a young fellow.”
But he had gone by them and they knew it; he was no longer the coming man, and other writers were prepared to be jealous. Woolson thought the
Portrait
’s reviews remarkably bad-tempered for all their praise; praise that was almost always hedged, even in recognizing it as an advance on his earlier work. For with the
Portrait
, the future had “become the present. They see it and cannot deny it. They don’t like it.”
The Portrait of a Lady
got the kind of mixed reviews that are only given to a writer who matters. Henry James had become inescapable, and to be ambivalent about him was, from this point on, to be ambivalent about the direction of fiction itself.

W
oolson believed the attack would come from other Americans. Instead it found its origins in what should have been a moment of triumph. The
Century
was the glossiest New York monthly of its period, its circulation high and its slick pages sprinkled with illustrations. The issue for November 1882 included a story by Frank Stockton whose title—“The Lady, or the Tiger?”—survives though the tale itself does not, and an obituary essay on Victor Hugo by Alphonse Daudet. But James led the magazine with “Venice,” one of his best travel sketches, and the piece was followed by both his engraved portrait and a tribute from Howells called simply, “Henry James, Jr.”

This amounted to the period’s equivalent of a media blitz, but Howells’s essay wasn’t a puff piece. Or at least it doesn’t seem so now. He touched on
Daisy Miller
and a number of other international tales, but he always circled back to the
Portrait
, and assumed a knowing audience; he wrote as if even minor characters needed no introduction. His tone was measured, but the claims he made were still large enough to cause trouble. He thought that only George Eliot could match James’s analytic bent and suggested that they had created the two noblest heroines in contemporary fiction. Howells also argued, however, that Isabel was more subtly depicted than
Middlemarch
’s Dorothea and thought that James himself stood at the head of a
“new school”
in the writing of fiction. That school avoided the often sensational plots of the past, the catastrophes and coincidences, on which even George Eliot had sometimes depended. Instead it found its material in the everyday world, and in a way that—the depiction of sexual life aside—one might even be tempted to call French. Howells wasn’t sure that readers would be content with “an analytic study rather than a story,” with books in which nothing much might seem to happen and the narrative shoelaces were left untied. But about one thing he was certain. The art of fiction had in these latter days become a much finer one “than it was with Dickens and Thackeray.”

Fighting words, red flags to John Bull. By “fine” Howells meant “refined,” but the evaluative note was inescapable, and the British reaction against what critics called the American school was both immediate and fierce. By January, Oliphant had a piece in
Blackwood’s
that depicted American literature as engaged in a hostile takeover of the English language. Howell’s own novels had just come out in London, and she admitted to begrudging the praise a British audience had given him. Yet why should that audience defer to America on any question of taste whatsoever? It wasn’t so long ago, as she reminded her readers, that American culture had been defined by the spittoon. Still, she preached tolerance—the tolerance of parents who are inclined both to applaud and to laugh
“at the exploits of the little one.”
In the
Quarterly Review
, L. J. Jennings took on the
Portrait
along with Henry Adams’s anonymously published
Democracy
and books by both Howells and George Washington Cable: all of them written on the oddly modish
“principle that the best novelist is he who has no story to tell.”
Jennings admitted that James himself occasionally betrayed his own aesthetic and produced something that looked like a plot. Howells never did, and as for the
Portrait
, its many hundreds of pages of small type followed that principle so relentlessly as to make it the most tedious book of the year.

Howells’s argument was fatally easy to caricature. British critics saw him as claiming that not only the methods but also the pleasures of Dickens and Thackeray were obsolete, that there was something wrong about liking a story that was a story, densely plotted and thrilling, and with a last chapter that told us what happened to everyone when it was over.
“The indictment is rubbish,”
James wrote in a letter, but it stuck, and a few months later he added that articles about the two of them were still
“as thick as blackberries—we are daily immolated on the altar”
of the English classics. The most interesting of those articles came out simultaneously with Howells’s own, however, and it anticipated rather than responded to the argument. Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Gossip on Romance” suggested that though it might be clever to write a book without a story, that cleverness remained at odds with what drew us to fiction in the first place. He had just finished writing
Treasure Island
, and the essay is the most sophisticated defense of simple delight imaginable. Stevenson believed that no books are so passionately read and loved as those we discover in the
“bright, troubled period”
of childhood. At that age we read for “incident” above all, pulled on by our need to know what happens, and he wasn’t embarrassed to admit that he still felt a primeval pleasure in turning the pages. Such pleasures weren’t everything, he acknowledged, and yet the novelist who forgot them in concentrating on the “slips and hesitations of the conscience” was also apt to forget whole sides of the human experience.