Portrait of A Novel (31 page)

Nor would James himself go far enough, albeit for different reasons. In 1876 he had thought Zola a writer of “
brutal indecency
,” but in 1903 he wrote that the battle scenes in
La Débâcle
, Zola’s 1892 novel about the Franco-Prussian War, were fully as rich as Tolstoy’s, and suggested that
L’Assommoir
in particular would have been destroyed by any shred of “
timidity
.” Its greatness depended on Zola’s willingness to soak himself in a world gone rank. He did, however, have one final reservation about the French fiction of his age. He was willing to grant Zola and Maupassant their subjects, and knew that the day of “
hard and fast
rules,
a priori
restrictions” was over. But he also thought that their concentration on the “
carnal side of man
” had limited their sense of human possibility. They saw all life in terms of lust, a matter of compulsion and desire, a struggle for existence in which people were at the mercy of forces they could neither resist nor control. That determinism was entirely at odds with his belief in the shaping force of character, in the freedom of conscious choice. He remained skeptical of the young Isabel Archer’s faith in Emersonian self-fashioning, but he was too much of an American not to feel the seductions of that faith himself. Those other Victorians named Freud and Nietzsche would tell us that Zola was the more nearly right of the two, but James always maintained that there was both a drama and a liberty in resisting desire, and that other things mattered as well.

James was right that the age of a priori restrictions was over. In an earlier chapter I touched on the challenge to Mudie’s de facto censorship of British fiction that was presented by cheap one-volume editions of the novels the library refused to handle. Those novels included books by the Irish writer George Moore along with English translations of Zola. Both writers were published by the firm of Henry Viztelly, but other companies soon saw the advantage of a 6s. price, and the single-volume format also suited the wildly popular and relatively short adventure novels by writers like Stevenson or H. Rider Haggard that began to appear in the 1880s. The lag time between a novel’s first edition and its cheap reprint began to dwindle, the number of public libraries grew, and Mudie’s profits shrank. In 1894 the firm announced it would pay no more than 4s. for any volume of fiction, no matter its length, and that decision changed the whole structure of British publishing. It killed the triple-decker. At that price the three-volume novel, with its wide margins and heavy paper, could no longer turn a profit, and soon everything came out in a single inexpensive volume instead. Book sales boomed, and though Mudie’s lasted for decades more, it had in effect destroyed its own power. Zola’s challenge was not in itself sufficient to change that system. But it was necessary. In England the contents of his work required a change in the physical form of the novel itself, and that change made further experiments possible. The pornographic bookshop in which Conrad’s
Secret Agent
begins could not have been written about in Mudie’s era; nor could Lawrence’s
Sons and Lovers
.

The first British editions of James’s late novels appeared in a single volume. And he continued to think about the issues his reading of French had presented, above all in an 1899 essay called “The Future of the Novel.” English fiction had long insisted upon innocence and avoided any but the most cautious treatment of what he called, elliptically, “
the constant world-renewal
.” But the young were older than they used to be, and that omission could no longer stand. James imagined, however, that Anglo-American fiction would deal with sexual questions in a different way than the French had. Great changes were taking place in the condition of women, and though the New Woman of the nineties was not yet a suffragette, James still saw things shifting “
deeply in the quiet
.” Such women didn’t want to be protected from knowledge, and he thought they would use their own elbows to smash the windows of discretion. He suggested, moreover, that in doing so they wouldn’t show much consideration for the modesty of their erstwhile protectors. A generation later Virginia Woolf would echo that sentiment in her “Professions for Women,” noting that one of her difficulties in writing honestly about her own physical experience was the fact that men would be shocked; she felt “
impeded by the
extreme conventionality of the other sex.” James was not shocked. He was reticent, and he believed that an emphasis on passion alone would “
falsify the total show
.” But he looked forward to a fiction that might say the unsayable, a novel in which the truth could be told.

P
ART
F
IVE

PUTTING OUT THE LIGHTS

Henry James
. By Katherine McClellan. 1905.

(Courtesy of Smith College Archives, Northampton, Massachusetts)

20.

THE ALTAR OF THE DEAD

O
N THE LAST
day of 1882, Henry James went out to the Cambridge Cemetery, along the Charles at the city’s western edge, and stood over a freshly filled grave. The air on that New Year’s Eve morning was sharp and clear, a sky of bright winter sunshine, and the novelist stayed there for a long time, muffled against the cold and holding a letter in his hands. The letter was dated from Bolton Street, but he had not written it. It was in his brother William’s hand instead, and James had carried it with him from London on a final voyage of filial duty. Now he opened it and began to read his brother’s sentences aloud, each phrase forming a puff of vapor in the empty space above a modest headstone, and then vanishing.
“Darling old father,”
he began, and as he read, it seemed as though the two sons were united in the communion of words, and united as well with the parent whose last illness had brought them no true sense of shock. Henry Sr. was old enough, and had written enough; he would not be forgotten. Death in such circumstances could not be “inharmonious.” There was another reason why their father’s death now seemed fitting, however, and it wasn’t the first time that James had stood in the graveyard that year.

As I have already noted, James left England a few days before the
Portrait
had concluded its serial run, and arrived in Boston on the first of November 1881. He had delayed his homecoming by a full year, having first planned to cross the Atlantic the summer before, only to decide that he could not travel with his novel half-done. Or at least he couldn’t go to America; Venice was another matter, but then he didn’t have a family there. Once finished, though, he could indeed return, and return as one who has known success. Still, the Quincy Street to which he came back was a very different place than the one he had left in the fall of 1875. William had married and had taken his wife and son to live on Beacon Hill, but James had shown him around London the year before. His sister Alice had visited him in England just that summer. Yet he had not seen his parents in six years, and no matter how many letters had gone over the ocean, he wasn’t prepared for the changes he now found in his mother. Mary James seemed
“worn and shrunken,”
and in time he would recognize the depth of her weariness.

He planned an American stay of five months, and wrote that he felt glad to have come, glad to have seen his family, though not simply for the pleasure of it. Renewing his relations with them was also a form of measurement. It allowed him to define both who he was, and who he had become, and one of the things that measurement immediately showed him was that he could not stay in Quincy Street. His hours and habits were different now, he was too used to an independent life; he could not simply turn himself into a son again. After just a few days he moved across the river to Boston, and took a room at the Brunswick Hotel on the corner of Clarendon and Boylston streets. The city’s Back Bay was still in the course of development, with trainloads of gravel arriving by the hour, but many of the finest buildings in this suddenly opulent neighborhood were already up. Henry and Clover Adams had a house nearby on the narrow, elegant Marlborough Street, and at his hotel James had for a neighbor the city’s most majestic temple, H. H. Richardson’s newly finished and neo-Romanesque Trinity Church.

One morning he sat in his hotel room over a notebook that he had bought at a stationer’s in Piccadilly and began to compose the résumé of his European life that is paradoxically known as the “American Journal” of 1881–82, the journal on which I’ve drawn throughout this book. The notebook offers a roster of the country houses he had visited and the clubs that had welcomed him, and it describes his books in terms of the places in which they were written: Paris, Florence, Venice, and above all the Bolton Street apartment that
“ought to be sacred to me”
as the place in which he had thought and learned and above all produced. James wrote in that hotel room with a quick and unerring fluency—the manuscript is without the scratchings of revision—and his pages are elegiac and anticipatory at once. They mark the beginning of the self-mythologizing that so colors the autobiographical writing of his later years; pages that define a narrative about the shape and nature of his own career, and in which his new sense of triumph reaches back a
“hand to its younger brother, desire.”

James had kept occasional notes before, but this journal signals the beginning of a regular practice, not a diary but a cache of anecdotes on which his fiction would draw in the years to come. He was at the end of his thirties and told himself that he had no time to waste, or rather no impressions to waste; it was too late for him
not
to turn his every perception into usable material. Among those impressions, however, was the sense that, his family connections aside, the trip had not been necessary. Nothing he had yet seen in America had surprised him, and after a just a few weeks he already missed his London life. For he had long ago made his choice of the
“old world—my choice, my need, my life. . . . My work lies there.”
It lay there precisely because he
was
an American. James believed, at the very moment when the Gilded Age was beginning to assert its own self-sufficient power, that no American who wanted to take the earth’s full measure could avoid the burden of coming to terms with Europe. He wouldn’t have put it this way, but his country needed to know the world it was about to swallow.

But James’s notebook contains something more than a meditation on his own career. At the New Year he moved south, to Washington, where he spent much of his time with the Adamses. He met and liked the new president, Chester A. Arthur, who had succeeded to the office after the assassination of the Civil War hero James Garfield, and he also liked the city itself, a place where social life and conversation alike seemed more varied than in either Boston or New York. And he was in Washington when he got the news that sent him scrambling for the first train to the north. At the end of January his mother fell ill with a bronchial infection, and on the 29th he wrote her a tender note in which he described her as someone who had always hovered around other people’s sickbeds. It was hard for him to imagine her as sick herself, and he hoped that by the time she received his letter she would
“have ceased to suffer as you must have been doing.”
Indeed she had, though she never read those lines. Mary James seemed to rally, and then sank. She died that very day, and while a telegram had already gotten her favorite son en route to Boston, he arrived too late to see her.

Only once before had James known such a deep sense of personal loss—almost a dozen years earlier, when Minny Temple had died. Then his words had confirmed an absence; Minny was dead, and all he could do was write about it. His mother’s death said something else, and when he returned to his journal on February 9 it was to evoke everything he thought he had lost. He believed it impossible to describe
“all that has gone down into the grave with her. She was our life, she was the house, she was the keystone of the arch. She held us together, and without her we are scattered reeds. She was patience, she was wisdom, she was exquisite maternity.”
Yet in that loss he also felt himself possessed by a memory so powerful that it amounted to a sense of her presence, and he could not believe that death alone might bring an end to her love. Her being was immanent still. Henry James had nothing like an orthodox religious faith; no child of his father did, or could. But as William would write about the belief in an unseen world in his
Varieties of Religious Experience
and test the claims of psychics in a way that grew steadily less skeptical, so with the years the novelist defined his own sense of the numinous in a series of extraordinary ghost stories. The dead may exist only in the psychology of the living; that doesn’t make them any less real.

We could tell a different story about Mary James. The novelist felt in retrospect that he had been blind to her
“sweetness and beneficence”
in the few short weeks he had spent in Boston; those few weeks after an absence of six years. Leon Edel writes, however, that James could only create that image of maternal solicitude in memory; in his fiction the mothers are “
neither ideal nor ethereal
.” Often they seem as dry and forbidding as the
Portrait
’s Mrs. Touchett, and Edel’s own bent makes him take that fiction as an always more faithful record of the writer’s emotions than either his letters or his journals. This seems a simplistic version of the relation between the life and the work. Yet many of her contemporaries did think of Mary James as stiff and conventional, an unlikely mother to such brilliant children, and the younger ones were indeed crushed by the internal contradictions of their family life.

She was buried in the Cambridge Cemetery, in what then became the family plot; today the novelist lies there as well, as does his sister and William’s family too. Her funeral on February 1 was the last time that her children were all in the same place together. The ground was frozen and the snow high; they laid her in a temporary vault until spring. Wilky arrived from Milwaukee just a few hours before the service, crippled by both arthritis and his wounds; he died the next year of heart failure. Bob’s wife had enough money to allow him a peripatetic life, and the novelist once returned from abroad to find him staying, uninvited, in Bolton Street. He lived until 1910—waspishly funny, alchoholic, and unfaithful—having found in the end some satisfaction as a painter. And Alice has a story of her own, one of undiagnosable illness and long bedridden years spent trying, as she put it, to get herself dead. She passed her whole adult life as though waiting for the cancer that a decade later would kill her, and when she knew that it was coming at last, she wrote that death appeared to her as
“the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact, when living seems life.”

None of the James children escaped the irrationalities of their immediate milieu, and yet it’s mistaken to attribute their problems, in Edel’s words, to the
“tensions and emotions generated by the mother which played against the easy compliance of the father.”
It’s much more likely to have been the other way around. Mary James certainly aided and abetted the oddities of her husband. She was a pliant wife, and acceded far too easily to his peculiar ways of educating their children. But she probably gave her children whatever stability they knew, and their emotional turbulence can be more readily laid at their father’s door: the father with his sudden changes of direction and his own susceptibility to depression, to those moods in which, in his own best phrase, the
“obscene bird of night”
stood gibbering at his side.

T
wo weeks after his mother’s death James wrote to Isabella Stewart Gardner that losing her had produced a sense of suffering utterly unlike anything he had ever experienced; he felt thankful that it could only happen but once. He added that he wished for the time to stay near his father, and told his other friends that he would probably remain in America for the rest of that year. He took rooms on Beacon Hill, and after working through the day he often crossed the Charles for dinner in Quincy Street. The February air felt solemn and still, and he always kept the memory of walking back in the starlight on the cold and empty roads. James had expected that his sister and father would need his care, but they now appeared to live in a
“beneficent hush,”
and as the weeks went by, they each seemed to grow in tranquility, convinced that there was some meaning in even the greatest loss. Alice looked stronger than she had in years; running her father’s house had given her some long-needed sense of purpose. And as for that father—well, he had
“a way of his own in taking the sorrows of life.”
He was physically feeble but at peace, and the novelist soon knew that he could count on returning to England that May.

Henry Sr. did indeed have a way of his own. In early December the word came to Bolton Street that he was dying. William was on sabbatical in Paris that fall and, at the news, came over to England, where the brothers decided that Henry would be the one to go, carrying with him William’s note of farewell. He sailed from Southampton on December 12, his second voyage home in little more than a year, but the boat took nine days and as he stepped onto the dock in New York, he was given a letter from his sister. Henry Sr. had died three days before; William had already seen the news in the London papers, a notice sent through the transatlantic cable. Once again James had missed a parent’s deathbed, and this time he wouldn’t even make the funeral, which was scheduled for that very morning. Henry Sr. had asked that the entire ceremony consist of these words:
“Here lies a man who has thought all his life, that the ceremonies attending birth, marriage and death were all damned nonsense.”
The family could find no clergyman willing to pronounce them, and Alice arranged for a Unitarian service instead.

James learned on his arrival that his father’s death was not due to any medical crisis as such, even though his doctors talked of a
“softening of the brain.”
Or perhaps a hardening, a hardening of purpose. One speaks of losing the will to live, but the old man willed himself to die, through what James described as a form of self-starvation. He simply refused to eat, and yet never appeared to suffer. Instead he held court at his sickbed, welcoming his friends, talking even as his strength faded, explaining that he was about to enter into a spiritual existence and did not wish to maintain the “mere form” of bodily life. James wrote to William that to many people this would all seem strange, and yet “taking father as he was—almost natural.” Years before, in one of her deepest depressions, Alice had asked her father whether the desire to kill herself was sinful. He had told her it wasn’t, and knowing that it was not forbidden had robbed the idea of its attraction, and calmed her. Now he himself had chosen death, and though none of his children called it suicide, the novelist recognized that Henry Sr. had indeed prayed and wished for that death. He prayed for it because he did not recognize it as an ending—because he believed he was traveling to a reunion with his wife, whom he claimed with his last words to see.