Portrait of A Novel (32 page)

Once in Boston the novelist collapsed and spent the next week in bed with what was probably a migraine. But on the year’s last day he was finally able to go out to the Cambridge Cemetery, stand by his parents’ graves, and read William’s letter aloud in the cold of the dying year. He stood there for a long time, remaining on after his voice had fallen into silence, and he later told William that he was sure their father had
“heard somewhere”
that message of farewell. And yet just where is somewhere? William himself had written to the dying man about the afterlife with a mix of hope and open doubt, while to Henry standing there in Cambridge it was “difficult not to believe that [their parents] were not united again in some consciousness of my belief.” But that sentence claims less than it seems. Even leaving its double negative aside, it suggests that it is only his own mind that calls his parents’ departed selves into being.

T
heir father’s death left his children, in William’s words,
“feeling somewhat unprotected, old as we are.”
Not that they all reacted in the same way, and perhaps that statement best describes William himself, the son who had stayed near home. At Harvard he had taught physiology, psychology, and philosophy in succession without being able to choose between them or—as yet—to combine them. His achievement lay still in the future, while his younger brother was publishing two books a year. That brother, meanwhile, quickly moved to drop the last vestige of parental protection. Out of habit he still sometimes signed his letters as “Henry James, Jr.” but that spring he asked his publishers to remove the “Jr.” from the title page of any new books, and he never published under that name again. Each of the James children inherited a capital of around $19,000, more than they had expected and most of it invested in real estate that they continued to hold in common. The novelist made his share over to Alice; only after she died did he receive an independent income, one that eventually amounted to about £600 a year.

His parents’ deaths had bookended the year, and though it didn’t leave him feeling so vulnerable as William, it did make him see himself as a solitary figure. Nothing James wrote about his parents is so effusive as the letters he sent home in 1870 when he learned of Minny Temple’s death. Indeed, he did not write about them at all, his letters and journal aside, until he himself was old:
A Small Boy and Others
, the first volume of his autobiography, appeared only in 1913, the year he turned seventy. Once their funerals were over, he did not mourn in public. But over the next few years he did often write about the deaths of others, working his way through a series of extraordinary obituary essays about his literary forebears. Flaubert had died in 1880, as I noted in the last chapter; he went in May, when James was still at work upon the
Portrait
’s first chapters. George Eliot died that December, then Emerson in April 1882 and Trollope just a few weeks before Henry Sr.; and finally Turgenev in September 1883, the first great writer whom he had been able to count as a friend. James had known them all, and he wrote about them all in the years immediately following Henry Sr.’s death. Some of these pieces may have begun with an editor’s request, and their sheer number doubtless owes something to the accidents of death itself. Still, James usually chose his own subjects, and what he chose, at this moment, was to mark the passing of his parents’ generation.

Over the years he became an expert undertaker, fixing the terms and sealing the vault of one reputation after another. Later essays looked at both Zola and Robert Browning, and one of his later stories even begins with the writing of an obituary. In “Greville Fane” a journalist assigned to come up with a bit on the death of a popular novelist finds it hard to fulfill his editor’s charge that he
“let her off easy, but not too easy.”
That’s exactly what James himself did in his 1883 essay on Trollope; he got many things wrong about the most prolific of the great Victorians, but in praising his
“complete appreciation of the usual,”
he nevertheless set the terms of debate for the next century. James wrote the piece that spring in Boston, in the house to which Alice and Henry Sr. had moved after his mother’s death; wrote it, indeed, while living in his father’s own room. So too was his study of Emerson, one that found its occasion in an edition of the Transcendentalist’s correspondence with Thomas Carlyle. In writing, James suggested that their letters belonged not only to a vanished generation, but also to a vanished world. The people and things that concerned them had faded into
“a past which is already remote,”
and those two difficult minds were now for the ages. Which meant, in a way, that they weren’t for his, and James thought that Emerson’s optimism in particular was unsustainable, the voice of an earlier America, unmarked by civil war.

The most interesting of these essays is that on Turgenev. Written immediately after his death, it appeared in the January 1884 issue of the
Atlantic
, and begins on a rhetorical note that even for James seems high:
“When the mortal remains of Ivan Turgenieff . . .”
The piece differs from James’s other obituaries in saying almost nothing about the writer’s work. Its details are instead personal, and evoke such things as the look of Turgenev’s green sitting room in the rue de Douai, or his physical appearance, tall and broad-shouldered but with
“an air of neglected strength.”
James recalls fragments of conversation, the raciness of Turgenev’s spoken French, and their Sunday afternoons at Flaubert’s; and he remembers too that the Russian had a reservoir of experience into which neither a young American nor their French colleagues could enter. The article is fond, but it’s something more as well, and ends with his memory of their last meeting, in November 1882, when they shared a ride into Paris from the countryside. The older man was wracked by gout, and yet despite his suffering his talk kept up its accustomed flow of brilliance. The coach dropped James on an outer boulevard, and he could hear the sounds of a Punch and Judy show nearby. Then
“I bade him good-bye at the carriage window, and never saw him again.”
At that moment the essay becomes filial.

A dozen years later James published a tale called “The Altar of the Dead,” in which the main character, Stransom, remains ever full of the memory of his long-dead fiancée,
“ruled by a pale ghost . . . ordered by a sovereign presence.”
Stransom isn’t a believing Christian, but he still arranges to take charge of a chapel in an out-of-the-way church, and makes its altar into a burning forest of candles, tapers that in his mind are numbered and named for each of his lost friends, “a silent roll-call of his Dead.” The tale is usually counted among James’s ghost stories, but it differs from such pieces as “The Friends of the Friends” or “The Real Right Thing” in that there’s never any question of an apparition. Its ghosts are those of memory alone. James had suffered two more great losses by then: his sister Alice in 1892 and Constance Fenimore Woolson in 1894. He was fifty-two, he was beginning to think of himself as old, and had already begun to build an altar of his own. Only he built it in words, and with time he came to speak of his own dead in increasingly hallowed terms. He conjured the presence of those he had lost with a retrospective tenderness that became in itself a part of the myth he made about his own life. Indeed that summoning of the past would dominate the final years of his career, whether in the prefaces to the New York Edition or in the memories that he at last set down as he himself prepared to cross the bar.

To the younger James, however, those dead writers, his predecessors, might well have suggested something else. That on Turgenev aside, his obituary essays don’t speak with any special reverence. Even his 1885 piece on George Eliot offers a sharp account of her limitations, and, taken as a group, his articles of the 1880s depict an era that in its passing has left him not so much unprotected as alone. The deaths of such figures as Trollope and Flaubert meant that there was no longer a great and still-present older generation to whom he could compare himself, and against whom he might be judged. He himself now set the standard, and the English critics who thought the claims of the American school presumptuous could only point to the past by way of contrast; they had no living alternative whom they might praise instead.

James was still a young writer when he began the
Portrait
, a book intended to be his masterpiece in the old sense of the term, an announcement that he had arrived and was open for business. Then suddenly the competition was gone. He had some space, he could swing his arm freely, and one result of that was the voice of confident mastery in every sentence of his 1884 “Art of Fiction.” Years before, he had used his expatriation to rescue himself. He had broken away, and the deaths of his different elders in the early 1880s now underlined that sense of independence. Hard work made him feel happy and strong, and in his “American Journal” he wrote that he now expected himself to
“do something great.”
He already had. But not even
The Portrait of a Lady
was an achievement on which he would choose to rest.

21.

“I WAS PERFECTLY FREE”

S
OMETHING GREAT. ISABEL’S
vigil by the fireplace had ended with her memory of the moment she had interrupted, of the tableau in which “her husband and Madame Merle . . . [are] grouped unconsciously and familiarly.” But she cannot yet puzzle it out, and having left both her and us with that constituted scene, James then does something surprising. He puts the image behind him. He doesn’t allow Isabel to think about it for some 80 pages, as though it were all forgotten, and masks that omission by making the novel itself grow busy with the exits and entrances of its different characters, walking both Henrietta and Caspar Goodwood on and off the stage, and sending Warburton back to an English future and, eventually, an English bride.

In all this, the novel seems to pause, as though waiting for its narrative yeast to work, and the chapters that follow Isabel’s night before the fire paradoxically contain some of the finest comic writing of James’s entire career. A lot of the laughter depends on Osmond’s sister, the Countess Gemini, who is said to have had fifteen lovers and to have given her heart away
“in small pieces, like a wedding cake.”
Bored in Florence, she is delighted when Osmond invites her down to the Palazzo Roccanera. She knows she’s not as intellectual as Isabel but still believes she has mind
“enough to do justice to Rome—not the ruins and the catacombs, not even perhaps the church-ceremonies and the scenery; but certainly to all the rest.”
That semicolon is beautifully timed, and James’s use of the Countess recalls the appearance of the drunken porter in
Macbeth
, just after the murder of the king. The sharp lowering of tone makes us realize how tense everything around her has become. Still, Amy Osmond’s presence isn’t as trivial as it seems. Nor is the whole business of Pansy’s prospective marriage simply a detour. On a first reading it may look as inconsequential as the girl herself, and yet it’s precisely what James will use to bring us back to that riddling tableau.

For while the comedy may divert and distract us, we can’t help but remember that it stands upon the fact of Isabel’s sadness, the sadness this
“visibly happy”
woman so tries to keep her friends from seeing. Isabel knows that Osmond wants to put out the lights of her mind, but she has not yet begun to act in
“direct opposition”
to his wishes. Before her marriage this principled girl from Albany had thought she could give herself entirely; it’s a part of what James calls her great good faith. Even now she cannot forget what she calls the “traditionary decencies and sanctities of marriage,” sanctities that include the injunction not only to love and honor her husband, but also to obey him. She shrinks from any rupture, telling herself that to break with Osmond on even a single question would be to break with him forever.
“I can’t publish my mistake,”
she says to Henrietta, for doing so would amount to a repudiation of her life’s most serious act. Isabel believes that she should accept the consequences of her deeds, of anything she has freely chosen to do, and it is therefore with a sense of shame and dread that she begins to see that she might one day
“have to take back something that she had solemnly given.”
She might have to take back her word and her promise; she might have to reclaim her very self.

But she hasn’t yet reached for that remedy, and in the meantime the only thing that makes her trouble bearable is the city of Rome itself. One of the novel’s richest passages describes Isabel’s habit of driving through the city, descending from her carriage to visit the emptiest of old churches or to seat herself upon blocks of stone
“that had once had a use.”
She grows especially fond of a spot from which she can look across the Campagna, where emptiness itself has both shape and substance, and each field seems the ghost of a vanished world. James writes that Isabel has taken
“old Rome into her confidence, for in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe.”
She can confess to it, can admit her misery—the place has seen everything and doesn’t expect one always to smile. It has been crumbling for centuries and yet so much of it remains upright; its very age makes her realize the smallness of her own troubles, so small in the city’s long record that at times she can almost laugh at them. What she finds there is a sense, at once haunting and exhilarating, of the continuity of human experience; what she finds is what James found there himself.

Nothing in the whole of the
Portrait
brings Isabel closer to her creator—nothing makes the identity between character and author more complete—than this evocation of the help she gets from the stones of the ancient city. Rome may stand in her mind as a “place where people had suffered,” but that in itself works to normalize her own trouble in a way that a setting in New York’s bustling modernity would not. It gives her a language with which to understand her experience, a set of images that nothing in her own past can match; it suggests that her condition isn’t some odd individual exception, but the ordinary lot of human kind. The young James had often used a European setting to intensify his characters’ situation, but he had grown beyond that by the time he wrote this novel, and here that setting works to subsume his people instead. So in a passage that recalls the “Roman Rides” of the previous decade, Isabel looks
“through the veil of her personal sadness at the splendid sadness of the scene—at the dense, warm light, the far gradations and soft confusions of colour, the motionless shepherds in lonely attitudes.”
It’s scenery, true, and psychology as well, the warm confused mind of the character herself. But it is also a passage of history, and one that throws Isabel’s American newness into the shade. She inserts herself, as James did, into the long corridors of the past. She asserts a sense of continuity as a way to survive, to endure, in the present.

“I
was perfectly free.”
So Isabel says to Henrietta, and so she believes. Nobody made her marry Osmond; she elected her own fate. That faith in the individual’s freedom to shape the terms of his or her own life stands as one of the founding principles of nineteenth-century fiction, of a form that presents its people, in Iris Murdoch’s terms, as being at once
“free and separate and related to a rich and complicated”
social world. Murdoch’s phrase is one I’m always tempted to misread—I imagine her as having written “free and separate
but
related,” as though those qualities were in some necessary opposition. Yet she doesn’t present them as contradictory. George Eliot’s Dorothea has the freedom, and even the free will, that she needs to make her own choices; so does Tolstoy’s Levin in
Anna Karenina
. Yet neither those characters nor their authors would have denied that their freedom has limits, that they remain connected to and shaped by the life of their time and place.

Isabel claims something more radical. As a young woman, she had insisted on her right to choose which rules she might follow and had refused to believe that she could be measured by anything that belonged to her, by such possessions as a house or clothes. She was separate from all that, liberated from her enveloping circumstances, and her belief in that freedom speaks, as I have said, to an Emersonian conception of individual identity. It is autonomous, self-made, self-reliant; in a word, American. Nevertheless, she has decided to surrender that freedom, as marriage itself requires; she has chosen to form a part of something larger than she is alone, and thinks that she must bind herself to the very degree that her earlier state was free. But now her faith in that earlier and perfect liberty begins itself to erode; an erosion that stands as a direct consequence of Osmond’s hopes for Pansy’s marriage. James will not go so far as Zola. He won’t suggest that Isabel’s environment determines her fate and character, though he recognizes the challenge that naturalism provides, not only to Emerson’s ideal, but also to the more traditional sense of the self on which books like
Middlemarch
depend. He does, however, confront her with a set of facts that will force her to revise her peculiarly American understanding of her own past, of the degree to which she has made her own life.

James defines Isabel’s response to the Roman sadness as habitual, her customary way of thinking about the place, but he also offers his account of it in terms of a particular moment. She drives out one day determined
not
to think of a conversation she has just had with Madame Merle, and at this point James returns us to the tableau with which her midnight reverie had ended. For the older woman has seemed unreasonably disappointed to learn that Warburton has gone back to England instead of proposing to Pansy. She had so wanted that marriage, she says, and excuses her show of interest by adding that
“when one is such an old friend, one can’t help having something at stake.”
But what? Then her questions bubble up, and as she probes and pushes, as she tries to discover just what Isabel thinks of it all, one thing becomes clear. She believes, with Osmond, that Isabel has sent Warburton away, and not out of charity, not because she knows that Pansy loves Ned Rosier instead. No, Madame Merle suspects that Isabel wants to keep the Englishman for herself. Which makes her somehow desperate beneath her smiles, until she finally—commandingly, beggingly—asks the younger woman to
“Let him off—let us have him.”

The pronoun startles—“us”—and makes one wonder just why this family friend feels free to use it. Nor can we miss the note of ravening hunger with which she speaks. But Isabel has already begun to hear a
“mocking voice”
in her head, telling her that “this bright, strong, definite, worldly woman . . . was a powerful agent in her destiny.” So indeed her aunt has always claimed, insisting that Madame Merle had arranged Isabel’s marriage, introducing her oldest friend to the young woman’s fortune. Isabel has never believed it: Madame Merle had perhaps made Gilbert Osmond’s marriage by prodding him out of his lassitude, but the older woman has had nothing to do with her own. That was a matter of her own free choice. Now, however, she has a chill on her soul, and at that “us” she grows pale.
“Who are you,”
she asks, “what are you . . . What do you have to do with my husband. . . . What do you have to do with me?” And her friend, whose eyes seem to radiate darkness, answers in just a word. “Everything.”

Which makes Isabel realize that her aunt was right. Madame Merle has indeed made her marriage; which means that Madame Merle has made her. She has never been free, and was in some ways least free when she imagined herself most, when her new fortune allowed her to indulge her imagination, to believe she could do what she liked. Isabel remembers here that her friend had become especially affectionate after learning of her inheritance, and though she has long recognized that her husband’s ascetism is but a mask for his worldliness, she also realizes, now, that
“the man in the world whom she had supposed to be the least sordid, had married her for her money. Strange to say, it had never before occurred to her.”
He has measured her by the things that belong to her, and married her, in Madame Merle’s words, for the shell of her appurtenances.

Perhaps, she thinks, perhaps he might be willing to take that money and let her go, to swap her freedom for her fortune. This is as close as Isabel gets to the question of divorce, which Italian law, like that of the rest of Catholic Europe, did not then allow; even in England it remained extraordinarily difficult. For that she would probably have had to return to America, where in some western states it was relatively easy; easy enough, at any rate, to figure in the books of James contemporaries, Howells’s
Modern Instance
among them. Still, such novels almost always depict divorced women as morally “light,” and Isabel doesn’t appear to consider that journey. Her thoughts refer instead to a legal separation, in which she might pay Osmond to go away, using the investments otherwise secured to her by her marriage settlements. An English lawyer would find that easy enough to arrange, and yet even so it would make public what she sees as the shame of her failure. But Madame Merle’s words also prompt another thought. Isabel has always said to herself
“that the worst was still to come,”
and now she thinks it has. Being married for her money is the “worst [thing] she could think of,” and yet James chooses that phrase to make us remember what his heroine has forgotten. He wants us to recall Edgar’s claim in
King Lear
that “So long as we can say ‘This is the worst,’” we have still greater troubles before us.

Isabel’s talk with Madame Merle is but the first of the series of interviews—let me use the Victorian word—that James uses to move the novel toward its end. It makes her wonder if the older woman is someone to whom she might apply
“the great historical epithet of
wicked
,”
a term she knows only from books and of which she has always believed she had no personal knowledge. Any full account of James’s conception of evil will have to wait until the novel’s conclusion, however, and for now it’s best approached through his handling of plot, in every sense of the word; not only his own narrative plan, but also the designs his characters have upon each other, the secrets they hold, the metaphoric daggers in their sleeves. Osmond, for example—Osmond decides to put a bit more pressure on his daughter, to give the screw another turn. Warburton’s interest has suggested that Pansy can
“aim high,”
and he’s disappointed that she’s still fond of Ned Rosier, still has some remaining shred of an independent life. In Florence he had spoken proudly of bringing her up
“in the old way,”
but what he does now is the old way indeed. He sends her back to her convent, he demonstrates his power by locking her up. It is, he says, just a brief retreat,
“a chance for a little seclusion.”
She will soon be out again; once she has learned the right way to think.

Then a telegram arrives from Gardencourt. Ralph has been back in England for some weeks, but his life is now counted in days, and Isabel knows at once she must see him; whatever came between them has now lost its force. Except it hasn’t—or rather
he
hasn’t, Osmond hasn’t. When Isabel goes to tell him of her plans, she finds him preparing a watercolor copy of a print of an antique coin. Critics have always had fun with James’s description here, for it perfectly captures both Osmond’s values and limits. He is a copy of a copy; even his money comes to him thirdhand. But he has a bitter sting, and nowhere more so than in this scene, the last in which he appears. He sees no need for the trip, and tells Isabel that her relations with the visiting invalid had kept him on tenterhooks all winter, albeit for reasons he will not specify. He thinks her desire to go is simply an act of marital revenge, and his words are worth quoting at length: