Portrait of A Novel (35 page)

23.

THE SECOND CHANCE

I
F JAMES HAD
died at fifty, like Dencombe of the “Middle Years,” we would see him as a creature of fits and starts, of unfulfilled and even wasted potential; and we would wonder at the mixture of blindness and vanity that had led this once-brilliant novelist to scatter his time and talent on a series of unproduced plays. Instead he got his second chance, his chance at some final arc of achievement. Two months after the failure of
Guy Domville
, James told a friend that even if he had wanted to go on working for the stage, the truth was that he could no longer afford to. Five years had passed since he had stopped writing novels because he thought the theater might earn him more. Now he stopped making plays because he knew that while the market for his fiction was small, at least there was one.

Nevertheless, he felt the need to rescue something, anything, from his wasted years, anything that might give his loss a purpose. He found it in what he called the “
scenic
method,” drawing on what his work in the theater had taught him about how to block a narrative. James had always been good at entrances, but now he began to extend that skill to the book as a whole. He began to write novels as though they were plays, and in saying that I mean something more than that he composed
The Awkard
Age
almost entirely in dialogue. First, he started to plot his work out more carefully than ever before, to mock up an elaborate plan before he began to write. His notebooks contain only two pages on the
Portrait
, in which he outlines the later stages of a novel he had already half-finished. For
The Ambassadors
he produced a 20,000-word preparatory sketch. Second, he realized that the
“
march of an action
is the thing for me to . . .
attach
myself to.”
There must be nothing incidental or extraneous; everything on every page must work to further that march. Even the
Portrait
has its trailing fringes and furbelows, but though the sentences of James’s later books grow ever more complex, their dramatic situations are stripped as naked as a knife.

The scenic method did not, however, come easily, and James’s first conscious attempts to push it out to the length of a novel were more rigid than rigorous.
The Spoils of Poynton
(1897), which he began almost immediately after his West End failure, describes a family quarrel over a collection of fabulous old furniture; furniture that in itself goes famously undescribed. Its protagonist has a mind too fine for the world in which she lives, but with the stage still at the front of his own brain James begins a new chapter whenever a character enters or exits, and that creaky machinery remains at odds with his heroine’s darting inner life. I have already described the way that
The Awkward Age
explores the limits of what both young girls and English novels can be allowed to know about sex. But its interest outweighs its success, and whatever else James got from the theater, it didn’t help him to write dialogue; a skill at which the author of the
Portrait
had once been a master.
The Awkard Age
would be miserably unplayable, with its characters all talking alike and its speeches reliant on an ever-receding line of antecedent pronouns.

James had to figure out how to drape and clothe those knobby narrative bones. He needed to learn—or to relearn—how to give his fiction the illusion of flexibility. Nevertheless, he did write one marvelous book in this period. The opening chapters of
What Maisie Knew
have a sustained brilliance of phrase unmatched in his work since
Washington Square
, though what one most feels in reading it today is its terrible contemporaneity. It is the first important English novel to take divorce as a starting point rather than as an almost unimaginable conclusion, the first predicated on a child-custody case; and certainly the first to see such things through the child’s own limited comprehension. We never do find out exactly what Maisie knows. We’re not even told how old she is, let alone what she understands about the peculiar family of which she is the motive force. What we
do
know is that in learning to hide her feelings she has also learned that she has an inner self. James builds the novel upon—or perhaps within—that self, and he uses Maisie’s limited awareness to avoid having to specify the sweaty facts of adult life, of the lies and love affairs going on around her. In writing the
Portrait
, James had told himself to “place the centre of the subject” in Isabel’s ever-developing understanding of her own situation. Now he was doing it again. He had found his way back, and in his late novels he would work almost exclusively as if from within the mind of one character or another, locating his material in their slow, fumbling movements toward knowledge. He took his seat before the low-burning fire of the Palazzo Roccanera; he learned to stage consciousness itself.

One more thing happened as he wrote
What Maisie Knew
. Thirty years of his ceaseless scrawl had had their effect, and by the summer of 1896 the physical act of writing had become a torture. The pain shot through his arm and hand, it put him on the edge of missed deadlines, and the printers
“denounced”
him for holding them up. He called it writer’s cramp. We would describe it as a repetitive motion injury, but the result was the same, and his daily work became ever more debilitating. He hired a shorthand specialist and typist named William MacAlpine and began to dictate, employing him at first for letters only. However, at some point in the composition of
What Maisie Knew
he also began to use MacAlpine for his fiction, and the process exaggerated the development of his increasingly elaborate late style. A few of his friends even thought they could spot the chapter in which he had begun to speak the novel out. I wouldn’t claim so much myself, but something does change just over halfway through, as the chapters lengthen and the dialogue begins to lose its speed. The novel quickens again at the finish, and yet in allowing James to reproduce the stretched cadences of his spoken voice, the typewriter was to mark him to the end.

T
here were other movements in James’s life as he approached the new century. London had always satisfied and sustained him, it had always seemed to contain more of human complexity than anywhere else he had lived. But it exhausted him too. In his teens he had wandered Newport’s beaches and coves, and in the summer of 1895 he had searched out the ocean once more, staying on into the fall in the resort town of Torquay, on the mild Devonshire coast, and learning to ride a bicycle while his London flat was wired for electricity. The next summer he went to the coast again, this time taking a Sussex cottage that overlooked the ancient port of Rye. That stay changed his life, and in the years after his theatrical failure the quiet cobblestoned town would fill what he described as his
“long-unassuaged desire”
for a refuge from the city’s summer heat and social requirements alike. Rye might be sleepily unsophisticated, but in the season it was lively enough: not so small as to be wary of newcomers and yet sufficiently tight to have the air of an extended family. It was a place in which he might know and be known by everyone.

Before the summer was over James began to think about finding something permanent in the area. It took a year, but then the news came that the owner of Rye’s best house had died and his heirs wanted a tenant. James grabbed it at once, a long lease at £70 a year, scarcely more than half of what he had paid in Bolton Street, and began to furnish it in
“not too-delusive Chippendale and Sheraton.”
Two years later he bought it outright. Rye sits on a hill and Lamb House sits at its top, on the outer corner of a right-angled street. A minute’s walk in one direction took him to the town’s high-towered church; a pew came with the house, by custom, though he hardly ever used it. On the other the pavement fell away, down to the shops of the High Street below. The house had a high Georgian doorway, a wide imposing hall, and a garden shut in by a wall that looked heavy with espaliered fruit trees. There were two guest bedrooms and an upstairs study, and in that garden was the studio in which he would pace out the great work of his later career.

James did not abandon London. He kept his flat in De Vere Gardens for a while, and afterward had a bedroom at the Reform Club, a
pied-à-terre
that he took by the year. He spent most of the winter in the city, in fact, for in the rain and cold Rye often felt too far from a world of ready conversation. Nevertheless his move to Lamb House in the summer of 1898 did signal an enormous change in his habits. His travels had never before interrupted his work, but by now his fiction was dependent on MacAlpine and the sound of his heavy Remington typewriter. He couldn’t really write in hotels anymore, or even while staying with friends, and it’s no accident that his decision to make himself a home came after he had begun to dictate, after he had recognized that he couldn’t wander as freely as before. The Continent had once been a retreat from the distracting pace of the capital, and James had often left the city to finish a book in quiet, as he had done with the
Portrait
in 1881. Now from the concentrated solitude of home he would instead retire to the excitement of London itself; the home without which his late books would not have been possible. MacAlpine found rooms in Rye, as did all of James’s later typists, and the two men enjoyed bicycling together through the
“wide, sheep-studded greenness”
of the marshland that surrounded it. And James himself soon found a new vocation as a fussily benevolent host, welcoming guests and issuing elaborate instructions about the trains from Charing Cross.

Still, he did continue to cross the Channel, and it was on a trip to Rome in the spring of 1899 that Henry James was surprised by one change more. Hendrik Andersen had a long straight nose and shadowed, penetrating eyes. He had been born in Norway but grew up in Newport, blond and lean and hauntingly handsome, and had come to Italy to learn the sculptor’s trade. Andersen dreamed of using his art to create a new “World-City” of peace and harmony, but the ambition he put into his monumental nudes would always outrun his talent. He was, however, good at attracting the interest of older male artists, and in Rome had found a sponsor in a Scottish aristocrat called Lord Ronald Gower, a fellow sculptor and friend of Oscar Wilde’s.

He was twenty-seven when James met him, and the novelist felt such an immediate and unprecedented bolt of longing that it has to be called love. But his only way of acting upon it was to buy a piece of the young man’s work, a portrait bust of an Italian boy for which he paid £50, some 70 percent of his annual rent for Lamb House. He put the statue on a sideboard in the dining room, where it still rests today; he could see it from the table, and looked forward to Andersen’s promised visit. The sculptor stayed for only three days, however, and when James wrote to him that September, he sounded an atypically importunate note, asking him to
“come back next summer and let me put you up for as long as you can possibly stay. There, mind you—it’s an engagement.”

James had just turned fifty-six when he found himself so suddenly vulnerable to emotion, so open in his need for another person. He was acutely aware of the thirty years between them, and had an increasing awareness of his own mortality, one spurred by the shock of his professional crises; he also had a new and ever-more-settled sense of domesticity, and perhaps too the belief that age had brought safety. He offered to help his protégé set up a studio in Rye, and so fondly remembered a bicycle ride together that he couldn’t pass a particular corner
“without thinking ever so tenderly of our charming spin homeward in the twilight and feeling again the strange perversity it made of that sort of thing being so soon
over
.”
Andersen did visit again, playing the role of a coddled nephew, but though James’s heart rose at every prospect of seeing him, each stay was brief. He acknowledged the novelist’s kindness, but he was even more self-absorbed than most artists and thought of the older man chiefly in terms of the boost their friendship might give his career. As for James himself, if he ever recognized that his life had begun to imitate his art, that he had now stepped into his own first novel and taken on the role of the ever-encouraging patron Rowland Mallet to Andersen’s impetuous Roderick Hudson, he never admitted it. In time he lost his faith in the prospect of Andersen’s achievement, and cared less each year for the way his statues flaunted
“their bellies and bottoms.”
The “Beloved Boy!” of his early letters became simply “Dearest old Hendrik”; yet he kept his interest in the sculptor to the end.

There would be other young men in James’s future, other crushes, other loves, and many letters written with a similarly eager tenderness. Some of those to whom he wrote did have an active sex life with other men. The journalist Morton Fullerton was one of them, and so were the minor novelists Howard Sturgis and Hugh Walpole. And in certain cautious and ambivalent ways James now began to admit both the presence and the nature of his own desire, though he always held himself apart from the world-within-a-world of London’s homosexual life, with its secret addresses and all but open bits of code, like the green carnations that Wilde had made famous. Indeed, Wilde himself was much on James’s mind, and he wrote to William that the
“squalid violence”
of his fall had given him “an interest (of misery) that he never had for me—in any degree—before.” The arresting detail here is that interjected “in any degree.” It suggests an allusion to something the letter itself can’t say, as though Cambridge needed reassurance. Yet while James remained careful, he did increasingly allow a passionate if largely metaphoric physicality to enter the language with which he wrote to his male friends. When, for example, Fullerton told him of a troubled love affair in the fall of 1900, James offered to give him whatever help he needed,
“absolutely
holding
out the assurance of it. Hold me then
you
with any squeeze; grip me with any grip; press me with any pressure; trust me with any trust.”