Portrait of A Novel (36 page)

With its faint echoes of John Donne, James’s imagery attempts to conjure up being, to create an impossible presence through words alone. The novelist lards his other correspondence with effusive compliments on the recipient’s bounty or beauty or benevolence or talent. In writing to Andersen and his successors, however, he did something that he hadn’t done in any extant earlier letters. He gave physical expression to emotion in a moment of physical absence, and expressed an active wish for the other person’s bodily presence. Not in bed. A bicycle ride will do, a squeeze of the hand, a seat across the dinner table, and he writes as often as not in the expectation that such things will be withheld. But he never wished for his brother’s company in these terms, or for that of any of his female correspondents. He didn’t write in these words to anyone of his own age, and if at times with these younger men he wore an avuncular mask, we need to remember that he was also an uncle in fact, and he did not sound this way with William’s adult children. Whether James ever knew anything more than this must remain an open question. But there can be no doubt that from the moment he met Hendrik Andersen he felt himself free to describe the gasping force of desire itself.

T
he essayist and cartoonist Max Beerbohm is best remembered for the parodies he collected under the title of
A Christmas Garland
(1912), a book that snares every stylistic excess of such contemporaries as Conrad and Kipling, and above all those of James himself. In “The Mote in the Middle Distance” two children in their nursery look at the
“pendulous”
shapes hanging by the foot of their beds, and speculate about the treats Santa Claus has left “so blatantly suspended in the silhouettes of the two stockings.” But Beerbohm also did several caricature sketches of the novelist, and the most interesting of them shows him on one knee, bent to examine two pairs of shoes outside a hotel room door. The door remains shut, and James can only—
we
can only—infer what’s going on behind it from the simple presence of the shoes themselves, asking ourselves if they’re where they should be, the right shoes in front of the right room and the right people in that room. We peer down at those boots, and wonder about the connection between the private self and the public life, the life that’s left out in the hallway for everyone to see. We ask ourselves, indeed, if we can draw any conclusions at all, and Beerbohm’s 1904 sketch has a special relevance to the three long novels that James wrote in the early years of the new century.

James had worked well in both
What Maisie Knew
and the short fiction of the
fin de siècle
, but these books amount to a break in scale as sharply dramatic as that which had led to
The Portrait of a Lady
itself. At once austere and grandiloquent, they are both modern and modernist in the pointillism with which they catch the human mind in the second-by-second act of perception, and modernist too in the symbolic force and weight of their language. Different readers will have their preferences among them. James himself thought
The Ambassadors
the most perfect of all, and to me
The Golden Bowl
captures the sublime terror of the inner life in a way that remains unmatched in American fiction. Still, the three are sufficiently alike to be dealt with as a group, and in each of them James returns to the international theme that, after finishing the
Portrait
, he had virtually surrendered as a novelistic subject. The books of his splendid last manner all hang on the question of Americans in Europe, and it’s no coincidence that in doing so they also concentrate on the great drama of an expanding consciousness.

Each of them describes the encounter of innocence with a wider world, an access of understanding that proves punishing and liberating at once. But perhaps it is time to listen:

It wasn’t till
many days had passed that the Princess began to accept the idea of having done, a little, something she was not always doing, or indeed that of having listened to any inward voice that spoke in a new tone. Yet these instinctive postponements of reflection were the fruit, positively, of recognitions and perceptions already active; of the sense above all that she had made at a particular hour, made by the mere touch of her hand, a difference in the situation so long present to her as practically unattackable. This situation had been occupying for months and months the very centre of the garden of her life, but it had reared itself there like some strange tall tower of ivory, or perhaps some wonderful beautiful but outlandish pagoda, a structure plated with hard bright porcelain, coloured and figured and adorned at the overhanging eaves with silver bells that tinkled ever so charmingly when stirred by chance airs.

The Princess is named Maggie Verver, the last of James’s American girls, a dollar princess now married to an actual prince, an Italian whose family history fills whole rooms in the Vatican library. James will go on, in the rest of this long paragraph from the middle of
The Golden Bowl
, to describe Maggie’s walk around that imaginary pagoda, a walk in which its “great decorated surface” remains impenetrable. Some readers will take that as a description of the novelist’s own late style, and those of us who love it had better admit that. For it can look here as if James has given up on his audience. Or rather he’s stopped worrying about it, stopped trying to please it. He writes now as if he wants only to please himself, and to the degree that he’s concerned with his readers at all, it’s to pay the fit and the few the compliment of assuming that they’ll be able to follow. He is not, to my mind, as difficult as Joyce, not a creature of fragmentary allusions and broken syntax. Nor is he as elliptical as Faulkner or Woolf, in whom time itself can fall through the floor. But his doubly compounded sentences are indeed hard, and it’s worth taking a moment to ask why.

Look at the words that James’s free indirect discourse assigns to the Princess: idea, something, postponement, recognition, situation. He doesn’t define any of them, but lets them stand instead as her mental shorthand for the family problem that’s developed in the book’s earlier chapters. Whatever the Princess may have done, the nouns that define it remain abstract, without any “
solidity of specification
.” Though “define” is the wrong word.
Un
defined, rather, and undefined not only because she herself knows to what those words refer, but also because she doesn’t, because she isn’t quite sure what she’s done. Maggie too is groping, as we are, or indeed as James himself is, walking the length of his studio and hunting for the next phrase as his typist sits at the keys. The Princess wants a name to put to her experience, something more precise than “situation.” She tries to take in a set of facts that she also wants to resist, and in staying close to her consciousness James must also stay close to the imprecision of her understanding. Paradoxically, however, he does so by becoming very precise indeed. He turns that situation into an extended architectural metaphor, in which Maggie scans that unreal pagoda’s elevation for
“apertures and outlooks,”
and looks for a door on which to knock. He uses such metaphors, both here and in all his late work, to give physical form to the disembodied perceptions of his characters’ moral and intellectual lives; and in reading, it’s sometimes hard to remember that Maggie’s hand has in fact touched nothing. For James’s reliance on such metaphors creates in turn a further abstraction, a further set of difficulties. His description isn’t tethered to a particular moment, but evokes instead a habitual practice, with whole weeks of Maggie’s inner life collapsed in a phrase. Yet no matter how often she walks around it, the pagoda still lacks a door, and like the novelist himself in Beerbohm’s caricature, the Princess will need all her imagination to understand what’s inside, to understand what lies behind the eyes of that stranger, her husband.

Many critics
of an earlier generation found the late James to be the best of all, as some of their titles suggest—
The Major Phase, The Ordeal of Consciousness, The Expense of Vision
. I understand their claims, and yet rather than concentrate on James’s depiction of consciousness as such, I want to look instead at just who in these books perceives what. The anecdotal germs of
The Golden Bowl
and
The Ambassadors
each concerned Americans in Europe, and as James worked over his idea for
The Wings of the Dove
, it too developed an international thrust. In
The Ambassadors
a man from Massachusetts tries to rescue a friend’s son from an affair with a married woman in Paris. James had a sly awareness of cliché, and knew his countrymen’s belief that
“people’s moral scheme
does
break down”
in France, but rather than resist that convention he decided to play with it. Lambert Strether refuses at the start to admit that Chad Newsome’s relation with Madame de Vionnet is above all a sexual one. He sees that she’s charming and that the boy has grown up, and insists that their attachment is “virtuous”; but at the end his own moral scheme cracks, and he recognizes that Chad’s affair has been both adulterous
and
virtuous. In
The Wings of the Dove
, sex becomes an instrument of power, the ground on which two of the book’s main characters meet to seal a pact against the third.
The Golden Bowl
depends on Maggie’s growing knowledge that her husband has betrayed her. At first the young woman recoils. Then she begins to understand just how much she needs and wants him, even as she realizes that in fighting to keep him the one thing she cannot do is to admit what she knows.

The Golden Bowl
never uses the word “adultery,” and yet it remains as central to that book’s concerns as it does to
Madame Bovary
or
Anna Karenina
. But there is one crucial difference between them, as the cultural historian Barbara Leckie has argued. The European novels concern themselves with passion, the passion that starts an affair and sustains it, and whose waning brings despair. Their concern lies, that is, with the guilty. James gives his interest to the wronged spouse instead—to Isabel in the
Portrait
, and above all to Maggie. He’s drawn not to the sex as such, but rather to the process of finding out about it, to a mental act of discovery and not a bodily one. He is interested, finally, in epistemology, in how his characters know what they come, in the end, to know. Or at least Isabel’s knowledge comes at the end. Maggie’s in contrast arrives early, and James gives her many more pages in which to discover how to live with it, pages in which she learns not to shy away from what she has learned but rather to move toward it.

For these late novels don’t simply depict a developing consciousness. They also take sex itself as the focal point of that development. Each of them catches its breath at its power and its mystery, catches it and then finds it again in a newly powerful understanding of the knowledge it brings of the world, the other, and above all of the self. In a way, that had always been James’s subject, in
Daisy Miller
or
What Maisie Knew
or even in the
Portrait
. He had always been fascinated by the struggle to acknowledge the facts of sexual life, by characters who no more possess a language in which to admit what they know than did English fiction itself. But something had changed by the time he began to write
The Ambassadors
. Both Strether and Maggie can take in those facts in a way that neither Isabel nor Winterbourne can ever quite manage. They meet their difficulty, and are far from powerless in the face of it; Maggie in particular finds a personal force that she could never before have imagined. Probably some of that change came from the fact that 1901 wasn’t 1881, that the intervening years had seen the work of Hardy and the translation of Zola; and they had seen too the waning power of the circulating libraries. James had always argued on behalf of a greater frankness, hoping to close the gap between what people might say in private and what they could say in print. There would be many battles to come over the question of candor in fiction; nevertheless the range of admissible knowledge had grown. Still, that change in what James’s characters are capable of must also have had a source in the author’s own life. Probably we can attribute it, in some unquantifiable and unspecified way, to what his own knee-trembling love for Hendrik Andersen had taught him.

So make a Venn diagram, with four circles called Europe, America, sex, and consciousness.
The Portrait of a Lady
lies at their overlap, so does
Daisy Miller
, and so do these late books; not all of James’s great work, but enough of it, enough to call it his most characteristic terrain. It was a place to which he had returned after twenty years—returned when he found he had something new to say about it. For now the moral shading on the map has changed. In
The Ambassadors
the people who stay at home in New England see Europe as a trap. They know its inveigling ways, these cultivated descendents of the Puritans, readers of the
Atlantic
and even perhaps of Henry James. They know its iniquitous sophistication—they know all about Madame Merle, an American who has, as it were, gone native. That’s what Strether expects to find in Paris and yet doesn’t, as his soul expands beyond his own earlier standards; grows even as he recognizes that his own liberation has come too late. But Maggie Verver will rewrite Isabel’s history. She learns of the past that her husband and her best friend have shared between them. She learns of it, and suffers from it, and she will survive it too, as she moves on with him into a new life. Europe may have done a job on her mind, but it has also made her grow up.

O
nce before, James had marked his own sense of accomplishment with a voyage, sailing back to America on the eve of the
Portrait
’s 1881 publication. He had gone to see what he called
les miens
, and gone with full hands, believing that he had something to show for his time abroad. Now he heard that inner note of achievement once more. He knew as he worked upon
The Golden Bowl
that in these last years he had written at a pace and a pitch he had never before been able to sustain. He had a renewed conviction of his own force, and confessed in a letter that his native land had begun to look romantic in a way that England itself had
“hugely and ingeniously ceased to be.”
Time and change and absence had made his old country seem exotic, and the trip now appeared as if it might be the one true adventure left to him. He was, admittedly, afraid that at sixty his habits had become too rigid for even a little “molehill” of a six-month visit. But he got rid of his fears, found a tenant for Lamb House, and sailed on August 24, 1904, for what he thought would be his last visit to America. It was twenty-one years, almost to the day, since he had seen his birthplace.