Portrait of A Novel (40 page)

a flash that spread, and spread again, and stayed; and it was extraordinarily as if, while she took it, she felt each thing in his hard manhood that had least pleased her, each aggressive fact of his face, his figure, his presence, justified of its intense identity and made one with this act of possession. So had she heard of those wrecked and under water following a train of images before they sink. But when darkness returned, she was free.

It is the most frankly sexual moment in all of James’s fiction—frank in its emotion and its language alike. He could not have written it in 1881; perhaps no novelist in English could have. Hardy has moments of bawdry, and also of an age-old symbolism, like the sword drill that Sergeant Troy performs in
Far from the Madding Crowd
, with his blade darting around Bathsheba Everdene’s body. But he gives us nothing like this. Nor for that matter does Zola: nothing like the sublime and spreading flash this kiss produces, nothing like the heightened inner life that James presents as induced by the very power of Isabel’s physical reaction. She feels, as she takes that kiss, as if each fact of Goodwood’s being were realizing itself in the act of pressing up against her, as if he has now become more himself than ever. She may not like them, but she does now understand the purpose of “his face, his figure, his presence.” Still, she continues to feel his separateness even as he devours her; even as she loses herself in the waves of what he has forced upon her.

At this moment Isabel seems both entirely responsive to sexual passion and afraid of it in equal measure—afraid because responsive, because the strength of Goodwood’s emotion has turned the key of her own, and she discovers how entirely capable she is of losing herself. We remember the fear with which she regarded the likelihood of Warburton’s proposal, and her sense of the uncertain ground that Osmond’s declaration produced, her imagination halting before it could go too far. We remember too her belief that if a certain light ever came she could give herself entirely. Now that light has come indeed, and with a force that makes Isabel sink and gasp not for breath but for thought. Goodwood’s kiss clouds her head even as she thrills with perception, and it is exactly her presence, her independence, of mind that she most fears to lose. It’s what she had to fight for with Osmond, who wanted to deck her inner world in his own genius for upholstery. But she had saved herself. She sat before the fire and puzzled out her life, she came to a clear understanding of the forces that had shaped and trapped her, and she learned the nature of her own blindness. She set herself free, even before leaving to sit by Ralph’s bed. Now she might lose it all, but then Goodwood releases her, the darkness returns, and she knows what to do.

James’s revisions suggest the reason for the decision Isabel now makes; reasons that seemed obscure to many readers of the first edition and maybe even to the author himself. She returns to Rome. She leaves Gardencourt as quickly as she can, and the news comes to us as a punch, a kick, a stab. Rome? For what, and why? Once again James pulls away from Isabel at a moment of decision—he did not show her in the act of choosing Osmond, and he does not show her here. Once more he staggers us with a
fait accompli
. This second decision had, however, seemed undermotivated in 1881, as though Goodwood’s kiss had simply shown her where her duty lay. The later version gives us something much more complicated, and we can begin to understand it by taking literally the words she speaks at random. She goes to Rome to get away from Goodwood, not only from the “aggressive fact” of his presence but also from her own desire. She goes because she recognizes that the most valuable thing she has is a free mind, and Goodwood challenges that freedom as Osmond no longer does, threatening the autonomous self she has fought so hard to regain. She chooses, knowing what she doesn’t want, and she goes because at this point nothing forces her to; her choice is an active one, and she goes because she can. She goes, finally, because to stay would require her to accept an illusion. She would have to believe, with her own earlier self, that an unfallen world does indeed lie all before her.

The younger James had neither the language nor the emotional experience to write about that. The older one did, and he used it to show us just why Isabel makes this final choice. It’s not that she’s afraid of sex per se, as some readers have always thought, but that she refuses to grant it the power she now knows it could have. She will not allow her fate to be determined by desire. Whether James is
right
about this, whether he could or should have allowed her something more—well, that’s another question. In Maggie Verver he created a woman whose independence of mind is sharpened by that same desire, and in creating her he learned what he needed to know in looking at Isabel once more. He was himself a different man by then, and the world of the novel was different too. Stephen Crane had already given us his own Maggie, that girl of the streets, and Edith Wharton would soon bring a mathematical precision to seduction in
The Reef
; D. H. Lawrence would begin to work, and Proust as well. The printed page had started to admit what everyone talked about. But James was right about it for this character, for Isabel. In the New York Edition he could show, as he could not in 1881, just why she behaved as she did, and yet in doing so kept both the character and her novel within the boundaries he had first defined. She isn’t different in the later version; but he does know more about her.

The news that Isabel has returned to Rome comes on the book’s last page; the novel did not begin with Isabel, and it does not end with her either. Our heroine disappears from the text, vanishing into the smoke and the steam of a southbound train, and leaving Henrietta behind to give Caspar Goodwood the news. He turns away when he hears it, but Henrietta then grasps his arm and tells him to wait. On which, in the last words of the first edition,
“he looked up at her.”
Finis
.

B
ut what kind of ending is that? It is so fast, and so startling, that we seem to plunge as deeply into the waters as Isabel herself, a confusion in which our feet have no bottom to find. Many of James’s first readers felt troubled by it, and wondered just what, exactly, Goodwood was meant to wait for. The
Spectator
’s R. H. Hutton thought that the novel finished on the verge of what it dared not describe, and that Isabel’s straight path led directly to a
“liaison with her rejected lover.”
In
Blackwood’s
, Margaret Oliphant acknowledged James’s usual way of teasing his readers
“with an end which is left to our imagination,”
but her own imagination joined Hutton’s in seeing some “future stain” on the heroine; a suggestion she refused to abide. And James himself took pains to clarify those last sentences. His notebooks are explicit: Isabel now
“feels the full force of [Goodwood’s] devotion—to which she has never done justice; but she refuses.”
He did recognize his readers’ puzzlement, though, and at a Boston dinner party in 1883 he told the table that Henrietta’s words merely offer the man a note of encouragement about life itself. Not that he takes it, as the 1906 revisions make clear. There, Goodwood looks up at her
“only to guess, from her face, with a revulsion, that she simply meant he was young.”
No reader of that later version can entertain Hutton’s fear; even Goodwood himself no longer believes that Isabel might turn to him.

Still, that fear is instructive. It reminds us of how sharply sudden the book’s last words are, of how disconcertingly little we’re told about what’s going to happen next. We suffer from the absence of news, and that suggests both how much we have come to care about Isabel and the strength of our need for a conclusion. Not just an end. Endings may be bitten off or cut short, as this one is, and what we want instead is some final disposition of the characters’ lives. George Eliot lets her widowed Dorothea remarry and have a baby, and she also orders Lydgate’s early death; Anna Karenina disappears beneath the wheels of a train, and Levin, having decided not to kill himself, walks home with his wife and child. These separate fates may delight or trouble us, but what really matters is that we know. Their lives are settled, and when we shut the book, we can leave them in place. Yet about Isabel we know nothing, as though James’s protagonist herself were but a loose end. He stops with her en route to Rome, and we can’t really predict what will happen when she gets there. Some of us may even grasp at the straws of what he
doesn’t
write. We know she has
“started for Rome,”
but James doesn’t say that she’s returned to her husband, and we can find ourselves clutching at the ambiguity.

James thought about the problem of winding things up for the entirety of his career. In his notebooks he recognized that the
“obvious criticism”
of the
Portrait
would be that it wasn’t finished, that he hadn’t “seen the heroine to the end of her situation—that I have left her
en l’air
.—This is both true and false. The
whole
of anything is never told; you can only take what groups together.” And twenty-five years later he returned to that idea in the preface to
Roderick Hudson
:
“Really, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw . . . the circle within which they shall happily
appear
to do so.”
Human life spills out of form, and another episode is always possible. The novelist needs to acknowledge that and yet also to ignore it, and one of the ways James draws his circle is by drawing a circle in fact. The book returns to where it began—the same house, the same people, even the same bench, and that proto-modernist patterning offers a reassuring sense of wholeness, like the couplet at the end of a sonnet. It helps us accept that jagged stump of a last page. For James took a gamble here, and the response of his readers suggests that in 1881 it wasn’t entirely successful. Many of them couldn’t accept a heroine who seemed to have one foot over the edge of the unknown, couldn’t accept uncertainty. We are used to open endings now, and in part because of novels like this one; because James has turned us into the kind of readers who can be trusted to work things out for ourselves, and don’t need a final chapter of dessert and ices.

James wrote in his notebooks that Isabel’s departure for Italy stands as the story’s climax—not Ralph’s death, and not even the kiss. Those incidents work instead to produce that climax, one in which the book narrows itself down to a decision between two starkly different futures. It presents us with a simple binary in which she must either stay or go, and once she makes that decision, in full knowledge of the forces that have shaped her, the novel is of necessity over. And we cannot say what will happen to her now; what would happen, if she were real. James seems to have thought of giving the
Portrait
a sequel, writing in his notebooks that what he had done was
“complete in itself,”
but adding that “the rest may be taken up or not, later.” He never did, and in 1898 answered a friend’s question about the chance of one by saying that it was
“all too faint and far away.”
No record survives as to what he thought might happen after the end of the last page—if indeed he thought anything at all. For one of the wonderful things about this clipped and disconcerting ending is that Isabel seems to travel into a future that lies outside her author’s own knowledge. Some readers want her to take up Pansy’s cause, and others believe that she goes home in defeat. Maybe she will suffer on in a place where others have suffered before her; maybe Osmond will take her money, and let her go. The lives we choose for her say more about us than they do about the character herself; in my own next installment her new awareness makes her formidable, and she goes home only to fight. Isabel’s future will have more possibilities in it than anyone can know when she steps onto that train, simply by virtue of being a future, but this chapter of her imaginary life is now closed.

“Nothing is my
last word
about anything.”
The statement comes from a letter in which James answered a reader’s objection to one of his stories, and anyone trying to reach some final sense of a man who wrote so many millions of words should bear them in mind. Yet a last word we must have, and so let it be here. James enjoyed looking at pictures, and while visiting the London galleries in the early summer of 1882, he found himself drawn to a portrait that appeared to
“raise the individual to the significance of a type,”
one that made a khaki-clad reporter named Archibald Forbes seem the epitome of the globe-trotting Englishman. His own great picture was just a few months behind him, and we may take his words as an account of what he had tried to do with it. Another self-description comes in the lines he wrote a few years later about Sargent, when after considering such already-famous works as
Madame X
and
The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit
he warned the painter against his own facility. For while
“there is no greater work of art than a great portrait,”
the truly magnificent ones unite a sharp immediate perception with some quality of “lingering reflection.” The artist must be patient with his subject, must live with it and into it and learn to see beyond its surface. Only then can he humanize its formal problems.

Henry James did that with Isabel Archer, and with the novel that contains her. He did it twice, in fact, seeing ever more deeply into the slim shade of a young girl who had once stood there all alone in his mind, ready to affront her destiny. He built a house for her, and ever since, readers have wanted to live in it, wandering through its hallways and looking out of its windows, hoping for a cup of tea with some of its inhabitants and wishing we could warn her against others. Some of those readers may want to give the lady one more room of her own, and for all of us a sense of her being flows out beyond the ending, as though Isabel had some life beyond the words that fix her to the page. That too was a part of James’s ambition, and one he paradoxically fulfilled by refusing to tell us everything we might wish to know about her. We want her to go on—but let me borrow his words once more, and offer you the last sentence of the preface he wrote for her:
“There is really too much to say.”