Portrait of A Novel (5 page)

For their conversation was a collaboration indeed, and one that we can only recapture by reading what they wrote to and about each either for the next half-century. They would have spoken of Dickens, who visited Boston in 1867, leaving James with a memory of the Englishman’s all-consuming eyes, and probably they spoke about audience: about what American readers wanted and how they might be nudged into wanting something else. Neither of them liked the multiplotted novel of the Victorians, the twisted strands of seemingly divergent narratives that make up a book like
David Copperfield
. They wanted instead to tell a single story, and to make that story’s ending grow directly out of its characters, rather than be imposed through the deus ex machina of sudden or startling events. So as they walked along the Charles, they would have talked about plot, or rather about what their critics called plotlessness; years later, Thomas Hardy would contrast his own kind of forcefully knotted fiction to that of Howells in particular. Above all, they spoke of the need for a distinctively American realism. They both admired the recently dead Hawthorne, but nevertheless wanted to tamp down the metaphysical conceits on which his work relied. They similarly ruled against the kind of sentimental fiction that, for readers today, is exemplified by the death scenes in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
. Such books were enormously popular, and there was a trace of misogyny in the way they thought about such writers as Elizabeth Stoddard or even Harriet Beecher Stowe herself. But they took more from such novels than they would have been willing to admit; with James it shows in the way he idealizes his heroines, idealizes them so fully that he has to knock back a chaser of irony too.

Howells was never as much of a spectator as James, and he was in aesthetic terms by far the more conservative; he no more allowed himself James’s sense of ambiguity than he did the violent operatic grandeur of Hardy. He believed the American novel needed to recognize what he called the
“smiling aspects”
of life, and later opposed his own kind of realism to the naturalism of Émile Zola and such American followers as Frank Norris. As an editor, he tried to cajole his friend into providing the happy endings he thought their readers required. James fobbed him off with the charming but inconsequential
Europeans
(1878), which finishes with a handful of marriages while refusing to let the most interesting of its possible unions come off. They did not agree about everything, but between them they created an American novel of manners, the novel of our eastern seaboard.

T
he best of James’s early pieces is probably “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” a tale of sibling rivalry decked out as a ghost story. His work in the 1860s has often been read as a transparent indication of his own psychic state; and perhaps inevitably so, given its often clumsy narrative machinery. This story is different, both cold-blooded and playful in the revenge it allows a younger sister to take upon her elder; as though James winkingly knew precisely what he was up to. In truth, however, none of his apprentice fiction would have survived without the warrant of his later career. His ferociously capable criticism is a different matter, and scholars of Dickens and George Eliot among others still need to consider his early pieces on them. In these years he could most often be found at his parents’ house in Quincy Street. He was publishing regularly but not making enough to live on, and one detail in Howells’s memories strikes a curious note. James often knocked at their door on Sunday evenings, around suppertime, but
“he joined us only in spirit,”
for he took nothing except a digestive biscuit which had been prescribed for him, and which he didn’t eat so much as crumble. In the later 1860s he suffered from what Howells understood to be indigestion. It was in fact a prolonged period of constipation, and one that James believed made his back troubles worse. The biscuits did not help, and at times he seems to have felt both hungry and surfeited, reluctant to eat lest he exacerbate the difficulty.

We cannot prescribe at a distance—cannot determine the proportion of the psychological and the physical in the postwar disorders of both Henry and William James. They each craved and yet resisted an adult life, and in this there was a marked contrast with their younger brothers. Using their father’s capital, Wilky and Bob attempted after the war to grow cotton in Florida, hiring freed slaves as a labor force. They paid them fairly, but they had no experience of farming, and moreover encountered the forerunners of the Ku Klux Klan. Eventually they both moved to the Midwest, settling and marrying in Milwaukee. In the spring of 1867, William went to Europe, where he tried out a series of Teutonic spas and, more consequentially, began his love affair with German academic life. Their friend Perry was also abroad, and Henry’s letters to him are full of a longing for travel. On the one hand, that longing is professional—he thought he needed a few years in England before he could work as he wanted. But he also had a more primitive desire for escape, for the Paris that haunted his imagination. William came back—and then, with much complication and delay, it was Henry’s turn. His parents thought he was traveling for his health, and so he was; but not for his bodily ailments alone.

James’s friendship with Minny Temple had endured and deepened in the years since that New Hampshire summer. He was not
in
love with her, not in any physical sense, but he did love her. He found her a necessary presence, and her frank, playful independence already provided an inspiration. Yet that independence wore a curb, for she now lived with a married sister; not quite a poor relation, but not her own mistress either. And there was something more. In 1868 she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the disease that had killed her parents. She had never cared much for the marriage market, but now that shop looked closed to her. In the
Portrait
, however, James took the idea of cousins marrying seriously enough to make Ralph reject it as a bad idea, and to argue as well that people in his stage
“of pulmonary weakness had better not marry at all.”
Those words might have their origin in a letter Minny sent James in June 1869, when he was already in Switzerland.
“I wish I were there too,”
she wrote, and then added that “if you were not my cousin I would write to ask you to marry me and take me with you, but as it is it wouldn’t do.” Yet Minny could write that way precisely because such questions were not at issue between them. She struggled against her illness through a fiction not of love but of travel, of a health-giving voyage to the warm south; in the same letter she sketched a plan to get herself to Rome, and wondered if he would be there to meet her. James conspired with her in telling that story, and in his autobiography remembered that in their leave-taking they kept at bay the significance of her periodic hemorrhages. Those memoirs were written, however, with the blurry hindsight of over forty years, and it’s more accurate to say that Minny helped him not to know. She was more open in writing to John Gray, with whom she had developed a rich friendship. James’s autobiography aside, most of what we know about her comes in fact from the letters Gray preserved, letters that make a black comedy out of her different doctors’ prescriptions.

Henry James went to England, and to Paris. He hiked through Switzerland and traveled down into Italy, to Venice and Florence and then Rome, where he found himself
“reeling & moaning thro’ the streets in a fever of enjoyment.”
None of the letters he wrote to his cousin have survived, and the truth is that during his first ten months abroad he does not seem to have thought much about her; in writing to Quincy Street he mentions her but rarely. Perhaps his emotional landscape changed with his physical one; perhaps he took her affection for granted. Still, he read with pleasure of her plans for a trip to California, and wrote to Cambridge of his disappointment when the project fell through. In February 1870 he went back to England, to the spa town of Malvern in Worcestershire. There he learned that she had suffered a series of new hemorrhages and felt glad he had just sent her a letter. Now the envelopes from home began to carry their load of bad news, though it took some time for him to register its weight. On March 19 he wrote to his father that there was
“somehow too much of Minny to disappear”
just yet, and noted his plans to write her once more, as if making up his arrears.

But by that time her body was cold. She died on March 8, 1870; she was just twenty-four. The letters James sent on getting the news carry all the volubility of grief, and have been obsessively read by his biographers. He wrote to his parents within hours that it was all
“more strange and painful than I can find words to express.”
Mrs. James’s last account of Minny hadn’t prepared him for the thought of that “poor struggling suffering
dying
creature,” the girl who now survived only in memory—and yet given her suffering, who “would have her back to die more painfully?” Death is a release; so far, so Victorian. James also spoke, however, about her trouble in reconciling herself to the social world around her and suggests that her release wasn’t from a medical condition only. He dropped the letter and took it up again in the evening, claiming that he seemed already to have accepted her death, and yet wishing too that they had been in closer touch during these last months. But he also returned to his sense of the difficulties she would have faced in any future life, and in writing to William a few days later he struck that note once more. Minny was a victim of her own intelligence, and unlikely ever to have found happinesss. Nevertheless, she had taught him so much about the
“reach & quality & capacity of human nature,”
and he went on to evoke her strenuous, exacting presence for a dozen manuscript pages. But at the end of it all he still had to accept that no matter how long he might “sit spinning my sentences she is
dead
.” Nothing changed that, and he recognized then that he was trying to fight off his knowledge, to change her death from hard fact into the most billowy of ideas.

Edgar Allan Poe wrote, punningly, that
“the death of a beautiful woman, is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world,”
and many readers have found something ghoulish in James’s loggorhea, in the speed with which he reconciled himself to Minny’s loss. The fullest account of their relationship can be found in Lyndall Gordon’s
Private Life of Henry James,
which suggests that James’s inattention during his year away contributed to a loss of spirits that hastened her along. He was too fully absorbed by his own illness, too self-absorbed to commit himself to her plan of meeting in Rome. She turned her face to the wall. That reading owes too much to the plot of James’s own
Wings of the Dove
(1902) to be entirely persuasive, and yet that novel does in itself suggest a retrospective recognition of his own limitations, his own inability to sense the depths of another person’s need. I would stress something else about those letters. They resemble nothing so much as his later notebooks: notebooks in which, once given a nubbin of anecdote, he plots out such masterpieces as “Brooksmith” or “The Real Thing” in a few rapid moments, imagining characters and sketching possibilities. Wish away Minny’s consumption and there would be problems still. What would she do, and how would she live? Her unlived future goes on in his head. These letters are ghoulish only if that means they are written by a novelist, by someone whose job is to turn life into narrative.

3.

A SUPERSTITIOUS VALUATION

J
AMES TOOK MINNY’S
death as marking an end to youth, but for him these years formed a crux in other ways as well. In 1860 he had written to Perry from Bonn that if his family’s future lay in America, then it was about time they began to live there—
“the more I see of this estrangement of American youngsters from the land of their birth, the less I believe in it.”
That precocious generalization makes me smile; the “more” he had seen was very largely the example of his own siblings. Still, it does speak to a sense of disquiet. Expatriation made one interesting, but it also marked one off, and it remained unnerving even when he began to take his own steps toward it. Yet that literally unsettling quality wasn’t something he thought he could avoid. James would in any case have leaned toward Europe, toward its cities and art and the pleasures of its perfected landscape, but the Continent also presented him with a problem he thought he had to face. No European novelist, he wrote in an 1881 notebook,
“is obliged to deal in the least with America.”
No one would call him incomplete for ignoring it. He believed, however, that every American writer did have to take account of Europe, and while he suspected that the balance might shift, that American culture might someday become a necessary fact of European life, he saw that situation as fixed for his lifetime.

It was fixed, moreover, in a way that pressed upon his own generation in a different way than it had upon their predecessors. Hawthorne had done without Europe until he was fifty. He didn’t cross the Atlantic until his college friend Franklin Pierce was elected president in 1852, and gave him an appointment as the American consul in Liverpool. It had been an opportunity, not a necessity, and he had already done his most important work when he sailed. In fact, Hawthorne’s needs had been of a very different kind, for he belonged to a generation in whose formative years the books and standards and tastes had all come from abroad, and one that had in consequence to declare its own sense of self-reliance. It had to cultivate a sense of cultural difference, one that the nation’s very isolation had helped bring to maturity; in the days before steamships, when travel was still uncomfortable and slow, Hawthorne and his contemporaries could even believe that their own insularity might help keep them honest. James had both the luxury and the burden of a different aesthetic. He thought the future of American literature lay not in autonomy as such, but rather in the fact that
“we can deal freely with forms of civilization not our own, can pick and choose and assimilate.”
In that, at least, he was at an advantage. Europeans were too bound by their own national traditions, but “to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture.”

The difficulty lay in knowing how to weigh those choices. In the early months of 1872, James was living once more at his parents’ house in Cambridge and seemed for the moment to have stalled. He tried to keep busy with reviews, but he wasn’t writing much fiction, and he already knew that his future life lay elsewhere; he could console himself only by thinking that at least he wasn’t with his younger brothers in Wisconsin. His most regular correspondent that winter was Charles Eliot Norton, who as the editor of the
North American Review
had handed him the first money he ever earned. Norton was a translator of Dante who in 1875 became Harvard’s initial professor of art history, and in the early 1870s he had used his private fortune to set himself up for a year of study in Dresden. In February 1872, James wrote him a gossipy letter from Cambridge, full of news about the latest books and lectures, including the fact that
“Wendell Holmes . . . my brother, & various other long-headed youths have combined to form a metaphysical club”
; a club that touched off that distinctively American philosophy called pragmatism. For our purposes, however, the most interesting part of the letter is a seemingly casual sentence about his own longing for travel: “It’s a complex fate, being an American, & one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe.” James’s tone here seems at once playful and anxious. He knows he exaggerates the merits of life abroad, and yet dreams of “moonshiny” plans for getting there, as though he had already realized that defining those complexities would become the business of his life.

Later that spring he got his chance. His parents decided that what had worked for their older sons might work for their invalid daughter as well, and yet Alice couldn’t travel alone. She would need both a chaperone and a protector; their aunt, Catherine Walsh, might fill the first role, and James himself took the second. He spent five months as their cicerone, most of it in the Alps, and when they left for home that October, he stayed behind. It was in many ways a changed Continent from the one he had explored just two years before. The Franco-Prussian War had replaced the French Second Empire with a new Third Republic, and the radical democracy of the Paris Commune had been snuffed cold in a series of grotesque reprisals; France would never know another monarch yet remained firmly conservative still. But another empire had now risen, as if in its place—the new German Reich, with Otto von Bismarck as its “Iron Chancellor”—and then there was the afterthought of a fully united Italy. James could when he wanted be a shrewd political analyst, and in writing to William from Paris he noted that beneath the city’s
“neatness and coquetry, you seem to smell the Commune suppressed, but seething.”
Usually, though, he let himself look elsewhere, and his work in this period says little about the Continent’s political changes beyond noting that in Rome the end of the pope’s secular rule meant he could now buy an uncensored newspaper.

Nor did he take much notice of American public life when, under a mix of financial and familial pressure, he returned in the late summer of 1874. He settled in New York, making an attempt at independence in a city to which he felt a sentimental attraction, drawn as he always was to the traces of his personal past. It was an era to which a sharp-edged new writer called Mark Twain had just given a name: the Gilded Age, an age of watered stock and bought elections, of Jay Gould and Boss Tweed. At first, James liked the
“rattling big luxurious place,”
though he also knew what he didn’t know, and left the subject of Wall Street alone. In his apartment on East 25th Street he wrote two articles a week, most of them for
The Nation,
notices of books and plays and paintings, and worked his way through the year-long serial of
Roderick Hudson
. After a decade of short stories it was time to move past his apprenticeship—not only to commit himself to a full-length novel, but also to come out in hardcovers. So in 1875, James read the proofs of his first three volumes:
A Passionate Pilgrim,
a collection of stories; a gathering of travel essays called
Transatlantic Sketches
; and the book version of his
Atlantic
serial. It was a smart professional move, but he had come home in part because he thought New York would be less expensive than Italy. It wasn’t, and by the time
Roderick Hudson
was moving through the press, he was gone. In October he left America once more, settling at first in Paris and then, after a year, crossing over to the London that would become his home. He would not return to America until after the 1881 publication of
The Portrait of a Lady
itself.

H
e went for many reasons. He wanted to see paintings and old buildings, and he had found that in New York even a successful writer was an anomaly in a world given over to business. Literature was admired, and journalists had their narrow place, but the writer as such had little social purchase. He went because, though he had known periods of acute loneliness abroad, he was still his own man there, as he was not in America. But he also went because he knew that Europe was where his material lay.

In 1879, James accepted a commission from his London publisher, Macmillan, to write a short book on Hawthorne for a series called “English Men of Letters”; it was their first volume on an American writer. The book he produced records a new generation’s attempt to understand its ancestors, and with the exception of
The American Scene
, it offers his most searching account of his native land. Yet though
Hawthorne
remains a founding document in the writing of American literary history, at home James was attacked for what his readers saw as condescension, a criticism inseparable from their knowledge of his decision to live abroad. One passage in particular drew attention. In the preface to
The Marble Faun
, his 1860 story about a pair of American artists in Italy, Hawthorne had noted the difficulty of writing about his homeland, a country in which he pretended to believe
“there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity.”
James lifted that thought, and then extended it in a passage of great comic brilliance, a list of everything that in Hawthorne’s day looked absent from the

. . .
texture of American life
. . . . No State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church . . . no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses . . . nor thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals . . . no Oxford . . . no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political society, no sporting class . . . no Epsom nor Ascot!

It’s wonderful fun to read
Hawthorne’s
list aloud, and James allows that his ingenuity has led him into overstatement. He admits, moreover, that
a great deal remains even in a land without thatch or ivy, though just what is itself the American’s “secret, his joke, as one may say.” And the
critic Robert Weisbuch
has suggested taking this passage as an example of that joke. For most of James’s readers liked the fact that they didn’t have to live with those bits of an old European order. The absence of Ascot was for them a positive recommendation, and what was left seemed nothing less than America itself.

That list did, however, give a warrant to those who saw James as dismissive of American life, and in reading we have to remember that no matter how perceptive his criticism is about other writers, it usually says more about his own ambition and practice. So let me shift the terms. It’s not simply that America lacks the things he lists, but rather that such institutions and practices provide the novelist with his fabric, or at least the kind of novelist that James himself wanted to be. They make up the world of Austen and Balzac—the buzz of implication, of half-expressed meanings, that both characters and readers alike must learn to hear. The limitations James found in American life were limitations above all in the material it offered for the novel.
“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature,”
and in America the deposit of that history was still so thin
“that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature,”
a place where the air itself looks new.

Other kinds of fiction were possible. For much of the nineteenth century the country’s most important storytellers thought of themselves as writing not novels in the English sense of the term but rather what they called romances; as though the exceptionalism of the American condition operated even in the realm of prose. The difference is far from absolute, but still there is a distinction to make.
One classic account
suggests that while the novel sets its characters in some plausible and closely described relation to their world, the romance works in contrast to endow its people with a sense of mystery. The social background in such works may remain abstract, the characters are often flatly emblematic, and the writer’s emphasis falls instead upon an often astonishing plot that serves as the vehicle for an overarching symbolic truth. Hawthorne himself is the best example here. In James’s words, he had
“asked but little of his
milieu
”
and had used that very thinness to heighten his narratives. For once that Old World clutter was cleared away, his characters had accordingly appeared as giants, isolated on the granite platforms of their moral dramas. Often they were outcasts. Think of Hester Prynne in
The Scarlet Letter
, with her lonely hut at the edge of town; think too of Melville’s Ahab, or even of Huckleberry Finn. Then recall the busy village life of Austen’s
Emma
.

James himself would always feel the pull of romance, with its appeal to an ideal essence, and it reasserted itself late in his career in such tales of the blighted heart as “The Beast in the Jungle.” Still, he needed the thickened air of history. He needed its baggage and furniture, he wanted its Louis Quinze, and in his own overvaluation of Europe he associated history itself with abroad, as something America couldn’t give him. Later he would wonder if that had been a mistake, and encouraged Edith Wharton to
“do New York,”
to take up the chance he had missed. Missed, perhaps, because of the way his father had removed his children from American life; the more rooted Howells found that Boston had texture enough. But this is too simple. It’s not just that James discovered his material in that furniture, but rather that he discovered it in the American encounter with a world of chestnut commodes and silver salvers. He found his material in dramatizing the collision of an American sensibility with all that made the Old World old.

Some of that would come in travel writing—there was a market for essays with titles like “Roman Rides”—and some in criticism, presenting the works of European masters to an American audience. Most of it took the form of fiction, however, like the long story called “Travelling Companions” that James published in the
Atlantic
at the end of 1870, a tale of courtship conducted against a touristic experience of Italy. It wasn’t the first piece he had set in Europe, but it was the first he wrote about the adventures there of people like him, and on reading it his publisher’s wife, Annie Fields, noted in her diary that she wept as she finished it,
“not from the sweet low pathos of the tale . . . but from the knowledge of the writer’s success.”
Other stories followed. In “A Passionate Pilgrim,” an American claimant to an English estate learns that the Old World cannot give him a home, and in “Madame de Mauves,” James offered his first sustained look at a transatlantic marriage, an account of an American woman’s recoil from her husband’s moral universe. He would eventually grow tired of what became known as the “international theme,” and in the years after the
Portrait
he even abandoned it for a while. Yet he came back to it in such late masterpieces as
The Ambassadors
, and his encounter with the world that
Hawthorne’s
shopping list so merrily evokes would prove decisive. It is what made him Henry James.