The Master (40 page)

He glanced up and saw that Andersen was watching him.

‘Constance was a great friend,’ he said. ‘I knew the Storys of course and was in touch with poor Symonds, but Constance was a great friend.’

Andersen looked down at the tablet and must have seen, Henry thought, that Constance was one of the recent dead. He made to speak, but clearly thought better of it. Henry sighed and turned away,
realizing that he should not have taken someone he knew so little to such an intimate place. But more important perhaps, he felt that he should not have spoken just now, as the saying of her name
had brought tears to his eyes. He turned away and tried to regain control but found that he was being held by the sculptor, his shoulders cupped against Andersen’s chest and Andersen’s
hands reaching around to grasp his hands and hold them as firmly as he could. He was surprised at Andersen’s strength, the size of his hands. He immediately checked that there was nobody in
view before allowing the embrace to continue, feeling the other man’s warm, tough body briefly holding him, wanting desperately to allow himself to be held much longer, but knowing that this
embrace was all the comfort he would receive. He held his breath for as long as he could and kept his eyes closed and then Andersen released him and they walked quietly back to the cemetery
gate.

I
N THE CAB
as they travelled to Andersen’s studio in Via Margutta, he wondered how he would tell Andersen about how he had lived. As an artist, he
recognized, Andersen might know, or at least fathom the possibility, that each book he had written, each scene described or character created, had become an aspect of him, had entered into his
driven spirit and lay there much as the years themselves had done. His relationship with Constance would be hard to explain; Andersen was perhaps too young to know how memory and regret can mingle,
how much sorrow can be held within, and how nothing seems to have any shape or meaning until it is well past and lost and, even then, how much, under the weight of pure determination, can be
forgotten and left aside only to return in the night as piercing pain.

Andersen suggested that before making a tour of where he worked they eat lunch in the small restaurant below his studio. Almost as soon as he entered the small and, for him, familiar space,
being welcomed with friendly gestures by the proprietor and his wife, he became talkative and engaged. Henry was surprised not only by how much the sculptor knew about him, but by how freely now he
relayed the information. He was also surprised at how unselfconsciously Andersen spoke to him about his own talent and how fluently he could quote those who had come to admire it.

He listened to Andersen as lunch was served; the sculptor’s face seemed to change as much as his personality had changed. His eyes had lost their softness and sympathy and his expression
became more focussed as he reacted to each thing he himself said, adding to it in a torrent of explanation and contestation. His earlier silences, Henry realized, had been part of a great
withholding which was now being released. In the dim light of the restaurant, Henry relished the sight of him across the table, his young face moving in rapt animation, so restless and ambitious,
so ready for life, so raw.

Henry had imagined that Andersen’s art would be exquisite and finely wrought, made slowly and deliberately, but now, as the sculptor stood up from lunch, his cheeks flushed, it struck
Henry that his work might just as easily be distinguished by its lack of discipline. He had no means by which to judge him. Although the Storys and the Elliotts included Andersen in their
gatherings, they had not spoken of him privately. As he went up to Andersen’s studio, Henry remembered when he came to this city first, when he visited the studios of so many artists who had
failed or prospered as the years went by. Now all these years later he was here again, led by a young sculptor who was full of protean innocence, who was so tentative in some ways and so
overbearing in others, so full of mixtures and so mysterious. He watched Andersen ascend the stairs ahead of him, studying his strong white hand holding the banisters, the wonderful open agility of
his movements, and dreamed that he could stay in Rome for a while longer than he had planned and come here every day to the studio of his new young friend.

There was a sense of frantic work in the large studio, a great deal of it half-finished by an artist in love with the classical tradition, the classical body, a sense of work done for public and
triumphant display. He wondered if this was merely how Andersen’s work began, full of roaring and rhetorical disproportion, and then if the sculptor set out, with subtlety and an eye for
telling detail, to refine it. As he moved from piece to piece, he expressed his opinion that his friend had a large talent and expressed also his awe at so many figures and torsos, asking himself
if Andersen now planned to work on the faces, or if he would choose to leave them blank and anodyne. He was led to the work which seemed most in progress, a large statue of a naked man and woman
holding hands. He marvelled out loud at its scale and ambition as Andersen stood proudly beside it as though he were going to be photographed.

As the day wore on, Henry learned much about Hendrik Andersen. Some of it astonished him, especially the news that the Andersen family had, on arriving in America, settled in Newport in a house
a few streets away from where the Jameses had lived, and that the sculptor still viewed Newport as his American home. When Andersen began to speak of his older brother and the burden of being a
second son, Henry informed him that he, too, had spent his youth in the shadow of his brother William. Andersen seemed to know this already and wondered aloud if this had brought him and Henry
together, asking many questions about Henry and William and, often before Henry had finished responding, comparing the answers with his own experience with his brother Andreas. As the conversation
went on, Henry discovered that Andersen knew a lot about Henry’s family. He mentioned that his own father had the same love for alcohol that Henry’s father had shown in his youth, a
matter which was never discussed in the James family but which must have been trumpeted in Newport loudly enough for it to have reached the ears of Hendrik Andersen.

‘We are brothers,’ Hendrik laughed, ‘because we have older brothers and drunken fathers.’

Henry watched him with interest, observing the livid colours of his cheeks, his nervous talking and the way he moved from one subject to another, paying no attention to the response or lack of
one. Henry’s suggestion that he should take leave of the sculptor was met with an insistence that he stay, making Henry agree that they stroll together through the old city and find a place
where they could perhaps take some refreshment. Before they left, Andersen took him through the studio again. On seeing the figures once more, Henry wondered if Andersen was not interested in
creating a single, individual likeness. The bodies done in marble and stone had a fleshy presence, the generic bottoms and bellies and haunches sculpted with enormous confidence and zeal. He
expressed once more his admiration and his hope that he would return to the studio to see each piece completed.

H
E SAW
Hendrik Andersen almost daily, meeting him alone or in the company of others, and as he learned more about him, he was struck by how close the
sculptor was, in his background and his temperament, to the eponymous hero of his own novel
Roderick Hudson
, which he had published more than twenty years earlier. While the American colony
in Rome knew him as the author of
Daisy Miller
, the more serious among them, including Maud Elliott and her husband, had also read
The Portrait of a Lady
. They knew the difference
between the former, a popular tale light in its tone and impact, and the latter, more subtle and daring in its construction and its texture. None of them, however, as far as he could make out, had
ever read
Roderick Hudson
, even though it portrayed a young impoverished American sculptor in Rome, with all of Andersen’s talents and indiscretions, with his passionate and impetuous
nature. Both Hudson and Andersen made clear to anyone who knew them their ambitions and dreams. Both of them were doted on by a worried mother back at home, and both, once installed in Rome, were
watched over by an older man, a lone visitor, who appreciated beauty and took an interest in human behaviour and kept passion firmly in check. As Henry saw Andersen and tried to make sense of him,
it was as though one of his own characters had come alive, ready to intrigue him and puzzle him and hold his affections, forcing him to suspend judgement, subtly refusing to allow him to control
what might now unfold. Andersen had been taken up, much as Roderick Hudson had, by people with money who believed in him, and thus he had never compromised his art or flirted with commerce. His
work was a set of large, energetic gestures, commensurate with his dreams. The slow, sly systems used to write a novel, the building of character and plot through action and description and
suggestion were of no interest to him, just as he did not seek, through careful observation and calm effort, to sculpt a living face. Had he been a poet, he would have written Homeric epics, and
now, as a sculptor, he talked to Henry about his plans for large monuments.

Henry listened with interest most of the time, having prolonged his stay in the city, and managed to think about Andersen’s charm and his shortcomings in equal measure when he was alone in
a way which offered a golden tinge to those hours and that solitude. He wondered what would become of Andersen. In wanting, like his Mallet in
Roderick Hudson
, to help him and advise him, to
take the measure of who he was and what he would amount to, he managed, he hoped, to disguise longings which he did not entertain with much ease or equanimity.

The idea that he had published certain books which no one had read now, and which no one saw reason to allude to, added to a feeling that he belonged somehow to history, just as Andersen and his
associates gave their loyalty to the future. It was this feeling that, in the end, made him prepare with a heavy heart to go home, but he also felt, as soon as he made his plans, a tenderness for
Andersen and a longing to see him in England. This tenderness arose also from an impression which grew in him the more he saw Andersen – and sometimes in these weeks he saw him twice a day
– that the young sculptor’s silences and his intense conversation both seemed to spring from a desperate need for approval and a loneliness which the creation of monumental sculpture
could do nothing to assuage. He knew also that his own involvement with Andersen, the way he listened and studied the sculptor’s words and movements, had interested Andersen enormously, but
that Andersen, in turn, had watched Henry hardly at all, had chosen to believe him as not in need of close observation. He had never, for example, alluded to the scene in the Protestant cemetery
and had seemed to presume that the novelist’s solitude was an essential aspect of his art. What he had taken from Henry was Henry’s interest in him; he had opened himself for regular
scrutiny, as a church opens its doors for prayer. He was both puzzled and fascinated by himself. His prodigious talent and his grandiose ambitions, his origins, his fears and his daily tribulations
emerged as subjects for conversation, innocent and unguarded and undisciplined and endearing. He talked but did not listen; he grew silent, Henry noticed, because he knew the effect his silences
had on others. And he was deeply and instinctively alert, Henry saw, to how these changes in himself – how soft his eyes could become in their expression, for example, or how strong and
imposing he could seem in other circumstances – drew people towards him as they drew Henry now. And then,when they were close, Andersen did not know what to do with people save that he did
not want to lose them. He wanted their full attention, their reverence, and perhaps their love, and when he was sure he had these, he was gently indifferent to them.

Once winning fame as a sculptor came into question, however, he was like a wild animal searching for food; he was ruthless, and he cared more than anything for the chaotic hunting ground of his
studio, working on his huge figures, showing them off, smoothing out their haunches and loins and torsos, but never allowing them a face, having no interest, none at all, in what a face might
conceal or disclose, just as his own face managed most of the time a wonderful blankness, a pure, bland beauty which made Henry interested all the more in gazing at him and being in his company and
made his efforts to picture the face, when he was away from him, all the more intriguing and time-consuming and exasperating.

He wondered, as he prepared to leave the city, if he had placed too much emphasis on the dullness and provinciality of his life at Lamb House. Andersen had nodded in approval when he explained
his need for such a life and his wish to return to it, but Andersen, he knew, had not left Newport and come to Rome in search of dullness and provinciality. He was actively admired in their circle
in a manner which would not be part of daily life in Newport or Rye. This, he felt, would be the challenge for the sculptor in the years ahead – the possibility of failure and neglect and
solitude. The idea of how he might rise to this challenge charged Henry’s imagination. He imagined Andersen’s face become haunted by the slow concentration of work, his eyes more
inward-looking, his conversation more hesitant and subtle, and his sculpture smaller in scale and more intricate and delicate, more worked on and worried over. And in the years when this
transformation took place, he believed, it might not finally matter to Andersen who admired him or where he lived.

On one of the nights before Henry’s departure there was a gathering at the Elliotts’ of twenty or more people, all of whom were known to Henry. He was careful to arrive and depart on
his own, and enter into general discussion with many of those present while keeping a distant eye on Andersen. He eventually found time alone with him but they were interrupted by the arrival of
Maud Elliott who began to allude to the friendship between them. She came from a distinguished family of alluders, he thought; her mother and her aunt and her uncle the novelist usually succeeded
in breaking silence on most matters and did not have many unspoken thoughts. The raised eyebrow and the pointed remark ran in their family, he thought, as Maud Elliott drove Andersen away by asking
him if he had ever had a friend as attentive as Mr James. Now that she had Henry in a corner, she made clear that he was hers until she had finished.