Portrait of A Novel (12 page)

James thought that English writers were often squeamish, the men in particular, and praised the Neapolitan realist Matilde Serao for her frank acknowledgment of physical passion. If he found Zola’s concentration on appetite too narrow, he also admired him, and viewed the descriptions of prostitution and lesbianism in
Nana
as both filthy and fascinating in equal measure. In Paris he listened without apparent embarassment to the conversation in Flaubert’s circle of disciples and enjoyed shocking Howells by repeating some of it. These are issues to which I’ll return. Still, about some parts of his own life we must accept a sense of bafflement. He has never been convincingly linked to another person, and his precise mixture of self-knowledge and self-control, of repression and sublimation, remains a formula that we do not know.

Nevertheless, there is one moment in Gosse’s 1922 volume of literary memoirs that tantalizes us with a glimpse of something more. Most of James’s friends, Gosse wrote,
“supposed that he was mainly a creature of observation and fancy,”
whose senses remained untouched by the life around him. But he sometimes allowed the doors to open, and on a visit to Rye, as they walked in the garden amid the deepening twilight, Gosse suddenly found himself listening to a story. His host told him, “in profuse and enigmatic language,” that he had once stood at dusk on a city street, watching “for the lighting of a lamp in a window on the third storey. And the lamp blazed out, and through bursting tears he strained to see what was behind it, the unapproachable face.” James had stayed there for hours, wet from the rain and repeatedly jostled by the hurrying crowd, “and never from behind the lamp was for one moment visible the face.” The story ended, and from James’s voice Gosse knew that he could ask no questions about it. But for a long time the novelist stood there in silence beside him.

That is all. There is no date, no city specified, no name to that face. The mix of rain and romance will make many readers link it to Paris, but we have no real warrant for doing so. Maybe we think of Paris because of the moment in
The Ambassadors
when Lambert Strether looks up at the window of Chad Newsome’s flat, or because Gosse’s description corresponds so neatly to the Parisian ending of
The Age of Innocence;
so neatly, in fact, that it makes me wonder if Edith Wharton might have heard the story as well. The most provocative account of this moment belongs to the Irish novelist Colm Tóibín in
The Master
, his superb 2004 fictional account of James’s life. Toibin both places that window in Paris and gives its hidden face a name: that of the Russian Paul Zhukovsky. No biographer would take that liberty, and yet the suggestion strikes me as plausible. James first met him in the spring of 1876. Russian émigré society was easy to penetrate, and he found it an
“oasis . . . in the midst of this Parisian Babylon.”
But no one in it drew him as did the rich and elegantly bearded Zhukovsky. He was an amateur painter who had grown up in the Russian imperial court, and his family was close to Turgenev; indeed the acquaintance began with James pumping him for stories about the older writer. The American’s letters that spring are full of him. To Quincy Street he wrote that they had sworn an everlasting friendship, and though James suspected his friend was weak, he still found him “sweet and
distingué
.” He was fascinated by Zhukovsky’s tales of his months in Venice, but in writing home made sure to insist on his friend’s
“extreme purity of life,”
even if that life had been too picturesque to have “formed a positive character for him.”

James was smitten enough to make excuses for what he himself saw as Zhukovsky’s limitations. The Russian was darkly sensuous and quite clearly homosexual; if ever the young writer was tempted to go beyond the conventional terms of romantic friendship, it was now. That summer, however, Zhukovsky went down to Bayreuth for the opening of Richard Wagner’s new Festspielhaus, where the first full production of the
Ring
cycle had its premiere that August. And when the two men met again that fall, something had changed. Zhukovsky now had a new passion, and that November James wrote to his father of a
“musical séance”
at his friend’s apartment, in which he sat from nine until two listening to Wagner transcriptions for piano. James never had much feeling for music, and though he recognized the pianist’s talent, he also found himself bored. In that same letter he reiterated a decision he had announced in an earlier note to Quincy Street. He now planned, as we will see in my next chapter, to make his home in London; and later that month he wrote that though Zhukovsky remained charming he was also “a lightweight and a perfect failure.”

Maybe this was when James stood one night in that street, watching for that face, and yet knowing that even if he were to see it—even if he could overcome his own reticence and fear enough to come in, come out, of the rain—there would remain a gulf between them. It wasn’t just Wagner. It was James’s own sense of ambition and purpose. He admired Turgenev and yet soon outgrew the need to sit at his feet; Zhukovsky, in contrast, seemed to him but a dilettante and content to be a disciple. There was no break. James saw him for a few weeks in Paris the next year, and when in 1879 Zhukovsky took a villa at Posillipo on the Bay of Naples, he invited James for a visit. The novelist didn’t go to Italy that year but the next spring he went to Florence to begin his work on
The Portrait of a Lady
, and then continued on south to spend a few days with his
“peculiar”
friend before settling down to his desk. Yet James cut his visit short. Wagner had rented a villa nearby, and took up most of Zhukovsky’s time, so that the Russian seemed to be perpetually shuttling from house to house. And there was also his Neapolitan servant, Pepino—in Cosima Wagner’s words, a
“sturdy, thickset, simple”
fellow, whom Zhukovsky had
“rescued . . . from the gutter.”
Pepino had a good voice and the composer enjoyed singing duets with him, but his services weren’t limited to waiting at table, and when after two years Zhukovsky finally dismissed him, the Wagners sent him a note of congratulations.

James could no longer insist upon his friend’s purity, and in fact wrote to Grace Norton that the mores of Zhukovsky’s new world were as
“opposed to those of Cambridge as anything could well be—but to describe them would carry me too far.”
He added that he had declined an invitation to meet the composer, “as I speak no intelligible German and he speaks nothing else.” James’s sense of the intelligible was high; for the purposes of reading, at least, his German had once approached fluency. To his sister he wrote more frankly. Naples had a
“vileness”
that took the edge off the beauty of her surroundings, Zhukovsky was a “ridiculous mixture of Nihilism and
bric a brac
,” and he himself had recoiled from the “fantastic immoralities” of the people around him. Both Naples and Bayreuth were bywords for license, and
Kaplan suggests
that James was appalled by the mix of homosexuality and adultery that characterized Wagner’s circle. There is, admittedly, a difference between hearing about other people’s liaisons and seeing them enacted before you, and even a Henry James who
wasn’t
celibate would always have preferred discretion to display. Still, I think James’s biographers have overplayed the degree of his shock. He may have objected to Zhukovsky’s choice of a lover, but professing his moral revulsion was a useful strategy in writing to Quincy Street; and especially useful for someone insisting that he would never marry. James was on the brink of fame. He left that villa because it was the place in which he could least afford to be seen; perhaps the place in which he could least afford to see himself.

In Boston during the winter of 1881–82 James set down an account of his career to date. Composed with the new sense of mastery that the just-completed
Portrait of a Lady
had given him, this “American Journal” offers a mine of circumstantial details, defining the places he had visited, the people he had known, and what he had written where. It is in many ways more useful than his later memoirs: his clearest statement, in language at once colloquial and elevated, of his ambitions and dreams, of the myth he would make from his choice of the Old World. In summoning up the spring of 1876 he recalled his first meeting with Zhukovsky and then wrote this sentence:
“
Non ragioniam di lui—ma guarda e passa
.”
It is a line from the
Inferno
, with Dante’s plural adjusted to the singular, and the sentence stands as a pained memory and warning alike: “Let’s not talk about him—just look and move on.” Zhukovsky himself would move ever deeper into Wagner’s world and find there the sense of purpose that James thought he lacked. He did the production design for the 1882 premiere of
Parsifal
at Bayreuth, modeling the Grail Hall on the interior of Siena’s Duomo, and his sets were still being used in the 1930s. And James traveled on as well, back to Florence and his room at the Hôtel de l’Arno, back to the opening pages of what would become a great novel. There was new work and new friends. In the letter to Alice in which he wrote of Posillipo’s immorality, he also spoke of meeting an American writer named Constance Fenimore Woolson, an admirer who had brought him a letter of introduction from one of his many cousins. His relations with her in the years to come would be entirely different from those with Zhukovsky, and even more consequential.

8.

A LONDON LIFE

T
HE MUSIC HAD
bored him, the pianist’s fingers shimmering their way through hour after hour of the
Ring
cycle, and that boredom set him off from the other people gathered in Paul Zhukovsky’s drawing room. He didn’t share their enthusiasms, he wasn’t one of them, and perhaps his awareness of the gap between them extended to his sense of Paris itself. In the fall of 1876, James had reached another moment of decision. A year before, he had left America behind, had made his choice of a European life, and appeared to fix himself in France. Now Paris too had begun to seem unworkable. In later years his decision to quit the City of Light for the
“murky metropolis”
of London would come to have the look of a plan, as if he had simply needed a bit of finishing before settling down in the English capital. Yet though James would indeed write that he had wanted London all along,
“and Paris was only a stopgap,”
his decision was more sudden, and more contingent, than his words suggest.

That July he had left Paris for the summer, traveling at first to Étretat on the Normandy coast. The town had once been a fishing village but had now found a second life as a resort, its visitors drawn by the high white cliffs and natural arches that flanked its little bay. Courbet had already painted them, and in the next decade Monet would make them into icons. James then went south to Biarritz, and crossed briefly into Spain on his first and only visit; he went to a bullfight, and of course turned the experience into an article, telling his readers that
“if I sometimes shuddered, I never yawned.”
Before leaving Paris, however, he had thought to economize by giving up his apartment just off the rue de Rivoli. He hoped to get it back in the fall, but somebody else had taken it in the meantime, and he soon suffered another blow as well. Since arriving in France he had written a biweekly column for the
New York
Tribune
and counted on it to cover half his rent. The best of those pieces on French life still bear reading today, but they weren’t gossipy enough to satisfy his editor, and when James asked for a raise, the paper let him go.

His friendship with Zhukovsky wasn’t now enough to hold him, and he also felt caught between two different kinds of provinciality. The society of the city’s American colony seemed tiresome, and as for the writers he knew? Turgenev excepted, they were the creatures of quarrels he didn’t share, of schools and groups and politics in which he remained an outsider. The full tale of his relations with them, with Zola and Flaubert among others, must wait until this book’s fourth part, when I’ll turn to what James learned from his reading of French fiction. But in 1876 he wrote that
“I don’t like their wares, and they don’t like any others.”
He thought them parochial, virtually ignorant of anything that wasn’t France. Not reading Henry James might still be excusable; not reading George Eliot wasn’t.

It would, he thought, be ignoble to remain for the restaurants alone, but really there was nothing else to stay for. He wrote to his father that in imaginative terms Paris had ceased to pay—the language of mental investment was a constant in his letters to Quincy Street—but when he told William that he was thinking of moving to London, he also enjoined him to
“
say nothing about it until I decide
”
[italics in original]. He must have feared looking irresolute, someone to whom France was as unworkable as New York had been just the year before. James announced the move to Howells in the same letter in which he first mentioned his plans to write about an
Americana
, and he crossed the Channel on December 10. It was a choice he never regretted.

Within two days he had found the serviced flat in Bolton Street, just yards from Piccadilly, where he would live for the next decade. James was careful with money. He could draw on his father’s letter-of-credit, but he knew his siblings had cut into the family’s capital, and he now did without his parents’ help. London’s prices seemed a bargain after Paris, though at two and a half guineas a week—a bit more than twelve dollars—his apartment can’t be called cheap. He was paying over fifty shillings at a time when many skilled workmen had a weekly wage of just thirty, and twenty years later he took Lamb House for little more than half of what his few rooms had cost. On the other hand, he could afford it: his income for 1876, almost all of it from magazine sales, has been estimated at a bit under $2,800. Moreover the place came furnished, and with breakfast provided; he had no need for a servant of his own.

From one window he could see a narrow wedge of the then-almost-treeless Green Park, and in the entire city there were few more convenient addresses for a man of James’s habits. To the north Bolton Street opened after a block into the land of hostesses and dinner parties, into Mayfair and the more bourgeois quarter of Marylebone beyond it. To the south he had the shops of Piccadilly, some of them surviving still, like the epicurean grocer Fortnum & Mason; off it ran the more exclusive Bond Street, with its galleries and goldsmiths. A further walk along Piccadilly carried him past the Royal Academy, at whose annual exhibitions he soon became a regular, and then on toward the National Gallery and the theaters of London’s West End. Crossing it from Bolton Street took him by the site of the present-day Ritz and into the gentlemen’s world of the clubs in Pall Mall.

Not that that world was yet his. In later years James would have more invitations than he could accept, but he spent his first Christmas in London alone and wrote to reassure his mother that his spirits were high. The weather was
“beyond expression vile—a drizzle of sleet upon a background of absolutely
glutinous
fog,”
but his fire was warm and he delighted in his new subscription to Mudie’s, England’s largest commercial lending library, from which he could for a nominal sum borrow as many novels as he wished. Though he would not need Mudie’s for long. None of his work had yet appeared in Britain, and while he had many acquaintances there, he had as yet no friends. But within two months he would write to his father from the library of the Athenaeum. It was London’s most distinguished club—a fat archbishop was reading in a nearby chair—and frankly intellectual. Nobody got in on birth alone, but James had already become a temporary member, and in 1882, with
The Portrait of a Lady
behind him, he became a permanent one.

I
n 1948 the critic
Lionel Trilling
wrote an introduction to James’s 1886
The Princess Casamassima
in which he argued that many nineteenth-century novels work by tracing the career of the “Young Man from the Provinces,” an
ingénu
who is both enthralled and disillusioned by the great capital whose life he seeks to enter. Most of Trilling’s examples are French—Balzac’s
Père Goriot
, Stendhal’s
The Red and the Black
—but he also cites both
Great Expectations
and James’s own novel. Despite its title, the protagonist of
The Princess Casamassima
is a London bookbinder named Hyacinth Robinson, the illegitimate son of a woman who has murdered her aristocratic seducer. He stands as a provincial in social though not geographic terms and joins an anarchist cell whose leader charges him to commit a political crime. It’s unlikely material for James, however brilliantly handled, and yet despite the advantages of his own upbringing, he too had once been such a young man himself. America might have given him an excellent preparation for culture, but it was a preparation only; and like Hyacinth, he soon found himself in thrall to the glitter and charm of his new world.

It’s not my purpose here to chronicle James’s progress through London life. He later claimed he could barely remember how he
“came to know people, to dine out. .  . it came rather of itself.”
He knew some Americans in London and had letters of introduction from others, Henry Adams included. He paid a call and it led to a dinner, and then one meal began to roll into another. His manners were impeccable, but he still seemed a breath of fresh American air; he was the new thing and yet not a juvenile lead, a man who had come upon the city full-grown. The
Atlantic
had many English readers, and James also had a backlist of stories and novels that had never appeared in Britain. He published two books in London in 1878, both of them with Macmillan, who became his regular publisher, and the next year he brought out six more. His name was suddenly everywhere, and once
Daisy Miller
made him famous, the invitations arrived from people he didn’t even know; during the winter of 1878–79 he dined out 107 times. Those invitations all came from what he would call the
“better sort,”
but that category is a loose one, and what strikes us today is their heterogeneity. Some of them were literary, but he also sat down with generals and lawyers and bankers. One evening found him
“conversing affably”
with the former—and future—prime minister, William Ewart Gladstone, a flinty mutton-chopped Liberal whose political life still left him the energy to write about Homer and theology alike. And James made a specialty of old ladies with long memories. His favorite was the great actress Fanny Kemble. She had starred at Covent Garden fifty years before and, after marrying and divorcing an American slaveholder, had become a voice of Abolition; she gave him the plots of several stories,
Washington Square
among them.

In his “American Journal” of 1882–82, James described his new home as neither
“agreeable, or cheerful, or easy. . . . It is only magnificent.”
He drew up a list of the reasons why London should seem awful, beginning with the fog and the smoke and moving on to the city’s brutal inhuman size. He felt all the ways in which it was both “vulgar at heart and tiresome in form,” all the ways in which it was so entirely unlike Paris, but still it seemed to him “the most possible form of life”; most possibly precisely because of what made it so difficult, because there was simply more of it. He never lost his sense of excited fascination with his adopted city, and one of the last books he planned, though he didn’t get beyond a few notes, was a volume called “London Town.” Every corner appeared to have its bit of story, and to walk in London was to walk through time, to sense the arresting hand of the past on one’s sleeve. So in an 1888 essay he remembered moving down Fleet Street with some lines of Thackeray in his head and his eyes full of scenes almost two centuries gone, as though the time of Queen Anne had come alive and he himself were part of it.

James especially liked to evoke the city of Dickens, the city only then just gone, and in time his successors would recall the London of Henry James, a city on the brink of modernity, with the men in black and the women as if dressed by Sargent. We can see that London in some of the frontispieces to the New York Edition. The one to
The Golden Bowl
shows a hansom cab, in sharp-edged silhouette, wheeling through the fog along an almost empty Portland Place, the street wide and the buildings grand, and with an automobile shadowy in the distance. But James did not live in a disembodied Jamesian world; look closely and you’ll see that the street is muddy and spotted with manure.

“You can do low life,”
wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, with some surprise, as
The Princess Casamassima
began its
Atlantic
serialization; the novel opens in Millbank Prison, where the young Hyacinth Robinson has gone to see his mother. Stevenson admired the book’s sense of grime, and James had visited the prison himself to work up its details. Nor should this surprise us. Grime was unavoidable, and James walked with his eyes open to a city in which many of the poor bore on their face
“the traces . . . of alchoholic action.”
If he did not penetrate to the worst of its slums, he was entirely familiar with its miles of dreariness. He knew how much of London had to be left out by anyone who wanted to draw a genial picture; knew that the stark glare of a corner gin shop could make the city seem even more brutal than darkness itself. He could describe the smell of close-packed bodies, and an article in
The Nation
allowed him to play sportswriter in a report on the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race, standing on a bridge over the Thames amid
“the dingy, British mob, with coal-smoke ground into its pores,”
and waiting for the eights to flash by.

James learned his London by writing about it, and throughout the spring and summer of 1877 he sent a string of travel articles back to America, making copy out of a walk through Green Park or a visit to Westminster Abbey. He turned some of his first country visits into pieces for popular magazines, bringing his readers into a house built upon the ruins of an abbey, a place with a ghost where a Gothic past and
“modern conversation . . . have melted together.”
The English didn’t notice such apparent anomalies, but James could not yet take them for granted, and in this he was more like Henrietta Stackpole than we usually recognize. In fact, he showed in those early years what now appears a surprising journalistic range. Books and travel, pictures and theater: that much is familiar to us, and yet James also wrote about the stinginess of the British taxpayer and even about the imperial politics that in the later 1870s brought the country into brief though bloody wars in Afghanistan and southern Africa. In
Henry James at Work
, Theodora Bosanquet noted that the world of
“cabinets and parties and politics . . . remained outside the pale of his sensibility.”
But that absence of interest had to be learned, and in writing to Quincy Street this new Londoner was often astute in his reading of the world’s headlines. In that sense, at least, his success would prove narrowing.

P
erhaps that process had begun by the time James set to work on
The Portrait of a Lady
, for his letters make no reference to that spring’s general election, a Liberal victory that put Gladstone back in Downing Street. He had six weeks of steady work in the wet Florentine spring, yet he still found himself asking Howells to put off the start of the novel’s
Atlantic
run. The first installment was scheduled for August, yet now James wanted to bump it back to October. Italy had been
“insidious, perfidious, fertile in pretexts”
for doing anything but work. What he didn’t say was that his visit to Zhukovsky had made him fall behind. But James was as expert as ever in rationalizating the delay.
Washington Square
would now complete most of its own serialization before the new book began to appear; he wouldn’t be competing with himself. Moreover it would give him the chance “to get forward a good deal,” a running start that would allow him to give this big novel the care he thought it would need.