Portrait of A Novel (15 page)

10.

BELLOSGUARDO HOURS

A
T THE FOOT
of the Ponte Vecchio, I paused and looked back, turning away from its narrow shop-lined path for a view of the buildings behind me. Faceless buildings, now, and with their ground floors given over to tourist shops: gelato and postcards and a couple of ATMs. But one of them had been the Hôtel de l’Arno—
“well spoken of”
in Baedeker’s words—where James had sat in an upstairs window making Isabel walk onto her English lawn. Much had been rebuilt here, and I had no way to determine which window had been his, or to find the door he would have taken from the street. Shrug, and walk on. It was early still, with the bridge’s jewelry stores unshuttering for the day, and I walked over its crabbed arch in the milky light of an April morning, and then up the via Guicciardini toward the Palazzo Pitti. Every step here took me through a different bit of history. There was the palace itself, its dun-colored walls an exercise in brooding symmetry. It had been the massy home of the Medici dukes and was already a museum in James’s time; he found its collection more sumptuous than interesting, and the place had given William a headache. There was Machiavelli’s house, and then the many-windowed front of the Brownings’ Casa Guidi. There were the Boboli Gardens, with their fountains and terraces and lanes cut like tunnels through the greenery. My business was elsewhere, though, and I kept to the busy street until I had passed through the old Porta Romana.

Florence began to undergo a partial modernization in the 1860s, during its brief period as the Italian capital, with its town planners copying the precedent of Paris’s Baron Haussmann, and slicing wide avenues through some quarters of the city. In James’s time, however, the defensive walls on the south side of the Arno had remained in place. Today only the gates are left, and the Porta Romana itself was pierced by four lanes of traffic. Still, after a minute I was able to get away from the cars, leaving the main road and beginning to climb. Here the city’s fabric loosened. There were spaces between the buildings now, though the high walls that lined my way were almost continuous, with small green lizards running along them at shoulder height. Through heavy gates I had an occasional view of a villa, of mustard-colored buildings set back in a garden of umbrella pines and olives, and as the hill grew steeper, the villas got larger and security more elaborate. Signs warned about dogs, barbed wire ran above the concealing walls, and the tops of the walls themselves were a bristle of broken glass.

“If you’re an aching alien,”
James wrote, “half the talk is about villas. This one has a story; that one has another,” and today many of those stories have an American twist. James Fenimore Cooper had lived behind these roadside walls for almost a year at the end of the 1820s, and in 1858, Hawthorne rented the battlemented Torre di Montauto on top of Bellosguardo, the hill I was now approaching. For $28 a month he got a place that he described as
“big enough to quarter a regiment,”
and he later used it as a setting in
The Marble Faun
. The road leveled out and a man jogged toward me, in Italy an unusual sight. But as he approached, I saw he was carrying a copy of the
Herald Tribune
; a part of this hill has stayed American. My own destination was a place James had described as
“a little grassy, empty, rural piazza,”
no more, really, than a swelling at the juncture of two roads, and bounded upon one side by a villa with a “long, rather blank-looking . . . front.” The grass was gone now, though that didn’t stop a boy from kicking a soccer ball against a gate. But the villa itself remained.

Like many such places it has carried several names. For much of its life it was called the Belvedere al Saracino, but in the twentieth century it became known as the Villa Mercedes, and did time as a finishing school for American girls. James knew it, however, as the Villa Castellani, and some family friends of his kept an apartment there. I say “family friends” advisedly. The novelist made his own way in London, but almost everyone he saw in Italy was someone with whom he could claim an American acquaintance. They had dined with his parents, or he had gone to school with their cousins; a world composed of the friends of one’s friends. James had met the widowed Frank Boott and his daughter Elizabeth in Newport and Cambridge, but their real home was in Italy, where Boott had first gone at mid-century, soon after the death of his wife. There he lived on the profits of a Lowell textile mill and gave himself over to the education of his daughter. Lizzie Boott had also been a friend of the dead Minny Temple, and in his autobiography James remembered her as almost too civilized, a girl varnished to perfection. Yet her letters show a lively wit, and her colloquial French could match his own.

James wrote about the Villa Castellani in three different works: in
Roderick Hudson
, in an 1878 essay called “Italy Revisited,” and finally in
The Portrait of a Lady
itself. In the first of those he moves his characters into a place he calls the Villa Pandolfini, a building whose low façade is
“colored a dull, dark yellow, and pierced with windows of various sizes.”
Inside, its rooms seem cool and still, while the garden behind offers his characters a prospect of the river valley below. The essay describes the house as a place he couldn’t help coveting, and he loved both the tall cypresses outside and the sense, within, of a life dedicated to art and beauty.

Today the building is still painted an ochre-yellow. Its façade is modest, almost anonymous, and it sits directly on the street—no broken glass. And on this spring morning the house was unprotected in another way: its high, brass-studded doors stood open in the sunlight, and the caretaker waved me in for a look. There was a well in one corner of its lichen-covered courtyard and a Vespa in another, while the pavement was set with the gravestones of pets—“Bubeli, 1913.” I noted the names on the mailboxes of the dozen flats into which the building was divided: a German, a Scandinavian, and then a lot of Italians, including somebody called Corleone. There was also an English name, a place belonging to a “Lawrence of Florence.” In one of his Italian essays James describes himself as
“peeping up [the] stately staircases”
of one historic house after another, and wishing he could climb up for a view of the life within. So I paused with my finger over Lawrence’s button, wondering just who might appear. In the end, however, I had no more courage than James himself, and left that bell unrung.

Instead, I must rely on his own account of the interior, and of the garden that from the street I could see stretched out behind. The description comes a few chapters after Mr. Touchett’s death, when
The Portrait of a Lady
jumps in both time and space. James throws the action six months forward and rather suddenly moves us to Italy, where almost all of its remaining scenes take place. Here the villa goes nameless, and the language he uses for it has a new figurative power. The building seems
“incommunicative,”
and the irregular windows of its façade reveal not its face, but its “mask. . . . It had heavy lids, but no eyes.” The house isn’t what it seems—it doesn’t really show itself. Its different apartments are occupied by the citizens of this nation or that, foreigners long resident in Italy, and in one of them James shows us a room in which daily life itself has become a fine art. There are bits of tapestry and cabinets of age-polished oak, a scatter of books and modern chairs to read them in, oddments of medieval brassware and a wall of early masters. In this apartment lives an American widower, a man of forty with a daughter in her teens named Pansy.

W
e first hear of this man from Madame Merle, who at Gardencourt uses him to define the limitations of expatriate life.
“We are a wretched set of people,”
she tells Isabel with a certain complacency: parasites who have left their roots in one continent and haven’t managed to stick themselves into the soil of the other. Ralph is a good example, though his illness lends him a substitute for the occupation he otherwise lacks. Women have it easier, she claims, if only because they have “no natural place anywhere,” and so one land is as good as another. Yet men need an identity. Mr. Touchett’s bank has given him a rather weighty one, but as for the others she knows . . . well, the more cultivated they are, the more pitiful. The worst of them is one of the most delightful men she has ever met, someone whose charm seems inseparable from his irrelevance.
“He is Gilbert Osmond—he lives in Italy; that is all one can say about him.”
At home he might have become distinguished, and yet in living abroad he has made for himself “no name, no position, no fortune . . . no anything.” Osmond paints, albeit as an amateur only; the rest of him is indolence and taste.

No anything—words that for Isabel will eventually stand as a form of recommendation. The surface truth of Madame Merle’s account does, however, stay with her during a brief Parisian interlude, after she learns of her inheritance, when in looking over Mrs. Touchett’s collection of
“American absentees”
she says that their way of being “doesn’t seem to lead to anything.” It may be extremely pleasant, and yet there must, she thinks, be more to life than dinner at the Café Anglais. Her aunt’s circle isn’t so sure, but one of its members does at least try to give her an answer. Ned Rosier is a childhood friend, a polite young man with a fondness for old china, and what it all leads to, he tells her, is shopping. Where else but in Paris
“can you get such things?”
But to most people that isn’t enough. John Singer Sargent’s parents came abroad before his birth in 1856, for what they thought was their health. For the next thirty years, while the future painter’s mother moved with the seasons from one place to the next, his father dreamed of returning to his Philadelphia medical practice and seized upon every American newspaper he could find. They neither went home nor struck deep into Europe, and until John entered a studio in Paris, they knew only people like themselves.

For Dr. Sargent they were years with no purpose; Daniel Touchett did better. The young Sargent did of course develop that purpose, and so, to a lesser degree, did the generation of half-forgotten artists who formed the first American expatriate community in Italy. Such figures as the sculptors Harriet Hosmer and William Wetmore Story had gone to Rome in search of the training they couldn’t yet find in the States. They formed a link between Hawthorne’s generation and James’s own; indeed James would later write Story’s biography. And Hawthorne stands as the shrewdest of commentators on the issue that Madame Merle defines. He spent sixteen months in Italy, from January 1858 until May of the following year, and in his notebooks recorded a meeting in Florence with the sculptor Hiram Powers, whose
Greek Slave
had become a totem of the Abolitionist cause. Hawthorne told him that he hoped he would soon take up the place, and the fame, that his work had earned him at home, and yet added that Powers seemed without any plans for a return. To the writer it looked like an
“unsatisfactory life, thus to spend all the bulk of it in exile; in such a case we are always deferring the reality of life till a future moment, and, by and by, we have deferred it till there are no future moments.”
The next day he added that a shy, thoughtful man might find a home in a small city like Siena, and discover there a
“sombre kind of happiness . . . but it would be terrible without an independent life in one’s own mind.”

James himself always had that independent life—which doesn’t mean that he plunged more deeply. Italy had been the goal of his first adult trip to Europe in 1869, a country that for him, as later for Isabel, had long stood as a promised land. He arrived in Florence on October 5, and the next day bought a two-week membership at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Piazza Santa Trinità. It was the city’s largest subscription library, and its reading room was as a center of expatriate life; the names inscribed over the decades in its register amount to a history of European culture, from Mikhail Bakunin to Isadora Duncan. James went there both to read the newspapers and in the hopes of finding a familiar face. He had been in Italy for six weeks already, with brief stays in Venice and Bologna among others, but he hadn’t yet found anyone to talk to.

That would set a pattern, and in 1874 he wrote to Grace Norton that though he had been in Italy for a year he had
“hardly spoken to an Italian creature save washerwomen and waiters.”
He was once more in Florence and at work on a series of travel sketches that delighted in the city’s sense of an ever-visible past, but admitted that he sometimes found himself overwhelmed by the gap between Italy itself and the touristic rhapsodies he felt he had to provide. One evening he found himself gazing at a line of time-battered and almost mudlike houses along the Arno. Today those buildings contain some of Florence’s most expensively renovated flats, but James knew that in his native New York they would have been little more than a slum, and he could only explain his pleasure in them by supposing that Italy created its own standard of beauty. The simple fact that they weren’t brownstones had allowed the moonlight to refine their poverty away. At other times, however, those picturesque fictions seemed to explode in his hands. One day he stood at the gate of a hill town, with the road into the plain below winding down through chestnuts and olives, and watched as a young man came up toward him, his coat slung over his shoulder and his hat at a rakish angle. He was singing as he came, and James told himself that such a figure in the middle distance
“had been exactly what was wanted to set off the landscape.”
But when the man reached him and asked for a match, James quickly discovered that he was a brooding, angry young communist, “unhappy, underfed, [and] unemployed,” and very far from the operatic presence for which the novelist had taken him.

James came to know what he didn’t know, what the traveler’s view doesn’t usually allow one to see, and he turned those limitations of knowledge into the material of his work itself. Only in a few apprentice stories does he allow himself the kind of detachable set pieces on which Howells relied in his own Florentine novel,
Indian Summer
, with its touristic accounts of an artist’s trattoria or of the drive up to Fiesole. He more often uses Italy as a way to explore his own overvaluation of Europe. In his early “Madonna of the Future” he describes an expatriate painter named Theobald, who lives in the hope of beating out Raphael, and has spent a lifetime in the Tuscan capital in preparing—in delaying and deferring—his one perfect painting. Yet in the process his model has aged out of recognition, his blackened canvas has become illegible, and in his dream of an earlier age he has entirely missed the crude but undeniable energy of the modern land around him. Theobald’s Madonna belongs to the past. It is not a place on which an American art can take its stand.