Portrait of A Novel (17 page)

Osmond’s own paintings form a part of his
“traditionary”
pose: the work of a man who likes one to think that he could have been an artist if only he weren’t a gentleman. And his watercolors are not in themselves bad, even if to Madame Merle they seem inadequate
“as the only thing you do.”
One of the most puzzling things about this part of the novel is the tone that these two old friends take with one another. They speak bluntly, and yet their talk so brims with allusion that it amounts to innuendo, in a way that makes them seem creatures of another century—before, after, anything but Victorian. The more caustic they are, the more appears to go unsaid. Madame Merle tells Osmond that she wants to put Isabel in his way, and her phrasing is not disinterested. But we don’t yet see what she herself might get from it all, and therefore read with a sharp sense of the unspoken. Even Isabel herself will wonder at her friend’s eagerness, and at this point the novel’s plot starts to hang upon a plot in another sense of the word, to depend upon the hidden and unknown. The motivations and desires of the book’s other characters begin to exercise a shaping force upon both Isabel’s experience and our own; motivations unsuspected by her and unclear to us. One mark of that change is the growing freedom with which James starts to handle point of view. Up to this point he has stayed so close to his heroine as virtually to exclude his other characters’ sense of things, but now he begins to dip, however briefly, into their very different inner lives. So Isabel talks with Madame Merle about Osmond’s family history, and in the space of a single long paragraph James allows himself to slide from one mind to another, from Isabel’s perceptions of what the older woman has said to the latter’s impression of the girl’s response to Osmond’s sister. For Serena Merle worries about the Countess Gemini, worries about what that particular piece of flightiness might say.

When Madame Merle first comes to Osmond’s villa, her host tells her that she is
“looking very well.”
She has got an idea. On her that’s always becoming, and soon enough it begins to bear fruit. Osmond finds that
“the girl is not disagreeable,”
indeed that she’s charming. But she does have one fault. Isabel too has ideas, a lot of ideas—though fortunately, Osmond says, they are all very bad ones. Fortunately, for they must be “sacrificed.” Not because they are bad, but because they are hers.

12.

STRANIERI

I
N 1786 A
German poet traveling alone and under an assumed name boarded a coach in the spa town of Carlsbad and set off for the south on a holiday from the growing burden of his own fame. He ate his first figs in Munich, and once he had crossed the Brenner Pass and begun his descent into Italy, he exulted in a basket of peaches and pears. Venice seduced him but what he really wanted was Rome, and when he left the Adriatic behind, he pushed on so quickly for the papal city that he passed through Florence itself in a single night. Rome was the goal, for Goethe no less than for any other northerner on the Grand Tour, Rome and its remains, Rome and his hopes that the city might enlarge his very soul. So it will prove for Isabel Archer. She enjoys her weeks in Florence, but she too wants something more, and she will eventually make her home in the ancient capital.

Still, her first visit is a short one—just ten days at the end of May. She travels down from Florence with Ralph and Henrietta and they take rooms at the Hôtel de Paris. James himself usually stayed at the much larger Roma, in the Corso, which was especially recommended for
“passing travellers or bachelors.”
But he put his characters exactly where one would have found their real-life equivalents, just a few steps away from the Piazza di Spagna, in the center of what was called the city’s “strangers’ quarter.” The
Baedeker for 1879
lists an Albergo di Parigi in the via San Sebastianello, a steep and narrow little street that runs parallel to the Spanish Steps, climbing up toward the Pincio, the hanging gardens where Daisy Miller had scandalized her world by strolling unchaperoned with an Italian. Keats had died just around the corner, in a house near the foot of the Steps, and Dorothea Brooke in
Middlemarch
had spent her unhappy honeymoon close by in the via Sistina, which runs from their top down to Piazza Barberini. And today it remains a district of
stranieri
still, as anyone who has had to sidle around the crowds on those stairs will know.

In James’s day as in ours, the neighborhood was crowded with hotels, most of them with similarly generic names—the Russia, the Europa, the Inghilterra. Among them the only thing that distinguishes Isabel’s is the fact that it billed itself as suitable for families; an unostentatious choice for someone still getting used to her money. A few years later the Hôtel de Paris appears to have moved, while staying well within the quarter. My 1886 Baedeker gives an address on via San Nicola di Tolentino, a street in which many foreign artists kept their studios; advertisements note that it had one of the city’s first elevators. In that later spot it faced the Palazzo Barberini, where the sculptor William Wetmore Story rented an apartment of some fifty rooms, an apartment that functioned as the unofficial capital of the American colony in Rome and in which James himself spent many evenings.

In Florence, Osmond had told Isabel that he would like to see her in Rome, to watch her take it in, and soon enough he will follow her down. She will have another encounter before he does, however, and one that says more about the Anglo-American experience of the city. One afternoon she goes to the Forum, and when Ralph strolls off with a guide, she sits down on a fallen column. Scenery in this novel is never inert, never just a block of description. James always uses it to serve some dramatic purpose, to tell us something about his characters’ perceptions or desires. He has already suggested that though Isabel does feel the burden of Rome’s past, she also finds the city full of
“the fresh, cool breath of the future.”
Even the tumbled walls of the Forum make her think of nothing so much as her own prospects, and she’s so lost in her thoughts of the life to come that she doesn’t hear an approaching footstep, looking up only when a shadow falls across her line of vision.

The shadow belongs to Lord Warburton, and their meeting is accidental. He himself has been in Turkey and has stopped off in Rome on his way back home. In reading one certainly feels that the novelist is busily plotting; this way of bringing an old suitor onto the stage looks, at first, like coincidence on a Dickensian scale. Yet we shouldn’t allow it to strain our credulity. In an 1860 letter Henry Adams writes of going to the Vatican and running into
“a young lady whom I used to know at Dresden,”
while the letters his wife Clover sent from Italy are full of her chance encounters with other Bostonians. Warburton tells Isabel that he is merely passing through, but that doesn’t mean he’ll treat it
“as if it were Clapham Junction. To pass through Rome is to stop for a week or two.”
Clapham Junction was and is a South London railroad station, and even now remains the busiest commuter interchange in Britain. For people in Isabel’s world, however, Rome itself was a kind of Clapham Junction. It provided a major switching point on the routes of Victorian tourism, and in 1873 James wrote in a letter that
“I have first or last seen in a cab in the Corso every one I ever saw anywhere before.”

Warburton’s entrance will have its effect on the plot, but it also has an effect on the reader today that’s summed up by a line in the journals of John Cheever. The Forum now looks, Cheever wrote, as if it were
“a double ruin: a ruin of antiquity and a monument to the tender sentiments of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers, for we see not only the ghosts of the Romans here but the shades of ladies with parasols and . . . little children rolling hoops.”
Any experience of Rome is a layered one, with cars honking outside a church built atop a temple, but such things now also lie under a topsoil of Anglo-American perception, and all of Italy comes to us as filtered through our awareness of earlier travelers. We remember what James said, or Twain; we register the difference between their version of the Caesars and ours, and pat ourselves on the back for knowing more than Hawthorne, who described the church of San Luigi dei Francesi without noticing the Caravaggios. Tastes shift, and desires as well, and the chronicle of touristic appreciation stands itself as a part of the city’s meaning and a measure too of America’s ever-changing relations with Europe. We join our own perceptions up with our predecessors’, and so place ourselves in history. We assert a sense of continuity; we give ourselves a past.

James delighted in what he called the
“palpable imaginable
visitable
past—in the nearer distances”
of a recently departed era. Such a period seemed close enough to reach, as by the long stretch of a mental arm, and for Cheever—for me—one face of that past now belongs to James himself. But the ghosts he usually saw were those of people still present, and in Rome he reserved a special fascination for the earlier lives of his expatriated elders, the lives they had led just before his own arrival. They were the relicts of the city he called old Rome: a quiet town, and underpopulated, a place in which the pope was both the secular and the spiritual ruler, and where all modern opinion was censored. James had known that city for just a few months at the end of 1869, on his own first excited visit, and could never quite shed his sense of it. But the next year the Papal States were annexed by the new kingdom of Italy, and by the time he returned, in the winter of 1872–73, the city seemed to him to have lost a part of its color and style. The pope’s carriage no longer passed in the street; old Rome had vanished just when he got there, a fact that only increased his own sense of belatedness. America was a young nation, but even among other Americans he had come too late.

I
n 1903, James published one of his most curious books, a two-volume biography, in the accepted life-and-letters mode, called
William Wetmore Story and His Friends
. Its subject was the Salem-born son of a Supreme Court justice, and a bit of a prodigy; a man who in his twenties had produced treatises on contracts and personal property. But the law bored him. Story liked poetry more, and was also interested in the visual arts, an interest confirmed by his first visit to Italy in 1847. A decade later he took his family abroad for good. Money went far in Rome, and Story had plenty of it; his place in the Barberini seemed cheap. It was on an upper floor of a sprawling seventeenth-century palace, a building that made James meditate on
“what the grand style for the few involved in the way of a small style for the many.”
The owners had kept the best rooms for themselves, including the one with the Cortona ceiling that celebrated Urban VII, the family’s pope, and James sometimes caught a glimpse of history as he climbed the stairs to his American friends: the sight of the old Cardinal Barberini himself playing cards with his priests, whose resigned smiles announced that they had, once more, managed to let His Eminence win.

Story’s smoothly classicizing sculpture has little interest for us now, but it was famous in its time; a fame helped by his friendship with Hawthorne, who described some of it in
The Marble Faun
. By the time James knew him, however, the sculptor’s best work all lay in the past. He had settled into life as a host, and though the novelist admitted in an 1873 letter that the man’s
“cleverness”
was great, he added that “the world’s good nature to him is greater.” James liked some of Story’s travel sketches, but he thought the rest of it—the poetry and the marbles alike—nothing more than the work of a charming amateur. So he hesitated when, after his 1895 death, Story’s family asked him to do the biography; accepting only because he needed the advance to furnish Lamb House. Still, James kept putting it off, believing that the materials were too thin, that neither the man’s life nor his work contained enough to fill the project out. The money had been spent, though, and when he finally began, he discovered that he did have the makings of a book: not a biography per se, but a portrait of Story’s generation, in which the narrative is carried by the letters the sculptor had written to and received from larger figures.

In that excursion into the visitable past Story appears as one of James’s own
“precursors”
: those Americans who went to Europe when the going was not yet easy. Writing in an age when America had become one of the world’s Great Powers, James found himself fascinated by his nation’s early but ever-growing
“consciousness of the complicated world it was so persistently to annex.”
He himself belonged to a generation that had gone well supplied with guidebooks and photographs and letters of introduction. His elders had had no such luxuries, and especially the artists among them. They had had no one to tell them what and where and how to study, and James recognized that his own easy cosmopolitanism depended on the fact that his predecessors had cut the road before him. He knew that Story’s or even Hawthorne’s understanding of Europe appeared quaint in comparison to that of his own era; the era as well of Sargent and Whistler, no longer the Old World’s students, but counted among its masters. Nevertheless, he saw them with a filial piety, for those precursors included not only Story, or his parents, but also his own earliest characters. They had made his world, his fiction—had made
him
—possible.

In Italy the Americans and the English often formed a single community, and James couldn’t resist noting that during the fall of 1849 Elizabeth Barrett Browning read
Jane Eyre
in a copy she had borrowed from the Storys. But such homespun details should make us pause. The picture James’s fiction gives us of expatriate life has become so emblematic a part of our culture that we need to ask just how many people lived and moved in the world he described. Or rather how few. The 1872 Murray’s
Handbook of Rome
notes that in 1870 there were just 457 permanently resident Protestants in a city where the total population approached 250,000; given Italy’s own religious homogeneity, the term functions as a proxy for “foreign.” The Italian census for 1871 offers a rather different figure, however, and puts the number of Protestants at 3,798.
The historian John Pemble
explains the discrepancy as reflecting, first, a sharp increase in the scale of both business and diplomacy after Rome became the capital of the united Italy; and second, the possible inclusion in that figure of the temporary population in hotels and lodgings. The latter suggestion seems confirmed by the
travel writer Bayard Taylor
, who wrote in March 1868 that there were then 1,200 Americans in the city; most of them left immediately after Easter. Such transients were Rome’s equivalent of summer—that is, winter—people, those who came for the “season,” as James himself did in 1872–73. But the fixed population remained small. An 1894 survey of
“Americans Abroad”
in
Lippincott’s
notes that while Rome then received 30,000 of James’s countrymen as visitors each year, there were still just 200 permanent American inhabitants. Paris had 2,500.

That number would, however, have included many people who did
not
figure in James’s world. The young seminarians from the Vatican’s new American College were not likely to appear at the Storys’ Sunday evening at-homes. Nor were the city’s English tradesmen, to whom
Murray and Baedeker
provide something like a gazetteer. A Mr. Shea arranged the lease of furnished apartments from his office in the Piazza di Spagna, and was also recommended as a trustworthy agent for those wishing to ship luggage or artwork to England and America. A “depot of London saddlery” could be found at Barfoot’s in the via del Babuino, and G. Baker owned a pharmacy. There were no English booksellers as such, but the German-run Spithöver’s stocked English publications and got the newspapers too. An erstwhile drawing master named Arthur Strutt had become a noted distributor of Italian wines, and the eponymous Ice Company made its wares from “Trevi water.” A Miss Black is listed in Murray’s as a “daily governess,” an American dentist practiced in the via Nazionale, and a man called Jarrett kept a livery stable in the Piazza del Popolo. Thomas Cook had its office in the Piazza di Spagna, and an English company ran the city’s gasworks from a plant at the Circus Maximus.