Portrait of A Novel (25 page)

Still, the fact of a book’s availability doesn’t answer the question of who should be allowed to read it. One of Nana’s lovers is the middle-aged Comte Muffat de Beauville, a man with a sixteen-year-old daughter whom Zola describes as being of “
l’âge ingrat
.” The idiom is not easy to translate, but its many possible versions all refer to puberty, to the difficult years when one is neither a child nor yet fully grown, and the phrase gave James the title for the oddly intriguing novel, written almost entirely in dialogue, that he published at the very end of the century. At eighteen the deliberately named Nanda Brookenham has just reached what can be called
The Awkward Age
(1899.) She has begun to take her place in the adult world, and yet her mother isn’t sure that the girl belongs in the drawing room. For she herself is part of a very fast crowd, whose every conversation carries an allusion to one love affair or another. Might there be a danger for the girl in being exposed to such “‘
good’ talk?
”

What lifts the novel to its climax is the discovery by one of Nanda’s suitors that the girl has read a book that he himself has left lying around, an untranslated and famously indecent French novel. That troubles him. The kind of knowledge contained in French novels is exactly the kind that the young man doesn’t want his bride to have, and he stops himself before making a declaration; though in fact the printed page has told Nanda nothing that she hasn’t heard people speak of already. She knows everything, and it doesn’t appear as if the news has surprised her. But that knowledge has left her untouched. She is innocent, except in the eyes of others, and that makes
The Awkward Age
itself into a kind of paradox. For though the book isn’t nearly as explicit as Zola, it’s still about someone who would not, in theory, be allowed to read it herself. Such concerns had been a part of James’s work from the start. This apparently lifelong celibate was more entirely fascinated than any other English-language writer of his time by the question of sexual education. What can one know, and when? Under what conditions is that knowledge admissible? On what terms can be it be represented and made the subject of fiction? James never grew tired of these questions, and given the nature of his own life and period, it’s perhaps no surprise that he usually approached them in terms of a young woman on the cusp, not only in
The Awkward Age
, but also in the much earlier tale that had first made him famous.

Daisy Miller
is among other things about a fissure in the American language. The title character thinks of Europe as a jumble of “
old castles
,” while Frederick Winterbourne, the young man through whose eyes we see her, views it as a repository of “ancient monuments.” Her speech is colloquial and direct; his more formal diction is saved from stiffness only by an irony that Daisy herself doesn’t always catch. They meet at a hotel on Lake Geneva, and she flirts with him there as she has learned to do at home in Schenectady. Girls should flirt, she thinks, while married women shouldn’t, and she speaks proudly of having always had “
a great deal
of gentlemen’s society.” But Winterbourne has made his own superstitious valuation of Europe. He has lost his ear for American speech, American manners, and though he flirts himself, in proposing an excursion to the Castle of Chillon, he’s rather shocked when Daisy accepts. He doesn’t know how to read her, and when they meet again in Rome, he decides that she is nothing but a “
clever little reprobate
.” She goes around with a well-dressed Italian, a small-time lawyer named Giovanelli, and her willingness to appear in public, unchaperoned, has set every
straniero
in town to talking. For “when in Rome”; and Giovanelli would never have suggested to an Italian
signorina
that they might stroll about the streets together. One woman does attempt to warn Daisy of her risk, a Mrs. Walker, who tells the girl that she is “
old enough
. . . to be talked about.” The young woman is at first incredulous—but a second later says that “I don’t think I want to know what you mean . . . I don’t think I should like it.”

She knows and she doesn’t; and her face hints at a blush. A few years later, as we have seen, James would make Isabel claim that she doesn’t want to hear anything that Pansy might not; wants instead to remain in the awkward age, not yet forced to confront the world of adult knowledge. Nor can
Daisy Miller
itself confront it, not if the story is to remain available to the young girl in the Winslow Homer watercolor, lying on the grass with her novel. One evening Daisy asks Giovanelli to take her for a moonlight walk in the Colosseum. Winterbourne sees her there, and at that moment thinks he knows the worst. Then the girl sickens, and dies. She has caught the Roman fever, the
mala aria
that people then believed came from the city’s nighttime miasmas. Hawthorne’s daughter Una had gotten the same disease on a sketching expedition to the Colosseum, and the city’s Protestant Cemetery is full of tourists who had not built up the native’s immunity; the mosquito’s role in communicating malaria wouldn’t be understood until the end of the century. But in reading it’s hard not to think that James has killed Daisy off in order to avoid answering questions. He kills her so that he won’t have to give a name to just what Mrs. Walker means, kills her just before he needs to say if Winterbourne’s suspicions of her “actual or potential
inconduite
” are justified. He kills her so that his characters won’t have to admit what they know. Or rather what they believe, for once she is safely dead, the story allows Giovanelli to tell Winterbourne that she was the most innocent of girls, that the whole American community has been so naïve as to mistake appearances for reality.

Some readers might wonder—I certainly did, at eighteen—just why a nighttime walk in the Colosseum was so much worse than a walk anywhere else. For the story itself refuses to explain. It preserves both its young readers’ modesty and its own; and as for the Colosseum, that was just one of the things that adults were supposed to know about. It would take Edith Wharton to make it all explicit, in her great story “Roman Fever” (1934), a story about a different kind of heat than that from which Daisy suffers. On a visit to Rome two American women, old friends and rivals, watch their daughters chat up some Italian aviators. As the day passes, the women remember their own early visits to the city, at the turn of the twentieth century, and even those of their mothers, in Daisy’s day; young women of the 1870s who had in their turn to be carefully protected from the city’s dangers by
their
mothers. So Wharton evokes four generations of American women in Europe, the generations whose history both James and she herself had chronicled. Then she ends with a kill shot, a few sentences in which one woman tells the other the truth about the past, sentences that provide the best gloss of all on
Daisy Miller
in showing us just what, with all those massive arches to hide behind, the Colosseum was so famously for.

That wasn’t the only time Wharton used her work to comment on that of her predecessor and friend. After all, the hero of her greatest novel,
The Age of Innocence
, is named Newland Archer, a lawyer who seems the very “
portrait of a gentleman
,” as if he were indeed related to that girl from Albany. Wharton set the novel in New York during the early 1870s, in the world of the Knickerbocker cousinage that Isabel has left behind her, and the book opens at the city’s old Academy of Music on 14th Street, not far from James’s own birthplace off Washington Square. The performance that night is of
Faust
, and as Newland watches his fiancée, May Welland, he fondly allows himself to believe that she hasn’t a clue as to what the opera’s seduction scene is about. Though in fact she does, and just before their wedding she tells him that he “
mustn’t think
that a girl knows as little as her parents imagine.” On every page the novel reminds us of the gap between its 1920 publication and the date of its setting, showing us a New York in which telephones are the latest thing and the trains from the south don’t yet cross the Hudson. And among the historical changes it tracks are those in fiction itself, registering all that the novels of Isabel’s day were not allowed to say, and that Wharton now can. Everyone here knows and talks about a corrupt financier and his mistress, and some of them worry that their children will marry his “bastards”; while late in the novel May will lie about her own pregnancy as a way to keep her husband faithful. The gap between what people know and what they’ve agreed to admit they know has gotten a bit smaller, as James foresaw that it would. But such moments aren’t the only echoes Wharton offers of the
Portrait
. For Newland also remembers having spent a few weeks “
at Florence with
a band of queer Europeanized Americans,” with rakes and dandies and strange deracinated women who insist on telling him about their love affairs. One imagines a fling with the Countess Gemini; and one imagines as well just how Newland Archer’s own innocence would have been caught and pinned by Gilbert Osmond’s cold and ancient eyes.

17.

THE MAGAZINES

M
IDSUMMER, 1881.
HENRY
James has had his Venetian spring and brought
The Portrait of a Lady
to within a shout of its close. But an Italian July is another matter, and at the start of the month he left the peninsula’s
“stifling
calidarium
,”
and went north. James never traveled quickly, but on this journey he paused for only a week, at the Swiss resort of Engelberg near Lucerne. He crossed the Channel on July 12 and, as soon as he was back in Bolton Street, sat down to an awkward bit of correspondence.

He had another part of his serial ready, as he wrote to Houghton, Mifflin, and would send it to Aldrich at the
Atlantic
the next day. But his publishers expected that afterward there would be just a single installment left and so, he wrote,
“I am afraid you will be a little alarmed to learn that I have had to ask from Messrs Macmillan
one additional month
of their magazine, and I shall have therefore to beg the same favour of you.”
James had no doubt they would grant his request. Nevertheless, he apologized for stretching out what was already a long novel and, as if in compensation, noted that the last three installments would be short; each filled about twenty of the magazine’s pages, while the usual ones took twenty-five or more. Still, he would need that extra month, and what two years before he had described, in writing to Howells, as a serial of
“
probably
not less than six, & more than eight”
months’ duration would instead take fourteen.

Most of the Victorian novels we read today were serialized in one form or another. The important exceptions are the Brontës in England and Hawthorne and Melville in America, all of whom worked before the age of the great monthly magazines like the
Cornhill
or the
Century
or indeed the
Atlantic
itself. James often told friends to wait for the finished volume, but serialization was an unavoidable fact of almost every writer’s economic life. Nor was there anything odd in the book’s beginning its run before he had completed it. Nearly everyone did that, and Dickens in particular sometimes had to fight his way to a deadline. But serialization took several forms, and the kind of story a novelist told depended in part on the medium in which the work initially appeared. James’s request opens a window on the publishing practices of his day. We need to consider it carefully, and can start by looking at the magazines in which the
Portrait
first came out.

The two were
surprisingly alike. They had begun publication within a few years of each other, the
Atlantic
in 1857 and
Macmillan’s
in 1859, and they shared the same politics. The American journal spoke for a progressive humanism, and the British one for what was called Christian socialism, a movement that played a role in the early history of Britain’s Labour Party. Each was pro-Darwin, and in their early years each took an antislavery line; the latter was taken for granted in Abolitionist Boston, but not in a Britain whose textile industry relied on American cotton. Neither had pictures, and instead used double-columned pages of unbroken type. That would later hurt the
Atlantic
’s circulation figures in particular, and despite the magazine’s influence, its sales never threatened those of the lavishly illustrated and New York–based
Harper’s
. In 1880–81 it sold just 12,000 copies a month, while
Harper’s
topped 100,000. Both magazines suggested that culture was serious business and served as high-toned apostles to an aspiring middle-class; James himself made fun of the
Atlantic
’s sobriety. Even their prices were virtually identical.
Macmillan’s
cost a shilling and the American magazine 25¢ at a time when the pound fetched a bit under $5. Though the Americans got more for their money—an issue usually ran 144 pages, as opposed to
Macmillan’s
80.

James wasn’t the only writer to put the same piece in both journals. Harriet Beecher Stowe had done it with an 1869 article that provided the first hint of Byron’s incest with his half-sister Augusta, but nothing so scandalous appeared in either magazine during the year of the
Portrait
’s run. The novel began in the October
Macmillan’s
, an issue that also included a piece on the ancient town of Glastonbury, then as now associated with King Arthur. Over the next months the readers got an essay by Matthew Arnold and a poem by George Meredith alongside Isabel’s story, and articles on public libraries, the prevention of floods, and “Political Somnambulism” by J. R. Seeley, the historian who later argued that the British Empire had been acquired “in a fit of absence of mind.” In the
Atlantic
the first installment came out in November along with a piece on weather forecasting. Early the next year there was an essay by the naturalist John Burroughs, and James’s own father offered his recollections of the recently deceased Thomas Carlyle. Nothing in these issues looks so frivolous or, the
Portrait
aside, so purely pleasurable as a piece
Harper’s
ran at the same time about going “Down the Thames in a Birch-Bark Canoe.” Later in 1881 the
Atlantic
published stories by Sarah Orne Jewett and an anonymous review of Twain’s
Prince and the Pauper;
while one continuing feature was the back-of-the-book “Contributors’ Club,” a section of unsigned pieces on books or manners or travel. Often these brief notices responded to those of an earlier month, producing the sense of an ongoing conversation; “club” is indeed the right word.

There were some differences. The
Atlantic
was hospitable to women writers;
Macmillan’s
went further and pushed women’s issues, education in particular. In terms of daily operations, however, their biggest difference lay in the relations of owner and editor. The American magazine had been started by a clutch of Boston intellectuals, the poets James Russell Lowell and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., among them, and changed hands several times before it was bought, in 1874, by the printer H. O. Houghton. The new owner would build the greatest of Boston publishing houses; he kept a strict eye on expenses but didn’t often interfere with editorial questions. The
Atlantic
’s editors became public figures in themselves, and while Houghton, Mifflin often took a book from its pages, the
Portrait
among them, the monthly never functioned as a house organ.
Macmillan’s
was very different. It bore the name of its publisher, and no matter who edited it, the magazine was controlled by Alexander Macmillan, a Scotsman who began his career with a London bookshop in 1843. In 1880 the editor was George Grove, whose own monument is his eponymous
Dictionary of Music and Musicians
. Grove himself had reservations about James’s work, but almost all the novelist’s dealings were with the firm’s junior partner, Alexander Macmillan’s nephew Frederick. The novelist approached him soon after settling in London, and they quickly became friends. Over the years he placed work with several other firms as well, but Macmillan’s was his most important English publisher, handling virtually all of his books up through
The Tragic Muse
and later holding the British rights for the New York Edition. Or to put it another way, James was a Macmillan author who, with the exception of the
Portrait
itself, did not often publish in
Macmillan’s
. He was an
Atlantic
writer who did little business with Houghton, Mifflin as such. In Britain he made his deal for the
Portrait
with the publishing house; in America with the magazine.

James discussed the book with Frederick Macmillan in the spring of 1878, but though he noted his plans in letters to both Howells and Quincy Street, his surviving correspondence with the publisher doesn’t mention it again until the next year. Clearly they had been talking about it, however, for in July 1879, James wrote to canvass the possible dates for starting. Nevertheless, there were difficulties. The Macmillans had him committed to a serial, and yet James had also agreed to write something for Howells and told his Boston editor that he wanted to make the “
next
long
story
I write . . .
really
a long one.” Doing that would mean pushing the
Macmillan’s
piece back beyond a point that they were willing to accept. James found a solution by flexing the biceps that the popular success of
Daisy Miller
had given him. The
Atlantic
usually objected to simultaneous publication in England. It wanted to be the exclusive home of the things it ran and didn’t want to look, even with James, as if it were in the business of importing culture. But the competition at
Harper’s
made no such objection, and James reminded Howells that if he lost the chance to “double my profits . . . I shall have, to a certain extent, to remember this.” The editor recognized the threat, and by late August, James had arranged to publish the same novel in both magazines at once. On Macmillan’s part there was no difficulty; the firm offered £250 for the serial, and half the profits on its book form. Howells grumbled, but he wanted a similar arrangement for his own novels, and once he accepted the deal in principle James worked him hard on the price, asking for $250 each month; he had gotten only $150 for each piece of
The American
. Still, the
Portrait
’s installments were to be longer, and the page rate came to about $10, the
Atlantic
’s standard payment to established writers; the success of the
Portrait
would drive James’s fee to fifteen.

The novel’s serialization also involved a second balancing act. Until 1891 there was no reciprocal copyright agreement between Britain and the United States, and publishers on either side of the Atlantic often pirated the other nation’s books, paying little or nothing to the writers themselves. English copyright depended on the book having first appeared in Britain, but American citizens could assert their copyright in the United States by registering the work with the Library of Congress, whether they were in the country or not. There was, however, some danger that a pirated edition might appear before that registration took place, as indeed happened with
Daisy Miller
after its appearance in the English
Cornhill
. British writers could not file for copyright in Washington from abroad, and could only tap the U.S. market by selling advance sheets to an American publisher, giving the chosen house a chance to get ahead of any competition. That is what George Eliot did with
Middlemarch
, but because it could only delay and not prevent privacy, her American earnings were small in comparison to her English ones.

James got two copies of his proof sheets from
Macmillan’s
and, after correcting them, sent one to each publisher; the
Atlantic
then reset the text to fit its slightly larger page. The arrangement depended on a fast and regular mail service—letters took ten or twelve days to make the crossing—and yet that service could also be too fast.
Macmillan’s
published on the first of each month, and the opening installment of the
Portrait
appeared in England at the start of October; the same chapters came out in the
Atlantic
’s November issue, released on October 15. The two week gap seems nicely calculated both to ensure James’s English copyright and to keep off the pirates at home. But
Macmillan’s
had many subscribers in the States, and at Christmas, James wrote Frederick Macmillan a plaintive note. The mails were too fast, the presses too slow, and he had heard that the
Portrait
was
“devoured in the American papers before [it] appears in the
Atlantic
.”
Couldn’t Macmillan find some way to stop this? James had already put out a dozen books; but then no author, however experienced, can quite believe that his publisher has done everything possible.

W
ith most writers Howells didn’t hesitate to offer suggestions, and in his early stories James took a number of them. But we have no record of any editorial work on the
Portrait
; the only revisions appear to have been James’s own. Still, Howells was surprised by the scale on which his friend had begun to build. He knew from the start that the book’s installments would be longer than those of either
Roderick Hudson
or
The American
, but he also remembered James’s first proposal, and almost as soon as the serial began, he announced that it would end in the spring of 1881. Which in turn startled James himself. Whatever his initial plans, he now saw that the
Portrait
would cover a
“stretch of months or years”
in its characters’ lives, and he thought he had
“been explicit as to its longitude—twelve months.”
It would live and breathe through its sense of duration, and in doing so would strain his own ambition to the limits; a novel that would justify and fulfill his many years of preparation. Still, he did acknowledge that he had been
“strangely vague”
about its length. To
Macmillan’s
he had first suggested a run of eight or nine months, but by December his projected twelve were already becoming thirteen. At the start of the year he sat down to block out the remainder of the book’s plot and noted that
“after Isabel’s marriage there are
five
more instalments.”
The italics suggest a moment of revision, as if he were underlining an additional change in the book’s longitude. The wedding scene is itself unwritten—it takes place in the gap between the novel’s eighth and ninth installments. But the novel continued to grow. Those five became six, thirteen stretched itself to fourteen, and in July of 1881, James asked for that extra month.