Portrait of A Novel (27 page)

Middlemarch
’s commercial success owed a great deal to the idiosyncracies of its first edition; those eight little volumes were an encouragement to buy, not borrow. Moreover, George Eliot watched the response to the novel’s opening installment and used it in shaping the later ones. For serials were often reviewed, and several of
Middlemarch
’s separate parts got full write-ups in both the
Spectator
and the
Athenaeum
. Those first reviews were so entirely engaged by Dorothea that at the last minute her creator swapped a few chapters from one volume to another in order to bring her back more quickly. The
Portrait
didn’t receive such extensive coverage, and most of it came in the roundups of periodicals that many newspapers and magazines then featured. The
Atlanta Constitution
reviewed most issues of the
Atlantic
, and so did the
Detroit Free Press
; but neither paper much liked the story. The
Spectator
gave it an occasional line in its monthly “Some Papers from the Magazines,” writing of the first installment that
“nothing can be more delicate,”
and after that took the serial’s quality for granted. In America the richest commentary came in
The Nation
, where James had been a contributor since its 1865 founding. In March 1881 the magazine thought the book
“considerably the most important”
he had yet written; in August it foresaw some coming catastrophe to the characters, but was agreeably unable to predict its shape. But its most interesting account of the novel came early, in response to the second installment, when the paper’s anonymous critic spotted what even now remains, for some people, a source of James’s appeal. His every sentence is so nuanced and full that
“the reader feels irresistibly flattered at the homage paid to his perceptive powers.”

In Britain the novel received its most regular coverage in the
Examiner
, a weekly that ceased publication in the late winter of 1881. Its critic usually concentrated on James’s introduction of new characters; Henrietta Stackpole was
“quite too lifelike,”
and Madame Merle exquisite. One comment, however, looked directly at the question of serial form, and suggested that James presumed just a bit too much. None of the magazines he wrote for offered a way to fill one in on the story thus far, and the
Examiner
thought that
“the author evidently counts on the strong interest of his readers when he commences a monthly instalment with ‘He took a resolve after this not to misinterpret her words.’”
That’s the opening line of the novel’s third part, and any reader coming to it cold can be forgiven for wondering about the antecedents of those pronouns; for the record, they refer to Ralph and Henrietta. James did count on that interest. Or rather that sentence shows why he usually told his friends to wait for the finished book. In that form there’s no difficulty in simply turning the page and moving from chapter to chapter. We know where we are and what’s going on, we know to whom those pronouns refer, and the transition is seamless. Serialization may have been necessary, and yet James often did his best to ignore its requirements. He wrote instead with his eyes on the book—on the novel’s permanent form.

He did, however, begin one installment in a way that even the most old-fashioned of readers would have found unexceptionable. He sent his letter asking for more space in July 1881, and in that month’s
Atlantic
the serial’s ninth part started with this sentence:
“One afternoon, toward dusk, in the autumn of 1876, a young man of pleasing appearance rang at the door of a small apartment on the third floor of an old Roman house.”
It is the only date James ever gives us, and it signals a change: a shift in point of view, and a disruption of chronology. Isabel has gotten married—in the space between the lines, one might say—and we have moved forward by more than three years. That’s long enough for the marriage to have grown unhappy, as we are almost immediately told, and we will at first see “Mrs. Osmond” from outside, from that young man’s point of view. But James will eventually take us within, and the way he tells us about those missing months will make a revolution in the history of fiction itself.

18.

The Roccanera

T
HE DOOR BELONGS
to Madame Merle, and the young man with his finger on the bell is named Edward Rosier. James writes that we
“will perhaps not have forgotten”
him, but we have met this character just once before and readers of the
Atlantic
would have had four months in which to lose track of him. He is a childhood friend of Isabel’s, with an inherited income of £1,600 a year, and so thoroughly Frenchified that he sometimes has to hunt for the right English word. He hunts, and fails to find it; referring to Isabel, for example, not as Pansy’s stepmother, but as her
belle-mère
. For that is how he sees her now, as the stepmother of the perfect young girl he has met that summer in Switzerland. Ned Rosier has never in his life done anything indiscreet, but he does follow the Osmonds down to Rome, where they have lived since their marriage, and after a month he has learned two things. He knows that Osmond doesn’t think he’s rich enough, and that Madame Merle has some unexplained pull with Pansy’s family. So he rings, and hopes she’ll help him.

This is the second of the novel’s great ellipses. The first, as we have seen, came just before Isabel’s marriage, when James skipped over the year that ended with Osmond’s successful proposal, and presented us with a
fait accompli
. We didn’t even know she was engaged until the novelist made Caspar Goodwood cross the ocean simply to express his outrage. Now he has jumped again, a gap in time that corresponds to a gap in our knowledge of his heroine, and new readers inevitably find it disorienting; they may even feel cheated. We have not been to Isabel’s wedding; we have not witnessed the start of her life in marriage; all we know is that she has settled in Rome and that her stepdaughter has met a boy. We don’t even know how much time has passed, and then James knocks the wind out of us. Madame Merle tells Rosier that Isabel will probably favor his suit
“if her husband does not.”
Nothing more, not yet, but it’s enough to show us that the marriage has broken down even before we have seen it begin. We may not have trusted Osmond, but we knew that Isabel did and hoped that Ralph was wrong about him. Instead, we have gone from promise to ruin in the space of three pages, and it is as if our hopes have been drowned.

Three pages, and three years. We can work out the time from something else Madame Merle tells us. Isabel has had a son,
“who died two years ago, six months after his birth.”
Those details allow us to date the novel’s every scene. We will be told that her wedding was in June, and Rosier appears at the door at the start of December 1876. So we can place the marriage in 1873, and can even say that she conceived later that summer. But the child is dead, and in truth it’s hard to make very much of him. James does not connect that death to whatever has blighted the Osmonds’ marriage, and when Isabel later thinks back over its failure she will not spare the infant a thought. James gives her a child because it’s both the most efficient and least explicit way he has of telling us that the marriage has been consummated, and yet motherhood itself has no part in his conception of Isabel’s future. She believes that in marrying Osmond she has acted freely, and at the end of the novel she will need that liberty once more. She will need to choose with a freedom that she would not have in a child’s presence.

That baby aside, James refuses here to give us any direct knowledge of the inner life of Isabel’s marriage, and as a reader I’m split between my frustration at his refusal to take us over the brink and my admiration at the skill with which he switches his lens and approaches her through a hitherto-forgotten character. Still, that change does signal a larger change in mood, and perhaps a loss of
brio
. No scene after Isabel’s marriage offers the expansive delight of the book’s early chapters, the feeling of enchanted discovery with which she enters her European life. She no longer has decisions to make but must learn to live with the one she did, and the book shifts to a minor key, less exhilarating but with a new gravity and indeed nobility, whose force increases with each chapter.

At first, however, James’s decision to present Isabel indirectly can seem bewildering. He shows her through Rosier’s eyes and Rosier’s story, shows us only her social self, and it will take him sixty pages to open the closed door of her private life. We need something to do while we wait, however, and he uses the question of Pansy’s suitors and possible marriage to delay and distract us. Another American girl will have to choose. Madame Merle promises to help Rosier as much she can, and then she immediately tells Osmond. The news is disturbing—so disturbing, in fact, that Osmond signals his disapproval by offering the young man his
left
hand at the next of Isabel’s regular Thursday evening receptions. Rosier has no choice. He has to take it, but he turns away as soon as he can, and then finds himself face-to-face with Isabel once more.

She stands framed in a doorway, as at Gardencourt, and again she is dressed in black. The repetition is unobtrusive, but James means us to notice it and it serves to mark a difference; almost as if her story were starting over. She no longer wears the traveling dress of a girl in mourning, but is gowned in black velvet instead, and we don’t need to imagine the clinging stuff of Sargent’s scandalous and contemporaneous
Madame X
to see her as bare-armed and décolleté. At Gardencourt she had stood in the door of an ivy-covered house, gazing onto a green lawn, and then stepped out into the world before her. Here, however, the door that encloses her is smothered in gold leaf, and she looks only from one interior space to another, a receding vista of rooms enfilade. Isabel waits for others to approach, a hostess who appears to Rosier as the very picture of a lady, a woman whom the
“years had touched . . . only to enrich.”
But Rosier has never been to Gardencourt, and the reader will see a greater change. This portrait allows for a fourth dimension.

W
e need to pause over that doorway, over the setting that James has provided for her. Money went far in Rome. Servants and food, horses and houses—all of them were cheaper in Italy than in London, and with the painted ceilings thrown in for free. Isabel lives with a magnificence that even her substantial fortune would not have allowed in Britain, and as he walks through her rooms, Rosier finds himself admitting that
“these people were very strong in
bibelots
,”
in the beautiful decorative objects that he himself most covets. But the sensibility behind it all belongs to Osmond alone. Isabel has had nothing to do with furnishing their house and claims to have no taste of her own; her husband, in contrast, has what she calls a
“genius for upholstery.”
The place is his, an assertion of his will, of the self he wants to project. It is an old
“high house in the very heart of Rome; a dark and massive structure overlooking a sunny
piazzetta
in the neighbourhood of the Farnese Palace.”
Rome may be bright, but the building itself is called the Palazzo Roccanera, the Black Rock, and to Rosier its darkness matters. For it seems to him as if Pansy’s home is a kind of fortress, a place in which she might easily be locked up.

James describes it as marked with a
“stern old Roman name, which smelt . . . of crime and craft and violence,”
a place mentioned in guidebooks and visited by tourists. It has been most reliably identified with the
Palazzo Antici-Mattei
, a complex of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century buildings whose austere façade was built to designs by Carlo Maderno, and where the rooms on the
piano nobile
have ceilings by Domenichino and Pietro da Cortona among others. James masked the original just a bit by giving it some frescoes by Caravaggio instead. That makes one start. The Victorians did not admire the painter we call by that name, and he gets just two one-line references in
Italian Hours
; nor is he known to have worked in fresco. Still, the
Mattei family
did own a few of his canvases. They had made their fortune buying up real estate after the city was sacked in 1527, and quickly became one of the most powerful clans in Rome; three centuries later they were still turning out cardinals. The building now houses the Centro Studi Americani, and many visiting lecturers have found themselves in the rooms that were in some sense once Isabel’s. Nevertheless, the palazzo remains forbidding indeed, darkened by age and with barred windows on the ground floor. Inside, the courtyard walls are encrusted with fragments of ancient statuary, and the loggia overlooking it is lined with
“a row of mutilated statues and dusty urns,”
just as James described it. But there are many palaces in Rome, and I suspect that what drew him to this one wasn’t just its architecture or its atmospheric history, but rather its particular location in the city itself.

It lies indeed in the heart of the town, and not that far from the Palazzo Farnese. It is closer, however, to both the church of the Gesù and the Capitol, and closer still to the Palazzo Cenci, itself associated with crime and craft and violence. Every literate Victorian knew Shelley’s play about Beatrice Cenci, who at the end of the sixteenth century was executed for killing the father who had raped her. It is closest of all to the Ghetto, whose walls lay just a few paces off and which was abolished only with the final unification of Italy in 1870. The quarter is ancient and aristocratic, and was in Osmond’s period decayed; a neighborhood beyond all question of fashion, a place of squalid streets and private interior splendor. Which makes it a very good address indeed—a good
Roman
address, and about as far as possible from the American colony that gathered around the Spanish Steps. That’s where Madame Merle lives, but Osmond detests the modern city of hotels and English bankers. Not everyone is invited to their Thursday evenings, and even those who are might discover that the house isn’t easy to find, buried as it is in the narrow twisting streets of history itself. Its location stands as both a sign of his originality and a mark of his “
traditionary
” pose. This part of Rome may lie on level ground, but so far as the
stranieri
are concerned, the Roccanera is a Roman equivalent of Osmond’s Tuscan hilltop.

One unexpected caller does, however, find his way to them, an Englishman whom Osmond doesn’t at first recognize. Lord Warburton has come south with Ralph, whose consumption has grown worse each year and who now thinks of wintering in Sicily. But the journey has worn him out. He cannot move from their hotel, and one reason for Warburton’s visit is simply to announce their arrival. For Isabel has had no advance word, and to us that’s the truly startling thing: the cousins have fallen so far apart that they’re no longer in regular touch. James writes that the “
reflective reader
” shouldn’t find this surprising, given Ralph’s view of Isabel’s marriage, and we are told something similar about each of her old friends. Mrs. Touchett has faded from her life, and even Madame Merle has grown distant. Until this winter she has preferred England to Rome, and she now tells Isabel, a bit too often, that she doesn’t want to presume on the fact that she’s known Osmond for so long. Marriage often does attenuate old friendships, and yet the novel insists that we notice it, reminding us of it each time that the author brings back an old name.

James has a difficult task here. The chapters after Isabel’s marriage do not introduce a single new character, and he needs instead, as the novel starts over again, to catch us up on all his old ones after a gap in years if not in pages. He keeps both Henrietta Stackpole and Caspar Goodwood alive in our minds by bringing them down to Rome, and there is a special brilliance in his retrospective account of Ralph in particular. Ralph has come to Rome only once since Isabel’s marriage and quickly realized that his very presence made Osmond so unaccountably nervous that he in turn made it uncomfortable for his wife. Now he has returned, close to death and yet kept alive by his belief that his cousin’s story isn’t yet over, and James dives down into the character’s memory and then swims up to breast the novel’s present. It fuses these years into a single image of Ralph’s estrangement from her, a verbal equivalent of a medieval miniature in which several incidents share the same space. But let me put it a different way. There is a prismatic quality to these chapters. James doesn’t let us look at the white light of Isabel’s being directly, but instead refracts it through the differently shaded impressions of his other characters. Once he has done that, however, once he has reintroduced his cast, James needs to move forward into the new relations created by her marriage, and at this point the novel becomes thick with plot in every sense of the word.

The most important element in that plotting concerns Warburton’s surprising interest in Pansy. He finds her charming, at once polished and ingenuous, and comes repeatedly to sit with her at the Roccanera, even as he worries that Isabel won’t be pleased by his interest. For of course, as he tells Ralph, “
there’s the difference
in our ages.” It’s the most roundabout way to suggest that he’s thinking of marriage, and the idea so startles the invalid that it makes him risk Warburton’s anger. “I hope,” Ralph says, “you are sure that among Miss Osmond’s merits her being a—so near her stepmother isn’t a leading one?” Nor is Ralph the only one who has noticed Warburton’s attentions. Rosier has, and grown jealous. And Osmond has seen it too, and seen deep. He has seen what Ralph fears, and decided he can use it.

Isabel herself has seen something else. James hasn’t yet defined the precise contours of her marital troubles, but one day she returns home from a drive and stops short at the entrance to the drawing room. For she has, James writes, “
received an impression
,” and must pause to take it in. She has found Madame Merle standing while Osmond remains sunk in his chair, two old friends caught in a moment of ruminant silence. There’s nothing particularly unusual in that silence, but the image does offer her a flicker of perception, albeit one that’s gone before she can read it. What catches her is their physical posture—the gentleman sitting while the lady, his guest, stands. In fact, Madame Merle herself recognizes its oddity, and after Osmond leaves the room, explains that she herself was just about to go away. Now she stays to talk, however, to muse over Rosier’s jealousy and the odd fact that Warburton seems to have fallen in love with Pansy. Isabel too has spotted the Englishman’s interest but hasn’t discussed it with her husband, and the subject makes her impatient. So their conversation grows snappish, and becomes only more so when Madame Merle alludes to something that Isabel has never told her. For the older woman knows of Warburton’s proposal at Gardencourt, and hopes that she will now “
make him the reparation
of helping him to marry some one else.”