Portrait of A Novel (3 page)

Ralph says that Isabel has a
“general air of being some one in particular,”
and James’s acount of her Albany life goes some way toward specifying just who. He has started with an image, with a girl who makes a sharp but literally sketchy impression, and then layers one moment upon another, a picture not in space but in time, touch added to touch, tint upon tint. Isabel’s portrait will develop slowly, emerging chapter by chapter; George Eliot may give us a firm sense of Dorothea Brooke in a line, but this woman will not be clear until the end. And perhaps not even then. Some part of her character will remain enigmatic, and in this James’s work does indeed resemble a painting. Even in the greatest portraits we find a gate we cannot open. There is always a limit to what we can know of the sitter, to how far we can read the soul in the face; the
Mona Lisa
’s smile provides but the most obvious example. Isabel’s inner life is as fully dramatized as that of anyone in the nineteenth-century novel, but James will at certain crucial points maintain this early refusal to enter her consciousness.

Here that refusal has something to do with the tension between Ralph’s words about the “general” and the “particular,” a tension also posed by the book’s peculiar title; peculiar for a time in which novelists most often found their titles in proper names and gave their work the form of biography. James will provide that biography, and yet he resists the temptation to call the book
Isabel Archer
. His picture may be definitive—
the
portrait—but its subject has something generic about her.
A
lady, maybe any lady. Think for comparison of Joyce’s title, which reverses the articles—
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
. The Irish writer offers a portrait of this particular artist, but he suggests that it’s only one of many possible versions, that he could make a different image. Of course, James’s title also suggests Isabel’s social role and category. A “lady” is not born but made, the product of her own training and other people’s perception; indeed of convention itself.

Isabel is just twenty-one when the novel begins, and she will need to grow beyond the sense of undefined potential with which she steps onto the lawn. A lady is what she needs to
become
, and we can understand the terms of that becoming by juxtaposing the nouns of James’s title to another pair of words, to “girl” on the one hand and “study” on the other. Those words belong to
Daisy Miller
, which bears “A Study” as its subtitle, and in a certain sense neither a girl nor a study can stand as a completed work. A study is but a quick preliminary drawing, an indication of line and shadow. The term suggests both process and preparation, a stop on the way to a more finished product, and yet it can also seem dismissive. Studies may be quick and slapdash, they have the charm of the not-yet-formed, and as such the word fits James’s eponymous heroine, a girl who is left incomplete by her death. The people around her see Daisy as “artless,” and a girl is in a way the product of nature. But most girls grow up, and a study may in time give way to a work of greater polish.

When Isabel steps onto the lawn at Gardencourt, she is simply an American girl, a term that in itself suggests a person ever-developing but as yet unfinished. A girl is not a lady—not yet, in some cases not ever. That, however, is what Isabel becomes, and despite James’s use of the indefinite article, a portrait is finally the picture of a specific person. Isabel will need to earn her claim to particularity, but by the end of the novel she appears as the definitive version of her type. For in her grace and poise and even, James suggests, in the way she bears her sadness, Isabel Archer will stand as what a lady should be.

2.

A NATIVE OF NO COUNTRY

A
T THE END
of the 1860s the Royal Mail steamship
China
made a regular circuit between Liverpool and New York under the command of E. M. Hockley. At 1,500 tons the ship wasn’t a large one, and she tossed and rolled even on a passage of relative calm; though for her period she was quick enough.
A manifest handed
in on her May 1868 arrival in New York suggests that along with the mail the
China
carried about 70 passengers. Few of them were immigrants, most were American citizens, and 15 of them listed their occupation as “gentleman,” though a Mr. George C. Power defined himself as a “miser” and the teenaged Thomas Scarby was a jockey. The young man who boarded the
China
in New York in February 1869 had published a dozen stories, but he too would have put himself down as a “gentleman.” He was twenty-five years old, and after a ten-day passage he disembarked in Liverpool, where he celebrated his arrival with a cup of tea and promptly wrote to his parents. He had been taken to Europe as a child, but this was his first visit as an adult: a stay of fourteen months that would take him through England and France and down into Italy. They are the months in which the figure we know as Henry James becomes recognizably himself, the months in which he began to inhabit the transatlantic world he would make so distinctively his own.

Yet nobody is without antecedents, and least of all Henry James. Part of what made this time so important, in fact, is that it gave him his first sustained period away from his family, and if we want to understand him, we will need some account of the people, places, and events of his early life. He was a second son, and had been born in New York on 15 April 1843, at his parents’ house on Washington Place. The street runs for a few blocks west from Broadway to Washington Square, and was then quietly fashionable. Or at least it was for the moment. Manhattan’s grid pattern already defined its layout, but as late as 1840 there were unbuilt streets within a few blocks of James’ birthplace, and only a few spindles of development went up as far as 30th Street. The city’s growth was already unstoppable, however, and the census of 1840 put New York’s population at 312,000, fully 100,000 more than it had been in 1830. In 1850 it broke half a million, and by the time of James’s birth the fashion had for fifty years been moving steadily uptown, from the Battery to the Bowery to Lafayette Place; even Washington Square itself would soon enough seem outmoded.

He was just fifteen months younger than his brother William, but the gap looked determinative. The older boy appeared to be
“always round the corner and out of sight,”
and in childhood the two were scarcely ever in step. Nor was William’s priority limited to age. No other American family has produced two such minds in the same generation, and their relationship has been obsessively analyzed; I use that last word advisedly, while recognizing that the obsession doesn’t figure as heavily in William’s biographies as it does in Henry’s. Leon Edel has read the pair in terms of the relations of Jacob and Esau, a sibling rivalry in which the younger eventually outdoes his elder; more recent accounts see Henry as following after his brother in a haze of homoerotic desire. And there is evidence for all of it. Henry established himself as the rising star of the
Atlantic Monthly
while William was still suffering from one spasm of professional uncertainty after another. The future author of
The Varieties of Religious Experience
didn’t publish his own first book until 1890, but early on he seized the right to criticize. Their relations became tender with age, and yet William never lost his sense of competition; the more wavering his own path, the more faults he found with Henry’s steady application. As for the question of desire, much can and has been made of a letter Henry wrote from London on William’s marriage in 1878, in which he described his own absence from the ceremony in terms of being
“divorced from you.”

I would tell a different story, albeit one that does stress William’s earlier birth. But to understand it we need to look at their parents, and in particular at their father. Henry James, Sr., had been born in Albany in 1811, a city where his own father had made a fortune. An Irish Protestant immigrant, the first William James had begun by importing everything from rum to window glass, before moving on to banking and real estate. He eventually owned the land that would become the downtown of Syracuse, a city that developed around the saltworks he founded, and he had thirteen children by three wives. The James family lived in great comfort—but also, in Henry Sr.’s case, in great pain. At thirteen he was so badly burned in trying to put out a fire that he lay bedridden for years, and finally lost a leg. He became an adept user of his day’s prostheses, with his cork leg stumping along a sidewalk. But he did need sidewalks, and that meant that the family life he later established with Mary Walsh—they married in 1840—was therefore an urban one. At seventeen he entered Union College, and his career there was so marked by extravagance that his father cut down his share of his estate. Henry Sr. broke that will in court, and is said to have murmured
“Leisured for life”
at the judgment that gave him an income usually estimated at $10,000 a year in the dollars of his time.

What he did with that leisure was to become one of the most incoherent of American religious thinkers. He went to divinity school, dropped out, abandoned Calvinism and returned to it, traveled, drank, swore allegiance first to the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and then to the French social philosopher Charles Fourier. In 1844 he suffered a breakdown that he described as a great
“vastation,”
produced by the sense that there was “some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room.” His recovery took two years, but he then found what was, for him, a stable faith, one that matched his belief in the literal divinity of humankind with a bitter condemnation of anyone so foolish as to worship a God of punishment. He had a talent for aphorism but could not carry an argument; his many books went unread. In an America that already worshiped business, he was an anomaly, a man without an office, and even his children found his position strange. It didn’t help that he answered their questions about what he “was” by telling them to
“Say I’m a philosopher, . . . say I’m a lover of my kind, . . . or, best of all, just say I’m a Student.”

T
he elder Henry James found his true career in the peculiar education he constructed for his children. Eventually, there were five of them—two more boys, Wilky and Bob, and at last a solitary daughter, Alice. His own quest for answers had made him take his family abroad soon after Henry’s birth; they were in England when the “vastation” hit. They soon came home, but after a decade of New York he was ready in 1855 to go again, only this time to Switzerland and in search of schools. He followed the rumors of progressive education wherever they led, and sometimes moved his children from one establishment to another for the sake of change alone. In New York the older boys went to ten schools in eight years, and in Europe they quickly retreated from Geneva to Paris to Boulogne. James gives Isabel a version of this upbringing, describing her as having neither a settled home nor a coherent education. But he adds that Isabel herself would dispute that description, and believed that her own
“opportunities had been abundant.”
Still, the results could be comical, and in 1859 his parents decided that “Harry” was too fond of books and sent him to an engineering school instead.

In all this the father consulted his own preferences, but in the late 1850s he began to heed William’s desires as well. Henry was a quiet boy, with a marked stammer, and happiest when left alone. William was energy embodied, and his plans and ambitions seemed to change by the week. He craved a more systematic education than the family practice had as yet allowed, he was interested in science, he wanted to be an artist, and the Jameses returned from Europe not once, but twice so that he could work in the Newport, Rhode Island, studio of the painter William Morris Hunt. All told, the family was abroad from 1855 to 1858, and again between 1859 and 1860. Those years gave the future novelist so decided a command of French that his English would later be convicted of Gallicisms. More important, that experience reinforced the family’s sense of isolation from the central experiences of American life. They lived apart from the turmoil of the years before the Civil War, estranged from the defining issues of their nation and their day. The Jameses learned of Bloody Kansas or John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry only from outdated newspapers, and the young Henry never quite got over that sense of disengagement from public life. Years later he wrote that their expatriation left them
“interested in almost nothing but each other,”
and his words give some point to William’s 1889 statement that the novelist was
“a native of the James family, and has no other country.”

That country had a most irregular landscape. Henry remembered that they
“breathed inconsistency and ate and drank contradictions.”
The enveloping clouds of parental concern hung heavy and low, but their father changed his mind so often that the children’s world sometimes seemed to shift its shape, and they might be told that the canyons suddenly at their feet had been put there in their own best interests. Not that that world looked the same to everyone who lived in it. Most observers thought Mary James was far more conventional than either her husband or their children; a benign but passive presence, and so fully subsumed by motherhood that no biographer has yet been able to separate her from that role. And the terrain that Alice had to negotiate looked especially trackless and strange. Her father believed that women had their lives in a separate and subordinate sphere, and she did not share her brothers’ education. She was taught instead at home, and spent her adult life as an invalid, the victim of indefinable ailments that kept her in bed for years at a time, apparently unable to walk. Yet she had a caustic tongue, which her brothers enjoyed, even if Henry also found himself disturbed, after her 1892 death from breast cancer, by the frank and intimate pain of the diary she left behind.

Alice’s future would forever be on hold, but by the time the family came back to America in 1860, the question of a career had become pressing for her two oldest brothers. Their father rejected the idea of college—it was narrowing, a restriction of the mind’s free motion. He wanted his children to proceed by mistakes, to experiment with careers, not choose one; an interesting life was enough, it needn’t be
“paying”
as well. But his fortune wasn’t large enough to give his children the same freedom that he had had. Choice was required, and at this point a barrier fell between the older boys and their younger brothers. On their return the family settled in Newport, but Wilky and Bob were sent away to the new Concord Academy, whose curriculum stood for their father’s latest thing—a fusion of Abolition and Transcendentalism. William painted, and Henry looked on, reading quietly in a corner of Hunt’s studio, where the other pupils included John La Farge. The New York–born La Farge is now remembered for his stained glass above all, but his 1862 portrait of the writer is the best early one, and shows the young James in full-lipped and moody profile.

Newport had by the middle of the century become the most stylish of summer resorts, though by the standards of the century’s end both the fortunes and the houses were modest. But the town with its shipyards and close-packed eighteenth-century streets had its own independent life as well. It had been a center of fine cabinetmaking and was the site of both the first synagogue and the oldest lending library in America; a port city with its own traditions, and its own old families. James’s best friend in town belonged to one of them. He was a boy named Thomas Sergeant Perry, whose grandfather Oliver Hazard Perry had been a hero of the War of 1812, defeating a British squadron in the Battle of Lake Erie. Perry would later teach at Harvard and become a noted critic, and in his teens he gave the young Henry James someone to talk to about novels; someone, moreover, who knew things that James didn’t. For Perry was a passionate reader of American literature, and introduced his friend to the works of Hawthorne.

When the Civil War began, Henry Sr. did not at first support it. He had backed Lincoln in the 1860 election, yet thought the president’s initial war aims—restoration of the
status quo ante
—too limited to be worth dying for, and spoke of having to keep
“a firm grasp upon the coat tails of my Willy and Henry, who both vituperate me”
because he wouldn’t let them enlist. Perhaps they did not try very hard. William at this period began to suffer from eye strain. He left Hunt’s studio and persuaded his father to let him enter the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, where he worked with the Swiss geologist Louis Agassiz. He enrolled there in the fall of 1861, just a few months after the war’s start. Two years later he switched over to the medical school, and then interrupted that study as well to join Agassiz on an expedition in the Amazon. He finally earned his M.D. in 1869, though he never practiced, and years later wrote that civic life needed to find a sense of collective purpose in what he called the
“moral equivalent of war.”

His two youngest brothers did not need that equivalent. Wilky was bigger and more athletic than his elders, Bob had an inborn sense of aggression, and their school had made them militant. Wilky joined up at seventeen, and Bob was even younger. They each gained commissions in the Union’s new regiments of black soldiers, and Wilky was badly wounded in the 1863 assault on Fort Wagner in South Carolina; the battle is commemorated in Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s bas-relief in honor of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry, across the street from the State House in Boston. He never fully recovered from his wounds, and died in 1883, before he reached forty. His father shuddered at what he called the sight of
“so much manhood so suddenly achieved.”
But he was proud to have some sons in uniform, now that Abolition had become central to Lincoln’s purpose; and Bob would always believe that the two of them had been discarded.