Portrait of A Novel (37 page)

Everywhere he found himself surprised by the country’s size: not only by the physical stretch of the land, but also by the changed scale of the things he had once known. The Washington Square of his childhood had spoken of a smaller and slower world, one now overpainted by a modernity that seemed interchangeable with energy itself. New York Harbor throbbed with whistles and explosions, it rushed and shrieked in an intricate dance, a
“steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws.”
The bridges looked like pistons, and the skyscrapers told him of a New York that never meant to be old. Such buildings were all
“expensively provisional,”
and each individual one of them would survive only until the city’s money had invented something bigger and better, more profitable and doubtless more temporary. Indeed, everything everywhere was bigger—hotels, and Harvard, and the summer houses of Newport, where the seacoast of his early manhood had been conquered by the whited sepulchres of the new American plutocracy, by the
“distressful, inevitable waste”
of a wealth so grand that it could dispense with history or taste.

In their imitation of European splendor those houses paradoxically reminded him of his own deliberate alienation. So did his visit to a Yiddish theater in New York. His brother William had warned that American speech and manners might shock him, but James was less startled than fascinated by his evening on the Lower East Side. The families he saw there had kept the customs of their origins in Danzig or Budapest. Yet if they spoke Yiddish, they also spoke a fluent New Yorkese, and their very ease and carriage owed less to
“the moral identity of German or Slav”
than it did to the spirit of 1776. James confessed himself puzzled here, and an earlier visit to Ellis Island had made him uncomfortable. Even in living abroad he had assumed that America was his, but he now had a haunting awareness of his own dispossession, a sense that the country belonged to somebody else. These immigrants had assimilated “our heritage and point of view” in a way that made him feel as though he himself were the foreigner, and he wondered what such new citizens might make of the older New York and New England from which he had come. Long before, he had written that it was a complex fate to be an American, but as he traveled throughout his old homeland, he began to see more whorls and layers in that complexity than the young man had ever dreamed of.

James had thought that his two countries might merge into one English-speaking culture; it had been the wager of his career. Now he began to understand that the ocean between them wasn’t so much a girdle as a gap. The eleven months of his American tour showed him both that he had become more English than he knew, and that his birthplace had made a culture of its own, albeit one about which he would always be ambivalent. He visited William’s summer house in the White Mountains, and saw old friends wherever he went; he traveled down through the south to Florida, and then as far west as San Diego. Yet each mile made him fear that the land’s very spread and bounty might lead to the permanent
“triumph of the superficial and the apotheosis of the raw,”
and it was out of that fear, that ambivalence, that he wrote
The American Scene
, a book that on its best pages is as brilliant as, if less systematic than, Alexis de Tocqueville’s similarly uneasy journey.

His trip had other results, however, and among them was the depth of his new friendship with Edith Wharton, at whose house in the Berkshires he stayed in the fall of 1904. The two had met the year before in England, and James had already issued his famous command that she should
“
Do New York!
”
She should take him as a negative example and stick to an American subject, “the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for,” the opportunity that was uniquely hers. Wharton would accept that advice in
The House of Mirth
and its many successors, while doing much else besides, and their friendship—their letters and visits, their excursions in Wharton’s chauffeur-driven Panhard—would be one of the great pleasures of James’s last years.

The other great consequence of his American journey took the form of a publisher’s contract. James appeared under many imprints over the course of his career, but his relations with the long-established firm of Scribner were recent. Nevertheless the house had released both
The Wings of the Dove
and
The Golden Bowl
, and their books were as handsomely made as their Beaux-Arts office building on Fifth Avenue. As early as 1900 the company had cabled James’s agent, J. B. Pinker, to ask
“Would You Care on any terms to arrange for Collected Edition Henry James,”
and negotiating such an edition was a secondary motive in his American voyage. James let the issue hang through the fall, but in the spring of 1905 he asked Pinker to come settle the terms of an agreement in person, and in July he himself wrote the publisher to describe his plans and desires. He had loved the elegance of their job on
The Golden Bowl
and hoped for something similar. He planned to sift out his lesser pieces and to revise his work where necessary
“as to expression, turn of sentence, and the question of surface generally.”
He promised to write a preface for each book and suggested that the whole be called the “New York Edition” in honor of his “native city.” James would spend the next four years at work on it. He had had his second act, he had found his late manner, and his long shelf of books now had the coherence and the sense of teleology that it lacked a decade before. The New York Edition would stand as the final glory of his long career, and perhaps its last disaster too.

24.

ENDGAME

T
HE OLD MAN
in Rye drew his pen through a line and wrote two in its place; he gave a colloquial twist to a moment of dialogue and eliminated a demonstrative pronoun. He set aside a scribbled-over sheet for his typist and refined his sense of a character with a newly vivid image. James spent his mornings in that Edwardian spring of 1906 at work on
The American Scene
, recounting his impressions of such things as the
“rushing hotels”
of a Pullman train and the
“hot-looking stars”
of a Florida sky. He stopped for lunch at half past one, and then went out into the town’s quiet streets; perhaps delivering an order to the butcher as he went or pausing on a corner to chat with another of its 3,900 inhabitants. Then in the late afternoon he returned to a desk spread with the pasted-up sheets of
The Portrait of a Lady
, each of them with a wide margin in which he could scrawl around the set type of the book’s early self.

On that desk James hoped to build himself a monument. Other novelists had revised their published work; others had written introductions. No one had yet done so on this scale; no one has done so since. James wanted to smooth down his career’s rough edges, and he used the New York Edition to suggest that his
oeuvre
had some overarching shape. He threw his emphasis upon the international theme, eliminating a few purely American works like
Washington Square
, and in doing so both underlined the power of his final manner and cast its retrospective majesty over his earlier work. He told his friends, moreover, that he was always astonished at how
“filthily”
he used to write, and his secretary, Theodora Bosanquet, noted that he believed his first books all needed to be redone before they were
“fit for appearance in the company”
of his later ones. That was true even of the
Portrait
, successful though it had been. Every page of the novel now had its changes, every page differed from the version his readers had known for a quarter of a century. Yet those revisions were meant to do something more than kick his early style into line. For he also wanted, in Bosanquet’s words, to uncover the
“values implicit in his early works, the retrieval of neglected opportunities,”
and her two statements point in effect to different things. Both suggest James’s sense of the inadequacies of that work, but the one stresses its problems and the other its potentialities, the things he might do that his younger self could not.

Some of those problems would remain insoluble; he couldn’t alter what he now saw as
The American
’s false and melodramatic conclusion. Other changes came at a cost, and many readers prefer the initial versions of his early tales, where his relatively lean narrative prose better suits the comic bubble of his dialogue. With the
Portrait
, however, his revisions speak to his sense of its potential. Its style was already rich enough to sustain the black brocade of his later manner; the novel’s foundations were sound and its windows in all the right places. Many of his revisions seem inconsequential, substituting a proper name for a pronoun, or making a character “hint” instead of “intimate.” Others are substantial, and James took an additional care in establishing his people. So his opening description of Madame Merle now gives her an eye
“incapable of stupidity,”
adding an early note of danger to a character who was at first simply enigmatic.

But of course the largest changes occur in his account of Isabel, and they will have a special importance in the last pages of the novel’s last chapter. For the moment, however, I’ll simply look at one of them, unimportant in itself, as a way to illustrate their burden. It comes after Isabel has left Rome and Osmond to sit at Ralph Touchett’s deathbed; after she has crossed the Channel to fall into Henrietta Stackpole’s arms at Charing Cross; after she has gone down to Gardencourt, where Ralph’s new servants don’t recognize her and she has to wait while her name is brought up to her aunt. She waits a long time, in this place where her story began, and in the book’s first version James had written that
“she grew impatient at last; she grew nervous and even frightened.”
The words say enough, but by 1906 he wanted to say something more, and now Isabel grows
“nervous and scared—as scared as if the objects about her had begun to show for conscious things, watching her trouble with grotesque grimaces.”

Those grimaces recall the terrors that had crowded in at the start of her fireside vigil, and James’s revision does two things. He shows us the shape of Isabel’s fears in a way that takes us far more deeply into her mind, and he figures that interior plunge in physical terms. The very furniture of these
“wide brown rooms”
now glows with malicious life, as though the material world were responsive to the terms of her inner being; as if thought itself had all the flex and thrust of a body. In 1944 the Harvard critic F. O. Matthiessen noted,
in the first systematic study
of these revisions, that many of the changes stress the presence of Isabel’s own consciousness as such, and indeed often substitute that word for others. When she first meets Osmond, for example, she’s no longer merely “entertained,” but has a
“private thrill [in] the consciousness of a new relation.”
Few of these small changes will register upon even a careful reader as he or she moves from line to line. Nevertheless, they have great cumulative force, and that additional access of interiority does make the 1906
Portrait
more closely resemble James’s last books. It reminds us that the novel isn’t finally about a young woman’s choice of a husband, or even about Americans in Europe. It is instead a drama of the perceiving mind, and one that, like
The Ambassadors
, hangs upon the point of view of its protagonist.

That might suggest James has simply revised the book in the light of his own later interests. But there’s something more complicated here, and we can best understand it by looking at the different ways in which his prefaces define the act of revision. Sometimes he saw his books in organic terms, as living things that were necessarily capable of growth and change. They were his children, and could be trained up into a presentable maturity. More often he accounted for them in pictorial terms, as if he were putting each story back up on the easel and asking himself what
“time and the weather”
had done to it. Some had faded, and no varnish could bring them back. Other seemed to contain
“a few buried secrets,”
and as he went to work with his brush and his sponge, they began to flush into color. An expression could be heightened, a pose adjusted, but he saw himself as working on what was already implicitly present, allowing the
“latent”
aspects of an old work to vibrate into life. This is what Bosanquet meant in speaking of the New York Edition as a recovery of the chances he’d missed. By particularizing Isabel’s fears at Gardencourt, by giving an expressive power to the room itself, James recalls not only her own midnight thoughts, but also the link she makes between her suffering and Rome’s long record of misery. It tells us how much has happened to her since she first stepped onto that English lawn; tells us that even in returning to it she has not managed to escape her own life.

But James says other things about revision as well, and in his preface to
The Golden Bowl
suggests that in going back over his early books he has indeed tried to close the gap between
“the march of my present attention . . . [and] the march of my original expression.”
To some readers that statement suggests he has done more than simply retouch his work, that the concerns of his later career are now dominant. I myself see the
Portrait
’s second version as a fulfillment of its first; as though the book, like a person, had grown up while remaining in essence the same. Others find the changes so great as to make Isabel a different character in each edition, and in an influential essay the critic Nina Baym has even suggested that we have in effect two novels. That of 1906 is the work I’ve described as an interior drama, a modernist look at the question of Isabel’s “awareness.” The novel of 1881 is in contrast concerned with her “independence,” and written against the background of an ever-increasing discussion of women’s rights and opportunities. It is the product of its historical moment, and explores the questions James had once asked about his cousin Minny Temple; questions about the kind of life available to a spirited and intelligent girl in a world where her fate still largely depends upon marriage. In this account of the 1881 version,
“the inner life is only one aspect of character, which is defined by behavior in a social context.”

That argument might hold if the novel had gone on as it had begun, if it had remained a book about a young woman’s progress through that social world. It might hold if it were not for Isabel’s night before the fire. But at the moment James set her there, in motionless activity, he discovered both the formal and the thematic preoccupations of his later career. His revisions to
The Portrait of a Lady
don’t change the novel so much as they make its opening chapters fit the book that it had by its last chapters become.

O
ne of the first things James makes Isabel say is that she wants to know the things she shouldn’t do: not so she can do them, but so she may at least have the power to choose. And now the question of choice returns to the novel. Isabel doesn’t believe that she consciously
chose
to return to England. Her need to see Ralph was instantaneous; the obstacles came later. At Gardencourt, however, she has both the time and the distance she needs for reflection, and if she weren’t herself aware that she faces the forking paths of a decision, the book’s other characters are determined to remind her of it. Henrietta bluntly tells her not to return to Rome, and though Ralph can barely talk, he will stammer out the question to which we all want an answer:
“Are you going back to him?”
But Isabel hardly knows. She has promised little Pansy that she will return, though she cannot now remember just why she made that pledge. She tells Ralph that “I don’t think anything is over,” and yet her statement doesn’t lead us to any one conclusion. It suggests that if she does go back, Osmond will make her
“a scene that will last always.”
It also points, however, to the moment of strange exhilaration she feels on the train across Europe, when she recognizes that
“life would be her business for a long time to come”
and understands that she will someday be happy once more.

The last serial installment of the
Portrait
was a short one, just three tightly packed chapters. James uses the first of them to take his heroine from the train to Gardencourt, raising the question of choice in a series of oddly comic conversations with Henrietta. Yet the mood changes once he gets Isabel off into the country, and the novel’s penultimate chapter contains two of the most searching moments in all his work. The first of them comes in a conversation with Mrs. Touchett and is so brief that many readers might miss its importance. The old woman asks after Madame Merle, and Isabel admits they are no longer friends, that indeed she has done something
“very bad.”
When Mrs. Touchett asks what it was, however, all Isabel says is that “she made a convenience of me.” She has earlier recognized, during their meeting at the convent, that the woman has employed her as though she were a piece of hardware, an instrument or tool. She’s been used. Her money—her means—have made Serena Merle see her
as
a means, and one whose only purpose is to serve Pansy’s future. Isabel realizes that now, and recognizes that in treating her as a convenience her erstwhile friend has also treated her as something less than a person.

Scholars have often glossed this moment in terms of
Kant’s idea of the categorical imperative
. The philosopher writes that we must act so “as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, in every case as an end withal, never as a means only.” Probably James himself didn’t know those words. He had an unmatched grasp of fiction in both English and French, and read widely in poetry, drama, and the literature of travel; he had as well a special fondness for memoirs of court and military life in the Napoleonic period. He did not, however, often turn to works of politics or philosophy, and had little interest in any form of German culture. William James would have known Kant’s 1785 argument, and so would George Eliot. Henry James didn’t need to, for Kant’s ethic is in many ways at one with the ethic of the realistic novel itself. Of course, James does employ some of his imaginary people in the service of others, using such figures as Henrietta to illuminate Isabel’s story. But he also and always suggests that
his secondary characters
have a case and a claim of their own; they are valuable in themselves, and not for what one can get out of them. People are an ends, not a means, and the novel as a form explores the gap between that ideal state in which they are not to be used and a world in which they always are. James would have gotten some of that from George Eliot, but it also characterizes the less grounded work of Balzac, in whose books the sinners are those who eat up the lives of others, consuming first their money, then their hearts, and sometimes even their souls. That ethic is present in Dickens’s anger against utilitarianism. It figures for Hawthorne in stories, like “The Birthmark,” of those who force their own vision upon others, and in Turgenev it carries a political meaning. His insistence upon starting with an individual character was itself a blow against autocracy, and in briefly exiling him to his estate after the 1852 publication of
A Sportsman’s Sketches
the Russian government showed that it knew it.

In James the great crime remains that of imposing your will upon another person, of using him or her to implement your own desires. The stern father of
Washington Square
, so determined to be right that he wrecks his daughter’s faint chance for happiness; the revolutionary cell of
The Princess Casamassima
, for whom Hyacinth Robinson is but an instrument; the parents and stepparents of
What Maisie Knew
, who treat the girl as a shuttlecock: all these have broken Kant’s law. Or look at
The Turn of the Screw
. If the ghosts in that famously problematic story are really there, then their wickedness lies in trying to control the fate of the tale’s children; if they aren’t, then its madwoman of a governess wants that same control. In either case the work carries the same weight. And finally there is “The Beast in the Jungle,” in which John Marcher grows so used to thinking of May Bertram as the repository of his secret that he never recognizes either her love or her own autonomous being. James worked that theme for the whole of his career, and his insistence on showing how people consume one another has made his biographers especially sensitive to the ways in which he might have done so himself. This, certainly, is the argument of Lyndall Gordon’s
Private Life of Henry James
, with its close examination of his relations with Minny Temple and Constance Fenimore Woolson alike.