Portrait of A Novel (41 page)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I first read
The Portrait of a Lady
during the fall of 1977, in a class at Amherst College taught by John Cameron. He did not often let himself refer to James’s biography, still less to the details of the novel’s publication. But I learned most of what I know about the rhetoric of fiction from him and from my other teachers at Amherst, and my education there sits in judgment on each sentence I write.

A fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation made it possible for me to spend the academic year 2007–08 at work on this book’s opening chapters. Smith College has been characteristically generous with sabbatical leave, travel grants, and other research funds, and I am grateful to the provost’s office and in particular to Susie Bourque for that material support. Earlier, a grant from the Mellon-8 Consortium administered by Smith encouraged me to spend a summer putting together a detailed proposal, a narrative of what I wanted this book to do. And at the other end, I finished this book in Paris, where Columbia University’s Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall graciously provided me with an office.

My agent, Steve Wasserman, found me the perfect editor in Bob Weil. Bob pushed me into paradox, pushed me to be at once tighter and yet more expansive, and my every page is stronger because of his work on it. At
W. W. Norton and now Liveright I am indebted as well to Drake McFeely, Phil Marino, Peter Miller, Will Menaker, Devon Zahn, and Fred Wiemer.

Christopher Benfey, Ruth Bernard Yeazell, and David McWhirter read the entirety of the manuscript and saved me from many mistakes. Several colleagues at Smith deserve special thanks: Rick Millington and Michael Thurston served as my guides to the American nineteenth century; Nancy Mason Bradbury did the same thing in a far more literal way in Florence. I owe a particular debt to Greg Zacharias and Pierre Walker for making available the transcripts of James’s unpublished letters from 1880 and 1881. Many other people had the generosity to answer my questions; my gratitude to John Auchard, Michael Anesko, John Pemble, David Ball, Philip Horne, Cornelia Pearsall, Fred Kaplan, Larzer Ziff, James Shapiro, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Franco Zabagli, Sara Philo, Sheldon Novick, Lyndall Gordon, Carol Osborne, Paul Saint-Amour, David J. Supino, and Joseph Donohue. Sir Julian Rose arranged for my visit to Hardwick; Piers Plowden and Francesca Rowan, the current tenants of Lamb House, allowed me a glimpse of James’s bedroom and upstairs study.

Yale’s Beinecke Library and Harvard’s Houghton Library allowed me to use their holdings. At Smith I am grateful to Karen Kukil and Martin Antonetti of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, while Susan Barker in the College archives and Henriette Kets de Vries at our superb museum gave me their help with the photographs. Catharina Gress-Wright and Stephanie Friedman, my undergraduate research assistants, have worked with skill and care.

Most rigorous of critics and best of traveling companions, Brigitte Buettner has had to listen to far too much about Henry James for far too long. Our daughter Miriam has yet to read a word of him. But she did enjoy the garden at the Lamb House.

SOURCES AND NOTES

The literature on Henry James is enormous and ever-changing. The biographies are rich; the criticism both helpful and provocative; and the documentary evidence pertaining to his life, his work, and his world can seem unending. I have benefited from everything I have read but have kept my references to a minimum. These notes indicate the sources of my quotations and mark a few specific debts, but they are not intended to summarize the terms of scholarly debate.

I have used the Library of America volume of James’s
Novels
,
1881–1886
as my source for the 1881 text of
The Portrait of a Lady
; for the novel’s revised version and preface in the New York Edition, I’ve drawn on the relevant entry in the series of Oxford World’s Classics. A complete and newly authoritative edition of James’s letters is under way from the University of Nebraska Press, but many of the important ones are already in print, and some of them several times. For quotations from letters I therefore give the date and the recipient, and note whether it remains as of 2012 unpublished, but do not cite any one source for those now available. Interested readers should consult the on-line
Calendar of the Letters of Henry James
(
jamescalendar.unl.edu
) about where to find any particular piece of correspondence.

References to standard works—
The Prelude
,
Middlemarch
—are given by either line or chapter number but are not keyed to particular editions; in the case of some short poems and essays, I have simply supplied the date. Canny readers may notice that at times I work in close paraphrase of a Jamesian text, or even include the occasional ventriloquized phrase, an unmarked or buried quotation. A good example can be found on my prologue’s first page—“taken possession of it, inhaled it, appropriated it,” words adapted from a letter to his family of 1 November 1875. I have given references for some of these in the notes below, but not all.

All italics in quotations appear in the original.

ABBREVIATIONS FOR SOURCES FREQUENTLY CITED

A—Henry James,
Autobiography
. Edited by F. W. Dupee. New York: Criterion Books, 1956.

CS—Henry James,
Complete Stories
. 5 vols. New York: Library of America, 1996–99. Reference given with number added (e.g. CS1) to indicate volume.

CTW—Henry James,
Collected Travel Writing
. Vol. 1:
Great Britain and America
. Vol. 2:
The Continent
. New York: Library of America, 1993.

E—Leon Edel,
Henry James
. 5 vols. New York: Lippincott, 1953–72.

LC—Henry James,
Literary Criticism
. Vol. 1:
Essays,
American and English Writers
. Vol. 2:
European Writers and The Prefaces
. New York: Library of America, 1984.

LFL—Michael Anesko,
Letters,
Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells
. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

N—Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers,
The Complete Notebooks of Henry James
. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

P—
The Portrait of a Lady
(1st American ed.), in Henry James,
Novels, 1881–1886
. New York: Library of America, 1985.

PLHJ—Lyndall Gordon,
A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and his Art
. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.

PNY—
The Portrait of a Lady
(New York Edition; revised 1906, published 1908) Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2009.

WJL—
The Correspondence of William James
. Edited by Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley. 12 vols. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992–2004.

PROLOGUE: AN OLD MAN IN RYE

xiv—
He blotted
: These pages do not survive in their entirety; those that do can be found at Harvard’s Houghton Library. The best study of them is in Philip Horne,
Henry James and Revision
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).

xiv—“
last manner
”: CS4, 350.

xv—“
would pretend to date
”: Virginia Harlow,
Thomas Sergeant Perry
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950), 305.

xv—“
curiosity and fastidiousness
”: P, 242.

xvi—
“
selective as well as collective
”: To J. B. Pinker, 6 June 1905, unpublished.

xvi—“
frank critical
”: To Charles Scribner’s Sons, 30 July 1905.

xvi—
“
delicate vessels
”: George Eliot,
Daniel Deronda
, ch. 11.

xvi—“
the surprise of a caravan
”: PNY, 16.

xvi—“
an American writing
”: To William James, 29 October 1888.

xviii—
“
that which people know
”: LC1, 63

xix—“
a wedge of brown stone
”: PNY, 43.

xx—“
the British maiden
”: To Alice James, 5 January 1880, unpublished.

xx—“
which we find
”: LC1, 401–2.

xx—“
swarming
. . . pretty girls
”: CTW1, 707.

xx—“
vacancy
”: CTW1, 698.

xxi—“
mildly pyramidal hill
”: To Mrs. William James, 1 December 1897.

xxii—“
extraordinary precocity
”: See B. R. McElderry, Jr., “Hamlin Garland and Henry James,”
American Literature
23.4 (January 1952), esp. 442–43.

xxii—“
wistfully an American
”: Ibid.

xxii—“
room began to sway
”: WJL3, 311–12.

xxiii—“
hugely improved
”: To J. B. Pinker, 10 June 1906, unpublished.

xxiv—“
single small
” . . . “her destiny”
: PNY, 9.

xxiv—“
organizing an ado
”: Ibid.

PART ONE: A PREPARATION FOR CULTURE
CHAPTER 1: THE GIRL IN THE DOORWAY

3—“
tall girl
”: P, 204.

3—“
a shrewd American
”: P, 194.

4—“
discovered
”
. . .
“
independent
”: P, 201.

4—“
square and spacious
”
. . .
“
shade
”: PNY, 9.

5—“
not one
”
. . .
“
slit-like
”: PNY, 7–8.

5—“
the consciousness
”: Ibid.

5—“
Under certain circumstances
”: P, 193.

5—“
It is a truth
”: Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice
, ch. 1 (1813).

6—“
Oh, I hoped
”: P, 205.

6—“
there will be
”: P, 200.

7—“
Miss Brooke had
”: George Eliot,
Middlemarch
, ch. 1 (1871–72).

7—“
nineteen persons
”: P, 224.

7—“
many oddities
” . . . “
accident
”: P, 211.

7—“
You must be
”: P, 216.

8—“
no mark
”:
New York Sun
, 27 November 1881. The review appeared under the initials MWH, since identified as Mayo Williamson Hazeltine; it can most easily be found in
Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews
, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

8—“
taken up her niece
”: P, 212.

8—“
continuity between
”: P, 225.

8—“
so entertaining
”: P, 218.

8—“
so held her
”: PNY, 42.

8—“
glimpse of contemporary aesthetics
”: P, 225.

9—“
with her theory
”: P, 214.

9—“
almost anything
”: P, 218.

9—“
physiognomy had an air
”: P, 226.

9—“
general air
”: P, 232.

CHAPTER 2: A NATIVE OF NO COUNTRY

12—
A manifest handed
: Information about the
China
can be found at www.immigrantships.net/v7/1800v7/china18680508.html.

12—“
always round the corner
”: A, 8.

14—“
divorced from you
”: To William James, 15 July 1878.

14—“
Leisured for life
”: Quoted in R. W. B. Lewis,
The James Family
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux), 30.

14—“
vastation
” . . . “
room
”: Lewis, 51–53.

15—“
Say I’m a philosopher
”: A, 278.

15—“
opportunities had been
”: P, 223.

16—“
interested in almost
”: A, 36.

16—“
a native of the James family
”: In a letter to their sister Alice, WJL6, 517.

16—“
breathed inconsistency
”: A, 124.

17—“
paying
”: A, 126.

17—“
a firm grasp
”: Quoted in E1, 171.

18—“
moral equivalent
”: The title of a 1906 speech, most readily found in William James,
Writings
,
1902–1910
(New York: Library of America, 1988).

18—“
so much manhood
”: Quoted in Alfred Habegger,
The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr.
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994), 422.

18—“
I had done
”: A, 415.

18—“
exacerbated by
”: E1, 183

18—“
during
” . . . “
history
”: A, 414–15. Edel’s biography offers as close a reconstruction of the event as possible; the most suggestive interpretation is that of John Halperin in “Henry James’s Civil War,”
Henry James Review
17.1 (1996).

19—“
muscular weakness
”: Edmund Gosse,
Aspects and Impressions
(London: Cassell, 1922), 27.

19—“
Fortunately he has
”: P, 392.

19—“
tented field enough
”: A, 417.

19—“
seeing, sharing
”: A, 461.

19—“
sense of what
”: A, 460.

19—“
through our great
”: Quoted in Louis Menand,
The Metaphysical Club
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001), 268.

20—“
Harry has become
”: Quoted in Harlow,
Thomas Sergeant Perry
, 249.

20—“
secret employments
”: To Thomas Sergeant Perry, 18 April 1864.

20—“
Come now
” . . . “
chose
”: A, 107.

21—“
scenic method
”: N, 167; the notebook entry is for 21 December 1896.

21—“
afraid of nothing
”: A, 509.

21—“
for what he called
”: Habegger, 137.

21—
William’s most recent biographer
: Robert D. Richardson,
William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006).

22—“
the most delightful
”: A, 508.

22—“
that I had no
”: A, 508.

23—“
unwritten history
”: CS1, 34.

23—“
published me
”: LC1, 507.

24—“
we seem
” . . . “
other
”: LFL, 471–73.

26—“
smiling aspects
”: From an 1886 essay on Dostoevsky. See Howells,
Selected Literary Criticism, 1886–1897
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 35.

26—“
he joined us
”: LFL, 472. See also Carol Holly’s essay in David McWhirter, ed.,
Henry James’s New York Edition: The Construction of Authorship
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).

27—“
of pulmonary weakness
”: PLHJ, 377.

28—“
I wish I were
”: Minnie’s surviving letters to James appear in Robert Le Clair, “Henry James and Minnie Temple,”
American Literature
21 (March 1949), 35–48.