Portrait of A Novel (45 page)

161—“
the dark shining
”
. . .
“
she chose
”: P, 522.

162—“
I would rather
”: P, 528.

162—“
I had no idea
”: P, 543.

162—“
You are going
”: P, 543.

162—“
more importance
”: P, 545.

162—“
soaring
. . .
sailing
”: P, 546.

163—“
a man to whom
”
. . .
“
of any sort
”: P, 548–49.

163—“
his very poverties
”: P, 550.

164—“
I hope it may never
”: P, 547.

164—“
disjoined
”: P, 551.

164—“
detestably fortunate
”
. . .
“
envying someone
”: P, 498–99.

CHAPTER 14: A VENETIAN INTERLUDE

165—“
the temperature ferocious
”: To Thomas Sergeant Perry, 24 January 1881.

165—“
quietly bring my
”: N, 220.

165—“
Frenchified
”
. . .
“
digestion
”: To Fanny Kemble, 24 February 1881.

166—“
dusky light
”: N, 220.

166—“
virtually finished
”: N, 221.

166—
Baedeker for 1879
: Venice then had 128,000 inhabitants.

166—“
painfully large
”: CTW2, 289.

167—“
be lived in
”: CTW2, 329.

167—“
awful
”: CTW2, 330. For the gondoliers’ strike, along with much else about the nineteenth-century city, see Margaret Plant,
Venice: Fragile City, 1797–1997
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).

167—“
battered peep show
”: CTW2, 292.

167—“
the most beautiful
”: CTW2, 314.

168—“
una bellezza
”: N, 221.

168—“
simpler pleasure[s]
”: CTW2, 289.

168—“
one of those things
”: N, 221.

168—“
sentient
”: CTW2, 291.

169—“
craved more to possess
”: Quoted in Rosella Mamoli Zorzi et al.,
Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Pala
zz
o Barbaro Circle
(Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2004), 255.

171—“
like a camel’s back
”: CTW2, 297. On this point see Zorzi’s “A Knock-Down Insolence of Talent,” in
Sargent’s Venice
, ed. Warren Adelson et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

171—“
in the fruitless
”: NPY, 3.

171—“
even the brightest
”: CTW2, 298.

171—“
The creature varies
”: CTW2, 291.

172—“
between the niece
”: CTW2, 296.

172—“
be a sad day
”: CTW2, 287.

172—“
you renounce all
”: CTW2, 305.

CHAPTER 15: FENIMORE

174—“
sky-parlor
”:
Henry James Letters
, vol. 3, 557.

175—“
Poor Isabel!
”: Ibid., 533.

175—“
I suppose there
”: Ibid., 540.

175—“
a woman
”: Ibid., 352.

176—“
immense power
”: To Elizabeth Boott, 18 October 1886.

176—“
thought the carriage
”: PLHJ, 199.

176—“
hide
”: To Francis Boott, 26 November 1886.

176—“
promiscuous polyglot
”: To Sarah Butler Wister, 27 February 1887.

176—“
making love to Italy
”: To Edmund Gosse, 24 April 1887.

178—“
local tone
”: LC1, 664.

178—“
that the old lady
”: N, 33.

178—“
in obscurity
”: CS3, 228.

179—“
publishing scoundrel
”: CS3, 303.

179—“
an out-of-the-way canal
”: CS3, 228.

179—“
make love
”: CS3, 235.

179—“
get out of it
”: CS3, 314.

180—“
Henry is somewhere
”: PLHJ, 231.

181—“
giving up being
”: PLHJ, 248.

182—“
to Miss Woolson
”: To Ariana Curtis, 14 July 1893.

182—“
whether the end
”:
Henry James Letters
, vol. 3, 550.

182—“
alone and unfriended
”: To William W. Baldwin, 26 January 1894.

182—“
sudden dementia
”: To Francis Boott, 31 January 1894.

182—“
sills overlooking
”: PLHJ, 276.

183—“
After such an event
”: To Francis Boott, 31 January 1894.

183—“
too many and too private
”: To William W. Baldwin, 2 February 1894.

184—“
all her precious things
”: PLHJ, 286.

185—“
and they came up like balloons
”: PLHJ, 289. This is the most readily available source for the anecdote; one can also find it in
Gondola Day
, 145. Gordon draws the story from a 1956 radio interview with Mercedes Huntington, whose words are quoted here. Her family owned the Villa Castellani, and she claimed to have heard it as a young woman from James himself; a transcript of the interview is available at Harvard’s Houghton Library. But sources closer to the period attest to it as well; see
Gondola Days
.

185—“
never failed
”
. . .
“
behaviour
”: CS3, 230.

185—“
If her depression
”: Kaplan,
Henry James: The Imagination of Genius,
383.

187—“
to whom nothing
”: CS5, 540.

187—“
The Beast in the Closet
”: See the chapter of that title in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Epistemology of the Closet
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

188—“
have appreciated
”: CS2, 295.

PART FOUR: SEX AND SERIALS, THE CONTINENT AND THE CRITICS
CHAPTER 16: MAUPASSANT AND THE MONKEY

191—“
suggestive of
”
. . .
“
sun-bonnets
”: The piece originally ran in the
Galaxy
for June 1875. It’s reprinted in Henry James,
The Painter’s Eye
, ed. John L Sweeney (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 96–97.

192—
Some Victorian commentators
: See Kate Flint’s analysis in
The Woman Reader, 1837–1914
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), ch. 4.

192—“
bring a blush
”: Dickens,
Our Mutual Friend
, ch. 11. On blushing, see Ruth Bernard Yeazell,
Fictions of Modesty
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), ch. 5.

193—“
Two ladies from the country
”: From George Moore, “A New Censorship of Literature,”
Pall Mall Ga
z
ette
, 10 December 1884.

193—
after a one-day trial
: See the trial transcript, “The Ministry of Justice Against Gustave Flaubert,” trans. Bregtje Hartendorf Wallach in the Norton Critical Edition of
Madame Bovary
, ed. Margaret Cohen, 3rd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

193—“
no English author
”
. . .
“
to read?
”: James Fitzjames Stephen, “
Madame Bovary
,”
Saturday Review
, 11 July 1857.

194—“
cleanliness
”
. . .
“
Expurgatorius
”: Margaret Oliphant, “Novels,”
Blackwood’s
, September 1867.

194—“
the novels of her
”: Ibid.

194—“
into the hands
”: See Cohen, ed. “
Madame Bovary
,” 333.

195—“
between that which
”: LC1, 63.

195—“
Candour in Fiction
”:
New Review
, January 1890. Hardy’s comments are on p. 20.

195—“
there is a terrible coercion
”:
Adam Bede
, ch. 29.

196—“
rather shy
”: LC1, 63.

196—“
I would rather
”: P, 558.

196—
French verb is branler
: See any complete edition of the Goncourt diary; this section is available in an English translation by Robert Baldick,
Pages from the Goncourt Journal
(1962; repr., New York: New York Review Books Classics, 2006), 212–14.

197—“
Le petit Maupassant
”: Ibid.

197—“
right mental preparation
”: To Edmund Gosse, 17 October 1912.

197—“
as if her sky
”: From Henry James,
Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune, 1875–1876
, ed. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1958), 40. This passage comes from a piece itself called “Parisian Sketches,” his letter for December 28, 1875.

198—“
rather embarrassed
”: To Henry James, Sr., 20 December 1875. On James’s Parisian experiences, see Peter Brooks,
Henry James Goes to Paris
.

199—“
editor of the austere Atlantic
”: To William Dean Howells, 3 February 1876. James records Howells’s reply in a letter of 4 April, and the Goncourt Diary lets us date the conversation to Sunday, 30 January; see Baldick, 220.

200—“
with astronomy
”
. . .
“
well-written
”: LC2, 1014.

201—“
the subscriber
”: Ibid.

201—“
more totally
”
. . .
“
or catches
”: LC2, 892–93.

201—“
misery, vice
”
. . .
“
disagreeable
”. LC2, 861–62.

202—“
nature
. . .
as a combination
”: LC2, 866.

202—“
poverty of
. . .
consciousness
”: LC2, 327–28.

202—“
English system
”: LC2, 869.

202—“
than the effort
”: To William Dean Howells, 21 February 1884.

202—“
I have to hide
”: Howells,
Selected Letters, 1882–1891
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 12. The letter is to John Hay.

202—“
when Nana raised
”: Émile Zola,
Nana
, trans. George Holden (London: Penguin, 1972), 44.

203—“
foulness
”: LC2, 867.

203—“
her sexual parts
”:
Nana
, 385.

203—
Henry Viztelly
: On his editions of Zola, and the novelist’s reception in England, see Anthony Cummins, “Émile Zola’s Cheap English Dress: The Viztelly Translations, Late-Victorian Print Culture, and the Crisis of Literary Value,”
Review of English Studies
60 (2008), 108–32.

203—“
l’âge ingrat
”: The phrase comes two pages in to
Nana
’s third chapter; Holden (75) translates it as “awkward.”

204—“‘
good
’
talk?
”: LC2, 1125.

204—“
old castles
”
. . .
“
ancient monuments
”: CS2, 247.

205—“
a great deal
”: CS2, 246.

205—“
clever little reprobate
”: CS2, 291.

205—“
old enough
”
. . .
“
should like it
”: CS2, 275.

206—“
portrait of a gentleman
”: Wharton,
The Age of Innocence
, ch. 14. Elizabeth Ammons’s “Cool Diana and Blood Red Muse” points out the nominal relation between Wharton’s protagonist and James’s own. See the Norton Critical Edition of the novel, ed. Candace Waid (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).