Portrait of A Novel (16 page)

Florence did not shape James’s imagination as powerfully as either Rome or Venice. But it made him happy,
“a rounded pearl of cities,”
and over the years he found that it was, above all, a good place to work. I have already mentioned his stay in the fall and winter of 1873–74, when he spent much of his time with William, and in the spring he remained in the city after his brother had left. He took an apartment on the corner of Piazza Santa Maria Novella, where he settled into the opening chapters of
Roderick Hudson
, and years later he wrote that the book’s first pages always recalled to him not the New England town of their setting but the Italian city of their composition. In his memory he could hear
“the clatter of horse-pails”
from a nearby cabstand and stood once more looking out at the dusty square through the slits of his shutters. That stay made the city seem a kind of refuge, and later James would sometimes go there as a way to avoid the invitations of London.

So it was in 1880, when he wanted a few uninterrupted weeks in which to begin
The Portrait of a Lady
. Not that he played hermit. He was happy to see the Bootts, and at another gathering met the Crown-Princess of Prussia—daughter of Queen Victoria, mother of Wilhelm II—and wrote home that she was
“easy, friendly, intelligent.”
Still, he complained to his sister that
“one is liable to tea-parties,”
and noted that he was expected to call on an American writer who had been chasing him across the Continent with a letter of introduction.

C
ontance Fenimore Woolson’s life had been nearly as peripatetic as James’s own. Born in 1840, she was the great-niece of James Fenimore Cooper, but though her family origins lay in New Hampshire and New York, she had spent much of her childhood in Ohio and on the Great Lakes at a time when they were still seen as the “West.” In the 1870s she traveled through the South with her widowed mother, visiting battlefields and cemeteries and eventually settling in St. Augustine. She was, in the words of her biographer, Lyndall Gordon, both vulnerable and stubborn, someone who insisted upon
“an unconventional course of action . . . it was odd to be a Northern woman living by choice in the ruined South,”
and it was even odder for such a woman to explore the alligator swamps of the Florida wilderness, alone.

Most of her fiction and travel sketches appeared in the New York–based and heavily illustrated
Harper’s
; James preferred the more austere
Atlantic
. Still, her work was in some ways the other side of his coin. If he wrote about Europe for what was at first an East Coast audience, then she wrote about the varied regions of America for that same audience; specializing in the
“local color”
stories that, in bringing the news of faraway places, paradoxically underlined her readers’ sense of their own cultural centrality. Such tales usually depicted provincial life through the eyes of a city-bred protagonist; the classic examples are Sarah Orne Jewett’s stories of coastal Maine. The self-conscious cosmopolitanism of James’s work carried a greater prestige. It gave his readers something to which they might aspire. But the local-color writers often had more readers. Woolson’s stories are both gimlet-eyed and affecting, and the best of them can stand comparison with Jewett’s. The most widely known is the 1877 “Rodman the Keeper,” which she based on a visit to the military graveyard at the Andersonville prison camp in Georgia. Soon afterward, however, her work changed, and changed in two ways. In 1879 she sailed for Europe, encouraged to do so by Howells among others, and she also began a series of tales about the lives of women artists.

In each of these things Henry James was very much on her mind. She had already written about him for the
Atlantic
and later claimed that in his work she had found
“my true country, my real home.”
But he had begun to show up in her fiction even before they met, in a story called “Miss Grief” that is narrated by a parody version of James himself, an American writer in Rome. One evening he gets a visit from what can only be called a distressed gentlewoman, a shabbily-dressed figure named Aaronna Crief who has read his every word and wants him to look at her own work in turn. He tries to get rid of her, fails, reads, and finds to his surprise that her pages have force; later she tells him she would have killed herself
“if your sentence had been against me.”
Yet no editor will take her, and “Miss Grief” soon sickens and dies, killed not by her poverty so much as by the neglect of the literary world itself.

The story seems almost naked in its sense of need; and in later years James might well have wondered if he should have read it as a warning. Still, in material terms Woolson had nothing like her character’s struggle. Her family connections had eased her way into print, and by 1880 her career was both settled and prosperous. She carried a letter of introduction from one of James’s relatives and had been in Florence for some ten days when he arrived. There’s no record of their initial meeting, but James first mentioned her in a letter to his sister Alice on April 25. He found her
“amiable, but deaf,”
and full of questions about his books to which she couldn’t quite hear his replies. A week later he wrote to his Aunt Kate that he had gone driving with an American
“authoress,”
but added that he didn’t know her work. Still, her manners were perfect, and though he found her “intense,” he liked her. Woolson’s own letters of the period describe James himself as a form of paradox. He was attentive and charming, and yet his self-presentation was both quiet and cold; a man who had driven all expression from his light gray eyes.

James often called for her in the morning, retreating to his desk as the afternoon grew hot. One day they strolled in the Cascine, the large park at the city’s western edge; on another he took her to the vast empty Duomo and, as she wrote in a letter, tried to make her admire it. They went to Santa Croce, in whose sober Gothic majesty Florence’s most illustrious citizens are buried, and where Woolson thought the Giottos beyond her; then to San Lorenzo, where she couldn’t get herself to like nude statues. At times she thought James might need a break from her
“horrible ignorance,”
and yet there’s no doubt he enjoyed the company of this intelligent reader, a woman who admired his work in the same way that his friend Zhukovsky admired Wagner’s. After his visit to Naples he may have needed that salve, that perceptive but largely uncritical appreciation. James took very few colleagues into his confidence, but to Woolson he spoke about his books with an openness that at this time he extended only to Howells. One mark of their friendship can be found in the story she wrote about those months, “A Florentine Experiment,” which appeared in the
Atlantic
that October, a month before the
Portrait
started its own run. It’s a tale of expatriate life in which Woolson describes the places they had visited together, and it ends with Trafford Morgan, a man who
“likes to be listened to,”
confessing his love to Margaret Stowe. The wish embodied here needs no comment, and what matters isn’t simply the fact that Woolson wrote such a story, but that James didn’t object to it. A decade later the English writer Vernon Lee based one of her own characters upon him—and he broke with her.

At first James saw Woolson with the same sense of fond amusement with which Isabel regards Henrietta’s intrepid naïveté. Later there was more, as he came to understand the shape of her loneliness and the place he had within it. Yet their friendship was not public. Two middle-aged writers might visit an Italian church without exciting speculation, but James had already needed to quell too many rumors of his own impending marriage, and when Woolson moved to England in 1883, he kept her apart from the main current of his life. Sometimes they went to the theater together, and in Florence she became increasingly close to Frank and Lizzie Boott, but to most of James’s friends she remained hidden, as hidden, in a way, as Zhukovsky, and for much the same reason. People might have talked about their anomalous friendship, and talked all the more because there was in fact nothing to say.

Leon Edel writes that
“the two destroyed each other’s letters by mutual agreement,”
but four of hers do survive, two each from 1882 and 1883, years he spent partly in America and where he left some papers behind. They are extraordinary documents. They are extraordinary in her acute reading of his reputation and of the change in it that was made by
The Portrait of a Lady
itself; a reading to which I’ll return in a later chapter. They are extraordinary too in possessing a voice, richer and more flexible than that of her fiction, that claims all while appearing to claim so little. In their aggressive modesty, their seeming denial of desire, these letters recall such great novelistic characters as Dickens’s Esther Summerson from
Bleak House
, or the first-person narrator of Charlotte Brontë’s sublime
Villette
, the emotionally famished Lucy Snowe. At one point Woolson imagines building a cottage in Cooperstown, New York, and then suggests that James must come and stay with her there, bringing along
“that sweet young American wife I want you to have—whom you
must
have. . . .”
And these letters have an anecdotal value as well. They are the richest portrait we have of James in the confidence, indeed the swagger, of his first mastery.

One example must do. From Leipzig she writes that she has been making a clean copy of her new novel. Her whole arm now ached, and the pain made her remember a morning in Florence when they sat on a bench, and

. . .
you said, in answer
to a remark of mine, “Oh,
I
never copy.” And upon a mute gesture from me, you added, “Do you think, then, that my work has the air of having been copied, and perhaps more than once?” I think I made no direct reply, then. But I will now. The gesture was despair,—despair, that, added to your other perfections, was the gift of writing as you do, at the first draft!

But
sprezzatura
is almost always a pose. James covered his proof sheets with corrections, and whatever his usual practice, with
The Portrait of a Lady
he did “copy,” he did revise. Nothing came on the first draft, and in reading Woolson’s letter I cannot help wondering just why he seemed so interested in impressing her, and perhaps so willing to deceive her as well.

11.

MR. OSMOND

I
N A VILLA
on top of an olive-shrouded hill sits a man with a thin, sharp face. The ends of his mustache are twisted up, his grizzled beard has been shaped to a point, and he seems unmarked by any national origin; a man who might
“pass for anything,”
or nothing. The open door lets in the Tuscan spring; he flicks his eyes toward the young girl standing across the room, and then his hooded gaze drifts back to the two nuns who sit facing him. They have brought the girl home for the summer from her convent school in Rome, but though Pansy is now fifteen, her father still sees her as a child: an obedient child, fluent in three languages, and so timid that she wonders if she dares do anything so grown-up as to make a pot of tea.

It will be some pages before James tells us the man’s name, and perhaps only the most attentive of the serialized novel’s first readers would have thought back a month, and remembered Madame Merle’s account of her friend Gilbert Osmond, a figure without the solidity of either Caspar Goodwood or Lord Warburton, a man who has nothing to declare but his own cultivation. His income is small, he knows that he lacks genius or even talent, and he thinks of himself as someone who has renounced ambition. He does admit to envying the pope,
“for the consideration he enjoys,”
but he has made up his mind to live quietly and
“not to strive nor struggle.”
He will do nothing to risk failure. In Florence he almost never comes down from the top of Bellosguardo—he wants the rest of the expatriate world to know both that he’s there and that he doesn’t want to see them. Osmond pays just two visits a year to the Palazzo Crescentini, Mrs. Touchett’s house in the city below, and dislikes Ralph, who returns the favor.

Madame Merle had spoken of Osmond in England, when Isabel was poor, and she speaks of him again now that the girl is rich and has come to Florence with her aunt. It is early May in 1872. Mr. Touchett has been dead for six months, and later that year, in America, Ulysses S. Grant will be elected to a second term in the White House. None of James’s characters will notice, or care. His expatriates are not the kind who hang upon the news. They have more immediate concerns, and right now Madame Merle is occupied by the question of Isabel’s future. One shouldn’t live in Italy, the older woman tells her, without meeting Gilbert Osmond, who knows more about the peninsula than anyone but a few German professors. To Osmond himself she says something else—she tells him that Miss Archer has £70,000. Madame Merle arrives at the villa while the nuns are still there, and at the news of Osmond’s visitors she hesitates, as if there were some risk in entering. But though she seems shawled in caution she’s also an old family friend, someone who has visited Pansy in Rome, who has met these nuns before and can charm them. Osmond’s own manners are offhand. He recognizes that her visit means something, that Madame Merle wants something, and once the sisters have gone, his voice acquires a touch of vinegar. She in turn appears on edge, and James explains their shared but apparently unmotivated temper by noting that they usually
“approached each other obliquely, as it were, and addressed each other by implication.”
Yet that only begs a further question, and one that the author leaves hanging.

At first Osmond rejects the woman’s suggestion that he should meet her new friend. Effort is such a bore, and
“I know plenty of dingy people.”
Even the news of Isabel’s wealth and beauty hardly appears to interest him, though he sharpens his ears at the sum. But he finally agrees to call at the Palazzo Crescentini, and when he does, Isabel listens to him talk with Madame Merle and thinks herself dull by comparison. The young woman remains quiet, even subdued, and yet does so precisely because something about Osmond arrests her, and makes
“it seem more important that she should get an impression of him than that she should produce one herself.”
He speaks simply about complicated matters and appears delicate even as he invites Isabel to come up and visit his garden. On this second meeting her impression deepens, even though the villa itself scares her a bit; its blank façade makes it seem
“as if, once you were in, it would not be easy to get out.”
But she is delighted with Pansy, and she even enjoys Osmond’s sister, the Countess Gemini, a prattling scandalous creature of fashion, unhappily married to a local nobleman. Moreover, Osmond himself seems genuinely beguiling, as he speaks of Italy’s fusion of beauty and lassitude, of spending his life in a country that most other Americans only pass through.

And as Isabel looks at him with his arm around Pansy’s waist, as she walks through his rooms and watches him take down a picture to bring it into the light, she begins to think that the man himself is far more interesting than his possessions. He resembles no one she knows—he has the air of being someone in particular. Most of her friends, she now realizes, belong
“to types which were already present in her mind”
; Ralph does, and Henrietta, and even Madame Merle. Osmond is different. She can think of no class or category to which he belongs, and he seems all the more original for not being in any way an eccentric. She finds herself attracted by his slender fingers and his overdrawn face; she admires his fastidiousness and even what she suspects will prove his irritability. He is shy and self-critical, and yet he treats her kindly, so kindly that Isabel wonders at his attention, and, as the afternoon proceeds, she becomes careful in her enthusiasms, lest she admire the wrong thing.

James’s heroine carries a story away from that hill, a story about a sensitive widower, who holds his daughter by the hand as they pace across his moss-covered terrace. She sees his
“studious life in a lovely land”
as one that involves a choice between the shallow and the serious; a choice she imagines he has not hesitated to make, even while knowing that the latter path must lead to loneliness and sorrow. She sees him, that is, as he would like to be seen. Her eyes give him back a version of his own best self, in which his love of beauty is inseparable from his “half-anxious, half-helpless fatherhood.” But James has already let his readers see enough to tell a different story. When the nuns deliver Pansy home to Bellosguardo, Osmond’s eyes drop with amusement at their claim to have made her a good Christian. Nevertheless, he uses their terms to cultivate Isabel’s favor, and when she praises the girl, he says, as though his father’s heart were full, that
“she is a little saint of heaven!”
Though he is not so bad as Madame Merle, who affects astonishment when Mrs. Touchett asks her if
“that man is making love to my niece.”

T
his is the man Isabel will marry. She will make him wait, but a dozen chapters later she will marry him, and no one we like will be happy about it, not Ralph, or Henrietta, or even Mrs. Touchett, who thinks Osmond both a gentleman and a negative sum. James’s foreshadowing has been heavy enough to make us suspect that Isabel won’t be entirely happy in any marriage, but still everyone who reads this book thinks her acceptance of Osmond needs to be justified. With Warburton or Goodwood, in contrast, it was her refusal that required justification. But let us stop anticipating. James will offer an explanation in its place, and so let us, in Madame Merle’s words, distinguish instead.

In the New York Edition, James didn’t precisely soften his characterization of Osmond, but he did cut a long passage in which he tells us how to see him. It may, he had written, seem a
“coarse imputation,”
and yet still it must be said: Osmond is “not untainted by selfishness.” Even in the first edition, however, James backs away from that judgment as soon he makes it. For the word doesn’t cover Osmond in his entirety. Isabel has some cause for the picture she draws for herself, and we had better start by admitting it. Osmond’s literary tastes mix the expected—Machiavelli—with the recherché, and while few of us can share his enthusiasm for the rococo cream-puffs of the eighteenth-century librettist Metastasio, his interest in the sixteenth-century poet Vittoria Colonna is today worth taking seriously. His Tuscan primitives, bought cheap, are already worth something more, and though he speaks too much about his “
willful renunciation
” of chances he never had, even Ralph sometimes finds him good company. He may disapprove of Osmond’s courtship, but in these early days he recognizes that the man’s
“good humour was imperturbable, his knowledge universal, his manners were the gentlest in the world.”
Osmond’s pose works because it isn’t only a pose; Isabel’s view is partial, but not entirely misplaced.

Yet there’s another and more interesting reason for Isabel’s attraction, and one best approached by considering a few words of Madame Merle’s. Your rooms, she tells him,
“are perfect. . . . You understand this sort of thing as no one else does.”
Osmond would have liked to own the walls of the Uffizi itself, but even with modest means he has worked a great effect, and his apartment sounds attractive, mixing its modern furniture with elaborately carved wooden chests and pieces of antique pottery. “This sort of thing” is an art of its own, and we have to take it seriously before we can take it lightly. One of the Venetian essays in
Italian Hours
, James’s 1909 gathering of his travel pieces, is a graceful obituary for his friend Katharine De Kay Bronson, at whose small house on the Grand Canal the novelist often stayed. In it he recalls her love of the decorative arts, and suggests that she would have surrendered a Tintoretto
“for a cabinet of tiny gilded glasses or a dinner-service of the right old silver.”
Such pieces may be what Osmond has had to settle for, and yet a Tintoretto would overmaster almost any owner. You might envy the luck of the acquisition, but its possession points to little beyond a bank account. Yet to select just the right little goblets, to have no vulgar things—the ambition may be small but it isn’t in itself unworthy. One may not be a personage, but one can still belong to an aristocracy of taste.

Isabel will come to think that there was nothing terribly refined about inheriting such a fortune, and sees good taste as a note of distinction in a society that has no other way to mark it besides money. It’s not quite an alternative to money, but it does serve to justify her wealth—it will be what her money is
for
. James shared that prejudice, as his account of Mrs. Bronson suggests, and also saw through it. He enjoyed racketing around in curiosity shops, he delighted in things old and obscure, and in his fiction often allowed an appreciation of them to stand as a sign of intelligence. He bought little, however, and he never made the decoration of houses into an interest of his own. He knew how unsustaining good taste alone might prove, and had little sympathy with a younger generation’s belief in art for art’s sake, or indeed with Walter Pater’s idea that our finest moments come to us through the sensory pulses of aesthetic appreciation. Osmond of course shares that idea—or seems to.

Still, if he were indeed the man he wants Isabel to take him for, he might prove genuinely attractive: someone who has accepted his limits and decided to cultivate his own garden. That would make him rather like Frank Boott, the Bostonian in whose apartment James placed him. None of the records suggests that Boott had as keen an eye for a painting as Gilbert Osmond. Instead, he wrote music, and though his songs were best suited to the amateur tradition of
Hausmusik
, he did occasionally find a professional performance. He was more sociable than Osmond, a good host, and a more devoted father; his daughter Lizzie had tutors in Florence rather than being sent away to school. Nothing about the Bootts suggests the isolation that Osmond seems determined to cultivate; indeed the reverse, for Lizzie grew up in a lively set of expatriate children, a community split between Florence and Rome and that even included some cousins. Nor did their life abroad preclude an occasional stay in America, and after meeting them in Newport the young James quickly grew fond of the daughter. Her father, however, he thought childish and didn’t hesitate to describe him that way; even as he got to work on
The Portrait
of a Lady
, James wrote to Quincy Street that the simplicity of Boott’s
“mental constitution only increases with age.”

No one would use such terms for Osmond, and this brief sketch should be enough to caution anyone who might want to claim that the character was based upon Frank Boott. The difference between them is in fact so great that it could make one question the usefulness of tracing such “originals,” or indeed the literary tourism of my own walks up Bellosguardo. And yet the reason for doing so seems to me simple enough. Searching for some putative original allows us to see what was in fact created; the difference between the fictional page and the gravel of documentary truth can stand as a guide to artistic practice. Matching the description of the villa in
The Portrait of a Lady
up against the similar account in James’s “Italy Revisited,” and then comparing both of them to an actual walk up the hill suggests the degree to which his Italian settings are traceable to a particular place. The people he puts in those settings are a different matter.

Isabel herself is a special case, but few of James’s important characters have a source in a specific person. Or rather his characters’ characters—their moral being, their personalities—don’t usually have that source. What he does instead is to take not a person but a set of circumstances from the life around him. In the Villa Castellani he had an
“Italianate bereft American,”
a widower and an aesthete, who had devoted his life to the education of his daughter; who had raised an American girl on a European model, protected and cosseted and formidably polished. Their situation planted itself in his brain, and waited there until it proved exactly what his work required. “I
had
it there,” he wrote in his autobiography and had it all the more because Frank Boott “had no single note of character or temper . . . in common with my Gilbert Osmond.” What James got from his family friends—what they suggested, what he used—was the drama of their position, not that of their particular individual beings. Gilbert Osmond is an interesting creation precisely because he differs from the man in whose house James put him. If we’re looking for originals, we might do better to consider the twice-married collector James Jackson Jarves, who impoverished himself in buying the same kind of once-disregarded paintings that Osmond does; there’s a version of his story in Edith Wharton’s
False Dawn
, and most of the paintings are now at Yale. But Jarves was also less saturnine than Osmond, and perhaps the character owes his sense of unappreciated merit to James’s good friend Henry Adams, who never got over his discovery that there was more to politics than intelligence and a family name.