Portrait of A Novel (26 page)

He was not, however, asking for more time in which to work. There’s no suggestion that he hadn’t been able to cover his pages, that he would need that month just to finish off. Nor is it simply a plea for more space. Printing the book’s last chapters in just two parts would, admittedly, have made for long installments. But it could have been done, and at roughly 30 pages they would have been only a few columns longer than those for several earlier months. Nor, finally, can James be accused of wanting that month for the sake of an extra month’s check. His fees were important to him and we know he could be a shrewd negotiator. But in terms of pace and balance the book’s nine concluding chapters do indeed work better in three pieces rather than two, and each of these late installments forms a discrete dramatic unit.

That’s especially true of the book’s final part, three extraordinary chapters that begin by moving Isabel back from Italy to England, back to Ralph and the novel’s opening scenes at Gardencourt. I suspect that what made James ask for the extra month was the discovery, as he worked in Venice’s brilliant light, that he needed to prepare that conclusion more fully. In roughing out the novel’s later stages he admitted to himself that its early portion was “too exclusively psychological,” but he thought the installments after Isabel’s marriage could make up for that. They would be crowded, perhaps too crowded, with incident. Yet though he knew what those incidents would be, he wasn’t yet sure how to handle them all, and wrote that certain issues of motive and crucial moments of revelation were
“to be settled later.”
It’s easy to imagine how that might have made the book grow, especially because James characteristically found a way to cover all the possibilities he had sketched.

Of course, he was hardly the first novelist to ask for more time. Margaret Oliphant was a regular contributor to
Macmillan’s
, and one of her own serials there makes James looks like a model of exactitude;
A Son of the Soil
(1866) was projected at four parts, and came in at seventeen. Other writers were told after a few months to tie things off as quickly as they could, and even Elizabeth Gaskell, in working for the popular
Household Words
, was made to shorten up the concluding parts of
North and South
(1855). In extending the
Portrait
’s run, James presumed on his status as both Howells’s friend and one of the
Atlantic
’s most valued contributors. He also knew that the pages of a monthly magazine were within certain limits fungible. Articles, poems, and even the start of a new novel could be delayed from month to month; short pieces and long ones could be switched around as needed to make an issue fit its appointed size. But that wasn’t true of all kinds of serial publication, and especially not of the particular form that had given the nineteenth century its taste for long-running novels.

Serials had a particular job of cultural work to do in the ever-expanding Victorian world; a world in which all things seemed to grow, and literacy among them. Such works, as the critics Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund have argued, fostered a belief in
“process and progress,”
a sense of
“steady development in installments over time, seeds planted in spring leading to harvest in distant autumn.”
They required, from both their readers and their writers, an ability to hold disparate things together, to make a mental link between the first month and the last, and yet they weren’t really exercises in delayed gratification. Instead, one lived in the moment while also anticipating the future. Pleasure and peril in the present, and fulfillment in the months to come—that was what they offered, and no one more regularly satisfied that desire than Dickens. Books like
David Copperfield
and
Bleak House
were first published in monthly parts that sold for a shilling and contained exactly two illustrations and 32 pages of text. There was no other editorial material, though the pamphlet did include many pages of advertisements, some for books but others for laxatives, opera glasses, and the “London General Mourning Warehouse.” The finished novel took up twenty such parts, each containing three or four chapters, though the last two installments appeared together in a single booklet, producing a sense of acceleration at the end.

Thackeray, among others, often worked in this form as well, and the writer who chose it needed to keep two structures in mind—that of the book as a whole and that of each separate month, which readers expected to end with a satisfying climax. In consequence, the novelist often set three or four different plots going at once; plots that at first might appear loosely connected but which are far more tightly linked than they seem. Dickens usually managed to touch on most of his different story lines in every installment, building up and tamping down his readers’ expectations that one of them might resolve itself. At the same time, he had to ensure that some piece of his narrative was ready each month to produce a moment of crisis or change. So he ends a chapter of
Bleak House
with the news that its heroine has been blinded by smallpox, and then finishes the installment by turning to other material, another climax, making us wait until the last pages of the following month before we learn that she can see once more. But that example is too easy. Dickens’s greatest long novels can seem terribly episodic—and yet try to unpick them! Try to dispense with any single character or point in the narrative, and the whole begins to unravel at once.

Publication in monthly parts created the multiplot novel that is often taken as the Victorian norm. Only by keeping several story lines going at once could the writer develop enough plausible moments of climax to give his readers a reason to buy the next issue. The weekly serials of Dickens’s later years—books like
Great Expectations
or
A Tale of Two Cities
—required something different. Their installments were shorter, and that relative brevity necessitated a tighter focus. A good comparison is that between the first-person narratives of
David Copperfield
and
Great Expectations
. The former appears to meander, and David himself often seems a mere witness to other people’s stories. The short weekly installments of the latter may twist and turn, but they never mark time. Nor do we ever doubt its central concern—our eyes are always upon its narrator, Pip. Neither book could have been successfully serialized in the other one’s form.

The period’s most complicated case of serial publication is that of
Middlemarch
. George Eliot didn’t like working ahead of herself in the way serialization required, and she released both
Adam Bede
and
The Mill on the Floss
as three-volume novels, without the benefit of any prior magazine appearance. In
Middlemarch
, however, she wanted to write on a very large scale, and eventually decided to publish in a bimonthly series of eight short books, each about the size of three of Dickens’s monthly parts. They had soft green covers, sold for 5s., and fit comfortably in a coat pocket. The volumes vary slightly in length—that flexibility was part of the form’s attraction—and their scope allowed for a more complicated interplay of the novel’s different plot lines than do even Dickens’s monthly installments. George Eliot begins with the story of Dorothea Brooke, and at first holds it apart from the rest of the novel’s concerns; we stay with Dorothea for 80 pages, but when George Eliot switches focus, she is banished for another 80. Then slowly, gradually, symphonically, the novel’s different sets of characters begin to entwine themselves with one another. The multiple plots start to merge; and by the end of the book they are all one. Yet even this form reflected the material realities of the novelist’s working life. For
Middlemarch
is a fusion of what George Eliot had originally imagined as two separate stories, and we owe its long initial account of Dorothea to the fact that she had already written it before she began to splice.

Weekly serials allowed a bit of room for the writer’s improvisation and uncertainty, a week or two to swell or shrink. Freestanding volumes or pamphlets had none. There could not be more of them, or less; with Dickens, indeed, the very page count was fixed. They couldn’t stretch out their time, as James did, and for all their seeming looseness, they required that the narrative be defined in advance; a model made, and stuck to. There is a paradox here. The
Portrait
seems to discover its final shape as it grows, as though it were unplanned; but its action appears as a taut and single motion. Dickens looks rough in comparison, and yet his books were rigorously planned, their outlines carefully developed before he began to write. James never worked in such monthly parts. The form had begun to die by the time his career began, supplanted by the journals for which he himself worked. Those magazines offered a different set of possibilities, however, and reading a serial there was a fundamentally different activity from reading one in separate parts.

The Portrait of a Lady
was the main attraction in both
Macmillan’s
and the
Atlantic
, but it was still just one attraction among many, and not even the only novel. Most of a magazine’s readers were regular subscribers. No one story had much power to make the monthly circulation rise or fall, and readers came to the journal for many reasons; an
Atlantic
reader who didn’t like James wouldn’t necessarily stop receiving it, not so long as he enjoyed the “Contributors’ Club” or the poetry. An installment of
Bleak House
, however slender, could seem to become the world. That illusion wasn’t possible for a reader who held a monthly magazine in his hands, and might open to a different piece each time. In consequence, the expectations for an
Atlantic
serial were different than those for a novel published in monthly parts; and different again than they would be in a more popular periodical. And in some ways those expectations were less.

Unlike Dickens, James did not have to keep the customers coming back. He didn’t have the same need for a regular monthly crisis and often chose to avoid the obvious high notes, to end an installment off the beat. Warburton’s proposal falls in the middle of a part; Mr. Touchett’s death at the start of one. Osmond’s declaration does indeed conclude a month, but then so does Isabel’s statement that she would “rather hear nothing that Pansy may not.” That’s the last thing we hear her say before her marriage, and her words don’t signal a change so much as they serve to reinforce our impression of her fears. It is a curiously understated ending and suggests that James had a very different sense than Dickens or even George Eliot of what constitutes a turning point in a narrative. It suggests that though
The Portrait of a Lady
may have been serialized, it is not, when seen against its Victorian predecessors, a serial novel.

A
generation later Joseph Conrad was at work, and desperate, upon one of his greatest books, the story of Russian guilt and terrorism that he called
Under Western Eyes
, and a part of that desperation came from his fear that
“no magazine will touch it.”
For though one finally did—the
English Review
, with a circulation of just 1,000—the kinds of books Conrad wrote were increasingly difficult to publish in parts, and his ambitions were at odds with the progressive thrust of serial form. Dickens’s world had possessed something close to a pure linearity. The story unspooled month by month or week by week, and the order of events in his characters’ lives was virtually identical with the order of their narration. In contrast, Conrad’s books were full of flashbacks, of great looping motions in time and sudden shifts in point of view; they would skip into the future and then back up to plug the chronological hole. But then many narratives of the
fin de siècle
were at odds with what Hughes and Lund describe as the serial’s emphasis on
“slow, sure growth and development.”
Instead, they offered a world of disorder and even chaos, a world best contained in the “autonomous whole” of a single volume.

James played his part in that change. Nevertheless, serialization remained a financial necessity even for those, like Conrad, whose work was unsuited to it. Most nineteenth-century novelists made their money from magazine publication rather than the sale of finished books. Advances against royalties were not yet common, and in England those royalities might amount to nothing at all. Macmillan issued just 750 copies of the
Portrait
’s first, three-volume edition, and many of those went at a discount to Mudie’s or its competitors.
James’s income
from books in 1881 was under $1,000, a figure that includes both American and British sales; though to be fair, he got more than that the next year in the States alone, as the
Portrait
went into a series of reprintings. At the same time, he received a bit over $5,000 for the novel’s serial rights. His earnings fluctuated over the course of his career, and with time his income from books increased. But in the first twenty-five years of his European residence, he often made four or five times more from magazine sales than from books.

Five thousand dollars was indeed a substantial figure; Henry Sr. had supported a large family in comfort on an income that never exceeded $10,000. Five thousand dollars was what Howells got for editing the
Atlantic
, a job he left only when he felt he could make as much from his fiction. It did not, however, put James among the top earners of his period. Anthony Trollope kept scrupulous records and listed his takings at the end of his autobiography, at great cost to his reputation. Other writers, James among them, resented the way that the older man’s balance sheet made him seem like a tradesman rather than an artist, though James himself maintained a comparable but private ledger. Trollope made £3,200 from
Phineas Finn
, over $15,000. George Eliot did even better; by the time
Middlemarch
was finished, she had earned over £4,000 from its serial sales alone.