Portrait of A Novel (38 page)

Madame Merle is an easy case; Osmond too. Their desire comes unmixed with any pretense that what they want is for Isabel’s benefit too, and for them we may use the word “evil.” It is a quality that James thought his optimistic fellow-Americans had trouble recognizing. Isabel remains blind to it for years, and in her creator’s eyes the Emerson who stands behind her self-conception never overcame his own obliviousness of its very existence. Yet insofar as Pansy’s parents present us, for once, with something simple, they cannot hold the same disturbing interest as do James’s more ambiguous pictures, and in the
Portrait
the most troubling of those images is that of Ralph Touchett himself. For how else can we understand his desire to make Isabel rich—his attempt to gratify his own imagination by watching what she’ll do?

Ralph is generous indeed and yet he also wants to see his cousin going before the breeze. He thinks of himself as having bought a ticket for a show, and though he’s right in warning her about Osmond, his objections grow in part from his hope that she will, for his sake, do something better and more. When Isabel arrives at Gardencourt, he is too weak to say anything, and she sits with him for hours in silence. Only on the third day does he find the strength to speak, and when Isabel encourages him to be quiet, he murmurs that he will soon
“have all eternity to rest.”
Now is the moment for one final effort; and we recall that on his own deathbed, old Mr. Touchett had said much the same thing. At first, however, all that Isabel herself can do is cry, and yet in that wet face she finds a new resolution, finds that she has
“lost all her shame, all wish to hide things.”
For she wants Ralph to know that she has finally learned what he did for her, and so she sobs out an apology.
“I never thanked you,”
she moans, “I never spoke—I never was what I should be!”

Those words make Ralph turn away. He knows what he has done for her, what he has done to her. He has made her rich but
“that was not happy,”
and when he turns to face her once more, he tells Isabel that he believes he “ruined” her. The verb is deliberately chosen. It’s one most often attached to a seducer—a rake may ruin a girl for his pleasure—and by making him choose it James suggests Ralph’s awareness of what he has done. He has made Isabel vulnerable, someone attractive enough to be a victim, and he understands the blight that has flowed from his good intentions. Few readers will find it hard to distinguish Ralph’s use of Isabel from Osmond’s, and yet his own generosity has made him commit a weak version of the same crime: by amusing himself with his thoughts of her future he has failed to recognize the complexity of her own individual being. He has failed to feel the whole weight of his relations to her. Yet nobody could accuse him more than he accuses himself, and Isabel wants now only to admit to her own weakness and vanity. So the walls between them fall, and they see each other fully. They recognize each other as “an end withal,” and speak of ignorance and knowledge, of death and pain and the question of Isabel’s future; and finally they also speak about love. For pain will pass but love remains, and Ralph believes that in her heart
“I shall be nearer to you than I have ever been.”
On the last pages of his life the two of them can admit to each other what every reader has always known, and as they speak of what will last beyond his death, something odd seems to happen—something wonderful, uncanny, sublime. James no more invokes the idea of God or an afterlife than he did at Mr. Touchett’s deathbed. Nevertheless, the two of them seem, in confessing all, to float for a second beyond their bodies, unbound by any sense of self and with their minds moving at the end as one. It is as if their souls stood naked to one another, a flash so powerful—so rare, so brief—that it makes all the suffering needed to produce it seem worthwhile.

I cannot read this scene without tears.

T
he New York Edition took almost four years of steady work. The two volumes containing the
Portrait
appeared early in 1908, and Scribner issued the rest of the set over the next year and half, finishing up with
The Golden Bowl
in the summer of 1909. As physical objects, they fulfilled James’s hopes, substantial but not heavy in the hand, the paper deckle-edged and creamily thick, and the typeface of an elegant sobriety. Yet sticking to his publisher’s schedule became first a slog and then a nightmare, and the work had a cost beyond the moment. It finished him as a novelist. James was sixty-six when the edition’s final books came out, but though he continued to write stories,
The Golden Bowl
was the last long piece of fiction he managed to complete. The remainder of his writing life would be devoted to the retrospection that began with his biography of William Wetmore Story and continued with
The American Scene
and the edition’s own prefaces.

Still, most readers would rather have those eighteen prefaces than another long novel. James left some work in fragments at his death, but neither
The Ivory Tower
nor
The Sense of the Past
would have added to his achievement. These essays do. Sly, demanding, rigorous, and playful, they give us both our most vivid sense of their author’s mind at work and a newly rich vocabulary with which to think about the art of fiction. James’s description of how to handle a protagonist, his instructions on the shaping of narrative endings or the management of point of view, his strictures on the inadequacies of the first-person: all of it remains quotable, provocative, and useful. Before he was done with them, he realized that they could be gathered into a volume of their own,
“a sort of comprehensive manual or
vade-mecum
,”
though he shrank from the idea of writing a preface to his prefaces; such a collection finally appeared only in 1934, edited by R. P. Blackmur and called
The Art of the Novel
. James’s acolytes in succeeding generations would often go too far in systematizing his principles, trying to make his practice into a set of laws for fiction as a whole. But no novelist has left a more sustained account of his own creative process.

Not everyone liked them. A Cambridge friend found them too
“self-occupied,”
and believed that James’s attempt to show how he had managed it all destroyed any sense of fictional reality. Some reviewers used his criticism of his own work to club him down; look, even he had said that
The Princess Casamassima
wasn’t what it should be. Many readers thought, moreover, that in revising so heavily James had committed a kind of crime, and resented any alteration to the books they had known and loved for years. Yet the New York Edition soon presented him with another and bigger problem. Its separate volumes sold for $2 apiece, the same price as the 1881 American edition of the
Portrait
, but committing oneself to the series as a whole did make it expensive, and many potential customers already had his work on their shelves; the prefaces alone weren’t enough to tempt them. Scribner printed 1,500 copies of the first volumes, and hoped to sell them as a set. By the end of 1908, however, the American sales were still below 600, and Macmillan took just 100 for distribution in England. Nor were those figures his only trouble. James had as always hoped for a good market, and had worked so hard and so exclusively on the edition that his income from periodicals had virtually disappeared. Now he learned that his proceeds would be eaten up by Scribner’s obligation to pay his other publishers for the use of their copyrights, and in
October 1908 his first royalty statement
showed that he was due a derisory £7 14s 2d. Even a year later and with the edition complete, he was owed only $600. He told Pinker that the news delighted him; but by that time the damage had been done.

There are many explanations for the depression into which James fell at the end of 1909. He had long practiced an odd, faddish way of eating called “Fletcherizing” in which he chewed his food into liquid, but it now left him feeling undernourished and exhausted. He was periodically lamed by gout and believed he had begun to suffer from a heart condition like the one that would soon kill his brother William. And he had a family history as well, from his father’s “vastation” of the 1840s on to William’s own periods of despair in the years after the Civil War and Alice’s sense of perpetual dusk. Those things all contributed, but we cannot discount what he saw as his own professional disaster, a catastrophe that struck him even more powerfully than his earlier one in the theater. Then he had believed that he could go back to the novel, that he had in fiction a retreat and a future, but it now seemed that the years he had spent on his great edition had led only to the utter absence of an audience. James was in no danger of poverty; the income from the family properties in Syracuse would take care of his needs. Nevertheless, his royalty figures mattered as a mark of the value, in the broadest sense of the term, that readers placed upon his work: a mark of attention, esteem, and permanence, and one that counted all the more now that he could only manage the occasional story. Like many people suffering from depression, he persisted in denying it and claimed that his illness had a purely physical cause. In October he wrote to William that he believed himself over the trials of his recent months, but at the New Year he could no longer get out of bed, and knew that he had entered a
“black and heavy time.”

It was so black, indeed, that William James sent his oldest son, the novelist’s namesake, across the Atlantic to look after him. “Harry” James had trained as a lawyer and became both a successful businessman and a trustee of the American Academy in his uncle’s beloved Rome. And it is this third Henry James who has left the most affecting record of the novelist’s illness. For one night in March 1910 the old man simply broke, sobbing and stammering for hour after despairing hour while his nephew held his hand. He spoke of his own death, and of his sister Alice’s lingering illness, an illness that he feared might be his own fate as well. And he spoke too of his own failure, believing that he had lived to see
“the frustration of all his hopes and ambitions.”
The future could only grow worse.

The young man’s report was so alarming that his father decided that he must go over himself, ill though he was. The years since the turn of the century had brought William an unbroken chain of intellectual success, even as his heart grew ever more fluttery and weak. In 1900 he went for his first course of treatment at Bad Nauheim, the German spa that specialized in cardiac cases. He had needed regular injections of digitalis to get through the series of Edinburgh lectures that became
The Varieties of Religious Experience
, and yet his retirement from teaching only seemed to increase his pace. He filled lecture halls at one university after another, he turned his essays into such crucial volumes in American thought as
Pragmatism
and
A Pluralistic Universe
, and he enjoyed every minute of this belated flowering. But by the beginning of 1910 his disease kept him from his desk and made him plan another stay at Nauheim, though there was little that the period’s doctors could do for him. His son’s report was disturbing enough to make him sail early, however, and a note his wife wrote in Rye that June speaks to the family’s condition:
“William cannot walk and Henry cannot smile.”

James’s pocket diary for that spring records his own series of “
Bad day[s]
—bad, very, very bad . . . after bad night.” He needed Veronal to help him sleep, and wrote to Edith Wharton that he was
“wholly unfit to be alone.”
He wanted only to cling to his family; to cling so much, in fact, that he not only went to join William in Nauheim but also decided to return for a time to America. For he knew that William himself was hopelessly weak. He knew that these days would be the last they would ever spend together, and his notes on William’s health soon began to supplant the ones he made on his own. They sailed in mid-August for Quebec, and then traveled by car over the difficult irregular roads of the day to William’s summer house in New Hampshire, a farm surrounded by the lakes and pine forests of the White Mountains. The philosopher had wanted to see it once more, but by now he could hardly sleep or breathe, and he lived on a cocktail of
morphine and milk
. It could not last, and he had been at home for just a week when he died.
“His extinction changes the face of life for me,”
James wrote. He had been the elder brother always, and the novelist had never ceased to look up to him as “my protector, my backer, my authority and my pride.” Of course, that wasn’t the whole truth. William had remained jealous of his younger brother’s quick path to fame, while James was always anxious about the older man’s response to his work, wanting his approval and knowing that he wasn’t usually going to get it. Yet their competition was a form of companionship, and the novelist never forgot that, though desperately sick himself, his brother had come to see him through the darkness.

That knowledge gave James a new sense of purpose, and in the terrible empty winter that followed, he realized, as he sat with William’s Alice in Cambridge, that he must now commemorate the family of which he was the last survivor. Intending at first merely to collect and annotate his brother’s letters, he soon found himself seized by the
“ramification of old images and connections”
and planning a final
“difficult & unprecedented & perilous”
work.
A Small Boy and Others
and
Notes of a Son and Brother
are the last books he completed; there was a third memoir unfinished on his desk when he died. I have drawn liberally from them in my own early chapters: his recollections of early childhood, his account of Florence and the Boott family, and his memoir of Minny Temple. The second volume ends with her death, but James did not maintain a strict chronology. Instead he wandered as freely in time as Faulkner or Woolf, and in dictating to Theodora Bosanquet he would interrupt the flow of a year to anticipate a later relation or fall back into a newly remembered past.
“I recover it as for ourselves a beautifully mixed adventure”
; the words describe his schooling in France but they might indeed stand for it all. So long-forgotten Albany cousins grow as vivid on the page as Ralph or Isabel; Henry Sr.’s sudden changes of plan make him look as capricious as Daisy Miller herself; and modest antebellum Newport becomes the paradise his whole family has lost.