The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography 1119483077, 9781119483076

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The Life of Henry James

BLACKWELL CRITICAL BIOGRAPHIES General Editor: Claude Rawson This acclaimed series offers informative and durable biographies of important authors, British, European, and North American, which will include substantial critical discussion of their works. An underlying objective is to re-establish the notion that books are written by people who lived in particular times and places. This objective is pursued not by programmatic assertions or strenuous pointmaking, but through the practical persuasion of volumes that offer intelligent criticism within a well-researched biographical context. Also in this series The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer Derek Pearsall

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The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Rosemary Ashton The Life of Evelyn Waugh Douglas Lane Patey The Life of Thomas Hardy Paul Turner The Life of Goethe John R. Williams

The Life of D. H. Lawrence Andrew Harrison The Life of Robert Frost Henry Hart The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley Thomas Lockwood The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography Peter Collister

The Life of Henry James A Critical Biography Peter Collister

This edition first published 2023 © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Peter Collister to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK John Wiley & Sons Singapore Pte. Ltd, 1 Fusionopolis Walk, #06–01 Solaris South Tower, Singapore 138628 For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Collister, Peter, author. Title: The life of Henry James : a critical biography / Peter Collister. Description: Chichester, West Sussex : John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2023. |Series: Blackwell critical biographies | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2023003648 (print) | LCCN 2023003649 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119483076 (paperback) | ISBN 9781119483083 (pdf) | ISBN 9781119483090 (epub) | ISBN 9781119483120 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: James, Henry, 1843-1916. | James, Henry, 1843-1916--Criticism and interpretation. | Authors, American--19th century--Biography. | LCGFT: Biographies. Classification: LCC PS2123 .C65 2023 (print) | LCC PS2123 (ebook) | DDC 813/.4--dc23/ eng/20230228 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003648 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023003649 Cover Image: © Glasshouse Images/Alamy Stock Photo Cover Design: Wiley Set in 10/12pt BemboStd by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd, Pondicherry, India

For Linda and Claude, those ‘willing and prepared hearers’.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Note on the text xi Abbreviationsxii Prelude: James and Biography xiv

Part I  The Early Years

1

1 ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City (1843 –1855) 3 2 Europe and Newport: In Search of a ‘Sensuous Education’ (1855 –1861) 26 3 Civil War and ‘a Consecration to Letters’ (1861 –1869) 49

Part II  Independence and Europe 4 Italy and the ‘Complex Fate’ of Being an American (1869 –1872) 5 Return to Italy and ‘an Incalculable Number of Gathered Impressions’ (1872 –1873) 6 Rome and Paris: Roderick Hudson: An Experiment in Journalism (1873 –1876) 7 ‘The Wheel of London Life’ and Early Novels (1876 –1879) 8 Friendships Begin and End: The Achievement of The Portrait of a Lady (1879 –1881)

Part III  The Lure of the Theatre 9 Family Deaths: New Friendships in Europe (1881 –1884) 10 A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson (1885 –1887) 11 ‘The Sawdust & Orange-peel Phase’ Begins: The Tragic Muse (1887 –1891) 12 Deaths and Losses: Theatrical Ventures (1891 –1895) vii

71 73 93 110 134 156

181 183 209 229 248



  Contents 

Part IV  The Later Years

269

13 14 15 16

Return to ‘The Sacred Fluid of Fiction’ (1895 –1899) A Roman Encounter: ‘Letting Yourself Go’ (1899 –1902) ‘Dearly Beloved’ Young Men: The Final Novels (1902 –1904) The ‘Agreeable and Absorbing Adventure’ of America: The New York Edition and Last Stories (1904 –1909) 17 Loss of William, ‘So Shining a Presence’: Autobiographical Writing: The Great War and Death (1909 –1916)

271 297 323 343 369

Letter Details 395 Notes421 Bibliography435 Index447

viii

Acknowledgments

The literature on Henry James, biographical and critical, is enormous and my indebtedness to the books and articles I have managed to read is correspondingly great. Even in death, Leon Edel stands at the portal for students of James. In recent years he has been criticized on several counts – for his sometimes cavalier editorial methods, for his predominantly Freudian interpretation of events in James’s life, and for his exclusive control over the availability of manuscripts – yet the breadth of his work as biographer and editor in making James’s writing available to readers is undeniable. Edel’s own writing is invariably engaging and persuasive and his biographical endeavours have an assurance which comes from his having met many of the protagonists in James’s later life. Of more recent biographers of James and members of the James family I have found the work of Fred Kaplan, Sheldon Novick, R.W.B. Lewis and Alfred Habegger most helpful. The most significant event in biographical terms in recent years has been the project to publish The Complete Letters of Henry James undertaken by the University of Nebraska Press which began in 2006. Given the number of his extant letters (some 10,000), this is an ambitious undertaking which, as it progresses, is already proving of immense benefit to those investigating James’s life and work. Based on the Calendar and Biographical Register created by Steven H. Jobe and Susan E. Gunter, the collection of Complete Letters (fifteen volumes so far) contains a wealth of detailed biographical information, the product of extensive research by editors Greg W. Zacharias, Pierre A.Walker, Michael Anesko and Katie Sommer. It has been the indispensable resource for the first forty-three years of Henry James’s life and my indebtedness to this team of scholars will be apparent. Editions of James’s fiction are now appearing under the aegis of Cambridge University Press and, as well as supplying a reliable text, they provide a range of editorial matter which helps contextualize his work in personal and cultural terms.

ix



  Acknowledgments 

When available (there are currently ten volumes – the eleventh, Washington Square, arrived too late for me to consult), this is the edition I have used when discussing James’s novels. For much of my work I have relied on the resources of the British Library and, once again, I am pleased to record my gratitude to its staff in the Rare Books and Music Reading Room whose professionalism and helpfulness remain unparalleled. Also in London, I wish to thank Kate Jarman, Trust Archivist, Barts Health NHS Trust, who gave me useful advice as well as access to the archive at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City. I am especially grateful to Bay James, James’s literary executor, for granting me permission to quote from previously unpublished material held at the Houghton Library, Harvard College, at the Henry James Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, and the Morgan Library and Museum, New York, where Dr Philip S. Palmer was especially helpful. Meredith Mann of the New York Public Library also arranged for me to use the resources of the New York Public Library. For granting permission to reproduce the Mathew Brady daguerreotype of Henry James with his father (Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1092-9 (4597.6), I am grateful to Leslie A. Morris, Gore Vidal Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Houghton Library, on behalf of the president and fellows of Harvard College. On literary executors and permissions I received some useful advice from Michael B. Winship. In Rome the helpful and well-informed volunteer staff at the Non-Catholic Cemetery on Via Caio Cestio made me feel very welcome. At Wiley Blackwell I am grateful for the support and advice given by Nicole Allen, Britta Ramaraj, Liz Wingett and Ed Robinson. I am indebted to the two anonymous readers appointed by Wiley Blackwell who offered detailed and sometimes challenging comments on my manuscript. They saved me from a number of errors: I am to blame for any remaining. I am grateful, too, for the encouragement and advice offered over the years by Pierre A. Walker, Adrian Poole, Peter C. Caldwell, Michael Anesko and Greg Zacharias (who provided copies of James letters as well as advance sight of the most recent volumes of the Complete Letters). I also spent an illuminating hour with Alexander Nemerov looking at the Holbein portrait of The Ambassadors in the National Gallery, London. From the beginning, Linda Bree and Claude Rawson have been involved in the progress of my manuscript and have made many valuable suggestions: I am grateful to them both for their kindness and support. Finally, it is a pleasure to express my gratitude to John Aplin who has been an enthusiastic and encouraging partner in my study of James both in Britain and America.

x

Note on the text

Currency values At certain points in the biography I note Henry James’s earnings from his writing and lecturing. It is very difficult to assess their equivalent current values, but it might be worth noting that in the last decades of the nineteenth century the average US worker in manufacturing earned roughly $345 per annum (£71). Exchange rates for dollars and pounds sterling remained fairly constant from 1875 through to the 1900s when £1 sterling (with minor annual changes) was equivalent to $4.85 (see Lawrence H. Officer, ‘Dollar-Pound Exchange Rate from 1791’, MeasuringWorth, 2022. URL: http://www.measuringworth.com/exchangepound).

Methods of Documentation The practice of the editors of James’s Complete Letters is to reproduce the MS text as it appears; any slips or spelling mistakes are reproduced without editorial intervention and I have followed this principle. References to frequently-quoted texts are given in parentheses; all other references appear at the end of the volume.To avoid cluttering my narrative, information on the dates and recipients of letters from which I quote, each with a cue phrase, is provided in ‘Letter Details’ at the end of the volume.

Translations I have included translations only of less familiar French words or phrases.

xi

Abbreviations

AS

The American Scene, ed. Peter Collister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) CH Henry James:The Critical Heritage, ed. Roger Gard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968) CL55-72 Complete Letters of Henry James, 1855–1872, 2 volumes, ed. Pierre A. Walker, Greg W. Zacharias (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006) CL72-76 Complete Letters of Henry James, 1872–1876, 3 volumes (2008) CL76-78 Complete Letters of Henry James, 1876–1878, 2 volumes (2012–2013) CL78-80 Complete Letters of Henry James, 1878–1880, 2 volumes (2014–2015) CL80-83 Complete Letters of Henry James, 1880–1883, 2 volumes (2016–2017), ed. Michael Anesko, Greg W. Zacharias CL83-84 Complete Letters of Henry James, 1883–1884, 2 volumes (2018–2019) CL84-86 Complete Letters of Henry James, 1884–1886, 2 volumes (2020–2021) CN Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) CP The Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949) CR Henry James:The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Kevin J. Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) CT The Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, 12 volumes (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962–1964) CTWC Henry James: Collected Travel Writings:The Continent, ed. Richard Howard (New York: Library of America, 1993) CTWGBA Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America, ed. Richard Howard (New York: Library of America, 1993) CWHJA The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art, ed. Peter Collister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)

xii

CWHJD CWJ DBF HJC HJL HJ&EW LC 1 LC 2 LHJ LL NSB SBO TMY WWS HJ AJ HJ Sr MWJ WJ AGJ

  Abbreviations  The Complete Writings of Henry James on Drama, ed. Peter Collister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 12 volumes (Charlottesville,VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992–1999) Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men, ed. Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001) Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene, ed. Pierre A. Walker (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 volumes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974–1984) Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters: 1900–1915, ed. Lyall H. Powers (New York: Scribner, 1990) Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature: American Writers: English Writers, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984) Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers: Other European Writers: the Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984) Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 volumes (London: Macmillan, 1920) Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1999) Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) and The Middle Years (1917), ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011) A Small Boy and Others (1913), ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville,VA: University of V   irginia Press, 2011) Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) and The Middle Years (1917), ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011) William Wetmore Story and His Friends from Letters, Diaries, and Recollections, 2 volumes (London: Blackwood, 1903) Henry James Alice James (sister) Henry James Senior (father) Mary Walsh James (mother) William James (elder brother) Alice Gibbens James (wife of WJ)

xiii

Prelude: James and Biography

‘The Real Right Thing’ (1899), a strange, ghostly story by Henry James, outlines some of the pleasures and (more emphatically) the anxieties of writing biography. Just a few pages long, it is less a story than a record of changing circumstance. The widow of a recently dead author approaches one of his younger, obscure friends, offering him all her husband’s papers and his warm, comfortable study to work in so that he can record his life. It is a convenient arrangement, but she is a strange Gothic figure clad in black, her face half-obscured by a black fan, as she silently appears and disappears in stairways and rooms. And her intentions soon become clear – she will ensure that her role in the author’s life is represented as she wishes. Initially the work goes well and Withermore, the emblematically named young man, senses the benign presence of his friend: ‘the light breath of his dead host was as distinctly in his hair as his own elbows were on the table before him’ (CT 10: 478). If he only were to look up from his work, he knows he would see him across the table. Both widow and aspiring biographer acknowledge his presence. Then, one evening, Withermore realizes that he has been abandoned. He presses on, but it is hopeless. He stands with the widow in the hall, the world of the living illuminated by electric light and furnished with fashionable rugs from Tottenham Court Road stores, and they recognize that ‘some monstrous oppression … was closing over both of them’. Withermore’s earlier conviction that the ‘artist was what he did – he was nothing else’ is confirmed (475). The dead man is vulnerable and helpless, and his admirer has to acknowledge the effrontery of the intrusion: ‘“[w]e lay him bare. We serve him up. What is it called? We give him to the world”’ (483). Finally, his biographer must surrender as his subject seems to stand in the darkness at the top of the stairs, projecting the incontrovertible wishes of the dead: ‘[h]e strains forward out of his darkness; he reaches toward us out of his mystery; he makes us dim signs out of his horror’. It is not the horror of death or oblivion but rather his helplessness – he is not indifferent and his strength of feeling has the power of a curse. Withermore finds the door to his room guarded by his presence, ‘“[i]mmense.  But dim. Dark. Dreadful”’ (484, 485). xiv



  Prelude: James and Biography 

This is one, sensationally sinister version of the biographical enterprise, though other acts of investigation, or intrusion, and entailing alternative horrors, feature in James’s fiction. In ‘The Aspern Papers’, the posthumous privacy of Jeffrey Aspern is threatened by the inquiries of the dishonourable American scholar who turns up in Venice to befriend the two women who can help him. Aspern is finally saved when the unnamed man (who also narrates) is frightened off by the final bargain offered to him: the unpalatable prospect of marriage to the younger of the women – his own life and body in exchange for the real object of his desire: Aspern’s papers. James’s great essay of 1907 on Shakespeare and The Tempest endorses the completeness and untouchability of the poet’s works, the corresponding irrelevance of his personal circumstances and the futility of scholars’ biographical enquiries. By contrast, the novelist assumed the biographer’s role himself in the portraits and sketches he wrote in the manner of Sainte-Beuve, the French critic he so admired, which combine the critical with a selection of biographical detail, ‘life’ made to serve ‘letters’. In an early monograph on Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879), James distances himself from the genre from the beginning by affirming that he will give ‘this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography’ (Hawthorne, p. 1). The title of his other biographical essay, William Wetmore Story and his Friends (1903), indicates the broader nature of James’s interest beyond its principal subject.The life of this expatriate Bostonian, resident in Rome, established sculptor and aspiring dramatist, is approached through impressions of Italian landscapes and cities and sketches of celebrated writers such as James Russell Lowell and Robert and Elizabeth Browning. James confessed that ‘there is no subject – there is nothing in the man himself to write about. There is nothing for me but to do a tour de force, or try to – leave poor dear W.W.S. out, practically, and make a little volume on the old Roman, Americo-Roman, Hawthornesque and other bygone days’.1 The text of this biography is, naturally, more circumspect, though ‘the interesting boxful’ of materials to which he refers seems to be a formal invocation of the biographer, a rhetorical aside, rather than raising the romantic possibilities and mysteries attaching to his subject, the dark mood of ‘The Real Right Thing’. In his own latter years, James, clearly and acutely aware of the biographical curiosity attaching to great authors, sought continuously to preserve his own posthumous privacy. He insistently (and often fruitlessly) advised friends to destroy his letters, and the scene of his supervising the burning of papers in his back garden in later years must have seemed like an episode from one of his short stories. He did not wish – quite understandably – to leave ‘personal and private documents at the mercy of any accidents’.2 Many of his letters to family and friends are finely written and engaging documents, but those to the young men he loved in later life, make the reader feel, even now, as if intruding on the novelist’s privacy. Finally, recording a time long past, a society and culture quite distinct from a present that was preparing for world war, James embarked on his own ­autobiography, xv



  Prelude: James and Biography 

highly original in its avoidance of the ponderousness of many Victorian memoirs, affectionate in its recollection of people and incidents otherwise forgotten, and faithful in its adherence to the prevailing motive which was to follow the development of a life pursuing the ambition to be ‘just literary’. He exploits allusion and a style rich in possibility which conveys (at least initially) ‘the indelibility of the childish vision’ (AS, p. 92). In these two and a half volumes, A Small Boy and Others, Notes of a Son and Brother and the incomplete Middle Years, James discloses a wealth of unique biographical detail and has thus determined how posterity will learn of his earlier life. In addition, his text contains other less obvious messages, minor revelations which yield their secrets when innocent assertions are examined. His last typist and amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet, recalls the scene of their composition and the fluency of James’s thoughts as he paced the room, ‘sounding out the periods in tones of free resonant assurance. At such times he was beyond reach of irrelevant sounds or sights’.3 The process had not been without hazards for James himself: the genesis for the autobiographical writing was a projected edition of his late brother William’s letters, though his handling of these soon led him to his own childhood memories which take up the first volume, A Small Boy and Others. The second volume, Notes of a Son and Brother, contains a generous selection (closely ‘edited’ by James himself) of family letters, written principally by his brother, father, and cousin, Minny Temple. The fact that they were now all dead clearly allowed him a revisionary freedom that he sometimes exploited, whatever others said. Editorial criteria have, of course, changed over the years, but James’s confidence in handling such documents never wavers. In Notes of a Son and Brother, he assumes an assured authorial stance, a role as informed mediator and arranger of information uniquely qualified and therefore to be trusted: ‘I allow myself not to hang back in gathering several passages from another series for fear of their crossing in a manner the line of privacy and giving a distinctness to old intimate things. The distinctness is in the first place all to the honour of the persons and the interests thus glimmering through; and I hold, in the second, that the light touch under which they revive positively adds, by the magic of memory, a composite fineness’ (NSB, p. 207). If these volumes have indeed negotiated a ‘line of privacy’ and honoured to some degree those ‘old intimate things’, they may stand then as an authorized life quite literally, and they offer the richest resource for the biographer. But the dangers of the biographical process are many and forbidding, not least in diminishing or compromising the mystery and autonomy of the individual. James himself, who in his later years gave an interview whose premises he then denied, spells out his own anxieties to what may have been his surprised interviewer – though his change of mind or disowning of the process nevertheless was included as part of the final published portrait. He seems struck by the potential vulgarity of any association with the press and its ‘reverberations’, and, more forcefully, by the horror of his xvi



  Prelude: James and Biography 

private self publicly paraded: ‘“I have a constituted and systematic indisposition to having anything to do myself, personally, with anything in the nature of an interview, report, reverberation, that is, to adopting, endorsing, or in any other wise taking to myself anything that any one may have presumed to contrive to gouge, as it were, out of me. It has, for me, nothing to do with me – my me, at all; but only with the other person’s equivalent for that mystery, whatever it may be. Thereby if you find anything to say about our apparently blameless time together, – it is your little affair exclusively”’.4 Given that biography demands such violent intrusion – and James has been unusually emphatic here – it must also be alive to the mystery of its subject and to the darkness, mysteriousness or ghostliness which he sees as a potential consequence of enquiry. The late short story, ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908), raises a comparably unsettling biographical vision: when the mature expatriate (with much experience in common with James himself) returns to New York, to the house of his youth, he there pursues and confronts his alternative self, the man he might have become, in whose spectral presence he finally collapses.

xvii

Part I

The Early Years

1 ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City (1843 –1855)

On the fine late-summer afternoon of 1904 when the ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm II arrived from Southampton and docked at Hoboken, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City, the passengers who gathered to disembark included the distinguished and highly respected novelist, Henry James. Now tending to corpulence, he was 61 years old, representing himself archly to his readers as a ‘mere ancient contemplative person curious of character’ (AS, p. 19). Though born in America, he had lived in England for most of his adult life. As for his personal circumstances: he was a celibate bachelor in indifferent health, enjoying a variety of close friendships with both men and women, though his passions were engaged by younger men; his closest family was that of his brother William James, America’s foremost philosopher and professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Henry, too, was a public figure, and this visit to his homeland which would last almost a year, partly answering a personal need, had a public dimension; his progress was reported regularly by newspapers across the country. He planned a book that would record his impressions, to be published in 1907 as The American Scene, and he went on to deliver two lectures at numerous venues. He was a name and a celebrity, though comparatively few had read his fiction which, short on action, returned most characteristically to the theme of innocence and its loss, dramatized within intricate relationships in settings both American and European. He had last visited America in 1883 and now he was particularly shocked at the transformation of New York; the once prominent spire of Trinity Church in Manhattan’s Financial District, had been dwarfed by skyscrapers – some reaching as high as 21 stories. The city’s population

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

3



  ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City 

had tripled and it had become a centre of commerce and industry.When walking its streets, James was shocked both by the place and its occupants. The place in which James had spent many of his boyhood years was mid-nineteenth-century New York: he was born on 15 April 1843, at 21 Washington Place, into a family which belonged to the privileged classes. The city had recently become America’s largest conurbation, boasting fresh running water for its inhabitants from the Murray Hill Reservoir, and offering cultural diversion with the founding of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. James’s twentieth-century return acted powerfully, it seems, to draw him back to his memories of that earlier time, a retreat later made more pressing by the death of William in 1910 and a planned edition of his brother’s letters. As a consequence, James embarked in his last few remaining years on a major autobiographical project. In A Small Boy and Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914) and The Middle Years (1917), he found a new voice and evolved a new medium of autobiographical expression. As he explained to his nephew, Harry, ‘It must be an absolutely original, personal, unprecedented thing’.1 The first two-thirds of A Small Boy and Others has New York for its setting, and this city of the 1840s and fifties provides a rich and complex setting for his tender, sometimes self-effacing account of his early life. A short story of 1884, ‘Georgina’s Reasons’, refers to this ‘primitive epoch’ with pointed nostalgia, and it clearly has a kind of Arcadian status for the narrator as he recalls a time when ‘the battered rotunda of Castle Garden echoed with expensive vocal music’, and ‘Hoboken, of a summer afternoon, was a genteel resort’ (CT 6: 17). In James’s late memoir, its houses, streets, parks, entertainments, shops, transport, are itemized in detail and in their different seasons – in summer time, for instance, the dusty smell of the city, down in ‘the rank and rubbishy waterside quarters’, and the bushels of peaches transported from Middlesex County, New Jersey (SBO, p. 60). Even the playbill advertisements on Fifth Avenue were read and pondered with serious concentration. It is an idealized version of the past, as he readily admits, of locations viewed ‘in a dusty golden light that special memories of small misery scarce in the least bedim’ (p. 161). It was a place of such innocence – his own, at least – that, as he wandered alone, Broadway itself ‘must have been then as one of the alleys of Eden’ (p. 164). It is a place which no longer exists, as ephemeral as his own childhood, a form of personal construction. Everything, it seems, was noticed, nothing wasted, such, as he confesses, was ‘the measure of my small adhesiveness’ (p. 82).

The James Family James’s paternal ancestry was predominantly Irish; the grandparents of his grandmother, Catharine Barber, had emigrated in the previous century, while his grandfather, William James, had travelled to New York from County Cavan more 4



  1843 –1855 

recently in 1789. James believed that his grandmother represented ‘the only English blood’ in the family (SBO, p. 8), though this has been questioned or modified by later commentators.2 Her family had been Scottish Presbyterians, a form of dissent shared by William, and they had emigrated from Ireland. When the two married in Albany, New York, in 1803, Catharine became William’s third wife, both of her predecessors having died young; this partnership in which eight children survived to adulthood could not have been especially happy – Alfred Habegger regards her as ‘simultaneously disregarded and depended on’3 – but it lasted almost thirty years until William’s death in 1832. Their substantial house in Albany, with Catharine at its centre, became a home for her children and grandchildren within an extended family whose members seem to have been especially prone to illness and early death. Aside from her own children (the last born when she was forty-six), there were three from her husband’s earlier marriages; Catharine’s younger sister had also died, leaving eight children. James, in his memoir, remembers this home as ‘a nurseried and playroomed orphanage’ and it is clear that his grandmother, daughter of a former Minuteman, gentleman farmer and judge, had become the kindly but exhausted centre of the large family establishment at 43 North Pearl Street. Money was not a problem, for William James was a shrewd businessman whose fortune was originally built on trading and importing goods. He had later purchased land in the distant Midwest, in Syracuse, New York, and also Manhattan, and had invested widely and successfully. He had been an early proponent of the construction scheme which linked Lake Erie with the Hudson River; the building of the Erie Canal linked the Great Lakes, and thus the Midwest, with the Atlantic Ocean, an ambitious and highly lucrative venture. The chief speaker at the ceremony celebrating the completion of this historic project on 2 November 1825 at the Albany Capitol was William James. Forceful, irascible, he had become rich, leaving an estate on his death of over a million dollars (some say $3 million) – a fortune which allowed the next generation (including Henry Sr, the novelist’s father) the luxury of never having to seek employment. His will proved contentious, however: he bequeathed just $3,000 per year in her lifetime to his wife, and seriously reduced amounts to two of his sons, one of them Henry Sr, with whom there had been a falling-out; he received a mere $1,250 per year, much less than what most of his more compliant siblings received. But the will was successfully contested and the estate more equitably divided; Henry Sr’s inheritance worked out at $10,000 per year. There had been conflict within the family and Henry Sr, whatever his father’s high-handedness, had also been a source of disappointment.The crucial point in his young life had been the major accident he suffered as a boy of thirteen; in a school game (or possibly experiment) illustrating how hot air rises which involved flying balloons with a burning rope attached to them, a hayloft had been set ablaze; he had 5



  ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City 

tried to douse the fire but his trousers, soaked in turpentine, ignited. One of his legs was so badly burnt that he spent two years in bed and underwent two amputations, the last removing the leg from above the knee. He would later use a cork prosthetic limb, though his capacity to walk would always be compromised. Henry Sr’s tutor, the brilliant Joseph Henry, went on to become a professor at the Smithsonian Institution, a connection ‘of grateful pupil with benignant tutor’ which Henry Jr is keen to mark in his biography of William Wetmore Story, the artist commissioned to execute a bronze sculpture of the eminent scientist (WWS 2: 269). In 1828, Henry Sr, a bright boy of seventeen, enrolled at Union College, Schenectady, an institution not far from Albany to which his father, a trustee, had been a generous donor. He followed a classical curriculum including Latin, Greek and rhetoric, and was popular with fellow students and members of staff. Student life there, was, however, too strict for Henry. Drinking excessively, he quickly ran into debt and eventually dropped out. Having returned, he graduated in 1830, though his academic record remained mediocre. Eventually he gave up alcohol, but his dependency had blighted much of his early manhood. Having taken up gambling, he followed an uncertain path in the years following. He also became, however, religiously enthusiastic, enrolling in 1835 on a course at Princeton Theological Seminary, New Jersey, well known for its strong Calvinistic tendencies. He intended to prepare for the ministry, but his religious views here became extreme and he was still beset by his addictions; at this time, some years after the death of his father, his inheritance came through, and he realized that he need never work to maintain self or dependents; after almost two years he left the college and set off on the long journey to England and Ireland, much of his visit spent quietly in London. He returned once more to Princeton, but by now vocally hostile to established religion, he soon dropped out. His later writings, original and sometimes controversial, chart James Sr’s earnest, lifelong spiritual questing and social engagement, though, as F.O. Matthiessen points out, he was ‘always talking about potentiality rather than actuality’.4 Two and a half chapters of his autobiography survive, attributed, as his son William observes, to ‘an entirely fictitious personage’. Immortal Life: illustrated in a brief Autobiographic Sketch of the late Stephen Dewhurst. Edited with an Introduction by Henry James, reflects his spiritual and emotional commitment, often in highly dramatic detail. This fragment is included in The Literary Remains of Henry James, a collection selected by William James, who attempts to synthesize the essentials of Henry Sr’s philosophical belief: ‘[i]n the first place, he felt that the individual man, as such, is nothing, but owes all he is and has to the race nature he inherits, and to the society into which he is born. And, secondly, he scorned to admit, even as a possibility, that the great and loving Creator, who has all the being and the power, and has brought us as far as this, should not bring us through, and out, into the most triumphant harmony’. William includes, however, a warning for his readers: ‘[d]o not squeeze the 6



  1843 –1855 

terms or the logic too hard!’, for ‘he despised every formulation he made as soon as it was uttered’.5 A fellow student and room-mate of Henry Sr at Princeton, Hugh Walsh, introduced him to his sister in New York City, Mary Robertson Walsh, who (after he had made another trip to Europe) became his wife in 1840. The civil ceremony took place at Mary’s home in Washington Square, accommodating Henry Sr’s distaste for formalized religion; the bride wore ‘India muslin and a wondrous gold headband’ (SBO, pp. 184–185). A year older than her husband, she came from a wealthy New York family; her father had died long ago in 1820, and her sister Catharine (who also found Henry Sr’s original thinking attractive), would, as ‘Aunt Kate’ become a semi-permanent member of what became the James household. Mary clearly offered her husband a reassuring stability, and her son Henry (despite portraying some grotesque family dynamics in his fiction) invariably speaks of her with warmth.The couple would have five children, and the marriage seems to have been happy, though from the beginning when Mary had renounced her ‘rigidly devout’ faith,6 it was largely she who deferred to her husband’s often idiosyncratic needs. Children quickly arrived: William in 1842, Henry in 1843, Garth Wilkinson (Wilky) in 1844, Robertson (Bob) in 1846, and Alice in 1848. Theirs was a peripatetic childhood owing to Henry Sr’s restlessness.When Henry Jr was just six months old the family travelled to England and also visited France before returning to New York a year later, in autumn 1844. The following year they were living at 50 North Pearl Street, in what is now downtown Albany, close to grandmother James, where they remained until early 1846. Albany, high up on the Hudson River, some 150 miles north of Manhattan, was at this time considered to be on the edge of frontier territory, a thriving river port, and one of the country’s biggest cities, though Henry recalls it as bathed in a golden light redolent of a painting of a Dutch street scene, his grandmother’s house (demolished in 1860) with its ‘yellow archaic gable-end’, a memory of ‘brick baked in the land of dykes’, and cobbled streets (SBO, p. 13). The family then returned to New York, travelling between the two cities until 1848, when they moved into a newly built house bought by Henry Sr at 58 West Fourteenth Street. Here they stayed until 1855 when once again the entire family crossed the Atlantic; they remained in Europe for almost three years, living in Switzerland, France and England. They returned, not to New York, but to Newport, Rhode Island, when, having stayed for a year, they left once more for Switzerland in 1859. By October 1860 they were back again in Newport, and here they stayed until 1864. The next move was to Boston, Massachusetts, and, in 1866 they crossed the Charles River to Cambridge. Their house at 20 Quincy Street would become the family home until Mary’s death in 1882. European travel was the norm for comparably wealthy, privileged American families in these ‘classic years of the great Americano-European legend’ (LC 2: 1167), but such relentless movement and long-distance travel are exceptional. 7



  ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City 

Doubtless, however servanted and supported, the weight of organizing travel arrangements for small children and for creating some form of domestic order fell upon Mary James’s shoulders. The intellectual excitement, meantime, was for her husband; in London in the winter of 1843, carrying a letter of introduction from Ralph Waldo Emerson, he met Thomas Carlyle as well as a range of other British luminaries, including John Stuart Mill, Alfred Tennyson (not yet a Lord) and George Henry Lewes. The following year while staying near Windsor he suffered what he described as a ‘vastation’. The term applies primarily to the idea of laying waste, as in war, but by the middle of the nineteenth century (OED quotes Emerson’s ‘Swedenborg; or, the Mystic’ (1847) as an example) the term had come to mean ‘the action of purifying by the destruction of evil qualities or elements’. James Sr’s account indeed dramatically describes ‘some damnèd shape squatting invisible to me … raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life’,7 as if some demon within, perhaps expressing the kind of inherited guilt derived from formative religious teaching, needed to be exorcized. He attributed his long and difficult recovery from this crisis to the writings of Swedish philosopher and mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, whose ideas he would study for the rest of his life.William James suggests that ‘his philosophy indeed is but the statement of his cure’.8 Henry Sr had been drawn to Swedenborg by the anonymous articles of the British doctor, James John Garth Wilkinson, who would become a close friend, and for whom his third son would be named. Emerson, too, published an important essay on Swedenborg, examining the relations between mysticism and scientific reasoning. The effect of the Jameses’ migratory life on the children was enduring: apart from the six years they spent in New York, every home and any local friendship would have seemed temporary; education was similarly piecemeal, provided through a range of establishments or private tutors. On the other hand, they lived in a stimulating, unconventional and loving environment, and were exposed to an extraordinary range of experiences as they moved between two continents and appreciated at first hand the riches of European culture. In later years William James, commenting on his younger brother Henry and his long residence in England, offered a more general insight applicable to the dynamics of their family and the rich interdependencies it engendered: ‘[h]e’s really … a native of the James family, and has no other country’.9

The ‘Dispensaries of Learning’ Henry Jr’s education, as he recalls it, was curiously haphazard, allowing him little opportunity to distinguish himself. School didn’t begin well: brother William had preceded him to the Dutch House in Albany and ‘was already seated at his task’; Henry, by contrast, was dragged there, ‘crying and kicking’, quickly retreated and 8



  1843 –1855 

refused to return (SBO, p. 12). The two brothers, we are told (possibly with some exaggeration) were never again in the same schoolroom together. Always ‘round the corner and out of sight’, William would never be caught up with, and Henry projects his own role as secondary and subservient. His schooldays in New York City emerge as generally uninspiring and uncertain, both stressful and dull, peopled by Dickensian grotesques among the adults and unleavened by peer friendships. He began in Dames’ schools, feeling some ‘humiliation’ at being taught by genteel women who ‘handled us literally with gloves’ (p. 17): their names survive – Mrs Daly, Miss Rogers, Miss Sedgwick, Mrs Wright (Lavinia D.). He was tutored at home in French, by ‘small brown snappy Mademoiselle Delavigne’, and ‘a large Russian lady’, with ‘Merovingian sidebraids’ who had arrived, it seems,‘straight from Siberia’ (pp. 19, 21). He takes pleasure in summoning up ‘certain faint echoes, wavering images’ of other teachers now consigned to anonymity,‘ladies and gentlemen, dimly foreign, mere broken syllables of whose names come back to me’ (p. 160), though the name of the formidable Count Adam Gurowski, a Polish émigré, fluent in French, German and Russian, survives, however brief his tenure. Later Henry was enrolled at the Institution Vergnès, probably on 166 East 10th Street (though he says Broadway, SBO, p. 160) which offered a wide variety of modern languages (such schools were fashionable at the time) as well as commercial arithmetic and higher mathematics. There he witnessed, sitting alongside ‘[l]ittle Cubans and Mexicans’ much ‘whacking’; among ‘infuriated ushers, of foreign speech and flushed complexion’, Henry sat ‘unscathed and unterrified’, protected simply by his own insignificance (p. 163). In 1853–1854 he attended with William the school of Richard Puling Jenks at 689 Broadway,10 ‘a small but sincere academy’ whose drawing- and writing-masters, Mr Coe and Mr Dolmidge, are recalled with affection (p. 170). Benjamin H. Coe looked like the formidable war veteran General Winfield Scott, but produced small, treasured ‘drawing cards’ for his pupils. Handwriting and calligraphy were important elements in the curriculum of the time, and Mr Dolmidge becomes an emblem of his discipline, ‘a pure pen-holder of a man’ and likened to a Phiz or Cruikshank illustration for Dickens’s fiction (p. 165). After a year the boys were withdrawn, ostensibly because Mr Jenks moved premises, and in 1854–1855 Henry came under the tutelage of Messrs Forrest and Quackenbos in a shop-like if fashionable establishment at 71 West Fourteenth Street, where, once again, he languished. Having failed to succeed at Latin in Mr Jenks’s school, Henry was compelled to study ‘the theory and practice of book-keeping’, while William was promoted to the first floor ‘classical’ department. Here at least, with Mr Forrest, ‘awful and arid’, school became reassuringly predictable: ‘we didn’t, under his sway, go in terror, only went exceedingly in want’ (pp. 170, 172). Henry attended some dozen schools and experienced a range of curricula, but remained passive and unengaged, preoccupied ‘with almost anything but the fact of 9



  ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City 

learning’ and receiving no ‘throb of assurance or success’ (pp. 169, 158).Though we are reliant here on the elaborate medium of the writer’s recollections, a few points emerge: the large number of establishments attended, enough to ‘excite’ the author’s ‘wonder’ (p. 17), his seeming imperviousness to most of what was offered, and his confessed insignificance. No blame is attached to the parents who were paying these school fees, and for whom the idea of continuity seems to have been absent. It was not unusual for boys at this time to attend a number of schools (as occurred with some of the James cousins) though even in subsequent years in Switzerland, James Sr’s choice of schools was, at best, eccentric. Henry’s vocabulary as he recalls his relationship to his education as ‘inapt’ and of his having shown ‘inaptitude’ – terms much less common than ‘inept’ and ‘ineptitude’ – may signify some unease, a sense of opportunity lost. Aside from the Dickensian references which represent Henry’s young self as a kind of innocent, haplessly abandoned to the world, James invokes in these pages of recollection another work of fiction, Alphonse Daudet’s Jack (1876).The young hero of the title attends the Gymnase Moronval, described in consistently colonialist language as a ‘multi-coloured school’, located in ‘one of the finest quarters of Paris’,11 having been deposited there by his self-indulgent mother. James sees his own schooldays as presaging this work, a fictionalized account of ‘contemporary customs’, as if he had already lived certain of the experiences it narrates and can vouch for their authenticity. He sees himself in the moment, so absolute and unavoidable as such childhood moments are, when Jack looks around and believes he, a native of the place, is as bereft as those of his contemporaries who have come from the distant tropics, the ‘pays chauds’: ‘It seemed to him that his life was now to be thrown amongst orphans, forsaken children, himself as forsaken as though he also had come from Timbuctoo or Tahiti’ (Jack, p. 51). Such sensations of isolation, institutional carelessness, parental negligence, enacted in privileged conditions, are powerfully – forensically – recorded, though the pain and irritation have become tempered in the elaborate nuances and allusive gestures of lateJamesian prose. Adopting a more direct, assertive voice, James himself offers a strange (if touching) justification of his parents’ approach to education – namely, an encouragement of their children to ‘Convert, convert, convert!’ all experience, even ‘things vain and unintended’, for their best moral development (SBO, pp. 173–174): not to pursue the vain idea of ‘success’ but to aspire to ‘spiritual decency’ – as if life itself didn’t already offer enough opportunities for boredom or disappointment. In the public arena of his writings Henry Sr affirmed portentously that he wished any child of his to become ‘an upright man’, by ‘instructing his understanding by moral truths, and investing him with a certain responsibility over his own conduct’.12 By contrast, his son’s most unguarded, and significantly retrospective comment on his education is direct and untypically bitter; it appeared not in print but in a letter of 8 November 10



  1843 –1855 

1906 to his niece, Peggy James (William’s daughter), with reference to himself as that distant ‘small boy’: he looks tenderly at his past self, as if he were a neglected Dickensian child: ‘No one took any interest whatever in his development, except to neglect or stunt it where it might have helped – and any that he was ever to have he picked up wholly by himself ’.The conclusion is corroborated independently by the youngest of the James children, Alice, when she advised William on his children’s education: ‘What enrichment of mind and memory can children have without continuity and if they are torn up by the roots every little while as we were! Of all things don’t make the mistake wh. brought about our rootless and accidental childhood’.13 Young Henry’s early education may have failed him, though he was to find less formal means of apprehending the world. For instance, the British illustrated weekly magazine Punch, with its humorous satirical commentary on current figures and institutions, which he describes, with a nod to Matthew Arnold, as its ‘“criticism of life” … gentle and forbearing’,14 with contributions from William Makepeace Thackeray (a favourite author) and illustrations by John Leech, provided insights into alternative social and political systems in the most entertaining way for this ‘silent devotee’. It must have helped form part of that soon-to-be-fulfilled dream of Europe; indeed, he recalls how, for him, ‘Punch was England: Punch was London; and England and London were at that time words of multifarious suggestion to this small American child’ (CWHJA, pp. 358, 359). For the time, though, New York itself could offer him a richly diverse, potentially dangerous, set of experiences. The most important opportunity was to be found in the operation of the city itself and his parents’ apparent willingness to let him wander its ‘beguiling’ streets alone, ‘master of my short steps’, like some child in a Perrault fairy tale, though he, at least, remained a ‘safely-prowling infant’ (SBO, pp. 24, 85). He sees himself once more as the small boy, smelling ‘the cold dusty paint and iron as the rails of the Eighteenth Street corner rub his contemplative nose’ (p. 25), yet such a natural habit of observation also anticipates a future adult calling to be played out on the streets of Europe’s great cities. It is an activity which he self-deprecatingly calls ‘dawdling and gaping’, a pursuit ostensibly unambitious and inactive, but which denotes a sensitivity, a capacity to receive an impression, to feel a relation or ‘vibration’ which is the distinguishing mark of the creative artist. Mid-nineteenth-century New York City retained a semi-rural or -agricultural character, with poplars, pigs and poultry in evidence near Henry’s Fourteenth Street home. Soldiers still rehearsed their parades in Washington Square seven blocks from home. But even now the city’s infrastructure was changing: as Henry and William walked back from school along Fourth Avenue, they witnessed with excitement ‘a riot of explosion and a great shouting and waving of red flags’ as work began on the Hudson River Railroad which would link Manhattan with Albany 11



  ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City 

(p. 23). For the James family it meant that the twelve-hour overnight voyage up the Hudson by steamboat would be replaced by a shorter rail journey along its banks, and the consequent loss for young Henry of that ‘peculiar note of romance’ (AS, p. 164) as the boat docked ‘in dim early dawns’ (p. 146).

New York City: Art and Theatre The young Henry was also taken to art galleries by his parents, having an especially vivid memory of a painting which would achieve an almost mythological status as a patriotic emblem of the heroic in American history. Emanuel Leutz’s Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), now exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows the revolutionary commander highlighted against a line of boats crowded with men and horses battling through the winter ice-floes as they prepare for victory. When it was exhibited in New York at the Stuyvesant Institute the James family went to view it after dinner one winter evening; the eight-year-old Henry was especially thrilled at the lateness of the hour and the ‘wondrous flare of projected gaslight’ which illuminated the work. The romance of the experience did not deter him from eventually questioning this initial enthusiasm; his critical scruples were engaged and he later judged it ‘lividly dead’. At home, the emphasis, in decorative terms at least, was on Europe, with front and rear sitting rooms displaying ‘a great abundance of Italy’ (SBO, pp. 207–208, 210); a sculpture of a Bacchante made in some Roman studio by an American artist graced the back parlour. In the other room was hung a large painting of great significance: Thomas Cole’s View of Florence from San Miniato, completed just a few years before Henry’s birth (1837). In a sense, it reflects some of the values and aspirations of the James family itself. Cole is habitually called ‘the American Turner’, as James mentions, and his work certainly inspired the generation of painters belonging to the Hudson River school who created atmospheric, often sublime landscapes, typically depicting the grandeur of the country’s rivers and mountains. In fact, Cole was a British painter who responded to the scale and magnificence of the New World to which he had emigrated, and his training was essentially European. The choice of subject, too, is European, a product of the artist’s first stay in Italy (1831–1832). None of the James family had, as yet, visited Italy, though James Sr had crossed the Atlantic several times. As we shall see, Europe was a seductive and troubling presence in young Henry’s early years, but a place as yet to be dreamt of and wondered at. The picture meanwhile allowed him to lose himself ‘as soon as look’, and a small monk seated in the foreground became ‘a constant friend of my childhood’ (SBO, p. 210). When he

12



  1843 –1855 

finally arrived in Europe the continent’s meaning became manifest to him as a pictorial insight, a glimpse altogether less serene and composed than the Cole veduta. He had looked out from a travelling carriage on a scene both humble and romantic, which seemed somehow timeless. A ruined castle formed the backdrop for a single figure, ‘a woman in a black bodice, a white shirt and a red petticoat, engaged in some sort of field labour’: ‘I knew her for a peasant in sabots’. He had never before seen a peasant and the scene with its quite complex sociological and historical message served as an emblem of Europe, a ‘sublime synthesis, expressed and guaranteed to me’ (SBO, pp. 220, 221). The theatrical entertainments available in mid-century Manhattan constituted the other facet of Henry’s unofficial education which would play out significantly in his mature life. The idea of the dramatic ‘scene’ (such as that in a play) would come to occupy a central role in the construction of his fiction, but, more directly, his aspirations to succeed in the theatre were long-lasting. To write for the stage was, he noted in 1881, ‘the most cherished of all my projects…. None has given me brighter hopes – none has given me sweeter emotions’ (CN, p. 226). His early memories conjure up in lovingly colourful detail the theatrical productions, vaudevilles, circus spectaculars and pantomimes, along with their participants, which formed the entertainment of ‘our old original New York’.15 Along with the performers the names of the venues – Burton’s Theatre, the ‘Lyceums’ of Wallack and Brougham, Old Broadway Theatre, Park Theatre, Niblo’s Garden, Castle Theatre, Tripler Hall, Barnum’s, National Theatre – are all affectionately listed. Early in life he enjoyed watching such plays as Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado about Nothing. He could have been as young as seven when he saw the first of these at Niblo’s Garden, the magnificent, recently rebuilt theatre on Broadway, and Harriet Holman, playing the role of Luciana, came out dressed in white satin, ‘quite irrelevantly’ to sing to the audience between the acts, much in the manner of popular vaudeville. The waiting for the curtain to rise was an anguish hardly to be borne: ‘One’s eyes bored into it in vain, and yet one knew it would rise at the named hour, the only question being if one could exist till then’ (SBO, p. 88). Although alive to the romance of the theatre and to its staged illusions, this sharp-eyed child didn’t fail to notice the mechanics by which such effects could be achieved. He enjoyed an old favourite of the time, W.T. Moncrieff ’s Cataract of the Ganges, billed temptingly as ‘an equestrian melodrama’, and recalled as ‘a tragedy of temples and idols and wicked rajahs and real water’. He watched with excitement the heroine, ‘preferring death to dishonour’, dashing up ‘the more or less perpendicular waterfall on a fiery black steed and with an effect only a little blighted by the chance flutter of a drapery out of which peeps the leg of a trouser and a big male foot’ (SBO, pp. 93, 92).

13



  ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City 

The world of theatre seems, from the beginning, to have existed for him as a fascinating mix of the glamorous and the mundane. He looks back, in older age, to the unnervingly corporate ‘face’ of the actor and the dismaying gap between its ‘histrionic’, stage presence and, ‘with the artificial lights turned off – the fatigued and disconnected face reduced to its mere self ’ (p. 86). He had admired the ‘tragic actress’, Miss Emily Mestayer, who had appeared in James Sheridan Knowles’s Love, performed at the Old Broadway Theatre in the 1850s, yet when he had glimpsed her, years later, in a Boston street, she appeared as ‘the very image of mere sore histrionic habit and use, a worn and weary, a battered … thing of the theatre, very much as an old infinitely-handled and greasy violoncello of the orchestra might have been’ (p. 129).The unsparing observation marks the disappointment of finding that the fostered illusions of the past cannot be sustained. The adult James would always be drawn to the idea of performance, the mystery of dramatic illusion, and the contrasting reality of everyday circumstance. Though Shakespeare was fairly consistently in production in New York, the plays of Sheridan were also popular, as well as those more modern works by actormanager Dion Boucicault. Such Dickens novels as Dombey and Son, Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby were frequently plundered for their high drama, ready sentiment and comic eccentricities, and reduced to knockabout stage adaptations – ‘the roughest theatrical tinkers’ work’. Similarly crude versions of French plays, notably those of Alfred de Musset, were frequently performed:‘what was then not of French origin?’ James wonders (SBO, pp. 97, 94). Some six decades later he could recall (mostly with great accuracy) the names of the actors and their costumes, the stage effects – the wrecking of a steamboat, for instance, the live horses onstage, the sheer spectacle ingeniously achieved. Meantime, the names of these places of entertainment,‘Lyceums and Museums and Lecture Rooms and Academies of Music’ (p. 89), promoted an idea of high seriousness which belied their commercial priorities. Henry enjoyed performances by Italian singers and conjurors, by the Ravel family, acrobats, dancers and pantomimists, in this ‘pre-trapèze age’, as well as admiring the grace of Signor Leon Javelli, the celebrated rope-dancer now remembered for having crossed the Niagara Falls on a tightrope (pp. 136, 137). And on certain Saturdays Henry would travel down Broadway to the Great American Museum of Phineas T. Barnum to pass along ‘the dusty halls of humbug, amid bottled mermaids, “bearded ladies” and chill dioramas’ (p. 127). New York theatre of the mid-century mixed high art with the sensational and spectacular, and its plays and players were primarily of European origin. But a literary event of 1852 highlighted a specifically New World condition of historic significance. Within months of its serial appearance in an abolitionist magazine, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had been adapted for the stage and it would continue to be successfully performed in numerous different versions into

14



  1843 –1855 

the twentieth century. Probably more people saw it onstage than read it as a novel, and its themes and characters became part of the national identity and its language. With its vivid evocation of the conditions of the enslaved people of the South, the work made such a social and political impact that it influenced events leading to the Civil War of 1861–1865. On a more personal level, Henry saw so many different performances of the play in the company of his brother William that he attributes to it his faculty of ‘conscious criticism’, a means of comparing and assessing which would eventually, as he says, throw him ‘into the critical arms of Matthew Arnold’. Despite registering some detectably crude moments, Henry’s impression was of ‘a story rich and harmonious’ (SBO, pp. 133, 134). The subtitle of Stowe’s work is ‘Life among the Lowly’ and there was a point in these years when James’s experience touched briefly on such lives. A neighbouring family, the Norcoms, recently arrived from Kentucky, had ‘two pieces of precious property’ in their household: Aunt Sylvia (pronounced ‘An’silvy’) and her son Davy were enslaved servants. James wonders if they had ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The ‘light-brown lad’ (his father presumably a white Master) and his mother with her ‘vivid turban’, were ‘a joy’ to get to know, Davy adding ‘a pictorial lustre that none of us could emulate’. The owning of slaves in New York City was not that unusual at this time, but mother and son did not stay long: belying young Henry’s innocent impression of happiness, the two, taking advantage of this northern stay, fled suddenly into the night, to become part of that dangerous fugitive movement by which the enslaved sought liberty. ‘I don’t remember their going, nor any pangs of parting; I remember only knowing with wonderment that they had gone, that obscurity had somehow engulfed them’ (SBO, p. 198). This was a brief, scarcely understood encounter for James with the ‘peculiar institution’ that would divide the nation. It occurred a good decade before the outbreak of Civil War and the catastrophic, internecine conflict between North and South, but the Norcom family itself was notable for its different southern ways and lavish hospitality: ‘the sausage-mill kept turning and the molasses flowing for all who came’ (p. 195). Henry has only to look at the scar on his hand to recall one of their sons, Reggie, who accidentally crushed his fingers in the hinge of a closing door.There was another boy, too, a few years older than Henry, and so not available as a friend, to whom he had been drawn, ‘the slim, the sallow, the straight-haired and dark-eyed Eugene’, on whose fate he speculates. Was he a victim of that war? James is haunted by ‘some dark but pitying vision’ which sees him ‘stretched stark after a battle’ (p. 198). James never learnt what happened to Eugene, but one source states that he had died in 1864 at the age of 27, a victim not of war but of consumption and that the family came not from Kentucky, as James has it, but North Carolina. Eugene was born in Vicksburg, Mississippi, or New York City in 1837 (information varies), and became a bookkeeper.16

15



  ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City 

Henry James’s earliest surviving letter (written before summer 1855) charmingly indicates that his theatrical interests were met to some degree within his close domestic circle. It was sent from Paris to a boyhood friend and neighbour in New York, Edgar Van Winkle: ‘Dear Eddy / As I heard you were going to try to turn the club into a Theatre. And as I was asked w’ether I wanted to belong here is my answer. I would like very much to belong / Yours Truly / H James’. Though Henry’s younger siblings are hardly mentioned in A Small Boy (it was doubtless too shaming to play with younger children), brother William plays an important, even dominant part, always one step ahead and gone before his younger brother could catch him up. They played with neighbouring boys of the street (many with the surnames of the city’s wealthiest families) and staged their own shows, dramas for which it seems Henry provided the text on folded sheets of stationer’s ruled paper specially purchased on Sixth Avenue, the final quarter sheet left blank for an illustration of the scene; he relished the paraphernalia and conventions of the drama, the entrances, exits and indication of ‘business’ to be enacted. As for performance (which took place in one of their attics), he habitually remained in the wings, short of an improvised costume to wear, while William, ‘in fantastic garb’, fronted the public as the ‘constant comic star’ (SBO, pp. 203, 199). At such times Henry seems passive, an observer rather than protagonist, and the content of these dramas is neither disclosed nor even perhaps remembered. It is the situation, the excitement, which matter. He would go on experimenting with the drama in his adult life until compelled to admit defeat in a traumatic and public experience in a professional London theatre. There is a similarly compelling gap in his account of preparing ‘a romance’, with schoolfriend Louis De Coppet who, by his name, accent and culture represented the allure of France and, indeed, embodied Europe (his family was a combination of Swiss-French and American): his was ‘the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail’ (p. 32). Once again, the pleasure derived from peripheral matters – the ‘business’ of planning how to publish their work – leaves no time for anything to be created. William is shown occupying centre-stage in these theatrical ventures and, indeed, he was the most influential figure in his brother’s early life: clever and entertaining, and showing great talent, he is considered superior in every way, confirmed by his superior place at school. At home, Henry is his quiet and loving observer, as William ‘sits drawing and drawing, always drawing, especially under the lamplight of the Fourteenth Street back parlour … always at the stage of finishing off, his head dropped from side to side and his tongue rubbing his lower lip’. So much of this volume is about observing, gaining impressions, ‘gaping’, so clearly an apprenticeship for novel-writing. Henry casts himself humbly and consistently as ‘the imitative, the emulative’:William ‘drew because he could, while I did so in the main only because he did’ (SBO, pp. 167, 205). 16



  1843 –1855 

Early Life and Experiences If the provision of Henry James’s formal education seems woefully careless and inadequate, family circumstances allowed for other opportunities which enabled the children to meet some of the most influential thinkers and writers of the time. In November 1852 William Makepeace Thackeray began a lucrative American tour in which he delivered his series of lectures on ‘English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century’. He opened in Boston, travelling as far south as Savannah, Georgia, but he spent considerable time in New York, where he was entertained by the James family. Young Henry was horrified (though Thackeray was fond of children) to find himself summoned by the celebrity visitor with the words ‘Come here, little boy, and show me your extraordinary jacket’ (p. 74). He was drawn into the library where the British guest appeared ‘enormously big’ (indeed, six feet three inches) and ‘the hand of benevolence’ was laid on his shoulder. The nine-year-old was wearing the jacket which appears in the Mathew Brady daguerreotype with its nine visible buttons, and so Thackeray named him ‘Buttons’, which probably meant little to Henry but which, in England, signified the uniformed pageboy or servant in a hotel. The memory stayed with him, and so did the jacket. It was still in James’s possession when he came to dictate his memoirs five decades later and he rushed off to find it to show to his temporary typist, Miss Lois Barker.17 In these years the works on philosophical and theological topics published by Henry James Sr included Moralism and Christianity; or Man’s Experience and Destiny (1850), Lectures and Miscellanies (1852), The Church of Christ Not an Ecclesiasticism (1854) and The Nature of Evil, Considered in a Letter to the Rev. Edward Beecher, D.D. (1855). He also began giving public lectures at such venues as the Stuyvesant Institute, the meeting place, too, for the Swedenborgian Society in New York. In March 1842 Henry Sr had heard Ralph Waldo Emerson lecture and was immediately enthused, indeed infatuated, by his person and ideas, describing him as ‘a soul full of doors and windows, a well-ventilated soul, open to every breeze that blows, and without any dark closets receptive of ancestral political and ecclesiastical trumpery’;18 he rapidly introduced himself to this Transcendentalist who urged men and women to find ‘an original relation to the universe’.19 An intense, at times troubled relationship between the two men developed, and Emerson became a frequent guest in the James household, one of the bedrooms being designated ‘Mr. Emerson’s’. Horace Greeley, editor of the increasingly influential New-York Tribune (‘a new morning Journal of Politics, Literature, and General Intelligence’) and a supporter of Emerson, shared similar interests, providing space over a number of years for Henry Sr’s sometimes contentious letters and articles on such subjects as, for instance, ‘free love’. A little younger, the abolitionist journalist Charles Anderson Dana, a contributor to the Transcendentalist Harbinger magazine, had joined the staff of the Tribune, and shared Henry Sr’s sympathies with the Fourierist movement, 17



  ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City 

a group advocating idealistic social experimentation and female equality. George Ripley who, like Emerson, had resigned his church ministry, had been instrumental in the founding of the Transcendental community at Brook Farm in Massachusetts, and Bronson Alcott who had established another short-lived community also belonged to this circle which gathered around Emerson. Henry Sr’s relations with all of them would have difficult moments, principally because of his strongly expressed and often-changing views; his temperament seems reflected in his writing style – brilliant, unpredictable, and often large-spirited. When Henry was taken by his father to the offices of the New-York Tribune on Nassau Street in Lower Manhattan he found it ‘a wonderful world indeed, with strange steepnesses and machineries and noises and hurrying bare-armed, brighteyed men, and amid the agitation clever, easy, kindly, jocular, partly undressed gentlemen (it was always July or August) some of whom I knew at home’ (SBO, p. 63). His later journalistic experience would leave him forever disillusioned with the newspaper world, partly because of its perceived shallowness and sensationalism, but also because it was a profession for which he had himself shown little aptitude. It was during this visit that his father was handed a new work written by one of the Tribune’s reporters, Solon Robinson. Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated was published in 1854 and is dedicated to Horace Greeley ‘and his co-laborers’. A collection of vignettes which first appeared in the Tribune depicting the poverty, dangers and deprivation experienced by children living in the notorious Five Points district of Lower Manhattan, it tells the stories of such girls as ‘Little Katy’,‘Madalina’, ‘The Ragpicker’s Daughter’ and ‘Wild Maggie’. Little Katy sells hot corn on the Manhattan streets, singing,‘Hot corn! Hot corn! / Here’s your lily-white corn. / All you that’s got money / Poor me that’s got none – / Buy my lily-white corn / And let me go home’. Its publishers claimed to offer ‘works intended to promote temperance and virtue, to lift up the lowly, to expose to open day the hidden effects produced by Rum, to give narratives of misery suffered by the poor in this city’.20 Young Henry was immediately interested, only to be informed that this was no work for ‘an innocent child’: its pages remained closed to him. In fact, he was just a year or two younger than his fictional counterparts, but the moment serves as an emblem of social division and the disparities between privilege and poverty. Hot Corn, sensational and sentimental in the style of popular journalism of the time, presents that other dark and squalid world which has no place in A Small Boy and Others. As he records, he was fobbed off with another work which quickly became a best-seller, a ‘romance … on every one’s lips’ (SBO, p. 66), Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter (1854). This improving fiction in which virtue is rewarded as an orphan girl from Boston’s streets finds happiness through her own enduring goodness and love offered a sanitized version of urban reality less troubling, less shocking, than the sensationalism of Hot Corn.

18



  1843 –1855 

Henry Sr was undoubtedly a loving if unpredictable father and even in his son’s kindly and carefully phrased account he emerges as irrevocably impractical, even irresponsible, having ‘a wonderful way of being essentially right without being practically or, as it were, vulgarly, determinant…. It was in no world of close application that our wondrous parent moved’ (NSB, pp. 41–42). His troubled past was never referred to, but it is clear that the lives of many of the other men (predominantly men, it seems) within the extended James family were permanently blighted. The wealth acquired from a driven, ambitious young immigrant such as William (William of Albany, as he has become known) who had emerged as an authoritarian father allowed his offspring the freedom, whatever safeguards he tried to impose, to become jobless, feckless, and heavy drinkers, summed up as those ‘incoherent Albany uncles’ (SBO, p. 147). Henry Sr’s half-brother Robert predeceased his father, dying aged 28; John Barber, ‘the brightest of the Albany uncles’ (NSB, p. 37), became a gambler, philanderer and heavy drinker, dying on 22 May 1856 in a Chicago hotel room aged 40. Uncle Edward led a similarly troubled, alcohol-dependent life, and was dead at 38. Howard James at 59, had had no career, and had been treated for alcoholism in a number of asylums. Henry’s mother, Mary James, reported on 8 August 1869 that he appeared in Albany ‘far from sober’ and ‘and about to go into the Binghamton Asylum’.21 The novelist privately thought him ‘very good-looking’ but ‘of an almost épouvantable [appalling] badness’, ‘most loved, most beautiful, most sacrificed of the Albany uncles’; his son, Johnny, ‘a tormenting hoverer and vanisher,’ just as ‘luckless’, died, probably suicidally, aged 23 (SBO, pp. 154, 157). Both Edward and Howard, with their hats worn ‘slightly toward the nose’, are treated kindly and discreetly: they were ‘not less than strikingly genial, but with vaguenesses, lapses, eclipses’ (p. 148). Later, another of young Henry’s cousins, Bob Temple, son of Henry Sr’s favourite sister Catharine, makes sporadic appearances in the family’s life, getting by as a conman and forger, and begging from his rich relations. Though in later years he was spurned by brother William, the more emollient Henry sometimes helped him out with money. Henry’s uncles are mentioned in an episode described as full of ‘mystification’ in his early life when he is taken to the Manhattan establishment of Mrs Cannon by his father. It was a summer’s day when the two travelled back from Staten Island where the family were holidaying – the occasion, it seems, when the famous daguerreotype was made of father and son in the studio of Mathew Brady. Mrs Cannon, however, ‘lurked near Fourth Street … “back of ” Broadway’, and her establishment with ‘independent side access’ was both ‘a parlour and a shop’. It is genteel and decorous, with Mrs Cannon getting on with her sewing – ‘a shop in particular for the relief of gentlemen in want of pockethandkerchiefs, neckties, collars, umbrellas and straw-covered bottles of the essence known in old New York as “Cullone”’ (SBO, pp. 78–79). The term ‘particular’, in French particulier, signifies 19



  ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City 

Figure 1  Henry James with his father, Henry James Sr (c. 1854, daguerreotype by Mathew Brady)

privacy. Talk with Mrs Cannon and the staff, which included Miss Maggie and Miss Susie, would often turn to inquiries about Mr John, Mr Edward and Mr Howard: ‘their consumption of neckties and Eau de Cologne was somehow inordinate’, though the puzzled Henry cannot help feeling that such purchases are not ‘their only consommation’ – another French term, carrying for Anglo-Saxon readers, a sense of sexual relief. So discreetly appointed, the place offered ‘an intimacy of comfort that the New York Hotel couldn’t yield’. The term ‘dissimulation’ recurs ominously. The situation was understood by all, including Mrs Cannon, Miss Maggie and Miss Susie: ‘It was only I who didn’t understand,’ the reminiscing James emphasizes, as if it were a scene from that sustained exploration of childhood innocence and its cynical, adult exploitation, What Maisie Knew. In a 1913 letter to his friend Howard Sturgis apropos the recently published Small Boy and Others, James confided, ‘Uncle Edward never married – he was most

20



  1843 –1855 

particularly of Mrs Cannon’s’, while Uncle Gus, another uncle, ‘wasn’t of the “Mrs. Cannon” company. He was the eldest of all and more detached and maritally, etc. established’. The location is important, however; the area just a block west of Broadway, Mercer Street, had become at this time well known for its brothels,22 and James’s language consistently skirts the reality.The services of prostitutes were commonly available to wealthy New Yorkers at this time, so the behaviour of this generation of James brothers was not untypical. In his public writings Henry James Sr had pronounced on the matter of sexual relations, controversially advocating free love, and, in these years, he regarded monogamy as a form of slavery.23 Aside from this revelation of his private pursuits – and more disturbing – is that he would take his ten- or eleven-year-old son with him, incorporating this call into a day out which was primarily intended to have that portrait taken – an intended gift, it seems, for Mother who stayed at home. In fact, this was not a one-off: there were visits ‘delightfully repeated’. If young Henry had originally been at a loss to understand, he seems now to call his father to account, implicating him through the veiled nuances and masterful indirection of his powerful late style. Such autobiographical revelations transcend the scope of the standard memoir of the time. Such uncles and cousins were, he says, the object of ‘sad vague headshakes’ as they sank into anonymous obscurity. Their deaths seem to have become familiar and predictable events for the growing Henry: ‘[a]ll the uncles, of whichever kindred, were to come to seem sooner or later to be dying, more or less before our eyes, of melancholy matters’ (SBO, pp. 154, 111). Cousin ‘J.J.’ (John Vanderburgh) who had shown musical talent, left behind ghostly ‘aesthetic manifestations’ figured poignantly as ‘the thinnest conceivable chip of stray marble, the faintest far-off twang of old chords’ (p. 154).The settings in which these self-destructive lives were enacted were often, nevertheless, elegant and urbane. With his family James visited, for instance, his uncle Gus (the oldest of the uncles) and aunt Elizabeth at Linwood, a magnificent estate at Rhinebeck situated on a bluff on the banks of the Hudson River. Henry was especially impressed by the ‘gardens and graperies and black ponies, to say nothing of gardeners and grooms who were notoriously and quotedly drole’ (SBO, p. 149). In fact, part of the place had been owned by another uncle, John Barber James,24 who had incurred debts from gambling and so probably had to give up Linwood. Gus’s tenure was fairly brief: by 1865 the estate had been sold once more, he had lost much of his money in speculation and would die in a pitiful state in 1866. Despite its grandeur and hospitality, there was an underlying insecurity and impermanence in this home. For Henry the occasion held other significance, too. One of his young cousins, Marie Bay James, played up when told that it was bedtime; her mother insisted on her ‘not making a scene’ and the phrase, a moment of ‘witchcraft’ for the observing boy, proves, in his re-telling, to be transformative. He had not apparently witnessed such defiance before (Marie was generally acknowledged as ‘spoilt’), and he has the 21



  ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City 

realization that we have choices and some autonomy in the matter of ‘scenes’: ‘we could make them or not as we chose’. A ‘rich accession of possibilities’ attaches to this incident, reaching as far, perhaps, in another form of ‘witchcraft’, as his own ‘scenic’ method which would characterize his fiction, allowing the dramatic scène à faire to convey its own message freed from obvious authorial intrusion.The occasion carried a further, more tragic significance. Henry Sr had been summoned to speak to his sister Catharine whose husband, Robert Emmet Temple, lay dying in Albany in the late stages of tuberculosis; she had been unwillingly removed to Linwood to preserve her life, though she, too, was suffering from the disease. In fact, both died in 1854, leaving nine children, the youngest no more than a year old. Henry is the unwilling witness of the offstage scene between brother and sister: ‘Vivid to me still, as floating across verandahs into the hot afternoon stillness, is the wail of her protest and grief; I remember being scared and hushed by it and stealing away beyond its reach’ (SBO, pp. 151–152). It was a sudden brush with impending mortality, a premature collision between childhood and a complicated adult tragedy. Children lacking parents (one or both) were familiar within the extended James family, to the extent that naïve young Henry envied such ‘blest orphans’, attributing to ‘orphans as orphans a circumstantial charm, a setting necessarily more delightful than our father’d and mother’d one’. Many of the characters, scenes and situations recounted in his memoirs take on some of the features of Dickens’s fiction with its range of parentless children. James saw his own recollecting as a formalizing, composing medium, his imagination ‘making a scene’ of events which occurred decades ago: ‘I see the actors move again through the high, rather bedimmed rooms – it is always a matter of winter twilight, firelight, lamplight; each one appointed to his or her part and perfect for the picture, which gave a sense of fulness without ever being crowded’ (SBO, pp. 103, 107). Memory has acted to resolve life’s disorder into some more formal composition, each actor integrated into the scene. On one occasion it is the young orphan Albert, son of Mrs James’s cousin, Alexander Robertson Wyckoff. A little older than his James cousins, and inheritor of distant land in the Beaverkill district of the Catskill mountains (about 80 miles from Manhattan), he is considered more knowing; his future will lie, not, it seems, in Europe, but the American West. William and Henry were invited to take a trip with Albert, but parental permission was refused: ‘the place was in the wilderness … reached by a whole day’s rough drive from the railroad’ and offering the ‘possibility of prowling bears’. The household at nearby 72 West Fourteenth Street which had taken Albert in is governed by ‘Great-aunt Wyckoff ’, ‘an image of living antiquity’, who ‘signified her wants as divinities do’ and was never heard to speak (pp. 105–107). She is cared for by her daughter, Helen, who has also taken charge – indeed control – of Henry, her younger brother, who is mentally impaired. The relationship is partly fictionalized by James as sister and brother are translated into Miss Betsey Trotwood and Mr 22



  1843 –1855 

Dick in Dickens’s David Copperfield. It is a novel young Henry had heard read aloud in the evenings; hoping to hear more of it, and thus avoiding bed, he had secreted himself under a table, to be discovered only when he burst into tears of sympathy during the pages describing the cruel Murdstones. Mr Dick is thwarted in writing his own history because King Charles I keeps trying to find his way into the volume; the impediment for cousin Henry, as rich as he is simple and seemingly harmless, is that he is accounted untrustworthy and therefore allowed just ten cents per day for any extraneous living costs. His sister Helen rules the household and James notes with some pleasure how, after her death, Henry has three years of innocent freedom, his life blooming ‘like a garden freshly watered’. A more sinister perspective, derived not from Dickens but from Aeschylus, arises when James recalls his cousin Albert as ‘a small New York Orestes ridden by Furies’ (SBO, pp. 125, 113), thus associating cousin Helen not with the murderous wife and mother, Clytemnestra, but with Electra, Orestes’ decisive sister who saves him from death. He uses the same classical allusion when describing a dominant female figure in another part of the family, and it is clear that many of its men, impoverished, diminished or incapable, had surrendered themselves to female dominance. If such women are saviours, the men are in many respects victims, not least in their relinquishing of power in the domestic setting.The classical comparison forms part of a retrospective assessment, of course, but it also hints at a degree of sexual antipathy toward such women and a corresponding affection for the men, however weak or stoical. One further episode from Henry’s young life further illustrates (as he represents it) some ambiguity about gender and its representation. A part of his education had taken place in ‘the halls of Ferrero’, the elegant dancing establishment run by Edward Ferrero, ‘in the prime of life, good-looking, romantic and moustachio’d’, where the boy attended classes. Ferrero was much admired by the accompanying mothers at the evening entertainments and, living up to his heroic appearance, he would go on to raise a New York military regiment in the Civil War. Fiddlers provided the music for dancing and Ferrero was supported by his sister Madame Dubreuil and her husband, a baritone from the opera, ‘flushed, full-chested and tawnily short-bearded’. The scene with its decorous, slightly flirtatious undertones might have come from a Thackeray novel. For the school’s celebrated fancy-dress ball Henry donned a costume curiously at odds with such embodiments of conventional Victorian masculinity. He appeared in the garb of a débardeur, previously worn by his cousin Johnny at ‘some Parisian revel’, its ‘puckered folds of dark green relieved with scarlet and silver’ giving out ‘an exotic fragrance’ (SBO, pp. 187–191). There was some mystery within the James family as to what a débardeur was, ‘and I am not sure indeed that I know to this day’, he adds – a disingenuous comment, given his knowledge of French culture and language. A débardeur was a stevedore or unloader of goods and a version of his clothing became popular in the Parisian masquerades of the mid-century. Thus its origins 23



  ‘Wondering and Dawdling and Gaping’ in New York City 

signified male manual labour, but, in a transformation, it became popular with women who, in thus cross-dressing, combined ‘working-class roughness with female sexuality’. The outfit, ‘with its open shirt, wide cummerbund, and baggy pants, the uniform of porters in the wine markets … licensed insolent behaviour, an imitation of the stevedore’s Herculean and cheeky independence’.25 For André Gide in L’Immoraliste (1902), the débardeur is classed with the tramps and sailors, ‘the lowest dregs of humanity’, who haunt the muddy alleys and stinking booths of Syracuse, and so the type becomes charged with erotic possibility and danger.26 In this item of fancy-dress and its history of male sweat, transformed and sanitized into a fashion style adopted by women, the small boy, Henry, emerges as a confused innocent. And James allows the confusion to remain, hinting at his own feminized self in a social setting which seems to have had no words for such a possibility. The James family’s departure from New York on 27 June 1855, Liverpool-bound aboard the luxuriously appointed steamship Atlantic, was inevitable.The prospect of an extended stay in Europe had often been mooted by Henry Sr, already familiar with that trans-Atlantic journey. In fact, he had escorted his young family (when Henry was just six months old) to Europe in autumn 1843 and they had stayed for a year, principally in England. The novelist claimed, later, ‘in the second year of my life’ to remember, in Paris, being ‘[c]onveyed along the Rue St-Honoré while I waggled my small feet’ and having admired the Colonne Vendôme in the square of that name (SBO, p. 46). The column commemorates Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaigns of 1805–1807 and the observation seems prescient since the novelist would go on to have a lifelong fascination with the French Emperor. On their return, his parents had talked fondly of London, Green Park and Piccadilly, and he recalls burying his nose in new books, often printed and published in Britain, to savour ‘the English smell’. He was soon infected and ‘prematurely poisoned’ by the idea of Europe (pp. 69, 70).When he was taken to the New York Crystal Palace (‘second of its name’) which had opened on 14 July 1853, the first world’s fair held in America, his bleak mood was immediately lifted. The place was ‘vast and various and dense’, the sculptures marvellous: ‘[i]f this was Europe then Europe was beautiful indeed, and we rose to it on the wings of wonder’. Indeed, the entire family, we are told, kept breaking out ‘in choral wails’ at the allure of the Old World (pp. 139, 118). This family preoccupation with Europe seems to have set in as early as 1849, as can be seen from the list of books borrowed by Henry Sr from the New York Society Library on Broadway which included English Civilization, Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture, John Sanderson’s The American in Paris, Gray’s Rome, Husted’s Italy, Tappan’s A Step from the New World.27 For many families in the James circle an extended European stay was a matter of course, but when the time finally arrived, the reason for going was ostensibly educational. It was judged that the boys, following the ways of their New York peers, were becoming loud and badly behaved. Their father refers to his ‘four stout boys’ importing ‘shocking bad manners from 24



  1843 –1855 

the street’ (NSB, p. 156), and William once rejected his brother’s request to play by boasting, ‘I play with boys who curse and swear’ (SBO, p. 202). European schools were also considered superior to what was available in New York – though Henry Sr’s choices there were certainly flawed. His brother John Barber had taken his son Johnny (John Vanderburgh) to Switzerland, to a school in Vevey, and Henry had earlier consulted his friend Edmund Tweedy on possible places in Geneva. He was seeking for his children a ‘sensuous education’ and the opportunity to ‘absorb French and German’ (NSB, p. 156). Tutors had already provided some language tuition and young Henry had had a brief visit to an establishment where a cousin was enrolled, Madame Reichard’s finishing school for young ladies on Fifth Avenue, in which French only was spoken. Henry’s senses were already alerted: ‘I sniffed it up aromatically, the superior language … it took the form of some strong savoury soup’ (SBO pp. 153–154). The put-upon heroine of one of James’s short stories of 1877, ‘Four Meetings’, is observed during her Atlantic crossing: after years dreaming of Europe she sits, ‘at the side of the vessel with her hands crossed … looking at the eastward horizon’ (CT 4: 94), the goal of her direction of travel, exemplifying a form of devotion and a poignant sense of destiny that would have been readily recognized by the James family. Henry, too, was excited by the prospect of change, though he was unaware (as probably his father was, too) that the family would never again make their home in New York.

25

2 Europe and Newport: In Search of a ‘Sensuous Education’ (1855 –1861)

When Henry and Mary James with their five children, Aunt Kate and a French maid left America in 1855, the plan was to spend time in Switzerland for the sake of the children’s education. Doubtless, exposure to Europe, its history and culture, would form part of this experience, though there seem to have been no longer-term or definite aims. In the event, the next five years entailed relentless change and travel, largely reflecting Henry Sr’s restlessness and indecisiveness. Most of the children were placed in schools in Switzerland by the late summer (though Henry was convalescing from malaria and Alice had a governess), yet by October the family had left for Paris en route to London where they would stay until early summer 1856. Paris was their home for the following year. Much of summer and autumn 1857 was spent in Boulogne-sur-Mer in the Pas-de-Calais region of northern France. Having just settled back in Paris in October, they soon returned to Boulogne, a cheaper option after the recent major stock market crash in America. Here they remained until late May 1858 when they again crossed the Atlantic to take up residence in Newport, Rhode Island. But after just over a year on the eastern seaboard, the family returned to Europe in October 1859. They lived in Geneva until summer 1860 when, having travelled through Germany and France, they went back to America and to Newport once more. Henry Jr was seventeen by the end of this peripatetic phase. In his autobiography he makes a significant simplification, conflating these two European trips into one. It is a revision of history designed to serve not himself but his father. In a conversation of 1913 he confessed to his nephew Harry his acute

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

26



  1855 –1861 

sense of ‘our poor father’s impulsive journeyings to and fro and of the impression of aimless vacillation which the record might make upon the reader’.1

Arrival in Europe The young Henry as represented by his older self has to this point emerged as a passive, relatively deferential observer within the family, though there is no doubt that, temperamentally, he was the kind of boy ‘on whom nothing is lost’ (LC 1: 53). For the time he was rendered even less active and more dependent. Soon after his family’s arrival in London he fell ill, having months earlier ‘perversely absorbed (probably on Staten Island upwards of a year before) the dull seed of malaria, which now suddenly broke out in chills and fever’ (SBO, p. 218).The Jameses, escaping the heat of the city, had regularly vacationed in New Brighton and, as late as 1910, the New York Times was referring to ‘the hordes of winged insects that from time immemorial have infested the island’.2 The English visitors in the short story ‘An International Episode’ (1878–1879) also complain of New York’s summer heat and mosquitoes. Though the infection could remain dormant in the body for an extended period, sometimes proving fatal, the family continued its European progress. Playing down his physical discomfort, young Henry recalls the pleasure of those ‘particular certain short sweet times when I could be left alone’; in his room at London’s Euston Hotel, ‘the very smell of which was ancient, strange and impressive’ (an alternative, perhaps, to that previous English smell of newly arrived books), he could hear through the open window the sounds of a great city, translated romantically to ‘the far off hum of a thousand possibilities’ (SBO, p. 218). And, having crossed the Channel, when the family travelled by carriage on the 75-mile journey from Lyon to Geneva (the train line did not extend beyond Lyon), young Henry enjoyed the indulgences that come with illness; offered ‘invidious luxuries’, he lay on ‘a plank laid from seat to seat and covered by a small mattress and other draperies’ (p. 220). The family arrived in Geneva on 26 July 1855 and rented part of the Campagne Gerebsow (or Villa Gerebsoff) on the River Rhône, an elegant house belonging to a Russian colonel, Count Alexander de Gerebsow, and his Viennese wife. ‘I had never before lived so long in anything so old’, James recalls. Still an invalid, he remained here while his three brothers were sent to board at a school run by a German exile, Achilles Heinrich Roediger, a man full of ‘big bearded bonhomie’ (SBO, pp. 224, 225). The Pensionnat Roediger was chosen over the alternative, the Institution Haccius, favoured by many American families and thus offering fewer opportunities for the James children to hear French and German spoken. Family visits to the school proved enjoyable and the James parents were impressed 27



  Europe and Newport: In Search of a ‘Sensuous Education’  

by the genial relations between pupils and instructors. The life of the Swiss schoolboy had been anticipated back in New York when the family had read two  recent volumes by ‘a schoolmaster of endless humour and sympathy’ (pp. 226–227), Rodolphe Töpffer. His Voyages en Zigzag and Nouveaux Voyages en Zigzag, narrate the author’s holiday excursions with pupils through Switzerland and northern Italy in which ‘humorous sketches are … agreeably intermingled with descriptions of scenery and episodes of everyday life’.3 To look at their pages in older age was, for James, to enter ‘a lost paradise’. In his letters published at this time in the New-York Tribune, James Sr was describing mountain excursions in the manner of Töpffer, but even before autumn was over he grew restless and dissatisfied. On 25 September he wrote to his mother that he thought Swiss schools ‘greatly over-rated’: ‘we have come to the conclusion that home tuition will be the best for all of them’.4 Though the James boys would later enjoy walking in the Alps, the Swiss experiment was, for the time, over: its educational offer failed to measure up to Henry Sr’s expectations.

London: Pictures, Pantomime, Plays By October, the family were retracing their steps through France. Paris was full of tourists visiting the Exposition Universelle, though twelve-year-old Henry accompanied his father to the Palais d’Industrie and was especially impressed in the English section by the important Pre-Raphaelite painting by John Everett Millais, The Order of Release 1746, which had created a sensation at London’s Royal Academy when first exhibited in 1853. It is a historical genre piece illustrating the release from prison of a Scottish rebel soldier, though the presence of the wife who greets him, holding her child, adds some narrative ambiguity to the scene. The petals scattered from the primroses held by the child hint at the loss of virtue.What James recalled was ‘the rare treatment’ of the ‘baby’s bare legs, pendent from its mother’s arms … still as vivid to me as if from yesterday’ (SBO, p. 230). When the family arrived in London he would have a chance to see more of Millais’s earlier works. The Parisian stay was brief, however, and the James family were soon established in London where a private tutor was sought. After a few weeks in fashionable Mayfair’s Berkeley Square, a furnished house was taken at 10 Marlborough Place, St John’s Wood (at a rent of £250 per year), further west and less central, but considered at the time to have ‘an air of quietude and seclusion … a favourite abode of the literary and artistic professions’.5 The Jameses moved in on 1 December 1855. Not far from Regent’s Park, Marlborough Place runs west of the Finchley Road where Henry Sr’s Swedenborgian friend James John Garth Wilkinson lived with his family. Henry James would return to this suburb for some of his fictional scenes – in, for instance, The Tragic Muse (1890) and ‘The Tree of 28



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Knowledge’ (1900); the painter Oliver Lyon in ‘The Liar’ (1888), noticing ‘unmitigated emptiness in the straight sunny roads where the little plastered garden-walls, with their incommunicative doors, looked slightly Oriental’, feels here that ‘the tide of human life flows at no time very fast’ (CT, 6: 427). Perhaps because it was so different from what might be observed in downtown New York, young Henry was charmed at the sight of ladies and gentlemen practising archery nearby – ‘such a whiff of the old world of Robin Hood’ (SBO, p. 235). Though Henry Sr considered sending his boys to a fee-paying school, he quickly concluded that such institutions were too socially exclusive and so (even more exclusive) a tutor was appointed, Robert Thomson, a Scotsman of ‘fresh complexion’ and ‘very round clear eyes’ with a tendency to fall over his feet (SBO, p. 233). James recalls that he went on to teach Robert Louis Stevenson, a friend of his adult years.Thomson rented rooms nearby and lessons were conducted each morning between breakfast and lunchtime, though the novelist retains little memory of what was learnt save receiving the reward one day of, ‘of all things in the world’, Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare. Extra-curricular trips included the Tower of London, the Thames Tunnel, St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and the Zoological Gardens. James also recalls the ‘ghostly names’ of a series of French governesses who came and went with puzzling regularity (SBO, p. 238). As occurred in earlier days in Manhattan, much of Henry’s broader education (often in company with William) took place on London’s streets where the boys were allowed, once again, to wander freely. He wondered at the appearance of its workers – postmen in ‘frock-coats of military red’, milkwomen in ‘little shawls and strange short, full frocks … with their pails swung from their shoulders on wooden yokes’, ‘inveterate footmen hooked behind the coaches of the rich’ and ‘mounted and belted grooms’ (p. 240). These would have been familiar figures in mid-Victorian London, but the James boys themselves excited attention in their top hats and ‘inveterate gloves, the childish costume of the place and period’, as they walked down nearby Baker Street. They were undeniably foreign, of ‘alien stamp’, and they received a not-especially friendly ‘from-head-to-foot stare’ from both children and adults. They knew no other children at this time except for those encountered in the street, ‘essentially rude ones, rude with a kind of mediæval rudeness’ (SBO, pp. 234, 239, 240). James’s recollections are deliberately literary, as if he here apprehended in person the colourful city scenes and characters he had enjoyed in his reading of Dickens or Thackeray. Having invoked the Artful Dodger, Bill Sikes and Nancy as illustrated by Cruikshank, he recollects seeing, one summer evening, ‘the vivid picture, framed by the cab-window, of a woman reeling backward as a man felled her to the ground with a blow in the face’ (p. 241), another emblematic and terrible ‘scene’ that remained with him. In later life, James realized that this was an aspect of London, with its often brutalized poor, that stretched back at least to the eighteenth century as observed by the humane but satirical eye of William Hogarth. 29



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Nearby, in this suburb associated with artists, Benjamin Robert Haydon, ill-fated painter of grandiose scenes from history, had lived with his family in Lisson Grove. He had died dreadfully by his own hand in 1846, ruined and bankrupted after exhibiting two of his works earlier in the year, The Banishment of Aristides and The Burning of Rome, at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. They had been sidelined by a rival spectacle imported from P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, New York, which displayed General Tom Thumb (Charles Stratton) who drew enormous crowds, curious to see his diminished size. Now, nearly a decade later young Henry, accompanied probably by William, was taken to see The Banishment of Aristides, one of six paintings by Haydon illustrating the workings of government and displayed at the Pantheon on Oxford Street. Though the genre of history painting was already becoming old-fashioned, Henry found the ‘beauty of Haydon … new, shiningly new’, in contrast with the historical scenes of Rubens or Titian. It was a youthful enthusiasm: ‘[i]f we adored daubing we preferred it fresh, and the genius of the Pantheon was fresh’. His father had prepared his sons for this trip by giving them the three volumes of ‘the hapless artist’s Autobiography’, recently published, and Henry admits that he learnt from Haydon’s enormous canvases something of ‘the grand manner, the heroic and the classic’ (SBO, pp. 244, 243). Sir Edwin Landseer, celebrated for his animal paintings (as well as for the lion sculptures in Trafalgar Square), was another long-term resident of St John’s Wood, and his works, along with those of other British and Irish artists were on exhibition at Marlborough House, on Pall Mall in Westminster. Henry especially admired Daniel Maclise’s Play-scene from Hamlet, though he felt that Ophelia looked ‘as if cut in silhouette out of white paper and pasted on’ (SBO, p. 245). Scenes from drama continued to be a source of inspiration for British artists, offering a compositional challenge as well as an identifiable moment of narrative with which the Victorian public could engage. During these months in London, the James family enjoyed a number of theatrical entertainments, though the travelling proved ‘a serious, ponderous business … over vast foggy tracts of the town’ (the city was notorious for its polluted air and occasional pea-soupers). One of the best attended shows of the era was Albert Smith’s Story of Mont Blanc, which ran for six years at the Egyptian Hall, and helped popularize mountain climbing. It was clearly a tour de force for Smith, combining instruction with entertainment: he ‘festooned the stage with “chamois skins, Indian corn, Alpenstocks, vintage baskets, knapsacks, and other appropriate matters.” At the intermission Saint Bernard dogs lumbered through the room with chocolates in barrels under their necks’.6 Henry was especially impressed by the stage effects which included the arrival and departure of a train (p. 247). The family also enjoyed the Christmas production of James Robertson Planché’s Discreet Princess, or The Three Glass Distaffs at the Royal Olympic Theatre, ‘A New and Doubly-Moral though Excessively Old Melodramatic Fairy Extravaganza in One Act’. The pantomime derived originally from one of Charles Perrault’s fairy 30



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stories, ‘L’Adroite Princesse’, in Les Contes de ma Mère L’Oye, the Mother Goose collection later much admired by James in an edition which included illustrations by Gustave Doré.7 Its star was Frederick Robson who gave a ‘very dreadful and very droll’ performance as the villainous Prince Richcraft; it was a role created for him, its burlesque elements matching his talents, his gift for mixing pathos with high comedy already established in The Yellow Dwarf. Though the pantomime is full of farcical potential and theatrical surprises and devices, its high-cultural frame of reference and Planché’s insistence on dramatic discipline distinguish it markedly from our modern experience of the genre. Recently premiered operas by Rossini and Verdi are alluded to, while Shakespearean quotations and echoes are embedded within the dialogue. Such holiday entertainments (the show opened on 26 December 1855) must have appealed to the young Henry who had already gained considerable theatrical experience. Even at this age he would have belonged to what Richard Schoch calls those ‘competent’ members of the audience, possessing ‘sufficient knowledge of the burlesque’s “sources”, whether plays, novels, poems, operas, fables, history books, or contemporary events’.8 Young James also admired Still Waters Run Deep, a more serious ‘well-made’ piece in the manner of Eugène Scribe, which represents the relations between a husband and wife, concluding with the triumph of its mild hero over his ‘rash mother-in-law whom he so imperturbably puts in her place’ (SBO, p. 251). The play had opened (again at the Olympic) on 14 May 1855 and its author was Tom Taylor, who had recently edited those three volumes of Haydon’s Autobiography. Based upon Charles de Bernard’s novel, Le Gendre, with its reference to marital infidelity (though lightly comic and occasionally melodramatic), it may seem a strange choice for family entertainment, though Alice James (only seven at the time) later recorded her enjoyment in her Diary.9 But the real theatrical highlight for Henry during this London stay was perhaps a production of Henry VIII by Charles Kean at the Princess’s Theatre. Only partially by Shakespeare, this chronicle-like sequence of scenes was popular through the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, principally because of the large-scale theatrical opportunities it afforded. Kean’s production (in which he played Cardinal Wolsey) was especially admired for its wealth of historically accurate detail; it included, a ‘“Grand Moving Panorama Representing London in the Reign of Henry the Eighth” … a view of London as the Lord Mayor himself would have seen it in 1533’.10 The play made a strong impression on the James children. Like a number of professional painters, they chose to illustrate the memorable scene of Queen Katherine’s dream-vision in which angels appear from above – in this production exploiting the latest mechanical devices – for their own versions in water colours. The dying Queen has a vision of ‘six Personages clad in white robes, wearing on their heads garlands of bays, and golden vizards on their faces’, and these ‘spirits of 31



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peace’ in dance and other rituals seem to welcome her into heaven. The scene was even included in the Illustrated London News (2 June 1855). The James children engaged, too, with the play’s emotional highlights, declaiming at home Wolsey’s final speech to Cromwell and the Duke of Buckingham’s farewell to the bystanders as he proceeds to the scaffold (SBO, p. 248): ‘as the long divorce of steel falls on me / Make of your prayers one sweet sacrifice, / And lift my soul to heaven’ – powerful words to be delivered to this precocious group. As James looked back on these distant experiences, he considered the nature of dramatic art, the relationship between the player and his or her role, and the power of individual presence onstage – the personality which transmits its values to a waiting audience. Indeed, some of his most ‘ineffaceable’ memories of Shakespeare were associated with the one-woman readings given (conveniently in Assembly Rooms on nearby Finchley Road) by Fanny Kemble, a name with a distinguished theatrical pedigree and a woman whose friendship he would enjoy later in life. She sat at a table covered by a green velvet cloth, a candelabra at each end, dressed in black for tragedy, white for comedy. Few later theatrical productions of either King Lear or A Midsummer Night’s Dream rivalled, in James’s eyes, ‘the power and beauty of her performance’ (CWHJD, p. 395).

Paris and the Call of Art These outings constituted, perhaps, some of the highlights of this London period, though for Henry James Sr and his wife it was generally a dull, unsociable time, and their eldest son William later commented on the ‘monotony’ of life in St John’s Wood. So it must have been with some relief that on 3 June 1856 they left for Paris, taking an expensive house on the north side of the Avenue des Champs Élysées for a couple of months.This was still the Paris of Balzac, retaining many of its mediaeval corners and angles, untouched as yet by Haussmann’s grand urban scheme, instigated by Napoleon III. James would come to favour the old Paris, later referring to the ‘deadly monotony’ of the city’s transformation (CTWC, p. 724). The house belonged to a rich planter from Louisiana, and the area was favoured by American families.The décor was, according to William, relentlessly in the French style:‘There are six gilt legged armchairs & four mahogany d[itt]o. Naked gilt babies all over the ceiling. Gilt stripes all over the walls; gilt sofas, gilt other chairs. gilt fender; huge gilt clock and candelabra; gilt wood work; gilt every thing …’ By August they had moved once again, to a second-floor apartment at 19 rue d’Angoulême-St. Honoré (later to become rue La Boëtie) – much frequented by both British and Americans, including, in the past, Thackeray’s mother and stepfather – and here they remained until the following summer. There were six bedrooms, as well as a piano, though Mary James, with little French, found the servants 32



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untrustworthy, and Henry Sr complained about the ‘grossest extortion’ practised by Parisians on foreigners.11 A private tutor was engaged for the boys, Monsieur C.F. Lerambert, ‘spare and tightly black-coated, spectacled, pale and prominently intellectual’ (SBO, p. 257), who, according to William, attended for two hours on four days per week. He was a literary man, and his Poésies were published in 1856, later receiving an honourable mention from the great Sainte-Beuve in one of his Causeries du lundi. He may have been justified in feeling affronted when released by James Sr after a few months, though he had, in any case, a low opinion of Henry Jr’s aptitude, a judgment repeated to the boy himself, typically unmediated, by his father. Afternoons were taken up with the governess, Mlle. Augustine Danse, whose eyes were as green as Becky Sharp’s in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (SBO, p. 258). The allusion to the worldly Becky is significant and, despite her undoubted charm and the trips around Paris on which she accompanied the children, she too had to leave for reasons undisclosed. When it opened at the end of December 1856, three of the James boys were enrolled at the Institution Fezandié, 6 rue Balzac. Henry suggests that it was run on Fourierist principles, and thus attractive to his father who had been drawn to the idea of ‘the “phalanstery” as the solution of human troubles’ (SBO, p. 290). The French utopian socialist Charles Fourier regarded the phalanstery, a set of buildings occupied by a ‘socialistic community’ (OED), as a means of reorganizing society. He had a significant following in New England and New York, promoting the idea of a community based on cooperation and collaboration, freed from contemporary social evils. James’s implicit characterization of the school’s philosophical principles has more recently been questioned; its tenure was short-lived and the place closed in 1858–1859, though Henry seems to have enjoyed his months there.12 M. Fezandié is recalled as a ‘type’ familiar from Daudet’s fiction, ‘a son of the south, bald and slightly replete’, whose wife was ‘slim, graceful, juvenile’ (SBO, p. 292). Lessons, taken with ‘young men and young women of the Anglo-Saxon family’, were enlivened by a M. Bonnefons, who, like many of the best teachers, was a consummate actor, and whose life had begun in the previous century, endowing him with the values of revolutionary France. James recalls, too, how, with a child’s intuitiveness, he had suddenly felt himself sidelined when a new Henry arrived, son of Arsène Houssaye, director of the Théâtre-Français. The French boy would become a ‘shining Hellenist and historian’ (p. 295). Though the young American registered ‘a sense of some shrinkage or decline’ about the school, he appreciated its unconventional freedoms and its regard for the individual. Alive, too, to the historic presence, the ‘majesties and symmetries’ of Paris itself (p. 260), he witnessed the fête held to celebrate the baptism of the Prince Imperial, Napoléon-Eugène-LouisJean-Joseph Bonaparte, son of Napoléon III, on 15 June 1856. It was a grand ceremony – three hundred thousand people had travelled to the capital – and James, with an eye to literary posterity, speculates that a boy of about his own age (in fact, 33



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three years older) was also present in the crowds: the scene bathed in late-afternoon sunshine is represented in Émile Zola’s Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, the sixth in the sequence of Rougon-Macquart novels which trace the history of a Parisian family during the Second Empire. In the private sphere, Paris, more than London the great draw for most American visitors, offered chances for the James family to catch up with relatives. Gertrude Pendleton, the married daughter of Augustus James, passed through with her husband; Lydia Mason, daughter of James Sr’s stepbrother, Robert, was visiting with her husband Henry, along with their four daughters and one son – the ‘inimitable Masons’. Mary James’s cousin Charlotte King, despite links with Newport, ‘figured for us, on the field of Europe, wherever we looked’ (p. 214). With her ‘stiff conservatism’, she was not popular, but Henry recalls her son,Vernon, who was five years his senior with a lingering affection. He was studying for his baccalauréat in Paris at the time: ‘he glances at me out of the Paris period, fresh-coloured, just blondbearded, always smiling and catching his breath a little’ (p. 308). He would later die for the Union cause in the Civil War, having defied his mother’s wishes. Once again William and Henry were free to wander the city streets at will, crossing the Seine and exploring the Left Bank, with its bookshops and printshops. On ‘the long, black Rue de Seine’ which runs due south from the river toward the Palais du Luxembourg, he recalls he might have heard one day a ‘dark’ and ‘sinister’ message which would prove incisive and life-changing: ‘Art, art, art, don’t you see? Learn, little gaping pilgrims, what that is!’. The voice he heard offered a sudden challenge to the youthful James and, in his re-telling, it marks a defining moment, signifying a future avocation. Much given to ‘gaping’ on the streets of New York, Henry would now realize a specifically aesthetic calling, for the moment founded on those surrounding streets with their ‘high grey-headed, clear-faced, straightstanding old houses’. They address the ‘jeune homme’, or young man, reminding him that they embody more than simply history or tradition: ‘we are dignity and memory and measure, we are conscience and proportion and taste, not to mention strong sense too’ (pp. 266, 267). It was in these same streets, in the École des Beaux-Arts, that a retrospective exhibition was staged of the work of the celebrated painter of historical scenes, Hippolyte-Paul Delaroche, who had died a few months earlier. Following these topographical associations, James recalls his admiration for Les Enfants d’Édouard (1831), which portrays the princes imprisoned in the Tower of London, the children of King Edward IV, young Edward V and his brother Richard, soon to be murdered (as generally believed) by their uncle, later Richard III. At the time, he regarded this painting as embodying ‘far-off history of the subtlest and most “last word” modern or psychologic kind’ (p. 273), though he would later adjust his opinion of the artist: ‘He was the idol of our youth, and we wonder we can judge him so coldly. But, in truth, Delaroche is fatally cold himself ’ (CWHJA, p. 64). 34



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Nevertheless, he allows space for it in his memoir, and the nature of the work’s subject, two brothers in desperate circumstances, the elder looking troubled, the younger clinging to him anxiously, has been compared to the relations between the two eldest James boys, as illustrating ‘William’s own difficult struggles to Henry’.13 The unusual term ‘psychologic’ is resonant: both brothers would suffer psychological ill-health, and the term would of course come to define William’s later career. The young Henry was drawn to other grand scenes from British history imagined through French eyes and entailing high, tragic emotion, such as Delaroche’s Execution of Lady Jane Gray and Charles I Insulted by the Soldiers of Cromwell on the Eve of His Execution. In this predominantly academic tradition,Thomas Couture, teacher of many aspiring American painters, was especially influential. Though famed for his largescale Romains de la Décadence, with its censure of Roman and perhaps more contemporary moral corruption, it was his Page with a Falcon which Henry thought ‘the rarest of all modern pictures’ (SBO, p. 271); the great art critic and poet Théophile Gautier referred, too, to ‘this handsome adolescent with peach-like cheeks, shiny black hair, eyes drowned in light’.14 In his recollection, James presents the young man, dressed in seductively rich fabric, as himself the aestheticized object of our attention, in an innocent form of self-display, or, as Michael Moon suggests, ‘the male body … turned into spectacle’.15 As James observes, the painting of ‘the splendid fair youth in black velvet or satin or whatever … shows off the great bird on his forefinger with a grace that shows him off ’ (p. 271). It is a recognition of conscious male beauty, expressed with the candour and confidence of older age, though the impression was set down when he was roughly the same age as the painting’s subject. Henry followed William once more in his admiration for Eugène Delacroix, whose uncertain reputation during the nineteenth century remained dependent on ‘the see-saw’ of critical and public taste (p. 272). La barque du Dante depicting a disturbing scene from the Inferno in which Virgil escorts Dante into the Underworld on a craft crowded with lost souls (some of them recognizable Florentines) destined to be punished for their crimes, caused a sensation at the Paris Salon of 1822. For many, including the James brothers, it retained in its unconventionality and boldness, its writhing naked flesh reminiscent of Michelangelo sculptures, a ‘queerness’ (a term repeated) registered initially by William which characterized its unconventional and tragic beauty. Henry, years later (in 1876) watching a seaside holiday scene of men and small ‘rosy’ children disporting themselves on decorated boats at Étretat on the Normandy coast, translated this Delacroix vision into a gentle picture of wholesome domesticity.The infernal lake has become ‘one of the streams of Paradise.The swimmers are not the damned, but the blessed, and the demonstrative French babies are the cherubs’.16 Delacroix represents, then, something of the ‘incalculable’ and unknowable of which the young Henry had been warned on the rue de Seine, and this is the 35



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painter at the centre of that illumination which embodied for him the nature of style and of a mystery ‘which indeed was one of its forms’. A climactic moment of A Small Boy occurs in the Louvre‘s Galerie d’Apollon, a magnificent room decorated in the gilded style of the Second Empire, recently re-opened after renovation, and it has Delacroix at its centre. The young Henry, in ‘a long but assured initiation’ into ‘Style’, conscious of the ‘supreme coved ceiling and inordinately shining parquet’, inhales ‘a general sense of glory’ (SBO, p. 274). It is a moment of exultation which recognizes beauty and art, history, fame and power, ‘the world in fine raised to the richest and noblest expression’. He had to raise his eyes upward to see the Apollo which gave the room its name. The god of light is portrayed in the ceiling’s central panel, a tribute to the mortal Sun King, Louis XIV. The commission had been completed just a few years earlier, in 1850–1851. Delacroix depicts the combat, as narrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, ‘between Apollo and the serpent Python, after which Victory descends to crown Apollo, and Iris unfurls her scarf as a symbol of the triumph of Light over Darkness’.17 Light and creation are seen to defeat the mediocrity of conformity as Python writhes in darkness, asserting the triumph of spirit over mortality, the magnificence of individual genius, the power of the creative act. This emblem of the value of art is nominated by James over fifty years later as a point of clarification, the moment when he foresaw all the ‘fun’ it might bring him. Yet what is most noticeable is that he remains silent about the painting itself, as if he wished to free the personal revelation from one specific inspiration, allowing the situation, the atmosphere of the magnificent salon and his own youth to carry the moment.The looking at pictures could only ‘half express’ such occasions, as he later comments, when he felt ‘the house of life’ and ‘the palace of art’‘so mixed and interchangeable’. He moved, catlike, alongside the walls of the palace of the Louvre, his ‘young sensibility’ rubbing against them ‘for endearment and consecration’ (SBO, pp. 280, 281). His other, literal support for such moments of exposure to great art (notably Géricault’s spectacular Raft of the Medusa, another scene of anguished, semi-naked bodies clinging to a craft) was a living man who seems to have embodied both maleness and the spirit of Europe. Henry clung to the arm of the ‘good’, ‘brave’, ‘black-whiskered’ Jean Nadali, the Italian courier hired by the Jameses for much of their travelling. Despite his turbulent emotions – young Henry feels ‘appalled but uplifted’ – Nadali’s ‘professional acquaintance with the splendours about us added for me … to the charm of his “European” character’ (p. 278). The Galerie d’Apollon reappeared to James, ‘one summer dawn many years later’ in ‘the most appalling yet most admirable nightmare’ of his life. He was pursuing a terrified ‘dimly-descried figure’ in a sudden reversal, ‘the tables turned’, of a situation in which, woken from sleep within the dream, he had been holding shut a door against the intruder, ‘awful agent, creature or presence, whatever he was’. He was outdone ‘for straight aggression and dire intention’, fleeing for his life 36



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while thunder and flashes of lightning revealed ‘the deep embrasures’ and ‘so polished floor’ of the magnificent room. The dreamer, ‘appalled’, had himself become the ‘more appalling’. One might speculate that he was realizing in this ‘dreamadventure’ his boyhood relationship with William, always ahead, or even glimpsing the inherent monstrosity of art, but James avoids explanation and, as in ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1898), allows the unspecified horrors to be freely imagined (p. 277). He would dramatize a similarly inexplicable reversal of power in which the pursued becomes the pursuer in ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908). Its expatriate protagonist confronts, when opening doors on his nocturnal visits, some ghostly ‘other’, revealed as mutilated yet capable of reducing him to a state of abjection. Such nightmare visions containing unknowably desperate possibilities represent some personal ‘heart of darkness’.

Boulogne-sur-mer During this stay of almost a year in Paris, Mr and Mrs James made two trips to Germany, probably in search of a suitable school. Their efforts were, for the time, fruitless, however, and in the summer of 1857 the family left for the sea air of Boulogne where they rented an apartment on the rue Neuve Chaussée, one of the town’s ‘most frequented and fashionable’ streets.18 This busy fishing port and holiday resort was popular with the British, some avoiding social or financial problems at home. The location was convenient, for Folkestone was only 28 miles distant across the English Channel and a train line to Paris had recently been opened. Henry James Sr paid several visits to Britain in these summer months. For young Henry, the place was redolent with the spirit of Thackeray who had referred to the town as the ‘refuge of how many thousands of other unfortunate Britons’.19 The aged Colonel Newcome in The Newcomes had retreated to the old town, the haute ville, after the disastrous failure of the Bundelcund Bank, and indeed Thackeray had stayed with his daughters in Boulogne just a few years earlier. Henry soon became a subscriber at the thriving ‘Merridew’s British Library and Reading-rooms’ where he could keep up with ‘the principal English and French journals, liberally supplied, and the monthly periodicals, together with some of the Indian and colonial journals’.20 The three oldest James boys were enrolled at the local Collège Impériale. A more socially mixed establishment than most they had attended, it educated ‘the sons of all the small shop-keepers … of certain of the mechanics and artisans’, as well as ‘the English contingent, these predominantly internes and uniformed, bluejacketed and brass-buttoned’. Here, in the person of ‘a brownish, black-eyed youth’ of his own age, Henry received a fleeting but powerful impression of a larger and more troubled colonial world. The First War of Indian Independence, the Indian 37



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Mutiny, had broken out in May 1857, and the boy who became his friend was Napier (‘or Nappié as he was called at the school’), probably Robert William Napier, a son of field marshal Robert Cornelis Napier who was made a C.B. after the defence and fall of Lucknow. Because of his parents’ involvement in ‘the general Indian peril’, Robert himself took on, in Henry’s eyes, something ‘almost Indian of stamp and hue’. Ignorant of whether or not his parents still lived, he represented emotions and experience unknown, ‘the glamour of an altogether new emphasis of type’, and the memory of his face stayed with James over the years,‘quite undimmed’ (SBO, pp. 317, 318). An encounter with another pupil, a local boy, Benoît-Constant Coquelin, son of a local baker, would have more lasting consequences, for he would grow up to become one of France’s leading actors, ‘the most interesting and many-sided comedian’, the ‘most unsurpassed dramatic diseur of his time’ (p. 319). Coquelin went on to spend twenty years at the Théâtre-Français and later toured America with Sarah Bernhardt. James’s admiration was lifelong since the actor embodied the kind of serious and self-conscious commitment to his art frequently lacking in British or American theatre. When the Théâtre-Français paid a fund-raising visit to London in 1879 James was invited to breakfast with Coquelin at the home of Andrew Lang (best known for his collections of folk and fairy tales) and was deeply stirred: ‘Coquelin’s personality, his talk, the way the artist overflowed in him – all this was tremendously suggestive … I listened to some purpose, and I have never lost what I gained’ (CN, p. 228).To herald the actor’s arrival in America, James contributed an entire essay on this ‘Balzac of actors’ to the Century Magazine (1887, CWHJD, p. 333). Alice James, at nine the youngest member of the family, would provide, many years later, an anecdote which reveals the young Henry, then fourteen, at his most wry and engaging. Alice’s retrospective pleasure derived from recognizing her brother’s talent for finding the right words at the right moment. The whole family, minus William, had been invited to visit the family of the current governess, Mlle. Boningue, who lived locally. It was a long day. Having been fed, the children were sent out to play in the garden, with its ‘two or three scrubby apple trees from one of which hung a swing … Harry was sitting in the swing and I came up and stood near by, as the sun began to slant over the desolate expanse … when Harry suddenly exclaimed: “This might certainly be called pleasure under difficulties!”’.21 Alice was delighted at such considered precision. By 23 August, however, Henry had once again fallen ill: suffering from typhus (a disease spread by lice), he remained in a dangerous condition and was confined to his bed for two months. It was, as he says, ‘the gravest illness of my life’ (SBO, p. 313), and its consequences were long-lasting. As late as 4 January 1858, William could write to their New York friend Edgar Van Winkle, ‘[h]e is quite as sound in body and mind as any of us, although he is not considered well enough to go to 38



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school.The only trace of his fever remaining is a scarcity of hair on his head, which we had shaved’. After their summer by the sea, the family was back in Paris by the third week of October where, having rented an apartment at 26 rue Montaigne (later rue J. Mermoz), they planned to spend the winter. However, world events intervened: the American stock market had crashed in late summer 1857 and even the James family’s comfortable finances had not been immune. Their wealth was founded upon the family inheritance and, at this point, they considered returning to America. But their New York house had been leased and was unavailable, and so by December, in a bid to economize, they returned to Boulogne for the rest of the winter, renting a house at 24 Grande Rue and making do with just two servants. The monthly rent (for a six-month let) was 150 francs, while the College fee was 10 francs per month. Henry Sr at least was enthusiastic about the return to the coast: ‘Boulogne is about the most cheerful place in France, prosperous in a business point of view, full of bustle, picturesque in situation and costume’.22 The cook was English and Henry Sr, after previous unhappy domestic experiences, was happy to sacrifice ‘French elegance’ for ‘English honesty’. Life for young Henry was, however, undeniably dull. Still considered too delicate to return to school, for three mornings a week he had lessons at home with a tutor, the ‘good’, ‘mild’ M Ansiot. Though his teacher’s personal hygiene may have been questionable (Henry had to open the window after each session), he represented ‘an absolute ancientry of type, of tone, of responsible taste’ and the two ‘sociably explored’ the boy’s principal interest – literature (SBO, pp. 327–328). Pierre A.Walker has persuasively suggested that Henry’s tutor was, in fact, Napoléon Ansieaux, a rhetoric professor at the local Collège Communal, an author who published a book of poetry, and a contributor to the local newspaper of articles arguing for society’s need of cultural enrichment and the importance of critical thought.23 The tutor seems to have adopted an Arnoldian system of ‘touchstones’ for his teaching, offering ‘collected extracts from the truly and academically great … in a small and pocketed library rather greasily preserved’ to which James attributes his ‘“working” sense of the vieux temps’, those ‘olden times’ in which the greatest writers found their place within historical tradition (SBO, p. 329). British visitors to the town seemed dowdy, but the more colourful locals drew the attention of this youth who still retained an American sense of the proprieties. He remarked on the quays and beaches ‘the tanned and trussed and kerchiefed, the active and productive women, all so short-skirted and free-limbed … deep-wading, far-striding, shrimp-netting, crab-gathering matrons or maidens’ (322). He had perhaps not seen such expanses of bared female flesh before. Two decades later, James’s painter friend, John Singer Sargent, would record comparable scenes of Breton working life in his Fishing for Oysters at Cancale and Oyster Gatherers of Cancale, and toward the end of the century James himself returned to this northern seaside ­location in that work which exposes the squalors of adult corruption through the 39



  Europe and Newport: In Search of a ‘Sensuous Education’  

trusting observations of a child, What Maisie Knew. The fisherwomen, subject to male attention, would re-appear in that novel. James Sr noted that his son had, in these months, become ‘a devourer of libraries, and an immense writer of novels and dramas’,24 though these literary experiments were never subjected, it seems, to family scrutiny. For Henry himself, in retrospect, and recalling his illness, it was a period ‘too endlessly and blightingly prolonged’ (SBO, p. 312), though the gains for the rest of the family are clear.There can be little doubt that William, Bob and Wilky benefited from regular attendance at the local Collège; though their academic achievements may have been mixed, their proficiency in French improved, and they had a chance to extend their social circle beyond the family. By the end of May 1858, however, they had left Boulogne and, having spent three weeks staying in a house near London’s Paddington Station (not far from St John’s Wood), they boarded the R.M.S. Persia at Liverpool, arriving in New York on 22 June.

‘Reattachment’: Newport, RI After a brief return to Albany, the family then moved to the historic New England coastal town of Newport, Rhode Island. According to James’s highly subjective account in that late work, The American Scene, he felt it to be the most European of places; many in his social circle (often subscribers to that emblem of European culture, the Revue des Deux Mondes) had spent extended periods on the Continent and he imagined them as stretching ‘fond arms across the sea’ (AS, p. 240). Among them, Mary and Edmund Tweedy had taken (as well as a house in Pelham, New York) a summer villa at Bellevue Court. Tweedy had been a successful banker and treasurer for the American Union of Associationists (supporters of the ideas of Charles Fourier) who had met Henry James Sr through the offices of James John Garth Wilkinson. Tweedy and James Sr became friends and in 1848 the former married Mary Temple, a sister of James’s brother-in-law, Colonel Robert Temple. Like the Jameses, they had spent years in Europe, but they had also lost their three children to diphtheria. At this time the Tweedys took on Henry’s four orphaned cousins, daughters of Catharine and Robert Temple who had both died of tuberculosis in 1854 (the tragedy briefly observed by young Henry at Rhinebeck). Many of the places where he had lived contained for James ‘ghosts’, poignant and sometimes troubling reminders of the past and, generally, its regretted losses. But Newport’s ghosts, as characterized retrospectively in The American Scene, are more benign; its historic streets retained an Arcadian innocence and vulnerability, and its genteel occupants are imagined as offering ‘a little bare, white, open hand, with slightly-parted fingers, for the observer with a presumed sense for hands to take or to leave’. It was a privileged but kindly society that young Henry found 40



  1855 –1861 

there: ‘on the old lawns and verandahs I saw them gather, on the old shining sands I saw them gallop, past the low headlands I saw their white sails verily flash, and through the dusky old shrubberies came the light and sound of their feasts’ (AS, pp. 225, 236). Its streets and houses dated back to colonial times, and it was a place only just being noticed by the men of business who, retreating from the summer heat of the great east-coast cities would build their ‘cottages’, now famed, those mansions which have come to represent the excesses of that gilded age. James would return to this transformed Newport in his consideration of wealth, innocence and American corruption in the unfinished late novel, The Ivory Tower. In company with Wilky and Bob, Henry (now 15) began at yet another school, the Berkeley Institute, in the Masonic Building at 10 Washington Square.The headmaster was the Reverend William C. Leverett and it offered a fairly narrow curriculum of ‘English, Classical, French, German, Spanish, Drawing and Music’. Henry proved, once more, to be ‘an uninterested scholar’ and indeed his chief interests lay outside the schoolroom.25 Soon after the family’s arrival, two local boys, Leslie PellClarke and Thomas Sergeant Perry, called to introduce themselves. Pell-Clarke was the son of the Governor of Rhode Island while Perry’s ancestry was especially distinguished. Towards the end of his life, James referred to him as his ‘superexcellent and all-reading, all-engulfing friend’ (NSB, p. 87); on his mother’s side he was a descendant of Benjamin Franklin, while his grandfather, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, had led the naval force against the British on Lake Erie in the War of 1812; Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, his great uncle, had been chief among those who opened up Japan to the West. Thomas, or ‘Sarge’ as he was affectionately known, became a scholar, translator and editor, and married Lilla Cabot, the American Impressionist painter who had been a pupil of Claude Monet. He observed that Henry occupied a somewhat withdrawn role within the family, recalling that ‘[w]hen we got to the house and the rest of us were chattering, Henry James sat on the window-seat reading Leslie’s Life of Constable with a certain air of remoteness’.26 The two boys went on to take many walks together on the coast, discussing Fourier and Ruskin, and reading the English literary magazines as well as the Revue des Deux Mondes. It was a friendship which endured; uniquely they had shared ‘the long afternoons of youth’ (AS, p. 227), and after James had published his autobiography, he wrote to Perry, ‘I felt again & again that you would be the only person alive who would understand what I meant there, & that though others might think they did it wouldn’t be so true of them as of you’.27 In 1860, Sarge’s older sister, Margaret Mason Perry, would marry John La Farge who, having settled in Newport the previous year, became an eminent painter, muralist and designer of stained glass, if an unreliable husband. Older than the James boys (he was born in 1835), elegant in appearance and embodying European culture, he made a lasting impression on young Henry. He had been raised in New 41



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York by wealthy French parents and had gone on to study art with Thomas Couture in Paris.There he had met Théophile Gautier and Puvis de Chavannes, had admired in England the Pre-Raphaelites,28 and, with his wide reading, represented for James, ‘an artistic, an esthetic nature of wondrous homogeneity’ (NSB, p. 72). La Farge was able to discuss Browning and Balzac, and his impact on James was almost physical: as he recalls, ‘he swam into our ingenuous ken as the figure of figures’ (NSB, p. 70). That term ‘figure’ holds especial significance for James. Writing to Arthur Benson, a younger friend of his later years, who had just published in 1906 a monograph on Walter Pater, he suggests that the latter has ‘become in our literature that very rare and sovereign thing, a Figure: a figure in the sense in which there are so few!’.29 A ‘figure’ possesses a wholeness and self-confidence which belong to genius; in a further verbal correspondence, La Farge, like Pater, enjoys, in James’s eyes, ‘sovereignty’ – a gift of authority, having a ‘prompt grasp by a nature essentially entire, a settled sovereign self, of the truth of what would work for it most favourably’. And, with a further Paterian resonance, La Farge is recalled as ‘a rare original’, ‘an embodiment of the gospel of esthetics’ (NSB, pp. 80, 71). The artist died in 1910 and in Notes of a Son and Brother, written not long afterwards, James’s expansive pen portrait is full of admiration as he recalls how he accompanied La Farge on local expeditions when they could both paint side by side – ‘we paint!’, he exclaims in wonderment (p. 83). Even the artist’s demeanour and manner of speaking seem to anticipate James’s own delivery of later years: ‘his sentences when they do come forth are often worth the throes of concentration which attend their birth’, he confided to Perry, and it is clear that he embodied for James the ‘figure’ of the artist who had found and practised his vocation.

To Switzerland After only a few months, however, the family was about to be uprooted once more. Henry Sr had been engaged in public debate on matters of individual freedom and marriage, principally in the pages of the New-York Tribune, from which he had not emerged well; from this point he would become less involved in such controversial issues. So it is not surprising that not long after their arrival he was looking forward to a return to Europe the next spring, and in particular to Geneva, ‘that educational paradise’. On 8 October 1859, after little more than a year, the James family set out from New York aboard the S.S. Vanderbilt, bound for Le Havre, embarking on what proved to be a rough 11-day passage. Having established important friendships outside the family circle, Henry, now 16, was sad to leave. He had said farewell to Sarge Perry and another friend, Jim Mackaye, in Newport, and Perry records on ‘this rather solemn occasion’ his ‘boyish despair’30 as the two remaining friends 42



  1855 –1861 

turned back home through its darkened streets. Henry wrote to Perry from New York, ‘this is our day for sailing … I can scarcely sit still to write this and feel my self thinking much more of what I leave behind than what I expect to find…. Good bye to you and every body and every thing!’. The Jameses’ journey to Geneva via Paris was made entirely by train on the recently opened rail line. Henry’s health had now improved and he was quickly enrolled at the Institution Rochette, which prepared its students for careers in engineering and architecture – his father’s vain attempt to counter Henry’s predisposition for reading novels. A ‘dilapidated old stone house’, it was situated on rue de l’Evêché, beside the prison and behind the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre, in ‘the most triste quarter’ of Geneva. The protruding walls of the church where Calvin had used to preach appeared to Henry forbidding, belonging to ‘an old-world sordid order … somehow of a harsh tradition and a tragic economy’, as he tried to ‘rub off history from its stones’ (NSB, p. 9). At the opening of one of Töpffer’s most successful stories, ‘La bibliothèque de mon oncle’ in Nouvelles genevoises (1841), the young narrator had looked down on much the same city street scene. The school was, nevertheless, an eccentric choice and, once more, though he worked hard, the adolescent James struggled pitifully in mathematics, and was made to feel a failure: ‘mere darkness, waste and anguish … it was hard and bitter fruit all and turned to ashes in my mouth’ (NSB, p. 7). But he did have the opportunity to speak French and was taught French literature by Charles Töpffer, son of the author of those Voyages en Zigzag, that had been so enjoyed by the family. Even more romantically, Charles, a great talker, could reminisce about what seem to be his rakish days in Paris, his visits to the Théâtre-Français, and his passion for the great Rachel as he recounted the details of her performance in Racine’s tragedy of scorned love, Phèdre. By Easter 1860 some relief was offered when Henry’s timetable was reduced to cover just French, German and Latin. He also began attending some courses at the Académie de Genève (soon to become the University of Geneva) where William was already a student, and where, incidentally, the fictional Frederick Winterbourne in ‘Daisy Miller’ (1879) was educated. While at the Academy, James accompanied other students to the hospital to watch a dissection of a deceased ‘strapping big [gendarme]’, a shocking experience through which he remained unaffected, as he was pleased to report to Perry. In company with William, he also became an honorary part of Swiss student life by attending the annual fête of the Société des Zofingues, a three-day event involving ‘[d]rinking, smoking big German pipes and singing’ which took place in the village of Moudon, 45 miles from Geneva. Toward the end of their Swiss stay and the awaited arrival of summer (and managing to suppress the memory of the smell of rank cheese that pervaded its alleyways), Henry had come to the conclusion that Geneva was ‘one of the loveliest spots upon earth’, though he would come to regret its social inadequacies, ‘the want of humor in the local atmosphere, and the absence 43



  Europe and Newport: In Search of a ‘Sensuous Education’  

… of that æsthetic character which is begotten of a generous view of life’ (CTWC, p. 627). Henry was continuing to write, though his subjects remain as mysterious as those play scenes he worked on in New York as a boy. Wilky wrote to Sarge Perry that ‘Harry has become an author I believe, for he keeps his door locked all day, & a little while ago, I took a peep in his room, and saw some poetical looking manuscripts lying on the table, & himself looking in a most authorlike way’.31 Henry confesses archly to Perry the nature of his ‘secret employments’, telling him that ‘to no style am I a stranger, there is none which has not been adorned by the magic of my touch’. The need to maintain his privacy was serious, however; intending to submit a ‘modern novel’ to the Atlantic Monthly, once back in Newport, he asked Perry to act as an intermediary:‘I cannot again stand the pressure of avowed authorship (for the present;) and their answer could not come here unobserved. Do not speak to Willie of this’. From the beginning Henry was subjected to fraternal criticism, or at least joshing, unrequested and unwelcome. During this second stay in Switzerland the family’s plans for the future seem characteristically uncertain and as early as March 1860 Henry suspected that they would be returning to America ‘sooner than we expected when we came’. He confided to his friend that ‘the state of suspense in which I am living is very disagreable’. As late as June of that year there was a possibility that they might pass the next winter in Frankfurt, yet by the end of September the Jameses had, once more, abandoned Europe. Before leaving, Henry and William spent a week walking in the Swiss mountains and in July the family took up residence in Bonn. Henry and Wilky stayed at the home of Dr P. Humpert, a professor of Latin and Greek, at 190 Bonngasse, not far from the birthplace of Beethoven. William, on the other hand, lodged with the Stromberg family. Frau Stromberg is characterized as a literary kind of Hausfrau by James in his memoir;‘young and fair’, she ‘wrote tragedies as well as made pancakes’, and William was certainly enthusiastic about her cooking. In fact, Mathilde Reichardt-Stromberg had published a five-act drama, Aspasia, in 1852 (James refers to a play called Cleopatra, of which there is no record), and she would go on to become a strongly antifeminist voice, promoting the role of the family as a social force and locating woman’s power within the household, indeed, within the kitchen, a kind of priestess of civilization. The James family seems to have had no inkling of her significance in the history of ideas.32 Despite the romantic landscapes and ‘the great flow and magic name of the Rhine’ (NSB, p. 29), Henry found his lodgings airless and failed (unlike his older brother) to acquire any lasting sympathy for German culture and language. It was here, nevertheless, that he first saw the great Italian actor, Adelaide Ristori, in a performance of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, considered miscast by Henry Sr as ‘the vulture counterfeiting Jenny Wren’ (p. 36). In fact, Henry had been translating this play 44



  1855 –1861 

which he liked ‘exceedingly’ as an exercise under the tutelage of Dr Humpert.33 When the decision was finally made to return to Newport, Henry, at least, was delighted at the prospect, writing to Perry, ‘I think I must fire off my biggest gun first. One—two—three! Bung Gerdee bang—bang … !!!’. On 1 September Henry, in company with William and Wilky, left Cologne where they had stopped to visit the cathedral to join the rest of the family in Paris. They shared a carriage for the twelve-hour rail journey with a French lady’s maid, a valet and a coachman and Henry was characteristically fascinated by their conversation, what it disclosed of life below stairs, and what emerged so unflatteringly of the privileged lives of their French employers. In these final days, nevertheless, he was acutely aware of the charms of French life, its traditional culture and cosmopolitanism. The historic city of Strasbourg in Alsace, for instance, could only be glimpsed from the train window, ‘a mild monster behind bars, that is above chimneys, housetops and fortifications’. The departure from Paris is marked by a sense of time running out, of something funereal demanding ‘obsequies’. This city of ‘the shining second Empire’ had been transformed by the efforts of Napoleon III, but James’s recollection was doubtless coloured by the knowledge of its imminent future (NSB, pp. 46, 50). As a later historian commented, ‘[d]own their bright new boulevards the inhabitants of the scientific, gas-lit Empire danced their way to the national disaster of Sedan and to the horrors of the Paris Commune of 1871’.34

To Newport: Friendships and Family James associated the mood of this ‘frenzied dance’ (NSB, p. 46) with the novels of Parisian life by Edmond About and Alphonse Daudet, though a letter written to Perry during this brief stay in the city foretells with its seemingly effortless choice of detail and sense of movement James’s talent as observer and, indeed, travel writer: I am more than ever ‘penetrated’ with Paris….  The window at which I write is in the fifth storey and looks down on part of the Palais Royal and up at the New Louvre. Underneath is a wide open place upon which there is a ceaseless swarming movement. On one side there is a cab station. The drivers are snoozing with their bloated heads reclining on the tops of their square boxy fiacres, and the little low rats of horses are wearily stamping and whisking their feet and tails. Now, there is a grasp of warriors of the line receding across the place little squat, brown men in blue and red who move with a gait formed of a mixture of a waddle and a swagger. Two Zouaves are coming this way. They too, are brown but not squat and neither waddle nor swagger.35

Nevertheless the family’s Atlantic passage was already booked, and by 11 September they were aboard the Adriatic, arriving in New York twelve days later. 45



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Their return was rationalized by Henry Sr declaring ‘the superiority of America to these countries after all … how much better it is that we should have done with them’.36 It was, for the elder Jameses, their last trip to Europe. They headed now, once more, to Newport, as Henry observed to Perry, ‘the place in America we all most care to live in’. Part of the justification for this return was William’s desire to study with the artist William Morris Hunt who had settled in the town in 1856. The apparent irony of leaving the ateliers of Paris for a studio in Newport was not lost upon the young James. In fact, though the movement of aspiring American artists took an opposing direction, Hunt, whom the Jameses had met earlier in Europe, was highly respected.37 In 1858 he had extended Hill Top, his estate in the Italian style overlooking Newport, to include a studio,38 and John La Farge had already enrolled as a student. Like La Farge, Hunt cut an exotic, European figure and indeed James would liken him unflatteringly, with his ‘muscular spareness and brownness and absence of waste’, to Cervantes’ Don Quixote. He had been a favourite pupil of Thomas Couture’s and, after an 1851 visit to Barbizon, the artists’ colony in the Forest of Fontainebleau, he became a champion of the work of Jean François Millet in New England and, indeed, of French art generally. At this time, William, despite his parents’ lack of enthusiasm, was intent upon a career as a professional artist. While staying in Paris he had attended classes with one of the city’s most eminent teachers, Léon Cogniet, and it was La Farge’s view that he might have become ‘a remarkable, perhaps a great painter’.39 It is perversely endearing that James Sr, believing art at this time to be a ‘crawling thing’ feeding ‘into fawning sycophancy’, regarded a career as a painter to be insufficiently unconventional.40 Henry’s immediate future (he was now 17) remained uncertain; he had written to Perry on 5 August 1860, ‘I have not the remotest idea of how I shall spend my time next winter. I don’t wish to go back to Mr. Leverett, at least under the same conditions as before. I wish, although I’ve no doubt it is a very silly wish, that I were going to college’. In the event, he filled in time by following William to Hunt’s studio where, predictably (and replicating some of his earlier New York schooldays), while his purposeful brother worked upstairs, he remained below,‘quite in solitude’, with ‘a chamber of the temple all to myself, with immortal forms and curves, with shadows beautiful and right’ (NSB, pp. 64, 65), happy to receive the odd word of encouragement from his master. These ‘long quiet hours’ were spent in rendering ‘the sublime uplifted face of Michael Angelo’s “Captive” in the Louvre’, known also as the Dying Slave. This celebrated sculpture of a youth with a slightly arched body, one hand voluptuously placed behind his head, bound tightly across the chest by a fabric which accentuates his nakedness, exemplifies once again the beauty of the male form, consciously displayed for its own sake, which Henry had earlier admired in Couture’s Falconer. 46



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Daily life was interrupted by a comparable moment of aesthetic and erotic awakening. Henry found, one morning, his companions ‘of the larger, the serious studio inspired to splendid performance by the beautiful young manly form of our cousin Gus Barker, then on a vivid little dash of a visit to us and who, perched on a pedestal and divested of every garment, was the gayest as well as the neatest of models’ (NSB, pp. 75–76). Gus, this ‘little red-headed kinsman’, was a favourite cousin; just a year older than Henry, he had boarded at a ‘military school’ at Ossining, on the banks of the Hudson, and this ‘most beautifully made athletic little person’ would appear at the Jameses’ home like some figure of romance in Henry’s eyes, ‘as floated by exotic airs and with the scent of the spice-islands hanging about him’. He held an unattainable sensory mystery, a pleasure scarcely imaginable, as one of those who ‘were so other – that was what I felt; and to be other, other almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright compound wistfully watched in the confectioner’s window’ (SBO, pp. 140, 141, 153, 144). If that ‘other’ is a masculinity Henry found wanting in himself, a natural confidence and spontaneity, Gus’s heroism was to be confirmed by his all-too-premature death in the conflict of the imminent Civil War: he was picked off by a sniper’s bullet while patrolling behind the lines at Kelly’s Ford, on the Rappahannock River, Virginia, on 17 September, 1863, and died the following day. Henry’s moment of insight when he could associate the ‘beautiful’ with the ‘manly’ carried an additional message with enduring implications. He wondered at his brother’s confidence and talent as he sketched Gus: ‘nothing less than that meant drawing … and since our genial kinsman’s perfect gymnastic figure meant living truth, I should certainly best testify to the whole mystery by pocketing my pencil’ (NSB, p. 76). This need be not the ‘mystery’ simply of Gus’s beauty but may also include the idea of ‘mystery’ as ‘métier’, ‘craft’ or ‘occupation’. In this moment of incipient sexual panic, James is reduced (alone of the company) to a state of abjection, a confirmation of incontrovertible desire, as well as a recognition of his own technical limitation.The pencil is put away and he will abandon all idea of dabbling in art. He would see Gus just once more, ‘on a brief leave of farewell to his Harvard classmates’; they had no chance to speak, but James retained into older age a sharp visual impression, ‘his charming latent agility … his bright-coloured wagging head … the large gaiety of the young smile that made his handsome teeth shine out’. After that scene in Hunt’s studio, defeated by the challenge of his perfection, Henry ‘secured and preserved for long’ William’s finished sketch of the young man (NSB, pp. 96, 77). It was perhaps some consolation for Henry that La Farge had assured him that he had ‘the painter’s eye, adding that few writers possessed it. … In those old days he advised Henry James to turn writer, but, he said, he did not offer his counsel dogmatically’.41 The James family lived in Newport from autumn 1860 until spring 1864. After a childhood characterized by change and relocation, these years, with some 47



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i­ nterruptions, allowed James to enjoy once more the regular and sustained companionship of friends and relatives beyond the immediate family circle. Something of the atmosphere of the idyllic local landscapes and seascapes, the beach and cliff walks, the boat trips, picnics, the old fort across the bay, survives in a story of 1866, ‘A Landscape-Painter’, and it has even been suggested that the artist-narrator, the ‘artist-eccentric’ type, ‘brash and idealistic’, may have been modelled on John La Farge.42 Nearby lived some of what James later called his ‘Albany cousins’ (NSB, p. 61), Katharine (Kitty), Mary (Minny), Ellen (Elly) and Henrietta Temple, the orphaned sisters taken in by Mary and Edmund Tweedy who came to Newport early in 1861; the two older sons, Robert and William, visited in the summer. William was soon to die in the Civil War, while Robert (Bob) would sink into a life of criminality. Of the girls, Minny ‘shone with vividest lustre’ and James’s memoir of the period, wondering at the ‘originality, vivacity, audacity, generosity, of her spirit’, defines her as someone who ‘counted’ (NSB, pp. 61, 62). Other young men were also fascinated, including William and another friend, John Chipman Gray, though Minny’s independence and forthrightness seem not to have suited the James parents; Henry Sr was perhaps accustomed to being shown greater deference towards his ideas, especially from young women.43 She would die of tuberculosis in 1870, aged 24, never having realized her dream of visiting Europe (where Henry received news of her death), but her presence is to be felt in the inspiration she provided for some of his most memorable heroines – independent, courageous, affecting women such as Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady (1881), and Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove (1902).

48

3 Civil War and ‘a Consecration to Letters’ (1861–1869)

On 12 April 1861, just a few days before James’s eighteenth birthday, Confederate troops fired on a small federal garrison based in Fort Sumter, Charleston Bay, South Carolina, marking the first hostilities of the American Civil War. Eminent Charleston resident and renowned diarist Mary Chesnut, hearing the booming of a cannon at 4.30 in the morning, fell to her knees and prayed. South Carolina had been the first state to secede in December 1860 and within weeks six more southern states had followed. The ensuing civil war split south from north, pitting a primarily rural, agrarian economy against a richer industrialized urban society. As the nation pursued the course of ‘manifest destiny’, a seemingly limitless movement across the continent, the enduring conflict between slavery and abolitionism became acute as Federal territories decided whether or not they would legislate for a slave state. Commerce in the south with its rich European market links was founded on cotton whose production was dependent upon a slave labour force. Nation and indeed family were divided; brother sometimes found himself fighting against brother.The four-year war which, like many such events, had been supposed to be quickly over, became the greatest trauma in the young nation’s history. By its end 620,000 participants were dead, 2% of the population. Others would carry their wounds, psychic and physical, until their deaths.

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Civil War and the James Family Life in Newport, Rhode Island, remote from any theatre of battle, changed little for the James family, at least initially. In these early months young men rushed to volunteer before the war should end, though this was not the case for the James brothers. Wilky, 16, and Bob, 15, were still too young to enlist and they were delivered to their final school, a co-educational establishment in Concord, Massachusetts, some 90 miles away, run by Francis Sanborn. He was a controversial figure, linked with John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, and his credentials were impeccably abolitionist. He had been an admirer of James Sr’s writings, and his pupils included the late John Brown’s two daughters, as well as the children of Emerson, Hawthorne and Judge Ebenezer J. Hoar. There was, it seems, no question of Alice attending this school (she was now 13) and, in fact, the two James boys, rather older than most pupils, remained there only temporarily. On 12 September 1862, Wilky, still a year short of the prescribed age of 18, enlisted with the 44th Massachusetts Regiment, and in June 1863 Bob, aged just 16, joined the 55th Massachusetts Regiment. Their father had endorsed these decisions, as Wilky later recalled, describing himself as ‘the son of parents devoted to the cause of the Union and the abolition of slavery…. My father accompanied me to the recruiting station, witnessed the enrollment, and gave me, as his willing mite, to the cause he had so much at heart’.1 Similarly, James Sr was willing to sacrifice Bob, so that ‘whether he lived or died he might be fully adopted of that Divine spirit of liberty which is at last renewing all things in its own image’.2 By contrast, Henry Sr had forbidden his two older sons to volunteer. In a letter written in summer 1861 he had insisted (with an echo from Othello), that ‘no existing government … is worth an honest life and a clean one like theirs; especially if that government is likewise in danger of bringing back slavery again under our banner: than which consummation I would rather see chaos itself come again’.3 He recognized, inevitably, that William and Henry were very different from their siblings, and, in fact, most of the decisions taken in relation to where the family might live and be educated had been predicated upon William’s needs. While Henry’s role seems to have been passive, watchful and compliant – he was known as the ‘angel’ in the family and was his mother’s favourite – William had been demonstrative, brilliant and demanding, and had had most of his needs met. Indeed their father had concluded that the three younger boys (thus misguidedly including Henry) were ‘not cut out for intellectual labours’.4 At this point in autumn 1861 with the war recently begun, William gave up all thought of a career as an artist and registered as a student at the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard in, as Henry says, ‘the pursuit of science, first of chemistry and then of anatomy and physiology and medicine, with psychology and philosophy at last piling up the record’ (NSB, p. 43). 50



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A ‘Horrid Even if an Obscure Hurt’ Henry, alone of his male siblings, remained at home. Earlier in the year, just three days after his eighteenth birthday, a major fire had broken out in Newport in the early hours of 18 April, a common enough event in those days of wooden-built structures. Firefighting relied on volunteer forces and two hundred men were involved that night, including Henry James, who suffered an injury during his exertions, ‘a horrid even if an obscure hurt’, as he enigmatically describes it (NSB, p. 240). Because of his opaqueness, the episode has excited biographical interest ever since. He became wedged, he explains, into a fence corner as he tried to operate a water pump: it was strenuous work which frequently caused injury: ‘The pumping action, sucking in water to the vacuum chamber on the upstroke and forcing it out through the hose on the downstroke, required bending down to knee level on the downstroke and reaching above the head on the upstroke’.5 James himself reflects upon the incident so that his own injury and pain become a part of the greater trauma of the war itself, establishing ‘a sort of tragic fellowship’ with those ‘thousand wounds’ sustained by the ‘enclosing social body’ (NSB, p. 240). As a result he suffered from intermittent but chronic back pain for many years following, though an eminent Boston physician known to his father, when consulted, unhelpfully dismissed the problem at the time. The indirection and generality of James’s late prose style have led to speculation as to the precise nature of the injury and its consequences. It can be read as a continuation of seemingly inevitable accidents befalling male members of the James family. Henry’s grandfather, William of Albany, had faced a comparable conflagration on the wharves of Albany when he had unsuccessfully attempted to save his business,6 while his father had suffered mutilation as a consequence of the barn fire of his boyhood. James describes his injury as ‘horrid’, ‘odious’, ‘intimate’, with physical consequences drawn out ‘incalculably and intolerably’ (NSB, p. 239), leading to speculation that he suffered castration or that he was rendered sexually impotent,7 an explanation for his assumed long-term celibacy. Edel, conflating James’s terms ‘vast’ and ‘visitation’ allies the experience to his father’s ‘vastation’, his recovery from psychological collapse by means of the doctrine of Swedenborg. A later commentator refers to the young James as having suffered ‘a malign invasion of the spirit.… In other words, he had neither castrated himself nor developed a hernia, but he had suffered a psychic wound’.8 Though Henry enjoyed a week’s walking in New Hampshire with his friend Perry in mid-July 1861, his suffering continued ‘not only for the next four years but for long afterward’ (NSB, p. 240). From August until December 1864 he spent time undergoing a water cure at Springdale near Northampton, Massachusetts, an institution advertised as offering the ‘relief and cure of chronic disorder and disease’, his father having sought similar treatment at an experimental school on Ham Common in south-west London after his psychological collapse in 1844. It is not clear whether Henry’s visit related to treatment for his back or whether it was for relief from the 51



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digestive and bowel problems that would beset him in the later years of the decade. He is more precise when referring to being confined to his bed in Swampscott in summer 1866, ‘miserably stricken by my poor broken, all but unbearable, and unsurvivable back of those [and still, under fatigue, even of these] years’ (CN, p. 239). He played no part in this war, but though some of his friends were to volunteer, notably Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr and John Chipman Gray, his position was not unique. Many southern students at Harvard joined the Confederate army and numbers of northerners gradually left to fight for the Union, but ‘campus life was affected less than might be expected. Even the son of President Lincoln calmly continued his studies until his graduation in 1864’.9 In spring 1863 William and Henry applied to the Boston Educational Commission to join a group who would travel to Port Royal, South Carolina, to support and teach those who had been enslaved, though both were rejected as lacking experience and appropriate qualifications. Henry was drafted in July of that year but later exempted, suffering from ‘various complaints’, as recorded by the local newspaper, the Newport Mercury. He was thus very likely freed from ‘any personal anxieties … concerning his own individual relationship to the war’.10

Law at Harvard After the withdrawal of northern forces from Fort Sumter and the acknowledgment of a state of insurrection, President Lincoln made his appeal for 75,000 volunteer militiamen on 15 April 1861 – Henry’s birthday. In his memoir, with the expansiveness of privilege belonging to older age, he interweaves the specifics of his own pain and anxiety with the generalities of the national crisis, referring to ‘a private catastrophe or difficulty, bristling with embarrassments, and the great public convulsion that announced itself in bigger terms each day’. The ‘huge comprehensive ache’ he felt at the time seemed to become a part of the engulfing national tragedy. Within the year (by September 1862) he had enrolled, aged 18, not in the army, but at the School of Law at Harvard, a move freeing him from the routine of rest and reading demanded by his back pain. In this new situation, in another transfiguration of the phenomena of war, Harvard Yard, the central recreational area of the campus, is recalled echoing the soldierly Othello as a ‘tented field’, his fellow (predominantly younger) students, a ‘bristling horde’, forming ‘the illusion of a mustered army’ (p. 243). The limited curriculum offer at Harvard may have dictated James’s choice of course. Literature or the liberal arts were not available options, though he did sit in on James Russell Lowell’s classes on English literature and Old French, ‘on dusky winter afternoons’, escaping ‘with irresponsible zeal into the glow of Mr. Lowell’s learned lamplight’ (LC 1: 519). He missed, seemingly, none of the lectures delivered by the law faculty, composed of three apparently dull men, Theophilus Parsons, Emory Washburn and Joel Parker, and he regularly took out of the library relevant 52



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‘sheepskin volumes’, though this was probably for appearances’ sake (NSB, p. 270). Genuine and more private intellectual stimulation was available in Causeries du lundi, the weekly Monday essays appearing in the 1850s and 1860s written by ‘the acutest critic the world has seen’ (LC 2: 669), Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, which would furnish him with an enduring model for his own critical method. James was self-educated – a largely solitary experience – and his literary and cultural ideals were predominantly French. His ‘literariness’ was offered a ‘sacred connection’ at home in Newport, with its collection of Revues des Deux Mondes.There he could cross a threshold into almost spiritual enlightenment, opening ‘the door of the big square closet … on the shelves and round the walls of which the pink Revues sat with the air, row upon row, of a choir of breathing angels’. He lasted just two terms on the law course and, after a public humiliation caused by a failure to argue a case in a ‘moot court’ in which he finally ‘quavered away into mere collapse and cessation’, he withdrew and returned to Newport (NSB, pp. 238, 268). The moment recalls other classroom occasions when, for instance, the young Henry stumbled in working out a mathematical problem at the blackboard, as if such failure must always be publicly witnessed.There is

Figure 2  Henry James as a Harvard student (1862–63) Credit: Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo

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no evidence of any sustained interest in Law as a prospective career, though some of his friends would go on to prosper in the field, and so this experiment may well have reflected a need simply to be active at a time of national crisis, to leave home, and to follow his older brother into some formal, validating academic discipline. On a personal level, however, in these months at Harvard he first lodged in Divinity Hall before moving to ‘certain ancient rooms in the Winthrop Square’, long since demolished, which granted him a new independence, a freedom from his family, constituting ‘a veritable bower toward which even so shy a dreamer as I still had to take myself for might perhaps hope to woo the muse’. He is quick to point out that this is ‘the muse of prose fiction’, and so it was far from being a wasted year. There was much for him to observe within this predominantly male society. He took meals, along with William, at Miss Upham’s lodgings just north of Harvard Yard, as he saw it, ‘a translation into American terms of Balzac’s Maison Vauquer, in Le Père Goriot’ (NSB, pp. 269, 246).This is the pension in a down-at-heel part of Paris which shelters social types ranging from respectability to destitution, described by James in an 1875 essay as ‘the stage of vast dramas’ (LC 2: 60). The Kirkland Street establishment was less sensational, with Professor Francis J. Child, editor of the poetry of Edmund Spenser and of English and Scottish ballads, presiding at the dinner table, and with William helping ‘the lame dog of converse over stile after stile’ whenever silence threatened (NSB, p. 260). His fellow students allowed Henry plentiful opportunities for observation of different types. John (or perhaps Joe) May, a friend of William’s, was noticed as ‘ardent and delicate and firm’, while Charles Christie Salter, who with his ‘developed moustache and short dark pointed beard’, recalled for Henry at least,‘some old portrait supposedly Spanish’. Beach Vanderpool Jr, silent and modest, is recalled with ‘tenderness’ after a lifetime, and John Bancroft, son of a distinguished historian and diplomat, who had studied art in Europe, embodied ‘a sort of glory of experience’ (NSB, pp. 260, 261, 264, 265). A namesake and midwesterner, George Abbott James, would become a lifelong friend with whom James would spend time during his final stay in America. Sam D. Craig of New York, ‘a finished fop’ in his fine clothes representing ‘Savile Row in its prime’, was accompanied by ‘a bristling toy-terrier’, incongruous in this still rural New England setting composed of ‘rude breasts’, yet exhibiting ‘the sweet in the imperturbable’ (p. 283). Sam stands as a ‘type in a collection of types’ (in the French sense a ‘chap’ or ‘bloke’), and he might be regarded as a ‘drôle de type’, in the language of the day, a ‘rum stick’, sketched in one of those French collections of national identity such as Les français peints par eux-mêmes: Encyclopédie morale du dix-neuvième siècle James had enjoyed as a child (SBO, p. 268). He translates this exclusively male enclave to which he only nominally belonged into ‘an intimate secret garden’ in which his fellow students, coyly (and with a hint of Dickens) characterized as ‘the young appearances’, are themselves the object of attention, the experience represented as ‘flowers of perverse appreciation’ which return to him once more with ‘unspeakable freshness’. He admits this period as 54



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‘so queer a case’ (NSB, pp. 281, 280), and his transgressive terms mark the private pleasures he derived from this experience and the slightly detached nature of his relationship with the group. This, too, was James’s first opportunity, as he saw it, to slough off European values, to enter established American society, and, more specifically, to ‘sniff up straight … the sense of that New England which had been to me till then but a name’. He recalls Boston,‘the Puritan capital’, in similarly olfactory terms, breathing ‘a savour … the breath of the fields and woods and waters, though at their domesticated and familiarised stage’, constituting a tone signifying ‘the most educated of our societies without ceasing to be that of the village’ (NSB, pp. 244–245, 275). A few years later in a letter to Perry, James seems to foresee an American future for himself and to regard his nationality as a privilege. SainteBeuve belongs to ‘a dead generation’, while ‘we young Americans are (without cant) men of the future’.‘We are Americans born – il faut en prendre son parti.… I think that to be an American is an excellent preparation for culture’. He writes unironically, and indeed Perry was in Paris at the time, yet that French phrase, that ‘one must make the best of a bad job’, momentarily undermines his commitment to America. The great virtue, it seems, of being American is that he can exercise an eclecticism to deal with ‘forms of civilization not our own’, as if what he saw as cultural impoverishment at least allowed the freedom to choose. Of course some of these may simply be random thoughts of the moment: not many months earlier he had written enviously and mockingly, again to Perry,‘Ah, thou who hast trod the pavement of Moorish shrines & gazed upon the olive cheek of dark-eyed Castilians, thou hast a weighty message for him who as he writes at his window, escapes not the distant tower of Bunker, & the eloquent dome of Boston State house’.When the family finally moved to Cambridge, a forty-minute horsecar ride from the city and still a quiet, rural place, he would become more deeply acquainted with predominantly Brahmin society and, with something of the arrogance of youth, find it limited and parochial. In these years of national crisis, however, James found in the figure of the soldier a more robust, romantic and patriotic form of American identity with which to engage. In autumn 1862, in company with Sarge Perry, he twice visited Camp Meigs at Readville, now part of south Boston, where brother Wilky was undergoing training with his regiment. In older age James characteristically transforms the scene into something idyllic and carefree. His younger brother,‘soft companion of my childhood’, has been absorbed into ‘an exercise of sociability’.The episode struck him as ‘a picture, an interplay of bright breezy air and high shanty-covered levels with blue horizons, and laughing, welcoming, sunburnt young men, who seemed mainly to bristle, through their welcome, with Boston genealogies, and who had all alike turned handsome, only less handsome than their tawny-bearded Colonel’ (NSB, p. 289).The remembered scene acts partly to restore the much-loved Wilky whose later injuries cast a shadow on his short life, but this array of Bostonians, youthful, handsome, and untroubled, appears transformed, detached from the horrors of war. 55



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The soldier, then, figures as an example of desirable masculinity and James himself becomes a feminized admirer. Visitors to such places as Camp Meig frequently included women, keen to offer their support for the Union cause. James also visited Portsmouth Grove, an army hospital in a small summer resort just north of Newport harbour, which cared for both Union and Confederate casualties, transported there by steamboat. Earlier visitors had included his cousin Minny Temple, fourteen-year-old sister Alice, and Emerson’s two daughters, Edith and Ellen. In recalling ‘the American soldier in his multitude’ James’s language invokes an almost sacramental motive (it was a trip, ‘so piously, so tenderly made’) as he refers to ‘the tender elegiac tone’ of Walt Whitman (NSB, pp. 248, 249), the passionate voice of the Civil War experience and a poet whose work he came to love in later life. Edith Wharton recalls his reading aloud from Leaves of Grass and his voice filling ‘the hushed room like an organ adagio … crooning it in a mood of subdued ecstasy’.11 Given Whitman’s sustained and selfless dedication to caring for the wounded and dying, James’s comparing of himself with ‘dear old Walt’, as he offers ‘pecuniary solace’, is unusually misjudged. There can be no doubt, though, of the intensity of the experience, however aesthetically transformed, of what must have been the grimness of the hospital scene. Under these ‘brothering’ conditions he becomes tenderly aware of their ‘common Americanism’, mixing the erotic with the patriotic. He admits, touchingly, that he is lost for words in recalling ‘the American soldier … the most attaching and affecting and withal the most amusing figure of romance conceivable … as the afternoon light of the place and time lingered upon him’ (NSB, pp. 252–254). This radiant, mellow mood is sustained during his short sail back to Newport. His back pained him in the waning light, but he resigns himself to the recognition that he must accept ‘the common fact of endurance’ – suffering shared, that is, with the military men whose stoicism he admired. Some of James’s earlier short stories would return to what was, for him, always, ‘the war’, as we shall see, and their perspective directly reflects his role as non-participant, a passive witness to what remained a distant conflict.The war’s greatest and costliest battle in human loss took place at Gettysburg in southern Pennsylvania, one of the most northerly sites of conflict, between 1 and 3 July 1863. Gus Barker was a participant and another cousin, William Temple, had already died at Chancellorsville in May. Henry, meantime, waited in the heat in company with his ‘New York cousins’ in a Newport garden some 340 miles distant, ‘restlessly strolling, sitting, neither daring quite to move nor quite to rest, quite to go in nor quite to stay out, actually listened together, in … almost ignobly safe stillness, as to the boom of far-away guns’. He never became one of those described by his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr as ‘touched by fire’. Brothers Wilky and Bob had witnessed events ‘portentous and prodigious’, while Henry records a sense of experience missed, exclusion, even manhood denied (NSB, pp. 250, 295). 56



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Stories of the Civil War The dark reality of war arrived at the Jameses’ front door when, on 31 July 1863, eighteen-year-old Wilky was brought home, seriously injured after the unsuccessful assault by the 54th Massachusetts regiment on Fort Wagner in Charleston Bay. He was ‘very severely wounded both in the ankle and in the side’, as his father recalled (NSB, p. 194) and, close to death on arrival, took many months to recover. ‘The Story of a Year’, the first of James’s tales to be published under his name, appeared in the highly respected Atlantic Monthly in March 1865, and the return of a wounded soldier, Jack Ford, forms a central episode. As the narrator initially indicates, the story will document ‘unwritten history’ and preferring ‘the reverse of the picture’ will treat not the monumental events of war as enacted by men, but the domestic sphere of primarily female experience. Lizzie, the girl to whom the young man is secretly engaged wraps herself in his ‘old army blanket’, to be transported from New England to ‘those far-off Southern battlefields’: ‘A strange earthy smell lingered in that faded old rug, and with it a faint perfume of tobacco.… She saw men lying in swamps, puffing their kindly pipes, drawing their blankets closer’ (CT 1: 62, 91). When Jack’s mother leaves to go and nurse her son, Lizzie allows herself to be wooed by another young man. When, finally, her fiancé dies, having released her from their engagement, she ambiguously dismisses the new suitor, though it seems unlikely that he will surrender her. Before he leaves for war, Jack has dismissed the kind of ‘“tawdry sentiment”’ demanding that a bereaved sweetheart should remain ‘“constant to my memory”’. In the uniform of a newly appointed lieutenant, he appears in Lizzie’s eyes ‘a very pretty fellow’, boasting of a heroic future, covered in mud and gore, but with a beard and ‘“magnificently sunburnt”’. Lizzie indulgently complains of ‘“the vanity of men in their faces!”’ (53, 49, 52). The two lovers gaze up at the clouds in the evening sky whose ‘imagery was all of war, their great uneven masses … marshalled into the semblance of a battle’, filled with charging columns and standards, mounted horses, the smoke of cannon, fire and blood (50). James was perhaps recalling ‘the thrilling and haunting form’ of Gustave Doré’s sometimes grotesque and sinister illustrations12 which had recently appeared in a volume by the seventeenth-century French teller of fairy tales, Charles Perrault. There is a more direct allusion to Perrault when Lizzie is compelled to keep secret her engagement. The image of her mouth as ‘a tightly clasped jewel-casket’, full of undisclosed riches comes from ‘Les Fées’, or ‘The fairies’, in which an enchantress disguised as an old woman rewards a kindly girl who helps her by causing flowers, diamonds and pearls to fall from her lips when she speaks. James adds a further unsettling speculation when Lizzie feels that she might need a bigger mouth, ‘a mouth huge and unnatural, – stretching from ear to ear’.The girl is living with Jack’s mother, a hostile surrogate mother, a familiar fairy tale topos, and the older woman briefly becomes a domesticated witch as, when sewing, she grimly bites off the end of a thread, as if ‘executing a human vengeance’, ‘another decapitation’ (55, 60–61). 57



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James, clearly experimenting in this early tale, invokes too the tradition of Gothic horror when Lizzie, torn between loyalty to the wounded Jack and a new suitor, has a macabre dream. She is walking with a dark-eyed man who calls her wife; they find a body and propose to bury it: They dug a great hole and took hold the corpse to lift him in; when suddenly he opened his eyes. Then they saw that he was covered with wounds. He looked at them intently for some time, turning his eyes from one to the other. At last he solemnly said, ‘Amen!’ and closed his eyes.Then she and her companion placed him in the grave, and shovelled the earth over him, and stamped it down with their feet (78).

The girl has forsaken the man who hangs between life and death, ‘he of the wounds’, for a new companion,‘he of the dark eyes’. It is a horrible moment – the blessing of the dying man followed by his burial, firmly accomplished so that the living will not again be troubled. The dream may directly foreshadow the story’s outcome, but it seems also to relate to broader national trauma, to the still-unfinished war of a divided nation and a desire for the burial of the past, however haunted by the sacrifice of young men. A tale of 1867, ‘Poor Richard’, set in rural New England, has a rich, established woman, Gertrude Whittaker, at its centre. Though ‘positively plain’, Richard, the impoverished young man who admires her is, by contrast, ‘an impassioned and beautiful youth’ (CT 1: 191).The civil war continues offstage and he is outmanoeuvered by two of its veterans, Captain Severn, a man of honourable intentions who (like Gus Barker) eventually falls victim to a guerrilla sniper, and Major Luttrel who, drawn to her fortune, almost succeeds in marrying Gertrude.Young Richard, with his ‘big black eyes’ (remarked upon by Luttrel), is no match for these men of war, though a spell of hard work affirms his masculinity: ‘His face and neck were browned by a week in the fields, his eye was clear, his step seemed to have learned a certain manly dignity …’ (221). But in an effort to keep Gertrude for himself, Richard makes the mistake of telling a lie, leading her to believe that Severn has left once more for war without bidding her goodbye. In a state of contrition, he weeps and is taken home by Luttrel, to be struck down by typhoid fever. Richard becomes another of those fragile young men, ‘his careless garments, his pale, handsome face, his dark, mistrustful eyes’, noted by the military men (208). A number of the story’s scenes involve men observing each other’s faces, conscious of eyes and lips and sighs, sensitized to words and gestures, while the troubled Gertrude emerges as only a token centre of attention. At the end, these protagonists set out on separate journeys, moves which reflect the post-war epoch. The surviving soldier eventually loses an arm in the conflict but finds a rich girl from Philadelphia; Richard abandons his impoverished life in New England to start out for the West, while the wealthy Gertrude, like many of her class, leaves for Europe to spend time ‘in the ancient city of Florence’ (258). 58



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In ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’, the final tale of the Civil War sequence, the hero, Colonel Ferdinand Mason, suffering from some undefined injury, is rescued from his New York hotel room by a wealthy aunt who takes him off to the healthier climes of the Hudson Valley. He is attended by a young doctor who had served alongside him in the army, and their friendship develops. Ferdinand improves and becomes attached to Caroline, a niece of his aunt’s. Shocked at learning that Caroline is to marry the doctor, Ferdinand opts for death, to become what the doctor refers to as ‘an extraordinary case’. It is a conventionally sad tale in outline, though certain episodes offer a revisionary account of male and female experience. Men rather than women emerge as fragile and vulnerable; after being visited by his aunt, Ferdinand weeps ‘like a homesick schoolboy … reminded of the exquisite side of life’. He has earlier (and surprisingly) been told by a waiter that he looks beautiful, a remark quickly modified when the man adds that women ‘“like a sick man”’ (CT 1: 326, 321). Intimacy between men, nevertheless, may exclude women: Ferdinand confesses to his doctor that he is ‘“saturated with whispers and perfumes and smiles, and the rustling of dresses. It takes a man to understand a man”’. The doctor’s reply also crosses boundaries. If his patient doesn’t get well, he confides that ‘“I shall hate you; I shall think you did it on purpose”’ (340–341). In contrast with this almost conspiratorial male intimacy, the women of the tale, healthy and strong, occasionally appear in a disquieting light. On a drive along the banks of the Hudson, Ferdinand must sit and watch while Caroline speaks in German to an impoverished immigrant family, a language he cannot understand. She sits on a rock at the water’s edge and he hears her voice, siren-like, ‘wafted upward as if she were gently singing’. She has momentarily become one of the beautiful but fatal young women of myth, perched on the Lorelei rock, who lured sailors to their deaths on the Rhine. She has torn her dress in her scramble as Ferdinand later points out: he ‘poked out his walking stick and inserted it into the injured fold of muslin. There was a certain unexpected violence in the movement which attracted Miss Hofmann’s attention’ (350). This disturbing moment was a later revision on James’s part: the original magazine version of the story simply comments of Ferdinand’s action that when he ‘extended his walking-stick.… There was a certain graceless brusquerie in the movement’. These tales of the civil war era, detached from the theatre of battle and nominally following a romantic interest, seem more fully committed to representing masculine subjectivity. The experience of war confers manliness upon its young men, bearded and tanned by the sun, appreciated by women, but acutely responsive to each other. Male–female relationships are enacted more regularly as a series of manoeuvres while the male relationships and interchanges belong to a more intimate, subjective medium. Many years ago, psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Howard Feinstein extrapolated from these tales the idea of a biographical Henry James as ‘a young artist who had become painfully aware of himself as a female consciousness 59



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masquerading in the body of a man’.13 The terms are emotive and predate much subsequent theorizing on the subject of gender as performance, but it is clear that James was exploring an established genre – tales of romance with a Civil War setting, especially popular with women readers – while developing other, less orthodox and more historically transgressive interests, based upon the mythologized figure of the young, often vulnerable soldier. These stories written in the mid-sixties, often somewhat mannered and worldly wise in their observations, mark James’s debut as a professional writer. They carry the signature ‘Henry James, Jr’ though the first of these, ‘A Tragedy of Error’, a sensational tale set in Le Havre, appeared anonymously in the very short-lived Continental Monthly. The others were published principally in the more prestigious Atlantic Monthly, edited at this time by James T. Fields. It was based in Tremont Street in the centre of Boston and it was to this city that the James family moved in spring 1864 to live for two years at 13 Ashburton Place, a tall red-brick house on Beacon Hill. It was a time of great change for the city, with the demolition and construction of many houses and continuing, decades-long work on land reclamation in the Back Bay area, originally marshland bordering the Charles River. James, now in his early twenties, continued to live at home, as did siblings Alice and William, but he was beginning to earn some money and indeed a reputation for both his fiction and book reviews. He continued, too, to visit Newport with its connections of family and friends and in August 1865 spent a week at North Conway, New Hampshire, in the company of his female Temple cousins, as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, and John Chipman Gray whom he met here for the first time. North Conway, in the White Mountains (now a tourist destination and outdoor centre) involved a journey from Boston of some 135 miles by train and coach, and its name came to have, he later confided,‘almost the force for me of a wizard’s wand’.The war had ended and it was a youthful time of ‘blest unawarenesses’ as they gathered ‘under the rustling pines’, talking, at times, about Matthew Arnold and Robert Browning. In James’s memory of ‘the splendid American summer drawn out to its last generosity’, the stay typified the best of American life, or, as he calls it,‘the general American felicity’ (NSB, pp. 359, 361). James would remain in contact with Holmes until the end of his life, but the central force, the ‘heroine of the scene’, was Minny Temple.‘Slim and fair and quick’ (NSB, p. 63), she was independent, high-spirited and intellectually engaging, the focus of everyone’s attention. James, like others, taken by ‘the bright intensity of her example’, loved, even ‘adored’, this girl and he carried her memory throughout his life, cherishing her spirit and independence.Within the James family, attitudes were more mixed. In a letter of 1869, William James, for instance (whom she admired, as her letters show), confesses that he may have done Minny ‘a good deal of injustice for some years past.… She is after all a most honest little phenomenon, and there is a true respectability in the courage with which she keeps “true to her own instincts”’. In his older age Henry shared this sentiment: ‘[s]he was absolutely afraid 60



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of nothing she might come to by living with enough sincerity and enough wonder’ (NSB, p. 363).

Early Reviewing Assignments If the great writers and poets of the day (mainly, it seems, British) were discussed on this North Conway vacation, James was finding a more formal platform for his opinions in the book reviews he now began to publish. The first of these he had written as an unsolicited piece for the influential New England journal, the North American Review, and it dealt with Essays on Fiction (1864) by the British economist, Nassau William Senior. James’s tone is confident and urbane but, though he regards many of the book’s ideas as quite derivative, he appreciates the seriousness of Senior’s approach to fiction: this critic reads novels ‘thoughtfully’ (LC 1: 1197).The point may usefully remind us of fiction’s relatively low status at this time.Though Dickens and Thackeray had reached a popular audience, George Eliot, such an important model for James, had yet to produce her late, great works. Equally important, James rejects the commonly held view that fiction should set out to ‘improve’ its reader: at its best – and here he thinks of Scott’s Waverley – it should be ‘self-forgetful’ and ‘prove nothing but facts’. Much of the essay is concerned with Scott’s poetic qualities and his dealing with history ‘in all poetic reverence’ (1202). This youthful but powerfully argued essay already speaks with an original voice and a discrimination entirely of a piece with the future writings of one of the novel’s great theorists. Though James himself was modest about this ‘very first awkward essay in criticism’ (CWHJA, p. 522), it was immediately accepted for publication by the North American Review and many of his reviews of 1865 appeared in its pages. Established in Boston in 1815, the journal was generally thought to have become staid and dull. Recently, however, Charles Eliot Norton, in company with James Russell Lowell, had taken over the editorship and the relationship between James and Norton would prove enduring. Norton, scholar, student of Dante and a friend of Ruskin, would later teach history of art at Harvard. He lived with his young family at Shady Hill, Cambridge, in a substantial house on an estate not far from Harvard Yard.With a European circle of interests – and of friends – he was to prove important in James’s professional life.The twenty-one-yearold Henry would always recall with gratitude the transformative half-hour he spent in the long library with the 37-year-old Norton, the winter sun illuminating bookshelves and pictures, describing it as ‘a positive consecration to letters’ (NSB, p. 318). For James, it was a seminal experience, an acceptance and endorsement of what had been, to this point, a relatively private pursuit. Their friendship, based perhaps on respect rather than love, would last until Norton’s death in 1908. Despite a warm relationship with his father, Henry had not so far been encouraged to pursue a literary – or indeed any other – career, and so for the young man attempting to establish a role, this 61



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extra-familial assurance was crucial. It is significant (conversely) that James Sr had no time for Norton, the man who, according to his biographer, James Turner, having ‘written about the Mound Builders, roamed India, organized classical archaeology, scoured medieval archives, publicized nineteenth-century painting’, virtually invented the idea of ‘Western civilization’.14 He was privately dismissed by James Sr, however, as ‘culturally debauched’ and, when it came to including some of his father’s letters in his memoir, Henry had to resort to some redaction.William, too, shared something of his father’s hostility toward Norton: failing to get into one of Norton’s crowded public lectures, he angrily asked ‘Why can’t one speak truth sometimes, and call C.E.N. publicly and without apology the infernal old sinner and sham that he is?’.15 Many of the works reviewed by James in the 1860s are now long forgotten, but it is clear that he was entrusted with some important assignments. Matthew Arnold’s first series of Essays in Criticism came out in 1865 when, ‘under the fingered spell of the little loose smutty London sheets’ he was transported, as he recalls, many years later in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, ‘as in a shining silvery dream, to London, to Oxford, to the French Academy, to Languedoc, to Brittany, to ancient Greece’ (LC 1: 172). Allowed ample space in his youthful critique which appeared in the North American Review, James clearly sets out Arnold’s arguments on the ‘duty of criticism’, demurs where he feels he must, admires the critic’s style of ‘intelligent amiability’, and concludes with great intuitive insight by suggesting that his work expresses ‘the melancholy of an age which not only has lost its naïveté, but which knows it has lost it’ (LC 1: 715, 712, 719). Arnold was, it seems, pleased at this notice, though he was unaware of the identity and the youth of its author. Arnold’s habit of invoking French criticism as a model of aesthetic ideals – his emphasis on ‘disinterestedness’ derives, for example, from Saint-Beuve – would have appealed to James. Indeed, he reviewed a number of French critics at this time. He complains that Edmond Schérer ‘has no doctrines’ in his recently published Nouvelles Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine, yet admires the critic’s ‘love of liberty’, and the evidence of ‘a moral unity’ in his work (LC 2: 803). Though James had an enduring respect for the work of Sainte-Beuve, he is unable to recommend a recent translation of some of his essays of 30 years earlier, Portraits of Celebrated Women, since hardly any of its subjects are known ‘by name to American ears’ (LC 2: 664). A translation of Hippolyte Taine’s travel book Italy, Rome and Naples is considered ‘broadly picturesque’, though the writer’s tone – his statements often ‘a ringing hammer-blow’ – is ‘dogmatic’ and ‘didactic’. James also feels compelled to question whether Taine’s celebrated theory of ‘la race, le milieu, le moment is an adequate explanation of the various complications of any human organism’ (LC 2: 826, 827, 829). In a review of a recent edition of Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels, James assumes a formalist position, concluding that ‘as a work of art, it is lamentably defective’, though he concedes that it is ‘a specimen of the grand manner’ (LC 2: 947, 949).When dealing with a new and 62



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untranslated foreign work, such as Victor Hugo’s Travailleurs de la mer, or Toilers of the Sea, recently published in Brussels, the critic is careful to provide a detailed resumé of the plot, though his conclusion is uncompromising: the novel is dismissed as ‘the work of a decline … written exclusively from the head’ (453–454). The review of Carlyle’s translation of Goethe appeared in the North American Review, but the French works are reviewed in the Nation, a newly established journal based in New York, which Charles Eliot Norton had helped found. Many recent publications by some of England’s most respected writers passed through James’s hands at this time, including Swinburne’s play, Chastelard. A Tragedy (dedicated to Hugo), William Morris’s poetry, Charles Kingsley’s Hereward, the Last of the English, Anthony Trollope’s Miss Mackenzie, and Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters. Escaping the summer heat of 1866 he spent time with his family in Swampscott, on the coast just north of Boston and here he reviewed George Eliot’s latest novel. His back continued to be painful and decades later he found that ‘[t]o read over the opening pages of Felix Holt makes even now the whole time softly and slyly live again’ (CN, p. 239). His essay is judicious and considered, examining both Eliot’s ‘talent’ and her ‘foibles’.The plot is artificial and the pace slow, yet the work is redeemed by a humanity which ‘colors all her other gifts – her humor, her morality, and her exquisite rhetoric’. What Eliot offers, it seems, is something new in the English novel, ‘powers of thought … commensurate with … powers of imagination’ (LC 1: 907, 908, 911), though James hints that, as a consequence, the general homage has been ‘excessive’. Her late novels with their heroines prone to misjudgment, yet revealing a remarkable capacity for moral enlightenment, would inspire his own fiction. James was to turn down an offer to write a biography of Charles Dickens and it seems that despite his childhood enthusiasm for the earlier novels he was more critical of the later works. The recently published Our Mutual Friend which he reviewed for the Nation on its appearance in 1865 betrays ‘permanent exhaustion’: he has ‘seldom read a book so intensely written, so little seen, known, or felt’.The ‘grotesque creatures’ and eccentrics are driven by ‘no principle of nature’, resulting in ‘very cheap merriment and very cheap pathos’ (LC 1: 853, 854). Most damningly perhaps, the novel lacks ‘philosophy’: quite simply, the novelist ‘must know man as well as men, and to know man is to be a philosopher’. It is not enough to introduce humorous or fanciful figures, and in failing to depict ‘men and women … in their complete and unconscious subjection to ordinary and healthy human emotions’, Dickens is unable to reach ‘those generalizations in which alone consists the real greatness of a work of art’ (857). If James expresses misgivings about both Eliot and Dickens, he is more abrasive on a subject much closer to home, the poems of Walt Whitman.The poet was a contentious figure at this time (though admired by Henry James Sr) and the collection Drum-Taps, unarguably an important literary document reflecting the experience of the Civil War, contains nothing redeeming in James’s eyes. Doubtless Whitman’s idiosyncratic style, described as ‘anomalous’, disturbed James. This author is ‘very fond 63



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of blowing his own trumpet’ and deemed capable of writing neither verse nor ‘ordinary prose’. James continues to attack: ‘[w]e find art, measure, grace, sense sneered at on every page’, and he advises the poet that it is not ­acceptable ‘to discharge the undigested contents of your blotting-book into the lap of the public’ (LC 1: 630, 631, 633). James quotes from only two of the collection’s poems, ‘Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries’, and ‘From Paumanok starting I fly like a bird’, highly significant choices since both are remote from the collection’s central subject – the detailed record of the common soldier’s life, injury, illness and suffering. The young critic felt himself to be, perhaps, too much a product of those ‘proud libraries’. James’s own Civil War stories had notably kept their distance from the action, remaining within the domestic sphere.Yet an old army blanket, so redolent of a distant battlefield in ‘The Story of aYear’, plays a parallel and more disturbing role in Whitman’s evocation of camp life: ‘Three forms I see on stretchers lying, brought out there untended lying, / Over each the blanket spread, ample brownish woolen blanket, / Gray and heavy blanket, folding, covering all’. He moves on to ask,‘who are you my child and darling? / Who are you sweet boy with cheeks yet blooming?’, and then, reaching the third figure, concludes, ‘Young man I think I know you – I think this face is the face of the Christ himself ’.16 Such emotional intensity marks, by contrast, the limitations of James’s Civil War writings. It is likely, too, that such an endorsement of male friendship, of physical attachment between men, culminating in a disturbing religious vision, was shunned by the young James, as if he is denying elements of his own desires and experiences. By 1898, his opinion had changed and he could pay tribute to ‘The WoundDresser’ as a memorial to ‘the innumerable nameless of the troublous years’ (LC 1: 672). James was not, of course, the only critic hostile toward Whitman in the 1860s, and W.D. Howells, soon to become a close friend, was equally dismissive. James later recanted, referring to his review as ‘the little atrocity … perpetrated … in the gross impudence of youth’.17 It is ironic that within a few years both Whitman and James would be writing for the Galaxy magazine.There can be no doubt, though, that the older man was wounded by James’s judgment and may have been informed of the identity of its anonymous author. At any rate, he could find little good to say about James in 1888:‘I don’t see anything above the common in him: he has a vogue – but surely his vogue won’t last: he don’t stand permanently for anything’.18 The gap, temperamental, social, even stylistic, between the two was evidently uncrossable. Whitman admired President Abraham Lincoln for his devotion to the Union and its democratic values; indeed, though he never met him, he confessed to his Diary,‘I love the President personally’.19 Whitman’s celebrated elegy on Lincoln’s assassination in Washington D.C., just after the Civil War had ended,‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, was to become part of a national mourning. Henry James, probably along with most of his fellow citizens, could recall precisely where he was when the news broke: ‘Ashburton Place resounds for me with a wild cry, rocks as from a convulsed breast, on that early morning of our news of Lincoln’s death by murder’. It was here too that he 64



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heard of the death of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer who had enchanted James’s childhood with his Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls and Twice-Told Tales; his relative Edmund Tweedy had been an intimate friend of the author, but it was only more recently, in ‘otherwise blank months at Newport’, that he had come to appreciate in ‘one straight draught the full sweet sense of our one fine romancer’s work’ (NSB, pp. 320, 321). In this same house another event of private rather than national significance was also recollected. In the mid-1860s on a table in his third-floor bedroom (shared with William), with its ‘rich … many-hued light’, Henry had spread out ‘the very greenbacks, to the total value of twelve dollars’, exchanged for a cheque representing his ‘first earned wage’ for his contributions to American journals (NSB, p. 318). Given his father’s disregard for the practicalities of earning money, this was an especially important step, a moment of innocent pride, the beginning of life as a professional writer.

Friendships An important element in this American scene was James’s relationship with William Dean Howells. Six years James’s senior, he had begun working for the Atlantic Monthly in 1865 and would succeed James T. Fields as editor in 1872. A mid-westerner and recently married, Howells had served during the war as consul-general in Venice, but he was now a part (if never entirely comfortably) of the Boston and Cambridge literary scene. It was he who had informed James that ‘Poor Richard’ had been accepted for publication while inviting more submissions for the Atlantic. James acknowledged his gratitude to Howells ‘well-nigh half a century’ later, recalling ‘the beautiful thrill of that. You published me at once – and paid me, above all, with a dazzling promptitude’. The two became lifelong friends (indeed Howells was probably working on an essay, ‘The American James’, at the time of his own death) and regularly took a walk together in ‘the kind Cambridge streets’ on Sunday afternoons. Howells recalled that ‘[w]e were always going to Fresh Pond, in those days a wandering space of woods and water where people skated in winter and boated in summer’.20 For both these men, committed to the writing of fiction, the principal topic of conversation was literature. Unlike James, however, Howells was to confine himself predominantly to American life in his fiction, always a limitation in James’s view.The unsuccessful expatriate artist in James’s ‘Madonna of the Future’ (whose narrator may have been modelled on Howells)21 wails that ‘“We are the disinherited of Art. We are condemned to be superficial! … The soil of American perception is a poor little barren, artificial deposit”’ (CT 3: 14–15). Given his developing role as magazine editor, Howells was an influential figure. The two men reviewed each other’s works, and perhaps because of their friendship James’s opinions remain polite and respectful. Nevertheless he confided to Charles Eliot Norton, a fellow-traveller and Europhile, that he believed that ‘the face of nature & civilization in this our country … will yield its secrets only to a 65



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really grasping imagination’ – an enquiring quality he missed in Howells whom he thought would be well advised to read some Sainte-Beuve. James went on to publish seven short stories with the Atlantic Monthly through to the end of 1869, and his relationship with its proprietor and editor James Fields and his young wife Annie would prove to be important. The journal had become ‘a significant voice in American “high” literary or intellectual culture’22 but the Boston publishing house of Ticknor and Fields had also introduced to the public many of the significant contemporary voices of the day, including Hawthorne, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Harriet Beecher Stowe,Thoreau, and MarkTwain, as well as unpirated British writers. At the end of his life James recalls thinking of Fields as ‘invested with a stately past’ (LC 1: 163); as a child he had pored over the title pages of books and wondered at the mystery of such publishers’ names as ‘Ticknor, Reed and Fields’. The recently built home of James and Annie Fields at 37 Charles Street on Boston’s Back Bay served as a literary and cultural salon; beautifully appointed and much influenced by European taste, it welcomed such visitors as Dickens and Thackeray as well as the Swedish soprano Christina Nilsson (whom James also met) and the AngloFrench actor Charles Fechter (LC 1: 163, 171).With its view across the Charles River, it would provide the model for Olive Chancellor’s sitting room in The Bostonians (1886), a novel which was to ruffle many feathers in the city. James would return to Charles Street on his American visit of 1904–1905, after a life largely spent in England, and having registered the demolition of his own family home in Ashburton Place, regarded it as a kind of sanctuary: ‘[h]ere, behind the effaced anonymous door, was the little ark of the modern deluge, here still the long drawing-room that looks over the water and toward the sunset, with a seat for every visiting shade, from far-away Thackeray down, and relics and tokens so thick on its walls as to make it positively, in all the town, the votive temple to memory’ (AS, p. 261). He noticed, too, however, the street’s social decline: Charles Street was becoming increasingly commercialized and, indeed, Annie Fields expressed a wish that her home be demolished on her death.23 In autumn 1866 the James family moved from Boston to 20 Quincy Street in Cambridge, on the east side of HarvardYard, and this would be their final home.The two younger boys were now, with very limited success, attempting to find their way in postwar America.William had returned the previous year from a scientific expedition led by Professor Louis Agassiz to Brazil in ill-health and now resumed his medical studies at the Massachusetts General Hospital. In the spring of 1867 he would leave once again, to spend an extended period in Europe, principally in Germany. He moved between Paris, Dresden, Tepliz, Berlin, Divonne-les-Bains and Geneva, returning only in November 1868. He was suffering chronic ill-health, including digestive disorders, insomnia, eye problems, back pain, and depression, and this trip was an attempt to find a cure, though he also wished to pursue his interest in experimental physiology, a subject for which German universities were renowned. A proportion of the family wealth had been expended on an ill-fated Florida plantation enterprise on which Wilky had laboured 66



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after the war. Bob, with a number of ideas for a career, received little encouragement or financial help, but William, it seems, was considered more worthy of investment. Alice, too, suffered her first health breakdown, aged 19. She had been educated by governesses and her posthumously published diary reveals a brilliant and original mind, but she suffered from neurasthenia, a condition recently identified, whose symptoms could include fatigue, anxiety, high blood pressure, cardiac palpitation, and depression. It was a condition common, it seems, among the young women of Boston, though it was a diagnosis given for William James too. She recalled in later years how she had recognized, even when young, that this ‘was a fight simply between my body and my will, a battle in which the former was to be triumphant to the end’.24 In a letter to his older brother, Henry complains of his own continuing ill-health – ‘I shall have a very long row to hoe before I am fit for anything’ – and this may refer to his back trouble and also the chronic constipation which came to blight his life in these years. Biographical speculation that he was only truly well when William was absent and fell ill again on his re-appearance, however convenient in reinforcing the idea of their sublimated rivalry, fails to take account of day-to-day circumstance. Henry himself seems to attribute his indifferent health to the dulness of life in Cambridge where he lacked companionship. He was too old to mix with the local undergraduates and too young for the Brahmins: ‘Longfellow, Lowell, Norton and co. [were] (in spite of great amiability), not at all to [his] taste’.25 ‘Social relaxation’ was not to be found in Cambridge – ‘or only a ghastly simulacrum of it. There are no “distractions” here’, he complained to his brother: ‘I haven’t a creature to talk to’. Home life may have been dull, too: Lilla Cabot sharply commented on ‘the poky banality of the James household, ruled by Mrs. James’. She regarded Alice as ‘clever but coldly self-absorbed’;‘HJ’s father used to limp in and out and never seemed really to “belong” to his wife or Miss Walsh, large florid stupid seeming ladies’.26 Aside from his personal frustrations and anxieties, these later years of the decade nevertheless allowed James to establish himself as a respected critic and writer of short stories. The North American Review and the Atlantic regularly published his work, but the entrepreneurial Irishman, Edwin Laurence Godkin, editor of the Nation, also included in its first number in July 1865 writing by both Henry James Sr and Jr. The younger James’s relationship both with the magazine and its editor was to prove long and generally happy. He was a busy critic in the years 1865–1868, producing some 55 reviews, mostly on literary topics. There is no doubt that his friendship with Howells helped place some of James’s early short stories, though the twelve written in that fouryear spell (including the Civil War tales) were published in a range of magazines. By 9 o’clock one late-November morning in 1867 a crowd of a thousand had spilled onto the street outside Boston’s Tremont Temple; they were in search of tickets for the public readings by Charles Dickens of scenes from his novels. It was his second lecture-tour of America. James arrived too late to be successful, but he later had the good fortune to encounter Dickens in person in a more private setting. The literary 67



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celebrity was entertained to dinner at Shady Hill by Charles Eliot Norton, and James was invited to drop in later in the evening. James and Dickens, with another acquaintance, met briefly in a doorway, without introduction or exchange of words. In his memoir, however, with the accumulated power of time, the encounter becomes a shimmeringly exciting experience for the aspiring writer:‘an already groping and fumbling, already dreaming and yearning dabbler in the mystery’, engages with an international celebrity, ‘erect and concrete before us there as in a sublimity of mastership’. As James looks ‘in dumb homage’ he is met by ‘a merciless military eye … an automatic hardness’ which betokens ‘in the most interesting way in the world, a kind of economy of apprehension’ (NSB, pp. 205–206). This then is Dickens the artist, who had ‘entered so early into the blood and bone of our intelligence’ (SBO, p. 101), now stored away in memory, silent, formidable and observing, uncompromised by the banality of small talk. He recalls, too, with pleasure another British stage performer, Fanny Kemble, whose readings he had attended as a boy in London. Her repertoire included Shakespeare’s Henry V, one of the plays she read to raise money for the Union cause; James was especially excited by the rousing speech invoking ‘God for Harry, England and Saint George!’ Some of the local friendships now established proved important for the future. Charles Eliot Norton’s unmarried sister, Grace, nine years older than James, became a lifelong correspondent with whom he would come to talk through a number of life-changing experiences. When Norton’s wife Susan died prematurely in 1872 Grace became closely involved in the raising of their six children as a resident of Shady Hill which James later (perhaps punningly) later described as ‘the most agreeable and graceful and civilized house in a scantly civilized place’. A student of French literature, she became an authority on the sixteenth-century philosopher and essayist, Montaigne. She is one of a number of women with literary or artistic pursuits who figure in James’s life, offering an affectionate and intellectually engaging relationship involving some intimacy, untroubled by romantic possibility. Minny Temple’s sisters were now marrying and Minny herself was spending time in Newport as well as Pelham, a suburb of New York City. To the consternation of many, after a brief engagement her sister Kitty had married Richard Stockton Emmet, a rich man twenty-two years her senior who could provide a home for the younger girls. James saw less of Minny, but he did meet one of her friends, Elizabeth Boott, daughter of widower Francis, a musician and amateur composer whose substantial family wealth had been founded on the textile mills of New England.The two had spent many years in Italy, but were living in Cambridge at this time in the late 1860s. Lizzie was three years younger than Henry, a talented artist who at his suggestion attended classes with William Morris Hunt in Boston. She went on to become an accomplished painter of landscapes and portraits. She represented for these New England friends ‘Europe’, and she seemed, at least in James’s opinion,‘markedly produced’. He went on in retrospect, however, to characterize 68



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her as a beneficiary of both the old and new worlds, this ‘delightful girl, educated, cultivated, accomplished, toned above all, as from steeping in a rich old medium’ who ‘had the further, the supreme grace that she melted into American opportunities of friendship’ (NSB, p. 378). His mother privately and typically preferred Lizzie, more passive and accommodating, to the less conventional Minny. In a letter of 24 July 1869, reporting Lizzie’s staying with the family, she wrote to Henry, ‘You know Father used to say to you, that if you could only fall in love it would be the making of you’.27 He was unable to oblige in this case, though it has been thought that in a different sense he captured her in The Portrait of a Lady as Gilbert Osmond’s daughter, Pansy.

Departure for Europe James’s departure for Europe on 17 February 1869 on a trip that would last for fifteen months may appear as a latterday Grand Tour, but he was also motivated by concerns for his health. William had undertaken a similar journey, partly to attempt various ‘cures’ for his back problem and Henry, whose ailments added chronic constipation (or, as he said, ‘unhappy bowels’), to back pain, may have had a similar plan. Other friends from his social circle were also visiting Europe: Tom Perry had already completed a two-year tour of France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Spain which included study in Paris and Berlin (where he roomed with William James). Oliver Wendell Holmes had spent four months there in 1866.And Charles Norton, also unwell, took his family across the Atlantic for what turned out to be an extended period at this time. One short story of these years, ‘A Light Man’ (1869), equates the European experience with immorality, decadence, sensuality indulged – a complex of associations which would continue to fascinate James. It is a work to which he attached some importance, revising it thoroughly after its first appearance in the Galaxy magazine. An experimental narrative, it is written in diary form and narrated by a young man, Max, who is exposed as cynical and self-interested; having recently returned to America, he meets up with an old friend of such apparent purity that he (the diarist) feels by contrast ‘short and fat and dark and debauched’ (CT 2: 64). The friend, Theodore, acts as a secretary to a rich old man, Mr Sloane, who has had in Europe ‘adventures and passions and all that sort of thing’ (65) so that he is now reduced to a physical wreck. He has had a string of protégés in the past and indeed when Theodore falls ill, Max is invited to replace him, to become, as he says, his son, ‘“the son of my age and desolation”’ (82). Sloane’s affections are transferred to Max and there is a dramatic scene between the two young men when their patron decides to change his will.The question of inheritance creates a conflict familiar to the James family, but in this case neither of the fictional young men benefits and the will is destroyed. In some respects, a young man to whom a rich old man wishes to bequeath his wealth foreshadows the opening of the late unfinished novel, The Ivory Tower, but 69



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the situation in ‘A Light Man’ is less innocent, suggesting an unwholesome sexual commodifying dimension whereby the young can exploit the aged through their youth. The former favourite is rejected when he appears ill and wearing an unflattering dressing gown. His replacement boasts, by contrast, ‘I might come into his study in my night-shirt and he would smile at it as a picturesque déshabillé’ (83).The sexual tension increases as Max threatens to leave and sadistically works the old man into a frenzy, ‘prompted by the irresistible spirit of my desire to leap astride of his weakness and ride it hard to the goal of my dreams’: ‘I shall probably never again have such a sensation as I enjoyed to-night – actually feeling a heated human heart throbbing and turning and struggling in my grasp; know its pants, its spasms, its convulsions, and its final senseless quiescence’ (89). The story’s title invokes Browning’s poem ‘A Light Woman’, and one of its verses serves as an opening epigram: two friends are divided when the latter (in Browning, ‘No hero, I confess’) easily appropriates the woman who would have taken his friend as her hundredth conquest. Though James retains the divided friendship theme, he steps further outside conventional social norms by introducing the idea of wealthy old age preying on impoverished youth and, even more transgressively, making the triangle of relationships a same-sex entanglement. The ‘lightness’ too is transferred from Browning’s girl, as easily picked as a ripe pear, to the diarist-narrator who ousts his old friend in James’s tale. The worthless female object of desire in Browning becomes the scheming old man who acts to divide the friends in James. When, before departure, Henry went out to Pelham to say goodbye to Minny Temple on a two-day stopover in New York, the moment contained laughter as well as sadness. She was by now mortally ill, but continued to consult a range of medical men. Henry asked how she slept and she replied, ‘“Oh. I don’t sleep. I’ve given it up”.… I well remember the laugh with which she made this sad attempt at humor’. She recounts the events of these months – the pleasures and diversions as well as the setbacks – in the series of letters written to another friend, John Chipman Gray, which James later included in Notes of a Son and Brother. In the past her relationship with William James had been troubled and there is some evidence of an attachment between the two, but whatever the tensions with other members of the family, she had found Henry to be ‘as lovely as ever, verily the goodness of that boy passeth human comprehension’,28 though the young man himself later hoped that Minny, not knowing how ‘sick & disordered a creature’ he was, might have known him as recovered, and ‘more active & masculine’. Part of the irony of this scene in a quiet sitting room in Pelham lay in the fact that Minny herself longed to travel to Europe, and she still had plans for the future, yet her comment after he had left is characteristically generous. ‘I’m very glad he has gone, though I don’t expect to see him again for a good many years. I don’t think he will come back for a long time, and I hope it will do him good and that he will enjoy himself – which he hasn’t done for several years’ (NSB, p. 368). 70

Part II

Independence and Europe

4 Italy and the ‘Complex Fate’ of Being an American (1869 –1872)

James left New York in February 1869, his first unaccompanied visit to Europe. Aged 25, having formed friendships with William Dean Howells, James T. Fields and Charles Eliot Norton, he had established himself as a writer of short stories and reviews which were published in highly respected American journals. He had witnessed the Civil War from a distance and attempted to study Law at Harvard and, as he later observed, felt ill at ease with himself. The experience of Europe might, it seems, offer the kind of enrichment for an artist unavailable in America, though James hoped, too, to find a cure for his physical maladies. It was an anxious, uncertain time as he set out across the Atlantic from Manhattan.

‘Gabrielle de Bergerac’ and History One of the earlier but more important short stories, probably written before James left America, turns exclusively to Europe for its setting, as well as its social and historical framework. The principal narrator of ‘Gabrielle de Bergerac’ is an old man who recollects his aristocratic but impoverished childhood in pre-Revolutionary France. It is framed by a situation in which he is in debt to the introductory narrator; he will not be able to pay but will instead pass on a beautiful painting of his aunt, Gabrielle, as a girl, much admired by the creditor. The old man witnessed, when a boy, the love between his young aristocratic aunt and his tutor, the plebeian Pierre Coquelin, son of a tailor, a former soldier and lover of the classics. The

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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­ utcome is surprisingly happy in that Gabrielle breaks free from the constraints of o social convention, refuses a more advantageous offer of marriage, and escapes to marry the young man. But the dark shadow of the Revolution hangs over the tale, and both will finally die on the scaffold:‘Yes, in 1789, there came a great convulsion; the earth cracked and opened and broke, and this poor old pays de France went whirling through space’ (CT 2: 99). The family’s château has been razed, replaced by ‘a homœopathic – hydropathic – what do you call it? – establishment erected in its place’: in fact, the kind of institution to which both William and Henry resorted in their attempts to cure their ailments. The story is an exercise in historical imagination, James’s response to the echoing halls and palaces of Europe, locations in which the great, prevailing human emotions had been played out. The inspiration derives, too, from literary and pictorial sources from James’s own life. When Coquelin invents fairy stories as tutor to his young charge, ‘[h]is fairies were the fairies of the Grand Siècle, and his princes and shepherds the godsons of Perrault and Madame d’Aulnay. They lived in such palaces and they hunted in such woods’ (132). These two French writers of tales belong to the seventeenth century, but that edition of Perrault’s stories, with Gustave Doré’s powerful illustrations, continued to fascinate James. The landscape of ‘Gabrielle de Bergerac’ becomes a part of that romantic nineteenth-century version of an earlier less troubled and altogether less liberal era. Recalling idyllic days spent in the fields with his tutor, the narrator asks, ‘Do you remember in Doré’s illustrations to Perrault’s tales, the picture of the enchanted castle of the Sleeping Beauty?’ In the foreground ‘stand a couple of old woodcutters pointing across into the enchanted distance and answering the questions of the young prince. They are the bent and blackened woodcutters of old France, of La Fontaine’s Fables and the Médecin malgré lui’ (131). Doré’s work invokes, for James, some of the greatest literary and dramatic traditions of the seventeenth century – the verses of La Fontaine and the drama of Molière. Yet the frame of reference moves beyond the picturesque or the grotesque landscapes of this nineteenth-century artist and hints at the seemingly inevitable darkness and tragedy of history itself and the temporary nature of human endeavour. Visiting the ruined castle of Fossy, Coquelin detects beyond its evident grandeur, ‘a vast underground world of iniquity and suffering …’ (144). The setting of ‘Gabrielle de Bergerac’ is provincial southwestern France, the region east of Bordeaux. James must have taken the name of the tale’s hero from the boy he had met at school in Boulogne, the local baker’s son, Coquelin, who was to become a celebrated actor. By coincidence, one of his greatest roles was to be Cyrano de Bergerac, the self-sacrificing hero in Edmond Rostand’s play of the same name which James would discuss in an essay of 1901. It has been said that the novelist’s interest in the French Revolution was obsessive, and certainly many of the allusions in his writing emphasize its tragic human dimension. James would never again set his fiction so entirely in the past. 74



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The tale first appeared in three parts in the Atlantic Monthly (July–September 1869) when its author was already in Europe, and, though Minny Temple admired it, he admitted to Alice that ‘[i]t all strikes me as amusingly thin & watery – I mean as regards its treatment of the Past’. Nevertheless the story received two fulsome reviews in the New-York Tribune, with the second concluding that ‘We have no story writer in America who writes at once so delicately and so strongly as Mr. James. His style, with perhaps a suspicion of French epigram too much, is almost faultless as an expression of his idea, his power of description is a gift of serenity and artistic skill, and his character-drawing is a treat in this generation of daubers and slashers’.1 Indeed, the first reviewer comments on James’s versatility, impressed by the contrast between ‘A Light Man’ and ‘Gabrielle de Bergerac’. The France of this story, represented nostalgically in the colours and values of eighteenth-century painting and literature, bears little relationship to the country of 1869–1870 on the verge of war with the Prussians, a humiliating defeat imminent, its capital to be besieged and scarred by conflict and civil unrest. When war broke out, James, disregarding any hint of future German militarism, judged France to have been belligerent, and its difficulties self-inflicted: ‘[a]ll the French utterances I read, seem to me, almost unexceptionally, those of barbarians & madmen’. In fact, he was to spend little time in the country on this first trip to Europe.

Arrival in England James disembarked at Liverpool, the principal departure and arrival port for North America, on 27 February 1869, after a relatively untroubled 10-day Atlantic crossing aboard the Royal Mail steamship The China. Suffering from seasickness, he spent much of the voyage on deck, avoiding ‘the odorous gloom of the cabins’ below. He stayed just a night at the Adelphi hotel, feeling that he had returned to his youth and found ‘la Vieille Angleterre. The impressions of my boyhood return from the past & swarm about my soul’. Embracing ‘Old England’, he claimed that he had refined the ‘English accent’ to perfection, promising to entertain and amuse his family on his return. He had considered visiting the nearby city of Chester, but found, having awoken too late the next day, a Sunday, that he had missed the train. It was raining, so he decided to press on southwards to London. After a long, slow journey he took a cab from Euston Station to Trafalgar Square and checked in at Morley’s Hotel, a place recommended by a talkative fellow-traveller. On this dark Sunday night he observed that the ‘low black houses were as inanimate as so many rows of coal-scuttles, save where at frequent corners, from a gin-shop, there was a flare of light more brutal still than the darkness’. He felt ‘gloom-smitten’ by the hotel, as if he had stepped back into some grim Hogarthian scene. In later years, however, with the softening influence of memory, Morley’s came to seem more 75



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welcoming, ‘a ruddy spot; brilliant … is the coffee-room fire, the hospitable mahogany, the sense that in the stupendous city this, at any rate for the hour, was a shelter and a point of view’ (CTWGBA, p. 15). It was a temporary stay and he immediately searched for lodgings, a depressing experience, though he was eventually pleased with the rooms he found on Half Moon Street, a short thoroughfare, running north from Piccadilly and thus centrally located: ‘I pay a guinea & ½ a week for sitting room, bed-room (with dressing closet, brilliantly illuminated by a glass roof – a great blessing in this murky light) & attendance: fires, lights & breakfast extra.… The situation therefore is excellent – central, healthy, & highly respectable’. A friend of Charles Norton’s, Albert Rutson, who worked as Secretary to Lord Aberdare, Gladstone’s Home Secretary, had told him of these furnished rooms where he also lodged. James enjoyed the late breakfasts (timed to accommodate the working hours of Parliament) to which he was invited by Rutson and his colleagues, though he felt some embarrassment at being unable to answer all of their questions on the American political scene. He renewed acquaintance, too, with the Wilkinsons, friends of his parents who lived in St John’s Wood. But he was most indebted at this time to the Norton family, fellow residents of Cambridge, who had embarked on an extended European tour. Staying for a time in Kensington, they were a large group: as well as Charles and his wife Susan and their four (soon to be six) children, they included Charles’s mother and his sisters. Since 1855 Charles had spent much time in Europe; he and his family had a network of friendships with London’s literary and artistic elite, giving James ready access to this influential circle. He accompanied the Nortons, for instance, to William Morris’s shop in Queen Square, Holborn. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. were advertised as ‘Fine Art Workmen in Painting, Carving, Furniture and the Metals’ and their handmade work which revived the values and practices of mediaeval arts and crafts began a tradition which came to exercise a continuing aesthetic influence. Morris, as well as being a writer, was one of the century’s greatest designers and James was enthused by what he saw, finding it ‘quaint, archaic, pre-Raphaelite – & I may add, exquisite’. The Morrises lived over the shop and Mrs Morris, suffering from toothache, lay on a sofa, a handkerchief to her face. She was Jane Burden, a source of fascination, a model and muse for both Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Morris appeared ‘short, burly & corpulent, very careless & unfinished in his dress’, but his wife transcended the everyday, ‘a grand synthesis of all the pre-Raphaelite paintings ever made’, oblivious to contemporary fashion, dressed in ‘a long dress of some dead purple stuff, guiltless of hoops’. James invited his sister to imagine ‘a mass of crisp black hair heaped into great wavy projections on each of her temples, a thin pale face, a pair of strange sad, deep, dark Swinburnish eyes, with great thick black oblique brows’. It was a significant moment, for it must have brought to life and 76



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confirmed what had been till then a youthful and primarily aesthetic experience: ‘[t]he very word Pre-Raphaelite wore for us that intensity of meaning, not less than of mystery, that thrills us in its perfection but for one season, the prime hour of first initiations’ (SBO, p. 246). He joined the Nortons once more for lunch with Charles Darwin in Kent and also dined with one of the pre-Raphaelites’ earliest and most important supporters, John Ruskin (TMY, p. 418). He was already familiar with the ideas of this influential Victorian critic and social commentator, describing him in an early review as England’s ‘single eminent representative’ in the field of art criticism (CWHJA, p. 1). James heard him lecture, in March 1869, on Greek myths at University College, London, but he seems to anticipate something of Ruskin’s eventual mental decline during a visit to his home at Denmark Hill, south-east London, observing that ‘to see him only confirms the impression given by his writing, that he has been scared back by the grim face of reality into the world of unreason & illusion & that he wanders there without a compass & a guide – or any light save the fitful flashes of his beautiful genius’. His host showed James his art collection, including a portrait attributed to Titian, ‘an old doge – a work of beauty & elegance, such as to give one a new sense of the meaning of art’. It was probably the portrait of Doge Andrea Gritti which James admired, though the work is now attributed to Vincenzo Catena. Ruskin, appointed in 1869 to be first Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University, was later regarded by William Morris as having found ‘a new road on which the world should travel’.2 Yet, with the rise of the Aesthetic movement, Ruskin’s belief in the role to be played by art in the nation’s social and political values was becoming increasingly marginalized; indeed, it is clear from his essay collection, Italian Hours (1909), that James himself eventually valued Ruskin less. Nevertheless, both men shared an intense admiration for the Venetian painter, Tintoretto, and Ruskin, who came to admire James’s writings on art, was hoping in 1873 that he might become Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge. Soon after his taking up residence in Half Moon Street, James received a dinner invitation (along with Jane Norton) from historian, critic and mountaineer, Leslie Stephen and his wife Minny, Thackeray’s younger daughter. The couple had visited America in 1868 where James had met them. Minny was to die prematurely in 1875 and Stephen would re-marry, the children of this second marriage to include Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Minny was less than impressed by Henry, referring to him inaccurately as ‘a rather dull young Bostonian’,3 but his account is warmer, and he reported that the couple ‘appear to much better effect on their own premises than they did in America’. Afterwards Stephen, a member of the Zoological Society, accompanied Henry and Jane ‘to see the beasts in the Regent’s Park’. Henry seems to have been even more excited, however, at travelling on the newly opened Metropolitan underground railway, the world’s first – ‘a marvellous phenomenon – ploughing along in a vast circle thro’ the bowels of London, & giving you egress 77



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to the upper earth in magnificent stations, at a number of convenient points’. Compared to hiring a hansom cab, it was a cheap form of transport, though the steam trains running through those underground tunnels undoubtedly made travelling conditions trying. The weather was poor and he suffered from chilblains and though he complained of homesickness and a longing to be back at the family hearth, James found life in London congenial. At least part of his reason for travelling to Europe was, however, related to his health: initially boasting that his appetite was ‘enormous’ and that he had developed a taste for English beer, he was soon complaining that his digestion ‘continues decidedly bad’. To alleviate both his back and digestive problems he thus booked himself into ‘Dr Rayner’s Establishment’, a health spa at Great Malvern, an elegant town at the foot of the Malvern Hills west of the rural Cotswolds. A few miles from Worcester, with the opening of the railway in 1859 the place had become a popular destination, experiencing a boom from the many visitors seeking a cure. James spent the first three weeks of April at the spa. Though he found his fellow patients somewhat conventional, he quickly settled into a routine, telling Grace Norton that the ‘baths are ingeniously delicious: the doctor (in spite of a black velvet coat & a somewhat oleaginous beard) inspires confidence; the house is extremely comfortable, the table grimly plain … & the air delightfully fresh & bracing’. He appreciated the English spring in this beautiful, pastoral setting, and some of his sketches of nearby locations survive. Having checked out, and feeling that some travel might do him more good, he made a short tour of the picturesque English– Welsh borders, spending three days in Leamington Spa before visiting Worcester, Ross-on-Wye, Wilton Castle, Monmouth, Tintern Abbey, Raglan Castle, Usk and Newport. He went on to Gloucester and Warwick, before seeing Mark Pattison, rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, and his young wife Emily (art historian and later wife of Sir Charles Dilke). She was – as James was later informed – ‘famous for her Platonic friendships with handsome young men’. The couple may have served George Eliot as models for the aged Casaubon and Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch. Not far away, he admired the paintings at Blenheim Palace, the magnificent family home of the Dukes of Marlborough, near Woodstock. He writes from London to Alice on 7 May 1869, that he has visited Stonehenge in Wiltshire, as well as a series of historic cities, including Salisbury, Winchester, Cambridge, Ely, Peterborough, Boston and Lincoln. An American’s pleasure in Britain’s countryside and history, Hampton Court, rural Herefordshire, and the tranquil colleges of Oxford, is recorded in ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’, a tale which first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in spring 1871.The plot involves a brief conflict between American and British protagonists over inheritance, a tragic ghostly past, an element of romance, and unspecified illness and death, but is more memorable perhaps for its evocation of the atmosphere of the English countryside. 78



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James returned for a few days to London and records visiting George Eliot on a Sunday afternoon in May, in company with Grace Norton and Sara Sedgwick (an occasion which would have especially excited Minny Temple who much admired the novelist). Eliot lived with critic and philosopher, George Henry Lewes, at the Priory, a house at North End near Regent’s Park (not far from St John’s Wood where James had stayed in his youth). He remarks on the novelist’s ugliness in a letter to his father before finally claiming to be ‘literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking’. She was, as it happened, distracted by the suffering of Thornton, Lewes’s second son. James returns to the episode (incorporating a few inaccuracies) in his late unfinished memoir, The Middle Years, recording Eliot’s eloquent description for her visitors of a recent trip to the south of France,‘an impression de voyage so little tainted with the superficial or the vulgar’ (p. 444). Their ‘unrelinquished proper talk’ must have helped he felt, to distract Eliot from the current emergency, though this may have been a vain hope. Meantime Lewes’s son lay on the floor in an adjoining room in agony while his absent father attempted to hunt down some morphine to allay his pain. Trying to be helpful, James knelt at the young man’s side, ‘I see his face again, fair and young and flushed’, before offering to go off in search of ‘the preeminent surgeon’, Mr Paget (p. 445). The great man was absent from home, but James left a message and returned to North End. Young Thornton himself would succumb to spinal tuberculosis in October that year. Aside from these social opportunities, James also fitted in daily trips to the National Gallery and to the Royal Academy (fairly recently re-opened at Burlington House), as well as visiting Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s studio in Chelsea where he once again looked upon a familiar, haunting face: ‘He paints nothing but Mrs. Morris – Mrs. M. in purple samite, on a very empty stomach’. Inquiries from Quincy Street as to the extent of his expenses recur during this time and, in response, James provides a detailed account of his spending, enlisting, too,William’s support to his cause. Financially – at the age of 26 – he was still almost entirely dependent on his parents, and he represents this European trip as an investment in his future, a furthering of his knowledge of European culture and part of his mission to get well; thus, as he protests to his father, to ‘have you think that I am extravagant with these truly sacred funds sickens me to the heart’. He represents travel (necessarily first class, owing to his back pain) as beneficial to his health, though to a modern reader, his choices of hotels, spas and clothes ordered from London’s best tailors may seem extravagant. Doubtless, however, whatever the parental anxieties, his habits and expectations conform with his class and with the age in which he lived. Meantime, as part of this new self-help regime, he deliberately limited both his reading and his writing, confining himself to composing lengthy descriptive letters home, intended to be shared, possibly read aloud, and to be preserved as a diary holding impressions for future reference. 79



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Switzerland and ‘Obermann’ On 14 May 1869 James left London for what became an eight-month tour of continental Europe which proved little less than transformative. Breaking free from corporate James family experience, he discovered Italy, the ‘beautiful dishevelled nymph’, a country to which he would return on fourteen occasions. On leaving Britain, at this time of her imperial ascendancy, he humorously summed up his affection, indicating perhaps why he eventually returned to take up permanent residence:‘I find I like it even better – more cordially – than I fancied. It’s so healthy, so honnête & above all, so comfortable. I realize now the blessings of its admirable cookery – enough in itself to preserve the virtue & maintain the empire of a great people. With that & her bath-tubs England may take her stand’. Passing through Paris, he made for Switzerland, much of it familiar from his itinerant childhood, where he settled for three months. He had found Paris, now transformed by the large-scale urban planning initiative of Haussmann, dull with ‘monumental splendour’ and full of ‘[f]lare & glare’, while Geneva, too, where he had also spent time as a boy, now seemed ‘extremely pretty, but rather vacuous’. In Switzerland he enjoyed once again the company of the Nortons (especially the women of the family) who were staying at Vevey, at the eastern end of Lake Geneva. Here he spent a pleasant day, an experience he would partially recreate in the opening scene of ‘Daisy Miller’ which takes place in a garden at the Hôtel des Trois Couronnes, a popular destination for American tourists. Though the weather was poor when James moved on to the village of Glion near Montreux, he enjoyed the impressive mountain scenery and watched the sunrise (after an overnight walk) from the Rochers de Naye with its panoramic views of mountains and lake, in company with two Englishmen and a German. In fact, he did much walking at this time, and it was perhaps inevitable that he should refer twice to Matthew Arnold’s two ‘Obermann’ poems in his letters home. Philosopher and essayist Étienne Pivert de Senancour, born in the second half of the eighteenth century, presented his hero Obermann (appropriately here) through the medium of letters, as Arnold points out, ‘a collection of letters from Switzerland treating almost entirely of nature and of the human soul, [which] may be called a work of sentiment’. Arnold laments, like Obermann, his sense of feeling out of time and place, in ‘[t]he hopeless tangle of our age’.4 James’s perspective raises more practical concerns: quoting from these ‘Stanzas’, he complains to Alice of his chilly room which feels as if ‘the glaciers had spared to it “the soul of their white snows”’. Later, too, having travelled south through Italy as far as Pompeii, he invokes ‘Obermann once more’, one of Arnold’s latest poems, composed just a few years earlier, between 1865 and 1867. It dwells once again on spiritual uncertainty, the poet’s conviction that mankind can neither benefit from religion in its present state nor simply do without it. James confesses himself incapable of describing Pompeii: ‘The sadness of 80



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the place flattens you out into nothing. Truly as M. Arnold says – “that hard Roman world,” &c. “But oh, its heart, its heart, was stone // And so it could not thrive!”’. In the poem the world is ‘Pagan’ rather than ‘Roman’ – James was doubtless quoting from memory – but his response which contrasts the humane values of Christianity with unyielding pagan beliefs serves as a reminder of ongoing mid-Victorian examinations of religious belief and differing faith systems. James, fleetingly inspired by the surrounding icy landscapes, may well have seen himself in the European tradition of the isolated artist in search of enlightenment. In such a place the life of his young fictional sculptor Roderick Hudson comes to an end. Arnold had visited Switzerland in the late 1840s and James may have responded to the poet’s simple formulation of the seemingly inevitable division between society and the artist: ‘Some secrets may the poet tell, / For the world loves new ways; / To tell too deep ones is not well – / It knows not what he says’.5 James admired Arnold’s writing, especially its European range of allusion, and indeed would go on to choose the nature of the secrets he would tell; he must have known, too, that the French critic he most revered, Sainte-Beuve, included a translation of ‘Stanzas in Memory of the Author of “Obermann”’ in his Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire (1860). Reading of Sainte-Beuve’s death in October 1869, James wrote to his mother that ‘I have lost my best friend’. Matthew Arnold and, specifically, Obermann continued to colour James’s impression of Switzerland. On a later visit to the country, when staying in Villeneuve at the eastern end of Lake Geneva, he wrote of his ‘lounging away the days in the shade of “Sonchaud’s piny flanks”’, a reference to the nearby mountain of Sonchaud and Obermann’s vision of the dawn at the end of ‘Obermann once more’.

The Thrill of Italy After spending much of the summer in Switzerland, by the end of August James had reached Cadenabbia, on the shores of Lake Como, not far from the SwissItalian border. On this slow progress into Italy, some of it made on foot, it seems that all his expectations were fulfilled, as he enthusiastically told Alice: … the sense of going down into Italy – the delight of seeing the north slowly melt into the south – of seeing Italy gradually crop up in bits & vaguely latently betray itself – until finally, at the little frontier Village of Isella where I spent the night, it lay before me warm & living & palpable (warm, especially) – all these fine things bestowed upon the journey a delightful flavor of romance … on, on into Italy we went – a rapturous progress thro’ a wild luxuriance of corn & vines & olives & figs & mulberries & chesnuts & frescoed villages & clamorous beggars & all the good old Italianisms of tradition.

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The first sight of Italy was a ‘never-to-be-forgotten thrill’ (LC 2: 1205), and he would elaborate upon that very present ‘flavor of romance’ in ‘At Isella’, a short story which opens with a Swiss travelogue based on this journey. The principal action begins with the arrival at the narrator’s inn of a beautiful Signora who embodies ‘the rich capacity of the historic womanhood of Italy’. She is fleeing from an unworthy husband and, after a brief meeting, the narrator expedites her escape, thrilled to be involved in the adventure: ‘“I was part and parcel of a romance!”’ (CT 2: 324, 336). Arriving in northern Italy he stayed for a few days in Milan, admiring Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin and Leonardo’s Last Supper in the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, ‘horribly decayed – but sublime in its ruins’. Now in the Veneto region he stopped at Verona, where he confessed to his mother that his affection had been won by an Englishman: the stranger remained anonymous, leaving behind ‘only a delightful impression … a man of about 38 with a sort of quiet perfection of English virtue about him, such as I have rarely found in another’. In such anonymous encounters he seems to have been particularly drawn to the English, not least, as he comically suggests to his mother, because of their physical and moral purity: ‘[y]ou see Englishmen, here in Italy, to a particularly good advantage. In the midst of these false & beautiful Italians they glow with the light of the great fact, that after all, they love a bath-tub & they hate a lie’. James enjoyed the celebrated Palladian architecture of Vicenza until ashamedly realizing that Ruskin had condemned the style in his Stones of Venice. Mr Brooke, the narrator of his story, ‘Travelling Companions’ (1870), is more single-minded, however, enjoying Palladio’s palaces ‘in defiance of reason and Ruskin’ (CT 2: 186). The progression of this story through Italy largely replicates James’s own route and aesthetic judgments, and much of it again reads as a cultural travelogue. He returns again to the fading beauty of Leonardo’s Last Supper in Milan and he cannot resist mentioning, in the manner of a travel guide, the Caffè Pedrocchi during an episode set in Padua, a real establishment patronized in the past by such customers as Byron and Stendhal. Overlaying the series of sites observed, the simple development of the plot follows Brooke’s meeting with an American girl, Miss Evans, and, despite some mishaps, their eventual marriage, a romantic outcome aimed, it seems, at a predominantly female readership. The narrator is approached in Vicenza by a captivatingly handsome but shabby local youth, perhaps ‘a young prince in disguise, a Haroun-al-Raschid’ (187) – the legendary caliph of A Thousand and One Nights. The impoverished boy has an ill, once-beautiful sister and to raise money for her treatment, offers the narrator what he claims to be a Correggio picture of a Madonna and Child which Brooke eventually buys, charmed by the Madonna’s likeness to Miss Evans. Miss Evans’s father, by contrast, a successful American businessman, represents a type that James came to interpret with increasing discrimination. Despite a nasal voice and a lack of 82



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culture or polish, ‘he nevertheless produced an impression of substance in character, keenness in perception, and intensity in will, which effectually redeemed him from vulgarity’ (198). Arriving in Venice in mid-September, James found the city, despite the squalor and offensive smells, to be ‘strangely the Venice of dreams, more than of any appreciable reality’, if ‘awfully sad too in its inexorable decay’. Here he could easily concur with Ruskin in his passion for the sublimely tragic, stormy paintings of Tintoretto ‘raging’ on the walls of such buildings as the Ducal Palace and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. And aside from other ‘local’ artists such as Veronese and Bellini, his attention was caught by the living scenes around him. He rented a gondola by the day, observing the Venetians – especially the men, ‘pushing & paddling & screaming – bare chested, bare-legged, magnificently tanned & muscular … a very effective lot’. Despite such diversions, however, he continued to be troubled by digestive problems (alleviated a little in England) and in the night he was plagued by mosquitoes. With these mixed emotions he confesses to a conviction of his own ‘inexorable Yankeehood’, and indeed scanning the sea from the Lido, he is reminded by the light and islands on the horizon of Newport, Rhode Island. He continued his journey southwards through the cities of Padua, Ferrara, Bologna and Parma, and by early October arrived in Florence. He diligently explored the great palaces and galleries of this impoverished and temporary capital of Italy, though by now his digestive system was proving so troublesome that he considered cutting short his stay in Italy. He interestingly itemizes his meat-heavy diet (typical of its time) for brother William: I always breakfast on a beefsteak. At dinner I have more meat & a vegetable, which with a little fruit in the middle of the day is my regular diet. Potatoes I long since forswore, & I am now on the way to suppressing bread as nearly altogether as I can.Wine I never touch – the common sorts are too bad & the better too dear. At dinner I drink Vienna beer & at breakfast chocolate made with water. You must have been in Italy to appreciate the repugnance that one acquires for the water of the country as a beverage.

Rome ‘Beats Everything’ Dr Duffy, the Irish doctor whom he consulted on the Via de’ Tornabuoni, provided James with medication, tablets composed seemingly of aloes and sulphuric acid, which for a time relieved the chronic constipation which was also aggravating his back pain. By the end of October he had made his way to Rome, staying first on theVia Bocca di Leone, midway between the River Tiber and the Borghese Gardens. On the day of his arrival, after an overnight journey, he began exploring in a state of high excitement: ‘It makes Venice – Florence – Oxford – London – seem like 83



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little cities of paste-board. I went reeling & moaning thro’ the streets, in a fever of enjoyment’.The city spoke to him of the past in all its rich complexity and he found its air ‘thick with the presence of invisible ghosts’. He visited the Caves of Caracalla, on the Appian Way the hilltop tomb of Cecilia Metella, a consul’s daughter and daughter-in-law of Marcus Crassus, and the ancient church of San Clemente, whose foundations date back to pagan times; he saw, too, the ‘great transfigured statue of M. Aurelius’ as well as making the requisite visit to see the Coliseum by moonlight. Turning from classical to Renaissance Rome, James was especially moved by Michelangelo’s great statue of Moses at the Church of San Pietro in Vincoli. Outside the city, he looked across the surrounding countryside, the ‘great violet Campagna … a wilderness of sunny decay & vacancy’ and visited ‘that divine little protestant Cemetery where Keats & Shelley lie buried’. Alongside regular visits to the Vatican to admire its treasures he enjoyed those ‘delightful princely shabby old Palaces – with their great names – Borghese, Farnese, Colonna, Corsini, Doria …’. As a friend of the Lowells and Nortons, James also found a welcome at the home of William Wetmore Story and his wife who, long resident in Italy, occupied an impressive apartment in the Palazzo Barberini on the Quirinal Hill. Story, a native of Salem, Massachusetts, who had trained in law, had devoted most of his life to sculpture and to writing, and he and his wife entertained on a grand scale in this sumptuous setting designed originally for Pope Urban VIII. By the end of November Aunt Kate had arrived in Rome, accompanied by other relatives from his New York childhood – ‘onerous society’, as he says. They included his mother’s cousin Helen Wyckoff Perkins and her brother, Henry Wyckoff, who, mentally impaired, ‘confines the party to seclusion & solitude’; the mood was lightened, however, by the presence of his second cousin, Helen Ripley, with whom he experienced ‘the excellent joy of looking at great works in the society of a sweet young woman’. By mid-December he had reached Naples. The weather continued to be poor, but there were still fascinating things to see – the city’s renowned Archaeological Museum with artefacts from nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum, and, further down the coast, the awe-inspiring Greek temples at Paestum.Yet, having visited some of Italy’s greatest cities, James was disappointed by Naples, ‘a vast swarming ugly place, with pink & blue houses & a population of terrific vileness.… Heaven has cursed them with picturesqueness! In fine, Naples is a barbarous city’.

Return to America and the End of Youth It was time to travel north once again and his return included valedictory visits to Rome, Assisi, Perugia and Florence. Even allowing for the high emotions colouring some of his letters, it is clear that he felt bereft at leaving Florence and her ‘immortal 84



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soul’. He followed the Ligurian coast towards the French–Italian border and at Oneglia wondered at the blueness of the Mediterranean and the southern culture he was leaving behind: ‘the last sweet remnant of the beautiful Italian race looks at you with kindly dark eyed wonder as you take your way to the stupid unlovely North’. James continued through the historic cities of southern France and then lingered for ten days in Paris in early 1870. He enjoyed the performance of Mlle. Aimée Desclée in a new play, Froufrou, by Ludovic Halévy at the Théâtre Gymnase as well as spending four evenings at the Théâtre-Français, seeing plays by Molière and Augier and such celebrated actors as Regnier, Got, Coquelin and Mlle. Favart. This was his first exposure to theatre of this calibre and he found it ‘an immense revelation of the power of good acting’. Once again, the question of his expenses arises and, while admitting that he is no economist, James reminds his mother of the extra cost of being unwell and of travelling alone: ‘I may be considered therefore to have cost you in a year about 400£ … a good round sum’ – something in excess of £46,000 (or roughly $60,350) in current terms. Having left Paris not long before the war with Prussia and the consequent civil and political unrest, James found himself once more at Great Malvern where he stayed for more than two months. The inadequacies of British rather than Italian cuisine here struck him again, understandable given his ongoing digestive problems and the heaviness of what was on offer: ‘how I do find myself longing for a great succulent swash of American vegetables – for tomatoes & apples & Indian meal! The narrowness of English diet is something absolutely ludicrous. Breakfast cold mutton (or chop) toast & tea: dinner leg or shoulder, potatoes & rice pudding: tea cold mutton again (or chop) toast & tea’. The tedium of these dull meals may have been alleviated for him by the return of another English spring; though he still feels haunted by memories of ‘this Italian ghost’, he remarks on the beauty of the skies, ‘tremendous & Turneresque, a chaos of rolling grey – a rain of silver, a heaven of tender distant blue …’. Meantime, the news of his cousin Minny Temple was troubling. ‘It is a wondrous thing to think of the possible extinction of that immense little spirit’, he wrote to his father on 19 March, not yet knowing that she had died on 8 March. Recently and abruptly told that she had only two years to live, ‘[f]rom this moment she sank’, he reported to Grace Norton. James’s resulting letters are eloquent in their grief and recognition of loss: ‘with all that wonderful ethereal brightness of presence which was so peculiarly her own.… It comes home to me with irresistible power, the sense of how much I knew her & how much I loved her’. He confided to William that he had never been in love with her, ‘& yet I had the great satisfaction that I enjoyed pleasing her almost as much as if I had been’, a quality that accords with his designation of ‘angel’ at home. Minny becomes especially associated with his early, happy Newport days, in his memory the ‘air vocal with her accents, alive with her movements’, and he sadly 85



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anticipates a future in which she will have no place: ‘how much – how long – we have got to live without her!’ Having assigned the girl to an irrevocable past, as if imprisoned, he seems to foresee the bountiful role she will play for him in the decades ahead: ‘[h]ow it comes back to one, the charm & essential grace of her early years.… But it’s all locked away, incorruptibly, within the crystal walls of the past. And there is my youth – & anything of yours you please & welcome! – turning to gold in her bright keeping’. When he came to memorialize Minny so many years later in Notes of a Son and Brother, he simply observed that ‘[l]ife claimed her and used her and beset her’, concluding that her death, for both himself and William, marked ‘the end of our youth’ (NSB, pp. 363, 404). On 30 April 1870 James left England, having met up with Aunt Kate once again, aboard the Scotia, a luxury vessel and one of the last of Cunard’s paddle steamers.To Grace Norton who remained in Europe, he wrote, ‘I have time only for a single word – a sad sad word: farewell’. Aside from a sense of bereavement at Minny’s death, his health remained uncertain, as did his future. He had tasted Europe, indeed been penetrated by the experience, as he later confessed, once back in America: ‘I feel my European gains sinking gradually out of sight and sound & American experience closing bunchily together over them, as flesh over a bullet.… But I have only to probe a little to hear the golden ring of that precious projectile’. It was an enduring wound which he hardly wished to heal, not knowing when or whether he would return. The wrench was severe as he made his mock-valediction to the Norton family: ‘[i]t’s a good deal like dying. Farewell, beloved survivors’.

American Travel Writing The transatlantic journey was swift – 9½ days – and ‘without storms or serious discomforts’. Life back in Cambridge proved to be pleasant, if uneventful. The James parents were moving into later middle age, and William and Alice, both in uncertain health, continued to live at home. James’s letters to Grace Norton are full of nostalgia for Europe, playing perhaps to the fact that she was still there. He attended some of Howells’s lectures on Italian literature at Harvard’s own version of Italian Renaissance style, Boylston Hall, where he sat with ‘eyes closed, listening to the sweet Italian names & allusions & trying to fancy that the window behind me opens out into Florence’. And sitting before the open window of his room in Quincy Street he pursues a similar kind of make-believe: ‘thro’ the thin trees I see the scarlet walls of the president’s palazzo. Beyond, the noble grey mass – the lovely outlines, of the library: & above this the soaring campanile of the wooden church on the piazza’. Thus he was settling into life in what he called ‘our dear detestable common Cambridge’, and, as he had hoped, his health was improving. He was also beginning to write once again and in the summer, escaping the heat and humidity, 86



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he spent a month taking the waters at Saratoga Springs in upstate New York, an increasingly fashionable destination for the rich. Further north, he stayed on Lake George for a week, at the base of the Catskill Mountains. He also joined his parents who were renting a vacation house down in the small town of Pomfret, in northeast Connecticut. And, for the first time since Minny Temple’s death, he spent two weeks in Newport. His observations from these trips made up the brief travel sketches James contributed to the Nation magazine. In a sense they are an extension of his letters, quickly establishing a sense of place and speculating on the anonymous lives of those he noticed. His picturesque, shifting landscapes are reminiscent of the recently popular Hudson River school of painters: on Lake George ‘[t]he oars of a little boat twinkled in the sun and wrinkled the waveless deep. I chased the great slow shadows on the mountains into little shadows, and the little shadows into shadows which still were great’. The distant strains of military music he later hears take him back to Europe: ‘[s]trolling toward the place where the band was stationed, I beheld behind every trumpet a sturdy German face and heard in every note an uplifted German voice’ (CTWGBA, pp. 745, 746), though across the Atlantic at this time, the sounds filling the embattled countryside of Alsace and Lorraine were far different. On the piazzas of Saratoga, he noted, too, the kind of American male he would come occasionally to portray in his fiction, deftly sketched in a few sharp details. Such men,‘lounging with the negro waiters, and the boot-blacks, and the news-vendors … are not the mellow fruit of a society which has walked hand-in-hand with tradition and culture; they are hard nuts, which have grown and ripened as they could. When they talk among themselves, I seem to hear the cracking of the shells’ (p. 753). This is the kind of intimidating masculinity observed, for instance, in George Fenton, a character in Watch and Ward, James’s first novel, a man ‘redolent of enterprise, of “operations,” of a certain fierce friction with mankind’ (pp. 64–65). James casts a critical eye, too, on the richly attired women, suggesting their obliviousness to ‘society’ and their trivial concerns: ‘here at Saratoga, at any hour of morning or evening, you may see a hundred rustling beauties whose rustle is their sole occupation’ (CTWGBA, p. 754). The ‘society’ of Newport is decidedly more fashionable by contrast; its members are also ‘beautiful’ and ‘idle’, but the idea of business, that American preoccupation, could not seem more remote. It is an illusion, of course, since the town was to be transformed by new money and the leisure needs of many of the century’s entrepreneurs and investors. It is not the setting for tragedy, but James can imagine ‘a transient observer … dreaming momentarily of a great American novel, in which the heroine might be infinitely realistic, and yet neither a schoolmistress nor an outcast’ (pp. 762–763). James may well be that dreaming author. His own short story, ‘A Landscape Painter’, is set in Newport and its heroine is a schoolmistress, but it seems that James is mocking – as well as himself – the typical features of popular contemporary fiction enjoyed principally by women. 87



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In later years he referred to this period as his ‘brooding exile’ (LC 2: 1205), exile, that is, from Europe, and at the time the sense of loss and a more general uncertainty about his future must have been disturbing. His friendship with Howells continued; he visited Ralph Waldo Emerson for a couple of days in nearby autumnal Concord, and was entertained by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, both men belonging to his father’s generation. When writing to Grace Norton, he represents his life as indolent and directionless: ‘I lounge in a darkened room all the forenoon, reading lightish books in my shirt=sleeves; the afternoons I spend abroad; the evenings, generally gossiping with Arthur on the piazza’. Arthur Sedgwick, whose sister Susan was married to Charles Norton, lived nearby on Kirkland Street; a year younger than James, Civil War veteran and Harvard Law graduate, he soon took up a post to work on the Nation and plans that the two men might travel to Europe together were abandoned. James also made expeditions into the nearby unpopulated hills of Waltham and Arlington to the west of Boston, ‘full of sylvan seclusion and sweet shady breezy coverts which look down on the great blue plain of Boston and its bluer cope of ocean … so utterly unhaunted that I can people them with what shapes I will – with their vast outlook into purple distances and nameless inland horizons fretted by superb undulations – which all simply mean honest Massachusetts’. Indeed Cambridge itself was in these years a leafy, countrified place. In late summer 1871, moving further afield, James made a brief visit to Canada, finding Quebec, with its strikingly picturesque likeness to ‘the Gallic mother-land’, reminiscent of the Boulogne of his youth. He observes a mix of Catholic and Protestant cultures and imagines the kind of provincial dulness captured in Balzac’s fiction, an evident preservation of the past threatened, he suspects, by its proximity to the new-world values of ‘the “States”’ (CTWGBA, p. 769). A companion piece on the Niagara Falls, also published in the Nation, is a descriptive tour de force which captures the wondrousness of the natural phenomenon – ‘the brow of Niagara’ an enduring emblem of the vanished ‘line of beauty’ – while noting the unworthy presence of ‘hackmen and photographers and vendors of gimcracks’ (pp. 782, 780).

Plays and Stories In fact this two-year period was more productive than might be thought: aside from ten reviews and eight travel sketches, James penned a number of tales, a short novel, and two dramatic sketches. The two pieces of drama seem modelled on the lyrical, romantic style of the much admired Alfred de Musset, works written by a poet and intended for reading rather than performance.These proverbes dramatiques, ­illustrating the virtues and vagaries of human relations, would be referred to in The Tragic Muse as ‘just the thing for the cheek of the young person’ (1: 94) and James’s dramas, too, 88



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are light and untroubling. Pyramus and Thisbe, the title invoking the play performed by the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, follows the happy coming together of a young woman and man, irritated by the proximity of their living quarters (she is a piano teacher), who find they are, in fact, in love. Still Waters repeats the triangulated relations between two young men and a young woman explored in some of the short stories. Though the girl is the nominal centre of attention, it is the friendship between the men that seems most to engage the author. The speeches are elegantly turned and worldly wise, the form simple and economical, but there is little of the profundity one might expect from the title (which may be derived from Tom Taylor’s Still Waters Run Deep,6 a play seen by James as a child). Most of the tales of this time are slight and engaging, demonstrating James’s awareness of the market place and the preferences of the popular readership. In ‘Master Eustace’, the principal narrator, a governess, carries none of the complexity or weirdness of the equivalent role in ‘The Turn of the Screw’, and the tale uses and subverts a number of the devices of sensational fiction, including the secret of Master Eustace’s birth, an attempt at suicide and his mother’s death, believing herself cursed by her son. James shows his interest, too, in the dynamics of family life – the nature of the mother-son relationship and the damagingly long-term effects of childhood indulgence. A trip to Europe will enable Eustace ‘“to rub against other men”’ and to escape what the callow young man regards as the ‘“fearfully womanish”’ atmosphere of his home (CT 2: 355, 354). He returns, more manly, ‘bronzed by travel and dressed with great splendour’, though his newly acquired moustache seems ‘a slender thing as yet’ (364), as the governess observes. ‘Guest’s Confession’, an extended story which appeared in two numbers of the Atlantic Monthly in autumn 1872, represents another version of familial dysfunction. The antipathy between the two step-brothers at its centre probably has little to do with the relationship between Henry and William, though Edgar, the unsympathetic elder, is characterized as ‘both doctor and patient in one’ (CT 2: 376). Set in a health spa not far from New York, the narrative involves a double set of romantic entanglements of a conventional kind. Guest, however, father of the girl admired by the younger brother, has swindled Edgar out of $20,000, the ‘genial gentleman’ revealed as ‘embodied fraud’: ‘guilt is not the vulgar bugaboo we fancy it … it has organs, senses, affections, passions, for all the world like those of innocence’ (389, 390). The scene of Guest’s ritualistic humiliation forms the story’s climax. Sparing him criminal prosecution and using his step-brother as witness, Edgar compels Guest to kneel before him and beg his pardon, ‘this man of ripe maturity and massive comeliness on his two knees, his pale face bent upon his breast’ (397). The fetishized masculinity conferred upon such a man by business, property and accounts, is shockingly dismantled in this disturbing scene of quasisexual domination. 89



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A First Novel, ‘Pretty Enough’: Watch and Ward The most substantial of the works of these years is Watch and Ward which first appeared as a five-part serial in the Atlantic Monthly (August–December 1871). In fact James had submitted its first three parts to James Fields by November 1870, which suggests that he may have begun work on the novel before leaving Europe. He was certainly occupied with ‘a long & urgent & momentous piece of Autumn work’ – presumably Watch and Ward – in mid-September of that year. Its publication history is unusual, indicating that, despite his roll-up pitch to Fields that it was ‘one of the greatest works of “this or any age”’, he felt some misgivings about its quality. Only seven years later, and much revised, did the work appear in book form, ‘pretty enough’, though ‘very thin, & as “cold” as an icicle’, as he informed his father. It was never later to be included by James in any collected edition of the novels. The primary sense of the novel’s title (‘watch and ward’ is a phrase with a long history) suggests the idea of a ward (as in a ward of court), a young person needing protection or guardianship, reflected in the plot which involves a child brought up for marriage with an older, caring man, a situation reminiscent of Dickens. Another sense, involving vigilance, as in ‘ward off ’, is also implicit, a term that would have been familiar to most readers. The New England Society for the Suppression of Vice was established in Boston in 1878 as the first branch of the original New York Society founded in 1873. In 1891 it became the Watch and Ward society, named after the old volunteer police force whose responsibility was to ‘watch and ward off evildoers’, but concerned principally with the censorship of books. One further shade of meaning: a ward was also the term for a small key used to wind up a watch and an incident in the novel neatly illustrates this usage.7 The initial premise of Watch and Ward, a virtuous, rich young man, Roger Lawrence, saving Nora, a twelve-year old girl from destitution, rearing and educating her so that they may eventually marry, might seem disquieting to the modern reader, though no misgivings seem to have been voiced at the time. The novel opens sensationally with the violent suicide of the girl’s impecunious father and Nora herself orphaned, appearing to Lawrence (perhaps recalling Sissy Jupe in Dickens’s Hard Times) ‘“as if she belonged to a circus troupe”’ (Watch and Ward, p. 19). Saddened by an early failed romance, he had decided ‘to live only for himself and turn the key on his heart’, but having taken responsibility for the orphan child, his feelings change: ‘“From the lips of babes and sucklings …” – he softly mused. Before twenty-four hours had elapsed a child’s fingers were fumbling with the key. He felt deliciously contradicted’ (pp. 20–21). The symbolism is developed later when, en déshabille and with her hair in disarray, Nora, having lost her own key, seeks help from Lawrence and his churchman cousin Hubert to wind her watch: ‘Roger’s key proved a complete misfit, so that she had recourse to Hubert’s. It hung on the watch-chain which depended from his waistcoat, and some rather intimate fumbling 90



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was needed to adjust it to Nora’s timepiece’ (p. 93). Other symbolic moments seem equally awkward: Lawrence, wonders, for instance, whether to allow his ward’s rough-cut relative, George Fenton, not merely a man of the world, but ‘of twenty worlds’, access to the girl for some ‘precursory love-making’: ‘[t]he ground might be gently tickled to receive his own sowing; the petals of the young girl’s nature, playfully forced apart, would leave the golden heart of the flower but the more accessible to his own vertical rays’ (pp. 65, 66). And Nora, now grown into ‘a young lady’, comes to regard her cousin ‘with something of the thrilled attention which one bestows on the naked arrow, poised across the bow’ (pp. 67, 68). Once again a visit to Europe proves transformative: accompanied by the rich widow unsuccessfully proposed to long ago by Roger, Nora goes everywhere and sees everything, to return ‘a mature, consummate, superb young woman’ (127). The girls in James’s own life may well have served as models for this early heroine: he regarded Lizzie Boott, for instance, as largely the product of Europe, while in Clover Hooper, a Boston-born contemporary, and in Minny Temple, he came to admire such rare qualities as ‘intellectual grace’ and ‘moral spontaneity’. But it is the correspondences with Minny’s life, the girl whose abiding wish had been to visit Europe, which are the most strong. On Nora’s return, Lawrence is incapacitated by illness for many weeks, as if James recollects what he regards as his own compromised masculinity in the eyes of his cousin. The novel ends, conventionally, with their marriage, despite the age difference, and it is worth recalling that two of Minny’s sisters, Kitty and Ellen, had recently married rich, older men (much to the James family’s consternation). Despite an apparent attachment to the local New England landscapes, James continues to dwell restlessly on his own complex relationship with Europe at this time, writing to Charles Eliot Norton in February 1872 of ‘various vague moonshiny dreams of getting to your side of the world with what speed I may.… It’s a complex fate, being an American, & one of the responsibilities it entails is fighting against a superstitious valuation of Europe’. Italy may be no more the ‘absolute’ than Massachusetts, it seems. The lives of his peers were moving on: Oliver Wendell Holmes would marry Fanny Dixwell in the summer of 1872, and Henry Adams whom James first met in 1870 would marry Clover Hooper. Teaching at Harvard College, Adams had also become editor of the North American Review. A less welcome change was marked by the arrival of news of the death on 17 February 1872 of Charles Eliot Norton’s wife, Susan, who had suffered complications after the birth of their sixth child, Richard. The family were still in Dresden, but the young mother’s body was transported back to New England for interment. James attended the funeral and later burial at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, recording some brief but poignant details of the final scene for her bereaved husband;‘[t]he day was extremely sombre – a momentary relapse into winter.While we stood at the grave the snowflakes began to fall heavily’. 91



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Some years earlier, in 1868, James’s sister Alice had undergone a major health crisis which included ‘fainting spells, mysterious pains, attacks, and nervous prostrations’.8 She was now 23 and it was decided that this youngest child should visit Europe for the sake of her health and that she would be accompanied by Aunt Kate. It was to be a trip carefully organized so that she would not overexert herself. It also, incidentally, provided an excellent opportunity for Henry to act as their chaperone. He therefore negotiated with Godkin that he should supply some articles on Europe for the Nation which would help pay back the advance funding provided by his father. The three set out in mid-May aboard the Algeria for what would be an eight-day crossing. Henry had been back in America for just over two years.

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Europe with Alice and Aunt Kate The party of three – Alice, Aunt Kate, and Henry – disembarked at the Liverpool landing stage on 21 May 1872, after a brief landfall at Queenstown (now Cobh) in southern Ireland. Alice’s health was of paramount importance on this five-month tour of Europe and Henry tirelessly and reassuringly recorded for their parents her generally improving condition. He was excited to be back, finding England ‘just as I left it – still, to American eyes, full of the old world’, he declared. The group stopped off first at the Roman city of Chester, which James had thought of visiting three years earlier, and here the visitors acclimatized themselves. The sermon of Canon Charles Kingsley (also a noted author) at Chester Cathedral proved disappointing, but there were other compensations. James wrote to Grace Norton that ‘we have slept in Christian beds & walked on the sweet old walls of Chester and are sitting now beside a British hearth looking out into a high=walled British garden, dark with British verdure & the rolling clouds of a cold moist British May’. In his essay for the Nation he reiterates the idea of cultural contrast – the city with its charm, ‘that delightful element of the crooked, the accidental, the unforeseen’, so appealing to American eyes ‘accustomed to our eternal straight lines and right angles’ (CTWGBA, p. 56), and he would return to Chester in the opening pages of The Ambassadors (1903). Moving on to Derbyshire, the family group took in Haddon Hall, ‘in perfect solitude’, and the ‘glories of Chatsworth’, the magnificent home of the Devonshire

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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family (pp. 74 and 76), as well as the cathedral at Lichfield in Staffordshire; here he regretted how little the place had to say about her greatest son, Dr Samuel Johnson. Travelling by train ‘through the gentle Warwickshire land’, in the knowledge that this was ‘Shakespeare’s country’, the three arrived at Warwick Castle, a palace in which ‘the past joins hands so stoutly with the present that you can hardly say where one begins and the other ends’ (pp. 76–79). By 3 June they had reached Oxford and visited nearby Blenheim Palace, the magnificent family seat of the Dukes of Marlborough, ‘more lordly & lovely even than when I saw it before’. From central England they travelled to the southwest where James admired the Norman stonework of Exeter Cathedral along with the somewhat melancholy atmosphere of the cathedral close. By contrast, the north Devon coast, visited in mid-June, offered fresh sea air and wonderful light effects. James sketched for his parents the coastal landscape overlooking the Bristol Channel: ‘[w]e fancied Ilfracombe about the best thing visible in the way of bosky headlands, with seaward faces great mountain cliffs of rock & landward slopes and shoulders all muffled in a maze of the rarest wildflowers and trailing ivy, & every lovely color’, and he judged the town of Lynton, perched on a cliffside overlooking the village of Lynmouth, to be ‘the very lap of Paradise itself ’. Now heading eastwards for London, they passed through Wells, in Somerset, where during a cathedral service on a hot Sunday afternoon, James found the atmosphere ‘peculiarly luminous and sweet’ (CTWGBA, p. 96).The aged men he observed, occupants of a local almshouse, might have emerged from a Trollope novel. Reaching Salisbury, in Wiltshire, he found its cathedral, despite a marvellous spire and general ‘sweet perfection’, just ‘the least bit banal’ (p. 103), in the sense, he says, that the Apollo Belvedere or the Venus de’ Medici are ‘banal’. The residence of the Earls of Pembroke, Wilton House, with its classical marbles and superlative Vandyke paintings, pleased him, though his impression of the nearby prehistoric monoliths of Stonehenge was spoilt by a party of beerdrinking trippers. This journey through a historic English landscape provided the young writer with material for the essays which appeared almost concurrently in the Nation under the umbrella title of ‘A European Summer’. It was a useful source of income, though even at this stage of the tour he felt obliged to account to his parents for what might have seemed excessive outgoings:‘Alice & I have spent … in the month, from £65 to 70. The sum of course is large, but it has been for a substantial value & it is probably very much larger than any coming month will demand. It has been a positive necessity to do 2 things which help materially to consume money – travel 1st. cl. & have a sitting=room at the inns.… A few more days will see us in cheaper climes’. London proved expensive, too, though costs also included a hat for Alice and two suits and a pair of trousers for Henry (£12.16s) at prices which undercut anything comparable in Boston.

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En Route for Venice Having taken in several galleries and museums, the group left London on 26 June and, after a choppy two-hour crossing of the Channel, arrived in Paris, ‘still the perfection of brightness & neatness & form & taste’. During their brief stay Alice visited the Louvre and the Salon, while Henry went to see the Norton family at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, to the west of the city. Travelling on to Switzerland, the party took a hotel on the shores of Lake Geneva before heading for the popular mountain destination of Grindelwald where they met a number of compatriots, including Lizzie Boott and her father, ‘the same easy=fitting Bootts as before’, though after a week or so James confided to his father that ‘Lizzie’s unshared society was a little heavy’. Meantime, Alice continued to enjoy relatively good health, James concluding that ‘[c]hange as we have sought it, seems to me to have been the great agent in her marvellous improvement during the last two months’. And he himself proved his fitness, finding his ‘old Swiss legs’ with an eight-hour walk on the Faulhorn mountain. It was a hot summer and they moved eastwards via Meiringen (the women travelling part of the way on horseback) to Thusis, a ‘singularly lovely place’ in the Viamala Region of Switzerland. But it was here that Alice suffered some form of neurasthenic crisis, ‘a case of climatic antipathy’, as James describes it. She soon revived and it was thought that ‘glutted with mountain grandeur & gloom’, she might benefit from the stimulation of great cities. Travelling through Zürich and Berne, Chambéry, Fribourg, Lausanne and Turin, they reached the tranquillity of Cadenabbia on Lake Como by late August. James’s impressions are all recorded for Nation readers – the house where Jean-Jacques Rousseau had lived in Chambéry, the excitement of passing through the futuristic, recently opened Mont Cenis Tunnel, the colourful inhabitants but less impressive architecture of Turin, the ‘northern reserve’ of Milan, and the Italianate charm of Cadenabbia which transforms the writer into ‘a hero of romance with leisure for a love-affair’ (CTWC, p. 374). The reality was quite different: for once he was not travelling alone, and he seems to have been amused by the fact that ‘Alice is everywhere, invariably & obstinately taken for my wife! – & addressed as Madame – A.K. passes of course for our mamman’. After a sail down Lake Como (‘four of the most delicious hours we have ever spent’), and a brief stay in Milan, the group arrived in Venice. Here they spent just ‘four delightful days’, feasting on figs and ‘ices every night at Florian’s’ on St Mark’s Square. During the day they visited the nearby islands of Torcello and Murano, and also made two trips to the Lido: ‘[w]e had two mighty gondoliers, and we clove the wandering breezes of the lagoon, like a cargo of deities descending from Olympus. Such a bath of light & air – color and general luxury, physical and intellectual!’.

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At nearby Torcello, ‘mother-city of Venice’, they were pursued by hungry, begging children and by night compelled to endure the ‘martyrdom’ of the local mosquitoes, to be repulsed only by the burning of ‘certain stifling pastilles’. Lizzie and Francis Boott had hoped to catch up with the party at Venice, but the Jameses moved on before they arrived, heading northwards to Botzen (later Bolzano) in the Trentino Alto-Adige region of Italy. Once again, James found it difficult to leave Italy and in Germany acknowledged that he would never share his elder brother’s affection for the country. Despite its collection of old masters, Munich was dismissed as ‘a nightmare of pretentious vacuity: a city of chalky stucco’. Strasbourg, too, besieged and bombarded during the recent Franco-Prussian War, was ‘gloomy, battered & painful’, indeed, ‘much Germanised’.

Alice and Aunt Kate Prepare to Return The travellers were now on the return leg of their European tour. During the course of the summer, four of James’s English travel essays had appeared in the Nation, and with the departure date for Aunt Kate’s and Alice’s return to America approaching, he makes it clear in his letters to Quincy Street that he will not be accompanying them: ‘[m]y own desire to remain abroad has by this time taken very definite shape. In fact, I feel as if my salvation, intellectually & literarilly, depended upon it. I have had too little time to write, to lay up any great treasure to commence with; but I shall need but little to start with & shall be able to add to it fast enough for comfort. I have laid up on the otherhand a great treasure of health’. Arriving in Paris they saw (among others) Mary and Edmund Tweedy, familiar older relatives from Newport days, and Henry went to the Théâtre-Français with Grace Norton for a performance of Musset’s On ne badine pas avec l’amour, ‘too exquisite not to suffer by acting’. During these weeks of late September and early October he also mentions seeing in the Musée du Luxembourg, two paintings by Henri Regnault, his Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade and a Portrait of the Spanish General, Juan Prim.The young artist had died heroically and prematurely in the recent war with Prussia, and James would later praise his work on the publication of his Correspondance. By 9 October the group was back in London. Alice and Henry took a trip to the city’s East End, to the Bethnal Green Museum, a recently opened branch of the South Kensington Museum (later renamed the Victoria and Albert), to see an art collection belonging predominantly to Sir Richard Wallace. In a later Atlantic Monthly review, James admired its ‘variety and magnificence … its genial, easy, unexclusive taste’ (CWHJA, p. 58), though in a letter to his parents he described the location as ‘a diamond on a dunghill … the grimy squalor of the whole vast circumjacent district is inexpressible’. Indeed this area of London, deprived and 96



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sinking into destitution and criminality, must have seldom received visits from wealthy American travellers. Yet, for a brief period, as he points out, it contained ‘treasures which all well-dressed London is flocking eastward to behold’ (CWHJA, p. 57). In 1900 the Wallace Collection was to open its doors to the public in the more salubrious setting of Manchester Square in Marylebone, London. With the departure of Aunt Kate and Alice, James returned to Paris, though not before spending six days in Boulogne.The weather on the coast was fine and he found the place ‘strangely filled with dormant memories’. He stayed in Paris till late in the year, though the city was in a state of political unrest with the President of the Third Republic, Louis-Adolphe Thiers, in conflict with a powerful group of monarchists. James Russell Lowell was also visiting and, though they had been familiar acquaintances in Cambridge, there now developed what James called a ‘furious intimacy’ between the two. Lowell was staying in a small hotel just off the Quai Voltaire, and James sometimes joined him at the table d’hôte. He had himself returned to the Hôtel Rastadt, taking a small but comfortable room on the fourth floor at three francs a day. He sometimes joined Lowell on his extensive forays hunting out bargains in second-hand bookshops as well as meeting other Americans (principally New Englanders) who were passing through. Among them was Ralph Waldo Emerson and his daughter, and the two men paid a visit to the Louvre. The weather was cold and wet, but James felt himself to be ‘in a better way for production’. He kept up his theatre visits, crossing the swollen Seine to see at the Théâtre Odéon Les Précieuses  Ridicules and Le Malade Imaginaire, judging Molière to be ‘the heartiest & most heroic of humorists’. It was at this time that he reviewed George Eliot’s ‘study of provincial life’, Middlemarch. Despite that descriptive subtitle, and though he much admired its author, he felt that the novel’s principal premise – the idea of ‘a young girl framed for a larger moral life than circumstance often affords’ – became lost among charming but subsidiary details of rural life. A ‘very splendid performance’, but the novel, he decided, ‘sets a limit … to the development of the old-fashioned English novel’ (LC 1: 959, 965). James himself would, of course, take up a similar idea and carry further Eliot’s portrayal of ‘matrimonial infelicity’ in The Portrait of a Lady, whose Preface, written so many years later for the New York Edition, acknowledges her originality in depicting a sequence of young girls, her penetratingly intelligent treatment of their often naïve experiences, and her confidence in making them ‘a centre of interest’ (LC 2: 1077). He sees such a focus as a formal device and in his own fiction would develop further the representation of experience as apprehended through the sensibility of a young woman. It had been agreed that this review of Middlemarch should appear in the Nation, so when it instead published a review by Albert Dicey and forwarded his own piece to the Galaxy, without reference to its author, ‘throwing me overboard at the last minute for a stranger, after an agreement & after my long service’, James justifiably felt himself ‘shabbily’ treated. It would not be the last time that he felt aggrieved by journalistic practices. 97



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Some Short Stories and the Pursuit of Art Two of James’s short stories written in these months, in parallel with his own experiences, reflect upon Europe and its art as observed by an attentive American. A small cameo scene in ‘At Isella’ (1871) notes the parallels between humble domestic life and the sublimities of religiously inspired art. At an inn the narrator sees ‘a nursing mother of peasants’ who must turn to quiet her screaming child; he watches ‘the little unswaddled child on her breast … she made a picture which, in coming weeks, I saw imitated more or less vividly over many an altar and in many a palace’ (CT 2: 318). This correspondence between the stuff of mundane life and the transcendent beauty of great art is further developed in ‘The Madonna of the Future’ (1873), a tale set in Florence, in which the young, rich American narrator encounters Theobald, an impoverished American painter who speaks eloquently about art’s ideals. He enthuses about Raphael’s Madonna della sedia, a mother and child portrait, as the most sublime example of perfection, of conception ideally realized, a work which intoxicates the spectator ‘with the fragrance of the tenderest blossom of maternity that ever bloomed on earth’ (CT 3: 20). It is a work James had seen in the Pitti Palace and admired in ‘Florentine Notes’ (1874) for its ‘flower-like irresponsibility’ (CWTC, p. 549). Theobald has his own contemporary Madonna, a local woman who has been his muse for many years. Indeed, this ‘Serafina’ turns out to be all too human, older and coarser than any Renaissance Madonna, as the narrator remarks. She has other more worldly relationships, too, for instance, with an animalier who produces vulgar statuettes of cats and monkeys which sell well. She lives in a domestic squalor which Zola might have imagined, and indeed the episodes which were eventually to reveal her faithlessness were deemed too ‘risky for the magazine’ by the Atlantic’s editor, W.D. Howells.1 James was in Europe at the time, so his father made the necessary cuts, Henry complaining that ‘it makes it a bad look out ahead for imaginative writing. For what class of minds is it that such very timorous scruples are thought necessary?’ In fact – for whatever reason – he never reinstated the cut material on the several occasions when the story was republished. Theobald, disillusioned and realizing that there is ‘no call’ for such works in this ‘“corrupt generation”’ (CT 3: 22), dies in obscurity. And sadly, despite his eloquent talk, the project to which he has devoted himself for years, the Madonna of the Future, is found to have been ‘a canvas that was a mere dead blank, cracked and discolored by time. This was his immortal work!’ (47). Exposed to the great Renaissance works of Raphael, Michelangelo and Correggio for the first time, James was perhaps contemplating the disjunction between art’s immortal triumphs and the relentless triviality of everyday circumstance. He also had a literary model for his tale, having, in his early twenties, translated and amplified

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Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio, a play set in sixteenth-century Florence which dramatizes the human and political machinations of Lorenzo de’ Medici and his court. Musset’s Tebaldeo Freccia, who advocates a pure, uplifting life dedicated to art, religion and love (30), appearing in just two scenes of the play, becomes James’s Theobald. It is quite a literary story for Theobald’s artistic failure has been foreseen, too, by another expatriate who suspects that in his studio will be found a ‘“mere mass of incoherent scratches and daubs, a jumble of dead paint!”’, just as in ‘“that tale of Balzac’s”’ (28).The reference is to ‘Le chef d’œuvre inconnu’, in which an unknown masterpiece has been so long worked over that it is reduced to a confused jumble of layers of thick paint and strange lines.2 When the truth is revealed, this artist, like Theobald, an eloquent speaker, also dies. Balzac implies that painters should think only with brushes in their hands: to speak too volubly of art’s mystery is to compromise its practice. Yet the conclusion of James’s tale moves beyond these French models. The narrator is about to leave Florence when he happens to meet the Serafina in the Medici chapel of San Lorenzo, an episode which powerfully suggests that art itself must inevitably remain incomplete, imperfect. Downcast at human failure, he observes the surrounding ‘immortal treasures’ (50), Michelangelo’s sculptures of Night and Day, Dawn and Dusk, those opposing abstractions which decorate the Medici tombs, transcending human activity. Ironically, the animalier’s cats and monkeys are on sale nearby. What James fails to mention, another instance of incompletion, is that Michelangelo never finished the planned statuary for the Medici chapel, that he was soon to leave Florence forever for a new life in Rome. Theobald’s problems as an aspiring artist are in part James’s, their American heritage regarded as insufficient to nurture their calling.Yet the story’s narrator offers a more encouraging possibility, protesting that ‘“[t]he worthy part is to do something fine! There’s no law in our glorious Constitution against that. Invent, create, achieve!”’ (14–15). James had not yet, it seems, resolved the question for himself, continuing to ponder the adequacy of American life as a subject, alongside the cultural and historical abundance of Europe. In contrast with ‘The Madonna of the Future’, the other tale written in these months, ‘The Sweetheart of M. Briseux’ (1873), begins with a finished piece of art. As in some other stories, the narrator is a solitary visitor in an art gallery (this time in Provence) which boasts only one great work, Briseux’ portrait of a Lady in a Yellow Shawl. Its painter is now highly regarded, and the work, purchased just before his death, has accordingly increased in value. It is a picture, however, of ‘something more than a yellow shawl’, seeming to contain a story, the woman’s mouth wearing ‘a look of smothered agitation’, her cheek burning ‘ominously’. At this point the everyday moves into the romantic as the narrator, ‘a very sentimental

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traveller’ (CT 3: 55, 57), later notices an aging woman, like him, it seems, an American. He quickly realizes she is the unknown woman in the portrait, and she has, indeed, a tale to tell. As a girl she had come under the protection of a socially superior widow whose son Harold, ‘a decorous young Apollo’, aspired to be a painter (61). She is accepted by mother and son, with some condescension, as a prospective wife for the young man. They winter in Rome where Harold may study the antique and, when his fiancée suggests he paint her, a living model, he agrees. Work begins, though he refuses to allow her to wear her yellow shawl which he considers ‘a meretricious ornament’ (74).Things don’t go well, however, and she pities him; in his absence she looks at the portrait and is dismayed at what she finds. By chance another young man, ‘hungry-looking’, an ‘impudent little Bohemian’ (77), has entered the studio and, horrified at the incomplete portrait, paints over it, insisting that she now wear the yellow shawl. On his return Harold is justifiably angry, both with the girl and the ‘“dirty little Frenchman”’ (84) he finds there; defying his orders, the girl remains to have her picture finished by M. Briseux, inhabited, as he says, by ‘“the divine afflatus”’ (83), a phrase of which James was fond.3 Her relationship with Harold founders as a consequence, and his mother regards her as disappointingly romantic. As with a later tale,‘The Liar’, it seems that a picture, specifically a portrait, is able to tell enduring truth and to achieve immortality, though Briseux is now dead, and his model’s identity unknown. On its appearance at the Paris Salon of 1836, ‘Mademoiselle X’ (so-called to protect the sitter’s identity), had been acclaimed and Briseux’ career was launched. The idea for the yellow shawl, ‘glowing splendidly’ (80) with its captured light effects, may have been inspired by Henri Regnault’s painting, Salomé, celebrated at the Paris Salon in 1870, which James admired in his review of the painter’s Correspondance. Its subject, a young, Mediterranean-looking girl holding a platter and an ornamental dagger, is surrounded by a variety of shimmering, silky yellows; as James observes in a letter to his brother, Regnault ‘seems to have thought, so to speak, in color’. A little more than a decade after this tale was published, James met John Singer Sargent, also a frequenter of the Parisian salon of expatriate American, Henrietta Reubell, and the two embarked on an enduring friendship. In a strange way life seems to have reflected art, for Sargent exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1884 an avant-garde portrait, not of ‘Mademoiselle X’, but of Madame X. It created a scandal: depicting a ‘professional beauty’, the picture was condemned for its display of ‘female sexuality and the transgression of class boundaries’.4 The term ‘professional beauty’, applied to a woman who promotes herself by means of her physical attractiveness, was later taken up by James himself who applied it to the promiscuous Selina Berrington in his tale, ‘A London Life’ (1888).

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Return to Rome: Echoes of Clough Just before leaving Paris in December 1872 James attended one of the Masked Balls at the Paris Opéra, in company with a Bostonian, Charles Hazen Dorr. A regular Saturday evening event dating back to the early eighteenth century, it proved a disappointing experience, as he reported to his sister (with an echo of Hamlet),‘stale, flat & unprofitable’, throwing ‘much light on the french character’ as a ‘peuple léger’. He left early and walked off his headache ‘in the wholesome rain=washed moonshine’. By Christmas Eve he was once more in Rome, having travelled south via Turin and Florence, ‘a blessed change from drenched & draggled Paris’. He was charmed by what he called in his 1874 tale ‘Adina’ – perhaps with some nostalgia for New England – the novelty of ‘a Southern Christmas, without snow on the ground, or sleigh-bells in the air, or the smoke of crowded firesides rising into a cold, blue sky’ (CT 3: 229). The streets were quiet and the young man was welcomed into their ‘little crimson drawing room’ by Mary and Edmund Tweedy at 33 Via Gregoriana, in the artists’ quarter not far from the Spanish Steps, before being served with a Christmas Eve dinner. They must have been happy to see him, for Edmund was suffering from gastric fever through many of these winter months and the younger man accompanied Mary on her open carriage rides around the city. Quite soon, however, he was disappointed to find her ‘passably erratic & uncomfortable … in a state of chronic dissatisfaction with everything’. Rome, recently designated capital of the newly formed Kingdom of Italy, appeared to James ‘a strange jumble now of its old inalterable self and its new Italian assumptions’. He would soon move into the Hôtel de Rome, but he wrote to his father on Christmas Day, casting himself aptly at this historic time as the latter-day poet, Arthur Hugh Clough. He begins with the quotation, ‘I was writ in a Roman Chamber’, a line which comes at the end of Amours de Voyage when the poet tells his ‘little book’ to ‘go forth to the world’.5 Clough had been in Rome in 1849 to see for himself the Roman Republic, recently established in a move opposed by most of Europe.The poem documents the political turmoil he witnessed during the siege of the city, ‘[w]hen from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon of France’ (p. 39). Essentially an epistolary novel in verse form, the simple plot relates how the hero Claude, subject to religious doubt, hesitates in declaring himself to an English girl, Mary Trevellyn, following her around northern Italy, without ever finding her. Clough, and the connection with Rome, had been present in James’s mind in 1869 when he colloquially described the city as ‘rubbishy – magnificently, sublimely so’, an iconoclastic expression which also has its literary origins in Amours de Voyage: Claude confides to his friend Eustace, ‘Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand, but Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it’ (p.

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3). It is Claude, too, who, refers light-heartedly, if donnishly, to the happy chance of sitting next to a girl in a railway carriage or steamer, and the ensuing chat which leads at journey’s end to ‘Talk of eternal ties and marriages made in heaven’. He concludes that ‘Juxtaposition is great’ (pp. 24–25). The phrase must have struck James because in ‘Adina’ he echoes it when a young archaeologist courts and proposes to the American girl of the title: ‘“juxtaposition is much,” says Clough; especially juxtaposition, he implies, in foreign countries’ (CT 3: 224). The idea of juxtaposition is repeated several times in Amours de Voyage, appearing, too, in the late poem ‘The American’s Tale; or Juxtaposition’, always for Clough with a romantic connotation. James was likely to have read Amours de Voyages in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly when it first appeared in 1858. Clough’s personal and cultural links with America were extensive – a friend of Francis J. Child, one of James’s dining companions during his year at Harvard, he was also close to the young Charles Eliot Norton in 1852–1853.6 Clough died in 1861, to be commemorated by his boyhood friend, Matthew Arnold in the elegy, ‘Thyrsis’. And it was in spring 1873 that James finally met Arnold in the apartments of William Wetmore Story, another of Clough’s friends. James exchanged a few words with Arnold, ‘the idol of my previous years’ (WWS 2: 208), but concluded that ‘[h]e is not as handsome as his photographs – or as his poetry. But no one looks handsome in Rome – beside the Romans’. Arnold is mentioned again a month later, this time encountered at ‘a vast & ponderous banquet’ given at the Villa Mattei by the Baron von Hoffmann and his wife, Lily, an old friend of the James family. Writing to Alice, James dwells once more upon Arnold’s physical presence: ‘[h]e is not delicately beautiful, but he has a powerful face and an easy, mundane, somewhat gushing manner. Up to a certain point, it is very good: but the rest belongs too much to the little glass he screws into one eye. This little glass was rather a Mécompte to me in the poet of Obermann’s. But I fancy he is a fine man ….’.The eye glass clearly struck James as an affectation for he mentions it again in a later letter, and indeed the poet whose work he so admired seems to have failed to fulfil his expectations: ‘I had first & last a little small talk with him. It remained small talk & he did nothing to make it big, as my youthful dreams would have promised me. He’s a good fellow I should say, but he is decidedly a disappointment, in a superficial sense’. The experience would be replicated in James’s later encounters with other celebrated men of letters. One meeting with more enduring consequences for James involved the great actress, Fanny Kemble, who would remain a friend until her death in 1893. He had witnessed her readings from Shakespeare as a relatively small boy, and now found her offstage presence equally appealing. James wrote to his mother of ‘the terrific Kemble herself, whose splendid handsomeness of eye, nostril & mouth were the best things in the room’. He had already met in Rome Kemble’s daughter, Sarah Wister, a resident of Philadelphia, who was accompanied by her husband and son. 102



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Now in her sixties, Kemble resented ‘the decay of her accomplishments’, but according to a sonnet she later addressed to him, James became the ‘friend of many lonely hours’ (CWHJD, pp. 412–413). Generous of spirit and intellect, a member of a distinguished acting dynasty, she must also have embodied something of the mystery and the ‘business’ of theatre, an abiding passion for James. She provided him with some of his fictional données and doubtless gave him insights into the practice of her art and the creation of the dramatic illusion, the ‘making’ of a scene, themes and devices to which he would regularly return in his fiction. She was also a woman of letters, having published drama and poetry, as well as an account (perhaps her most enduring work) of life on a slave estate in ante-bellum America, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation (1863). James found abundant social opportunities within Rome’s expatriate American community. Aside from Mrs Wister’s receptions, he was welcomed by the Luther Terry household who were living at the Odescalchi Palace not far from the Trevi Fountain. Terry was a painter and his wife Louisa, formerly the widow of sculptor Thomas Gibson Crawford, was a sister of Julia Ward Howe’s. They offered fine musical entertainment in their concert room. James also regularly enjoyed the hospitality of William Wetmore Story and his family. Despite misgivings about Story’s sculptures, he found the company congenial: James confided to his sister that ‘The Storys, if you take them easily, are very good’, and he was drawn to the sculptor himself, admiring ‘his singularly handsome, expressive, and vivacious physiognomy’. Story was a writer as well as sculptor and James records a long evening when the host read aloud his recently completed play, Nero, to a small group which included Fanny Kemble: ‘he got through 3 acts in 3 hours, & the last two were resumed on another evening, when I was unavoidably absent’. The anonymous review James wrote for the Nation a couple of years later points to the undramatic and unrelieved nature of the work: it offered, he judges, ‘too complete a monotony of horror’ (CWHJD, p. 110). Undoubtedly more entertaining were the Shakespeare comedies performed at the Palazzo Barberini during ‘bright Roman winters’, with Story playing a ‘vivid Shylock’, surrounded by ‘handsome young costumed figures’ (WWS 2: 247). In some respects, especially in contrast to Paris, Rome struck James as dull and provincial and he complained of how, at the time Parisian theatres were opening for the evening, he had to make his way ‘homeward’ after dinner ‘through a narrow black alley lighted by a single lamp, in which here and there, in a dusky caffé a lot of frugal Romans were huddled round a lot of empty tables’. He quickly grew bored with the expatriate society to which he was generally confined, and the traditional Carnival which he describes in an Atlantic Monthly essay had become a vulgar affair where, it emerges, he had a half-bushel of flour dropped on his ‘too-philosophic head’ as a prank (CTWC, p. 415). His pleasure in the city’s churches and historic sites evident from the essays he wrote in these 103



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months endured, however, and he also took up horse-riding with some enthusiasm, braving ‘the slippery saddle’ as a source of exercise, which he thought might improve his health. It was, as he admitted to his mother – his usual confidante in matters financial – his ‘only serious expense – 11 frs. for as long a ride as you please or 300 frs. for a horse by the month’, and Rome was, after all, less expensive than Paris.

Some Roman Tales Despite these social commitments, James was engaged in writing during these Roman days. ‘The Last of the Valerii’ (1874) and ‘Adina’ are two tales especially imbued with the atmosphere of the city. The title of the former refers to a patronym with a long and illustrious past, for the Valerii were an important patrician Roman family from the beginning of the Republic till the end of the Empire, from whom many emperors claimed kinship. In an essay which first appeared in the Galaxy magazine, James records visiting the church of San Stefano Rotondo and seeing there the tomb of the Valerii, ‘a single chamber with an arched roof, covered with stucco mouldings perfectly intact, exquisite figures and arabesques as sharp and delicate as if the plasterer’s scaffold had just been taken from under them’ (CTWC, p. 474). The influence of Prosper Mérimée’s horror story ‘La Vénus d’Ille’, a sensational piece which invokes the horrors of pagan superstition in southern France, which James translated in youth, is clear. A young bridegroom carelessly places a ring on the hand of a statue of Venus. In the night the cursed figure comes to life – the narrator hears heavy footsteps on the stairs – to claim the drunken man as her husband. He is found dead the next morning in his marriage bed, horribly disfigured as if squeezed to death. ‘The Last of the Valerii’, is less sensational in its evocation of the dark and sinister dangers which have reached beyond the antique past. An Italian, Count Marco Valerio, marries Martha, a rich American girl who decides – despite her husband’s wishes – to excavate the grounds of the Villa Valerio in search of antiquities. Valerio, nominally Catholic, is essentially a pagan, a ‘natural man’, ‘perhaps a little stupid’, his handsome head adorned with ‘such hair as the old Romans must have had when they walked bareheaded and bronzed about the world’ (CT 3: 95, 89, 90). From the beginning he has been fearful of these archaeological excavations: ‘“I can’t bear to look the statues in the face. I seem to see other strange eyes in the empty sockets … Don’t dig up any more, or I won’t answer for my wits!”’. The buried figure of Juno, ‘of perfect human proportions’, is located, however, and Valerio’s wits indeed suffer. He becomes obsessed, having anticipated the discovery of the Roman goddess in a dream, admitting that ‘“she rose and came and laid her 104



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marble hand on mine”’ (98–101).The narrative dwells on the coldness of stone, the warmth of the human touch, and, implicitly, the sinister deadness of the pagan past. His wife finds herself excluded, complaining that ‘“[h]is Juno’s the reality; I’m the fiction”’ (117). The statue must be reburied to become part once more of ancient, pagan Rome if  Valerio is to be restored to the present and to his marriage. A further, living aspect of ancient Rome would have appealed to James in the figure of Mary Tweedy’s coachman, who took the pair on many drives around Rome at this time. James described him to brother William as ‘a most affable coachman who talks, not Italian, but Roman – delicious stately, full=lipped Latin, which adds greatly to the local color of a drive on the Appian way’. He makes a further appearance in the essay ‘From a Roman Note-Book’ as ‘G., with his beautiful caressing, open-lipped Roman utterance, so easy to understand, and, to my ear, so finely suggestive of genuine Latin’ (CTWC, p. 472). G’s identity is never disclosed, but he may have been speaking Romanesco, a Roman dialect sometimes known as ‘old Roman’, as John Auchard has suggested.7 An account of those horse-rides James took on the picturesque Campagna appeared in ‘Roman Rides’, first published in the Atlantic Monthly (August 1873). It was a favourite haunt for artists, and James’s observations – he notes, for instance, a peasant, or contadino, in cloak and peaked hat riding a donkey, and, in the distance, white villages, a grey tower, the light on the Sabine Mountains – have a pictorial quality, reminiscent of a Turner painting as well as recalling the Romantic figures of Byron and Berlioz. Certain melancholy scenes invite some narrative speculation: a mouldering villa might have witnessed, ‘behind bolted door and barred window’, the suicide of some ‘despairing creature’ (CTWC, p. 441). There were brighter moments, too, imagined, for instance, as a classical scene from Virgil, but with an extra erotic frisson. James noticed a sleeping shepherd who has been ‘washing his feet … and had found it pleasant afterwards to roll his short breeches well up on his thighs. Lying thus in the shade, on his elbow, with his naked legs stretched out on the turf and his soft-peaked hat over his long hair crushed like the veritable bonnet of Arcady, he was exactly the figure of the background of this happy valley’ (p. 445). William Wetmore Story suggests in his portrait of Roman life, Roba di Roma, that such shepherds, however romantic and colourful, were, in fact, a common sight, ‘the modern type of old Pan’.8 James incorporates his chance encounter on the Campagna into his other Roman story, ‘Adina’ (1874), when the American narrator and his classical scholar friend, Sam Scrope, encounter a similarly handsome young shepherd. The narrator confesses himself to be a ‘sentimental’, legitimately susceptible to the ‘poetic’, the picturesque and the beautiful. With ‘careless, youthful grace’ the shepherd is first found sleeping, and open to observation, a ‘rustic Endymion’, ‘a young Hercules … as handsome a vagabond as you could wish’ (CT 3: 214, 215). His name turns out to be Angelo Beati, both heavenly and blessed, in the observer’s eyes. He awakens 105



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with a broad smile and is found to be holding an intaglio, an engraved topaz from the time of the emperor Hadrian which he has just found in the earth. James may have been inspired by a poem by Gautier who had died in autumn 1872. In his essay on the poet which appeared a few months later, in 1873, James quotes in its entirety ‘L’Art’, the final poem of Émaux et Camées (‘Enamels and Cameos’, 1852): Tout passe. — L’art robuste Seul a l’éternité. Le buste Survit à la cité Et la médaille austère Que trouve un laboureur Sous terre Révèle un empereur. [‘All passes. – Robust art lives for ever. The bust survives the city // And the plain medal found by a labourer in the earth reveals an emperor’] (LC 2: 361). And the plot which James develops when Scrope tricks Angelo into exchanging this priceless relic for a few scudi seems to have been derived from an anecdote recounted in William Wetmore Story’s Roba di Roma in which ‘a gentleman’ encounters ‘a contadino’ who offers him ‘a magnificent intaglio in pietra dura, one of the rarest and largest of the antique stones that exists’, having ‘for its possessor no other value or use than a common flint’.9 James’s shepherd Angelo continues to lurk in the background as Scrope courts and proposes marriage to the young American girl, Adina, recently arrived in Rome. The scene shifts to nearby Albano allowing the American visitors to avoid the debilitating Roman scirocco, but the romance seems mysteriously to founder. Finally, Adina disappears, only later to be discovered living modestly in Rome: she and Angelo have been secretly married, and the young shepherd’s revenge is complete. In the final scene Scrope casts the intaglio, ‘the beautiful, the imperial, the baleful topaz’, into the waters of the Tiber. There it will lie buried, never to reveal its brief connection with ‘this passionate human interlude’ (257). The spring of 1873 was advancing and James would celebrate his thirtieth birthday in April. Meantime his father had offered to pay for the plates for the publication of a selection of earlier tales, but James preferred to collect some of his more recent work from the past three years ‘on the theme of American adventures in Europe’, starting with ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’, believing these stories to be ‘much better & maturer than their predecessors’. Already he was aware of the ‘thin spots in 106



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the writing which I should deplore to have stereotyped’, an early indication of what would become an abiding need to revise his own work. A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales would be published in 1875. Rome’s theatres could not rival those of Paris, but in April James enjoyed Carlo Goldoni’s play I Quattro Rusteghi (The Four Rustics), though (unsurprisingly) he found its Venetian dialogue difficult to follow. This was staged at the historic Teatro Valle, and later in the month he attended a performance of Othello at the Teatro Apollo, a beautiful building on the banks of the Tiber quite soon to be demolished. The title role was taken by Ernesto Rossi who enjoyed an international reputation playing Shakespeare’s major tragic roles. James judged the actor to be ‘both very bad and very fine; bad where anything like taste and discretion is required, but “all there” … in violent passion’ (CTWC, p. 482). He would see Rossi perform again in later years and the actor may have provided a model for Signor Ruggieri, Miriam Rooth’s coach in The Tragic Muse. The Roman weather was, however, by this time making James feel ‘thick=headed  and a little head=achy’, and so, he decamped to Albano about ten miles southeast of Rome, a setting used in ‘Adina’. The hotel where he stayed, the Albergo di Parigi, made up in charm for any other shortcomings, and the countryside around, ‘haunted with throbbing nightingales’, offered walks ‘innumerable’ and views ‘divine’. Rome was visible in the distance, and he had time to read, freed from the social obligations of the city, the location, a ‘perfect Paradise of picturesqueness’. By May James had returned to the city; with the warmer weather the tourist season was coming to an end, so he fitted in some final sight-seeing. With Lizzie Boott who had been wintering in Rome with her father he made a memorable visit to the Villa Ludovisi (no longer standing) where they admired the sculptures in the Casino, ‘the beautiful sitting Mars and the head of the great Juno’ (CTWC, p. 483); the eponymous hero of Roderick Hudson (on which James would soon begin work) exclaims that, after seeing the Juno, ‘it was a profanation to look at anything but sky and trees’ (1: 129). The church of St John Lateran, as recently as 1870 the venue for the crowning of popes, shone in the spring sunshine, and accompanied by an unidentified ‘Miss — ’, James records a visit made ‘in the loving mood of one’s last days in Rome’ (CTWC, pp. 484–485).

Some Roman Essays The travel essays of this period, ‘A Roman Holiday’, ‘Roman Rides’, ‘Roman neighbourhoods’, ‘The After-Season in Rome’, and ‘From a Roman Note-Book’ found a ready market with the Nation, Galaxy and Atlantic magazines in America. Their author seems confident of his audience, assuming a transatlantic perspective and a deliberately wise-cracking manner, whilst also offering a personal response to 107



  Return to Italy and ‘an Incalculable Number of Gathered Impressions’ 

the historic and aesthetic richness, the paintings, statuary, churches and palaces he observes. Some of the chattier speculations of the magazine version – ‘If I had fifty thousand dollars, I should certainly buy, for mere fancy’s sake, an Italian villa (I am told there are very good ones still to be had)’10 – would be edited out when the final version appeared in Italian Hours. In a similar vein, James also cautions his home audience that European public places, unlike those of America, will contain ‘unoccupied people, of every age and condition, sitting about, early and late, on benches and gazing at you, from your hat to your boots’ (CTWC, p. 476). Of all James’s journalistic enterprises, this travel writing probably shows him at his best, though even here the occasional allusion to a predominantly European literary tradition which included Stendhal, Taine and Gautier may have puzzled some readers. In contrast with Gautier’s Gallic flair,‘light and true’ (LC 2: 358), John Ruskin’s voluminous writings on Italy (and especially Venice) were highly opinionated and didactic, and though he later became dismissive, James was indebted, initially at least, to Ruskin’s historically informed accounts of Italian art and architecture in The Stones of Venice. He carried with him Venetian Index, the third volume of that work.Writing at a time when Italy was undergoing great political and social change, James is often drawn into a nostalgia for an earlier epoch whose last days he witnessed and is thus closer to Ruskin than he might have cared to admit. And in his informed, yet personal discussions of art and sculpture, James is clearly indebted to the older man, even though he characterizes the latter’s judgments on art as if dispensed in an ‘assize court’ and subject to ‘Draconic legislation’ (CTWC, p. 408). James’s own freer and more discursive manner emerges most clearly when he adopts an anecdotal or observational mode. In describing the history and architectural features of the ancient Santa Sabina church on Rome’s Aventine hill he lightly touches, for instance, upon the impressions of the moment, the ‘stale smell’ which pervades the nave and the ‘strangest jaded humility’ in the mini-drama of the young Dominican monk who showed him around: ‘[h]is lugubrious salute and sanctimonious impersonal appropriation of my departing franc would have been a mastertouch on the stage’ (p. 472). For entrance to the Villa Mellini you must give half a franc to ‘one of the greasy peasants huddled under the wall in the sun’. And on leaving you may encounter ‘a row of ragged and livid contadini … some downright brigands of romance, or of reality, with matted locks and terribly sullen eyes’. In the city, numbers of respectable-looking but idle young men hang about, ‘leaning by the hour against the doorways, sucking the knobs of their canes, feeling their back hair and settling their shirt cuffs’ (pp. 475, 476). James was, for the time, happy to leave Rome, having suffered for the previous five months from ‘an incipient headache’ which had hampered his work. His last evening was spent with the Story family, though he confessed that for the sculptor himself, he now didn’t ‘care an inordinate number of straws’, finding him altogether ‘too much occupied with himself ’. On his northward journey towards Florence, 108



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James passed through Assisi, Perugia, Cortona and Arezzo, his impressions of Umbria and Tuscany recorded in ‘A Chain of Cities’. By the end of May he was back in Florence when he realized that the Renaissance city had been, for him at least, ‘murdered’ by Rome, ‘a hundred times more wondrous in retrospect’. In a late essay, ‘Other Roman Neighbourhoods’, which he added to the 1909 volume of Italian Hours, he looks back nostalgically to the Rome of that time (free of earlytwentieth-century motor-cars and the fashion for cycling) and to the emotions it inspired. For ‘the author of these now rather antique and artless accents’, ‘[t]he city of his first unpremeditated rapture shines to memory … in the manner of a lost paradise the rustle of whose gardens is still just audible enough in the air to make him wonder if some sudden turn, some recovered vista, mayn’t lead him back to the thing itself ’. The wistful moment passes, but he looks on the city emphatically as the place ‘loved in youth’, and he would, of course, return to it for some of the greatest scenes in the novels which lay ahead (CTWC, pp. 486, 487). After ten days in Florence, and avoiding the summer heat of southern Europe, James moved northwards via Milan to Glion, on Lake Geneva, once more. After stopping off at Bern, he left Switzerland and spent the summer at the prosperous German spa town of Bad Homburg, north of Frankfurt. He had been suffering again from constipation which may explain this choice of resort, though generally he felt that his health had improved. His plans remained unclear, though at least his writing was, for the time, gaining him financial independence. In a letter to his parents written on 4 May 1873, he sets out for them his finances in two columns, the first ‘Drawn by me since Dec. 18th’, the second ‘Paid and to be paid father on my acct.’; the account is now balanced in his favour.

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6 Rome and Paris: Roderick Hudson: An Experiment in Journalism (1873 –1876)

A Northern Summer James arrived at Bad Homburg on 11 July 1873 and it would be 14 months before he returned from Europe to Cambridge once more. During stays in France and Italy his thoughts and intentions were mixed: he felt drawn to Italy, especially Rome, to its people and culture, while experiencing homesickness, missing family and American food. Though moving towards a conviction that his future would be in Europe, he became bored by expatriate American society while also feeling closed off from either genuine Italian or French society. To live in a country as beautiful as Italy might also prove a distraction from his own work. It had its charms, but ultimately Northern Europe, he decided, would be less distracting, more conducive to work. Like most rich tourists of his day, James moved north for the summer to avoid the heat of southern Europe. His choice of the spa town of Bad Homburg, which was attracting an international clientele by the mid-nineteenth century, reflects his continuing health concerns. He undertook the water cure, and though after three weeks the results were unremarkable, he appreciated the setting, the fresh air and the music in the gaming rooms of the Kursaal. The ‘music of roulette and of clinking napoleons’ (CTWC, p. 635) was no longer to be heard in this social meeting place following the recent ban on gambling, an activity by which George Eliot had been morally repulsed on her 1872 visit. With its gilded interiors it was still a place to observe society, typically native Germans, often ‘heavy and fair-haired, deep

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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drinkers and strong thinkers’ (p. 640). On his walks in the surrounding countryside, James could imagine himself transported into a scene from a Grimm brothers’ fairy tale. He stayed at the Hôtel des Quatre Saisons and fellow guests for several weeks included the Tweedys, and later in the summer, family friends, Miss Bessie Ward and her mother. He also found a new companion, five years younger than himself in Henry John Wastell Coulson, ‘a very good young Englishman staying at this hotel also for his health – a graceful product of Harrow & Oxford & of heirship to Northumberland estates’. But for much of the time he was alone, his loneliness a theme of his letters during the ensuing year. By mid-August he had taken rooms in a house on KisseleffStrasse where he could be more comfortable in the cooler weather; he continued to ‘scribble’, producing essays and short stories, though he confessed to Howells that ‘I’ve not had a very productive summer – directly at least; but indirectly, yes; as I came here unwell & shall be leaving permanently better as I trust’. Yet earlier in the season he mentions that he is reading Turgenev in German, in preparation for what would be a substantial article for the North American Review, and that he has recently sent off a tale in three parts to the Galaxy magazine, ‘the best thing I’ve done’, probably ‘Madame de Mauves’. And he looked forward to the arrival of William in the autumn who for health reasons planned to take an extended break from his post at Harvard. Henry agreed that ‘a winter of European idleness and the European climate would do much for him’. As well as some books mostly by nineteenth-century French authors, he requested that his brother bring with him ‘a supply of Harrison’s lozenges’ (a long-established patent medicine) and some cakes of Davis’s toothsoap.

Italy and William’s Company James headed for Italy once more on 18 September, looking forward to his brother’s arrival and confiding to his mother that ‘[i]t will be a blessing to have a “superior mind” to converse with, after the general Roman rabble’. He guaranteed that William would receive ‘full instructions’ for his journey to Italy and the two would meet in Florence. Here James was established by mid-October, relieved at the absence of mosquitoes, though less happy, as he said, that because he had been ‘degenerating in health’ during the last six months, he was having to draw on his father’s account. In fact, he reassured James Sr that since the previous June he had earned some $600 (£124). William reached Florence on 29 October, after a swift journey via London, Paris and Turin, and was ‘very much charmed’ by the place. He explored the city while Henry gave his mornings to work; so long as the weather was fine, they would stay for another week or two before moving on to Rome together. 111



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They reached Rome by the end of November and Henry immediately took William to see the Forum and Colosseum by moonlight. The latter stayed at the Albergo di Russia while Henry returned to his former lodgings where the rent was reasonable; the two met and dined together daily. They were welcomed, too, by the Story and Terry families, though Henry avoided re-engaging with the busy social life of the previous winter. Soon, however, the brothers had to make a sudden retreat to Florence, following doctor’s advice when William suffered a mild attack of malaria; Henry also caught en route a ‘violent cold’. They took rooms in the Corona d’Italia hotel, centrally situated near the church of Santa Maria Novella and the Duomo, not far from the railway station. Henry regretted Rome, forced, as he saw it, ‘to substitute Florence the meagre, for Rome the magnificent’. The prime purpose of William’s European trip was to restore his health after a physical and mental breakdown, and so Henry’s letters to the family at this time provide a detailed account of his brother’s progress. Nor does he stint on reports of his own health condition, complaining of the air being too ‘relaxing’ or debilitating, of the Roman scirocco causing headache, or of ‘a disagreeable combination of indigestion & rheumatism’. Though the two brothers had thought they might travel home together, by the beginning of February William had left Italy for a brief stay in Germany before departing for America. Henry never shared his brother’s affection for Germany, and still feeling convalescent, he wasn’t ready to return to Cambridge. America might offer the opportunity to increase his income through book reviewing, but it is clear that he found the prospect at best uninspiring, describing his homeland to Grace Norton as ‘our great unendowed, unfurnished, unentertained & unentertaining continent, where we all sit sniffing, as it were, the very earth of our foundations’. Even life in Florence had its downside, as he explains in this same letter – perhaps reflecting a passing dark mood. Though the entertainments organized by the expatriate community offered some social diversion in these spring months, James felt that he was essentially a tourist and outsider, after almost a year in the country, conversing only with ‘washerwomen & waiters’. In March he engaged a young Roman for classes in Italian so that he could improve his fluency in ‘the divine tongue’, and, indeed, he would always continue to speak the language well. In April he spent a few days on the coast at Livorno but was shocked to find it ‘more American than America’. Returning to Florence he moved from his hotel and took an apartment on the Piazza Santa Maria Novella. But life there proved quite dull and on a ‘raw, rainy Sunday’, he skilfully catches the scene of the square below his window, ‘a wide glittering flood, with here and there two legs picking their steps beneath an umbrella’. Yet years later, with a degree of nostalgia, he could recall the ‘local glow’ of this period, and it is transformed into a ‘benediction, a great advantage’: he could hear still ‘the clatter of the horse pails, the discussions, in the intervals of repose under well-drawn hoods, of the unbuttoned 112



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cocchieri, sons of the most garrulous of races, and the occasional stillness as of the noonday desert’, as he laboured in his room (LC 2: 1042–1043). These were the circumstances in which work was begun on Roderick Hudson, the novel which started serialization in the Atlantic Monthly in January 1875. One of his fellow hotelguests in Florence had been a Mrs Mallet, providing perhaps the name for one of its central characters, Rowland Mallet. Even at this early stage with little written, but with growing experience of the literary marketplace, James shrewdly calculates the economics of any offer he might consider for his new novel. He had recently been productive, completing his ‘Florentine Notes’, the short stories ‘Eugene Pickering’ and ‘Professor Fargo’, as well as a number of book reviews. As for Roderick Hudson, he initially considered the possibility of its appearing in Scribner’s Monthly, whose editor, Josiah Gilbert Holland, had first approached him. But his prime loyalty was to W.D. Howells and the novel was eventually serialized in the Atlantic Monthly. Uncertain about terms, James based his calculations on the kind of fee he might expect for a short story, $100 (£21); his estimate for a complete novel varies between $1,000 and $1,200 (£206–£247), though he had to bear in mind potential loss of income from shorter pieces that he might otherwise have written. These are substantial sums when one considers that William’s salary for a year of teaching at Harvard was $600 – admittedly, in his eyes, a derisory amount. On the other hand, Henry confided to his parents that ‘[t]he writing and publishing a novel is almost as desirable a thing for me as the getting a large sum for it. The money=making  can come afterwards’. He soon laid the matter before Howells: whatever the sentimental ties, the ‘pure money question’ prevailed, and he named his terms as $1,200, to which Howells agreed. James planned to return to America in autumn 1874, though still he hesitated, toying with the idea of staying in London or Paris; but apart from location, what he really wanted, ‘& what would do me more good, is a régal of intelligent & suggestive society, especially male’, he told his mother. He might ‘delight’ in the prospect of such a treat, though the response he received from his sister and mother was more simple, as he readily acknowledged: ‘[b]oth your letter & Alice’s are a mine of advice: Alice’s that I must not turn up my nose at home things, & yours that I take a wife. I will bore a hole in my nose & keep it down with a string, & if you will provide the wife, the fortune, & the “inclination” I will take them all’. Both of his younger brothers were now married, but with this caricature of filial subjection he lightly evades the issue of marriage. Indeed a short story, ‘Crawford’s Consistency’, recently sketched out for him by his father and based on real, long-ago events in Albany, casts the most lurid light on the subject.1 The blameless young man, Crawford, embarks on a disastrous, abusive marriage to a woman who becomes a drunkard, while his former beautiful fiancée for whom he was considered too poor, is ravaged by small-pox and abandoned by her suitor, a rich planter from Alabama. Alcohol eventually kills Crawford’s wife while he is lamed by a fall she caused. 113



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Driven out by the sudden heat in early June, James left Florence earlier than intended, passing through Ravenna and Milan to Monte Generoso, high up on the Swiss–Italian border. He stayed there a week, and, after taking some of the Lombard family (Cambridge friends) under his wing, he moved on to Baden-Baden, a spa town on the edge of the Black Forest, where he spent several weeks before heading northwards. It attracted him partly because he thought he might call on one of its residents, Ivan Turgenev, whose writing he greatly admired; disappointingly, the Russian writer had already departed. But James’s mind was now on America, and, nostalgically invoking his youth, he requested that his mother order for his return ‘a goodly store of tomatoes, ice-cream, corn, melons, cranberries & other indigenous victuals’. More precise plans remained unresolved as he considered the possibility of wintering in New York, Boston or Philadelphia.

‘Madame de Mauves’ and Other Stories The short stories from these years cast an oblique but revealing light on their author’s response to European culture, his interior life and the accommodations and preferences he was developing. ‘Madame de Mauves’ appeared in the Galaxy, February–March 1873, a tale in which the young man Longmore falls in love with – but may never act upon his feelings for – the unhappy wife who is Madame de Mauves. Whatever the strength of his attachment, Longmore is incapable of transgression (a move in which he is encouraged by her erring husband), as if James cannot contemplate the indulgence of passion. In this Parisian setting idealistic American values are contrasted with the more cynical moral compromises routinely assumed in French life (a division further developed in The American (1877)). The hero Longmore chastely admires Mme. de Mauves, Euphemia (a name suggesting good reputation), a wealthy American girl, who has married the brother of a school friend and thus become part of a minor aristocratic but impoverished French family. She is quietly unhappy and Longmore learns that her older French husband, a roué, is betraying her. Most of the action occurs in Saint-Germain-en-Laye where the couple live, a salubrious location on the western outskirts of Paris.Yet, as if testing the prevailing narrative assumption which accords innocence and virtue predominantly to its American protagonists – she denies any simple national or cultural divisions. Considering her situation, she asserts that ‘“This is not America, perhaps, about me, but it’s quite as little France. France is out there, beyond the garden, in the town, in the forest; but here, close about me, in my room and … in my mind, it’s a nameless country of my own. It’s not her country … that makes a woman happy or unhappy”’ (CT 3: 146). Despite her endorsement of the individual’s survival strategies, her unhappiness is doubtless attributable to a kind of cultural innocence. Warning has 114



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been given by the elderly Madame de Mauves, world-weary grandmother of Euphemia’s schoolfriend, Mme. Clairin, that if the young wife has neither the simplicity of a Catholic ‘dévote’, nor cares to adopt a worldly opportunism, she must take life as ‘a game of skill’. But the older woman’s voice goes unheard: hers is simply a comprimario role and she speaks like ‘an old lady in a comedy’, like a minor character from an Alfred de Musset play (133, 134). The seemingly careless romance of a bohemian couple who set off from their inn to read poetry and paint by the river is watched and envied by the unhappy Longmore, but he is soon put right by the landlady. The young artist is not an ‘homme sérieux’ and the girl who has given all will soon be abandoned and replaced (189). Ironically, American girls who are allowed greater apparent ‘liberty’ than their chaperoned French counterparts can speak with more ‘candor’ and protect themselves more effectively, according to Madame de Mauve’s predatory husband – an observation more fully explored in ‘Daisy Miller’. Aware that the virtuous Madame de Mauves will never abandon her unhappy marriage, Longmore withdraws to America. Years later, he discovers that the unfaithful husband has returned to Euphemia and ‘fallen madly in love with her’ (208), but it is too late; he is rejected and in a final decline blows out his brains.The act replicates an earlier male suicide in the story when a husband, addicted to gambling, fears returning home to his wife (147). An unyielding female virtue may, it seems, prove as damaging as a man’s capacity for serial self-indulgence and it is worth recalling those cases of comparable male self-destruction in James’s own extended family which might have served as illustration. The history of Euphemia Cleve, the innocent, idealistic girl, neglected by her widowed mother, whose life is blighted by an unhappy marriage, anticipates a sequence of young American women whose wealth attracts unworthy European suitors. James would explore the moral and cultural complexities of this theme of national difference over the next three decades in some of his greatest fiction. ‘Professor Fargo’ is, by contrast, an entirely American tale written sometime in the spring of 1874, and it illustrates the author’s continuing efforts to reach a popular readership. Set principally in provincial New England and later in New York City, it begins in an anonymous town, some twenty-five miles from the nearest rail station. The narrator (a role with which James was experimenting) is a young salesman who happens upon a travelling show made up of the ‘professor’ of the title, ‘THE INFALLIBLE WAKING MEDIUM AND MAGICIAN, CLAIRVOYANT, PROPHET, AND SEER!’, accompanied by Colonel Gifford, ‘THE FAMOUS LIGHTNING CALCULATOR AND MATHEMATICAL REFORMER’ (CT 3: 261). Ill at ease in this rickety world of showmen, the Colonel performs impressive mathematical calculations with his deaf, mute daughter, while the Professor, expert in ‘spiritual magnetism’, is merely a quack, as the sceptical narrator points out. After touring they end up in New York, playing to 115



  Rome and Paris: Roderick Hudson: An Experiment in Journalism 

diminishing audiences and the story ends when the young girl runs away with the Professor leaving her confused father to be cared for in an asylum. It is a minor piece, but, aside from its treatment of the medium and the spirit world, a subject which would seriously occupy William James in the future, the tale anticipates in a sense a later, all-American work which deals with public performance and the persuasive powers of the orator, The Bostonians. In that novel Selah Tarrant, the mesmerist father of the heroine Verena, belongs to the seedy world of the Professor who similarly exploits public gullibility in depressingly shabby venues. ‘You could have fancied him’, quips the tale’s narrator, ‘in spangled fleshings, looking down the lion’s mouth, or cracking the ring-master’s whip at the circus’ (CT 3: 261).2 A more important tale from these years which, with ‘Madame de Mauves’, James included in his Passionate Pilgrim collection, is ‘Eugene Pickering’ (first published in the Atlantic Monthly, October–November 1874). Its donnée – a father having control over a son’s life in an arranged marriage with a distant princess-like girl, has something of the fairy tale, though there may well be echoes of parental conversations in James’s own earlier life concerning the kind of education best suited to children’s needs. The primary setting of Bad Homburg, the elegant Kursaal, and its fine concerts reflect James’s more recent travels, and the opening in which the narrator observes an interchange between a young man and a mysterious, exotic older woman, anticipates by just a few years the early scene in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, in which the hero watches Gwendolen Harleth lose at roulette in the fictitious German town of Leubronn. It turns out that Eugene Pickering had been the narrator’s schoolfriend long ago, but, in delicate health and in order to avoid ‘learning bad manners’ he had been withdrawn from school by his dominant father and educated at home (CT 3: 305); Pickering Sr, recalling for us James Sr, ‘thought the usual American laissez aller in education was a very vulgar practice’ (308). Though the liberated Eugene now wants to become a part of the world, he has been told by his dying father that his marriage has been arranged: he’s promised to the daughter of his father’s old friend, who lives in the provincial town of Smyrna. As he lamely admits, ‘“It will remind you of an old-fashioned romance”’ (312). Eugene carries a letter, recently received from Smyrna and left unopened, which he fears summons him to marriage and which he consigns for the time to the narrator’s keeping. The fascinating German woman who had drawn Eugene to her side at the gaming table is Madame Anastasia Blumenthal, a role which allows James to introduce a literary strand as elaborate as her name. The narrator speculates that she was perhaps ‘a friend of poets, a correspondent of philosophers, a muse, a priestess of aesthetics’ (301) and the tragedy she has written, Cleopatra, full of long speeches and soliloquies for the heroine, is considered ‘decidedly passionate’ by the narrator (302). This, it may be recalled, is the name of the play James attributed to William James’s Bonn landlady, recalled in Notes of a Son and Brother, and so in these allusions 116



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he is perhaps returning to his youth and re-working his impressions of German life and culture. Madame Blumenthal’s other works indicate that she is prepared to challenge contemporary orthodoxies; for example, a novel outdoes George Sand in its views on matrimony, and, along with her promotion of the paramount rights of romantic love, Blumenthal seems to share Sand’s capacity for literary survival, especially insofar as it may check male dominance. Insulted by comments on her motives as a woman writer from an admirer,‘a major in the Prussian artillery’, she casts her newly finished novel, ‘Clorinda’, into the fire and sweeps out of the room (328); the major desperately manages to rescue most of the manuscript, but her door remains closed to him. Some time later, however, ‘Sophronia’, a romance, appears at the bookseller’s. It is a renamed, revived version of the original which she has rescued; the offending admirer is consigned to history meantime, and good sense has replaced melodramatic gesture. Among her other works is an account of ‘the conversion of Lola Montez’ – a famous dancer and performer of the day whose scandalous offstage career had included liaisons with a number of foreign princes. She had been one of the theatrical stars seen by James as a ‘small boy’ in New York City in the 1850s. Finally Madame Blumenthal casts the smitten Eugene aside; it has all been for her a form of literary experiment and they have now reached ‘dénouement’:‘“We’ll close the book”’, she ruthlessly informs him (344). He is also unexpectedly freed from his Smyrna commitment. The young woman concerned considers the parental arrangement ‘horrible’ and will make her own choice. The ending is gently comic. Having decided in any case to visit Smyrna, Eugene finds the girl (against expectations) to be ‘a lovely creature’ (347, 350). And so James lightly raises (and sets aside) the matter of marriage, its desirability if not obligatoriness, and the nature of parental expectations. The spa town of Baden-Baden, with its glittering social life, gambling opportunities, fine music, and nearby country excursions, would reappear in James’s fiction, providing an elegant setting for some of the earlier scenes, for instance, in the minor novel, Confidence, published in 1879. Continuing northwards through Holland and Belgium, the young man passed through landscapes already familiar from paintings he had seen. He gave himself time to enjoy some of the region’s artworks, admiring, like many, the Ghent altarpiece, the ‘Adoration of the Lamb’, by the brothers Hubert and Jan Van Eyck, though he was less enthusiastic at this point about the Flemish Rubens, ‘the great painter of rosy brawn’ CTWC, p. 673).

Return to America James left Liverpool on 9 September 1874 and was soon established in Cambridge once again. Though struck by ‘the glory of an American autumn’, he nevertheless resolved to keep ‘a firm hold of the old world in some way or other’. Aside from 117



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a considerable number of reviews and notices, principally for the Nation, he continued work on Roderick Hudson. The beginning of the following year also saw the appearance of the short story selection, A Passionate Pilgrim; later, at the end of April, Transatlantic Sketches, a collection of his recent (principally Italian) travel pieces, was published in Boston. Sometime, at the turn of the year, James moved down to New York City, as he had planned, to 111 East 25th Street. He now found it ‘a rattling big luxurious place’, though he confessed to Lizzie Boott who was then living with her father in Cambridge, that he was leading ‘the quietest & most humdrum of lives’. In the early spring Lizzie visited the city and the two had dinner at the famous Delmonico’s, a restaurant which he says he went on to frequent every Sunday. His many reviews from this time cover a variety of subjects – theatre and art, history, letters, novels, biographies, and memoirs. He was unimpressed by current American theatrical performances (at least in Boston), in his memoirs recalling the players of the Boston Museum Theatre, for instance, as ‘raggedly itinerant’, and the ‘theatric air’ as ‘provincial’, ‘rustic’ and redolent of ‘barbarism’ (NSB, p. 277). His experience of French theatre had introduced him to such a level of performance that, as Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima contends, Anglo-Saxon standards appeared as ‘at the best but a confident form of horseplay’.3 James was dismissive about the Boston Museum’s 1874 production of Sheridan’s School for Scandal, but he is also unusually critical of the play itself. Conceding that it ‘must have been in its day prodigiously clever’, he concludes that the ‘types are coarsely depicted and the morality is all vulgar morality’. He finds fault, too, with American audiences who are ‘not demonstrative’ and whose impressions are ‘not penetrating’, implying that they get what they deserve (CWHJD, pp. 35, 36, 33). The public’s appreciation of art is similarly undiscriminating in James’s eyes as he complains of the respectfully submissive atmosphere of the room in which a group of paintings of variable quality belonging to the Duke of Montpensier is exhibited at the Boston Athenaeum. He is forced to concede that ‘we are a singularly good-natured people’ who, in matters of art, ‘take what is given us’, conditioned to ‘being treated as children and simple persons’ (CWHJA, p. 88). There is little doubt that, after extended exposure to European culture, he now felt increasingly ill-at-ease in American society. His literary reviews of the time clearly show that James’s conception of the aesthetics of fiction is becoming increasingly well-defined. He regards Victor Hugo’s final novel, Quatrevingt-treize, or Ninety-three, set principally in the Vendée region of France during the Revolution, as illustrating both ‘the sublime and the ridiculous’. He owns his own taste to be ‘conservative’ in literary matters, confessing ‘a relish for brevity, for conciseness, for elegance, for perfection of form’. Thus the romantic style and loose structure of Hugo’s narrative consign it to the past. The fiction of Turgenev, on the other hand, for all its gratuitous pessimism, speaks to 118



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James more closely as a model for his own writing: ‘“[i]t is life itself,” we murmur as we read, “and not this or that or the other story-teller’s more or less clever ‘arrangement’ of life”’. And, in even further accord with his own convictions, ‘[e] verything, with him, takes the dramatic form’. Enthusiastic about this first of his essays on Turgenev, James was shocked when T.S. Perry required a re-write before publishing it in the North American Review where he had become an assistant editor. James had been reading Turgenev for twenty-odd years, and the substantial essay which finally appeared in 1874, though nominally covering German translations of Spring Torrents and A Village Lear, ranges freely and knowledgeably across Turgenev’s œuvre (LC 2: 976, 977). Some of the questions occupying James during his New York stay are translated into the short story ‘Benvolio’ (1875), less a narrative driven by events than a sequence of alternatives. It opens with ‘Once upon a time’, but the piece is closer to allegory than to fairy tale.4 The hero Benvolio, ‘as pretty a fellow as any fairy prince’ whose name (in contrast with Malvolio’s) might be translated as ‘I wish you well’, leads a double life, appearing in public as a man of fashion, but in private becoming a shabby scholar (CT 3: 351). The two rooms inhabited by this hero of ‘poetic temperament’ reflect this division – one richly furnished and overlooking a busy square, while in the rear room with its view of a nearby tranquil garden, he is inspired to write his poetry. He is devoted to a rich, widowed Countess, to whom he persistently fails to declare himself: indeed, ‘she failed to satisfy him’ (353, 361). He becomes fascinated instead by a mysterious girl who appears in the garden reading a book which turns out to be his own volume of poetry (a kind of discovery more fully treated in a later tale, ‘The Middle Years’). She cares for her aged, blind professor father, and Benvolio names her in his diary ‘Scholastica’. The other protagonists remain nameless and Benvolio veers between the two women, until, finally, he confesses to the Countess that he cares for her ‘only by contrast’. Unsurprisingly their relationship ends and the story itself concludes in uncertainty. The fairy-tale option in which Benvolio and Scholastica might have married is also dismissed since such domesticity might have resulted in his poetry becoming ‘dismally dull’ (401). The tale, a kind of experiment in abstractions, an imitation of a Hawthorne ‘romance’, is most interestingly read as a projection of James’s dilemmas, or at least uncertainties concerning his own life choices. Its setting (as well as its protagonists) remains unspecific and if we are to interpret Benvolio as some glamorized projection of James himself, then the two women might embody the two facets of his professional life – the creative (the Countess puts on a wonderfully successful play he has written – wishful thinking perhaps) and the critical or scholarly assignments which provide much of James’s income. They might represent, too, the varied attractions of female sensibility which for him never advanced beyond conversation into physical expression. Benvolio has an exciting trip to Italy with the Countess, 119



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while the learned Scholastica, with her ‘homely, shrinking, subtle prettiness’ seems to personify the unthreatening virtues of New England (376). These were days when James, at the age of 32, was considering his future and the tale’s failure to reach resolution, its continuing inclusion of contrasting options and avoidance of commitment, suggests his own uncertain sense of where that future lay, even his hope for some accommodating fairy-tale conclusion. In fact, in the spring of 1875, he made another move in New York, though only to 36 Irving Place, not far from Union Square Park and the haunts of his childhood. In the summer he was elected to the Century Association, one of his backers being Arthur Sedgwick, now working for the Nation; this was a private men’s club, with a mix of literary and business interests, its spaces adorned with a fine collection of paintings. But life in New York was proving expensive and by mid-July James was back in Cambridge, pursuing a new plan, a journalistic enterprise, which would enable him to return once more to Europe. He had recently met John Hay, currently an editorial writer at the New-York Tribune (formerly secretary to Abraham Lincoln and later a diplomat) and, announcing his intention of spending the coming winter in Paris, presented himself as a prospective correspondent on a range of topics for the newspaper: ‘“social” matters, so called, manners, habits, people &c, books, pictures, the theatre, & those things which come up in talk about rural excursions & dips into the provinces’. Such letters, he promised ‘would always have more or less the literary turn’. A deal was quickly struck. The paper’s editor,Whitelaw Reid, agreed an ‘offer of $20. gold’ per letter and James would begin them at the end of October. He had hoped for more but acquiesced in his typically charming way: ‘[i]t is a smaller sum than I should myself have proposed, but being, as you say, good newspaper payment, I summon philosophy to my aid’ (228). For the New-York Tribune the arrangement held certain advantages. James’s name was established among serious readers and the paper could also save a little money since the current contributor, Arsène Houssaye (with whose son James had been acquainted at school in Paris) was receiving $30 per letter, each of which had then to be translated. John Hay assured his editor that the new incumbent ‘will write better letters than anybody – you know his wonderful style and keen observation of life and character’.5 It seemed an excellent arrangement on both sides.

Roderick Hudson In anticipation of his imminent departure for Europe, James had succeeded in persuading Houghton and Co. to let him have an advance on the four instalments of Roderick Hudson still to appear. With the Atlantic’s co-operation he also completed his checking of the serial’s proofs before he left on 17 October. James later described 120



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the novel, worked on both in Europe and America, as his ‘first attempt at a novel, a long fiction with a “complicated” subject’. In its dramatization of artistic failure Roderick Hudson develops a broad theme already treated in the short story, ‘The Madonna of the Future’, one of several pieces of fiction in which, as he says, he had ‘but hugged the shore … bumping about to acquire skill, in the shallow waters and sandy coves … master as yet of no vessel constructed to carry a sail’ (LC 2: 1040). The gift of genius carries dangers in this fuller exploration of artistic life, principally in two areas: how to remain sufficiently resilient to respond to the demands of the imagination, and how to combine those demands with the more mundane needs of simple domestic life. Hudson, the talented young sculptor, frustrated by his day-job training as a lawyer for which he shows no aptitude, eagerly leaves his provincial Massachusetts home when taken up by Rowland Mallet, a rich benefactor who, recognizing his promise, offers to take him to Rome where he may study from ‘the antique’.The idea of such a transformative gesture – a young man invested in and offered unthinkable opportunities – fascinated James until late in life, exemplified by his last unfinished novel, The Ivory Tower. Having arrived in Rome, the city which had so recently excited the young James, Roderick fulfils his earlier promise, yet, after some difficult months, his disintegration begins: he goes ‘to the devil’ and confesses,‘“I am damned”’ (3: 241). No one can help him. Aside from his artistic failure, Roderick’s fall is moral, and he has abandoned his original commitment to the loving New England girl, Mary Garland, to pursue the impossibly beautiful Christina Light, another expatriate, who has been groomed by her mother for a glittering marriage.When she goes on to marry an Italian prince, Roderick feels betrayed and, in an Alpine thunderstorm, falls to his death, presumably self-inflicted. His body is found and mourned over by faithful Rowland whose love for Mary will, despite the removal of this final obstacle, never be fulfilled. In the opening New England scenes Roderick’s aspirations are simple and, on a walk with Rowland, he asserts his wish to become ‘“the typical, original, national American artist”’ (1: 51). The beauty of the late-summer setting, with views of Mount Holyoke and the winding Connecticut River – ‘an American day, an American landscape, an American atmosphere’ (1: 50) – recalls the celebrated painting, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, by Thomas Cole, whose work and that of his Hudson River School followers had captured the sublimities and grandeur of the American landscape. For Roderick, as for James himself, however, the future lay not in the developing New World but in the more complex, historic traditions of Europe. In his 1907 Preface James confesses that in attempting to ‘do’ Northampton, Massachusetts, the setting for the early scenes, he was working, though ‘in feebler fashion’, ‘in the great shadow of Balzac’, much admired, whose Comédie Humaine sequence provides an almost encyclopaedic record of provincial French life of the mid-nineteenth century (LC 2: 1044).Though James 121



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undoubtedly falls short, the opening sequence of his novel touches deftly on some of the defining and traumatic aspects of recent American history. Roderick’s sculptures, for instance, include a bust of his brother, killed ‘in some Western battle’ of the Civil War, as well as ‘a colossal head of a negro, tossed back, defiant, with distended nostrils’ (1: 44, 56). A small statuette, titled ‘Thirst’, which so impresses Rowland Mallet, parallels the young sculptor’s aspiring ambition, hinting at a timeless need which cannot be met on home soil. The inspiration for this figure who ‘might have been some beautiful youth of ancient fable’, is classical. He represents ‘youth … innocence … health … strength … curiosity’, and holds to his thirsty lips a gourd which is ‘knowledge, pleasure, experience’ (1: 41–42). Alongside this complex artefact, Roderick is himself a ‘fair slim youth’, though his ‘want of breadth’ and ‘an air of insufficient physical substance’ (1: 36) foreshadow his later fragility. He aspires to create works of ‘perfect beauty’, and, anticipating the aims of a real-life sculptor, Hendrik Christian Andersen, with whom James would become intimate later in life, means ‘“to go in for big things”’ (1: 178). Roderick’s dapper appearance, a ‘bright red cravat’, the ‘yellow kid gloves’, the ‘silver-tipped walking-stick’ and ‘slouched sombrero’ might owe something to recollections of James’s artist friend, John La Farge, whom he had accompanied on sketching trips (1: 37). In this pre-European phase, Rowland briefly wonders whether, in the ‘lucid air of the American night’ there might not be sufficient artistic sustenance for the young man: perhaps ‘here was beauty too – beauty sufficient for an artist not to starve upon it’ (1: 104). Yet the thought is quickly dismissed as Roderick passes by in the darkness, unaware of his presence, already committed to Europe, singing to himself some lines from Tennyson’s The Princess, ‘The splendour falls on castle walls’. Europe – more specifically Rome – turns out to be a dangerous place with a sinister classical history, illustrated in that moment when Roderick sets off recklessly to pick for Christina Light a blue flower which grows high up on the walls of the Coliseum, ‘a very fair imitation of the mighty excrescences in the face of an Alpine cliff ’ (2: 129), a site, incidentally, only partly excavated by the early 1870s. Rowland, happening upon the couple by chance, has to step out (once more) from obscurity to intervene, and the blue flower, a symbol of happiness in Romantic literature, remains unpicked.6 Happiness for the hero may therefore entail (as for some knight errant) danger and potential death. The moment is foreshadowed when, on their family picnic in New England, Rowland successfully picks ‘a little blue-streaked flower’ to present to Mary Garland. Aside from the sentimental significance of the moment, she reveals her grounded, intelligent nature by successfully identifying it (1: 119).When she and Roderick’s mother arrive in Rome in an attempt to save Hudson, she is equally diligent, earnestly studying the city’s ancient history. Yet, with her stoical New England sensibility, Mary is challenged by Italy’s beauty, finding in the sensuous pleasures it offers ‘“something sinful!”’ (3: 155). 122



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Roderick has roots in the American south; born in Virginia, he has, by contrast, no such qualms in pursuing the beautiful. At one point he appears in his Roman apartment as a doomed aesthete, anticipating the decadent hero of Huysmans’ À rebours. Lying on a divan in a room scattered with ‘strongly odorous flowers’, he wears a white dressing gown while continually smelling ‘a large white rose’ (3: 59–60). Genius, it seems, is a dangerous gift, sitting uneasily within accepted social conventions. The pursuit of art and mundane life are rarely compatible and the novel’s other artists illustrate the compromises or dangers that may arise. We are told, for instance, of a pupil of the painter Overbeck, Schaafgans (in German, sheepgoose – James took care over names), who after an unworldly devotion to his art, married a Roman model, but, ruined by his abusive wife, was reduced to painting views of Vesuvius on small boxes. Roderick’s fellow artists in Rome, less touched by genius, are correspondingly less endangered. Sam Singleton executes modest water colours, Miss Augusta Blanchard specializes in flowers, while the worldly Gloriani produces ‘florid and meretricious’ statues which sell well (1: 164). It is he who foresees from the beginning that Roderick will not be able to ‘keep it up’ (1: 182). The circumstances of Roderick’s first meeting with Christina Light are unsettling. He has been resting in the gardens of the Villa Ludovisi with his companion Rowland near to the statue of Juno; ‘a colossal mask … with blank eyes’ (1: 129), its dangerous power has already exercised a baneful influence on human life in ‘The Last of the Valerii’. Christina and her entourage pass by and Roderick is captivated; he now sees what his next subject might be, though his incorporation of her living features into his sketch of the Juno statue does not bode well. The woman’s family history continues to warn of art’s uneasy relations with domestic life. Her American grandfather had been an unsuccessful painter, her grandmother an English actress who had beaten him. Christina’s striking beauty is exploited as a commodity and when her father is revealed to be the downtrodden little Cavaliere who accompanies the women, appalled at her illegitimacy, she is driven to accept the advantageous marriage to a prince which has always been her mother’s aim. Though a young woman ‘much to be pitied’ (2: 39), she may, nevertheless, prove lethal to men. Growing impatient while modelling for a bust by Roderick,‘with her shoulders bare’, she ‘unloosed the great coil of her tresses and let them fall over her shoulders’. In an Orientalist allusion merging the erotic with the commercial, her mother’s smile appears to Rowland as that ‘of an old slave-merchant calling attention to the “points” of a Circassian beauty’ (2: 11, 12). Admiring the finished sculpture, Gloriani concludes that she would make ‘“a magnificent Herodias”’, Herod’s wife, who engineered the death of John the Baptist (2: 29). Whatever Christina’s role in Roderick’s destruction, there can be little doubt (at least in Mrs Hudson’s eyes) that Rowland has also been instrumental. When the latter laments to his cousin Cecilia at the beginning of the novel that he is ‘a man 123



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of genius, half-finished … The genius has been left out’, she simply observes that this is ‘“an immense number of words … to say you want to fall in love”’ (1: 12). By the next chapter he has been introduced to Roderick Hudson, and when he later speaks to a shocked Mrs Hudson about his plan to fund her son’s trip to Europe, he represents himself in an uncomfortable scene almost as if he were a marriage suitor. The atmosphere is cool: ‘No one evidently was used to offering hollow welcomes or telling polite fibs’ (1: 79). And Mary later tells Rowland that she had been reminded of a fairy tale – ‘“Your coming here all unknown, so rich and so polite, and carrying off my cousin in a golden cloud”’ (1: 100). In a by now familiar Jamesian triangulation Rowland’s love for Mary is defined by her engagement to Roderick, and the latter’s death simply confirms – even sanctifies – her unavailability. James felt, in retrospect, that he had not sufficiently suggested ‘the impression made by Mary Garland. The ground has not been laid for it, and when that is the case one builds all vainly in the air’ (LC 2: 1051). Whatever her limitations as the object of male attention, Rowland’s own romantic aspirations remain safely circumscribed, and indeed his imaginative engagement, his involvement with Roderick, frequently casts him in a feminized role. As the principal observer, he himself, as James indicates, becomes the ‘centre of interest’: ‘the drama is the very drama of that consciousness – which I had of course to make sufficiently acute in order to enable it, like a set and lighted scene, to hold the play’ (1050). The novelist would continue to explore the possibilities of such a narrative point of view. When Roderick complained of the repressive atmosphere of his New England home, Rowland ‘had an instinctive vision of how this beautiful youth must be loved by his female relatives’ (1: 63). The realization, and its homoerotic associations, is further reinforced when Rowland, observes his companion after their arrival in Europe: ‘Surely youth and genius hand in hand were the most beautiful sight in the world’ (1: 138–139). During their stay in Venice the two take a gondola-trip, united in a moment which moves beyond the aesthetic, ‘watching a brown-breasted gondolier making superb muscular movements, in high relief, against the sky of the Adriatic’ (1: 140). Even James’s old friend, Grace Norton, an early reviewer of the novel, found this kind of intimacy between Roderick and Rowland difficult, commenting that ‘Americans … do not twist themselves into such odd arrangements as these’ (CR, p. 14). The novel essentially predates the idea of homosexual identity which emerged through medical discourse towards the end of the nineteenth century and so a degree of historical sensitivity should inform what we might read as same-sex desire. In fact, James normalizes male–male relations within a range of heterosexual options and Rowland’s possession of Roderick can be interpreted as a form of contractual investment, professional and artistic. Such is the novel’s representation of wealth and power that Rowland might be considered finally in his patient ‘waiting’ for Roderick as less lovelorn than practical. 124



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In its locations, its record of an identifiably American response to the social and cultural complexity of Europe, the novel manifestly explores James’s own European experiences, whilst also examining art’s relations with patronage and commerce and, indeed, social proprieties. Rowland’s New England self-restraint acts as a mediating rather than merely judgmental presence, though even he is drawn into one of the occasional scenes of melodrama. He has just one moment of danger when, in an episode reminiscent of Hawthorne, he is tempted to let Roderick ‘fizzle out’ and claim Mary for himself; but, as he confesses to a monk in Fiesole, he rejects this devil. The novel’s overriding premise, however, the rise and fall of artistic genius, proves difficult to sustain. James himself sees the weakness as principally a matter of pace in the unravelling of Roderick’s life: ‘at the rate at which he falls to pieces, he seems to place himself beyond our understanding and our sympathy’, resulting in ‘a certain factitious compactness’ (LC 2: 1047, 1049). But despite some finely imagined scenes, the plot also lacks a degree of inevitability; too often, perhaps, Christina Light and her retinue happen to re-appear to complicate Roderick’s already confused life. The reviewers of the day gave Roderick Hudson a polite reception. The Atlantic Monthly regarded Christina Light as the ‘main triumph’ of the work, while the Academy and the North American Review (where the reviewer was James’s friend Sarah Wister) had less sympathy for the novel’s egotistical hero (CH, p. 36, CR, pp. 12–13, CH, p. 40). The New York Herald, on the other hand, summed up Roderick Hudson as ‘a type of genius exaggerated, let us hope, but not impossible in a milder form’ (CR, p. 9). The Appletons’ Journal reviewer likened the plot to a puppet-show, yet otherwise conceded that it ‘might be accepted without hesitation as the longexpected “great American novel”’ (p. 9) – indicating something of James’s increasing standing in literary circles. When the revised version of the novel was published in Britain in 1879 the Graphic expressed some disappointment, complaining that ‘Mr. James … somewhat defeats himself by over-subtlety’7, though the Pall Mall Gazette review, by contrast, appreciates, in ‘these days of loose writing the value of work like this, equally remarkable for certainty of touch and justness of apprehension’.8

Paris: Journalism: New Friendships After his Atlantic crossing in October 1875, James immediately caught the afternoon train from Liverpool to London and by ten in the evening was sitting down to ‘cold roast beef, bread & cheese & ale in this cosy corner of Britain’, Story’s Hotel, just off Piccadilly. Delighted to be back in Europe, he proclaimed to his family, ‘I take possession of the old world – I inhale it – I appropriate it!’. He could ill afford to breathe in too deeply, however, as the city was ‘the same old big black London … half delicious, half dismal’, the winter air densely polluted. He complained to 125



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his family back in Cambridge, that ‘[a]s you sit in your room you seem to taste the very coal in the great clumsy fires, & when you open your windows for fresh air you admit upon your book, your linen and your skin a rain of sootflakes. I am impatient for glittering Paris’. His stay was brief – little more than a week – though James managed to catch up with the kindly Leslie Stephen once again, visited Henry Coulson whom he had met at Bad Homburg, now married, and to see Henry Irving in Macbeth at the Lyceum Theatre – not one of his better performances, as James pointed out in his review for the Nation (CWHJD, pp. 105–108). On 10 November he left London to take up residence in Paris and to assume his journalistic duties for the New-York Tribune, the newspaper which had published his father’s accounts of Europe in the 1850s. He would also continue with his own fiction. Although his long-term plans were fluid, it is clear that this stay would be extended, wherever he might be located in Europe. For the time he settled in the city centre at 29 rue de Luxembourg (now rue Cambon – in the 1st arrondissement) which suited him well, with ‘the advantage of being both central & noiseless … a snug little troisième with the eastern sun, two bedrooms, a parlor, an antichambre & a kitchen. Furniture clean & pretty, house irreproachable, & a gem of a portier, who waits upon me’. When, years later he recalled the writing of his next novel, The American, set in Paris, he could hear still the offstage sounds of the ‘light Parisian click of the small cab-horse on the clear asphalt’ and the ‘martial clatter’ of the troop of cuirassiers entering their barracks opposite, ‘the hard music of whose hoofs so directly and thrillingly appealed’ (LC 2: 1058–1059). As in Rome, there were plentiful opportunities to engage with an expatriate American community, though this did not form part of James’s plan. There were some exceptions. He met up with Charles Peirce, the brilliant, eccentric philosopher and scientist who was a friend of William’s and familiar from Cambridge. His wife had left him the previous year and he was leading in Paris ‘a life of insupportable loneliness & sterility – but of much material luxury’. He was quick to call on Henry and they dined together as frequently as twice a week. James was on more intimate terms with Frank Boott and his daughter Lizzie, but the two arrived in Paris only later in the year and Lizzie spent some months studying with the great academic painter, Thomas Couture, at Villiers-le-Bel, just north of the capital. In January 1876, James was entertained to dinner by the Reubells which initiated a friendship with the daughter of the family, Henrietta, whose father was French and mother American; the two maintained a correspondence until Henry’s death. In a letter to William, he commented that Henrietta was ‘27 or 28 years old & extremely ugly, but with something very frank, intelligent & agreeable about her’. Despite these mixed comments, she joins one of a number of enduring female friends whose company James enjoyed and she may well have inspired his portrait of the bohemian Miss Barrace in The Ambassadors. At her home at 42 avenue Gabriel, she entertained many of the great artists and writers of the day, and her 126



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portrait, painted by Sargent in 1884–1885, can now be seen in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Perhaps the most significant event for James himself was his meeting with Ivan Turgenev, whose fiction he much admired. The Russian, tall, melancholy-eyed and white-bearded, proved modest and very affectionate. James made the first approach by letter soon after his arrival and, on this occasion, a meeting with a literary hero did not disappoint: he thought the older man ‘a magnificent creature, & much handsomer than his portraits. I sat & talked with him for two hours upon a great variety of topics. We got on very well; I think he liked me, & that if opportunity served we might become intimate’. The two did become close and met frequently in Turgenev’s ‘little green salon’ or ‘to breakfast au cabaret’ (LC 2: 1018, 1019). The conversation, conducted principally in French (Turgenev’s being ‘that of the salons of the eighteenth century’),9 was predominantly literary, and years later James recalled how the preparation for a novel would begin for Turgenev with a ‘fictive picture’. Though ‘situations’ and ‘complications’ would later arise, ‘[i]t began for him almost always with the vision of some person or persons, who hovered before him … interesting him and appealing to him, just as they were and by what they were’ (LC 2: 1072). This recollection occurs in the Preface to The Portrait of a Lady and the practice must have struck James, for he wrote to Howells in October 1876 of his own ‘vision of some person’ and his intention to write about ‘an Americana’ who ‘triumphs over the insolent foreigner’. The person will, of course, be the novel’s heroine, Isabel Archer, conceived at this time when James was captivated by Turgenev, mentioned, incidentally, in this letter’s next sentence. The Russian novelist’s domestic arrangements were unconventional: since 1847 he had been living in a ménage à trois with the celebrated mezzo-soprano and composer Pauline Viardot and her husband. She was reaching the end of a major international career and James describes her harshly as ‘a most fascinating & interesting woman, as ugly as eyes in the sides of her head & an interminable upper lip can make her, & yet also very handsome or, at least, in the French sense, très-belle’.With his musical limitations (he confessed to Sir George Henschel some years later that he was ‘unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical, unmanageable’), James probably failed to appreciate Mme. Viardot’s standing. Writing to his father, he characterized Turgenev as ‘the slave of Mme Viardot.… She, her husband & her children (of one of whom T. is supposed to be papa,) keep him as a sort of vache à lait’. Whatever the situation (and it seems he often had to be home by 9 p.m. and, when there, was frequently pressed to play charades), the novelist showed no sign of wishing to escape such servitude.Whether or not he was a ‘cash cow’ as James suggests, remains unclear, but he was pleased when Turgenev wrote him a note at the end of January 1876 telling him that he and Mme. Viardot were enjoying reading Roderick Hudson together. 127



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It was Turgenev who introduced James to one of his most intimate friends, Gustave Flaubert, who in turn invited him to his Parisian apartment on the rue du faubourg Saint-Honoré where the Frenchman held his literary salons. Not long before, the younger man had been critical of Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine, seeing it as symptomatic of the malaise of contemporary French writing, which, in pursuit of the grotesque, had been left ‘morally stranded and helpless’ (LC 2: 294). Yet, whatever his former reservations about Flaubert’s work, James was won over by the man in person: ‘I took a mighty fancy to F. as well; he is not at all what his books lead one to expect. “C’est un naïf,” as Tourgenieff says – a great, stout, handsome simple, kindly, elderly fellow, rather embarrassed at having a stranger presented to him’. On Sunday afternoons James conversed with Edmond de Goncourt, the publisher, Georges Charpentier, Émile Zola, Alphonse Daudet and Gautier’s son-in-law, Catulle Mendès, described by the young Guy de Maupassant, also present, as having the ‘face of a sensual and seductive Christ’.10 Despite his cosmopolitan past, James was doubtless shocked at some of the attitudes and assumptions which emerged during these meetings, and he must also have been aware of the casualness of their unconventional personal lives. He also felt divided from them as an artist: ‘[t]hey are a queer lot, & intellectually very remote from my own sympathies. They are extremely narrow & it makes me rather scorn them that not a mother’s son of them can read English’. Nevertheless, he warmed to Flaubert in person and reported to his father the experience of hearing the Frenchman reciting some of the sonnets of his ‘intimate friend’ Gautier, so that they seemed ‘the most beautiful things in the world’. When he met the philosopher and biblical scholar, Ernest Renan, James had already admired his work in the letters he was providing for the New-York Tribune, and later he would praise the Frenchman’s volume of memoirs, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, when it appeared in 1883. Renan’s style was profuse and elegant, but on first acquaintance James recalled ‘a silent crash’ when he was struck by the man’s ugliness, in such contrast to his writing.11 At the time he observed to William James that ‘[h]is conversation … has a perfume of the highest intelligence .… bien qu’il soit d’une laideur vraiment repoussante’. He may have been repulsively ugly, but that notion of sweet fragrance, perhaps redolent of ecclesiastical incense, is repeated in his appraisal of Dialogues et fragments philosophiques for the New-York Tribune: ‘[t]he charm of M. Renan’s style is hard to define; it is ethereal as perfume’ (LC 2: 633). James was also welcomed to the home of the exiled Nikolai Turgenev (the novelist’s cousin) and his wife Klara who lived in the fashionable Faubourg SaintGermain. Through the Turgenevs, James met Paul Zhukovsky in early April 1876, and he writes home enthusiastically about this new acquaintance with whom he soon swore ‘eternal friendship’. Zhukovsky’s Russian–German background was colourful: he was the son of poet and court tutor,Vasily Zhukovsky, who, aged 58, 128



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had married a German girl of 18, Elizabeth Reitern. A painter, he had spent many years in Italy, and though James was not overly impressed by his work, he reported to William James that he noticed ‘something very sweet & distingué about him. He was brought up at court as an orphan by the Empress (wife of Nicholas,) his father having been tutor of the present Emperor; so you see that I don’t love beneath my station’. Zhukovsky was exhibiting two paintings in the Paris Salon for this year, but James concluded that he ‘will never be any thing but a rather curious & delicate dilettante’. Zhukovsky is now chiefly remembered for having created the set and costume designs for Richard Wagner’s final opera, Parsifal, which premiered at Bayreuth in 1882, and he became intimate with the Wagner family during the composer’s last years. James, with his limited musical sensibility, records an especially long evening in Paris, ‘– from 9 to 2 a.m! – at Paul Joukowsky’s, listening to a young French pianist play selections from Wagner’s Bayreuth operas, before a small Russian circle. I enjoyed the circle, but I had an overdose of Wagner, whom J-ky. vastly admires’. Given Wagner’s epic scores, the absence of orchestral colour, of singers, and indeed drama, his boredom is perhaps understandable. The relationship between the two men was, it seems, intense and intimate, an impression reinforced by the fact that James was to terminate it abruptly in 1880.

Letters for the New-York Tribune James’s stay in Paris was nominally supported by his writing for the New-York Tribune, though the twenty gold dollars he received for each of his letters failed to cover even his rent. His short stories continued to provide some income, though it is evident that he was still partially dependent on his parents. The newspaper had enthusiastically trailed his forthcoming appearance in its pages, pointing out that the author’s ‘thorough acquaintance with Europe, and his intuitive perception of the salient points of life and character, render him one of the best equipped Americans who have ever crossed the Atlantic’.12 In his first letter he assumes the role of a well-travelled man of the world and the twenty dispatches he sent back to America over these months are typically urbane. It was an interesting time to be in Paris. The Third Republic had been set up in 1870 after the disastrous Franco-Prussian war, and French public opinion, distrusting the traditionalist values of President Patrice de Macmahon who had been elected in 1873, increasingly favoured the influential anti-monarchist movement. The Tribune already had correspondents in Paris covering current affairs and politics, but James’s letters themselves reflect something of the febrile atmosphere surrounding the 1876 election of senators and the consequent fragile balance of power. He also offers sketches of such influential figures as Léon Gambetta, now heading a 129



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Republican majority, who was in process of introducing the idea of a Catholic university, and the former prime minister, briefly in office, Louis Buffet. But most of his reports confine themselves to Paris’s artistic scene. The magnificent Paris Opera, designed by Charles Garnier, had recently opened, hailed by James as ‘the Empire’s legacy to France’, though he voiced misgivings about the profusion of gilt, ‘gold upon gold’ (CWHJD, p. 116). He provides, too, a sketch of the formerly ‘dingy’ but respected Odéon theatre of the Latin quarter, subsidized by the state and now sumptuously refurbished, its public areas decorated with portraits and statuary. James reviews many of the plays in performance over the winter season, including Kean by Dumas père, starring Ernesto Rossi, the adaptation of Newsky’s Les Danicheff by Dumas fils as well as his Étrangère, staged at the ThéâtreFrançais with the ‘foreigner’ played by Sarah Bernhardt. He also witnessed Rossi working through the major tragic roles of Shakespeare during these months. The arrival of Giuseppe Verdi in the spring of 1876 proved an important event for Parisian musical life: he oversaw a production of Aïda as well as conducting his Requiem at the Salle Ventadour, both performed ‘with great perfection and proportionate success’ (p. 163). In lighter mode, James enjoyed the very popular Opéra bouffe, represented by Offenbach, Lecocq and Hervé. And in the Théâtre-Français, despite its often overheated, malodorous atmosphere, he admired the discipline and artistry of its players, the manifest technical skill and seriousness missing in comparable American and British productions. News from the art world constituted the other principal strand of James’s journalism. Antoine Louis Barye had died the previous year, and an exhibition of his animal sculptures and paintings which, James suggests, might have been subtitled ‘the plastic beauty of ferocity’, was described in the first of his dispatches (CWHJA, p. 151). More recently, the sculptor, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, had also died; his representation of La Danse, considered controversial at the time with its display of ebullient naked figures, adorned the Paris Opéra. Perhaps attempting to appeal to a wider public, James records the sale of JeanLouis-Ernest Meissonier’s painting of The Battle of Friedland (one of Napoleon’s victories) which had been sold, he affirms, for 380,000 francs, ‘the dearest piece of goods I have ever had the honor of contemplating’ (p. 156).The eventual purchaser was Alexander T. Stewart, one of America’s richest men and founder of the celebrated New York dry goods store on Broadway. In this age when illustrations were rare, James offers a detailed description of the painting, though there is a hint of irony (and some anticipation of future themes) when he confesses to ‘an acute satisfaction in seeing America stretch out her long arm and rake in, across the green cloth of the wide Atlantic, the highest prize of the game of civilization’ (p. 157). America’s appetite for European masterpieces would be a subject touched on in The Golden Bowl (1903) and, more fully, in The Outcry (1911). Works by both Meissonier and Jean-Léon Gérôme were attracting astronomical prices at this time, 130



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and James’s Tribune reports, along with his accounts of the art sales taking place at the Hôtel Drouot, the principal Parisian auction house, pay due attention to the marketplace. He must have felt relieved when the 93rd Paris Salon opened in May, since two complete letters are devoted to the artists exhibiting their work in the Louvre and Palace of Industry on the Champs Élysées. According to Émile Zola there were 4,033 works to see, and as well as paintings, 934 drawings and 631 sculptures; 104,775 visitors attended during the first week.13 James’s New York newspaper struggled with some of the foreign names he included (their slips much irritated him) and, indeed, though the reputations of many of the artists he singled out have endured – Bastien-Lepage, Carolus-Duran, Bonnat, Moreau, Gérôme, Doré and Bouguereau, for example – others have sunk into obscurity. James was in part following the taste of the time, though he finds it difficult to praise the painting which had been awarded the Salon’s first prize that year, Joseph-Noël Sylvestre’s horrific Locusta trying the effects of poisons before Nero, with its dying, writhing victims. Given his friendship with the man, it seems fitting that James should admire the portrait of Ivan Turgenev by Alexei Harlamoff, with its ‘air of intense and sinister reverie’ (CWHJA, p. 189). Most of the works which attract James’s praise are technically skilled and highly finished and they belong predominantly to the academic tradition. But like many of his peers he failed to recognize what would become the future of art, for it was in 1876 that the influential dealer Paul Durand-Ruel presented the second Impressionist exhibition of the more progressive and experimental works which had been rejected by the Salon – the Refusés. A disciple of Ruskin and Taine, James found it difficult to appreciate such artists as Caillebotte, Degas, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley: these ‘Irreconcilables’, as he called them, lacked first-rate talent and he could detect in their work no ‘idea of the beautiful’ (p. 177), indeed, he much preferred the more conservative style of the French Barbizon school. It was only many years later, in the next century and commenting from the other side of the Atlantic, that he came to record his appreciation of the Impressionists when he saw their work in Connecticut. With the arrival of summer in Paris, James moved outdoors, painting a scene of dining on the Champs Élysées and believing, despite the brilliant gas lighting, that one was in the countryside. You could, alternatively, take a penny steamer for the short trip down the Seine as far as Auteuil. He soon travelled further west by river and wrote up his impressions of the Normandy city of Rouen, enthusing over its churches and magnificent cathedral whose façade would later inspire Claude Monet.These were landscapes made familiar by the writing of Flaubert. Moving on to Le Havre, James could watch from his hotel the departing transatlantic liners, observing that ‘the swiftly moving ships pass before you like the figures on the field of a magic lantern’. 131



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Further up the Normandy coast, James then spent a relaxing three weeks of midsummer at Étretat. Another favoured spot for painters, the small, unpretentious town offered an economical tariff and James was happy to don comfortably old clothes, canvas shoes, and a fisherman’s cap.The beach might have no sand, but there was plenty to watch and the playing of children hoisted in and out of boats reminded him incongruously (as we have seen) of the great Delacroix painting, Dante and Virgil on the Styx. These seaside scenes would later figure in the novel, Confidence. Staying nearby was the American painter Edward Darley Boit and his wife Mary, whom James visited, parents of the four little girls painted by John Singer Sargent. He had enjoyed the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Paris, but James was beginning to tire of French life, privately characterizing its nationals as personally likeable but displaying ‘bottomless superficiality’. By contrast, he felt himself to be ‘turning English all over’: ‘I desire only to feed on English life & the contact of English minds’, he informed his brother William. During this unusually hot summer his intention was, nevertheless, to return for another winter in Paris and after leaving Étretat in mid-August, he arrived in the twilight at the end of a tiring journey at the Château de Varennes, the guest of Edward Lee Childe and his French wife, Blanche de Triqueti. Not far from Montargis, in the Loiret department, it was situated ‘au cœur de l’ancienne France’ (CN, p. 217), the heart of old France. James had met Childe, a journalist and writer, nephew of the great Confederacy war hero, General Robert E. Lee, through Charles Eliot Norton and had been entertained by the couple in Paris, describing them as ‘agreeable & kindly people, tho’ a trifle superfine & poseurs’. He missed the recent sea breezes of Normandy, but was charmed by this ‘little moated 15th century chateau … with walls 3 feet thick, turrets & winding staircases & a little green river tied in a circular knot close about its base’. He spent some ten days at Varennes, feeling at times as if he had stepped into a George Sand novel, recalling it several years later as ‘an exquisite sensation – a memory I shall never lose’ (CN, p. 217). Earlier in the summer James had suggested he might be due a rise to $30 per item for his New-York Tribune letters, but unfortunately Whitelaw Reid did not agree. His editor was prepared, though, to take shorter letters for the same fee. Reid also took the opportunity to point out that he would like James’s contributions to be ‘more “newsy” in character’ and less remote from popular interests; he described his writing as ‘magazine rather than newspaper work’ and, it seems, James’s pieces had not been especially popular with the public.14 In fact, the young novelist had quickly discovered for himself that he was unsuited to such work, frequently grumbling about the difficulty of finding appropriate topics. The project had not been a success for either side, but James (perhaps genuinely or with a sense of relief) took offence and withdrew his services, bridling at the observation that his submissions were too literary, telling Reid, ‘I am afraid I can’t assent to your proposal that I should try & write otherwise.… If my letters have been “too good” I am honestly 132



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afraid that they are the poorest I can do, especially for the money!’ This was just the first of James’s unhappy experiences with the newspaper press, and he would work through his displeasure in a number of fictional works. The Reverberator (1888) satirizes ‘the great institution of our time’, but he identified his tale, ‘The Next Time’, written almost twenty years later, as a specific treatment of ‘the old story of my letters to the N.Y.T[ribune]’ (CN, p. 123). At the beginning of September, he travelled down to south-west France and stayed first in Biarritz which he found expensive and not especially attractive, and then nearby Bayonne, ‘the prettiest little town in France’, where, across the Spanish border in San Sebastian, he also witnessed a bullfight, meeting once again the Childes who were staying nearby. It would be James’s only foray into Spain and, returning to Paris, he was disappointed that he could not re-occupy his old apartment on the rue de Luxembourg, having to move to rooms on the fourth floor of the same building. He was still unclear about his immediate future. He had, he felt, failed to engage with French society (regretting, for instance, having had to spend Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve alone), and he complained to his father that Paris ‘is rapidly ceasing to repay me for the cost of living here’ (199). He would remain, he feared, ‘an eternal outsider’ (CN, p. 217). Initially intending to stay in Paris for another six months, he toyed temporarily with the idea of going back to Italy. But by mid-October he had made up his mind: he would return to London. He spent his final morning beside the ‘gouty couch’ of beloved Ivan Turgenev, promising to keep in touch, before leaving autumnal Paris with some regret.

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7 ‘The Wheel of London Life’ and Early Novels (1876 –1879)

James would never again stay for so long in the French capital, and he took away impressions that would endure, among the strongest the performances enjoyed at the Théâtre-Français in the rue Richelieu.There were undoubted physical discomforts, yet James admits that ‘I am not sure that I did not find a certain mystic salubrity in the bad ventilation’.And it could be a long evening: performances frequently began by 7 pm, with the first hour or two ‘occupied by secondary performers’, and rarely ended before midnight (CWHJD, p. 189). He had to squeeze into the stalls, and the seats were far from comfortable, but the place embodied tradition – he could imagine the celebrated Rachel (whom he never saw) and believe ‘the echoes of her mighty voice were sleeping in that dingy dome’ (p. 190). The ‘toc-toc-toc’ sound of the curtain rising was enough to confirm the ‘prodigious’ greatness of the nation (p. 4). Onstage, everything was ‘smooth and harmonious’, ‘artistic and complete’. These were performances prepared with the greatest attention to detail: ‘you never observe an awkwardness, a roughness, an accident, a crude spot, a false note’ (p. 188). He would later attempt to imagine something of this discipline and professionalism in tracing the career of Miriam Rooth in The Tragic Muse.

The American If his residence in Paris exposed James to the magnificence of the Théâtre-Français, The American reflects on the city’s streets and buildings, public and private, its history and cultural associations. He had begun work on the novel in November 1875 and The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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its first instalment appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in June 1876. Though written mostly in France, it was far away, seated in an ‘American “horse-car”’, that the idea for the work came to him, ‘the situation,’ as he later recalled it, ‘in another country and an aristocratic society, of some robust but insidiously beguiled and betrayed, some cruelly wronged, compatriot’ (LC 2: 1054). The collision between American and European sensibilities (the ‘International’ theme that would fascinate him over the years) which constitutes the central interest of The American, is represented in the most striking way. The hero Christopher Newman (aptly named) represents American experience, the boundless confidence and labour which have allowed him to succeed and acquire great wealth, while the Bellegardes with their 800-year-old tradition and family name, their darkly moribund historic homes in Paris and the country, stand for a forbidding, unyielding embodiment of Europe. The central plot, with its downward spiral, is a simple account of disappointed love. How could it be imagined for ‘“an American man of business to marry a French countess”’? Valentin, the youngest Bellegarde son, asks (p. 196). The woman with whom Newman falls in love, Claire de Cintré, earlier married off by the family and later widowed, is the sacrificial object at the centre of this old-world/new-world conflict. Newman finds that boundless wealth cannot overcome the family hostility towards ‘“a commercial person”’ (p. 239). Newman has made his fortune in the American west, in San Francisco, and has been ‘“[s]uccessful in copper … only so-so in railroads, and a hopeless fizzle in oil”’; earlier in life, he sold leather and manufactured wash-tubs (pp. 34, 85). For contemporary readers the Californian city was synonymous with boom and bust, famous for its mid-century Gold Rush and, a little later, the mining of silver which allowed millionaires to prosper, at least until the economic downturn of 1877 (the year of the novel’s appearance as a book). James avoids further examination of the inner life of a businessman as a type, confessing elsewhere that he was ‘absolutely and irredeemably helpless’ in responding to the ‘mystery’ of such a man (LC 2: 1203). The action of The American begins in 1868, a precise date in history, soon after the American Civil War, and Newman’s four years of service with the Union army, and, in Europe, two years before the end of the French Second Empire and in advance of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. The novel’s hero, ‘a powerful specimen of an American …. not only a fine American … in the first place, physically, a fine man’ (p. 6), continually stretches his legs through the entire work, as if flexing his muscles against this constraining world he has entered. And in his late preface, James confesses to his own ‘beautiful infatuation’ with this ‘good fellow wronged’, ‘the intensity of the creative effort to get into the skin of the creature’ whose perspective most frequently guides the reader (LC 2: 1068). By contrast, the Bellegardes embody the conservative extremes of European civilization, Legitimists and Ultramontanes, as Mrs Tristram, the sharp American observer, points out – supporters of the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty and of 135



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the Pope’s influence on civil society, ‘“the skim of the milk of the old noblesse”’ (p. 40). As the young son Valentin warns Newman, ‘“Old trees have crooked branches, old houses have queer cracks, old races have odd secrets”’, and the guileless hero replies that ‘“that’s the sort of thing I came to Europe for”’ (p. 112). Newman must cross the Seine from the gilded salons of his own apartment to visit the ‘stoutly guarded Hôtel de Bellegarde’ with its forbidding exterior (p. 78) in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, the quarter favoured by the nobility. The geographical locations of Paris signify a division which extends into other oppositions – New versus Old Worlds, individual enterprise versus family tradition, new money versus aristocratic penury. Those who alert Newman to divergences of cultural and national mores are young women – Mrs Tristram and the new Madame Bellegarde, wife of the family’s eldest son. The outcome for another girl, Noémie Nioche, a ‘type’ of the modern Parisian who initially scrapes a living by making bad copies of paintings in the Louvre, is darker. She will become,Valentin predicts,‘“one of the celebrities of the future”’ who exploits men, later regretted by Newman as no longer ‘“an honest girl”’ (pp. 142, 190). Her given name, Noémie, derives, it seems, from the shady American woman who features in L’Étrangère, the play by Dumas fils, described by James as ‘a very unsatisfactory piece of work for so clever a man as Dumas’ in one of his New-York Tribune articles (CWHJD, p. 152). The romance at the centre of the novel is conducted by formal negotiation, the couple’s engagement marked by a Ball at which Newman is introduced to the aging company, the doors ‘inexorably closed against the myrmidons of the upstart power which then ruled the fortunes of France’ (p. 204). Claire de Cintré represents his ideal of womanhood, as he tells her, and his proposal speech is ‘the longest that Newman had ever made’ (p. 117). The fairy story he hears his fiancée spinning to her niece at a family dinner he attends in which a young prince triumphantly carries off his beloved to ‘the Land of the Pink Sky’ can have no correspondence to his own life (p. 145). He is rejected by the family who are keen to sign up another suitor, Lord Deepmere, a wealthy if unremarkable British peer. The unhappy Claire is left with her only remaining option, convent life with the Carmelite order of nuns in the rue d’Enfer (or street of Hell, in James’s day a location near the Cemetery of Montparnasse). Newman takes a last look at this ‘region of convents and prisons’ (p. 345): Mme de Cintré has now entered a new and more forbidding place of incarceration. He hears the chanting of the nuns, a dirge for ‘buried affections and … the vanity of earthly desires’: they are now dead to the world (p. 311).The retreat of a romantic heroine to a nunnery is, of course, a familiar outcome, perhaps especially familiar from French literature. In fact, many of the plot features are derived from the sensational or romantic fiction James himself had criticized in earlier reviews. Mme de Cintré’s first marriage, pressed upon her by her family, is dismissed by her brother Valentin as ‘“a chapter for a novel”’, and carried out, as Newman adds, ‘“in your horrible French 136



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way”’ (p. 104). Aside from the tropes of family hostility towards a handsome but self-made suitor, a worldly family at odds with the ideals of innocent love, the work’s latter stages involve a duel over the unworthy Noémie, a deathbed disclosure of the existence of a dark family secret, and the exposure of this secret on a scrap of paper kept by an aged retainer. This pencilled note written by the long-dead Marquis, condemns the original marriage of his daughter and accuses his wife of aiding his own death. Violence and vengeance are anticipated early in the novel when Valentin ominously compares his relationship with his sister Claire to that of Orestes and Electra, the avenging siblings who murdered their mother Clytemnestra and her lover. In keeping with this mix of antecedents, the text contains many incidental theatrical and poetic parallels. Shakespeare’s plays were clearly in James’s mind and there are several noticeable quotations from Othello. Early in the novel the hero in his inability to find a satisfactory wife is likened by Mrs Tristram to ‘“the heroes of the French romantic poets, Rolla and Fortunio”’, who feature in works by Alfred de Musset and Théophile Gautier (p. 38). An entire chapter which culminates in the challenge to a duel takes place appropriately alongside a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni; in the music of Donna Elvira, the opera’s conflicted and outraged heroine, Newman is reminded of Mme de Cintré. Occasionally the text draws attention to its own theatricality. As he observes Mme de Cintré at the Hôtel de Bellegarde, Newman imagines he is at the Théâtre-Français: ‘He felt as if he were at the play, and … sometimes he wished he had a book to follow the dialogue; he half expected to see a woman in a white cap and pink ribbons come and offer him one for two francs’ (p. 99). Mme d’Outreville, a grandee friend of the Bellegardes who embodies the Gallic preference for opinions and ‘mots’, appears to Newman like ‘a wonderful old lady in a comedy, particularly well up in her part’ (p. 325). Clearly Paris had made its mark on James’s imagination and the atmosphere of the city fills the pages of The American. Indeed, he recalls in his 1907 Preface that the figure of Christopher Newman rose before him ‘on a perfect day of the divine Paris spring, in the great gilded Salon Carré of the Louvre’ (LC 2: 1056). But the novel’s unhappy conclusion with no marriage disappointed many readers, among them W.D. Howells, in whose Atlantic Monthly the work was appearing as a serial. Some of James’s friends, including Lizzie Boott, also complained, but, as he pointed out to Howells, the lovers would have made ‘an impossible couple’. He asked simply – where would they have lived? – perhaps in ‘a farm out West’? – he could not imagine it. Many of the American reviews of The American also took issue with its subdued ending, in ‘what is vulgarly termed a fizzle’, as the New York Times reviewer commented, finding it hard to reconcile the defeated Newman with his earlier, entrepreneurial self (CR, p. 28). The critic in Scribner’s Monthly is similarly disappointed, attributing such a ‘miserable’ ending to the influence of Turgenev 137



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(CH, p. 48). English reviewers, generally mixed in their response, were understandably less preoccupied with assumptions about the treatment of American manhood, though George Saintsbury in his brief review in the Academy regarded Newman as ‘a typical Yankee’ while finally remaining equivocal about the novel in general (pp. 45–46). While in Europe, James had had no chance to proofread the serial text and was frustrated at the inevitable errors it contained. In addition, he complained to Howells that a year was too extended a period for serial publication – he would have preferred more substantial instalments over a shorter time. When the book version was due to appear, he arranged for his father to check the text. In fact, the earliest ‘authorized’ text is the Macmillan edition of 1879, prepared by James himself. The novel’s final appearance three decades later was as part of the New York Edition of James’s works, so thoroughly revised that it seems a quite distinct work. In the Preface to that edition, James draws attention to what he sees as two of the novel’s crucial flaws – the likelihood that, far from rejecting Newman, the greedy and impoverished ‘great house of Bellegarde’ would have welcomed the wealthy American, and the fact that, given her eventual ‘backing out’, the temperament of Mme de Cintré and her ‘dark “psychological” abyss’ are not sufficiently worked out for the reader (LC 2: 1069).

London Life James’s arrival in London on 10 December 1876 was not especially propitious and he was jarred by the contrast with ‘glittering, charming, civilized Paris’. Its theatres proved a disappointment and, as a member of ‘the Anglo-Saxon race’, he had to concede that ‘[i]n this matter … we are without an elementary sense that the French possess’. London was less expensive than Paris, but he could not ignore ‘its darkness, dirt, poverty, & general unaesthetic cachet’, and the weather, too, was unpleasant. He wrote to Lizzie Boott (living in the Italian sunshine) of ‘the heavens being perpetually enstained with a sort of sooty fog-paste, like Thames mud in solution. At 11 a.m. I have to light my candles to read!’. He had no doubt, however, that this was the place in which to work, and that his new address, 3 Bolton Street, Piccadilly, in the heart of the West End, would make ‘an excellent lodging in this excellent quarter’. He soon became, as he said, thoroughly ‘Londonized’, and, with just a few introductions, embarked on a dazzling social round – an immersion unavailable in Paris. Unsolicited, the first Baron Houghton, Richard Monckton Milnes, patron of literature and the arts, invited James to one of his celebrated breakfast parties, and followed this up with a further series of invitations where the new arrival met, at one dinner, such luminaries as Tennyson – ‘very swarthy & scraggy’, Gladstone – ‘his 138



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eye that of a man of genius’ – and the classical archaeologist, Dr Heinrich Schliemann. While moving among the upper echelons of British society, artistic, political, scientific, James discovered an affection for the gentleman’s club. He was temporarily admitted to the Athenaeum, ‘a little heaven here below’, and was quickly elected to the Reform Club, where he became a life member, a ‘convenience’, as he later proclaimed, ‘of the first order’ (CN, p. 219). Aside from the beau monde of which he was keen to become a part, James renewed other friendships. He met up with the journalist Theodore Child, whom he had first encountered at Étretat, admiring his handsome appearance, ‘very much like Dan’l. Deronda’. Sadly, Leslie Stephen, now bereft at the premature loss of his wife, proved ‘an impossible companion’, but James was happy to catch up again with Fanny Kemble. He also met John Addington Symonds ‘a mild, cultured man, with the Oxford perfume’, who invited him to visit at Clifton, in Bristol. Symonds shared a taste for Venice and his uneasy marriage would provide the inspiration for James’s story, ‘The Author of Beltraffio’ (1884). Robert Browning was also encountered over the dinner table, though James found him to be ‘a great chatterer’ and complained of his ‘shrill interruptingness’. Despite the city’s comparative cheapness, London cab fares were proving expensive, and indeed the underground rail network was just beginning to expand and to offer a more economical means of transport. James’s daily routine lacked some of the elegance of life in Paris: the ‘tender little tarts’ or gâteaux served in its ‘brightly mirrored’ pâtisseries have now given way to a pastry cook’s ‘big buns’ and ‘digestive biscuits’ for which he has to queue at lunchtime (CWHJD, p. 213). Tickets for the theatre, too, at $3, were expensive, and the standards of acting variable; nor did James share the general admiration for the two great celebrities of the day, Ellen Terry and Henry Irving. And, as for the plays in production, many, ‘transplanted from the Gallic soil’, had failed to ‘bloom’, he felt, in a more socially conservative, ‘genteel’ British context (pp. 209, 215). A widening social circle led to invitations to some of England’s great country houses in the shires, and these settings, epitomizing tradition and privilege, would be memorably reworked in many scenes in his later fiction. The weather could be unreliable – it rained during a visit to Wenlock Abbey in Shropshire, the home of Henry Adams’s friend, Charles Milnes Gaskell and his wife, Lady Catherine – but James enthused about its medieval origins. In the summer of 1877, he visited Warwickshire, enjoying the view of Kenilworth Castle from the home of Alexander Carter and his wife, and ‘dancing all the evening with the rosiest, shyest little Warwickshire maidens!’ James’s impressions of London, first published in the Philadelphia-based Lippincott’s Magazine, have the freshness of someone recently arrived in the city, with just the occasional unflattering comparison with Paris. After the trials of writing for the NewYork Tribune, the ‘literary’ journal offered a medium in which he felt more at ease. 139



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The first of these essays, ‘An English Easter’, describing principally a visit to nearby Chatham, Rochester and Canterbury, begins with a long observational preamble on life (as an outsider) in London. Alongside their talent for eccentricity, he wonders at the ‘conforming spirit’ of the English, a nation which seems uniformly to attend church on a Sunday morning – the respectable couples as well as ‘young unmarried men … the gay bachelors, the irresponsible members of society’ (CTWGBA, p. 107). He also observes the social customs of the upper classes – the banishing of servants from the room at breakfast time, for instance, and the regular decamping of the family to the country for major public holidays, when everything including theatres and music halls was closed and ‘private dissipation … suspended’ – enough to strike ‘terror into the stoutest heart’. As for laundry arrangements (again from the perspective of the single man), he contrasts the pleasures of chatting with his charming ‘blanchisseuse’ who delivered washing to his rooms in Paris with a Dickensian vision of her London equivalent, ‘lying prone in a puddle of whisky!’ (pp. 111, 112). By August the upper classes have departed for their country estates and James takes some pleasure in having London to himself, observing that the changing seasons – such is the climate – make little difference to the lives of the people. He betrays his American roots by observing how such fruit as peaches and melons are no more plentiful in summer than at Christmas time. There is no opportunity for such innocent public entertainments as sitting in the open air, eating an ice or listening to a band play. Convention demands that the respectable classes avoid such pursuits, and the only signs of life in the city’s great parks are ‘rough characters … lying on their faces in the sheep-polluted grass’ (p. 137). A river journey from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich offers a panorama, again reminiscent of Dickens, with nothing to be seen for miles and miles ‘but the sooty backs of warehouses…. The river is almost black, and is covered with black barges; above the black housetops, from among the far-stretching docks and basins, rises a dusky wilderness of masts’. Ironically – as he admits – this unappealing landscape with its ‘smudgy detail’ embodies for him ‘something very serious …. nothing less than the wealth and power of the British Empire at large’ (pp. 140–141). 1877 was the year in which Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India. Arriving at Greenwich, he is briefly returned to childhood, to its books and maps, and the familiar representations of its observatory. Other travel essays (two of which appeared in the Galaxy magazine) cover the quintessentially English social scene – Derby Day at Epsom (where he noticed much drunkenness), Commemoration Week at Oxford, and the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. This ‘appreciative American’, as he refers to himself, enjoys, too, the region of ‘mellow conservative Warwickshire’, its landscapes reminiscent of the works of Shakespeare and George Eliot, while the architecture of Broughton Castle and Wroxton Abbey in Oxfordshire, Stokesay Castle and Ludlow in Shropshire, embodies the richness of English history (p. 172). 140



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A Return to France and Italy For a brief spell there was a possibility that James might be employed as a secretary to J.R. Lowell who was about to become American minister to Spain.The prospect of a regular salary was tempting, but even in these days of patronage when appointments could be made in this way, he recognized he was not qualified for such a position. And so, when the plan fell through, he confessed to his mother only ‘very moderate regret’. Though he had intended to go to the seaside to work during the summer, James remained in town until early September and then left for Paris. Staying in ‘a couple of shabby little rooms just off the Champs Elysées’, he hoped to see Paul Zhukovsky once again, now, it seems, ‘ill, unhappy, impoverished & generally uncomfortable’. The Russian had not yet returned to the capital, however, and the portion of the letter which might explain his unhappiness is now missing. Nevertheless James renewed his friendship with Ivan Turgenev (suffering badly from gout) and dined with the novelist’s cousin and his wife, now finding them, however, too ‘simple minded – & Bonapartists into the bargain’. The good weather continued and James was pleased to be remembered by the waiter at the café to which he returned for his daily breakfast. Among the performances he attended at the Théâtre-Français were Racine’s Andromaque (with Sarah Bernhardt) and the Demi-Monde of Dumas fils, starring Sophie Alexandrine Croizette and Louis Arsène Delaunay. In an excursion down the Marne Valley, and the Champagne region, James marvelled at the massive Gothic proportions of the façade of Reims cathedral, and, to the north, the city of Laon magnificently situated on its ‘windy hill-top’, before turning back towards Paris via Coucy-le-Château and Soissons (CTWC, p. 744). Leaving for Italy on 16 October, James stopped first for a week in Florence where he caught up once more with the Bootts. Francis seemed more aged and tired than he remembered him, while Lizzie’s painting technique, ‘with its charmless absence of delineation & detail’, ‘imbibed’ from the teaching of Thomas Couture, disappointed him. Once in Rome, the sun continued to shine, and he went horse-riding once more on the Campagna; he economized by staying with a Roman family, and, though he found both the city and his feelings to have changed, soon succumbed to its charm. After seven weeks in Italy, he returned to Paris to find waiting for him Macmillan’s proofs for French Poets and Novelists, a collection of his earlier essays for American magazines submitted back in August. The contents of the volume are predominantly mid-nineteenth century, including pieces on Balzac, Sand, Flaubert, Musset, Gautier and Baudelaire, as well as Turgenev and the ThéâtreFrançais. James as critic shows an easy and wide-ranging mastery of his material, though he is surprisingly dismissive of Baudelaire’s poetry, considering the ‘evil’ of Les Fleurs du Mal to be sensational rather than mysterious or unimaginable – ‘puerile … an affair of blood and carrion and physical sickness’ (LC 2: 155). 141



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Resistant to modernist tendencies – evident, too, in his hostility to the Impressionist movement – he was generally less responsive to poetry. When Gertrude Bloede (who published under the pseudonym of Stuart Sterne) asked for professional advice on her poetry at this time, he replied that ‘I never wrote a line of verse in my life & cannot speak of the matter as one of the initiated’. John Morley, Macmillan’s reader, who had himself recently published a number of monographs on eighteenth-century French literature (his career as an influential Liberal politician lay ahead), had advised against the publication of French Poets and Novelists, though Macmillan went ahead anyway and the book received good reviews. Despite Morley’s reservations at this time – James’s critical writing was, he felt, no match for Sainte-Beuve’s – he later invited James to write on Hawthorne for the English Men of Letters series for which he was general editor. Of course, the series’ publisher, Macmillan, was also keen to retain James as one of its authors.

Becoming ‘a Londoner’ By 18 December James had returned to London and was happy to be back. He noticed, too, with a mix of pleasure and dismay, a pirated version of The American for sale, with a sensational-looking cover illustration, published by the British company, Ward, Lock & Co – proof of its commercial potential, but bringing him no royalties. And for the first time in a number of years Christmas was spent in company. He had been invited by Fanny Kemble to join the festivities at the home of her daughter Frances and her husband the Reverend James Leigh in their ‘picturesque old house’ at Stratford-upon-Avon. It was a brief stay, and he enjoyed the presence of children who attended a tea-party, but did not warm to the couple, growing tired of the American wife who complained constantly of England and the English. With the New Year, James continued his ‘junketing’, as he called it, mixing and dining with the cream of London society. This included, at the end of February, attendance at a wedding: Eleanor, daughter of his friend, Frederick LockerLampson, writer and bibliophile, was marrying Tennyson’s son, Lionel, in Westminster Abbey. The marriage was not to go well, however, and Lionel died young in 1886.1 James also saw once again Leslie Stephen’s sister-in-law, Anne Thackeray, who had recently married her second cousin Richmond Ritchie, seventeen years her junior and remarked on by James as her ‘infantile husband’. He noticed that she was ‘further advanced toward confinement … than I have ever seen a lady at a dinner party’; he found her to be ‘exquisitely irrational’, but the two were to become good friends. A meeting one evening in 1878 between James and Madame Marie Taglioni signals a further association with Anne Thackeray’s novelist father. Taglioni had 142



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been the celebrated ballerina at the Paris Opéra, admired in 1829 by Thackeray for her ‘most superb pair of pins’, and caricatured by him (writing as ‘Théophile Wagstaff ’) after he saw her dance in London in Charles-Louis Didelot’s ballet, Flore et Zéphire.2 Her fortunes had changed by the time of James’s meeting when he observed that she had become ‘an ugly little wizened old woman, but very entertaining & reminiscential. She has run through her various fortunes & in the evening of her days has settled in London, to give dancing lessons to the daughters of the aristocracy’. It was at this time that James became acquainted with James McNeill Whistler. The painter’s infamous libel court case against Ruskin, who had attacked him for charging ‘200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’, was still in the future, when James would write about it for the Nation. Whistler had constructed a romanticized version of his own American past, a myth part of which James repeats in a letter to his father. He dislikes the artist’s work, while appreciating the American flavour of the fare offered at his table: ‘[h]e is a queer little Londonized Southerner, & paints abominably. But his breakfasts are easy & pleasant, & he has tomatoes & buckwheat cakes’. James’s conservative taste in painting led him, at least for the time, to underrate Whistler’s work, so influential in the development of the Aesthetic movement. The previous year he had been critical, asserting in a long essay hostile towards the prevailing idea of ‘art for art’s sake’ that ‘a picture should have some relation to life as well as to painting. Mr. Whistler’s experiments have no relation whatever to life; they have only a relation to painting’ (CWHJA, p. 256). Among Whistler’s guests at the Sunday-morning breakfast attended by James were Sir Coutts and Lady Lindsay who had recently opened their Grosvenor Gallery on Bond Street, a beautifully appointed space established to counter the perceived stuffiness of the Royal Academy. James had covered the occasion for the Nation (pp. 234–238). With warmer weather, he began to make further trips beyond London visiting in Herefordshire, Florence Wilkinson, the married daughter of his parents’ old Swedenborgian friends, and on the Isle of Wight, Mary Codman Peabody, a Bostonian – though not the Miss Peabody who probably served as a model for Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians. James saw in her some of those qualities he associated with Minny Temple and which he had missed in England, ‘the native finesse & animation of the American female mind’. At this time he also renewed acquaintance with George Eliot, ‘both sweet and superior’, a representative, perhaps, of the European female mind. On his Sunday visit he found the Leweses ‘very urbane & friendly’ and took his turn in sitting next to the great novelist to converse on serious topics. Becoming assimilated into British life, James had clear views on the political concerns of the day. ‘London smells of gunpowder’, he comments, fearing that the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, to whom he disparagingly refers as ‘the tawdry 143



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old Jew who is at the head of this great old British Empire’, might draw the country into the conflict being played out in the Balkans involving a declining Turkish empire and Russia’s expansionist intentions. In fact, Disraeli ensured a peace settlement which limited Russia’s ambitions at the Congress of Berlin in June–July 1878. Aside from this international threat of war, at a more domestic level his own family was also causing James some anxiety. Asked by Lizzie Boott why she hadn’t heard from any of his family he explained quite simply that ‘[m]y father doesn’t pretend to write;Wm can’t use his eyes, & poor Alice, I am sorry to say, is wretchedly ill again, in her old way’. But there was one item of good news from across the Atlantic. Despite recurring physical and mental ailments, William had become engaged on 10 May 1878 to Alice Gibbens, a Boston schoolteacher, and much approved of by Henry Sr: two months later, they were married. Sister Alice whose relationship with William was always close – his letters to her mix the patronizing with the unsettlingly flirtatious – was too ill to attend the wedding and some psychosomatic connection between her indisposition and sense of betrayal and loss at William’s departure from the family seems likely.3 Though surprised, his younger brother was happy at the news; detaching himself from any comparable expectation, he told William in his message of congratulation that ‘I believe almost as much in matrimony for most other people as I believe in it little for myself ’. As for his health, he seems to have shaken off former maladies: in that age when excess weight betokened prosperity and good health, he informs his mother, ‘I am in superb health, & so fat that my flesh hangs over my waistband in huge bags’.

‘Daisy Miller’ and ‘An International Episode’ Feeling physically well, having established himself professionally and independently in a congenial environment, James had entered on a productive period for his work. Having ‘thoroughly mastered Dumas, Augier & Sardou’ – the choice of French models is significant – he was already contemplating writing for the theatre, though this long-held aspiration was not yet due to be fulfilled. And plans for the major novel, The Portrait of a Lady, which would finally appear in 1880, were already in progress, a work, he promised his mother, that ‘will cover you with fame’. Meantime, during those rides on the Roman Campagna the previous autumn, he had been offered a donnée, an idea for his next fiction by another expatriate, Alice Bartlett, a friend of Lizzie Boott’s. During the winter he escorted her to some of the London galleries and she was soon to marry and return to America. She had provided a Roman anecdote, as he later recalled, which seemed to beg for dramatic treatment, material leaving ‘a margin for the small pencil-mark inveterately signifying, in such connexions, “Dramatise, dramatise!”’ (LC 2: 1269). He accepted the injunction and 144



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the consequence was ‘Daisy Miller: a Study’, a novella whose success was immediate, not only critically but commercially; it was widely read, winning him a popularity never to be repeated. The term ‘study’, later dropped from the title, was intended to indicate the limited scope of the story, a sequence of scenes set in Switzerland and Rome. The skills of his travel writing are everywhere evident.The principal observer Frederick Winterbourne (most often referred to simply by his chilly surname), has recently arrived from Geneva and encounters at the hotel of the Trois Couronnes in Vevey on the shores of Lake Geneva the Miller family who come from Schenectady in upstate New York, ‘“a better place than Europe”’ according to the nine-year-old son, Randolph, who also points out, ‘“My father’s rich, you bet”’ (CT 4: 148). The principal centre of interest – the ‘case’ as James often expressed it – is, however, the young daughter, Daisy, who appears to Winterbourne as the height of unconventionality – talkative, independent and unchaperoned. Representing none of the dangers of the coquettes he has known,‘dangerous, terrible women’, she strikes him simply as ‘a pretty American flirt’ (151). But her inability to conform to social expectations will prove scandalous and lead to her rejection from the ‘best’ society. The contrasts and tensions between American and European standards of social behaviour are expertly sketched in, but it is by her own expatriate fellow Americans that Daisy is rejected as ‘uncultivated’ and ‘common’. Winterbourne’s aunt refuses to meet the young woman because of her observed ‘“intimacy with her mamma’s courier”’ (156). The family does not belong and their language marks them out: Daisy, for instance, accuses Winterbourne of being ‘mean’ to her – a term James himself would regard as a vulgar Americanism of the kind he could never accept. In the Miller family the children run wild and mother watches helplessly, the undisciplined behaviour he would still be shocked at nearly thirty years later during his American stay of 1904–1905 – the ‘freedoms’, ‘immodesty’, yet ‘innocence’ of the young, the silence of the accompanying mother: ‘[t]he whole phenomenon was documentary’ (AS, 41). When the family travels south to Rome, Daisy moves through society with a handsome, young Italian at her side – a ‘pretty face’, but Giovanelli is no gentleman, Winterbourne concludes (CT 4: 181). His American friend and resident of Rome, Mrs Walker, lives in the Via Gregoriana near the Spanish Steps, her ‘little crimson drawing-room’, clearly modelled on that of Mary and Edmund Tweedy where James had been entertained. In an unusually confrontational scene, Daisy refuses to abandon her Italian admirer on the Pincian Hill (the most fashionable of public spaces) and get into Mrs Walker’s carriage so that something of her reputation might be salvaged. In a wonderfully cinematic moment, Winterbourne observes Daisy and her cavalier come together as they face the setting sun, their heads hidden by a parasol; he lingers for a moment, but turns away, to return to the house of his aunt. A few days later Daisy appears at Mrs Walker’s party, is treated coldly, and when 145



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finally she approaches to take her leave the older woman ‘turned her back straight upon Miss Miller’ (192). The young heroine dies, not from social rejection, but from her stubborn wish to continue her romantic explorations of Rome by night.The pagan classical world which so often exercises its sinister influence across the centuries in James’s imagination, is represented by the Colosseum, a site of ancient human and animal slaughter; like others before her, Daisy wishes to enjoy it by moonlight.Winterbourne is horrified to find her there with Giovanelli and, in a decisive, poignant moment, follows conventional society in casting her off: ‘She was a young lady whom a gentleman need no longer be at pains to respect’ (202). Now beyond the pale, Daisy contracts malaria from the bad night air and rapidly succumbs. Despite its sad ending (to be altered when James came to adapt the piece for the theatre), the tale was immediately popular. With its romantic landscapes and settings, the narrative is light and at times comic, and its unconventional heroine, perverse as well as charming, raises simple but engaging issues relating to society and its conventions. The two central figures – the observing Winterbourne whose romantic impulses are sidelined, Daisy the naïve girl, careless of opinion – these are figures to be developed and re-imagined in The Portrait of a Lady. First offered to Lippincott’s Magazine, ‘Daisy Miller’ was rejected; perhaps it was considered ‘“an outrage on American girlhood”’, a comment made by a friend and remembered by James many years later (LC 2 1269); indeed, this was not the only occasion when the author was accused of patriotic disloyalty. Leslie Stephen, by contrast, was enthusiastic, accepting the story ‘with effusion’ for publication in the Cornhill Magazine and it appeared in two parts in June and July 1878. Even better,William James, so often highly critical of his brother’s writing, was for once complimentary. It was indeed ‘a capital start’ in Britain. Pleased at the novella’s popularity with the public, James was keen for commercial success, deciding that ‘in future I shall publish all my things in English magazines (at least all the good ones) & sell advance sheets in America; thereby doubling my profits’. It has remained a popular work perhaps because, as Adrian Poole comments, it draws on ‘a myth of beauty, innocence, grace, and promise menaced by predatory worldliness’.4 And, as further evidence of success, it was soon pirated both in Boston and New York. ‘An International Episode’, ‘a pendant or counterpart’ to ‘Daisy Miller’, which also first appeared in the Cornhill Magazine, dramatizes the collision between American and British values and modes of behaviour. Its heroine, Bessie Alden, is a young Bostonian, well read and interested: ‘if this was the Boston style the Boston style was very charming’, observes the young Lord Lambeth, visiting America with his friend, Percy Beaumont (CT 4: 270). The two are lavishly entertained at the luxurious Newport home of Mrs Westgate, Bessie’s sister, whose husband is lucratively employed in New York. When Bessie and her sister make a visit to London, 146



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the romance of the young American girl and the aristocrat prospers, only to end when Bessie, repulsed by the rudeness of Lord Lambeth’s formidable mother, refuses his offer of marriage and continues her tour of Europe. The story, though slight, is perhaps most interesting for its observation of American life at the beginning of the Gilded Age. Like the absent father in ‘Daisy Miller’, Mr Westgate must remain in the mosquito-plagued heat of New York through the summer because, as we are reminded, America, unlike Britain, has no ‘leisure-class’. The British visitors notice the black servants, the bathing facilities in the hotel, the ‘very snug hydraulic elevator’ at Mr Westgate’s workplace, New York’s brownstone buildings, the apparent need for American women to buy something every day, and their ‘passion for generalising’ (250, 268). Aspects of the lives of the British upper classes are also scrutinized and sometimes found wanting. Indeed, as Adeline Tintner pointed out, the tale is a form of centennial celebration of the American War of Independence.5 Lord Lambert is ill-educated, and, according to Bessie, as an ‘hereditary legislator’, he should know more about his national history (309). He is simply a handsome young Englishman of the kind that James always admired. In many ways an innocent like Daisy Miller, Bessie also wonders at the rigours of the British class system, especially the convention of ‘precedence’, the social pecking order according to which ladies are escorted into or out of rooms (315). And then as now, there is the question of the shared language of the two nations. Lord Lambeth laments to his friend, ‘“I suppose we must learn to speak American”’, and later, jokingly demonstrating the point, Percy Beaumont comments to his friend, ‘“I call that ‘real mean’”’ (246, 257). Harpers in New York quickly produced an edition in paper wrappers and earnings in England and America amounted to £95 ($461), ‘more money than I have ever got for so little labor’, James reported to his mother.When Leslie Stephen asked for the serial rights to his next novel James was able to tell him that it was already promised to Macmillan’s. This year James did not cross the Channel, though, during the summer, he paid several visits out of town, returning once again to the Milnes Gaskells at Wenlock Abbey, and, in September he enjoyed a three-week stay in Scotland, rejoicing in the ‘[p]urple moors, misty mountains, covered with a golden bloom, gleaming locks, glowing heather, grouse, partridges, Highland sports, good company’. He stayed first with the diplomat Sir John Forbes Clark and his wife Charlotte at Tillypronie, a magnificent estate overlooking Deeside, not far from Aberdeen. The weather was fine and a highlight of this visit was perhaps the sight at a nearby ball of the famous actress and socialite, Lillie Langtry, dancing a Highland reel, ‘in sooth divinely handsome’. Later in the month James journeyed south to Gillesbie, in Dumfries and Galloway, the home of the ‘laird’, James Alexander Rogerson and his wife; the house was filled with visitors, ‘[i]n all a bevy of young girls’. 147



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The Europeans Having travelled south through the Lake District, he was in London again by the beginning of October. His novel The Europeans had been published on 18 September, and it was also about to end its serial run in the Atlantic Monthly, for which he had not yet been paid. Despite this hard work, James complained that he was still quite short of money. Worryingly, too, the Galaxy magazine in which he had placed some of his slighter pieces had closed, passing on its subscription list to the Atlantic. He had promised Howells that he would come up with a fresh serial, something more cheerful than The American, with an American setting, and involving ‘a genial, charming youth of a Bohemianish pattern, who comes back from foreign parts into the midst of a mouldering & ascetic old Puritan family of his kindred’. In the event, The Europeans broadened its romantic interest with a narrative of light, sharply observed social comedy. Despite its title, this short novel is one of just a few to be set entirely in America. Its European dimension lies in the principal characters, the Baroness Eugenia Münster, and her younger brother Felix Young, both, in fact, expatriate Americans, recently arrived in Boston, who have come to look up their rich New England cousins and perhaps seek their fortune.The deftly executed opening chapter has the two observing the city from their hotel window: Eugenia sees an ugly, wintry scene of horsecars with their unappealing passengers, while the bohemian artist, Felix, finds material for his sketches.The action is set in the 1840s, rendering the horsecars (introduced only in the mid-1850s) anachronistic, as the Cambridge-born Thomas Wentworth Higginson later pointed out. The perspective of the two siblings may well replicate aspects of James’s own recent experiences: the scenes of refined, domestic New England life are reflected through a returning stranger’s gaze, affectionate but also critical. The native protagonists, the two young Wentworth daughters, their brother, Clifford, and another cousin, Lizzie Acton (according to Eugenia the ‘“American type”’, pronounced in the French way (p. 34)), and her rich, unmarried brother Robert, along with a young Unitarian clergyman named Brand – all of marriageable age – might have come from a Jane Austen novel, and the romantic developments, too, might seem familiar. Yet the greater cultural distinctions, the divide between Europeanized and American sensibilities, moves the narrative beyond the conventional comedy of manners. James’s growing expertise is evident in the first meeting of Gertrude Wentworth with the young man with whom she will fall in love – a simple and romantic moment merging dream and reality. Avoiding church on a Sunday morning, she looks up from the copy of the Arabian Nights she is reading to find before her a ‘beautiful young man’ who seems to have ‘dropped from the clouds’.This ‘apparition’ or ‘unreality’ is Felix and he fulfils her ‘vague wish that something would befall her’ (pp. 18, 19). 148



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Gertrude is a ‘restless’ member of this household, happy to go along with the excuse that she has a headache which prevents her attending church, a compromise which allies her with the new arrivals from Europe. The Baroness remarks that the local Bostonians ‘“are very sincere; they don’t tell fibs”’ (p. 66), anticipating a similar wry observation made by Mrs Luna in The Bostonians. She herself has no such difficulty: she flatters old Mrs Acton by confiding that her son has spoken much of her – not the case, as he knows, and she realizes she has ‘struck a false note’ (p. 74). She is quick to invent an excuse for Clifford Wentworth’s presence in her house when Acton calls one night, though she does confess her misdemeanour to him. Knowing that ‘[s]he is a woman who will lie’, Acton nevertheless wishes to marry her (131). And finally, it emerges at the end of the novel that, despite her assurances otherwise, she has never signed the papers freeing her from her morganatic marriage to the Prince Adolf Silberstadt-Schreckenstein (a name that might have come from a comic opera). The Baroness and her brother agree that at the home of the Wentworths, seven and a half miles outside Boston, ‘“we are in the suburbs of Paradise”’ (p. 65). The unpeopled landscapes of pristine beauty which they observe are reminiscent of the grand vistas of an unfallen America celebrated by the Hudson River school of painters. Indeed, Felix, mocked by his sister as ‘“a penniless correspondent of an illustrated paper”’, affirms that it is ‘“the country of sunsets”’ (pp. 7, 119).And when Eugenia and Acton take a drive, they see ‘almost no houses; there was nothing but woods and rivers and lakes and horizons adorned with bright-looking mountains’ (p. 68). It is the decade of the 1840s, the point at which Thomas Cole’s paintings began to inspire the movement which celebrated the sublime potential of the American landscape. James, it seems, had simply wanted to locate the novel in an earlier generation; his attitude to history was nothing if not flexible, as he admitted to Howells: ‘for the sake of the picturesque I shall play havoc with the New England background of 1830!’ The plain but elegant lives of the Wentworth family reflect a society active before the Fall and the loss of innocence marked by the Civil War. Their home, a large clean house sparely furnished and overlooked by elm trees (those ‘amiable elms’ typifying the villages James would later observe in The American Scene (pp. 48–49)), stands open, ‘unguarded … with the trustfulness of the golden age … with that of New England’s silvery prime’ (p. 18). In a letter, James Russell Lowell congratulated James on such insights: ‘You revived in me the feeling of cold furniture which New England life has so often goose-fleshed me with [so] that I laughed and shivered at once’.6 Felix, appreciative of the abundant fare on offer, is reminded of a classical scene in some Renaissance painting – ‘the mythological era, when they spread their tables upon the grass, replenished them from cornucopias’ (p. 45). The manners of these people are initially disquieting for the visitors from Europe, but their silences are not ‘necessarily restrictive or resentful’; it is simply ‘the silence of expectation, of modesty’ (p. 34). Gertrude confesses to Felix that ‘“We are 149



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not fond of amusement”’, and he agrees: ‘“You don’t seem to me to get all the pleasure out of life that you might”’. She protests laughingly to Mr Brand (who loves and wants to marry her) that ‘“No one is happy here”’ (pp. 56, 61). And so this latter-day Eden, for all its generous values, proves unnerving to young Felix, ‘“an obscure Bohemian”’, as his sister calls him (p. 7). It is a characterization lost on Gertrude, who recognizes its geographical rather than ‘figurative meaning’ (p. 58). In an attempt to soften the bareness of her surroundings, the Baroness decorates her cottage with India shawls and fabrics, silk blinds, velvet and lace, though, ironically, when they visit, the Wentworth girls wonder whether she doesn’t need some help in tidying up. Calling on the dying Mrs Acton in her home, Eugenia appreciates its opulent furnishings, all imported – the blue china-ware, the Oriental rug, pagodas, ivory cabinets, screens and ‘sculptured monsters’ (p. 72). The successful son of the house, Robert, has travelled in China, bringing home ‘“a fortune”’ in such luxury goods: ‘she had thought of just such a house as this when she decided to come to America’ (pp. 27, 129). More recently, he has visited Newport, Rhode Island, to visit an ill friend, also with links to China. The detail is precise, for a number of Newport families had commercial interests in China at the time, including James’s wealthy relatives, the Kings. His much-loved cousin,Vernon King, killed in the Civil War, was buried in Newport. Eugenia’s aestheticizing tendencies are also applied to the human scene. In this antebellum world she notes disappointedly that the Wentworths’ establishment boasts ‘no stout negress in a red turban, lowering the bucket into the great shinglehooded well’ (p. 18), as if that would have added to the picturesqueness of the scene. In time she rectifies this by hiring her own servant, Azarina, ‘an ancient negress, the contrast of whose polished ebony and whose crimson turban had been at first a source of satisfaction to her’. But despite her appearance, Azarina proves a disappointment: her conversation is ‘anything but African’, and Eugenia is soon reminded of ‘the tiresome old ladies she met in society’ (p. 113). Such ironic social observation is typical of this novel which fulfils James’s original promise to Howells that he would provide for him ‘a very joyous little romance’. It ends in a succession of marriages, its reassuring optimism only slightly qualified by the Baroness’s lone return to Europe and an uncertain future. Reviews of The Europeans were generally positive, admiring the subtlety of James’s observations, the accuracy of his portrait of New England life, and the elegance of his style. Certain reservations also emerge, however, suggesting that the plot lacks incident and that the protagonists are a little bloodless, a term applied by Richard Grant White in his lengthy article in the North American Review.7 W.E. Henley in the Academy similarly points to James’s seeming intention ‘less to write a story’ than ‘to show off the spiritual machinery of some six or eight men and women’ (CR, p. 49). What might have pleased James most perhaps were the passing comparisons of his writing to Balzac and Turgenev. 150



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Two Visits: Tennyson and George Eliot James spent the autumn of 1878 in London, with various excursions to the country houses with which he was becoming familiar. At the end of November he was invited to stay with Mrs Richard Greville who had, as well as a house in Knightsbridge, a country place near Godalming in Surrey called ‘The Cottage’. She was a kindly woman, ‘friend of the supereminent’ as James was to observe in The Middle Years (p. 454), and thought by Virginia Woolf in 1917 to belong emphatically to a now-extinct generation.8 James accepted her hospitality, while privately dismissing her as ‘crazy, stage-struck, scatter-brained …. on the whole the greatest fool I have ever known’. Just a few miles away, near Haslemere, Tennyson had overseen the building of Aldworth, a French-style Gothic mansion, where, in company with Mrs Greville, James was invited to lunch. Afterwards they joined the poet laureate in his study and, invited to request something to be recited, James chose ‘Locksley Hall’, the early-Victorian narrative of disappointed love and an optimistic critique of contemporary society. Having been given a volume of his poems as a boy, he had much admired Tennyson’s work, but this reading by its author proved rudely disappointing. James looked out of the window at a scene reminiscent of the poem’s o ­ pening – it was a ‘windy, watery autumn day’ – and despite knowing it was an experience to be remembered, remained unmoved by this ‘fine Tennysonian growl’. The reason, he decided, was simple: ‘Tennyson was not Tennysonian’ – an idea that he repeats (TMY, pp. 465, 460). James had already met Tennyson, a native of Lincolnshire, and, on one of these occasions the talk had been mostly about ‘port-wine & tobacco’ when James noticed the poet’s ‘strange rustic accent’. He had been immensely flattered, though, at having had one of his tales, probably ‘Madame de Mauves’, ‘superlatively commended’ by the older man (NSB, p. 461). They were very different creatures, however, as Anne Thackeray Ritchie observed when she read, with some irritation, James’s portrait of Tennyson in The Middle Years in 1917. She reported to his son Hallam a conversation with Mrs Walter Page, wife of the American ambassador, and also a friend of James’s, who had commented that ‘never were two persons more apart, that Henry was absolutely incapable of understanding Tennysons spiritual greatness & might – that Henry could not even conceive with all his fine intuition and humanity & perception of tangible things, the great inspiration that she felt more & more & that others were realising more every day’.9 The day after this visit to Aldworth, and again in company with Mrs Greville,10 James called on other neighbours, George Eliot and George Henry Lewes, who, three years earlier, had bought The Heights, a substantial quite modern house in Witley, not far from Godalming. He was by this time quite well acquainted with the couple, while Mrs Greville was a ‘most frequent caller’ who, it seems, ‘popped in 151



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without warning’.11 It was another wet day and the atmosphere unrelaxed, despite Mrs Greville’s presence, the laboured conversation a kind of journey up Mount Olympus.The visit was brief, and there being no prospect of tea, ‘a conceivable feature of the hour’, the pair soon took their leave. As they headed for their waiting carriage Lewes dashed out, returning to James’s hands two ‘blue-bound volumes’ which had been passed on to the Leweses by Mrs Greville. James invites us to share his own dismay at ‘the horrid truth’ when, once inside the carriage, he realizes that he is holding his own work, The Europeans, seemingly unwanted and with no recognition that he is their author (NSB, pp. 451–453). This was a humiliating outcome, but James may have misread the episode. Eliot’s biographer, Gordon Haight, offers a different interpretation, pointing out that Mrs Greville had loaned the volumes to the Leweses on 19 October and that as they were due to leave Witley ten days after this visit they wished to return them. Their failure was in not realizing ‘James’s projected vision of the occasion, in which George Eliot should recognize that he too was doing “her sort of work”…. Focussed on his own feelings, James’s mind failed to sense the tragic misery on that sad hearthstone’.12 In the company of the person recognized as England’s greatest living novelist, it is understandable that James had hoped for some acknowledgment of his own efforts. But Eliot had more pressing concerns: it was to be a dark time for the couple and Lewes was already becoming increasingly ill. Just four weeks later, on 30 November, he died of enteritis.

Observations on British Society It was an unusually cold winter and James headed north to spend Christmas in the Yorkshire home of the Gaskell family,Thornes House, near Wakefield. He also fitted in a few days at Lord Houghton’s, at Fryston Hall, near Castleford, not far away.The distinction between the ruling and the working classes was particularly marked in this industrialized region, as this visitor noted: ‘Yorkshire smoke=country  is very ugly and depressing, both as regards the smirched & blackened landscape & the dense & dusky population, who form a not very attractive element in that great total of labor & poverty on whose enormous base all the luxury & leisure of English country-houses are built up’. In an essay of the time,‘An English New Year’, James made reference to the general economic gloom both in Britain and America, not easily dispelled even by ‘the light of Christmas firesides’. Nevertheless he admired that ‘feature of English civilization’ which ensured that the poor and needy were supported by funds both public and private, visiting for the first time an English workhouse, redolent with the ‘odour of suet-pudding’, where his hostess (specified simply as ‘a lady’) distributed gifts to 150 local children. James recalled the opening of Oliver Twist, and indeed it was a poignant scene, as the ‘infantine bunch’ 152



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gathered to sing ‘a melancholy hymn’ to their benefactress (CTWGBA, pp. 219, 223–224). Though he enjoyed a visit to York Minster, he found, more mundanely, that ‘the Yorkshire climate has given me back the chill-blains of infancy’. The severe weather continued when James returned to London, as he complained to his mother:‘[v]iolent cold, torrents of driving sleet, poisonous pitch-black fogs – no abomination is wanting to it…. I have paid for all this by a violent cold, & the worst sore throat I have ever had’. He continued with a string of social engagements into the spring, however, all the time registering the mannerisms and speech patterns of the British upper classes. Among ‘the golden youth of every description’ he noticed ‘London colloquialisms. I certainly heard more “I says,” than I heard ever done before…. what I meant to indicate is the (I think) incontestable fact that certain people in English Society talk in a very off hand, informal, irregular manner, & use a great many roughnesses & crudities’. Now thoroughly immersed in London society of the time, he could privately conclude that ‘[t]he genius of conversation in the great upper middle-class is not a dazzling muse; it is a plain-faced, portly matron, well covered up in warm, woolen garments & fond of an after dinner nap’. And the inborne sense of entitlement, the cavalier treatment of staff, the ineluctable barriers of class, clearly caught his attention: ‘[i]t is part of the British code that you can call a servant any name you like, & many people have a fixed name for their butler, which all the successive occupants of the place are obliged to assume, so that the family needn’t change its habits’. It is often to his sister Alice that James makes such observations: for instance, as an American he was still occasionally surprised at the stolidity of the British diet. At the height of summer 1879 he complained, ‘I am sick for the bosom of nature – for breezes & blue sky – for lovely hills & ponds – even for a peach – a pear – a melon. If I ask for some “fruit” at the Club, they offer me a black-currant tart!!’. At the end of February 1879, James took a trip to the seaside town of Hastings, on the Channel coast, where he met Julian Hawthorne, the novelist’s son. There was a little shared history as Hawthorne had attended Frank Sanborn’s school in Concord with the two younger James brothers, Bob and WiIky. Now that he had been commissioned by Macmillan to write a short book on Hawthorne, James was keen for an interview. His initial approach had been tentative, and he was aware, perhaps, that Julian Hawthorne, as journalist and writer, might have considered himself more suitable for the task. James, with humorous self-deprecation, takes the line that the best candidate would be an American, and so ‘I could think (in all modesty) of no American who didn’t seem likely to do it worse than I’. It is clear, however, that Hawthorne was unenthusiastic at the prospect of encountering his more illustrious compatriot: ‘I don’t know that I can tell him anything useful; however I shall be glad to see him; he has hitherto kept out of my way, either purposely or not; but now that he thinks I can serve him, he finds out my address. Well, that is all right and natural; we shall see what sort of an impression we make upon each other’.13 153



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The meeting turned out to be amicable and the two men continued their acquaintance over the next two decades and more, though there is no evidence that James gained any significant insights for his projected book. And there remained an element of unease on both sides, for James appeared more British than American to the younger man, whom he in turn considered ‘by no means cultivated or in any way illuminated. He detests England & the English, & reminds one so a dozen times a day’. A journal entry made by James at this time (CN, p. 9), a brief dialogue on the topic of hating the English, may relate to this meeting and perhaps indicates some thoughts for a piece of fiction. Despite a sense of social ennui during these months, James maintained a busy diary. As his mother was his only regular correspondent, news from Cambridge was sparse, though he was delighted to hear that his sister-in-law Alice (whom he had yet to meet) had given birth to a baby boy in May, to be called Henry. Meantime, in his professional life he was developing a more business-like approach in his dealings with publishers. His rapid success as a writer in England, far out-stripping his standing in America, put him at an advantage in such discussions. He quite forcefully negotiated terms, for instance, so that, after (or towards the end of) a serial run, publication could take place on both sides of the Atlantic in order to maximize profits. He also timed publication so as to forestall pirated versions of his work. Material initially published in magazines was reissued in book form, and earlier novels were quickly revised for republication. Watch and Ward, which had been serialized only in the Atlantic Monthly, was published in book form in May 1878; in February 1879 ‘Daisy Miller’ was repackaged in England along with ‘An International Episode’ and ‘Four Meetings’ by Macmillan; a new ‘authorized’ edition of The American came out in March, a ‘new edition’ of The Europeans in April, and Roderick Hudson in ‘minutely revised’ form in June; in October that year Macmillan issued The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales, in two volumes, containing six stories in all. He remained in London until autumn 1879, working on Hawthorne, but also embarking on a ‘serial tale’, Confidence, which had been commissioned by the New York magazine, Scribner’s Monthly, a less prestigious but widely circulating rival to the Atlantic Monthly, for which he was pleased to be paid $1,500 (£309).When this work came to book publication, James again ensured that head should rule over heart. Abandoning Macmillan’s (who were hurt, but as a consequence improved their offer for later works) he assigned the novel to Chatto and Windus, receiving £100 ($485) for a three-year lease of English copyright. With the summer came some welcome visitors. In June, his old friends Henry and Clover Adams arrived for an extended stay before also taking in Spain. Henry saw much of them, accompanying them to receptions at what he later called the ‘damask-hung temple of the Grosvenor Gallery’ (TMY, p. 434). On 18 June Ivan Turgenev received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford and two 154



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days later James gave a celebratory dinner for him at the Reform Club to which were also invited a number of British literary men: ‘it was all extremely pleasant, dear Ivan Sergeitch being at his best & most charming’, James observed. He also met up with Isabella Stewart Gardner, the rich collector and patron of the arts, who later created the Venetian-style palazzo, Fenway Court, in Boston. The two made plans together to visit Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, the historic Jacobean home of the Cecil family. It had been a busy year and on 1 September James left London for Paris for an extended stay of more than three months. He would have gone on to Italy if winter blizzards and snowstorms had not blocked his way. Nevertheless, the trip provided a break, not from ‘comfortable, leisurely work’, but from the fashionable social round into which he had been absorbed, that is, ‘dinners, invitations, conversation, & the whole dress-coat existence’.

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Though James had ‘arrived’ socially in Britain, after three seasons he was finding the demands of dining out – ‘the need of swallowing inscrutable entrées &, tugging at the relaxed bell-rope of one’s brain for a feeble tinkle of conversation’ – to be excessive. Afternoon calls were similarly onerous and he complained (in all seriousness) to his mother of ‘diabolical attacks of pain in my head … in consequence of a prolonged spell of deep potations of tea’. Partly perhaps to free himself from such social demands, James made two extended continental trips in 1879–1880 – a three-month stay in Paris at the end of the year, and, in spring 1880, a further two months in Italy. That Italian spring also saw the termination of one important relationship and the beginning of another. He set off for Paris on 1 September, finding ‘a very tidy little lodging’ at 42 rue Cambon (formerly rue de Luxembourg).There he continued to enjoy the company of Clover and Henry Adams, visited Bougival to see Turgenev once again, and spent three days at Varennes with the Lee Childes. At first he avoided seeing any plays – ‘for ventilatory reasons’ – only a month later confessing to having been ‘a good deal to the theatres’, though only once to the Théâtre-Français. He was also working hard in Paris and, as an established name, was able to negotiate more advantageous deals with his publishers (especially the ‘unremunerative’ Macmillan’s). He had hoped to visit Italy, but heavy snowstorms and blizzards made that impossible. In Paris, ‘[t]he snow was piled up in the streets breast-high, traffic was impossible & existence inconvenient’. And so, without any farewells, James ‘bolted’, and was back in London by 12 December.

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Confidence Two new works were published at the end of 1879, Confidence, ‘in 2 very pretty vols’ (57), and his extended ‘critical essay’ on Hawthorne. Confidence was to finish its serial run in January 1880 in what James called ‘that puerile periodical’, Scribner’s Monthly; it earned well both as a serial and in book form, though it is now, understandably, one of his least known novels. Yet he had had high hopes for it initially, assuring his mother that ‘It will be very good indeed – much better than the Europeans, which I never thought good’. But Confidence is most interesting now, perhaps, from a biographical perspective. Central to the plot is the friendship between two rich young American men, Bernard Longueville, ‘so good-looking that he might have been a fool and yet be forgiven’ (1: 38), and Gordon Wright, whose ‘features were thick and rather irregular … his countenance … derived a certain grace from a powerful yellow moustache, to which its wearer occasionally gave a martial twist’ (1: 47). There are loose parallels with the two oldest James brothers. Gordon has scientific interests, ‘a firmly-treading rather than a winged, intellect’ and has spent time in Germany, ‘supposing it to be the land of laboratories’, while Bernard has been a student of the Law (1: 33, 36, 39). James’s extended preparatory note of 7 November 1878 indicates that the ‘William’ character will be ‘simpler, deeper, more masculine, more easily puzzled, less intellectual, less imaginative’, while his author brother will be represented as ‘the subtle, the refined, the fanciful, the eminently modern’ man (CN, p. 6). Bernard, while staying in Siena, happened to make a sketch of Angela Vivian, a girl escorted by her mother, though when, by chance, he comes across the pair again in the spa town of Baden-Baden where he has arranged to meet Gordon, she makes no acknowledgment of that earlier encounter. Ironically Gordon is now in love with Angela, but is persuaded against marriage by Bernard who mistrusts her, believing her to be motivated by money. It seems that Gordon takes Bernard’s advice and all go their separate ways. Years have passed and Bernard is surprised to learn that Gordon has married another girl, Blanche Evers, characterized as ‘simply the American pretty girl, whom he had seen a thousand times’ and, as a ‘type’, confident, chatty and flirtatious, a variant on the Daisy Miller character (1: 50). Bernard feels that in having warned his friend against Angela Vivian, he may have wronged her (1: 263). By chance Bernard meets Angela again; she remains unmarried and is staying with her mother in a pretty village on the Normandy coast. He realizes he has always loved her. When all the protagonists meet up again in Paris, Gordon is outraged: his marriage is going badly and he feels betrayed by Bernard. He will divorce Blanche and marry Angela himself. She, however, with what is described as the ‘real discernment’ unique to women realizes that the marriage of Blanche and Gordon can be 157



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saved: the two have treated each other badly: having married her because she was ‘silly’, he must simply take her more seriously (2: 214). Bernard need not, in any case, feel guilty since he was less influential than he thought – Angela was the one who twice refused Gordon’s proposal made in spite of Bernard’s advice. And so the novel ends happily with the marriage of Angela and Bernard, and Mrs Vivian affirms her complete ‘confidence’ in her son-in-law (2: 86). Sheldon Novick has speculated that the scene on the Normandy coast in which Bernard realizes he is, for the first time, in love may have been inspired by James’s 1876 stay in Étretat and by his passion for Paul Zhukovsky.The village with its cliffs and small casino is certainly similar to Étretat, and the fact that it boasts a fictitious name, Blanquais-les-Galets, may have given the novelist further latitude to draw upon the private sensations of that summer. Bernard/Henry has at last been introduced to the momentous experience of reciprocated romantic love: ‘For these things one lived; these were the things that people had died for. Love had been a fable before this …. now he stood in a personal relation to these familiar ideas, which gave them a very much keener import; they had laid their hand upon him in the darkness, he felt it upon his shoulder, and he knew by its pressure that it was the hand of destiny’ (2: 43). In fact, what can now be read as a kind of romantic comedy was initially planned as a darker, melodramatic piece. Blanche, having become an impediment to her husband’s amorous intentions, was to die, and he was to be implicated in her death, while the Angela figure (originally called Bianca) was to reject both of her suitors for ‘a religious life’. After the complaints from friends and public about the sad ending of The American and the kindlier reception accorded to The Europeans, James may have been anxious about the commercial consequences of not pleasing one’s readers. Though the novel’s range of locations – Siena, Baden-Baden, New York, London, the Normandy coast and Paris – mostly correspond to James’s own recent travels, its one-word title, Confidence, seems reminiscent of those Victorian plays often derived from French sources which James was reviewing in the mid-1870s, for example, Tom Robertson’s Society, Ours, Caste, Play, School or Peril. And a minor character, the unfortunate Captain Lovelock, ‘“an Englishman … aristocratically connected … rather rakish”’ (1: 82), who loses at gambling and provides a potential love interest for Blanche, seems derived from the popular drama of the day. Similarly, the novel’s dénouement in which Angela Vivian takes control of the errant men and imposes a happy ending, a sentimental conclusion in which woman’s wisdom and good sense are affirmed, is reassuringly optimistic, just right for what James refers to as the ‘“nice people”’ who are ‘English patrons of the drama’, an audience, he archly suggests, looking ‘as if it had come to the play in its own carriage, after a dinner of beef and pudding’ (CWHJD, pp. 216, 215).

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This was the point, ‘the 197th page of the second volume’, at which the anonymous Spectator reviewer (up to here complimentary) found that the heroine, ‘and all the rest of the dramatis personae with her, become … incomprehensible.… What could Mr. James have been thinking of?’ (CH, p. 85). The reviewer here was Julian Hawthorne, as James was aware; he quickly dismissed the piece as ‘wrong-headed & crude’. James changed the ending at the last minute, ‘for the better!’ as he assured the editor of Scribner’s, so the sentimental may have replaced the sensational. Brother William, always bracingly honest in his criticism of his brother’s work, felt that Confidence lacked gravity, though the reviewers, both British and American, were generally complimentary, admiring James’s style, his observational skills and his ability to establish a sense of place. T.S. Perry in the Atlantic decided that it was ‘an ingeniously devised situation’ rather than a novel, and that it shouldn’t be taken too seriously. He hoped, too, that James would in the future ‘give us novels of a higher flight’ (CR, pp. 96–97).

Hawthorne: A ‘Short Sketch’ Just two days after the book publication of Confidence, on 12 December 1879, Macmillan published Hawthorne. James had finished working on it in Paris, and it was well received in England. Feelings were, however, very different in America and the slim volume caused a critical storm. With such comments as, ‘Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them’, this is hardly surprising (Hawthorne, p. 153). Even more inflammatory was James’s now notorious listing of those aspects of British life and institutions, for which America, lacking ‘high civilization’ and tradition, has no equivalents: ‘no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses … no great Universities nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton, nor Harrow …’ – the list continues for ten lines (p. 43). He must have known that such endorsement of a social system based upon privilege and inherited wealth would outrage his fellow Americans, though this kaleidoscope of cultural institutions can be read, too, as a token of affection addressed to his newly adopted country. He had, after all, been made welcome and admitted to the heart of the British establishment. It is James’s opinion that ‘the flower of art blooms only where the soil is deep … it takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature … it needs a complex social machinery to set a writer in motion’. And so, with a comparative paucity of history, Puritan New England provides only meagre sustenance for a prospective artist: Hawthorne is held up as just one of ‘[t]hree or four beautiful talents of trans-Atlantic growth … in this modest nosegay’ (p. 3). Much of his

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boyhood had been spent in Salem, Massachusetts, one of ‘that rather melancholy group of old c­ oast-towns, scattered along the great sea-face of New England’. Like many smaller American towns, it is to ‘English eyes … primitive and rustic’, a place where ‘the “county” has no social existence’, and the villagers lack any ‘superincumbent strata of gentility’ (p. 15). The term ‘county’ with its specifically English resonance, signifies the landed gentry, and, implicitly, their civilizing influence. When, as a teenager, Hawthorne moved to rural Maine, James imagines a comparable ‘social dreariness’ and Bowdoin College where he studied is described as ‘a homely, simple, frugal, “country college,” of the old-fashioned American stamp’ (pp. 18, 19). Nevertheless, Longfellow was a fellow-student, and Franklin Pierce, later America’s fourteenth president, was a year ahead. Some rural pursuits were available, but, sadly, ‘[p]oor Hawthorne was indeed thousands of miles away from Oxford and Cambridge’ (p. 20). Hawthorne’s early adult years were reclusive, and the future offered limited prospect of pleasure or diversion. Though James had reservations about the 1876 biography of Hawthorne by his son-in-law, George Parsons Lathrop, he selects from it the scene of a social evening for family and friends who examine together ‘Flaxman’s designs for Dante’, the engravings which illustrate The Divine Comedy. The company humbly aspires to appreciate together ‘great works of art at a distance’, though Europe seems impossibly remote from this ‘little unadorned parlour, with the snow-drifts of a Massachusetts winter piled up about its windows, and a group of sensitive and serious people, modest votaries of opportunity, fixing their eyes upon a bookful of Flaxman’s attenuated outlines’ (p. 71). James had imagined a comparable scene himself in one of his ‘Florentine Notes’, published in 1874, in which the cold sparseness of opportunity in New England is juxtaposed with the prospective delights of Italy. He turns suddenly from recounting the mixed pleasures of the Florentine carnival, to a scene closer to home and mysteriously anonymous: ‘it occurs to me that by a remote New England fireside an unsophisticated young person of either sex is reading in an old volume of travels or an old romantic tale some account of these anniversaries and appointed revels as old Catholic lands offer them to view’. He repeats the epithet ‘young person’ several times as if to avoid the question of gender: was he speaking of himself, or possibly recalling some conversation with Minny Temple in which she had voiced her longing for Europe? This person may enjoy ‘a vision of sculptured palace-fronts draped in crimson and gold and shining in a southern sun; of a motley train of maskers sweeping on in voluptuous confusion’. But the sound of the relentless Connecticut clock is only momentarily suppressed, and the reader turns to gaze out of the window: ‘The dusk is falling on the beaten snow. Down the road is a white wooden meeting-house, looking grey among the drifts’. By contrast, ‘the flickering chiaroscuro of the future’ can be glimpsed in the firelight, to be experienced perhaps ‘twenty years hence!’ (CTWC, p. 544). 160



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Though Europe is assumed to be necessary to the development of the artist, Hawthorne was almost fifty when he first visited, having been appointed American consul in Liverpool by President Franklin Pierce. After several years he resigned this post and travelled to Italy, staying in Rome and Florence. Italy provided the setting for The Marble Faun, ‘a charming romance with intrinsic weaknesses’ (Hawthorne, p. 166), but it is, in any case, Hawthorne’s New England fiction that James most admires. The appearance of The Scarlet Letter on the family’s table was an event in his own childhood, its title innocently assumed to refer to some correspondence of ‘unaccustomed hue’ (p. 110). This is the work which transcends its limiting origins, breaking free from James’s bleak depiction of the provincial native scene, ‘a literary event of the first importance.… Something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as anything that had been received, and the best of it was that the thing was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New England’ (p. 111). When in his memoir James recalls the news of Hawthorne’s death in 1864 – the Civil War still waging – the sense of personal connection is evident. In a scene quite Whitmanesque he admits to tears: ‘I sit once more, half-dressed, late of a summer morning and in a bedimmed light which is somehow at once that of dear old green American shutters drawn to against openest windows and that of a moral shadow projected as with violence – I sit on my belated bed, I say, and yield to the pang that made me positively and loyally cry’ (p. 320). Hawthorne stands, for James at this later date, as one of the few American figures of international stature, an artist of emphatically American sensibility, his ‘tone’, ‘in its beauty … ever so appreciably American; which proved to what a use American matter could be put by an American hand … the moral was that an American could be an artist.… Hawthorne had become one just by being American enough’ (NSB, pp. 320, 323). James later came to regret his repeated use of the term ‘provincial’, though he seems to have found it difficult to accept that many Americans were affronted by his book.When W.D. Howells raised the issue, he defiantly asserted his preparedness to ‘do battle for most of the convictions expressed’ and his letters of the time remain unrepentant. He protested to Lizzie Boott that ‘[w]e are surely the most-thinskinned idiots in the world, & I blush for my compatriots’, while to Charles Eliot Norton he complained in further dubious terms that Hawthorne had created ‘a very big tempest in a very small tea-pot’: ‘it seems to me like the clucking of a brood of prairie-hens. My critics, either literally or essentially, seem to me all to have been of the hen-sex’. In 1879 James enjoyed his Christmas dinner with compatriots of an earlier generation, Russell Sturgis, a partner in Barings Bank (father of his friend Howard Sturgis) and his third wife, Julia, coming away pleased with two prizes won in a gift raffle, a cigar case and a photograph-frame. He saw in the New Year once again with the Milnes Gaskells in Yorkshire, attending two balls and energetically 161



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dancing with ‘the British maiden’. On the professional front, whatever the critical contumely crossing the Atlantic, Hawthorne’s publishers, Macmillan, were pleased with his work. To his father he reported that John Morley had judged it ‘The Best of the series!!’, and Frederick Macmillan, son of the firm’s senior founding partner, later presented him with ‘a beautiful set of Hawthorne’s complete works … charmingly bound for me’. Nonetheless he declined a request to write a volume on Dickens, calculating that, were he to take on the task, he would offer it to the highest bidder.

Naples and Zhukovsky By mid-March James was on his way to Italy, a trip planned originally for the previous autumn and designed to avoid the London ‘season’ which had become ‘a terror’ to him (CN, p. 219). He spent five days at Folkestone, ‘looking at the sea’, before going on to Paris for a few days, finally arriving in Florence, via Turin and Bologna. Europe was enjoying a fine spring, and he was happy to see once again Lizzie Boott and her father. The painter Frank Duveneck from whom Lizzie had received lessons, had now left Munich, transferring with some of his pupils to Florence. Lizzie and Duveneck would become engaged in 1881, but as early as November 1879, James had predicted that it would be a ‘natural & logical thing’ for them to marry. Though he admired Duveneck’s work, considering him ‘the most highly-developed phenomenon in the way of a painter that the U.S.A have given birth to’, the man himself he regarded as ‘uncouth but vigorous … terribly earthy & unlicked, having barely the “form” of a civilized white’. James stayed only a few days by the banks of ‘the yellow Arno’ before journeying to Rome and then on to Naples where he was to make ‘a long-promised visit to the peculiar Joukowsky’. Here he is perhaps endorsing the values of his father to whom he writes, or simply reflecting some changed feelings concerning the young Russian. Naples was regarded by travellers as squalid and crime-ridden, though James, having been unenthusiastic about the city in 1869, was less easily repulsed at such crowded humanity. He planned to stay for five days in a pension at the Villa Postiglione, on the coast near Naples at Posillipo, where Zhukovsky also had rooms as well as a studio1 – ‘a delicious nest … with the loveliest view in the world’. Despite the beauty of the place, the visit proved a bitter disappointment. Earlier in the year Zhukovsky had become friendly with Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima (Liszt’s daughter) and was now ‘living in great intimacy’ with the family. Funded by the infatuated King Ludwig II of Bavaria,Wagner was staying in Naples, composing what would be his last opera, Parsifal, while Zhukovsky worked on its stage designs. The artist was keen to introduce James to the company, but his friend refused, pleading (inaccurately) that he spoke no German and Wagner no French. 162



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James was not especially responsive to music and he probably remembered, too, that dull evening in Paris listening to a piano reduction of Wagner highlights. More tellingly, it is clear that James’s feelings about Zhukovsky underwent change at this point. A letter to his sister written a few weeks later seems disillusioned, reflecting perhaps anger, disappointment, rejection, the friend in whom much had been invested dismissed as fickle and trivial. He is characterized as ‘the same impracticable, & indeed ridiculous, mixture of Nihilism & bric à brac as before … Jouk.’s present plan – it will probably last about six months – is to go & live at Bayreuth “afin de prendre part au grand oeuvre”: that is to paint decorations for Wagner’s operas’. James’s scoffing at Zhukovsky’s work hints at hurt feelings and a sense of betrayal. His designs were, in fact, used for Parsifal’s premiere, at Bayreuth in 1882, a historic occasion. With some scenes based on such Italianate settings as Siena Cathedral and the Palazzo Rufolo at Ravello, it was a major work which had taken Wagner 25 years to complete. James cut short his visit, very likely further disturbed by Zhukovsky’s relationship with a young man of his ménage, a Neapolitan folk singer called Pepino who was also fêted by Wagner and his family. He had been living with the painter for about three years. Later, it seems that Zhukovsky legally adopted the boy as his son, but it seems clear that this was a same-sex relationship that flourished openly within what has been called the homophile Wagner circle.2 James rapidly left, possibly jealous of this relationship, having earlier sworn ‘eternal friendship’, but perhaps also unable to accommodate the casual and public acceptance of its unconventionality. In James’s fiction the Bay of Naples seems associated with the darker emotions, his personal memories of loss, his sexual anxieties. The charming but duplicitous Madame Merle in The Portrait of a Lady goes to stay with a friend at Naples, ‘the happy possessor of a villa at Posillipo’ (p. 467). And in the extended short story ‘Georgina’s Reasons’ (1884), two sisters, Mildred dying of consumption, and Kate, loved by the hero, Raymond Benyon, take lodgings in this same ‘lovely suburb’ (CT 6: 51).Walking through the royal palace of Naples with Kate, Benyon (callously abandoned by his wife) confesses to her that ‘There is not a man in the world less free. I am a slave. I am a victim’ (64). Many years later, the names of Naples and Wagner are once more connected in The Wings of the Dove. Milly Theale and her companion, Mrs Stringham, arrive in the city, fresh from ‘the great sustained sea-light’ of the Mediterranean, a condition in which less sublime matters ‘sounded with as little effect as a trio of penny whistles might sound in a Wagner overture’ (p. 96). James fled northward, stopping at Frascati to visit Somerset Beaumont, a man he had met previously at Wenlock Abbey, and the relief he felt is immediate, as he tells his sister Alice: ‘[t]his day … derived an extra merit from the contrast of Beaumont’s admirable, honest, reasonable, wholesome English nature with the fantastic immoralities & aesthetics of the circle I had left at Naples’. It seems that he had to flee 163



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that display of sexual licence – here, to his eyes, shamelessly demonstrated – desires which he could identify, but hardly acknowledge, in himself. The dangerous insouciance of southern Europe was replaced by some ideal of uncomplicated British decency. He rejected the ‘aesthetics of the circle’, a term which frequently served as code for effeminacy or homosexuality. He carried with him, too, something of the Puritan spirit of New England: relating a version of events to Grace Norton, he comments cryptically on ‘the manners & customs of a little group of Russians.… They are about as opposed to those of Cambridge as anything could well be – but to describe them would carry me too far’. The break with Zhukovsky was not quite final: though he seems to disappear from the novelist’s life, almost thirty years later, in 1908, James was to make enquiry of him once more.3 Whether his friend Perry who was in Russia at the time met with any success is not known. A more speculative moment was identified many years ago by James’s close friend, the prolific author, Edmund Gosse, now best remembered for his memoir of mid-Victorian family life, Father and Son (1907). In an essay first published in The London Mercury after James’s death in 1920, he recalls what seems a confessional scene which occurred one summer evening in 1897. James spoke ‘in profuse and enigmatic language’ and Gosse was granted ‘a flash or glimpse of deeper things’: He spoke of standing on the pavement of a city, in the dusk, and of gazing upwards across the misty street, watching, watching for the lighting of a lamp in a window on the third storey. And the lamp blazed out, and through bursting tears he strained to see what was behind it, the unapproachable face. And for hours he stood there, wet with the rain, brushed by the phantom hurrying figures of the scene, and never from behind the lamp was for one moment visible the face ….4

This might appear to be a fictional scene, but Gosse assures the reader that, on the contrary, it was ‘something that had happened’. If so, James may have been recollecting the 1870s and the time spent in Paris when he had first met Paul Zhukovsky. The mystery remains impenetrable, typically Jamesian in its anguished inaction, and shrouded in silence. In any case, whoever’s the face, it marks some distant but still painful access of passion and loss. Italy did not now charm James quite as when he had first seen it, though it remained ‘delicious … radiant … delicately and divinely beautiful’. Having spent a few days in Rome, he returned to Florence in mid-May before leaving for London at the end of the month. He was surprised by ‘the convulsing intelligence’ that George Eliot had married John Cross. On his last visit to see her, Cross, twenty years her junior, had been present, reading aloud from Chaucer.Within a few months, she would be dead. On the regular occasions when the possibility of his own marrying was raised by his parents, it was brushed aside or joked about. He promised, for instance, to ask their consent if he were ever to consider marrying Mrs Kemble, Mrs 164



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Procter or Mrs Duncan Stewart, warning them that ‘their combined ages amount to about 250 years’. The unmarried state was more seriously discussed with Grace Norton: he concluded that, within society, the ‘amiable bachelor’ is not ‘at all amiss … I think he too may forward the cause of civilization’.

‘The Diary of a Man of Fifty’ One of James’s 1879 short stories, ‘The Diary of a Man of Fifty’, explores the question of what constitutes happiness for a middle-aged bachelor, while also touching upon further sexual anxieties. The unnamed diarist, an ex-military man, has returned to Florence after a gap of twenty-five years and relives a romantic attachment to the Contessa Salvi through meeting a handsome young Englishman, referred to only as Stanmer, a remarkable embodiment of his own earlier self. The diarist had ended his relationship with this fascinating woman and now Stanmer is in love with her widowed daughter, the Contessa Scarabelli. The older man, convinced that his own beautiful Countess had been not only a flirt but a danger to men, warns him off. Exciting passion and jealousy, she had been the cause of death of two husbands killed in duels. He suspects, too, that the current Countess has been widowed in similar circumstances, telling this newfound friend that she is an enchantress, a charmer, a fascinatress, an artist, an actress. His advice is rejected and Stanmer, we learn after a gap of years, has gone on to have a happy marriage; the older man, by contrast, is left to ponder his own life which has hardly been one of ‘positive happiness’ (4: 390). Fearing the power of the Countess, the diarist had resolved to ‘clip her fine-spun meshes’ (415), a phrase which sounds Keatsian, and indeed, Lamia (especially) may have been in James’s mind. In the poem the old philosopher Apollonius undeceives Lycius, the young man infatuated with the beautiful woman, who, when the truth is disclosed, reverts to her earlier form as a serpent. Illusion is destroyed, but the young man also dies of grief. By contrast, Stanmer, the Lycius figure in ‘The Diary’, rejects his elder’s Apollonian advice and survives happily. A further reminder of Lamia occurs in the conversation between the diarist and Stanmer in Florence’s Parco delle Cascine.The two men sit on a bench overlooked by a statue of ‘solemn, blank-eyed Hermes, with wrinkles accentuated by the dust of ages’ (4: 397). The sensational underlay of the story – the love and duels – illustrates the mortal consequences of sexual passion and one of Hermes’ roles, of course, was to accompany the souls of the dead to the afterlife. James’s Hermes now appears as a remote, neglected relic, but, significantly, another more living, youthful Hermes, ‘bent warm on amorous theft’, presides over the opening of Keats’s poem: to fulfil his own romantic quest for a nymph, he becomes the means of Lamia’s escaping her ‘wreathed tomb’, her serpent form, so that she may experience human passion. 165



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Though beautiful women carry such fatal possibilities, the story’s most developed relationship belongs to the two men, the older advising, warning, pursuing the younger, showing an interest which seems to exceed the ‘paternal’. He is aware that he aspires to an intimacy which cannot be fulfilled: ‘I … felt it to be singular that though he regarded me as a perfect stranger, I had not the same feeling about him’ (411, 394). He invites Stanmer to his room, and later to escape by accompanying him to Venice (neither of which offers are taken up). The failure of such gestures implies both the forbidden nature of same-sex desire and the often inevitable disappointment of age in pursuit of youth.

Florence: Constance Fenimore Woolson In January 1879, a short unsigned and complimentary account of The Europeans had appeared in ‘The Contributors’ Club’ section of the Atlantic Monthly.5 Its author was Constance Fenimore Woolson, grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper, celebrated chronicler of frontier life and its conflicts. Miss Woolson was herself at this time chiefly a writer of short stories, most frequently set in the Great Lakes and the post-Civil War South, regions which she knew well. Shortly after the death of her mother in 1879 she visited Europe for the first time, in company with her sister Clara Woolson Benedict and young niece Clare Rathbone Benedict. And now James discovered that she had been ‘pursuing’ him ‘through Europe with a letter of introduction from (all people in the world!) Henrietta Pell-Clark’, a recently married sister of Minny Temple’s, well-known from Newport days. Miss Woolson’s income was derived from her writing, and, aged forty, she was slightly older than James: she had read and admired his novels. Though talented and relatively successful, she was a solitary figure, her sense of isolation accentuated by deafness. After a rough Atlantic crossing, she sought out James in London, to be told that he was in Paris. It was in Florence that the two finally met, in spring 1880: James clearly enjoyed her company, acting as a guide on their morning visits and sightseeing trips around the city and her short story, ‘A Florentine Experiment’ (1880), reflects on this experience. She also consulted him on the writing of fiction, though wasn’t always able, he admitted, to hear his answers. He perhaps felt some resentment when Fenimore’s first novel, Anne, enjoyed popular acclaim when published in 1882, though she was quick to reassure him of his superiority as an artist. James returned to London at the end of May, and Fenimore resumed her travels around Europe, but their friendship – despite what seems a troubling intensity on her part – would endure over the years. Fenimore (the name by which he called her – by others she was known as Constance) is an exception among James’s female friends: the intimacy he enjoyed with women was generally circumscribed either

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by their being married or by their greater age. He clearly became attached to her and they met often, but it was a relationship about which he was secretive; she is mentioned little (and then sometimes patronizingly) in his letters, for instance. Writing to Lizzie Boott, he refers to her as ‘The Litteratrice’; though she is ‘really an angel of quiet virtue’, he wouldn’t think of ‘taking’ her as a wife – ‘ma non prenderò neppure lei!’ – distancing himself, perhaps, from such a blunt comment – ‘but I won’t take even her’ – by using Italian. Such concealment may signify various possibilities, not the least, occasional irritating false rumours in the press that Mr James was engaged to be married. For Fenimore, unlike the heroine of ‘A Florentine Experiment’, there could be no happy ending in marriage – far from it, but that was in the future. For the time these two hard-working professional writers found mutual pleasure in each other’s company. Having embarked on a new and independent phase of life, she never returned to America, moving ceaselessly around Europe, her fiction reflecting her changed perspective.

Washington Square By contrast, the action of James’s Washington Square, first published serially in the second half of 1880 and appearing almost simultaneously in both England and America, returns to New York, the city of his birth. This short novel has, with justice, enjoyed considerable popularity, but James himself was less enthusiastic, telling W.D. Howells he had completed ‘a poorish story in three numbers – a tale purely American, the writing of which made me feel acutely the want of the “paraphernalia”’, by which he must mean the absence of the kind of cultural heritage itemized in the Hawthorne volume. Contemporary reviewers noted a French influence, however, the realist fiction of Maupassant, Daudet and Zola, and later critics have observed the work’s broad similarities to Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet. James’s young, innocent, Catherine Sloper falls in love with an unworthy young man, Morris Townsend, who is disapproved of by her wealthy father. She will be cut out of her father’s will if they should marry and, learning of this, Morris retreats. Distinctions are to be made, however: in the French novel money has a practical physical tangibility, while in Washington Square the power of wealth remains an offstage, abstract presence. Balzac’s is a scene of provincial life, while, for James, the setting of midnineteenth-century Manhattan makes it an emphatically urban, American piece, depicting New York in an earlier, more innocent state, its observations fleetingly touching on James’s own childhood memories and ‘the tenderness of early associations’ (p. 23). Through reference to the first grand residence of Catherine’s father, Dr Sloper, near City Hall, the novel stretches back to the early years of the century, but in the narrative’s brief historical resumé, he has, by 1835, moved ‘uptown’ to

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avoid the encroaching ‘murmur of trade’. He has a house built on Washington Square, embodying ‘the last results of architectural science’, and here most of the novel’s important scenes are played out (pp. 22, 23). Its opening pages hint at autobiography as the narrator announces that ‘It was here … that you had come into a world which appeared to offer a variety of sources of interest’. This world includes a hospitable grandmother, a nursery-maid, a child’s first steps, the odour of ailanthus trees, the first school overseen by an old lady with an unmatching cup and saucer – the affluent world represented in this ‘topographical parenthesis’, as he calls it, to which he would return more fully in A Small Boy and Others. New York City retains a rural air: Dr Sloper’s sister, Mrs Almond, lives, for instance, in a higher street number in which a few ‘desultory Dutch houses’ survive, ‘where pigs and chickens disported themselves in the gutter’ (p. 24). The future is, however, embodied by the young man, engaged to Mrs Almond’s daughter, who proclaims that ‘the way to live in New York’ is ‘to move every three or four years’ (p. 36). He invokes ‘Excelsior’ – the motto of onwards and upwards – the theme of the popular poem by Longfellow, not especially admired by James. By contrast, at the end of the novel, its heroine, now accepting spinsterhood, remains sitting in her drawing room overlooking the Square, considered eccentric and old-fashioned in not opting for the alternative, more modest conveniences of a modern brownstone. For Dr Sloper and Mrs Almond, money and the question of inheritance figure largely. He jokes to his daughter Catherine, dressed in a crimson gown, that she looks as if she had ‘eighty thousand a year’, later adding that Morris Townsend, who will become her suitor, must think this too (p. 33). Even he is slightly shocked when Mrs Almond clumsily implies that his daughter’s chief merit is ‘the prospect of thirty thousand a year’ (p. 49). The doctor, with his preference for ‘the ironical form’ (p. 32), compares his own logic and consistency to ‘a geometrical proposition’ (p. 156), but an alternative, though equally extreme mode is represented by the doctor’s other sister, Mrs Penniman, an impecunious, dependent widow, who lives with the family. Her ‘imagination’, romantic and fantastical in its comic excess, proves as misguided as Dr Sloper’s cynicism. She is disappointed to find that Catherine prefers for an interview with her suitor ‘a chintz-covered parlour to a sentimental tryst beside a fountain sheeted with dead leaves’ (p. 74). She aspires to the (melo)dramatic, imagining herself as confidante, Chorus, or simply delivering the epilogue. At a ‘tryst’ with Morris at a downtown oyster-saloon on Seventh Avenue, a populous location at odds with the novel’s prevailingly genteel social milieu (oysters were the food of the poor), Mrs Penniman appears wearing a veil to conceal her identity. More practically, Morris orders an oyster stew (p. 118). Dr Sloper, the man of science, considers his daughter to be a goose and a simpleton, ‘both ugly and overdressed’ (p. 21), and when he takes her to Europe (in an attempt to make her forget Morris), she appears to him to be ‘“as intelligent as the 168



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bundle of shawls”’ (p. 175). Indeed, Catherine who began her life by disappointing this father who had lost first his promising son and then his wife, has ‘a plain, dull, gentle countenance’ and will never ‘shine’ (p. 16). This is the originality of James’s conception of his heroine, for, avoiding sentimentality, he has created a figure of undemonstrative rightness of feeling and integrity. In the materialistic world predicated on money and real estate, Catherine’s vision is innocent and guileless – she sometimes speaks and responds so simply that she appears clever – and so, of course, she falls victim to two men, her father and her unworthy suitor. Her life, she finally learns, is irrevocably spoilt by them and these were ‘the great facts of her career’; it is a cruelly incontrovertible lesson: ‘they were always there, like her name, her age, her plain face’ (p. 244). By concluding years later, the novel’s tragic dimension is further extended. Her father demands that she promise never to marry Morris, but she refuses, and on the former’s death, finds that she has been cut out of his will: by now, with a small allowance, she really doesn’t care. When Morris eventually returns to New York and she hears of him, she discovers that the feelings she thought ‘dead’ retain some ‘vitality’ (p. 256).With Mrs Penniman’s connivance he pays her one final visit and she can hardly recognize him, though her father had earlier warned her that he had grown ‘“fat and bald”’; she wonders what had happened to ‘the most beautiful young man in the world’ (p. 247). In his initial note of 21 February 1879 which outlines what would become Washington Square, James ends by describing this outcome as ‘the retribution of time’ (CN, pp. 11–12). It was Mrs Kemble who had provided the work’s donnée, telling him of her brother Henry’s ultimately unsuccessful courtship of an heiress, along with other plot details, including the role of the aunt who attempted to bring about a happy outcome. In his note, James picks up on Mrs Kemble’s description of her brother (a military man) as ‘very handsome (“beautiful”) … but very luxurious and selfish’. She had herself warned the girl against marrying her brother and, in the novel, Morris’s sister, Mrs Montgomery, also surprises the cynical doctor when she, similarly abandoning family loyalty, pleads with him not to allow such a marriage. This decisive moment inspired one of the illustrations in the novel’s first edition. Surprisingly, many of Washington Square’s American critics were dismissive, the Chicago Tribune reviewer confessing that James is not ‘one of our favorite authors. He is too supercilious, too dilettante, talks too much and says too little’ (CR, p. 101). Their British counterparts, less irritated by some of the ironic comments on New York society, were slightly warmer, praising, for instance, James’s audacious choice of such a heroine, ‘plain, awkward, and wholly devoid of charm’ (p. 113). R.H. Hutton, however, while conceding that the novel reflects James’s genius, concludes damningly: ‘[i]f you desire a consummately clever study of perfect dreariness, you have it in Washington Square’ (CH, p. 90). The novel was published in serial form simultaneously in both Britain and America. Its first instalment featured in the Cornhill Magazine in June 1881, and in 169



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Harper’s New Monthly Magazine a month later, with illustrations by George Du Maurier. Though he had enjoyed the work of such illustrators as ‘Phiz’ (H.K. Browne) and Cruikshank in the magazines of his youth, James never endorsed the practice for his own work. Many years later he explained his reasoning, regarding the ‘grafting’ of ‘a picture by another hand on my own picture’ as ‘a lawless incident’ (LC 2: 1326). Du Maurier’s drawings – a full page at the beginning of each number, as well as a smaller design to decorate the opening paragraph – do little for the novel, lacking the charm and wit of his work for Punch magazine and tending to conventionalize the scenes they illustrate. In the future the two men would nevertheless become good friends.

The Two Brothers and a Trip to the West Country As the summer wore on, James left London for Brighton, ‘this rather cocknefied watering-place’ where he enjoyed the sea air, spent a fortnight in Dover, and visited friends in Warwickshire and Surrey. In June William had arrived, leaving wife and first-born child at home to pursue his scientific interests and contacts. The two brothers had not met for five years and William stayed in rooms beneath Henry’s. While the younger brother’s health had become more stable (he complains only of minor ailments),William seems still to have suffered with his eyes as well as with his mental health. Henry confided to his mother that ‘there remains more of nervousness & disability about him than I had supposed, & I can’t get rid of the feeling that he takes himself, & his nerves, & his physical condition, too hard & too consciously.… I wish he had a little more of this quiet British stoutness’. William returned to America at the end of August 1880, though Henry, who had planned a visit to Cambridge in the autumn, postponed his own trip for a year: he was still toying with the idea of a monograph on Dickens (eventually to be rejected), and, more importantly, wished to continue work on the new large-scale novel he had already begun, The Portrait of a Lady. By July he had started dispatching its early numbers, and in October Macmillan’s Magazine would publish the opening instalment. He hoped to earn a ‘good deal of money’ from the novel’s serial publication in both the Atlantic and Macmillan’s Magazine, some £1,200 ($5,820) if it ran for a year (it exceeded this). It entailed a major investment of time and allowed little opportunity for smaller-scale pieces, but for this period he enjoyed a welcome degree of financial security. For Christmas 1880 James headed to the west, first to stay at Government House, Devonport, on Plymouth Sound, with Lieutenant-General Thomas Pakenham, Commander of the army’s Western District, and his wife Elizabeth, ‘who used to be American, a hundred years ago’. This same Devon coast was the first English land sighted by James Sr many years earlier, as his son reminded him. 170



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The weather was wet, but he then pressed on to Falmouth on the south coast of Cornwall for New Year where he was the guest of Sir John Forbes Clark and his wife Charlotte. He had previously enjoyed their hospitality at far-away Tillypronie in Aberdeenshire. In Cornwall he appreciated the mild climate, noting ‘the great Atlantic heaving gently round the outermost point of old England’ (CN, p. 220), and was diverted by ‘much kindness, much talk, much food, much fire, much general amenity & appreciation’.

The Portrait of a Lady Work on The Portrait of a Lady had begun in Florence in the spring of 1880 (not, as James recalls in the New York Edition Preface, 1879) and he was still working hard on the later chapters during his extended stay in Venice in the following spring.The novel is imbued with the spirit of Italy and he continued to remember its sounds and distractions decades later. The finest of his earlier years, James’s novel had been long planned. With its many expansive paragraphs and deliberate pace, its attention to detail, its range of characters, its shifts of location and chronology, its sustained passages of analysis, The Portrait of a Lady reflects James’s confidence, the fruits of a long apprenticeship. He had worked at it steadily and slowly, each part, as he recollects, being written twice (CN, p. 220). Aside from its assured technical control, the novel deals in the profound themes of human experience – innocence, deception, love and death. In an arc reminiscent of other earlier nineteenth-century fictions, the narrative charts the life of a young woman, Isabel Archer, moving from a youthful American innocence to her embarking on a misguided marriage in Europe. Those who deceive her are, however, not Europeans but older, more worldly, expatriate Americans. Isabel’s provincial life in Albany, New York, is transformed initially by her visiting aunt who takes her off to Europe on an extended trip. Mrs Touchett returns to her husband and son, Ralph, both in states of ill-health, at Gardencourt, a Tudor house on the banks of the ‘reedy, silvery Thames’ (p. 16). Her son is much taken with his cousin, but a marriage proposal quickly comes from a wealthy though politically radical neighbour, Lord Warburton, which is as quickly refused. Isabel is already escaping from another suitor at home, Caspar Goodwood, who will, however, continue to pursue her. Isabel is wedded to independence, presumptuously keen to see for herself, happiness imagined as a ‘swift carriage, of a dark night, rattling with four horses over roads that one can’t see’. She is joined at Gardencourt by her old friend, Henrietta Stackpole, an independent woman who aspires to be the ‘queen of American journalism’ (pp. 159, 160). And it is here that Isabel meets a friend of Mrs Touchett’s, Serena Merle, an expatriate American resident in Florence. She is the most accomplished of social performers, first heard in another room playing a piano 171



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piece by Beethoven.6 Her means are limited, but she has kept ‘the best company in Europe’ (p. 186). Mr Touchett dies and, at Ralph’s instigation, has left the bulk of his fortune to Isabel, some £70,000. In due course, she accompanies her aunt to her house in Florence where, among the expatriate community, she meets Gilbert Osmond, ‘not handsome, but … fine as one of the drawings in the long gallery above the bridge, at the Uffizi’. He himself is a collector of beautiful objects, and he seems to Isabel ‘a specimen apart’ (pp. 238, 251). Ironically, it takes her time to realize that she will become one of Osmond’s ‘choice objects’; he has always been a ‘student of the exquisite’ (pp. 292, 263). A widower, he has a daughter, Pansy, sweet and innocent, convent-educated in Rome, though with a finish ‘not entirely artless’ (246). He proposes with discretion and despite the disapproval of friends and relatives, Isabel’s marriage to Osmond goes ahead. She likes that he has no fortune: she has married to please herself. Time has passed, Isabel has lost a baby boy, and the Roman fortress in which the couple live, dark and massive, the Palazzo Roccanera (the black citadel, or rock), seems emblematic of the withering effect of Osmond’s power in her life. She has come to realize that he ‘lived exclusively for the world’ (p. 380), and, having noticed various ‘false notes’ in Mme. Merle’s behaviour, finally realizes that this friend had engineered the marriage. When Isabel fails to promote Lord Warburton’s suit for Pansy’s hand, a prestigious union much desired by Osmond – despite the fact that his daughter loves the young American art-collector, Ned Rosier – the marriage deteriorates further. Worse is to come when, finally, Osmond’s sister, the Countess Gemini, herself a woman of ‘wrecked renown’,7 reveals to Isabel that Pansy is in fact the daughter of Osmond and Mme. Merle. Isabel stares at this story ‘as at a bale of fantastic wares some strolling gypsy might have unpacked on the carpet at her feet’ (p. 524). Despite Osmond’s objection, she flees to England to be with the dying Ralph Touchett. After his death, Goodwood, whose life she realizes has been blighted by his love for her, urges her to join him. Isabel, however, follows ‘a very straight path’ (p. 568), having promised her loving stepdaughter who has been returned to the convent, that she would return to Rome. The novel’s biographical origins are clear from the beginning. The heroine was inspired, in part, by the spirit of Minny Temple, ‘dear bright little Minny’ as Mrs James referred to her (NSB, p. 480), the girl loved by both William and Henry, who had died with her longing to visit Europe unfulfilled. As James pointed out, however, when Grace Norton suggested this,‘[p]oor Minny was essentially ­incomplete & I have attempted to make my young woman more rounded, more finished’. Isabel’s early scenes in Albany, her grandmother exercising ‘a large hospitality’ to an extended family, visits redolent of peaches, the colonial-period Dutch House opposite serving as a primary school – these come from James’s own memories of childhood (NSB, pp. 23–34). The novel’s highly evocative European settings – the 172



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Touchetts’ country mansion, Isabel’s walk through London’s West End in the ‘early dusk of a November afternoon’ (p. 322), the ‘ancient villa which stood on the summit of an olive-muffled hill’ (p. 217) which was Osmond’s Florentine home, the magnificence as well as the darkness of Rome – all derive from James’s more recent experiences. Ralph jokingly calls Isabel ‘Columbia’ (p. 57), a temporary embodiment of the noble spirit of New World aspiration, and, writing of this heroine in his letters, James often refers to her as his ‘Americana’, a young female figure, an emblem of the nation.Though so much of the novel takes place in Europe, James is careful to establish something of the texture of American life and values. Henrietta Stackpole, later regarded by the novelist as a ‘light ficelle’ to whom he gave too much attention (LC 2: 1082), is a rare figure in James’s œuvre – a sympathetic portrait of a journalist. Isabel regards her, with a hint of nostalgia for the frontier spirit in evident contrast with the elegancies of upper-class English womanhood, as embodying ‘“the great country stretching away beyond the rivers and across the prairies, blooming and smiling and spreading, till it stops at the blue Pacific!”’ (p. 89). Less rapturously, Ralph adds that Henrietta, smells ‘“of the Future – it almost knocks one down!”’.8 Ironically, Henrietta finally turns her back on America, marries an Englishman, and is rewarded with a visit (after a five-year wait) to the stately home of her sister-in-law (p. 546). Young American manhood is represented by Caspar Goodwood. With an income derived from his father’s Massachusetts cotton-mills, he can cross the Atlantic to spend just 24 hours in Florence in pursuit of Isabel: ‘“He’s an American truly”’, comments Mrs Touchett (325). In this novel where relationships are interpreted in predominantly social, aesthetic, even financial terms, he introduces a forceful physical and sexual presence which James further accentuated in his last revision of 1908. In the late scene in which Goodwood tries to detach Isabel from her marriage, dismissing her plea to be left alone, he forces upon her a final, desperate kiss which spreads through her ‘like white lightning’. She feels like someone drowning and ‘this act of possession’ repels her, his ‘hard manhood’ a summation of his aggressive presence.9 The Portrait of a Lady illustrates James’s technical control, most notably his adherence to the idea of a unified perspective, of predominantly one centre of consciousness, the work’s origin in ‘the sense of a single character’: ‘“Place the centre of the subject in the young woman’s own consciousness,” I said to myself, “and you get as interesting and as beautiful a difficulty as you could wish”’ (LC 2: 1071, 1079). If Isabel Archer is James’s ‘Americana’, her literary forbears are European, as he indicates in his Preface. Having touched on examples from Shakespeare, he nominates more specifically the heroines of George Eliot – Hetty Sorrel, Maggie Tulliver, Rosamund Vincy and Gwendolen Harleth – referring to them, with a quotation from Daniel Deronda, as ‘frail vessels’ carrying ‘the treasure of human affection’ (LC 2: 1077).10 173



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The Atlantic Monthly had published in December 1876 his substantial discussion of the novel, ‘Daniel Deronda: A Conversation’, and George Eliot’s exploration of egotism in Henleigh Grandcourt and the disastrous marriage embarked upon by Gwendolen Harleth clearly offered a model for James’s history of ‘a certain young woman affronting her destiny’ (LC 2: 1076). Both Grandcourt and Gilbert Osmond also have secret pasts, failed liaisons and illegitimate children. James’s 1876 account of Daniel Deronda is less concerned, however, with the failing relationship between Grandcourt and Gwendolen than with the novel’s Jewish themes while also invoking writers as distinct as George Sand and Turgenev for their skills in narrating what he later called ‘the complications of existence’ (LC 2: 1072). In its tragic breadth, its representation of innocence and its corruption, of human capacity for good and for harm, The Portrait of a Lady marks out the terrain which James will explore in the fiction to come. It traces the inequality between the mistakes of youthful naïveté – the wish to see for oneself – and the disproportionate punishment received at the hands of worldly cynicism and greed. James was concerned during composition that the ‘weakness of the whole story is that it is too exclusively psychological’ (CN, p. 13), though, years later, he justly identified the celebrated Chapter 42, in which Isabel sits through the night considering her marriage in an ‘extraordinary meditative vigil’ as ‘the best thing in the book’, as ‘“interesting” as the surprise of a caravan or the identification of a pirate’. This still, silent drama of consciousness, daringly extended, itself contains, as he says, ‘the vivacity of incident’, ‘the economy of picture’, marking for Isabel a point both of arrival and departure, and with all the fascination of an adventure story (LC 2: 1084). We watch thought in process, in dramatic silence. Though so much of the narrative is ‘psychological’ and depends upon interior monologue, James’s commentary often, by contrast, invokes the melodramatic, as when, for instance, Isabel realizes that Osmond has led her ‘into the mansion of his own habitation …. the house of darkness, the house of dumbness, the house of suffocation’ (p. 414). Such horror recalls the fairy tale monster, Bluebeard, a figure most familiar from the version by Charles Perrault, whose work James so admired, though it is worth recalling that the poem by his friend, William Wetmore Story, ‘Blue Beard’s Cabinets’, was published in 1868 in Graffiti d’Italia.11 The scenic method which James has developed as his prime means of representation itself becomes part of the narrative, a kind of thematic pointer, when, in a Roman theatre, Lord Warburton is compelled to recognize the ongoing courtship of Isabel by Osmond and, consequently, his own exclusion.The scene is a box at the opera, a ‘bad’ opera, staged at ‘one of the secondary theatres’. The idea of two such parallel ‘dramas’ being played out undoubtedly appealed to James, for an entire chapter of The American had unfolded during a performance of Don Giovanni. A similar device will be used, too, in The Princess Casamassima and The Ambassadors. The memory, this time, of Verdi’s music, offers little comfort as Warburton later 174



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walks through the ‘tortuous, tragical streets of Rome’ (pp. 287–288). And in Chapter 42, Isabel’s realization of the disappointment Osmond must himself have suffered in having overestimated her tractability and his consequent hatred, is marked by one specific memory – the moment when he had told her she had too many ideas: ‘it had been like the bell that was to ring up the curtain upon the real drama of their life’ (p. 413). Life conducted as a public performance characterizes the behaviour of both Osmond and Mme. Merle. With mock-modesty her husband early confided to Isabel that he had learnt to be ‘content with little’, and to renounce the world’s values, but it is Ralph who recognizes that he ‘lived exclusively for the world’ (p. 380). Isabel quickly realizes that her new friend Mme. Merle is ‘too perfectly the social animal’, that she exists ‘only in her relations with her fellow-mortals’. In recollecting what she calls a battered life she likens herself to a much-mended iron pot: but once taken out of the cupboard into the light, ‘“then, my dear, I’m a horror!”’ (pp. 185, 186). She is indeed a horror as she manoeuvres Isabel towards marriage. These two former lovers, Mme. Merle and Osmond, cultivate appearances in long-term roles adopted and sustained in mutual self-interest. Rarely are they caught off-guard, though when Isabel comes upon them unexpectedly to find Osmond seated while Mme. Merle stands ‘in familiar silence’, it signifies a breach of social decorum. More powerfully, it becomes a ‘moment’, an ‘image’, ‘like a sudden flicker of light’ which will eventually confirm their unpalatable secret for Isabel (p. 393). Mme. Merle is so practised, so observing and conscious, that it is she who guesses what Isabel had never imagined, that her inheritance was a consequence of Ralph’s intervention with his dying father. And Mme. Merle’s sophisticatedly ‘perfect manner’ falters only momentarily when, with customary insight, she guesses that Isabel has learnt the truth of her relationship with Osmond and that ‘everything was at an end between them’ (p. 537). Even more unhappy – as she says – than Isabel, she will return to America. It is ironic that she is disliked by her own daughter, Pansy, in her father’s eyes, ‘“a little convent-flower”’, whose affection for Isabel emerges in scenes of great pathos towards the end of the novel. Pansy carries something of the literary and the stylized, ‘an ingénue in a French play’, ‘the ideal jeune fille of foreign fiction’ (pp. 247, 267), and for Ned Rosier who falls in love with her she is as fascinating as ‘a Dresden-china shepherdess’ (p. 346). She has the appearance of ‘an Infanta of Velazquez’ who, when she smiles, looks ‘as if an angel had kissed her’ (pp. 357, 359). The moving scene in which she confesses to Isabel her love for Rosier takes place in a prison-like ‘immense chamber with a dark, heavily-timbered ceiling’ (p. 450). It is to fulfil her promise to Pansy that Isabel returns to Rome after the death of Ralph Touchett, and these final pages which reflect upon the values of trust and love, ‘the truth of things’, serve to alleviate the ‘architectural vastness’ of the ‘horrors’ to which Isabel has been exposed (p. 539). 175



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The contemporary response to The Portrait of a Lady was generally measured rather than enthusiastic: the reviewers whilst admiring the subtleties of characterization, the serious examination of moral issues, and James’s skills of observation, nevertheless complained at his style, described in the New York Times as ‘rather interlaced’. Some complained of the novel’s undue length and others thought it ‘dull’ and too demanding of its readers, though John Hay in the New-York Tribune had no doubt of the author’s genius (CR, pp. 126, 121).The Nation reviewer, declaring it to be ‘an important work’, feels obliged, nevertheless, to add that it requires ‘a happy aptitude for most serious and “intellectual” delectation’ (CH, p. 113). The ending was also considered insufficiently conclusive by some of the critics.

Spring Visit to Italy Publication of The Portrait of a Lady as a serial in both Macmillan’s Magazine and the Atlantic Monthly had begun in autumn 1880 and by early February 1881 James had left Bolton Street for what was a five-month trip to mainland Europe. He took his work with him, freed, to an extent, from the limitless string of social engagements available in town and country, the consequence of having made himself ‘agreeable’ (CN, p. 218). But despite the rigours of travel – ‘the modified martyrdom’ – it is clear that he inevitably stayed in the best hotels and enjoyed what seems an enviable quality of life. He spent almost two weeks in Paris where he caught up once more with Turgenev, though still disapproving of his domestic arrangements with the Viardots – ‘a rather poor lot … to live with them is not living like a gentleman’. He also saw once more Edward Lee Childe and his French wife, ‘intelligent & in many ways superior’ and found time for several visits to the theatre. Moving south, he stopped off in Marseilles, but was growing tired both of French cuisine and its patrons, ‘the messes, sauces, greases &c, combined with the extreme predilection for the table, of the natives, male & female, who all look red & fat while they sit there’. Avoiding the carnival at Nice, he still found the place ‘crowded & loathsome’ and quickly moved on to the far more congenial San Remo on the Italian Riviera. His notebook contains the happiest memories of a threeweek stay, time often spent in the company of old friends Mrs Lombard and her daughter, Fanny. He enjoyed the walks, the charming views, and most of all ‘an enchanting drive’ to the village of Ceriani, high in the mountains above San Remo. Most days he would ‘scribble’ for three or four hours in the afternoon (CN, p. 220). It is here, on ‘the threshold of Italy’ that the consumptive Ralph Touchett spends his winter in The Portrait of a Lady. Further along the coast, encountering ‘bad odours’ at Genoa, he rapidly moved inland to Milan where he spent some ten days. This northern city proved ‘prosaic and winterish’, but nevertheless he enjoyed at La Scala a performance of Weber’s Der Freischütz,‘done à l’Italienne’, as well as a ballet which 176



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he felt compelled to leave mid-performance: ‘[t]he Italians, truly, are eternal children. They paid infinitely more attention to the ballet than to the opera’. James arrived in Venice at the end of March, taking rooms on the fourth floor at 4161 Riva degli Schiavoni, a house near the passage leading to the church of San Zaccaria, not far from St Mark’s Square. Offering a view across the water to the basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore, this would be his base for the next three months. He quickly established a congenial routine: breakfast at Florian’s, a bath in heated salt water at the Stabilimento Chitarin, an excursion through the city streets, midday ‘breakfast’ at Café Quadri, work in the afternoon till 5 or 6 o’clock, followed perhaps by some music in the piazza, and then sometimes an hour or two spent in a gondola before dinner. All he could complain of was the introduction of the ‘infamous little vaporino on the Grand Canal’ – the local name for a vaporetto, the small steamship offering cheap transport. The journal he resumed some six months later (a passage dated 25 November 1881) looks back lovingly on this period, and there runs through it a sense of return and even of restored youth.The difficulties encountered on his previous Italian visit which had included the rupture with Zhukovsky have been laid aside. He was so enthused that he considered taking ‘a little pied-à-terre’ in Venice before finally rejecting the idea: ‘I shall go back; but not every year’ (CN, p. 221). He enjoyed instead the hospitality of permanent resident Katharine de Kay Bronson at the Ca’ Alvisi on the Grand Canal, their friendship stretching back to Newport days. He recalled many years later her kindness towards ‘the incessant troop of those either bewilderedly making or fondly renewing acquaintance with the dazzling city’ (CTWC, p. 359) and she would be transformed into Mrs Prest, a minor figure in ‘The Aspern Papers’.12 Browning was another great patron of her salon, though it is unlikely that the two writers ever coincided at Ca’ Alvisi. John Singer Sargent and James Whistler also enjoyed Mrs Bronson’s hospitality, but she was equally kind to impoverished local families. Another companion in Venice was Herbert Pratt, a friend of William’s who had studied medicine at Harvard. He had served at the end of the Civil War and travelled for much of his life. His graduating thesis on Thein (an alkaloid of tea) had been published (in his absence in Europe) by his tutor, Professor Clarke, in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1868. He represented for James an interesting, liberated approach to life, entertaining him with talk of Spain, the East, Tripoli, Persia and Damascus: ‘He gave me the nostalgia of the sun, of the south, of colour, of freedom, of being one’s own master, and doing absolutely what one pleases’ (CN, p. 221). In a letter to his father James observed that ‘[h]e is romantic, sentimental & naif, & is redolent of Persia. He seems to think always of Wm’. With Pratt he visited ‘a queer little wineshop, haunted only by gondoliers and facchini [porters], in an out of the way corner of Venice’ and also accompanied him to his rooms, ‘far down on the Grand Canal, overlooking the Rialto. It was a hot 177



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night; the cry of the gondoliers came up from the Canal. He took out a couple of Persian books and read me extracts from Firdausi and Saadi. A good deal might be done with Herbert Pratt’. Much was done: James predicted that ‘I shall certainly put him into a novel. I shall even make the portrait close and he won’t mind’ (CN, p. 221), and this resulted in Gabriel Nash, the exotic aesthete of The Tragic Muse. Late in April James travelled further south once again, stopping off at Florence on the journey to Rome. In Tuscany he visited Frank Boott whose daughter had gone to Granada with a group of women-painters. There he saw two portraits, one of Frank, the other of daughter Lizzie, paintings by Frank Duveneck, both now in the Cincinnati Museum of Art. The latter piece, well executed but ‘disagreeable as a likeness’ and presumably not flattering, struck him as ‘not at all the work, one would say, of a future husband’. A fortnight spent in Rome also proved restorative. On a shortish carriage ride to the fields north of the city beyond the medieval Ponte Nomentano which spans the river Aniene, he found that the ‘exquisite stillness, the divine horizon, brought back to me out of the buried past all that ineffable, incomparable impression of Rome’ (CN, p. 222). But he could not linger and was anxious to return to Venice to work on his long novel, briefly pausing at Recanati on the way, ‘the dreary little hill-town’ (CN, 222) in the Marche region, ‘birth-place of the divine Leopardi’. The colourful life of Venice continued. The place was decorated with flags and draperies for the fairly recently instituted Festa della Statuto of 1 June, but James laboured in his shirt-sleeves in his half-darkened room, fanned only by the breeze from the lagoon. There was one more excursion to the nearby cities of Vicenza, Bassano and Padua. He found his three days in Vicenza ‘wonderfully sweet; old Italy, and the old feeling of it’ (CN, p. 222). The summer temperatures were rising, however, and it was time to leave, though he took much away. On his return to England, he wrote to Mrs Bronson, ‘[m]y mind reverts, with a delicious pain, as the poets say, to Venice, and it serenades you every night beneath that balcony from which you waved me your last most friendly farewell’.

Arrival of Alice James was back in London by mid-July, and in his absence, his sister Alice had arrived, accompanied by Katharine Peabody Loring. Katharine came from a distinguished Beverly family, and the two women had met in 1873 when Alice had volunteered to teach history for the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, a group which offered distance-learning for women. The two became life companions and Katharine was welcomed into the James family, Henry observing to his father that she was ‘certainly worth her weight in gold to Alice’. Their visit remained largely

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independent of James, and, indeed, as he commented to his mother, Alice appeared ‘so extraordinarily fond of Miss L. that a third person is rather a superfluous appendage’. Nevertheless, he spent several days in their company when they were staying in Richmond upon Thames, in south-west London, and during his September trip to Scotland they moved into his rooms in Bolton Street before returning to America. Alice’s health generally held up and James predicted that ‘if it were only in her power to see people more, I know that (in this country of dull women!) her success would be brilliant’. The relationship between brother and sister was affectionate: James often sent her gifts (including an unsuitable hat which had to be exchanged), while she reciprocated with a pair of red socks, ‘lovely & most beautifully worked’: ‘I will sport them, in very low shoes, at the next country house I go to stay at’, he promised her. Another sibling, however, was troubling his parents. Bob, suffering from a nervous disorder and drinking heavily again, had been persuaded by William to leave Milwaukee and move back into Quincy Street, ‘“a trial both to him self & to others”’, as his mother lamented. During his extended stay in Scotland James enjoyed the hospitality of some of his rich and aristocratic friends. He once more made the long journey to Tillypronie, one of the residences of the Clarks, before moving on to Cortachy Castle, the home of Lord and Lady Airlie, whence he paid a visit to Glamis Castle, ‘famous & ghostly’ from its associations with Macbeth. Claude and Frances Dora Smith Bowes-Lyon, Lord and Lady Strathmore, lived at Glamis, maternal grandparents of the future Queen Elizabeth II. Toward the end of September James made his way southwards, staying first with the Roseberys at Dalmeny Park, Edinburgh, before moving on to Laidlawstiel in Galashiels, the home of Lord Reay, in Sir Walter Scott country. It was a trip marred only by news of the assassination of the recently elected President Garfield in the faraway Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington DC. After a year’s delay James finally left behind his ‘little London-dusky back bedroom’ to set off for his homeland, this time via Quebec, not minding the rail journey down to Boston: ‘I am going home to “see America”’, he told his mother. With an echo of Hamlet, he also warned W.D. Howells that ‘You will find me fat & scant o’breath, & very middle-aged, but eminently amenable to kind treatment’. He was 38 years old.

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Part III

The Lure of the Theatre

9 Family Deaths: New Friendships in Europe (1881–1884)

Return to Cambridge Having taken the Canadian route, James arrived in Cambridge on the last day of October 1881. He had been absent for six years and in fact family life there was soon to be disrupted: the following twenty months were to prove a sad and demanding time. Nevertheless, he now had the chance to meet William’s wife, Alice, with whom he came to enjoy a loving relationship which endured until the end of his life. In November, soon after his arrival, he was entertained by Mrs Isabella Stewart Gardner in her Beverly seaside ‘cottage’, and he also spent three days at Newport, ‘singularly lovely’ with its fine skies and weather, its sunsets and autumnal ‘“sickle-pears”’. By the end of the month he had moved into Boston’s grandiose Brunswick Hotel on Boylston Street. Though he loved and respected his family, it is clear that he cherished a degree of independence. He planned initially to stay for five months, principally to become part once again of his family’s life; this, he confirms, was the only reason for his visit. Here he began ‘the note-taking habit’, covering the pages of an ‘as yet unspotted blank-book’ with impressions of his recent years in Europe (CN, p. 213). And acknowledging his age and the passing years, he returns to the major decision of his life: ‘I have made my choice, and God knows that I have now no time to waste. My choice is the old world – my choice, my need, my life’. Such a choice is a ‘terrible burden’ not felt by European artists, but with America, ‘this vast new world’, he felt he had little to do: indeed, he confesses that ‘I feel as if my

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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time were terribly wasted here!’ (p. 214). And, as always happened when he left London, the letters he went on to write are scattered with references to his homesickness for Britain. A lengthy recounting of his European experiences, filled with the names of people and distant romantic places, seems to serve as a gathering point for considering what it has all meant: ‘of all that comes, that goes, that I see, and feel, and observe’ (p. 214). When the journal resumes on 20 December 1881, both location and mood have changed: ‘I had to break off the other day in Boston – the interruptions in the morning here are intolerable’, he snaps. He is now in New York City, the guest of old friend and editor, Edwin Godkin. He stayed some three weeks but complained that his time had ‘slipped away in mere movement’ (p. 223). At the Madison Square Garden Theatre he saw an adaptation of Esmeralda by Mrs Frances Hodgson Burnett (now best remembered for Little Lord Fauntleroy), a piece bad enough to make one ‘blush for the human mind’. When it was reprised in London as Young Folks’ Ways nearly two years later, James contributed a sharp critique to the Pall Mall Gazette. He also accepted an invitation to call from Julian Hawthorne’s wife, Minnie, finding her ‘in a gorgeous “up-town” mansion, in black brocade, & with a footman to wait upon her!’ Back in Cambridge for Christmas, he returned to recounting from a distance his European years, relishing the more romantic episodes. He fondly recalls a visit to Lord and Lady Airlie at Cortachy Castle, Angus, the drive ‘through the dim avenues and up to the great lighted pile of the castle, where Lady A., hearing my wheels on the gravel (I was late) put her handsome head from a window in the clock-tower, asked if it was I, and wished me a bonny good-evening. I was in a Waverly Novel’ (CN, p. 225). For this reference to the fiction of Sir Walter Scott, it seems ironic that James adopts an Americanized spelling of ‘Waverley’;Waverly Place was the location of the Dame’s school he attended in his New York childhood. Henry was not the only guest at Quincy Street, for his much-loved younger brother, ‘poor Wilky’, had made the journey from Milwaukee; the two had not met for eleven years. ‘Poor’ Wilky because, despite marriage and the birth of two children, he had never fully recovered his health, having sustained serious injuries in the Civil War. Now Henry was writing in ‘the old back sitting room’ he had once occupied with William, and he dwells on the choices he has made and the physical suffering he himself endured in those earlier ‘untried years’ (CN, pp. 224, 225). Social opportunities in Cambridge seem to have been limited – at least on the scale to which he had grown accustomed – though he saw friends from earlier days, Charles Eliot Norton, his sister Grace, a long-term confidante, and the Child family. Most of January 1882 was spent in Washington, DC, James’s first visit to the capital. Here he caught up once more with Henry and Clover Adams who introduced him to the cream of local society which included Chester A. Arthur, the 21st President of the United States, an intimate friend, it seems, of Henry’s uncle, John 184



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Barber James, having been present at ‘the suicidal death-bed of Johnny James’ at the Tremont House Hotel, Chicago, in 1856. James appreciated the city’s softer climate, considering its society ‘informal, familiar, heterogeneous, good-natured, essentially social & conversational, enormously big & yet extremely provincial, indefinably ridiculous & yet eminently agreeable. It is the only place in America where there is no business’ (66). In his story, ‘Pandora’ (1884), he developed some of these impressions as well as modelling two of the characters on the Adamses. Its heroine illustrates, too, the idea of the ‘“new type”’, the ‘“self-made girl”’, portrayed by James as gracefully circumventing social and gender conventions (CT 5: 375, 396). To James’s disgust, Oscar Wilde, ‘an unclean beast’, was also in town, fresh from his ‘silly success’ in New York. Wilde, just embarking on a packed year’s lecture tour of America and Canada, was an undoubted expert in self-promotion, and the animus James feels must relate, too, to the younger man’s public ‘aesthetic’ persona, his embracing of a celebrity role of the kind James so disliked. Nevertheless, after Wilde praised James’s novels in a newspaper interview at this time, the novelist called on him in his hotel to thank him, confessing during their conversation that he missed London, hoping presumably for a sympathetic response. Wilde’s reply is a characteristic slap down: ‘Really? You care for places? The world is my home’.1 It could not have helped when Wilde later went on to produce a series of spectacularly successful stage plays.

Mary James In a letter of 22 January 1882 written to his mother, James complained briefly of ‘a rather bad time with my head’ which had left him ‘sore & seedy’. His mother may have read this letter, but five days later he learned ‘with grief & horror’ that she was herself ill. For the time, he stayed in Washington, fearing to be ‘in the way’ at her bedside; he wrote to her again on 29 January, ‘in suspense’ as to her condition; that evening he received a telegram from sister-in-law Alice: ‘Your mother exceedingly ill. Come at once’ (CN, p. 228). He set off the next day, only to learn on arriving in New York that his mother, who had been suffering from a severe bronchial infection, was already dead. He took the overnight train to Boston, arriving in Quincy Street in the midst of a snowstorm.The stricken house seemed still to be filled with her living presence. Mrs James was buried on 1 February – ‘a splendid winter’s day – the snow lay deep and high’ – in a temporary vault down by the Charles River in Cambridge Cemetery, to be moved for final burial in the spring. It was a sad time: ‘she was the keystone of the arch. She held us all together, and without her we are scattered reeds’, he lamented (CN, p. 229). Henry had been her much-loved child and the letters written at this time eloquently express his sense of grief and loss – as, for instance, to Mrs Gardner: ‘I thank 185



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heaven that one can lose a mother but once in one’s life.The loss of that love, however, is a suffering absolutely apart – for it is the most absolutely unselfish affection any of us can know’. Several pages of James’s journal are devoted to his mother, written just over a week after this funeral, full of affection and admiration, of wonder at her sacrificing of herself for the sake of her family, of the long hot summers endured in Cambridge, and her care for her husband and daughter. He had realized, too, however, on his recent arrival from England that, at seventy-one, ‘the weariness of age had come upon her’ (CN, p. 229). This would be the last occasion on which all her family would be together. Despite her invalidism, Henry’s sister Alice rose to the occasion, caring for her aging father and taking charge of the running of the house. Henry reluctantly prepared to postpone his departure planned for May: ‘I must remain near father; his infirmities make it impossible I should leave him’. He took rooms in Boston in Mount Vernon Street, on Beacon Hill, while frequently having his evening meal with Father and Alice, to return later from Cambridge ‘in the clear American starlight’.These were weeks of ‘exquisite stillness and solemnity’ (pp. 230, 232). During this spring the family home at 20 Quincy Street was given up after nearly 16 years, and Henry Sr and Alice moved to a smaller house, 131 Mount Vernon Street, not far from his own rooms. James was working at this time not on a novel but on a dramatization of his highly successful story, ‘Daisy Miller’. To translate it into a piece for the theatre, he made a number of changes, most significantly providing a happy ending in which the heroine finally marries Winterbourne. Eugenio, the courier, is allotted a villainous role, and an ‘offstage’ character in the story becomes the worldly ‘Madame de Katkoff ’. He gave a reading of the play to Mrs Isabella Gardner which, as he later told her, he recalled ‘with extraordinary tenderness’.While in New York he had met the Mallory brothers, owners of the recently renovated Madison Square Theatre, who had initially been encouraging about his projected play. However, the theatre’s manager, Daniel Frohman, considered it, though ‘beautifully written’, altogether ‘too literary’ to be produced (CP, p. 117). James was hurt and humiliated at the way in which he had been treated during these negotiations, concluding that ‘the Proprietors behaved like asses and sharpers combined’ (CN, p. 232). He managed to retrieve the manuscript before leaving the country and, once in London, tried to interest the successful actor Charles Brookfield in the project, proposing that he might play the villain. James had seen and admired Brookfield in a version of Sardou’s comedy, Odette, and hoped that Marie and Squire Bancroft might take on the play for the Haymarket Theatre. But he was again to be disappointed, having to accept that it was a project ‘blighted by cold theatrical breath’. These initial dealings with the professional theatre involving considerable time and effort hint ominously at James’s later theatrical ventures.

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Another link with the past was broken with the death, on 27 April, of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a figure of national standing, regarded initially by Henry Jr as provincial, though later acclaimed as ‘the one really rare, American spirit in letters’ (AS, p. 282). The funeral for this ‘sage of Concord’ was a large public occasion, attended by Henry Sr.When his father insisted that Henry Jr should not ‘sacrifice’ himself by remaining in America to support this dwindling family, he was much relieved and, on 10 May 1882, he sailed from New York, carrying a generous message of reassurance and love from his father, bidding his ‘darling boy’ a ‘loving’ farewell: ‘I can’t help feeling that you are the one that has cost us the least trouble, and given us always the most delight …. it will be charming to think of you as once more settled and at work’.2

A Little Tour in France After a brief stop-off in Ireland, James was indeed relieved to be back in London, although he found his youngest brother occupying his Bolton Street rooms. Bob was in a poor state, having been trying to sail to the Azores in a schooner, as Henry had to explain to his wife Mary. Though Henry found him sympathetic, even cheerful in tone, Bob proved to be ‘a trying companion’. The social ‘season’ was by this time well underway and Henry’s diary was quickly filled with engagements. In addition, now a respected author, he was sought out by Americans (many of them women) passing through London. Among them was brother William, on his way to Europe to holiday and to meet others interested in the developing field of psychology. During this summer the second series of Mrs Kemble’s memoirs, Records of Later Life, was published, described by James as ‘three stout volumes: too voluminous, & ill put together, but full of interest, of wit, & above all, of life’. In the autumn, rather than travelling north to Scotland as in previous years, James headed to France for a nine-week trip. He planned to write ‘some papers’, a kind of travel book for Harper’s which would include expensive illustrations. In the event, Harper’s backed off, and A Little Tour in France was instead published in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly as a series titled En Province, and later as a book by James Osgood in Boston (1884). Finally, a revised edition, a ‘Holiday Edition’, appeared in 1900, lavishly illustrated by the American artist, Joseph Pennell, who also went on to illustrate English Hours (1905) and Italian Hours (1909). For A Little Tour, Pennell provided 94 drawings, described by James in his 1900 Preface as ‘things of the play of eye and hand and fancy’: ‘[t]he little book thus goes forth finally as the picture-book it was designed to be’ (CTWC, p. 4). Before setting out, James stopped off at Bougival to see beloved Ivan Turgenev, and in the earlier stage of his tour met up with Mrs Kemble, her daughter Sarah Wister and grandson Owen, comparing the fraught relations between the two 187



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women as akin to ‘holding a lighted bombshell’. Having enjoyed the soft landscapes of the Loire Valley, James headed towards the Atlantic coast, taking in Angers, Nantes and La Rochelle before moving southwards through Aquitaine, the city of Bordeaux and on to Toulouse. From here he journeyed east as far as the Roman cities of Provence before travelling up to Beaune and Dijon (with the river Rhône in flood) in the Burgundy region. Unlike much of James’s travel writing, this ‘tour’, a sequence of 40 short chapters, was set down as a continuous record, ‘a few informal notes’, celebrating provincial France, its cities, small towns, architecture, landscapes, and some of the local figures he encounters. Many of the locations were new to him and the ‘adventure’ demonstrated that ‘though France might be Paris, Paris was by no means France’ (CTWC, p. 18). The writing is relaxed and seemingly effortless: light-touch historical detail mixes with personal observations, literary references with travel advice, evocations of landscapes with diary-like entries describing chance meetings, remembered meals, the serendipitous surprises of a Victorian traveller. The weather was at best indifferent; there was much rain, and by the end of his journey the cities of the south were in danger of flooding. James travelled principally by train and he complains of ‘the deadly salle d’attente, the insufferable delays over one’s luggage, the porterless platform, the overcrowded and illiberal train’, and is compelled, finally, to admit the superiority of the British system (p. 256). Beginning in Touraine, he naturally thinks of his great hero, Balzac, whose birthplace was Tours. Gazing at the houses crowded around the cathedral he wonders which were those which had figured in Le Curé de Tours, one of Balzac’s Scènes de la vie de province sequence. The country’s literary associations continue to be logged. Driving through the tranquil landscape of the Sologne region he imagines himself entering ‘some rural novel of Madame Sand’ (p. 58) and, arriving at the château of Chenonceaux in the Loire Valley, he quotes from the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Reaching the Mediterranean, he begins a chapter with lines from Matthew Arnold on the town of Sète, and in Montpellier is reminded of Stendhal’s Mémoires d’un touriste, two volumes which ‘every traveller in France should carry in his portmanteau’ (p. 183). In Provence James thinks first of Alphonse Daudet and his comic hero,Tartarin de Tarascon, while, visiting Vaucluse, he wonders at ‘a hideous little café’ which had once been the cabinet of Petrarch (p. 245). The place was difficult of access and James confesses that he had had to resort to an omnibus to reach it. The landscape of the Loire Valley seemed unspectacular, reflecting ‘a deep, unrelieved rusticity’ (p. 50), but he appreciated the elegant outlines and decorative detail of the Renaissance châteaux of Chambord, Chenonceaux, Amboise and Blois and recounted distant historical episodes in atmospheric prose.With a critical eye, however, he cavils at some of the overzealous restoration that has taken place, and gently queries the methods of Viollet-le-Duc: ‘a more crumbling Carcassonne rises in the 188



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mind’, he observes, when looking at the town’s restored fortifications (p. 162). Just a few years earlier William Morris and Philip Webb had founded the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, revolutionizing attitudes towards the repair and conservation of historic buildings. James complains, too, of ‘the spectre of the great Revolution’ (p. 226), its destructiveness witnessed by the damage still evident in the buildings that survived across France. In the Roman cities and sites of the south, the Pont du Gard, Aix, Nîmes, Arles, Orange, he admires the undoubted architectural and engineering skills, yet, moving away from guidebook conventionalities, confesses unease at such expressions of colonial power: ‘It is brutal; it is monotonous; it is not at all exquisite’ (p. 202). And, alongside the historical and aesthetic observations, the personal and anecdotal also crowds in: his unexpected meeting up at Chenonceaux with a gondolier he had known in Venice, the often dirty inns, a horrible gras-double (a dish of tripe) served up for breakfast in Narbonne where ‘A man opposite to me had the dirtiest fingers I ever saw’, and, by contrast, another breakfast, eaten at Brou, ‘the best repast possible’, fresh boiled eggs, served with bread and butter: ‘I am ashamed to say how many of them I consumed’ (pp. 177, 266).

Henry James Sr By 20 November 1882 James was back in London, but early in December he was shocked to receive a telegram informing him that his father was dying. On 12 December he sailed from Liverpool aboard the SS Werra, a German express liner, to cross, once more, a ‘wintry Atlantic’. He arrived in New York by lunchtime on 21 December after a voyage ‘very rapid & prosperous, but painful’. But he was too late: letters from sister Alice and her companion Katharine Loring were awaiting him: his father had died on the 18th and was being buried even as Henry made landfall in New York: ‘There seemed no use in waiting for you, the uncertainty was so great’, Alice wrote.3 Her letter eloquently details the circumstances of their father’s last days – he had longed for death and had no suffering at the end. And, in a long letter to William who was in Paris, Henry provides further detail – his father’s refusal to eat, his serene cheerfulness, his desire to be with his late wife.William had himself written ‘a blessed farewell’ to his dying father on 14 December, which of course arrived too late. But in a moving letter to his brother, Henry described how he took it with him to the Cambridge cemetery where he read it aloud at their father’s graveside, ‘which I am sure he heard somewhere out of the depths of the still, bright winter air’. It was a bleak Christmas in Cambridge: Alice was being cared for by Katharine Loring at Beverly, some 20 miles away, Henry was confined to his bed with a migraine, and Aunt Kate sat alone downstairs. In her Diary entry for 29 January 189



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1890, Alice records, so much later, how she spent two days reading her parents’ old letters: ‘Mother died Sunday evening, January 29th, 1882, Father on Monday midday, December 19th, 1882, and now I am shedding the tears I didn’t shed then!’.4 The will left by Henry Sr might have caused lasting damage within the family. Aunt Kate had originally suggested that the sole beneficiary of the estate, valued at some $95,000, should be, since she had no livelihood, Alice. Alice rejected this, insisting that her brothers be included. This change was made, though, because Wilky had previously received financial support from his parents, the will denied him any further benefit. Given the kind of support previously offered to his three siblings,William, Henry and Alice, Wilky was predictably outraged. And so Henry, who had been appointed executor, took it upon himself to break the will and to apportion the proceeds more equably. William, still in Europe, with a wife and young family to provide for was initially reluctant to agree to this, but was finally persuaded by his younger brother. In fact, throughout this episode Henry demonstrates great skills in diplomacy. The prolonged legal battle over his grandfather’s will which had so threatened to disadvantage his grandmother and father in the 1830s was not about to be re-enacted. When this was settled Henry also insisted that his share of the income from rents of properties in Syracuse, should be paid directly into Alice’s account. The months which followed testify to Henry’s commitment to his family; he would remain in America till late August. In mid-January 1883 he made the long journey west to Milwaukee to discuss the will with Wilky and Bob, on the way back stopping off in Syracuse to see the inherited properties and meet the local financial adviser. The temperature was a punishing twenty degrees below zero, and he found Wilky in a poor physical state, in debt, and little helped by his wife Carrie. On his return James settled into a provisional domestic routine with Alice in Boston while managing to put together a volume of three of his tales, ‘The Siege of London’, ‘The Pension Beaurepas’ and ‘The Point of View’ for the publisher, J.R. Osgood, as well as preparing a set of twenty travel essays, to be called Portraits of Places. To Howells he complained of ‘the social desolation of Boston’ and to Louisa Lawrence, one of his London friends, he commented that ‘Boston is a city of serious winters – of serious everything, indeed’. There were some compensations – the offer of tickets, for instance, to concerts given by the newly established Boston Symphony Orchestra from its conductor, Sir George Henschel. He also finally agreed, after several invitations, to give a reading from his Little Tour in France to the young women of the city’s Saturday Morning Club. In the last three weeks of April he was in New York when he also fitted in a short visit to Washington. Significantly, he now instructed Frederick Macmillan, with whom he was planning a ‘Collective Edition’ of his works, to drop the ‘Jr’ after his name and he also celebrated his fortieth birthday. In New York he befriended Emma Lazarus, whose sonnet, ‘The New Colossus’, was donated to raise money for the 190



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building of the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. In it, ‘[t]he mighty woman with a torch’ makes an impassioned request to the ‘ancient lands’: ‘“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”’. He also co-hosted a dinner for the renowned Italian actor Tommaso Salvini whose work he greatly admired and whom he had recently seen perform in Boston. Returning to that city, he brought with him Wilky who had been staying in Florida for his health. He was now so ill that Henry feared for his life. For two months Henry became his chief carer while Alice, suffering again from neurasthenia, entered the Adams Nervine Asylum in nearby Jamaica Plain where she would remain until the beginning of August. Aside from these family difficulties, Henry’s old friend, a depressed Grace Norton, was in need of support. She had left the Cambridge family estate at Shady Hill and set up home for herself not far away in Kirkland Street. Henry had observed that she had little close connection with her brother Charles and it is clear that she confided in James during some bleak and lonely days; she was in her fiftieth year, so it is possible that her difficulties were also menopausal. His letters, kind, sympathetic, but also confessional, direct, and invariably honest, suggest the extent of her trust. From New York James wrote, on 26 April 1883, ‘[y]ou really take too melancholy a view of human life, & I can’t afford – literally haven’t the moral means – to hold intercourse with you on that basis. I am never in high spirits myself … I can only get on by pretending that I am…. Excuse my heartless tone’. Her unhappiness continued through this hot summer and he continued to offer what guidance he could: ‘remember that every life is a special problem which is not yours but another’s & content yourself with the terrible algebra of your own…. My dear Grace, you are passing through a darkness in which I myself in my ignorance see nothing but that you have been made wretchedly ill by it; but it is only a darkness it is not an end, or the end’. Despite the heat, James continued to work hard, politely refusing invitations to visit friends in refreshing locations. With just a hint of exaggeration he wrote to his British publisher Frederick Macmillan,‘I have a house all to myself, wear no clothes, take 10 big baths a day, & dine on lemonade and ice-cream’. Wilky, feeling a little better, took a trip to Newport, Rhode Island, and, at the end of June, returned to Milwaukee. After a brief visit to Beverly, Henry himself joined his old friend from Harvard days, George Abbott James (not a relative), to spend a few days at Mount Desert, an island off the coast of Maine, before going off to Newport for a ten-day stay.The place had changed, though he admitted that ‘the dead past lives again – just a little – in the interstices of its modern excresances’. Henry was now joined by younger brother, Bob, who had decided to study art at Arlington, not far away, a few miles from Boston. It is hardly surprising that, ‘hammered by domestic cares & unceasing occupations’, James was keen to return to England. He longed for London life and culture, confiding to Grace Norton that ‘My desire to get away has assumed – this last week 191



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– the proportions of a frenzy; I communicate this fact to your ear alone’. After this extended stay during which he had felt himself, despite the tensions, to have been at the centre of a network of family relations, he recognized that his departure would mark ‘a great disintegration’. Having left Boston, he spent a day in the continuing heat with Aunt Kate at the Delaware Watergap, a popular location on the Pennsylvania–New Jersey border, before sailing from New York on 22 August. The ocean crossing proved to be ‘a wonderful passage’.

Return to London Life He was pleased to be back in a London ‘very tidy, with smart new wooden pavements laid down everywhere & just enough fog to look autumnal & cosy’, but also saddened by the news that Turgenev had died: ‘greatly touched by his extinction’, James would write an article on his friend for Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s Atlantic Monthly. He later commented that ‘in all these last years seeing him has been the most interesting thing for me in Paris’. In October he made the journey once again to Tillypronie in Aberdeenshire, but the weather was poor and it proved to be ‘a melancholy wet lumbagoish week’. On a leisurely return south and in improved weather, he took in five of the great English cathedral cities, Durham,York, Lincoln, Peterborough and Ely. But further sad news was to follow for, on 15 November, Wilky died, aged 38. Suffering from Bright’s disease (a condition affecting the liver, now known as nephritis), he had endured a painful, ‘inch-by-inch extinction’, but Henry, though finally far distant, had helped when he could: he wrote to Bob that Wilky had now become ‘simply a genial, gentle, sociable memory, carrying me back to all sorts of innocent rosecoloured incidents in the far past’. He had hoped that his brother might be buried in Cambridge with their parents, but in the event the funeral took place in faraway Milwaukee and Henry sent his widow £42 ($204) towards the expenses. Miraculously, he had preserved the pencil sketch made by William long ago when Wilky had been invalided out of the Civil War. The small scrap showing Wilky’s head resting against a pillow and appearing near death would survive to be included in Notes of a Son and Brother.This proved to be the ‘most beautiful winter’ James had known in England – ‘fogless & frostless’, but it was inevitably a dark time: within two years he had lost both parents and a younger brother. There was now no James family home and his ties to America had become more tenuous: he would not return for another twenty-one years. During this autumn of 1883 James considered taking a house in St John’s Wood, a prosperous London suburb, familiar from childhood days. It was located on Elm Tree Road and he thought it ‘a perfect little residence’, but finally decided against the move: ‘the place was too far from the centre of things & it 192



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was revealed to me in a dream that I shld. spend ½ the time on the roads’. It is clear that, despite some drawbacks, Bolton Street, just off Piccadilly, and in the heart of what was known as ‘Clubland’ was very conveniently located: James was now a member of the Athenaeum as well as the Reform Club, both on Pall Mall, nearby. Having ‘arrived’ in London society, he was not yet prepared to leave ‘the centre of things’. His circle of friendship extended beyond the social beau monde and political grandees of the day to include fellow artists – all, it seems, necessary to his happiness. He enthuses in this same letter to Lizzie Boott about a prize-giving event at the Royal Academy of Arts (even closer to home), overseen by Sir Frederic Leighton, a dinner enjoyed with Alfred Parsons and fellow Americans George Henry Boughton and Edwin Austin Abbey, all of them artists he would write about, his meeting Lawrence Alma-Tadema and George Du Maurier, and about the photographs of his paintings Edward Burne-Jones sent him. The social life available in London was important to James, and he was willing to invest energy in its pursuit. He confesses to Grace Norton, after visiting his publisher Frederick Macmillan that he is ‘in better form than might be expected of a litterateur who went to supper in St. John’s Wood last night at exactly the witching hour (midnight) & afterwards walked home through the sleeping town at 2.30 a.m. … I don’t often take my food so irregularly’. And, a few days later, he reports to brother William that he had attended ‘a soirée of Gurney & Myers’s Psychical Society; & found it very dull & even repulsive, owing to the fearful verdigreased human & social types congregated there’. This would have been of particular significance for William: the Society for Psychical Research had recently been formed in response to a developing interest in the paranormal and he was at this time involved in the founding of the Society’s American branch in Boston. And Henry would himself be inspired to write a number of supernatural stories with a powerful psychical content. On a more practical level, James had recently received from Macmillan a statement of accounts for the sales of his books. He had put off checking what proved to be ‘melancholy’ reading: ‘I expected the said results would be small, but I now perceive them to be virtually nil. The balance owing me is £2.17.6! – for a year’s sale of some seven or eight books. The sale is depressingly small; – it appears however to have amounted to some 500 copies for all the books, without counting a quantity of sheets of one of them sent to America’. Despite his established literary standing, sales were humiliatingly low – signalling a problem in reaching a larger reading public that would consistently plague him. Things were slightly better in America. In 1882 sales and advances amounted to $2,258 (£466) from US ­publishers, with no income from UK publishers; in 1883 James received $5,772 (£1,190) from the US and $1,207 (£249) from the UK, and, in 1884, the respective figures were $5,975 (£1,232) and $1,435 (£296).5 193



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Macmillan had recently published the ‘Collective Edition’ of James’s works in fourteen volumes. Four include a selection of the short stories, but he had already decided to drop Watch and Ward from his acknowledged œuvre. The idea for this edition had been the publisher’s, linking the novelist’s name with a specific house, and James had responded enthusiastically, simply requesting that ‘these books be as pretty as possible. Can you make them really pretty for 18-pence a volume? I should like them to be charming, & beg you to spare no effort to make them so’. Macmillan’s did their best, it seems, for they produced slim, elegant volumes, almost small enough to slip into a pocket. The type for all the texts was reset and misprints corrected while James was in America, thus allowing no opportunity for revision. The venture with its cut prices probably did little to put extra money into James’s pocket, but the print run of 5,000 copies sold within three years, and Macmillan went on to produce an even cheaper version in paper covers and, later, a ‘Pocket Edition’.6 A month later (December 1883) Macmillan brought out Portraits of Places, travel essays taking in England, France, Italy and America, some dating back to 1870. The volume would be published early in 1884 in America, and, in slightly abbreviated form, by Tauchnitz, based in Leipzig, the dominant continental publisher of English-language books. Such recycling of material suggests – whatever the nature of reader demand – the urgency of James’s need to promote his work. In the letter to Macmillan of 29 January [1884] in which he refers to the ‘melancholy’ news of his sales, he is reduced to asking for an advance on the new Collective Edition and the travel essays he had compiled: ‘[i]t occurs to me to ask you whether the sale of the little books in a box – or that of the Portraits of Places – or the two sales together – may be such as to warrant your sending me a cheque on account. In the natural course, you would not, I suppose, do so for another year; but I shld. be glad if the process might be anticipated’ (307). At this time, it was not common practice for publishers to offer advances to their authors.7 In his dealings with the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, James was later forced into an embarrassing financial climbdown. Having originally asked for $500 per number for the serialized version of what would become The Princess Casamassima, he was later compelled to concede that this was ‘an exceptionally high price’ and that his proposal ‘was not a deliberate & mature proceeding’. Part of his original reasoning had been that a number of his stories (two, in fact) were soon to appear in the Sunday edition of the New York Sun, thus promoting his name and work to a wider public. This popular daily paper which survived well into the twentieth century published ‘Pandora’ and ‘Georgina’s Reasons’ in summer 1884, and James claimed (though it has been suggested that this might be an exaggeration)8 that he was paid $4,000 (£825) for each. He shamefacedly confessed to his friend T.S. Perry that ‘[t] hat journal has bribed me with gold – it is a case of gold pure & simple’. ‘Georgina’s 194



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Reasons’, with its sensational plot (from a donnée passed on to him by Mrs Kemble), fairly fast-moving episodes and deftly sketched settings, seems especially aimed at a popular readership. Much of February 1884 was spent in Paris. Though Turgenev was no longer there, James caught up with other literary men whose work he often admired while averting his eyes from their personal circumstances. Theodore Child arranged a meeting with the surviving Goncourt brother, Edmond, at his home in Auteuil, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. James also spent an evening at the home of Alphonse Daudet, in company with Zola and Edmond de Goncourt, and was reminded of what he missed in London, the sense of a group of artists seriously discussing their calling, and the physical demands it frequently entailed: ‘[t]he torment of style, the high standard of it, the effort to say something perfectly in a language in which everything has been said & re-said, – so that there are certain things, certain cases, which can never again be attempted – all this seems to me to be wearing them all out, so that they have the look of galley-slaves tied to a ball & chain, rather than of happy producers’. Of Daudet he commented that ‘there is something tragical, & his wasted, worn extraordinarily beautiful & refined little face expresses it in a way which almost brings tears to my eyes’. Already the Frenchman was showing signs of the venereal disease that would eventually prove fatal. As Leon Edel discovered, there is an eye-witness account of the evening by Theodore Child who accompanied James and later contributed his impressions to the ‘Contributors’ Club’ section of the Atlantic Monthly. James, ‘for the sake of convenience’, is referred to simply as ‘Mr. X’, ‘an eminent American novelist’, and the theme of the artist’s ‘pain and torture’ reiterated.9 London offered no comparable opportunities for the exchange of ideas of literary interest, moving James to complain to Child on his return from Paris of finding conversations ‘hideously political … there don’t seem to me to be three people in it who care for questions of art, or form, or taste’. Fenimore Woolson was staying in the city at this time, but his few references to her are equivocal. Writing to Lizzie Boott he invokes her Italian setting by referring to Fenimore as ‘The Costanza …. upon whom I have not a single reflection to make. I like & esteem her exceedingly’. He did, however, accompany her one summer evening to the theatre to see the celebrated Sarah Bernhardt in Sardou’s tragedy, Fédora, now best remembered for the style of hat worn by its heroine.

Artists and Actors James is much more enthusiastic and voluble about his new friendship with John Singer Sargent, the expatriate American artist resident in Paris. He had met the twenty-seven-year-old painter through Henrietta Reubell and Mrs Edward Boit, 195



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frequently praising both the man and his work in his letters to Grace Norton. Sargent was born in Florence of American parents; like James he spent most of his working life in Europe and never married. His career would prove highly successful, and his brilliantly executed portraits of ‘society’ women capture the most glamorous aspects of late-Victorian society. He came to London in March 1884 and James records a flurry of activity with the painter at its centre: ‘I went with him to the exhibition of Sir Joshua Reynolds (a most interesting thing) … took him to the National Gallery, dined him in the evening & took him to the theatre; & … yesterday, Sunday, I had him at lunch at 1.30, & after that under my wing (with just an interval to dress for dinner) till midnight. I took him to 10 artists’ studios, to see the pictures just going to the exhibitions; & at 8 o’clock entertained him at dinner at the Reform Club, where I had asked six men to meet him’. A few years later, in 1887, James was to write an important essay on Sargent which helped launch his career back in America and their friendship endured throughout the novelist’s life. He detected in Sargent’s work ‘a certain incompleteness’, but was nevertheless instrumental in persuading him to settle in London where he could put behind him the public outrage caused by his 1884 Paris Salon submission, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau), a seductive portrait of a woman already well-known in the ‘society’ pages. Among the studios the two men visited were those of John Everett Millais (not yet a baronet) and Sir Frederic Leighton (artists whose striking ‘worldly prosperity & success’ gave James some pause), and among the guests at the Reform Club dinner was Edward Burne-Jones, whose work James had long admired. Tommaso Salvini was appearing in London this spring, reprising his most celebrated role as Othello, as well as playing the other great Shakespeare heroes and parts in less famous plays, Giacometti’s La morte civile and Soumet’s The Gladiator. James reviewed his performances at Covent Garden for the Pall Mall Gazette, though conditions were initially discouraging: Salvini was forced to complain at the inadequate heating, the audience members had to keep their coats on, and the theatre was compelled to run advertisements reassuring the public when the problem had been fixed. Salvini’s acting, vividly described in James’s piece, might seem melodramatic to modern tastes, but the Italian remained, in the novelist’s eyes, as he reported to Theodore Child, ‘the greatest of the great’. Another notable theatrical event of this winter season was the debut of the American actress, Mary Anderson, in Maria Lovell’s five-act drama, Ingomar the Barbarian (a translation of Friedrich Halm’s Der Sohn der Wildniss). She had played the role of Parthenia in New York several years earlier when her great charm and beauty had excited the public. The critics (James among them) now complained of her crude acting technique in plays by W.S. Gilbert, Pygmalion and Galatea and Comedy and Tragedy. Parisian theatre had helped him banish the unhappy memory of her performance, as he confided to Mary Ward: ‘I have seen plays & performers 196



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that have dropped as a curtain over that last aberration of the misguided Mary’. Mrs Humphry Ward was an Arnold, a niece of Matthew and daughter of Thomas Arnold the Younger. She later became an important figure in social reform, involved with the settlement movement and the education of London’s impoverished children but, with a powerful intellect and heightened moral conviction, also enjoyed a career as a highly successful novelist speaking to the great issues of the day. It was at Mrs Ward’s home in Russell Square on 30 January 1884 that James met Miss Anderson, as the hostess’s sister-in-law, Gertrude, records in her diary: To day was delightful. We had a good large afternoon party to meet Mary Anderson. Mr. Lowell, Henry James, Geo. Russell, Sidney Colvin, Yates Thompsons, Lady Monteagle, Mrs Huxley, and several others. Miss Anderson looked exceedingly beautiful, & was so frank & gracious & charming. She talked to Mr. Lowell & Mr. James, but had to leave very soon.

James stayed on for dinner at the Wards’ and afterwards they all went to the Lyceum theatre to see the W.S. Gilbert double-bill. Miss Anderson had provided them with a box and they were near the stage, but all agreed that ‘her part was grievously overdone … Mr. James was very amusing and almost annoying; he got so angry at her “hysterics”, and stormed and raved at such untrained, unfinished, inartistic acting. It was easy to see that he is used to Parisian theatres’.10 The occasion and the questions it invited ‘as a study of the histrionic character’ proved interesting to both James and Mrs Ward (CN, p. 28). After six weeks’ work in summer 1884, Mrs Ward completed Miss Bretherton, a short fictional study of the development of a raw actress into a more informed and technically aware artist. That afternoon gathering, followed by the trip to the Lyceum theatre and the consequent disillusionment, provided the ‘germ’ for the work. Indeed, one of its minor protagonists, an American, Edward Wallace, ‘a well-known journalist, something of an artist, and still more a man of the world’, may well have been modelled on James.11 It would take the man himself more time and thought before he produced his own version of the actor’s acquisition of what Mrs Ward characterized as ‘art, conscious, trained, deliberate art’ in The Tragic Muse.12 And he would continue to be preoccupied by the associated, usually dubious trappings of celebrity and the value of popular acclaim.

Two Dedications Miss Bretherton proved sufficiently controversial on its publication through its perceived association with Mary Anderson – it was read, claimed the Pall Mall Gazette, with ‘the kind of interest excited by “Celebrities at Home”’ – that Mrs Ward felt 197



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compelled to defend herself both in a letter to the Athenaeum and in a Preface to the work’s second edition.13 Though her relationship with the actress herself remained cordial, Mrs Ward’s anxiety may have been exacerbated by earlier treatment accorded to a novel with a similar name, Miss Brown (1884), by Vernon Lee, a pseudonym for Violet Paget. Once again, James was drawn into a minor controversy. Violet Paget, born in 1856, had lived most of her life in Italy, but James met her in a number of London drawing-rooms during 1884 and was immensely impressed by her learning and intelligence. A childhood friend of John Singer Sargent’s (whose oil sketch of her survives), with a masculine nom de plume and a penchant for dressing à la garçonne, she must have seemed an exotic figure in London society. James was most attentive to her during that summer and, having recently read Euphorion, a study of Renaissance Italy, dedicated to Walter Pater, he described her as ‘one of the most charming & ingenious talkers I ever met’. With decorous humility he complied with her request that she might dedicate Miss Brown to him, and she had written, ‘To Henry James, I dedicate, for good luck, my first attempt at a novel’.14 It is quite a sensational work, dramatizing both the correspondences and discrepancies between the exercise of aesthetic sensitivity and an awareness of the more prosaic world of human suffering and moral duty. Picking up on other aesthetic theories of the time and coloured by the influential propositions of Pater in The Renaissance, the novel associates the good with the beautiful, creativity with moral rigour, though in her review of Pater’s Marius the Epicurean she had distanced herself from his controversial conclusion in The Renaissance, contending that ‘a system which has only the worship and pursuit of “exquisite moments” to recommend as a rule of life, leaves three-fourths of life untouched’.15 Having once read Miss Brown, James admitted to its author (never allowing friendship to sway critical judgment) that he found it ‘imperfect’ but ‘very interesting’. More specifically, he complained of ‘a kind of intellectualized rowdyism of style … a certain ferocity … a certain want of perspective & proportion’. The public reaction was more extreme, for the novel, crudely satirizing many aspects of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, contained thinly veiled portraits of literary figures including William Morris, Edward Gurney, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Justin McCarthy and Arthur O’Shaughnessy, and it created such a scandal that its author was cut by much of London society. James observed to Grace Norton, that he thought the novel ‘an interesting failure, if an unsavoury one’, though in a letter to William James, written nearly a decade later, he is much more forthright, offering his brother ‘a word of warning about Vernon Lee’, describing her fiction as ‘a tissue of ­personalities of the hideous roman-à-clef kind’. Mrs Ward’s novella is more circumspect and measured, but, having entertained Miss Paget in her own drawing-room, she clearly wished to avoid any comparable reaction. It didn’t help that Miss Bretherton and Miss Brown were reviewed together in the widely circulating Graphic newspaper.16 James was undoubtedly embarrassed at being associated with Miss 198



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Brown, though he maintained admirably cordial relations with its author, providing her with letters of introduction to some of his Venetian friends, and remaining in touch over the years. James was soon to receive the dedication of another first novel about whose author he harboured some reservations. He had been introduced by Sargent to the French writer, Paul Bourget, describing him as ‘literary, clever, a gentleman, & an Anglomane’, and fascinated by his conversation, had entertained him in London. In his effusive dedication to Cruelle énigme, Bourget recalls these meetings and the talk they enjoyed in a variety of settings – over dinner at the Athenaeum Club, in the shadow of trees of some vast park, and against the sound of the waves while walking on the promenade at Dover. It was to this seaside resort (rather than the Channel port it later became) that James retreated to work in the summer of 1884. The Frenchman concluded his dedication urbanely, in the hope that his work would prove worthy of its dedicatee: as a reader he admired James’s rare and subtle talent, as a colleague his intelligent sympathy, and as a friend his noble character. This ‘psychological’ novel, as it has been described, established Bourget in a successful career culminating in membership of the Académie Française. James would later characterize his work as looking ‘much more within than without’, noting ‘with extraordinary closeness the action of life on the soul, especially the corrosive and destructive action’ (LC 2: 485). James’s friendship with Bourget and his wife Minnie was to endure for many years, though early on he summed him up for William, strangely, as ‘extremely intelligent but full of mistakes and even of putrescence’. Cruelle énigme is a fluently written, predominantly analytical narrative depicting first the raptures of illicit love between an innocent young Parisian and a more worldly married woman, and then, after she has deceived him, his inability to reject her and his surrender to animal passion. James confided to Theodore Child that he found the piece somewhat unsavoury: ‘I am greatly compromised here by the dedication of Bourget’s novel – the story being so malpropre. But I admire it much – not the story, but the ability of it’.

‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’ and ‘The Path of Duty’ By a friend of much longer standing, Grace Norton, James seems once more to have been encouraged to consider marrying, at the time, of course, a step undertaken by many men, however uncertain their sexual preferences. Once again, James firmly spells out that marriage with what he refers to as ‘the British female’ is not for him, explaining that ‘if marriage is perfectly successful it is the highest human state; … if it fails of this it is little better than an awful grind, an ignoble, unworthy condition’. Earlier in the year the English Illustrated Magazine had published ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’ (1884), its theme of marital disharmony exposed through 199



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conflicting opinions on the nature and application of art, though reflective, too, of its author’s own sexual unease. The young American narrator is a besotted admirer of the writer Mark Ambient and his works, considered by the latter’s wife to be ‘objectionable’ (CT 5: 328).The couple have an angelically beautiful little boy, with the sweet name of Dolcino, a source of division between the two since the wife seeks to protect him from his father, whose mind she condemns as ‘a well of corruption’, ‘his writings immoral and his influence pernicious’ (329). Ambient’s style is exquisitely crafted, likened to ‘“the shaping of the vase – the hammering of the metal!”’ (332), its subject matter ‘pagan’ in its devotion to beauty, while Mrs Ambient is convinced that art must have a ‘“purpose”’ (328). Such terms and ideals reflect the theorizing of the period – the Aesthetic movement, Pater’s dedication to the transcendent value of the felt experience of beauty, Ruskin’s belief in art’s moral purpose, Matthew Arnold’s juxtaposing of Hellenism and purity of form, with Hebraism and life conducted according to moral conscience. The innocent child is not to be touched by men – either by his father (329), or, indeed, the narrator, also corrupt in Mrs Ambient’s eyes because of his adulation of her husband. The child falls ill, and having read Ambient’s most recent work at the narrator’s misguided urging, she locks herself in a room with the child: he must not be tainted by such an influence, and so she sacrifices his life, the first of a number of boy victims in James’s fiction which would include Morgan Moreen in ‘The Pupil’, another ‘lad just growing up’ in ‘Owen Wingrave’, struck down long ago by his soldier father (CT 9: 37), and Miles in ‘The Turn of the Screw’. In his ‘Notebook’ musings, James had briefly considered allowing the child to grow up to become ‘a lout and ignoramus’ (CN, p. 25), but in the event, the narrative is confined simply to the duration of a weekend in the country, as if to confirm that such beauty is short-lived. With a hint of fin-de-siècle fatalism, the narrator had foreseen such an outcome for Dolcino from the beginning: ‘he was too charming to live … there is a kind of charm which is like a death-warrant’ (CT 5: 310). The emblematic nature of the tale is clear. Mrs Ambient is associated with traditional Christian values, while her husband represents the extremes of aestheticism, a devotion to form, a corrupting influence, a perceived immorality which repels the non-Paterian ‘cold, thin flame’ of her Philistinism (336–337). The narrative twice cryptically mentions a friend of Ambient’s,‘the other great man, the one in America’ (305); this, one infers, is Walt Whitman, most notorious at the time for his bold proclamations of love between men: ‘who but I should be the poet of comrades?’, he asks in ‘Proto-Leaf ’. One of Whitman’s greatest British admirers who corresponded with him over many years was John Addington Symonds who, in later years, published a ‘Study’ of the poet. James had learnt of the difficulties of Symonds’s marriage from a mutual friend, Edmund Gosse, and his situation provided the donnée for the story. And, like Symonds, whose writing James so admired, Mark Ambient was imagined as an inspired interpreter of Italy and the Renaissance. 200



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Having met him once in 1877, James had sent Symonds an essay on Venice, published originally in the Century magazine and later reprinted in Portraits of Places (1883), receiving a warm response. In his reply, written in 1884, James confided that ‘it seemed to me that the victims of a common passion shld sometimes exchange a look’, and concludes by saying – ‘(I will say it) I think of you with exceeding sympathy’. This cryptic signing-off may simply refer to Symonds’s incurable tuberculosis, but the earlier exchange of a look hints at some guilty shared secret, more dangerous and transgressive than a mutual fascination with the beauties of Italy. James was probably not aware of Symonds’s A Problem in Greek Ethics, a sympathetic discussion of sexual ‘inversion’, and, indeed, of pederasty, originally drafted in 1873 and later privately printed, though he was loaned a copy by Gosse in later years. He did know, however, of the circumstances of Symonds’s life, his exile on health grounds in Davos, his unhappy relations with his wife, her dismissal of his writing as ‘immoral, pagan, hyper-aesthetic, etc.’ (CN, p. 25), and his passion for Italy. In a letter to Gosse (committed to his happy marriage, but attracted, too, to men), James comments of his story that ‘[p]erhaps I have divined the innermost cause of J.A.S.’s discomfort – but I don’t think I seize, on p. 571, exactly the allusion you refer to. I am therefore devoured with curiosity as to this further revelation. Even a post-card (in covert words) would relieve the suspense of the perhaps-already-too-indiscreet-H.J.’ The reference to ‘p. 571’ relates to the scene in Ambient’s study when he introduces his admirer to the ‘innermost mysteries’ of ‘the school in which he was master’; he confesses that he had only half expressed his thoughts in his writing, keeping back ‘the richer part’ for ‘dread of scandal’ (323). Allusions to guessing, concealment and the danger of public exposure run through the interchanges between Gosse and James, and the story, too, operates in a similarly covert medium, his devotion to aestheticism signalling the tensions in Ambient’s life, modelled on the incompatibilities within Symonds’s marriage. Symonds’s courageous honesty in consigning even to private print his own sexual history as a topic or a case is unique for its time. Another of James’s stories, ‘The Path of Duty’, which came out a few months after ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’, introduces a different set of marital tensions, duties and fears. A female American narrator will, she assures us, tell ‘everything’ (CT 6: 154). An eligible man, Ambrose Tester, has, for years, been in love with a married woman. Persuaded by his father that he has a duty to marry and procreate, he becomes engaged, but then faces a dilemma when the woman he has long loved is widowed: should he throw over the innocent girl to whom he is betrothed? Finally, he follows ‘the path of duty’ and marries her and they have children, though the act of marriage is represented as a form of execution. He also continues his virtuous meetings with his widowed friend, leaving his wife ‘white with uneasiness’ at the sanctity of their relationship (193). The tale is a masterly study of the manners and values of upper-class society, though the relationships, seemingly untouched by 201



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sexual desire, are constructed as a form of moral conundrum. James was aware of the story’s limitation: his preparatory note considers and rejects the dangerous possibility of the young wife’s agreeing to her husband’s taking his widowed friend as a mistress: ‘If I were a Frenchman or a naturalist, this is probably the treatment I should adopt’ (CN, p. 24).

Family Duties The novelist spent much of August and September of this year in Dover, feeling the pressure of the professional commitments he had undertaken – two long and quite different works to be serialized in the Century and the Atlantic Monthly, The Bostonians and The Princess Casamassima. By the end of September, the opening chapters of The Bostonians had been dispatched to New York. Meantime, many of his letters to William during this year concern themselves with the naming of his brother’s most recently born child, a boy, and Henry’s preference for one simple name, uncluttered by family associations. Eventually (with uncle’s approval) the name of Herman was chosen. In honour of their father’s memory William edited and published this year the Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, a collection of essays on spiritual themes, on Swedenborg and Carlyle, as well as ‘An autobiographic sketch’. It was a task he had promised to undertake in his last letter to his father which arrived when Henry Sr already lay dead.William had a deeper understanding of his father’s difficult and arcane philosophical ideas than his younger brother, though Henry’s affection remained undimmed. Having read a fragment of the volume published in the Atlantic, he felt moved in a letter to William to ponder mortality and life’s mystery: ‘[h]ow strange it seems to be doing these things over Father’s grave – he vanished into darkness and silence – far away – where? – and without movement in it or sound, and his face and voice already becoming a legend, a dim thing, of another life!’. Bob James continued to be a cause of much anxiety. Having secured a post as curator at the Milwaukee Art Museum, he resigned within two months and, having left his own family in the mid-West, he stayed temporarily with William in Cambridge. With no prospect of a secure career, a continuing dependency on alcohol, a marriage being destroyed through his own problems, Bob seems to have followed in the path of some of his male ancestors. Alice continued to suffer both mental and physical ill-health and, when Katharine Loring set off for Europe with her ailing sister, Louisa, she decided to join them and visit Henry in London. Grace Norton (one of Henry’s closest confidantes) expressed concern that Alice would make unreasonable demands on his time, but he replies reassuringly that ‘[t]here is no question of her living with me. She is unspeakably un-dependent & independent, she clings no more than a bowsprit, has her own plans, purposes, preferences, 202



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p­ ractices, pursuits, more than any one I know’. Having hired a nurse, he travelled north to meet his fragile sister who had to be carried off the Pavonia ‘in a very knocked-up condition’ when it docked in Liverpool. Katharine Loring was also present, dividing her time between caring for Alice and Louisa. Henry took his brotherly duties seriously, later installing Alice in lodgings near his Bolton Street rooms. Whatever demands she made, Alice was touchingly aware of her brother’s kindness. In a letter to William sent a month after her arrival, she wrote in a postscript that ‘[i]t occurs to me that I have never mentioned Harry. His kindness & devotion are not to be described by mortal pen, he shows no outward sign of impatience at having an old man of the Sea indefinitely launched upon him, I am afraid that he will find me attached to his coat-tails for the rest of my mortal career’.17 In January 1885, she moved to the south-coast town of Bournemouth and would never, in fact, be fit enough to make the journey back to America. Despite his close relationship with William, Henry’s ties with Cambridge, Boston, indeed, America, were also much reduced in these years.

‘The Siege of London’ and Tales of Three Cities Yet he continued to explore the tensions and anomalies of social and cultural difference between America and Europe, a theme running through the longer stories written at this time. The title of ‘The Siege of London’ (1883) has only a figurative application since James is solely concerned with social hostilities: skirmishes of the verbal kind take place typically in London drawing rooms or on the parterres of country houses. Its American heroine, Mrs Headway, a further development of the Daisy Miller figure, finds herself uncompromisingly at odds with British modes of behaviour, separated not least by her speech habits and distinctive Americanisms. The story’s conflict, however revealing of the jarring gap between British and American sensibilities, also introduces the theme of arrivisme. Mrs Headway (the choice of name suggests her gung-ho approach) emerges from a disreputable past and a number of marriages to encounter social and family hostility in her aim of marrying a colourless young man, Sir Arthur Demesne (a name reminiscent of landed estates), an embodiment of the British establishment by virtue of family antecedents and his role as a Member of Parliament. This ‘modern bacchante’ (CT 5: 49), a product of the American southwest, may have been coldshouldered in New York City and ignored by ‘nice’ Americans in Paris, but she meets with a form of success in London society. There she is a novelty, patronized by the nobility who find her sayings amusing and laugh even when she says nothing. Mrs Headway also manages to see off the opposition of the formidable woman who will become her mother-in-law, suggesting that a woman with a past may make her way – in this case – through marriage – into reputable society. 203



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Despite its title, ‘The Siege of London’ opens on a stuffy September evening in Paris’s Théâtre-Français, and the performance watched by two American men is Émile Augier’s L’Aventurière – the Adventuress – perhaps the first play seen by James himself in this theatre. In fact, its plot in which a woman’s past bars her from entering respectable society clearly relates to James’s story. Despite this outcome, L’Aventurière raises the question of how she is to be judged and, indeed, who has the moral authority to judge her.The theme of the ascendant ‘New Woman’ would interest many dramatists on both sides of the Channel in this period, and James’s story further extends its theatrical frame of reference when the two Americans return to their memories of evenings spent at the Théâtre-Français and compare their situation to the moral dilemmas dramatized both in Augier’s play and in Le Demi-monde by Alexandre Dumas, fils, a piece which treats the idea of prostitution as a threat to marriage. The older of the two, Littlemore, knows enough of Mrs Headway’s past to compromise her, and he is compared in the story to men in both Le Demi-monde and L’Aventurière. In a later 1892 Notebook entry James acknowledges his ‘vague rappel of the “situation” in Dumas’s Demi-Monde’, the situation involving, most simply, male ascendancy in determining a woman’s reputation and therefore her social visibility (CN, p. 72). In fact, another play by Dumas fils, L’Étrangère, not mentioned in ‘The Siege of London’, offers further parallels in mid-century French theatre. In a variation on the ‘international’ theme, New World effrontery is pitted against the intransigence of the Parisian nobility: its heroine, the rich Mrs Clarkson, ‘daughter of a mulatto slave-girl and a Carolinian planter’, attempts to insinuate her way into the upper echelons of Parisian society. James had disliked the play, but his description of the role played by Sarah Bernhardt, Mrs Clarkson,‘the mysterious American, her beauty, her diamonds, her sinister reputation, her innumerable conquests, and her total absence of female friends’ suggests an interesting model for his own heroine (CWHJD, pp. 150–151). And women of the kind represented by Mrs Headway, as James concedes in his 1908 preface for the story, have become a part of social history, to be seen as ‘brave precursors, as adventurous skirmishers and éclaireurs’ (LC 2 1215). By recalling her as a ‘scout’, he suggests the heroine’s frontier pluck while invoking, too, her dramatic French forbears. In that late preface, James recalls the London of the period of the story’s composition as seen from his rooms in Bolton Street, and he is reminded, too, of another Victorian adventuress,Thackeray’s Becky Sharp who, as Mrs Rawdon Crawley, had lived nearby. The view from his room is itself translated into a theatrical experience and his own vocation imagined as the quiet witnessing of colourful dramatic action and its conditions.The façade of the ‘great house’ opposite ‘hung there like the most voluminous of curtains – it masked the very stage of the great theatre of the town’ where the author was privileged to watch the ‘ample interacts of the mightiest of dramas’. And he reminisces fondly about his own ‘tolerably copious artistry of that 204



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time’, played out ‘with the curtain more or less quietly down and with the tuning of fiddles and only the vague rumbling of shifted scenery playing round it and through it’ (LC 2: 1220–1221). He reminds us of those long Victorian scene changes requiring much heavy lifting, but revealing, too, is his use of the term ‘interact’, an emphatically English though rarely used version of the more familiar entr’acte. In the autumn of 1884 appeared a collection of three of James’s extended tales previously published in the Century Magazine. The volume is called Tales of Three Cities, though only the last in the group, ‘A New England Winter’, really fits with this topographical title. The action of ‘The Impressions of a Cousin’ takes place on the banks of the Hudson River, in upstate New York, though the donnée for the tale derives from seventeenth-century France. James’s friend Anne Thackeray Ritchie had in 1881 published a study of Madame de Sévigné, best known for her letters describing life at the French Court. James, however, was drawn to the story of her granddaughter, ‘the poor little demoiselle de Grignan, who was being forced into a convent, because her father, during her minority, had spent all her property and didn’t wish to have to give an account of it’ (CN, p. 16). Eunice, the equivalent girl in James’s tale, has been swindled out of her inheritance by her financial trustee, Mr Caliph, but loving him, she would have happily forgiven and married him. He has been unaware of this and James complicates the narrative by relating it through the diary of her observing cousin, Miss Condit, herself in love with the swindler’s virtuous stepbrother. The idea of the convent is only a passing possibility in the tale and, characteristically, James develops more fully from the donnée the idea of love surviving in the face of deception. Around the dapper but duplicitous Mr Caliph gather a number of racial and cultural assumptions which are of their time: he is likened irreverently to Haroun-al-Raschid, a character from One Thousand and One Nights, who expects, asserts the self-designated ‘old maid’ cousin, Miss Condit, to find women ‘in a state of Oriental prostration’, though she is corrected by cousin Eunice who points out that ‘he is not the least of a Turk’. And Miss Condit continues to wonder in her diary whether, in his elegant clothes, he is not a Jew, ‘a Jew of the artistic, not of the commercial type’ (CT 5: 121, 150). The second novella in this sequence, ‘Lady Barberina’, turns to less troubling cultural issues, engaging with what James termed the ‘international’ theme. Moving away from the familiar juxtaposing of American innocence with European sophistication, this story adjusts the values, charting the marriage between an aristocratic though impoverished British girl and a wealthy American doctor. For James, in retrospect, it belonged to a specific historic moment soon to pass: ‘the general air in which most of these particular flowers of fancy bloom is an air we have pretty well ceased to breathe’, he observed (LC, 2: 1215). The ‘international’ element is here lightly treated, offering ‘the interest of contrasted things’, and thus simply ‘the greater amusement’ (1208, 1209), evident even in the choice of protagonists’ names: the 205



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British include the Canterville family, Lady Marmaduke and Lady Beauchemin, while the Americans are called Jackson Lemon, Dexter Freer, Sidney Feeder, Mrs Vanderdecken and Herman Longstraw. The snobbish assumptions of the British upper classes are gently satirized as they wonder how a man of considerable wealth (Dr Jackson Lemon, imagined in the planning as ‘a good deal of an Anglomaniac and a “dude”’ (CN, p. 20)) can possibly have a job or career, attributing such a failing to the fact that ‘there were no country-gentlemen’ in America (CT 5: 252–253) and so young men must find something to occupy their time.The beautiful but unyielding Lady Barberina accompanies her new husband to New York, but with her ‘immitigable Anglicism’, avoids being assimilated into the Manhattan social circle (LC 2: 1209). The much-travelled old American couple who observe events, Dr and Mrs Freer, had warned Dr Lemon of the dangers of such a marriage: Lady Barberina would never accommodate herself to ‘“a society of commoners”’ and by the end of the story the disappointed doctor has to concede that they were right (CT 5: 258). When she arrives in London on a visit, it is clear she will never return to New York. Lady Barberina cannot warm to the powerful society ladies who visit her in Fifth Avenue, whereas her sister, Lady Agatha, is excited by the social prospects on offer, ‘the rushings-out and the droppings-in, the intimacies, the endearments, the comicalities, the sleigh-bells …’. She has learnt, too, to speak ‘the most beautiful American’ (272, 269) and eventually marries a Californian, Mr Herman Longstraw, who with an impressive moustache and a ‘remarkable Western vocabulary’, ‘a foreign language altogether – a romantic dialect’, is as unfamiliar to New Yorkers as the British visitors (270, 279). Like Christopher Newman in The American and Mrs Headway in ‘The Siege of London’, Longstraw is a native of the far West, and his runaway marriage with the English heiress hits ‘a thousand newspapers’: ‘an unnameable vulgarity had been opened upon the house of Canterville’ (300). Much of 1883 had been spent by James in Boston and his experience of its wintry months is recorded in ‘A New England Winter’, the last in the sequence of his ‘City’ novellas. In this slight comedy of manners, a young man returns from Paris, and it seems to him that Boston has become ‘a city of women … a country of women…. the masculine note was so subordinate’ (142). He is called Florimond, a name found, we are told, by his mother in a ballad (fashionable reading at the time), though James may well have taken it from the Prince who appears in Perrault’s fairy tale, La belle au bois dormant, or Sleeping Beauty. His mother, Mrs Daintry, tries to entertain him by arranging for a young kinswoman to visit, but no romance ensues and finally she escorts him back to Europe. The material is thin – Florimond, for instance, make a visit to Cambridge which simply allows for a detailed account of Harvard and the changing seasons of this rural enclave – but the tale offers interesting observations on this ‘city of women’, detailing the lives of young mothers, one overwhelmed by her children, another enjoying the 206



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freedom facilitated by servants, poorer relations who come to stay for undefined periods, the interests and motives of women of a certain age, the question of how social calls are to be made, the conventions reflecting the collective ‘queerness of Bostonians’ (113). It is a closely observed tale based on the impressions of the newly returned Florimond who wonders at the crammed horse-cars in the slushy snow, the bustling commercial enterprises on Washington Street and the picturesque residential streets of the Back Bay and Beacon Hill. Equally detailed are the interior scenes, the rooms, fittings and furniture of the leisured classes. Indeed, the wryly ironic account of women’s lives and Boston’s eccentricities, and the cameo role of Miss Lucretia Daintry, undomesticated and given to social causes (though opposed to Female Suffrage), clearly anticipates the more ambitious scope of The Bostonians. James was surprised when this ‘little innocent jeu d’esprit’ was ‘taken in bad part’ by some of the city’s inhabitants, though feelings ran much higher on the publication of the novel’s larger scale examination of local life.

‘The Art of Fiction’ In this same autumn of 1884, James published in Longman’s Magazine an important essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’, a form of artistic credo, and a guide for aspiring novelists. He had written it before leaving for Dover, and it is a response to a lecture, ‘Fiction as One of the Fine Arts’, delivered at the Royal Institution by Walter Besant, a prolific popular novelist and essayist. Besant argued at this time when the reading of novels was often regarded as a light, undemanding pursuit that the genre should be considered ‘one of the fine arts’, the equal of poetry, painting, music and architecture (LC 1: 47, James’s emphasis). The field is admittedly ‘overcrowded’ by mediocre fiction, as James admits, its status undermined even by figures such as Trollope who apologized for the genre, reducing it simply to ‘make believe’ (49, 46). James’s experience of French fiction and those memories of searching discussions with Flaubert, Daudet, Zola, Mendès, Edmond de Goncourt, Maupassant, and, indeed, Turgenev, inform this essay from the beginning, exposing the absence of formal awareness in Anglophone writing. In the time of Dickens and Thackeray, the novel was not, as he says, ‘discutable’, and the method was ‘naïf’. The English novel had ‘no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself behind it – of being the expression of an artistic faith, the result of choice and comparison’ (44). James appreciates Besant’s summary of the novel’s attributes, its general ‘laws’, its ‘conscious moral purpose’, though he finds such a rationale overly prescriptive. By contrast, he proclaims the virtues of liberty, expansiveness and inclusiveness. The ‘good health of an art’ depends upon being ‘perfectly free. It lives upon exercise, and the very meaning of exercise is freedom’ (49). All art, of course, involves selection, 207



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whose ‘main care’, however, ‘is to be typical, to be inclusive’: ‘the province of art is all life, all feeling, all observation, all vision’ (58, 59). He advises the aspiring novelist to cultivate an openness to experience: ‘“[t]ry to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!”’ and aim in writing to achieve ‘the air of reality (solidity of specification)’ (53). James conceives of the genre as organic, rejecting as old-fashioned such artificial categories as ‘the novel of character’ and ‘the novel of incident’; indeed, he invites the reader to consider what constitutes ‘an incident’. It is perhaps ‘an incident for a woman to stand up with her hand resting on a table and look out at you in a certain way’, but it may also serve as ‘an expression of character’ (55). Thus he dismisses Besant’s contention that events, or ‘adventures’, are a necessity in fiction before going on to risk undermining his own point. He has just finished reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, filled with exotic incident, a work superior in its artistry to Edmond de Goncourt’s Chérie, the story of a ‘little French girl who lived in a fine house in Paris, and died of wounded sensibility because no one would marry her’ (61). Both works may be novels, however disparate – as he observes elsewhere, ‘[t]he house of fiction has … not one window, but a million’ (LC 2: 1075) – but the French work is dismissed because it fails to trace ‘the development of the moral consciousness of a child’ (LC 1: 61).The range of possibilities it may offer, he concludes, constitutes the genre’s great virtue: ‘[t]here is no impression of life, no manner of seeing it and feeling it, to which the plan of the novelist may not offer a place’ (64). James’s review of George Eliot’s Life (1885) by her husband John Cross, though full of admiration for her intelligence, follows a similar line in exposing an aesthetic, intuitive limitation of spontaneity. Her vision moves ‘from the abstract to the concrete’: her ‘figures and situations … are not seen, in the irresponsible plastic way’ (LC 1: 1003). ‘The Art of Fiction’, this important document in Victorian literary criticism, anticipates in its idiom and manner of delivery many of the themes of modernist criticism, as well as theorizing some of the features of his own fiction, ideas which would be developed in his last great critical enterprise, the Prefaces for the New York Edition of his works.

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Henry received from William his copies of The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James at the end of 1884, material too ‘theological’ for his taste, but nevertheless a task acknowledged as ‘beautifully & honourably done’. Alice, living ‘in 2 small London rooms’ and regularly visited at the time by her brother, had wept on seeing the volume, exclaiming ‘“how beautiful it is that William should have done it! … And how good William is, how good, how good!”’. And when this posthumous work was virtually ignored by the world (William reported to Henry that only one copy had been sold over a six-month spell), Henry felt indignant that his father had not been rescued from oblivion. He might, on the other hand, have wished to see the end of certain other family connections: he had received a request for money from Minny Temple’s brother, Bob, now ‘degraded, worthless & shameless’, who had been imprisoned in Oregon for ‘attempting to poison a man, & some sheep, while in a state of “alcoholic insanity”’.

The Bostonians The first instalment of The Bostonians appeared in the February 1885 number of the Century Magazine. In the proposal sent to its publisher James acknowledges his indebtedness to Alphonse Daudet’s recent novel, L’Évangéliste, an account of the powerful influence exercised by an older on a younger woman. As its title indicates, the context is religious, but, as in James’s novel, the potential for change rests

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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  A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson  e­ xclusively with women. The Bostonians is emphatically ‘a very American tale, a tale very characteristic of our social conditions’ exemplified by ‘the situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex, the agitation on their behalf ’ (CN, pp. 19–20). Its Boston setting, with its associations of intellectual earnestness, sobriety, high ideals and progressive beliefs, allows for an uncharacteristically satirical mode. James’s subject is the growing movement of female emancipation:Verena Tarrant, a girl with natural oratorical talent, is taken in hand by the wealthy Olive Chancellor, ‘unmarried by every implication of her being’ (p. 18).The beautiful Verena, exposed to a wider public and enjoying success, is also pursued by the young Basil Ransom, inimical to the cause, who contends that ‘“[t]he use of a truly amiable woman is to make some honest man happy”’, and that society needs to be saved from ‘“the most damnable feminisation”’ (pp. 210, 290). He finally wins Verena, just as she is about to launch herself at a major event at the Boston Music Hall, but it is an attachment which, it is hinted, may yet cause her tears. She has almost fulfilled the prediction of the cynical Mrs Luna, Olive’s sister, that she will ‘“run off with some lion-tamer; she will marry a circus-man!”’ (p. 181). The Bostonians revisits scenes with which James was familiar. Olive’s drawing room in Boston’s Back Bay, for instance, the setting for the novel’s early scenes, was modelled on the salon of Annie Fields on Charles Street, whose husband James had published some of Henry’s early fiction in the Atlantic Monthly. James was aware that Annie Fields, widowed in 1881, had taken as a life companion the novelist Sarah Orne Jewett, a relationship known as a Boston marriage. Such commitments, ‘so common in New England’, were also exemplified in his sister’s relationship with Katharine Loring (CN, p. 19). And so the exclusive, indeed, romantic companionship which Olive longs to establish with Verena Tarrant, to have ‘a friend of her own sex with whom she might have a union of soul’, has a specifically Bostonian resonance (p. 71). Olive, ‘subject to fits of tragic shyness’, is, however, a ‘morbid’ case, who longs for martyrdom as well as for ‘the coming of a better day’; hating men ‘as a class, anyway’, she is not typical of the female reformers of the time (pp. 11, 12, 22). Re-living women’s suffering, sunk in an ‘ocean of tears’, she apprehends the experience of women as a nightmare, ‘uncounted millions had lived only to be tortured, to be crucified’ (p. 34). Her aim is that she and Verena should together engage with ‘the history of feminine anguish’, though she has been disappointed in the past (p. 160). Having taken up impoverished ‘shop-maidens’, she has found them to be ‘odiously mixed up with Charlie. Charlie was a young man in a white overcoat and a paper collar; it was for him, in the last analysis, that they cared much the most’ (p. 32). Other leaders in the movement are less driven: Mrs Farrinder, ‘“great apostle of the emancipation of women”’, appears as ‘a mixture of the American matron and the public character’, while the New York socialite Mrs Burrage can offer Verena ‘a kind of social pedestal from which she might really shine afar’ (pp. 20, 28, 271). Most 210



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disinterested of the novel’s campaigners is the aged Miss Birdseye, ‘“one of the earliest, one of the most passionate, of the old Abolitionists”’, who, in the past, lent her support to the Short Skirt League, acted as a mission to ‘the Southern blacks’, and now hosts meetings of feminist sympathisers (p. 20). In opposition to such radical reformers, Basil Ransom is a Mississippian and Civil War veteran, his background a later development in James’s planning (CN, p. 19). The novel’s historical setting of the mid-1870s marks the end of southern Reconstruction: Ransom has turned his back on what he calls ‘the state of despair’ (13). With his ‘thick black hair, perfectly straight and glossy … rolled back … in a leonine manner’, he harks back to a pre-war epoch, illustrated even in his manner of speaking, a discourse ‘pervaded by something sultry and vast, something almost African in its rich basking tone, something that suggested the teeming expanse of the cotton-field’ (p. 6). James later admitted that his portrait of this ‘youthful Southron’ owed ‘something human and Mississippian’ to his impression of Senator Lucius Lamar II, ‘the noble Lamar’, a politician he had met in Washington in 1883. Basil Ransom, this ‘lean, pale, sallow, shabby, striking young man’ (p. 6), may also have been modelled on a remembered hero from his childhood, Eugene Norcom, son of a southern family who lived as neighbours in New York with their enslaved servants, a ‘pair of affectionate black retainers’ (SBO, p. 196). Accompanying the instalments of The Bostonians in the Century was a series of articles titled ‘Battles and Leaders of the Civil War’, contributed by both northern and southern veterans.1 The deaths of two of James’s cousins in the Civil War,William James Temple and Gus Barker, are recorded on the small white tablets located in Harvard’s Memorial Hall, a place familiar to the novelist, and Ransom and Verena’s visit to the hall invokes the pathos of recent history. The names of individuals and southern battles and skirmishes are already almost forgotten, and this northern monument now ‘arched over friends as well as enemies, the victims of defeat as well as the sons of triumph’ (p. 213).The Tarrants’ home is in Cambridge, and James adds a further, less violent, layer of history by locating it in Monadnoc Place. The name comes from a mountain in southern New Hampshire, and it has a range of New England Transcendentalist credentials, referred to by Emerson, Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. By contrast, the Tarrants’ wooden cottage is a humble place on an unpaved road with a footpath overlaid with planks, smelling uninvitingly of kerosene. Olive Chancellor is offended by that smell, on her visit regarding the Tarrant household as ‘a desert of sordid misery’, dismissing the parents as ‘trashy’, and taking over their daughter with a cheque ‘for a very considerable amount’ (pp. 151, 100, 145). Having moved in Abolitionist circles, Mrs Tarrant still clings to ‘society’ despite her marriage to ‘an itinerant vendor of lead-pencils’ (p. 64). There is a Dickensian grotesquery in the portrait of Selah Tarrant with his taste for hot pies, membership of the Cayuga community (a Jamesian invention, though the name of a native American tribe), advocating ‘no wives, or no husbands, or something of that sort’, 211

  A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson  his laying-on of hands as part of ‘the mesmeric mystery’, and his hanging about newspaper offices and hotel lobbies among the spittoons so as to be, somehow, ‘“on the spot’ (pp. 64, 67, 92). He is, in Ransom’s eyes, with a telling post-Civil War resonance, ‘the detested carpet-bagger’ (p. 52). As in the novel to follow, The Princess Casamassima, James very clearly differentiates between those who have money and those who don’t. Ransom himself, an impoverished young lawyer trying to make his way, has noticed the ‘organized privacy’ of his cousin Olive’s well-staffed home (p. 16), and, later, attending one of Verena’s performances at the lavishly furnished New York home of Mrs Burrage, thinks of his own shabby lodgings near the Dutch grocery store. Indeed, Mrs Burrage offers Verena ‘the largest cheque’ she has ever received for such an address, and the girl realizes the ‘tremendous force’ of money in fighting a cause (p. 266). The narrator pointedly allows us only a sample of Verena’s eloquence as an orator in New York when she exalts ‘“the intelligence of the heart”’. She has earlier been hailed as ‘a New England Corinna, with a mission instead of a lyre’, but her speech is quickly dismissed by Ransom as ‘vague, thin, rambling, a tissue of generalities’ (pp. 228, 231, 236). More disturbingly, Verena’s discourse at times blurs the distinction between public and private performance; her suitor is amused at her dropping ‘into oratory as a natural thing …. did she take him for a full house? She had the same turns and cadences, almost the same gestures, as if she had been on the platform’ (p. 196). And later, under pressure from Olive, this ‘spotless, consecrated maiden’ unrolls ‘a coil of propositions … with the most touching, most cumulative effect’ (261). An offer of marriage from the journalist Matthias Pardon involves a comparable melding of the public and private for Verena. He offers her the chance to ‘“wake up famous”’, an idea ‘“rather dazzling”’, a ‘glittering bait’, though these terms indicate that she will, in the process, become a commodity (p. 127). Enjoying the dubious endorsement of Mr Tarrant, Pardon follows the practices of the scandal sheets in exposing illicit liaisons by ‘going the rounds of the hotels, to cull flowers from the big, greasy registers which lie on the marble counters’ (p. 110). He will stand, as James emphasizes in a preparatory note, for ‘vulgarity and hideousness … the impudent invasion of privacy – the extinction of all conception of privacy’ (CN, p. 19). The Bostonians was not well received, dismissed in the liberal-leaning New-York Tribune, for instance, for its ‘disagreeable subject’ and ‘prevailing lowness of tone’,2 while many reviewers, admiring James’s brilliance and originality, simply failed to enjoy it. In Boston especially, James’s well-informed irony met with disapproval. Most damagingly, it was considered that Miss Birdseye was a crude portrait of Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, teacher, Transcendentalist reformer, and sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne – altogether ‘“a pretty bad business”’,William reported to his brother. James pointedly denied this, but it is significant that, as the novel progresses, her portrait becomes ever more sympathetic. She emerges as a touchingly 212



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high-minded and innocent figure, whose death constitutes one of its most poignant moments, ‘the prettiest thing in the book’, as the author also observed. The novel has a strikingly ‘local’ application, the city’s locations and atmosphere observed in meticulous detail. Many years later James received an enquiry concerning the addresses of Olive Chancellor and Miss Birdseye, and his reply, mixing fiction and reality, reveals the sharpness of his memories: Miss Chancellor must have lived in Charles St. on the left side from Beacon, and … her house had one of the white doors, partly glass, that open on a short flight of steps before the house door proper is reached…. I seem dimly to recall Miss Birdseye lived in – oh, I forget! I must have meant one of the streets in the neighborhood of the old Worcester station – or the Boston and Albany. I think vaguely of Essex – or of something off it, and I smell the house, inside, even yet; but I can neither name or number it’.

Initially excited by his new work, whilst conscious that some might object to its title, by the time of its completion James admitted a degree of disappointment. In his view, Basil Ransom failed to ‘become as solid as he ought to be’, while the middle part seemed ‘too diffuse & insistent – far too describing & explaining & expatiating. The whole thing is too long & dawdling’. He seems never to have changed this view, and The Bostonians joined The Europeans and Washington Square in being omitted from the New York Edition. To Edmund Gosse he confided that the prospect of having to revise it ‘loomed peculiarly formidable and time-consuming (for intrinsic reasons)’, probably referring to the novel’s specific and historic field of reference. Scribner’s request for its omission was thus easily accepted.3 Given the edition’s title, it is ironic that James excluded those novels which by title or setting specifically invoke American experience. Despite this exclusion The Bostonians has never since failed to enjoy the attention of later commentators responsive to the variety of cultural–historical issues it raises.

To the Seaside: Robert Louis Stevenson At the beginning of 1885 Alice had moved to Bournemouth, once again with the support of Katharine Loring, and in April Henry took rooms not far from them, staying until July. He was relieved to miss most of the London season which left ‘too little of the loose change of time’ (CTWGBA, p. 40).The town offered fresh sea air, much recommended by the medical profession, though the novelist found the routine of life there quite dull. He recognized, nevertheless, the importance of the relationship between the two women, while also confessing to William a certain unease about his sister’s dependency on her friend, observing that ‘as soon as they 213

  A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson  get together Alice takes to her bed’. There is no doubt, however, that his sister was chronically ill – possibly dying, as he informed her old friend, Lizzie Boott. Confined to her bed for the previous thirteen weeks, she had benefited little from the change of air: ‘[t]he next couple of months will probably determine whether she has a possibility of recuperation, or whether her future decline is to be rapid, certain & fatal. She shows immense courage & patience’. When she was well enough, James called twice a day on visits lasting about twenty minutes, allowing him time to carry on working on The Princess Casamassima. James’s essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’, prompted by a Walter Besant lecture, was itself replied to in ‘A Humble Remonstrance’ in Longman’s Magazine in early December 1884. Its author was Robert Louis Stevenson. The two novelists had met in 1879, and, in typically original style, Stevenson’s piece offers a gentle corrective to some of James’s assertions, suggesting that the idea of ‘the art of narrative’ (which he applies to poetry as well as prose) offers a more flexible starting point for the aspiring writer. The Scotsman creates for the literary apprentice a sense of the workshop, ‘the brushes, the palette, and the north light’, rather than the highly finished picture projected by James.4 The theoretical values of the two writers are actually closely allied: a well-­ written novel has ‘one creative and controlling thought’. They share the one aesthetic  – that ‘art’ and ‘life’ must not be confused: ‘[l]ife is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt, and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate’, asserts Stevenson. And, as if repaying James’s admiring words on Treasure Island, the younger man picks out James’s recent story, ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’, appreciating its technical assurance and structure as a ‘novel of character’ rather than a ‘dramatic’ piece. Much crucially hangs on the perspective of the young narrator so that the child’s death in that story, ‘the true tragedy, the scène-à-faire passes unseen behind the panels of a locked door’.5 Pleased with this essay, James wrote to Stevenson a letter of ‘hearty sympathy’, embracing him as a fellow writer, ‘really acquainted with that lovely art’, and agreeing that ‘all art is a simplification’. Their relationship now had a chance to develop, for the consumptive Stevenson was living in Bournemouth at this time (a three-year stay), and a routine soon followed, James visiting this new friend each evening at ‘Skerryvore’, a villa on Alum Chine Road, just a mile’s walk from the sea. On his first call James was mistaken for the expected carpet salesman, and was sent by a maid to the side entrance.6 Stevenson was a slight, if not emaciated figure, with long hair, a drooping moustache and a bohemian air, well characterized in John Singer Sargent’s contemporary painting. The author stands (perhaps strolls) towards the left of the picture, with his seated wife, tucked away far to the right, dressed ‘in the robes (veritable) of an Indian princess, one blaze of gold and colour and white lace’. The chair she sits in, once grandfather Stevenson’s, was later named for Henry James, ‘for it was there the 214



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novelist loved to sit’, Louis recorded, going on to wonder at Sargent’s ‘witty touch’ – ‘but of course it looks dam queer as a whole’.7 James also thought the painting ‘very queer & charming’, but warmed to the man himself, observing that ‘his face, his talk, his nature, his behaviour, are delightful’. James was the couple’s only guest at their wedding anniversary dinner this year, and he gave Mrs Stevenson a mirror. Stevenson responded with his poem, ‘The Mirror Speaks’ which ends engagingly with the mirror waiting for the door to open, and the entrance of Henry James, ‘Prince of Men’.8 It was a piece ‘scribbled off at the moment’, hardly worth publishing, James thought privately. After the Stevensons had left Europe in 1888, James contributed a ‘literary portrait’ of his friend (in the manner of Sainte-Beuve) to the Century Magazine. In an affectionate account of Stevenson’s life and work he traces his subject’s specifically Scottish romantic vision back to his boyhood, ‘passed in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle’, when he had walked through streets ‘so full of history and poetry, of picture and song, of associations springing from strong passions and strange characters’ (LC 1: 1241). Treasure Island, ‘as perfect as a well-played boy’s game’, reflects a refreshingly childlike – pre-adolescent – vision, and, in this innocent sphere, Stevenson ‘achieves his best effects without the aid of the ladies’: ‘[w] hy should a person marry when he might be swinging a cutlass or looking for a buried treasure?’ (1251, 1252, 1238). During the summer of 1885, Alice James’s health was showing little sign of improvement and so, with Katharine, she took a small cottage in the airy north London location of Hampstead, an arrangement made by brother Henry. On good days, she could get about in her room for a few minutes. In July arrived the sad news of the death of William’s baby son, Herman (mourned by his father as ‘little Humster’), who had contracted whooping cough after just over a year of life. His uncle had never met him, though his choice of name had been much discussed. Serialization of The Bostonians would continue in the Century Magazine until February 1886, but in April 1885 James had had to write to James Osgood, his American publisher, requesting half of the agreed payment for the novel, as well as other outstanding sums. There was a worrying silence and on 5 May James learnt from the London Times of the company’s bankruptcy, a ‘sweet flower of information’, as he wryly commented to Frederick Macmillan. He had, it seems, lost some $5,000 (£1,031). Though Osgood had been reimbursed by the Century for The Bostonians, James himself received nothing for the serial. His writing rarely paid well, and so this was a more than usually anxious time for him. More generally, he also felt uneasy at some disturbing aspects of English political life, especially current foreign policy – deteriorating relations with Russia (demonstrated in military disturbances on the borders of Afghanistan), in the Sudan, the fall of Khartoum and the death of General Gordon, and the hostility of German chancellor.The capital had been shocked, too, at the attacks on Westminster and the 215

  A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson  Tower of London by republican extremists, ‘Irish Dynamiters’, as James called them, and he fulminated against Gladstone (who would soon resign) as ‘an incurable shirker & dodger’ in his execution of foreign policy.These anxieties concerning the future of civil society would play out in his next major novel.

Some French Visitors James must have been briefly diverted by the London visit of some friends of John Singer Sargent. In 1882 the artist had exhibited at the Royal Academy a striking portrait of a handsome Frenchman dressed in a long scarlet dressing gown, ‘a very brilliant creature’, as Sargent wrote to James.9 Creating little stir at the time, the work now known as Dr Pozzi at Home, has since become celebrated. Pozzi himself was already a famous Parisian doctor, specializing in gynaecology, and also noted for his numerous love affairs. He arrived in the company of two other men, all, as James noted, ‘yearning to see London aestheticism’. Prince Edmond de Polignac, coming from a rich aristocratic family, was a gifted musician and composer who moved in the most distinguished musical circles of Paris. He was an old friend – possibly one-time lover – of Count Robert de Montesquiou, twenty-one years his junior, a dandy, symbolist poet and proponent of French aestheticism. Montesquiou lives still in a number of portraits, including those by Boldini and Whistler, and in the fiction of Joris-Karl Huysmans (À rebours) and Marcel Proust (À la recherche du temps perdu). As well as arranging for his French guests to see paintings by Burne-Jones and Rossetti, James entertained Polignac and Montesquiou, along with Whistler (representing British aestheticism) to dinner at the Reform Club, and organized a visit to the home of shipping magnate Frederick R. Leyland to see the spectacular ‘Peacock Room: Harmony in Blue and Gold’, created by Whistler, the ‘mystic apartment’ which they desired to see ‘unspeakably’. This Parisian company must have temporarily relieved James’s frustration with what he regarded as London’s philistinism. By the beginning of August 1885, he had returned to a Dover busy with day-trippers and ‘very pretty, with its silver=white cliffs, surmounted with the fine old castle, & the cool green sea covered with vessels whose sails take all kinds of lights’. He was working on The Princess Casamassima, which began serialization in September. He thought the subject ‘magnificent’ but had in the meantime been ‘terribly preoccupied … with the unhappy Bostonians’ (CN, p. 31). On a brief return trip to London, he caught up with an old friend, Lord Houghton, at the Westminster Abbey service honouring US President, Ulysses S. Grant, who had died in July. Years later James would pay his own tribute to the former northern military leader when on a cold winter’s day in New York, he visited Grant’s tomb overlooking the Hudson River (AS, 160–162). 216



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Despite an attack of lumbago, by mid-September James had left for Paris, though he was saddened to see that it appeared ‘more than ever like a big modern bazaar which isn’t doing a good business’. For the first time in his life he even felt obliged, overcome by ‘heat & heaviness’, to leave a performance at the Théâtre-Français; the play was Casimir Delavigne’s Don Juan d’Autriche. Nevertheless, he joined Dr Pozzi for lunch and met up once more with old friend, Henrietta Reubell. He also spent much time with two mortally ill friends. William Henry Huntington, formerly Paris correspondent for the New-York Tribune, after several years of illness, died in October. And Edward Lee Childe’s French wife, Blanche de Triqueti, was dying of tuberculosis; James had stayed with the couple at Varennes in the 1870s.

Broadway and London In early November he was brought back to England, ‘the land of the eternal chop & the everlasting “tart”’, by the news that Alice’s health was causing some alarm. The setback was temporary and in this same ‘muddy November’, he spent three more days with the Stevensons in Bournemouth as well as visiting the idyllic Cotswold village of Broadway, ‘in a hollow of the green hills in Worcestershire’ (CWHJA, p. 435). Here an artistic colony was thriving, reminiscent of similar French gatherings at Barbizon, Grez-sur-Loing, Pont-Aven and Giverny. A decade earlier William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones had stayed in this historic village of local honey-coloured stone, but now it was a haven for American artists, many of whom had been employed as illustrators for Harper’s magazines. James was to make four visits in all to this congenial group, appearing to Edmund Gosse on one occasion as ‘benign, indulgent, but grave’.10 Frank Millet and his wife, Lily, were the leading figures in this artists’ colony which also included Edwin Abbey, Alfred Austin, Frederick Barnard, George Henry Boughton, Alfred Parsons and (though not a Harper’s man) John Singer Sargent. James would go on to promote their ‘beautiful work in black and white’ in his 1889 essay, ‘Our Artists in Europe’ (CWHJA, p. 435). This affectionate piece also relishes the village’s isolation and timeless air, its traditional architecture reminding him of Abbey’s illustrations for an edition of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. Perhaps the most important art-work to emerge from this company was Sargent’s celebrated, almost impressionist depiction of two little girls (Fred Barnard’s daughters, Polly and Dolly) holding lit paper lanterns, titled Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. In October 1887 Harper’s New Monthly would publish one of James’s most distinguished pieces of art criticism, his essay on John Singer Sargent which helped establish the artist’s reputation in America. The year ended on a bright note as James finally found somewhere new to live. Having been invited to watch a distribution of medals ceremony for the Grenadier 217

  A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson  Guards at Wellington Barracks by ‘young Arthur Pakenham (a very good-looking & attractive young fellow,)’ James went on with Pakenham’s mother, Elizabeth, to inspect a ‘“residential flat”’, no. 13, at 34 De Vere Gardens, Kensington, which he had been thinking of taking. It was raining, but James liked the place, as did his companion, and he took it ‘on the spot’ on a lease for twenty-one years. After these military ceremonials, he may have been in a charmed and receptive mood. It was a good address, not far from Kensington Gardens, in a location he associated with his beloved Thackeray. The flat itself, ‘chaste & secluded’, on the fourth floor of a purpose-built mansion block (accessible by lift), offered both space and light, with servants in attendance, though he was fully aware that the upgrade came at a price. He moved in at the beginning of March 1886, and also acquired the first of a succession of pet dogs, a dachshund he named Tosca. Sad news arrived from America early in 1886 when James learnt of the death of Clover Adams, the ‘perfect Voltaire in petticoats’ who had so entertained him in Washington DC. She was a talented photographer, and had died by drinking potassium cyanide, the chemical used to print her work, thus finding ‘the solution of the knottiness of existence’. She had been depressed at the death of her father and the circumstances of her own death remained private. By contrast, James was more cheered by the news from Florence, for Lizzie Boott had finally become engaged to her painting mentor, Frank Duveneck, a native of Cincinnati: their marriage took place on 25 March. In a letter to Lizzie’s father, he now referred to her humorously as ‘the Queen of the Franks’, though privately he remained dubious about Duveneck’s rough edges.W.D. Howells, who had seen the painter in Florence with a group of his students, the ‘Duveneck Boys’, included a light-hearted portrait of them in his novel, Indian Summer (1886). Alice James, enjoying somewhat better health this year, left London in the summer for the elegant Warwickshire spa town of Leamington, with Katharine Loring in attendance. Henry worked on in London, occasionally interrupted by visiting Americans, including Mrs Jack Gardner, Mrs Bronson, James Russell Lowell and the Curtises who were avoiding the cholera ravaging Venice. And though he kept up with the Stevensons in Bournemouth, distracting stays in the country residences of friends were much reduced. During this summer the now celebrated Guy de Maupassant made his one visit to England, carrying with him a letter of introduction from Paul Bourget, although he and James had actually become acquainted in the 1870s. They probably had several meetings, including a Thames trip on 12 August, with other friends, by penny steamer to Greenwich for dinner. Maupassant was characteristically keen to meet (indeed, proposition) young women during his stay, so James may not have been his best point of reference. But he had the greatest admiration for the Frenchman’s writing, devoting a long Fortnightly Review essay to his work, while feeling obliged to warn British readers, unused to a French ‘tradition of indecency’, of their content, characterizing the short stories as 218



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‘strong’, ‘brutal’ and ‘obscene’, and offering a string of French synonyms on the theme of boldness, lewdness and licentiousness (LC 2: 535). By the autumn, Alice had returned to London and James made another trip to Broadway. He was obliged, too, to offer sympathy to Edmund Gosse who had just been publicly attacked by former friend John Churton Collins in the Quarterly Review for major errors of scholarship in his most recent book, From Shakespeare to Pope, based on a series of lectures delivered as Clark Lecturer at Cambridge. James wrote to Gosse reassuringly: while diplomatically avoiding the issue of inaccuracy, he turned to the topic of his own bête noire, asserting that Gosse had become ‘the subject of a peculiarly atrocious & vulgar form of modern torture – the assault of the newspaper’.

The Princess Casamassima The Princess Casamassima appeared in book form (originally three volumes) on 22 October 1886. Like The Bostonians, it is a substantial work (14 instalments in the magazine version, two more than originally planned) though the setting now is emphatically London. The hero, young Hyacinth Robinson, a skilled craftsman and bookbinder, becomes involved in an unidentified underground movement promoting social revolution by violent means. Composed predominantly of scenes of working-class life, the novel’s subject matter was something new for James, described by one reviewer as ‘a study of the new Socialism’ (CH, p. 174). On 12 December 1884, he wrote to his friend T.S. Perry that he had paid a visit to the Millbank Prison on the northern bank of the Thames (now the site of Tate Britain), finding it a ‘horrible place’: ‘You see I am quite the Naturalist. Look out for the scene – a year hence!’ Whatever his distaste for the subject matter and personal lives of the French Naturalist writers, he respected their methods and artistic seriousness and much admired Zola’s recent Germinal (1885). This story of a strike by coal miners ends on a disquieting note – ‘Men were springing forth, a black avenging army, germinating slowly in the furrows, growing towards the harvests of the next century, and their germination would soon overturn the earth’ – and James’s underground revolutionaries speak in similarly apocalyptic terms.11 By the time of his visit, the Millbank Prison was nearing its 1890 closure date. Constructed on a marsh, it was riddled with disease and heavily overcrowded, ‘a worse act of violence than any it was erected to punish’, James concluded (CTWGBA, pp. 41–42). Shaken by the experience, he used the setting for a seminal, nightmarish scene early in the novel. The young Hyacinth is taken to the prison infirmary to visit a dying woman prisoner who speaks only French. This boy with a French first name later learns that she is his mother, the once beautiful Florentine Vivier, and that he is, as AnastasiusVetch, a kindly neighbour, observes,‘“a prostitute’s 219

  A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson  bastard”’ (p. 40). His father, it emerges, was an English ‘milord’, murdered by the woman he had seduced. Left to the mercies of the workhouse the child has been saved and cared for by Florentine’s friend, Miss Pynsent, an impoverished seamstress. That sensational act of murder in the past, a form of revenge enacted by the underclass, anticipates the motives of some of the novel’s later violent discussions. James later recalled that ‘little Hyacinth Robinson … sprang up for me out of the London pavement’ (LC 2: 1087), as if he embodied in some way the spirit of the sentient but disenfranchised classes labouring in obscurity. Yet he is separate from his class, ‘some small obscure intelligent creature’, excluded and condemned to seeing the ‘civilisation’ of London, ‘only from outside’. Hyacinth’s experience is the author’s own, as ‘the habitual observer, the preoccupied painter, the pedestrian prowler’ (LC 2: 1087, 1101), a flâneur on whom, in that favourite phrase, ‘nothing was lost’ (p. 125). Humiliated by his sense of a shameful past, he must ‘go through life in a mask, in a borrowed mantle’ (p. 74). His name and appearance betray his French origins, his artistry as a bookbinder, his love of theatre which offers him ‘sweet deception’, his happiness at feeling ‘blood in his veins that would account for the finest sensibilities’ divide him from the working masses to which he belongs (pp. 135, 130). Despite his nostalgia for the refined lives of the nobility his shame concerning his own origins drives him towards the movement for revolutionary social change. Hyacinth’s fellow travellers spread out through London’s least fashionable addresses, in whose streets he can hear ‘the deep perpetual groan of London misery’ seeming ‘to swell and swell and form the whole undertone of life’ (p. 233). The Poupins, French émigrés (their name perhaps a Jamesian joke – ‘poupin’ is a fop or dandy), are residents of Lisson Grove, north of the Euston Road, while Hyacinth’s beloved hero, Paul Muniment, lives south of the river in Camberwell, caring for his bed-ridden sister, Rose, a Dickensian observer of society, a miniature portrait of vehement but futile energy, perhaps suggested by the plight of James’s own sister. They live at Audley Court, ironically also the name of a Tennyson poem, as Hyacinth notes. In Tennyson’s idyllic setting of ‘Audley Court’, two friends ponder the nature of political or social commitment, one asking ‘Oh! who would fight and march and countermarch, / Be shot for sixpence in a battle-field, / And shovelled up into some bloody trench / Where no one knows? but let me live my life’ (ll. 40–43). Hyacinth’s unfolding dilemma raises comparable moral questions, also ending with the spilling of blood and a lifeless body. Hyacinth’s frequent companion is Millicent Henning, a lustrous, almost Lawrentian figure, who works as a model for one of the ‘great haberdasher’s’, a glamorous shop-girl of the kind featured in much Realist fiction of the time.12 As a treat they go to a ‘luxuriantly tropical’ show, The Pearl of Paraguay (Millicent’s choice), in which the men wear sombreros and the women dance the cachucha. It is entertainment for the masses, yet Hyacinth’s intense involvement recalls James’s 220



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own early theatrical experiences as his imagination crosses the footlights, ‘losing itself so effectually in the fictive world that the end of the piece, however long or however short, brought with it something of the alarm of a stoppage of his personal life’ (pp. 135–136). It is here that he is introduced to the Princess Casamassima by Captain Godfrey Sholto, like himself, a frequenter of meetings in ‘a small occult back room in Bloomsbury’ (p. 140). She is the former Christina Light who, in Roderick Hudson, had married an Italian prince; James has, like Balzac, Thackeray, Trollope and Zola, returned to ‘the doll’s box, to which we usually relegate the spent puppet’ (LC 2: 1098). As her companion, Madame Grandoni, explains, the Princess, ashamed of her own past, has left her husband to devote herself to ‘the common people … the lower orders’ (p. 193). With forty thousand men out of work in the East End, Hyacinth sees,‘immensely magnified, the monstrosity of the great ulcers and sores of London’ (p. 241). His fellow activists envisage ‘the enthronement of the democracy’, the day of confrontation when the rich and the poor might meet, and ‘these two mighty forces … come to a death-grapple’ (p. 126). Having spoken out at a public meeting, Hyacinth will be called upon to perform an assassination likely to entail his own death (p. 238). And so ‘destined to perish in his flower’, he visits Paris and Venice to ‘make a dash at the beautiful, horrible world’ (p. 322). He even learns Italian to speak to some of the working girls, ‘the shuffling, clicking maidens who work in the beadfactories’ (p. 333), as if James is recalling John Singer Sargent’s painting, Venetian Bead Stringers (c.1880–1882). At the sight of such beauty, Hyacinth considers ‘the sweetness of not dying’ and weeps; he had dreamt, too, of ‘the religion of friendship’, though it was in fact his friend Paul Muniment who had offered him up to the cause (p. 332). Hyacinth has become a part of the machinery on whose lid ‘“society performs its antics”’: ‘“under the feet of each one of us, the revolution lives and works”’, he informs the Princess (p. 276). Mysterious and compromising messages arrive, conversations take place, looks are exchanged, both fearful and troubling, in oppressive rooms, the atmosphere charged with things unspoken. Men lurk in dark streets watching others’ movements. As Hyacinth moves towards some inevitably horrible end, he suffers incidental betrayals, finally receiving a ‘portentous missive’ whose pressure in his pocket feels ‘as the very penetration of a fatal knife’ (pp. 481, 482). His assignment is to assassinate some corrupt figure of the ruling class, an act to serve as unwelcome reminder to the world of his mother’s ‘forgotten, redeemed pollution’ (p. 503). Hyacinth disappears from the novel’s final pages, but his bloodied body is at last revealed: in a moment all too ‘personal’ and sacrificial, he has turned the gun on himself. Many of James’s letters of this period fulminate against the perceived ineptitude of Britain’s political leaders, and the novel reflects a troubled time when the dangers of social inequality were increasingly evident. The Princess Casamassima is unique in 221

  A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson  James’s œuvre, but a number of novelists, most notably George Gissing, were drawn to the subject of urban poverty and its social and political consequences. It was the era of the ‘Long Depression’, urban growth, extensive migration from the country, and regular industrial unrest. When James was out of London in February 1886 unemployed rioters had smashed windows near his Bolton Street flat and in the years when the novel was being written, similar civil unrest regularly broke out in London’s East End. The ‘Bloody Sunday’ protest (13 November 1887) which gathered in Trafalgar Square drew 10,000 supporters from all social classes, among them, William Morris, Annie Besant and George Bernard Shaw. At the end of the decade Charles Booth and his volunteers began their ground-breaking sociological survey of East London, beginning with the volume titled Life and Labour of the People. Lionel Trilling, perhaps the novel’s most influential advocate, contended that James had foreseen the corrupt, decadent nature of European civilization, and the inevitability of violence witnessed in the decades after his death.13 The contemporary response to the novel, missing this long retrospective view, was positive, though restrained. The Nation reviewer warned of ‘super-subtle analyses, ultra-refined phrases, fine-spun nothings’ and that it would need ‘careful reading’ (CH, p. 181), a judgment echoed by the Saturday Review; the Athenaeum was hostile, concluding that the novel was too long, while the Spectator complained that there was no sense of what drives a ‘revolutionist’ (p. 177). Other American reviews were more positive  – both Boston’s Literary World and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine were enthusiastic – but sales of the novel proved disappointing. Nevertheless, the money lost on The Bostonians was partly compensated for by earnings for The Princess; James received for the serial and book versions, a total of $7,000 (£1,443).

Florence once More: Constance Fenimore Woolson After a gap of six years, James returned to Italy late in 1886, a trip which he felt to have been earned after the completion of two large-scale novels: it had been over a year since he had left the capital for any appreciable time. Alice had offered temporarily to take over his new Kensington flat, and so what was planned as a stay of up to three months quickly extended itself to six. He reached Florence before Christmas and was happy to see again old friends Elizabeth (now Duveneck) and her father, Francis Boott, as well as Constance Fenimore Woolson who had returned to Florence in the autumn. She had been moving around Europe, spent time in England, and had also struck up a friendship with Alice James. When he had decamped to Dover to work in summer 1884, Fenimore joined him to carry on with her own writing. Neither mentions the other in surviving letters for fear, presumably, of scandal, but the arrangement suggests a close if entirely respectable relationship. 222



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Having spent the summer of 1886 in Geneva, Fenimore was now occupying an apartment in the imposing Villa Castellani on Bellosguardo, a hill offering panoramic views of Florence. The Bootts were also staying in this villa, and James had encouraged them to welcome her into their circle, describing her as ‘a deaf & méticuleuse old maid – but…also an excellent & sympathetic being’. The Villa Castellani had appeared in Roderick Hudson and again as Gilbert Osmond’s Florentine home in The Portrait of a Lady. Fenimore loved the place, though as her lease was to terminate by 1 January 1887, she arranged to take rooms for the next two years on the second floor of the Villa Brichieri-Colombi, down the hill close by. These were made available to James in December for the first three weeks of his stay, with Fenimore as ‘landlady’, as he jokingly suggested. In this relatively small villa he enjoyed ‘the space, the views, & the big wood fires’ as well as ‘the services of a queer old melancholy male-cook’. He caught up with Fenimore ‘every day or two’, the pair often dining together. A few days before Christmas, Lizzie Boott gave birth to a healthy baby boy and Fenimore was invited to be a godparent. In this more domestic setting Fenimore may have hoped for even greater intimacy, though James continues to make clear to many correspondents that he will never marry. He offers a number of reasons, and from his fiction one can infer that (like some French confrères) he regarded marriage, children and family life as inimical to literary creativeness. The four surviving letters written by Fenimore a little earlier, in 1882–1883, are self-effacing and at times abject, evidently wrapped up in James’s life and scattered with incidental references to his fiction while deprecating her own work.They are longer even than James’s own letters, occasionally touching upon her rootlessness and isolation, her ‘trying to make temporary homes out of the impossible rooms at hotels and pensions’. Occasionally her pressing, even regretful tone suggests an aching need for his presence:‘[y]our letters are better than you are. You are never in Italy … I do’nt complain; for there is no reason in the world why I should expect to see you’. And two weeks later, she reports that the lagoons, Piazzetta and canals of Venice ‘send their love to you. They wish you were here. And so do I …’. This interlude ended with James’s departure for the luxurious Hôtel du Sud nearby, overlooking the River Arno, the celebrated novelist immediately being fêted by expatriate American society. On 12 February 1887 Harper’s Weekly, the magazine in which much of Fenimore’s fiction had appeared, published his essay, ‘Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson’. It begins with two paragraphs of biography, later deleted from the reprint in Partial Portraits (1888), and it observes, too, that women writers show a preference for the ‘love-story’, for which, he concedes, ‘there is certainly much to be said’ (LC 1: 646). When he comes to characterize Fenimore’s fiction, James shows a remarkable, intuitive grasp of her interests and motives. While admiring her ‘remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness

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  A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson  of feeling’, he refers to secrecy, privacy and dark, melancholy tendencies, the single life reduced ultimately to a troubling affliction: She is fond of irretrievable personal failures, of people who have had to give up even the memory of happiness, who love and suffer in silence, and minister in secret to the happiness of those who look over their heads. She is interested in general in secret histories, in the ‘inner life’ of the weak, the superfluous, the disappointed, the bereaved, the unmarried (641).

Whatever her response to such a summary, their relationship continued as before, though there is a cryptic reference to her in a March 1887 letter James wrote to Francis Boott, which suggests some passing falling-out: ‘Tell Fenimore I forgive her – but only an angel would’. Her most recent biographer, Anne Boyd Rioux, references a triumphantly populist kind of comment in her notebooks that, whatever certain haughty male critics may say (‘Lang, or Birrell’, for instance – and ­perhaps Henry James is to be counted among their number), they will never appreciate a love story, while ‘the great fact remains that nine-tenths of the great mass of readers care only for the love story’.14 Some of Woolson’s short stories of this period cast an oblique light on her relationship with James, among them ‘Miss Grief ’, ‘At the Château of Corinne’, and ‘The Street of Hyacinth’. In sum, they involve a strong-willed female writer or artist who turns to an urbane, experienced, sometimes judgmental male. Woolson was clearly interested in matters of gender, especially in the problems confronting creative women, however ill-disciplined or challenging their talent, in testing the default position of devolved control assumed by men and in questioning the orthodoxies surrounding a professional writer’s career. In the first of these stories, possibly written in anticipation of meeting James, Fenimore’s own isolating deafness is echoed in the changing name of the heroine, the result of mishearing: she turns out to be neither Miss Grief, nor Miss Crief, but Miss Moncrief.When her mentor tries to remove a character from the story she submits to him, he finds that he is ‘so closely interwoven with every part of the tale that to take him out was like taking out one especial figure in a carpet’.15 James would develop that simile in his own 1896 novella, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, presenting another exploration of the writer’s life, involving a sympathetic if obsessive reader, and the challenges and mysteries of interpretation. As if foreshadowing Fenimore’s own fate, Miss Grief confesses to her young adviser that the pursuit of her art is a matter of life and death: she would have ‘destroyed’ herself, ‘“this poor tenement of clay”’, if he had dismissed her works (p. 258). Raymond Noel, man of letters in ‘The Street of the Hyacinth’, chooses to call Ettie by her more formal second name, Faith, just as James, rather than calling his friend Connie (as she was known to her intimates), addressed her as Fenimore. 224



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The expatriate community was shaken at this time by a scandal involving a fellow American. Miss May McClellan, a girl in her mid-twenties, welcomed into the homes of her countrymen resident in Venice, had written up her impressions for the popular New York World newspaper. In a shocking breach of decorum, she had named names. The girl herself carried a distinguished family name: her father had been for a time general-in-chief of the Union army in the Civil War, whose portrait James’s heroine in ‘The Story of a Year’ had kept by her bedside.The novelist visited the family in Florence in January 1887 and commiserated with an embarrassed Mrs McClellan. Less charitably, he wrote to his Venice friend, Mrs Bronson, pondering ‘what a superfluous product is the smart, forward, over-encouraged, thinking-shecan-write-and-that-her-writing-has-any-business-to-exist American girl!’ May McClellan is a strikingly living, updated version of Daisy Miller, as if confirming the accuracy of James’s portrait. The piece she wrote which appeared on 14 November 1886 now seems bland and effusive, principally concerned with the jewels and haute couture of Italian women, though her clumsy inclusion of family names is unfortunate.

The Reverberator James’s indignation at the free-wheeling intrusiveness of the popular press would find voice in the short novel he began writing in late-November 1887. The Reverberator, though a light, Musset-like romantic drama in its personnel (an ingénue heroine, two rival young men, a confidante older sister, and a genial paterfamilias), turns upon a sensational newspaper article of the ‘gossipy’ kind James ironically had found himself unable to provide for the New-York Tribune back in the 1870s. Francie Dosson is to marry into the ‘Europeanized-American’ Probert family resident in Paris (CN, p. 42), but unguardedly provides the local newspaperman, George Flack, with some ‘society’ chatter about the Proberts which makes its way into the newspaper of the novella’s title. Despite the family’s apparent outrage – their exaggerated self-esteem is reminiscent of the Cintré family in The American – all is resolved when the Probert son, Gaston, finally stands by his fiancée and the two marry. Francie, confronted with the wrath of the Proberts, protests that she is ‘“only an American girl”’, illustrating, if ironically, changing cultural difference (p. 96). She belongs to that group of American young woman which both fascinated and shocked James well into the twentieth century. Habitually deferred to by her indulgent father, Francie enjoys an ascendancy which she assumes as hers by right, the features of her speech, its slang, its casual grammar and idiosyncratic pronunciation, all meticulously recorded by James. The Reverberator is a comic piece, a ‘jeu d’esprit’ (LC 2: 1192), and its light, concluding dialogue seems to anticipate James’s dramatic interests of the 1890s. But the 225

  A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson  novella’s observations are serious. The wealthy American Dosson family, for instance, display a philistine lack of curiosity about French life, and they even regard the portrait of the prospective daughter-in-law, commissioned from an up-and-coming impressionist artist (an expatriate John Singer Sargent type), simply as a good investment. James’s animus against the press also endures: Flack is reduced in his own journalistic terms to a ‘Young commercial American’, ‘not a particular person, but a sample or memento – reminding one of certain “goods” for which there is a steady popular demand’ (p. 10). The novella has a further contemporary resonance, for Julian Hawthorne had recently published in the World (24 October 1886) an indiscreet report of a conversation with J.R. Lowell titled ‘Lowell in a Chatty Mood’ in which the interviewee had spoken unguardedly about British public figures, causing a minor stir. At a time when the ‘interview’ was becoming an established journalistic form, Hawthorne had crossed a line between private and public spheres; for the sensitive James it was a ‘beastly and blackguardly betrayal’ (CN, p. 41), an ‘infamous trick’ played by ‘the basest cad unflogged’. Its themes may have been current, but The Reverberator was not enthusiastically received: the Nation reviewer begins gloomily, for instance, by contending that no-one in a James novel ‘expects anything to happen, or anticipates emotional excitement’, going on to condemn the author as ‘a finical, snobbish fellow, whose soul is dead to the glories of his own, his native land’ (CR, pp. 206, 207). One supportive voice is heard in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, a piece written by the ever-loyal W.D. Howells. Feeling overwhelmed by Florence’s ‘social embroilments’ and fearing the prospect of the ‘shoals of people’ he would have to see in Rome, after a stay of some ten weeks James left for Venice towards the end of February 1887. He had been offered a wing of Mrs Bronson’s villa, located at the head of the Grand Canal, with a view across the water of the church of Santa Maria della Salute. In his tribute to Mrs Bronson on her death in 1901, James described his lodging as ‘a somewhat melancholy old section of a Giustiniani palace’ made available to her friends: ‘[s]he liked, as she professed, when they were the real thing, to have them under her hand’ (CTWC, p. 362). Here he spent some seven weeks, though illness, finally diagnosed as jaundice, kept him to his room (and mainly in bed) for sixteen days. He complained, too, of the ‘glutinous malodorous damp’ of the city’s squares and passageways and was happy to return to Bellosguardo in April, appreciating all the more the Tuscan spring and the fresh, hillside air. He stayed again in the Villa Brichieri where Fenimore had now taken her apartment. The city was celebrating the completion (finally) of the façade of the Duomo, left incomplete over the centuries and undertaken again only in 1876. A fancy-dress ball was held in a tapestried hall at the Palazzo Vecchio and, entering into the spirit of the occasion, James appeared in a ‘quattro-cento dress (of scarlet and black)…. I wish you could have seen me – I was lovely!’, he wrote to Mrs Kemble. 226



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‘The Aspern Papers’ During his previous stay in Florence, James had met up once more with Violet Paget, whose brilliance he continued to admire. Her disabled half-brother, Eugene Hamilton-Lee, had told him a true tale of predation and scholarly acquisitiveness which, with a change of location from Florence to Venice, would inspire ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888). Captain Edward Silsbee, passionately interested in the poet Shelley, took lodgings with the aged Claire Clairmont, once Byron’s mistress and mother of their daughter Allegra.An integral part of that brilliant, volatile Romantic circle, she spent her old age in Florence with her niece, Paulina. She possessed ‘interesting papers – letters of Shelley’s and Byron’s’, and Silsbee, having moved in, hoped to acquire them on her death. This occurred, but his plan was foiled when, in exchange for the papers, Paulina requested he should marry her, upon which he fled (CN, p. 33). Aside from its highly charged literary associations, the anecdote must have appealed to James for its human connection – notably the relationship between genius, its recognized achievements, and the outsider’s curiosity concerning the mystery of the subject’s personal life. Some of the story’s human motives are, however, more mundane, even devious. For the reader, the man-of-letters narrator remains anonymous, and, fearing his own might already be known to the aged Juliana Bordereau, he gives a false name. She may in the past have inspired some of Jeffrey Aspern’s ‘most exquisite and most renowned lyrics’, but now drives a hard bargain when renting out rooms in her dilapidated palazzo (CT 6: 290). Though tough, she is mortal; the green eye shade she wears conceals, the narrator suspects, not her once ravishing eyes, but ‘a ghastly death’s-head…. The divine Julia as a grinning skull’ (291). His suspicion seems to mix the vengeful with a degree of sexual anxiety. In a similarly sensational scene, as she nears death, the narrator takes his chance in rifling through her bureau, to find, with horror, that she is watching him: ‘her hands were raised, she had lifted the everlasting curtain that covered half her face, and for the first, the last, the only time I beheld her extraordinary eyes’. ‘“Ah, you publishing scoundrel!”’, she cries, before falling back into the arms of her niece (362–363). Her denunciation could not be more damning. When her aunt has died, Tita assures the narrator that, yes, there are papers, ‘“a great many”’, gently hinting at their availability, and her own, in marriage (370). In a sexual panic, he runs away from this ‘poor deluded, infatuated, extravagant lady’ to float aimlessly in his gondola, struck finally by ongoing daily life, a less sensational form of theatre: ‘the Venetian figures, moving to and fro against the battered scenery of their little houses of comedy … members of an endless dramatic troupe’ – real life transformed into a theatrical mise en scène (376, 379). After a sleep, the narrator decides that he might, after all, favour Tita by marrying her, but it is too late. She had noted his horror and has, in the interim, 227

  A Range of Novels: Robert Louis Stevenson and Constance Fenimore Woolson  destroyed the papers: ‘“It took a long time – there were so many”’, she pointedly tells him (381). The narrator twice remarks that Aspern was ‘not a woman’s poet’, and, pondering his harsh treatment at the hands of contemporary women admirers, likens him to ‘“Orpheus and the Mænads!”’ – the Greek poet and singer of legend finally torn apart by the Thracian mænads for (according to Ovid) spurning their advances (277, 278). He himself does not need women, for Jeffrey Aspern is his ‘god’ and his pursuit an ‘infatuation’ (276–277). When he finally sees Miss Bordereau’s ‘extraordinary eyes’, he feels only ‘horribly ashamed’, her literary immortality invisible to him (362). Towards the end of May, James returned to Venice, this time staying a little further down the Grand Canal at the magnificent Palazzo Barbaro, the home of Daniel and Ariana Curtis. They had restored this Venetian-Gothic palace dating back to the fifteenth century, and James would discreetly allude to the building and the life it contained in his 1899 essay, ‘Two Old Houses and Three Young Women’. He hints at the transience of such elegance and opulence, seeing the ‘twinkling in the multitudinous candles’ as ‘the idea of something waning and displaced’, inviting ‘the conceit that what one was having was just the very last’ of an era for which there was no future (CTWC, p. 350). John Singer Sargent, in his contemporary painting, Interior in Venice, captures the atmosphere of this life, the Curtises pictured with son and daughter-in-law, formally dressed against a shadowy salon with highlights of gilded mouldings of the palace’s piano nobile. It was ‘unreservedly adored’ by James when he saw it.16 Their home would finally appear as the Palazzo Leporelli in The Wings of the Dove, ‘appropriated’ by the dying Milly Theale, holding ‘its history still in its great lap, even like a painted idol, a solemn puppet hung about with decorations’ (p. 361). James had intended to spend ten days with the Curtises but this quickly stretched to five weeks. He had also considered returning to Florence, but abandoned this to Fenimore’s regret and began the return journey to London in early July. He left Italy reluctantly, nostalgically recalling his last Venetian dinner with Mrs Bronson and her daughter, taken on a gondola, ‘in the pink sunset, with the Chioggia boats floating by like familiar little phantom ships, red and yellow and green’.17

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On his homeward journey, on the shores of Lake Maggiore, James met up with Mrs Fanny Kemble, affectionately characterized in a letter to Grace Norton as ‘a very (or at least a partly) extinct volcano’. Once back in London, he was visited by J.R. Lowell, another old friend, no longer the American ambassador, but ‘the simplest person in London, as well as one of the cleverest’. At the end of August, the two were together again, in company with George Du Maurier, in the Yorkshire seaside town, ‘deeply delectable Whitby’ (LC 1: 892). James stayed for just three days. In early October he returned again to Broadway and to the colony presided over by the Frank Millets, enjoying the atmosphere,‘American & fraternizing’. James would meet fewer Americans in London this year and, sadly, there was a falling-out with T.S. Perry, his boyhood friend from Newport days. The precise reason is unclear – even to James, it seems – though he told his brother William that he had received ‘a most offensive and impertinent letter’ expressing Perry’s disapproval of his living in London. James’s private comments to William – he dismissed Perry finally as a ‘singularly helpless mediocrity’ – might seem, he admits, ‘ill-natured’, though happily the rift was later healed. As part of the festivities to see in the new year of 1888 James, in company with a number of children, was the guest of Sir Frederic Leighton at the pantomime, Babes in the Wood, at the Drury Lane Theatre, famed for its spectacular productions. He commented to Grace Norton that ‘[t]he box was full of rosy candid English children of whom I am very fond’. Indeed, several years earlier, speaking of a production of E.L. Blanchard’s Forty Thieves, James had observed in an essay on ‘The

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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London Theatres’ that ‘the best of the entertainment … was seeing the lines of rosy child faces in the boxes, all turned toward the stage in one round-eyed fascination’ (CWHJD, p. 224). Part of the show was a ‘Double harlequinade’, composed of Clowns, Harlequins, Pantaloons, Columbines and a ‘Harlequine (à la Watteau)’.1 During these winter days, fearful about his ‘portentous corpulence’ and in a drive to keep fit, he optimistically engaged the services of a fencing-master who visited twice a week.

Losses, Financial and Personal Never having managed to repeat the earlier success of ‘Daisy Miller’ and The Portrait of a Lady, James continued to be dogged by financial worries and so, on Edmund Gosse’s recommendation, he engaged the services of Alexander Pollack Watt, a leading literary agent of the day. But he must have had mixed feelings when that spring his friend Mrs Humphry Ward brought out her long novel, Robert Elsmere (1888), a huge success which sold over a million copies and included among its reviewers the Prime Minister, W.E. Gladstone. It examines the essentially midVictorian theme of the loss of faith, asserting the humanity of Christ while questioning His divinity, its arguments informed by Mrs Ward’s extensive reading in German biblical scholarship. Such sales were entirely unknown to James, but he went on to offer a long, technical critique, acknowledging her ability to suggest ‘the vast dimness of character, of personal history intimate and difficult to write’, while also pointing out some of the work’s weaknesses, things he thought ‘more invented than observed’. He, meanwhile, was working once again on The Tragic Muse, having laid it aside temporarily in favour of The Reverberator which began serialization in Macmillan’s Magazine in February 1888. At the beginning of March James made his way with Browning and a large crowd to the Kensal Green cemetery in north-west London (a final destination for many eminent Victorians) for the burial of his old friend, Anne Benson Procter.The aged widow of the poet known as Barry Cornwall (the dedicatee of Vanity Fair), she had striven stoically against infirmity; knowing many of the great literary figures of the century, she had offered James, who visited her often, ‘a kind of window in the past’. More shockingly unexpected news soon followed with the death of Lizzie Boott in Paris on 22 March, aged 41. She had given birth to a son at the end of 1886, now leaving him motherless at just 15 months old, as if repeating her own mother’s history. The cause of her death was pneumonia, though close friends such as Fenimore and James, thought that she had been worn down in sustaining the career of husband Frank Duveneck, taking care of the family, and supporting her aged father. James, who had known Lizzie well for over two decades and had helped promote her work as a painter with London dealers, now shook his head at the 230



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thought of ‘those two poor uncongenial men tied together by that helpless baby’. Lizzie was buried in the Allori cemetery in Florence, and Fenimore, still at Bellosguardo, did what she could to comfort the grieving father. James wrote to him of his comfort in the thought that ‘the dear old Florentine earth contains her’. James tried to alleviate his current financial straits by producing a number of short pieces and collecting previously published items. In February, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine brought out ‘Louisa Pallant’, a story in which it seems that romantic history may repeat itself in the lives of a mother and daughter. Both are worldly creatures, and mutual suspicion, horror even, dwell below the surface of an apparently decorous relationship. Louisa, a woman in whom the narrator doesn’t entirely trust, appalled at the marble-hearted daughter she has nurtured, steps in to save a prospective suitor from what would be an unhappy marriage. The reader never learns the nature of the conversation between mother and young man, and, when asked, James confessed (as if anticipating the darker unexplained mysteries of ‘The Turn of the Screw’) that he preferred to avoid such ‘vain specifications’. When, a month later, ‘Guy de Maupassant’ appeared in the Fortnightly Review, James, having received £23 ($111) for his work, complained at the ‘notorious stinginess’ of publishers Chapman and Hall. In May, however, Macmillan brought out Partial Portraits, a substantial collection of eleven essays on literary figures, British, French, American and Russian, dating back to 1876. An essay on ‘London’, written while he was in Italy, which begins with an autobiographical sketch of his arrival in the city eighteen years earlier, still awaited publication in the Century Magazine, appearing only in December 1888. Both affectionate and magisterial in tone, it is accompanied by thirteen fine illustrations by Joseph Pennell. Having enjoyed the hospitality of the best of British society over the years, James had now tired of the ‘Season’ and the relentless sequence of social engagements it entailed. The scandalous conclusion to the career of Liberal MP, Sir Charles Dilke, who had been tipped as a future Prime Minister but eventually exposed for his lurid sexual exploits, and the continuing debate over the question of Irish Home Rule, left the novelist feeling increasingly disillusioned with the political scene. A short story of 1891, ‘The Chaperon’, in which a disgraced mother who once abandoned her marriage to join her now dead lover is restored to society by the doughty efforts of her daughter, offers some penetrating observations on the mores of ‘polite’ society. It is a light tale with the reversed roles of daughter (re-)introducing mother to society which James later thought of adapting for the stage,2 but it also hints at the brutal treatment to be expected for those who transgress and challenge its conventions. Cocking a snook at genteel society and many of her family, the daughter joins her mother to endure ‘isolation and déclassement’ (CT 8: 111): the mother ‘didn’t exist, even for a second, to any recognizing eye’, and those most relentless and unforgiving are society’s aged women, ‘the dowagers, the old dragons with prominent fangs and glittering scales’ (94, 116). 231



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In August 1887 Robert Louis Stevenson and his wife had left England, as it turned out, never to return. On their departure James brought them a leaving gift of a case of champagne,3 not that appropriate, perhaps, in that they had been staying at Finsbury Circus in Armfield’s Temperance Hotel. James would miss this fellow writer whose literary values accorded so well with his own. In a letter of 31 July [1888], when his friend was already leaving California for an extended cruise to the Pacific islands, James emphasizes his sense of loss with the kind of longing intensity which characterizes his correspondence with younger men in later years. Stevenson is now ‘too absent – too invisible, inaudible, inconceivable’. However wondrous his adventures, James tells him, ‘[y]ou have become a beautiful myth – a kind of unnatural uncomfortable unburied mort’. As he observed to William, it is as if this ‘rare, delightful genius’ has already moved into some other sphere of being, no longer part of James’s living world. That last letter to his brother was written from the Hôtel de l’Écu, Geneva, a familiar place from the past, since it was here that the James family had wintered in 1859–1860. The hotel was less smart than formerly, but James was happy to feel himself ‘in sociable converse with family ghosts – father and mother and Aunt Kate and our juvenile selves’. He had arrived in early October, telling William that he suddenly needed to leave ‘stale dingy London’ (95), though omitting to mention that he was meeting up, once again, with Fenimore who was staying in a hotel a discreet mile away, on the other side of the lake. During the day he ‘pegged away’ at his novel, but the two dined and spent their evenings together, often talking of Lizzie and Frank Boott and life at Bellosguardo. James no longer wanted to return to that now depleted place. By mid-November, he was slowly travelling back to England, moving along the Riviera, spending two or three weeks at Monte Carlo, and the month of December in Paris. He was pleased to be back in the city, and spoke to the actress Julia Bartet, the ‘divine Bartet’ as she was known, in her dressing room at the Théâtre-Français, an ‘impression’ to which he would return in The Tragic Muse (CN, p. 48).

Marriage and Art in Some Short Stories One theme which emerges regularly in the stories of these years concerns the nature of the writer’s life, art and the lure of perfection, and the more mundane alternative, the duties of a personal and domestic life, the possibility of marriage and children. ‘The Lesson of the Master’ (1888) charts the decline of one great writer, Henry St George (a name slyly invoking the idea of James as the British patron saint, perhaps), and the rise of a young, inexperienced admirer, Paul Overt, advised by his hero, who has had to compromise his art in order to provide for a wife and children, to avoid any similar encumbrances. With some comic irony, St George, 232



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having become a widower, saves Overt from such a future by himself marrying the younger woman with whom Overt has fallen in love. And – whatever St George’s motivation – the calculating or shallow behaviour of the women in the story suggests a degree of sexual unease on James’s part. St George’s wife had taken control of her husband and his career, favouring financial over artistic success, while the young woman, Miss Fancourt, a great reader and critic, comments glibly of St George that ‘“He thinks he’s a failure – fancy!”’ (7: 250). In ‘Lord Beaupré’, a tale published in 1892, a young bachelor who has unexpectedly received a substantial inheritance conspires with a long-established woman friend to repel the advances of marriageable girls by pretending that the two have become engaged, thus avoiding ‘the trap matrimonial’ (8: 274).The premise may be unrealistic and the mood consistently light and comic, yet women have, it seems, fatal potential. Equating marriage with a last trip to the slaughterhouse, the young man determines not ‘“to be dragged to the shambles before I know where I am”’ (266). He sees the air as thick with portents, ‘as the sky over battlefields was darkened by the flight of vultures. They were flocking, the birds of prey, from every quarter, and every girl in England, by Jove! was going to be thrown at his head’ (273). And, when he comes across one of these hopeful young women, he notes unforgivingly that ‘Maud was a year older, a year more disappointed and a year more ridiculous’ (278). The dangers of domesticity had figured as a theme in James’s correspondence with his Parisian friend, Theodore Child, with specific reference to the circumstances of Alphonse Daudet, a name he later preferred not to disclose as the exemplar for Henry St George (CN, p. 43, LC 2: 1230). In fact, the associated idea of the artist as someone distinct from the everyday – a desirable condition, it seems – reaches back into the novelist’s past. He was fascinated by the discrepancy between the accumulated genius bound up within a writer’s work and the more humdrum reality of the social being. James’s meeting with Dickens at Cambridge in the 1860s and the few words exchanged represent such a key moment when his youthful pleasure in Pickwick and Copperfield had somehow (and excitedly) to be adjusted to the ‘inscrutable mask’ of the ‘shining’ figure before him (NSB, p. 206). ‘The Lesson of the Master’ (1888) involves principally the leisured classes, moving between ‘an old country house near London’, modelled probably on Osterley House, a Georgian mansion to the west of London, and the city’s fashionable quarter (CT 7: 213); ‘A London Life’ which also appeared in this summer of 1888, has a similar social milieu. Enjoying the trappings of great wealth and a profusion of discreetly silent servants, the principal couple, Lionel and Selina Berrington lead promiscuous, self-indulgent lives, suggestive of some of the seamier newspaper stories involving public figures of the time. Though the two may be considered a part of the ‘International’ theme, in that the wife is American, James wondered in his later Preface why he made this choice.The tale ends with the impending shame 233



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of divorce – an expedient available only to the rich. Laura, Selina’s sister, who ­witnesses the lies and manipulations involved in this mutual marital infidelity, ‘the necessary candid outsider’ (LC 2: 1152), adds a further puritanical dimension to the story (perhaps explaining its American term of reference), though she herself falls innocently foul of British norms regarding acceptable behaviour for young women. She turns for advice to the aged Lady Davenant, in her mixture of worldliness and wisdom, a version, perhaps, of Mrs Procter or Mrs Kemble. The dramatic scene in which Selina finally leaves her family occurs (once again) at the opera house, during a performance of Meyerbeer’s Huguenots, the quickly developing events of private life unravelling while the public performance proceeds inevitably onstage. There are glimpses, too, of James’s future interests. The nursery scenes featuring the Berringtons’ two unfortunate children in the care of a governess, have little of the disquieting mystery which will run through ‘The Turn of the Screw’.Yet the immoral, deceiving parents watched by these young dependents and the impedimenta of their busy duplicity, the lies, deceptions and flurries of telegrams, anticipate that later treatment of ugly adult behaviour witnessed by the innocent heroine of What Maisie Knew. An alternative version of social duplicity and transgression runs through ‘The Liar’, a tale published in summer 1888, in which the scrutiny of social conventions emerges in events and observations as revealing as those of ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’. An artist, Oliver Lyon, is engaged to paint a portrait of Colonel Capadose who is now married to the woman with whom the artist himself had once been in love. It has become tacitly accepted by society that Capadose is ‘“a thumping liar”’, and, to his wife’s horror, the completed portrait starkly reveals this moral failing, as if art has the capacity to detect and expose deception (CT 6: 407). In Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray which appeared a couple of years later the artist Basil Hallward makes a similar assumption: ‘“Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man’s face … it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even”’.4 The portraitist’s revelatory intent in ‘The Liar’ is enacted as a form of homoerotic subjectivity which undermines the story’s more conventional surface. During the intimacy of the sittings, Lyon ‘encouraged, beguiled, excited’ the innocent Colonel, one male privately gazing at another, inviting him to reveal himself, occasionally fearful that he might ‘discover his game’, but, in the meantime, lashing him on ‘when he flagged’ (CT 6: 420).The exposure theme is a variant on an earlier tale, ‘The Story of a Masterpiece’, in which a prospective suitor, on seeing his fiancée’s portrait executed by her former lover, recognizes her true moral ‘dinginess’ (CT 1: 292). Lyon has caught and will, indeed, perpetuate his subject’s expression ‘in the way he looked out at a bamboozled world’ (CT 6: 420).The Colonel fails to realize this ‘painted betrayal’ when the couple later return to examine the work, but his wife, in anguish, sees it all. She flees, and Capadose attacks and destroys the painting. 234



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One further interpretive strand emerges, however. The drama has an audience, for the whole scene is witnessed by Lyon himself; returning unexpectedly to his studio, he is cast as an excited but impotent voyeur.When the protagonists meet later, there is no reference to the shameful event. It is as if James is dramatizing his own accommodation with the cultural circumstances of the homosexual artist – professionally gifted, socially compromised and necessarily silent. In this same year James published ‘The Patagonia’ as well as two volumes containing ‘The Aspern Papers’, ‘Louisa Pallant’ and ‘The Modern Warning’, a prodigious achievement. Financially, too, it became an unusually profitable year with publications in America and Britain earning him almost $9,000 (£1,856). Christmas 1888 was spent in London, its relative quietness later recalled as ‘like a big black inferno of fog, mud, drunkenness and pauperism’. He decamped to Leamington soon afterwards to spend a week with Alice who, he observed with relief, was gathering strength. Much of her life was determined by illness, yet it did not define her: she observed the world, remaining absorbed in the contemporary political scene, and was especially voluble, for instance, on the subject of Irish Home Rule. Despite her suffering and confinement, her Diary, often displaying a brittle gallows humour, reflects a commitment to events beyond the sickroom, with its incisive observations of people and the natural world. Her style, as Diana Trilling commented, illustrates ‘that wonderful educated James prose with its incandescent accuracy and then its sudden flights of homeliness’.5 Aunt Kate, so much a presence in the James household, having been ill, died on 6 March 1889; Henry had last seen her almost six years earlier on returning from America and she had represented the final link with his parents’ generation. Once again, the execution of a will caused some disquiet to the younger Jameses, for Aunt Kate, a woman of means, left the bulk of her estate to less wealthy family members. She bequeathed to Alice, for instance, only a ‘life interest’ (with instructions as to whom they should then be passed on) in some silver and a shawl: as Henry confided to his brother, it ‘seemed a sort of slap in the face at all the past’. Alice, on the other hand, had always confessed to a lingering sense of guilt at having abandoned her aunt after her parents’ deaths for Katharine Loring and England.

The Tragic Muse The Tragic Muse started in the Atlantic in January 1889, and would prove to be James’s longest serial, running to seventeen instalments, despite an initial promise to himself that he would aim at ‘[v]ariety and concision … rapidity and action’ (CN, p. 48). The novel explores, as he later explained, ‘the personal consequences of the art-appetite raised to intensity, swollen to voracity’ and, with its predominantly theatrical theme, it heralds the half-decade to follow when James devoted himself 235



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to drama and the theatre (LC 2, 1113). Nick Dormer is propelled by his impoverished mother and the backing of Julia Dallow, a rich young widow, who loves him, towards a career in politics. But once successfully elected to Parliament he defies expectations and substantial financial backing to become a painter. One of his portrait subjects is an ambitious young actress, Miriam Rooth, who after a youth spent drifting around Europe with her mother (also impoverished), is taken up by a wellconnected young diplomat and ardent theatre-goer based in Paris, Peter Sherringham.The sessions he arranges with the celebrated Mme Carré, formerly of the Théâtre-Français, prove transformative, and eventually Miriam comes to enjoy success on the London stage. Sherringham falls in love with the actress, but though he returns to England at the end, marriage is, it seems, impossible: ‘“nice girls”’ cannot be ‘“filles de théâtre”’ (3: 136). In any case, Miriam has already married another actor, Basil Dashwood. The novel’s sustained aesthetic interest is directed principally towards the idea of representation. For Sherringham, with his passion for the theatre, his ‘“little hobby”’, or ‘“little folly”’, dramatic performance entails something more engaging than simple play-going, involving ‘“representation – the representation of life”’, an exercise dependent upon the ‘“highly trained”’ actor, given ‘his lift’ by the dramatist, a synthesis which is, at the same time, as he concedes, ‘“an amusement like another”’. Following an alternative calling, Sherringham’s cousin Nick Dormer surrenders himself to ‘the art-appetite’, or ‘“representation in oils”’ (1: 75–76). Even the call to public duty enters the sphere of the representational when James later playfully hints that Dormer’s role as a Member of Parliament constitutes an alternative version of performance. In the juxtaposing of politics and diplomacy with acting and painting, the novel raises questions of status within the workings of upper-class British life.The motives of Philistinism and class-snobbery associated principally with members of the Dormer family never deflect the narrative from acknowledging the simple power of money. Mrs Rooth and her daughter have led a hand-to-mouth existence in the cheap lodgings of Europe, spinning out time in cafés to save on heat and candles. Dormer’s mother, the widowed Lady Agnes, with two dependent, unmarried daughters, leads a similarly peripatetic life, discontented at her (relatively) humble home, and depending on the kindness of others with whom she might stay for extended periods. So it is unsurprising that she longs for her son to marry Julia Dallow, who, with a careless generosity, is happy to lend out one of her several houses when needed. Further economic pressure is applied to Nick by the patronage of Mr Carteret, a friend of his father’s, a childless and rich bachelor, who is the young man’s ‘providence’ (1: 79). When Nick gives up his parliamentary seat (aptly named Harsh), and backs out of marriage to Julia, he is also cut out of the dying Carteret’s will. Nick’s old friend, Gabriel Nash stands outside this socio-economic circle; he avoids ‘“the ugly”’ and cultivates ‘“the beautiful”’, contending that ‘“to live is such 236



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an art; to feel is such a career”’ (1: 30–31). According to Nick, he remains detached from conventional modes of behaviour or involvement, avoiding altogether ‘“the little prudences and compromises and simplifications of practice”’ (3: 215). His pronouncements echo the ideals of the Art for Art’s Sake movement, and, hearing such claims, Nick’s innocent younger sister Biddy asks, hesitantly, if he is an aesthete, a charge he dismisses, however, as too limiting. As we have seen, the aesthetic label carries a range of associations, and James’s friend, George Du Maurier had mocked the movement in his Punch character, Jellaby Postlethwaite, modelled, it seems, on Oscar Wilde and James McNeill Whistler. Nash appears and disappears effortlessly, and, when he sits for his portrait, this purveyor of aesthetic discrimination becomes restless, reluctant ‘to be himself interpreted’ (3: 229). He is much disliked by Lady Agnes who characteristically, according to her son, considers aestheticism ‘“a horrible insidious foreign disease”’ – a judgment partly founded on her regular perusal of Punch (3: 50). Julia Dallow also dislikes Nash and, significantly, when, in a late scene, Nick is informed that she wishes him to paint her portrait, he turns to the wall, ‘with an unreasoning resentment’, that unfinished portrait of Nash (3: 240). Even Nash’s portrait seems to conspire with its absent subject in contravening natural law, for Nick suspects his image to be imperceptibly fading away, ‘that the hand of time was rubbing it away little by little (for all the world as in some delicate Hawthorne tale)’ (3: 231). In fact, William James considered the whole of this chapter to be overly allegorical and ‘Hawthornian’. That figure of erasure invokes once again Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (which appeared within a year of The Tragic Muse’s serial publication), a work which scandalized the late-Victorian public: a young man remains beautiful, untouched by the years, while his portrait, concealed in the attic, grows old and cracked. James’s narrative never rivals Wilde’s sensationalism, though Gabriel Nash, observer and commentator, stands for the kind of questioning, transgressive experience which the novel’s Establishment figures find so threatening. On his first appearance he shows ‘a great deal of manner’, and, briefly absorbed into the novel’s theatrical allusiveness, appears ‘to know his part and recognize his cues’ (1: 23). Nick reminds Nash that in earlier days at Oxford, he ‘“communicated the poison”’, what might be specified as ‘“an interest in the beautiful”’, and now Nick ‘sticks’ to him (1: 172, 164, 66). In the absence of her mother, Miriam finds Nash to be a useful companion when she ‘goes about’, and, gently eroding his masculinity, asserts that ‘“it doesn’t matter that he’s not a lady. He is one in tact and sympathy”’ (2: 139). Nash, daringly promoting the values of culture – he thinks the Théâtre-Français a greater institution than the House of Commons – belongs to the forbidden world that Nick longs to enter, involving activities that his fiancée Julia Dallow finds repellent (1: 52). Nick must confess to Mr Carteret on his deathbed that he is ‘different’,‘“I’m not what you think”’, that he has not fulfilled his father’s wishes, cannot sustain a career in politics, and that his marriage to Julia is off: ‘“I have done something”’ (3: 7–8). Though 237



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Carteret fears some unpalatable moral lapse, Nick has, in fact, resigned his seat in Parliament. James’s terms, suggesting guilt, abjection and public humiliation, a successful career in the public eye abandoned for a private passion shared with a few like-minded confrères, illustrate his continuing interest in the workings of what might be perceived by conventional society as deviant, delinquent behaviour enacted primarily between men. In an early scene Nick is informed that Miriam Rooth might well serve as a model to represent the Tragic Muse, as if emulating Sir Joshua Reynolds’s famous portrait of the actress, Sarah Siddons. For the time, however, Miriam’s inspiration is French, and the extract she recites at Madame Carré’s comes from Émile Augier’s romantic comedy, L’Aventurière, the drama being played out, as we have seen, during an episode in ‘The Siege of London’. Madame Carré, though appearing ‘to a casual glance as a red-faced woman in a wig, with beady eyes, a hooked nose and pretty hands’, nevertheless embodies for Sherringham the greatest tradition in French theatre, a living example of ‘the actor’s art’, a miracle now lost (1: 110). Doubtless James was inspired by the many conversations he had enjoyed with a similarly aged and formidable Fanny Kemble who had offered him much ‘anecdote’ and ‘legend’, the accumulated experience of an otherwise irretrievable past.6 The family must have been in James’s mind, for Miriam counters Sherringham’s dismay at the haphazard diction of many contemporary actors with a reference to ‘“the grand manner, certain pompous pronunciations, the style of the Kembles”’ (1: 192). Much of the authenticating detail of The Tragic Muse – the hot stuffiness of Parisian theatres in summer, the precise seating arrangements at the ThéâtreFrançais, its backstage organization, and its décor, including Gérôme’s famous painting of Rachel – derives from James’s own theatrical experiences. But certain scenes in the novel themselves employ essentially dramatic stage effects. The recently re-elected Nick feels some guilt as he devotes his time during a parliamentary recess to painting a portrait of Miriam, an anxiety compounded as his fiancée (and political sponsor) arrives unexpectedly. As painter and sitter chat, the door soundlessly opens: ‘The person on the threshold was Julia Dallow’ (2: 155). Even worse, after some uncomfortable conversation in the studio, Julia goes to leave, and, as she opens the street door, finds herself confronting Gabriel Nash, the man she particularly dislikes, associating him with Nick’s apparent back-sliding. More generally, the novel increasingly privileges the dramatic scène à faire, extended passages of dialogue freed from authorial intervention, a feature that would continue to develop in the later fiction. The related idea of performance moves also from the conventional arena of the theatre into the exercise of private life, when the distinction between genuine feeling and acting becomes occasionally blurred. Miriam Rooth is regularly revealed as a performer in private as well as public, having ‘no countenance of her 238



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own, but only the countenance of the occasion, a sequence, a variety … of ­representative moments’ (1: 179).When she makes an appearance at Nick Dormer’s studio late in the novel, the episode becomes a play scene, characterized by her self-conscious artistry. She enters ‘as she appeared every night, early in her first act, at the back of the stage, by the immemorial central door, presenting herself to the house, taking easy possession, repeating old movements, looking from one to the other of the actors before the footlights’ (3: 242–243). Her appearance is entirely on cue: she has been the subject of a conversation between Nick and Biddy Dormer and the wonderfully theatrical moment seems modelled on one of those ‘well-made’ French plays which James had frequently enjoyed. The novel’s final episode once again counterpoints the fictional action with an ongoing theatrical performance. While Miriam is onstage premiering her role as Shakespeare’s Juliet, the front-of-house action in the auditorium offers a fictional coup de théâtre with Peter Sherringham’s unexpected arrival direct from Central America to claim her (unsuccessfully) as his wife. Despite his extant note on Mary Anderson, Mrs Ward and Miss Bretherton, James asserts in his late Preface that he can recall no specific point of inspiration, ‘impression or concussion’ for The Tragic Muse (LC 2: 1103). Late in his life he was able only to sense some lingering fragrance, as of ‘some aromatic bag of gathered herbs of which the string has never been loosed’. He had, nevertheless, fulfilled his longheld intention ‘to “do the actress,” to touch the theatre’ (1104, 1113). The moment when Nick Dormer surveys his cheerless studio and ponders ‘the duller conditions, the longer patiences, the less immediate and less personal joys’ of the creative life and its lonely demands, must have had some private application for James himself (3: 209). These are some of the continuing themes of his own life – the practice of an art, its rewards and trials, the need to earn money (the ‘profoundly pecuniary’), and the uncertain favours of an often unappreciative public. The critical reception for The Tragic Muse was respectful, indeed, the New York Times hailed it as ‘a masterpiece’, though many, such as George Saintsbury in the Academy, thought it oversubtle and detached from ‘real life’: ‘Mr. Henry James really might give us something a little more like English sense and a good deal less like French-American rigmarole’ (CR, p. 224, CH, p. 202). Others, the Athenaeum reviewer among them, complained generally that it contained too many French phrases. Sales once again proved disappointing, though William’s observations offered what must have been some welcome reassurance: ‘[t]he work is too refined, too elaborate and minute, and requires to be read with too much leisure to appeal to any but the select few. But you mustn’t mind that. It will always have its audience’ (CH, pp. 195, 193). This was probably the point at which James was compelled, finally, to accept that his fiction would struggle to find a wide readership and that he must consider an alternative means of reaching a broader public. 239



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The Lure of the Theatre and Death of Browning A real theatrical venture presented itself in December 1888, when James was approached by Edward Compton, an actor-manager who ran his own theatre company which toured the provinces, inviting him to adapt The American for the stage. It was perhaps Compton’s wife Virginia (née Bateman) who had first suggested the idea; she was an American and James had observed her two older sisters, Kate and Ellen, child performers, when he was a boy in New York. Despite his disappointing experience in a similar venture with Daisy Miller, and though he despaired at the condition of the English theatre, he agreed, bowing to ‘the lash of necessity’ (CN, p. 52) – indeed, he planned a series of such projects, confident that he could achieve a level of commercial success that would rid him of financial worries. He resolved to accept the kind of humiliation and discouragement he clear-sightedly foresaw in this commercial world, and write a pièce bien faite, following the example of his admired French playwrights, deciding that ‘it must not be too good and how very bad it must be!’ (p. 53). William James, having overseen the building of a substantial house at 95 Irving Street in Cambridge, not far from Grace Norton on Kirkland Street, crossed the Atlantic in the summer of 1889 to attend the first International Congress of Physiological Psychology in Paris, and the two brothers were happily re-united – however briefly – ‘to become intimate again as in old times’, as William remarked. The two journeyed to Leamington to see Alice; lest she became overexcited she had not been warned of William’s visit and so Henry acted as intermediary. When he informed her that he had important news to break to her, she had shrieked, ‘“You’re not going to be married!”’. Having reassured her otherwise, Henry then tied a handkerchief to the railings of Alice’s balcony to indicate that his waiting brother might approach. She later reflected on the pleasure she felt when all three were together, ‘a flowing oasis in this alien desert, redolent with the exquisite family perfume of the days gone by’.7 At this time, James was introduced by Paul Bourget to two Frenchmen, diplomat and author, Jules Jusserand, and the young Urbain Mengin, both of whom became long-term friends. With the former, James would regularly visit Du Maurier in Hampstead (now ‘all red brick & cockney prose’) where they used to take a Sunday-afternoon walk. Mengin, based in London as student and teacher, remembered James with affection until his own death in 1955. Jusserand also hosted a lunch at the Bristol Restaurant for the influential historian and critic Hippolyte Taine and his family, to which Henry was invited. He had reviewed – and admired – a number of Taine’s books and was charmed by his talk. In the summer – as in the previous year – he made a four-day return visit to Whitby where J.R. Lowell, ‘dear old eternally juvenile Lowell’, was holidaying on what would be his last visit to England. James also returned to Dover in the early 240



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autumn, this time staying at the Lord Warden Hotel. Once more he looked longingly towards the French coast, imagining that he could almost see ‘the red legs of the little soldiers all ready for an invasion’. Some of the action of the short story, ‘Sir Dominick Ferrand’ (1892), would take place in Dover, and its hero, ‘long enough shut up in London’ would be ‘conscious of refreshment in the mere act of turning his face to Paris’ (CT 8: 375) By the end of October James had given in, crossing the Channel for a six-week stay. He had been reluctant to attend the Paris Exhibition, organized to help the ailing French economy, but, in the event, though dismayed at the ‘hordes of furious Franks & fiery Huns’, he was much impressed at its magnificence. The structures were temporary, though one, the Eiffel Tower, the subject of considerable controversy at the time, survived. During this stay, still working on The Tragic Muse, he saw Alphonse Daudet once again. The Frenchman was recording the progress of the disease from which he was dying, but the two also discussed his Port Tarascon: dernières aventures de l’illustre Tartarin, a work recently completed and as yet unpublished, which James had undertaken to translate. This represented significant extra labour, but Daudet’s sequence of novels set in the Provencal town of Tarascon and featuring the comic adventures of the ‘genial and hapless hero’8 was very popular and James’s motivation was simple: he took on the job ‘for pure and copious lucre’, though it is also, in fact, a stylish, fluent translation. The year ended with James attending the funeral of Robert Browning who had died on 12 December in Venice, ‘the congruous, romantic, poetic place’. The two men had not long ago attended the funeral of Mrs Procter, but this was a state occasion, a ceremony at Westminster Abbey, where the poet was honoured in Poets’ Corner. James was moved by such magnificence, the ‘dim, sublime vastness’ of the Abbey and ‘the boy-voices of the choir soaring and descending angelic under the high roof ’. Though they had both loved Venice and Italy and had friends in common, the two men had never been close; James appreciated, nevertheless, the poet’s ‘conquest’, his ‘very modernness … the all-touching, all-trying spirit of his work’, as he observed in an anonymous article which appeared in The Speaker (LC 1: 788). Browning had been one of those (who included Tennyson) whose everyday conversation struck James as banal, quite unlike their writing. It was a dichotomy between public and private modes of being which he developed into a mysterious kind of conceit in ‘The Private Life’ (1892).Within a group of characters who happen to meet in the Swiss Alps, Lord Mellifont, is, in the most reductive way, all performance, alive only insofar as he is noticed by others. The conversation of a second, more Browning-like figure, Clarence Vawdrey, a celebrated author, moves all too predictably ‘into the flat country of anecdote, where stories are visible from afar like windmills and signposts’.Yet when the narrator enters his darkened room, a silent place of creativity, he sees only a seated, unresponsive figure, and hears only 241



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the silence; he retreats in confusion. Later Vawdrey reads aloud some of his work to fellow guests and it seems ‘the work of another man’ (CT 8: 192, 215). The Tragic Muse was to end its serial run in May, and in March 1890, in preparation for its book publication, James was offered a £70 ($340) advance by Frederick Macmillan – a disappointing but perhaps not unreasonable sum, given what the novelist conceded to be ‘the poor success’ of his recent fiction. He thought of trying his luck with another publisher, or even simply confining himself to the American market, and so wished farewell, ‘with great regret’, to the man who had, since 1878, published fifteen of his works. After some negotiation with James’s agent at the time, the company, keen to retain a prestigious name on its books, instead offered an immediate sum of £250 ($1,212) on condition that it took all profits from the novel’s sales over the succeeding five years. James agreed, and cordial relations were restored. In the event, Macmillan recouped only £80 of that sum. James’s problem with sales was to continue.9

New American Friends The menage at Bellosguardo had now been disbanded after Lizzie Boott’s death, but James returned to Italy in the early summer of 1890 for an extended period. Before this, he formed two new friendships, one to last a matter of months, the other, a lifetime. William Morton Fullerton, was a young, Connecticut-born journalist and writer who had recently taken up a post working for the Times in Paris where he would spend much of his life and where James regularly met him. Handsome and elegantly dressed, he would go on to have affairs with both men and women for many years, the best-known of these involving Edith Wharton – though that would be in the next century. He would also serve as a model for the young journalist in The Wings of the Dove, Merton Densher, and James held him in great affection, rejecting formalities, as his first brief letter to the 25-year-old suggests:‘don’t, oh don’t, my dear boy, insert the hard wedge of the “Mr.” – as if for splitting friendship in twain’. He went on to urge him – ‘mon cher enfant’ – to embrace life, so that his friend might then play a vicarious role: ‘Have as many adventures and impressions as you can, the next month, to the end that you may promptly thereafter come and relate them to yours affectionately Henry James’.10 With advancing years, James’s letters, reflecting his loneliness, become increasingly dependent, even possessive. Fullerton is addressed as ‘My dear, dear boy’: ‘You are dazzling … you are beautiful; you are more than tactful, you are tenderly, magically tactile. But you’re not kind …’.11 It was one of a number of intimate friendships with younger men cultivated by James in these later years. His relationship with Wolcott Balestier was of much shorter duration. The young American, a writer and editor who had dropped out at Cornell University, had arrived in London at the end of 1888 and immediately 242



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became a part of its literary fraternity. Dapper, even foppish in appearance – according to Gosse, a ‘mixture of suave Colonial French and the strained nervous New England blood’12 – Balestier was also a shrewd businessman with a sound knowledge of the publishing industry. With William Heinemann he had recently founded a publishing company which would go on to have a long and distinguished history. With that confident entrepreneurial flair of the kind James had attributed to his own Christopher Newman, he must have represented for the novelist the possibility of a happier, more lucrative future – ‘the admirably acute and intelligent young Balestier … he will soon “do everything” for me’, James informed Howells, the Atlantic editor to whom Balestier, aged seventeen at the time, had sent his short stories. As well as dealing with the problem of literary piracy – the international copyright agreement would not be enacted until 1891 – Balestier, successful and confident, was offering James optimistic advice on his theatrical venture, the play version of (appropriately) The American. Henry wrote to Alice of his ‘precious Balestier’, who, during his absence in Italy, was negotiating with Edward Compton about the staging of The American, referring to him as ‘the perfection of an “agent” – especially when you consider that he has undertaken this particular job out of pure friendship’. It was a friendship, however, which was cut prematurely short, for at the end of 1891, James found himself standing at the graveside of Balestier in Dresden. The young man, less than thirty, feeling slightly unwell on leaving London, had succumbed to typhoid. It was the end of ‘poor dear big-spirited, only-by-death-quenchable Wolcott’ – ‘a hideous loss’, as James lamented.13 Alice James never met Wolcott Balestier, yet her Diary entry for 11 December 1891 captures both the man and his relationship with her brother who must often have talked of his friend: The young Balestier, the effective and the indispensable is dead! swept away like a cobweb, of which gossamer substance he seems himself to have been compounded, simply spirit and energy, with the slightest of fleshly wrapping…. I was so happy in the thought that this was going to be a life-long companionship for him, and secure in his having, at last, a business friend, whom he sadly needs.14

Balestier never wrote the significant fiction to which he aspired, and is now mostly remembered as the brother of Carrie, whom Rudyard Kipling married in January 1892 in a ceremony at which James was present.There was much flu about and the novelist, one of just four men present, gave the bride away – ‘a queer office for me to perform – but it’s done – and an odd little marriage’, he confided to Fullerton. Balestier had called James his ‘dear Suzerain of the Drama’ (CP, p. 181), a kind of benign overlord: what the aspiring dramatist wryly referred to as his ‘sawdust & orange-peel phase’ had begun. By April 1890 he had completed The American ­(temporarily renamed The Californian), ‘a big (and awfully good) four-act play, by 243



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Figure 3  Henry James, March 1890, photograph by Elliott & Fry Credit: Photo 12 / Alamy Stock Photo

which I hope to make my fortune’, as he reported to Henrietta Reubell (CP, p. 179). Delighted at his sister Alice’s enthusiasm for the piece, writing from Venice, he confidently foresaw that he could complete ‘a dozen more infinitely better’. Having gone to Italy in mid-May, calling at Florence to deal with a dental emergency (looking in, too, on Bellosguardo), James was staying with the Curtises once more at the Palazzo Barbaro. With the Curtises he travelled by carriage to the Bavarian Highlands, and in the valley of Garmisch, witnessed the Passion play of Oberammergau, which he told Isabella Stewart Gardner was ‘curious, tedious, touching, intensely respectable and intensely German’. With Dr William Baldwin, a ‘dear little American physician of genius’ resident in Florence, a friend, too, of the Bootts and Fenimore, James hiked in the summer heat around a number of Tuscan towns.With Mrs Bronson, he spent a few days in Asolo, at La Mura, her country retreat in the foothills of the Venetian Alps, a place to which she had been drawn by one of Browning’s early poems. The 244



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poet recalls this in Asolando: Fancies and Facts (1889), his final collection which he dedicated to Mrs Bronson. It seems that James had never liked the house, finding it ‘too spartan for his precise tastes’.15 In Tuscany once more, in Vallombrosa, some three thousand feet up in the hills not far from Florence, he felt almost restored to his youthful self, as if he had returned to ‘the summer of one’s childhood’. But it was a short-lived fancy, for in Leamington in late July, Alice’s health broke down once again, and she admitted to feeling ‘sentimental and homesick’ on learning that ‘the blessed Henry’ had postponed his return by a couple of weeks.16 Receiving a telegram, however, he quickly returned to England, and was shocked at her deterioration: he arranged, with the ever-faithful Katharine Loring for his sister to move to the capital, to a house in Argyll Road in Kensington, not too far from his own apartment. Though principally committed to the writing of plays, James was taken aback when, in the autumn, a short story, ‘The Pupil’, derived from an anecdote provided by Dr Baldwin that summer ‘in a very hot Italian railway-carriage’ (LC 2: 1165), which he had recommended as ‘a little masterpiece of compression’, was rejected by Horace Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. As Edel suggests, the reason for Scudder’s decision (James later placed it with the British Longman’s Magazine) may have been that the story reflected so badly on an American family which drifted around Europe, lying and neglecting to pay their bills (CT 7: 12). Yet ‘The Pupil’ raises other, more troubling questions: mentioned in a notebook entry for What Maisie Knew, the story follows a similarly dark trajectory – innocent childhood unfolding against a background of dubious adult needs. The Moreen family have genteel aspirations, but are, in fact, ‘a band of adventurers’, ‘abject snobs’ (CT 7: 426). Pemberton is employed as a tutor for eleven-year-old Morgan, a boy with a weak heart, and the two form an affectionate relationship which ­acknowledges the shortcomings of the Moreen parents.The tutor rarely receives any salary, and on one occasion Mrs Moreen even asks him for a loan. To escape such humiliations, the precociously intelligent boy and his tutor dream excitedly of going off to live together. During the family’s stay in Venice, however, Pemberton is offered a more lucrative job, engaged to tutor an ‘“opulent youth”’, and he leaves for England (447). After little more than a year, he is summoned by Mrs Moreen, now in Paris, and told that Morgan is dangerously ill. When he arrives, Pemberton finds that the situation is less serious; but the mother, having engineered his return, contends that ‘He had taken the boy away from them, and now he had no right to abandon him’ (451). As a final payment, the parents offer the boy himself to Pemberton: ‘“Do you mean that he may take me to live with him – for ever and ever?”’, Morgan cries (459). Both overwhelmed and humiliated at the prospect, the boy dies of heart failure, held in the arms of both mother and tutor. The family in ‘The Pupil’ forms one of a series in James’s fiction of impecunious Americans leading aimless lives in Europe, and the idea of a child’s innocence and the possibility of its corruption continued to fascinate James. Morgan’s relationship with an adult, with the expressed 245



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hope of a happy, shared future, seems, however, to have a sexual dimension, a speculation taken up by many later critics. This may well have been the reason for Horace Scudder’s rejection of the tale.

The American in the Theatre Towards the end of the year, James was increasingly involved with the forthcoming production of The American. By early November Compton’s company had embarked on rehearsals while still touring with other plays, and James spent two chilly days in Portsmouth, sympathizing with the women in the cast and coaching Compton in his American accent for his role as Newman. He arranged to follow them to Brighton and Northampton, and during this winter rehearsal period, taking pity on the cast, provided them with food and refreshments – far exceeding an author’s conventional duties. James had few misgivings as to his own future as a dramatist and had been much encouraged by Wolcott Balestier and another friend, Florence Bell, an enthusiast for the theatre whose play, L’Indécis, had been successfully performed by Coquelin in 1887.To brother William he reveals his frustration at the practicalities of production alongside his avowedly commercial motives: ‘[t]he conditions (of the Ang[l]oSaxon stage) are really so base that one would be unpardonable for going to meet them if one’s inspiration were not exclusively mercenary. But to provide for one’s old age one is capable de tout …’. As an added investment, he also began work on another drama, Mrs. Vibert (written within a month, its title later changed to Tenants), and opened negotiations with John Hare, a respected actor-manager who had recently taken on the Garrick Theatre. And by December, he had embarked on a further stage-piece, probably The Album, intended as a follow-up for what he hoped to be the success of The American. Compton’s Comedy Company was an exclusively touring group and the premiere of James’s play took place on Saturday, 3 January 1891, far from fashionable London audiences in Southport, at the Winter Gardens Theatre. The everoptimistic Wolcott Balestier had been invited to the Lancashire seaside town, and William Archer, foremost dramatic critic and proponent of Ibsen, travelled from London to attend the play’s opening. James was understandably nervous on this first night, but the performance, thoroughly prepared, ran without a hitch before a full house and its author appeared for a final curtain call. In his view, the night had been a triumph, even though Archer, having offered a thorough critique, declared the play likelier ‘to have success in the provinces than in London’ (CP, p. 183). The play’s author was displeased, but the critic’s judgment was shrewd. In the dramatized version of The American James reduces his 1877 novel into four acts and, responding to earlier complaints about its unhappy ending, concludes with the prospect of marriage between Christopher Newman and Claire de Cintré. 246



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But there are some dramatic weaknesses relating principally to the need to simplify key episodes and relationships which in the novel develop over many pages. As James himself admitted, ‘[m]y play suffers from being a novel dramatized…. I shall never dramatize a book again – but let my subject and my form be born together’. His lack of practical experience shows, too, in the decision to have a set change for each of the four acts – a challenge for a touring company needing to stage several plays over successive nights in each venue. As one provincial reviewer commented, ‘there still remains much to be done in the shape of elimination and reconstruction before The American can be said to meet all the ordinary dramatic requirements’.17 During rehearsals James provided some well-intentioned notes for the leading man on American pronunciation, though some of the local critics later commented on the vagaries of the hero’s accent.18 As was customary in the process of a new play’s production, there were various re-writes, passages of dialogue added and cuts made, and eventually the fourth act was entirely revised. James had also taken great pains with costumes and sets for the play; clothes for the women and furniture for the set were imported from France, and photographs survive of Compton wearing a substantial brown overcoat with overlarge buttons, a caricature of the rich American which caught the eyes of some of the critics. Though William Archer’s comments doubtless sounded a warning bell for James, his published review in The World was encouraging and generous. The American was taken into the company’s repertory for that spring, performed in Ireland and Scotland and across England, with the plan to open in London at the Opera Comique Theatre (where some of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas had premiered) on London’s Strand in the autumn. Compton was keen for this to happen so that he might increase the revenues for a touring company by appearing in the West End. The London premiere on 26 September 1891 was a grand social occasion, with James enthusiastically supported by many of his American friends and literary circle. The most notable personnel change was the replacement of Compton’s wife in the leading female role by Elizabeth Robins, the American actress who had already distinguished herself in playing Ibsen. Having met Miss Robins at the beginning of the year, two weeks before seeing her in A Doll’s House, James was keen she should be in the cast. The two became lifelong friends. But the critical notices were mixed and audiences proved disappointing, despite the attendance of the Prince of Wales one evening in mid-October. Compton’s hope of scoring a long-running hit failed to be realized, and the play closed on 3 December 1891 after some 70 performances. Though the venture did little to improve James’s bank balance, he felt vindicated, and Compton, returning to his provincial tours, kept the play in his repertory the following year. Henry concluded optimistically to William that ‘I am launched & committed, I have had success with the fastidious, and anything else I do will be greatly attended to’.

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12 Deaths and Losses: Theatrical Ventures (1891–1895)

During the period of preparation for the London opening of The American, Alice James was increasingly weakened by illness, yet she maintained her interest in the play’s progress. Having suffered a bout of influenza, James himself had gone off to Ireland in July 1891, from there writing to William that their doctor friend W.W. Baldwin had seen Alice on four occasions when passing through London. A tumour in her breast was confirmed as cancerous, and though ‘“not immediately fatal”’, this arrêt de mort, ‘the great mortuary moment’, as she described it in her Diary (p. 14), seems to have offered a degree of release and a freeing sense of finality, as Henry suggested: ‘her intense horror of life & contempt for it, is practically falling away from her in view of her future becoming thus a definite & not long – a rapidly shrinking – term’.

The ‘Note-taking Habit’ James was staying at this time at Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), on the outskirts of Dublin, and it is here that he consigns to his Notebook at the age of 48 a revealing piece of retrospection and self-encouragement related both to the conduct of his life and to the practice of his art. However far he has travelled both literally and figuratively since that dedicatory blessing given by Charles Eliot Norton

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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at Shady Hill in the 1860s, it has somehow not been enough, and he has not accomplished what he had resolved: The upshot of all such reflections is that I have only to let myself go!…so I said to myself in the far-off days of my fermenting and passionate youth.Yet I have never fully done it….it seems the formula of my salvation, of what remains to me of a future. I am in full possession of accumulated resources – I have only to use them, to insist, to persist, to do something more – to do much more – than I have done. The way to do it…is to strike as many notes, deep, full and rapid, as one can. All life is – at my age, with all one’s artistic soul the record of it – in one’s pocket, as it were. Go on, my boy, and strike hard; have a rich and long St. Martin’s Summer. Try everything, do everything, render everything – be an artist, be distinguished, to the last. (CN, pp. 57–58)

In some respects, this self-urging to embrace life seems to anticipate a revelatory moment in the late novel, The Ambassadors, when Lambert Strether, whose own life has been constrained by tentativeness and self-effacement, advises the young struggling painter Bilham simply to ‘live’. Yet the need to offer this encouragement to himself suggests that such a desirable sense of liberation does not come naturally, that it has to be worked at. More generally, those notebooks and journals which survive reflect James’s abiding need to write and record the kind of self-review which for most people might remain a passing reflection or conviction. They are, of course, working documents, containing long lists of likely names of people and places for his fiction and a multitude of données often derived from social contacts, some ‘worked up’, others left. They document, too, his creative process, his intimate relationship with an idiosyncratic but more intimate version of a muse, ‘mon bon’, or, sometimes, ‘mio caro’, that friendly, faithful male spirit standing at his shoulder in the solitary moments when decisions and aesthetic choices are made. This conspiring ‘familiar demon of patience’ never left: many years later, in 1905, as James rests by ‘this green Pacific’ on his return visit to America, his muse ‘sits close and I feel his soft breath, which cools and steadies and inspires, on my cheek’ (CN, p. 237). The atmosphere in such lines is pervasively devotional as the author examines creative possibilities: ‘my poor blest old Genius pats me so admirably and lovingly on the back that I turn, I screw round, and bend my lips to passionately, in my gratitude, kiss its hand’ (p. 268). Most striking about the Notebooks, as the years pass, is their profusion of ideas and possibilities, with never a hint of being lost for a subject: as he would say, how much to do – ‘Ah, que de choses à faire, que de choses à faire!’ (p. 75). His confidence in his own capacity to treat a subject, essentially a conviction of genius, rarely falters. During this anxious summer of 1891 James Russell Lowell died of cancer and his funeral service was conducted at Harvard’s Appleton Chapel on 14 August. Henry had written his last letter, kindly and sensitive, knowing how ill the older 249



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man was, just a few weeks earlier: ‘I seemed to see that you were tied down by pain and weakness, that you were suffering often and suffering much. I don’t like to ask for fear of a yes, and I don’t like not to ask for fear of your noticing my silence’. William later remarked to his brother that Lowell ‘was a sort of boy to the end, and makes most others seem like premature old men’.

Death of Alice, ‘Blessed and Bountiful’ In September William crossed the Atlantic to bid his youngest sibling farewell. Alice’s condition was now rapidly deteriorating so that even the eating of breakfast in bed left her exhausted; she was becoming increasingly dependent on ‘the treacherous fiend morphia’ which, though relieving pain, caused sleeplessness and nervous disorder.1 By the end of the year, following William’s recommendation, Alice engaged the services of a young, pioneering Scottish doctor and found some relief in hypnosis therapy. William’s was a brief visit, though it also coincided with the London premiere of The American. On his return to Cambridge, he wrote to Henry, ‘I esteem my presence during those three days as one of my finest exotic memories. Tell Alice that the memory-picture I now have of her in her actual surroundings is something I wouldn’t lose for a great price’. In Henry’s thoughts, the imagery of illness, death and birth seems to connect Alice’s inevitable decline toward death with that ‘other ailing organism’, the anxiously-awaited box-office success of The American. He reported to William on 10 October that their sister ‘has undergone no particular change since you were here – though the last couple of days she has been too ill to see me….The other invalid – the illstarred play – is having a difficult infancy – a very difficult one’. Consumed, as he said, ‘with catarrh and rheumatism and lumbago’, and already feeling that he had passed into old age, James evidently pondered mortality in these months. In January 1892 the Atlantic Monthly published his essay celebrating Lowell’s life, and he wrote to Mrs Annie Fields, another old friend from his youngest days, that he had laid his ‘little garland on the cold new slab….In London, at least, the waves sweep dreadfully over the dead – they drop out and their names are unuttered’, a sharp impression of transience that he would develop in a later story, ‘The Altar of the Dead’. Alice’s condition continued to decline, and her brother called frequently, bringing with him news of the outside world to which she remained attached. He had always provided for her ‘a happy day’ on his visits to Leamington: ‘I should cry hard for two hours, after he goes, if I could allow myself such luxuries, but tears are undiluted poison!’, she had confided to her Diary (p. 74). And now in early February, as he reported to William, ‘when she is slightly better the power to live & talk seems such that one feels as if it might still go on for some time’.

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Her Diary records Alice’s movingly clear-eyed observation of her own decline and sense of diminishing possibility: ‘One sloughs off the activities one by one, and never knows that they’re gone, until one suddenly finds that the months have slipped away and the sofa will never more be laid upon, the morning paper read, or the loss of the new book regretted; one revolves with equal content within the narrowing circle until the vanishing point is reached, I suppose’ (pp. 229–230). By early March she seemed reduced in her brother’s eyes to ‘a tragic vessel, or receptacle, of recurrent, renewable, inexhaustible forms of disease’. On Saturday, 5 March she dictated to Henry a telegram to be sent to William in Cambridge: ‘Tenderest love to all farewell Am going Soon Alice’ (204, n.1). Katharine finished reading to her Fenimore’s ‘Dorothy’, a sentimental tale in which a widowed girl dies of grief for her lost husband. Its detail has especial resonance for the James family: the setting is Bellosguardo and one of the protagonists sings a song with words by John Hay, set to music by Francis Boott, old friends both of Fenimore and of the Jameses. Alice died the following day at four in the afternoon as Henry raised the window blind. According to her wishes, her body was cremated. Henry, in company with Katharine Loring, Alice’s nurse, and an old friend, Annie Ashburner Richards, accompanied her remains to Brookwood cemetery near Woking in Surrey, the site of England’s first crematorium, on a day of sleet and snow. Once again, in keeping with other family deaths, Alice’s will proved contentious. The bulk of her estate was divided equally between William, Henry and Katharine Loring who each received about $20,000. Given that Bob had married into a wealthy Milwaukee family and that his children would be well provided for, it was decided that he should have $10,000. He was not happy with this and Henry, generous as ever, offered $5,000 from his own inheritance. William, somewhat insensitively, given her enduring devotion to his sister, expressed surprise that Katharine agreed to accept her share while knowing that Bob was bequeathed so much less. Alice’s ashes were taken back for burial near her parents in Cambridge Cemetery, and William later chose some lines from Dante’s Paradiso to be placed on an ‘exquisite little Florentine urn’: ‘ed essa da martiro / e da essilio venne a questa pace’ – ‘and [the soul] came from martyrdom and exile to this peace’. Many years later, standing at the family grave and reading this epitaph, Henry was taken ‘at the throat by its penetrating rightness’ (CN, p. 240). That summer of 1892 he returned once more to Italy, staying first in Siena to enjoy the company of Paul Bourget and his wife; from the palace balcony of the Marchese Chigi (a friend of the Bourgets) they watched the traditional Palio horse race run on the Piazza del Campo. He moved north to Venice, staying with the Gardners who were renting the Bronsons’ villa on the Grand Canal, before paying another visit to Asolo. Having been granted a sabbatical year, William had travelled to Europe, bringing his family with him. Henry met up with them all in Lausanne, though his time with his brother was curtailed by William’s rapid departure on a 251



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walking tour. As if repeating those wanderings through Europe of Henry James Sr and his wife, Alice and William were searching for a base suitable for their children’s educational needs, and they eventually settled on Florence. Recalling her own rootless childhood, William’s sister had warned that he should only take his children to Europe when ‘they are old enough to have the Grand Emotion, undiluted by vague memories’.2 Henry returned to London by late August.

Theatrical Aspirations The American still had a place in the repertory of the Compton Comedy Company, but James had also been occupied with a number of other plays about which he remained secretive, referring to them in his letters only by number. Often he stressed the need for confidentiality when discussing future plans or financial matters, wishing at all costs to preserve his privacy. At the end of 1890 he had completed Mrs.Vibert, later renamed Tenants, and he continued to work on a number of other plays, including The Reprobate, The Album, and Disengaged. Though James spent much time and energy in promoting these works, none was ever produced, and so, as he told Elizabeth Robins, to avoid their ‘going down into utter silence and darkness’, he eventually had them published in 1894 as Theatricals (Tenants and Disengaged) and Theatricals: Second Series (The Album and The Reprobate) (CP, p. 254). None of these plays is likely to have enjoyed commercial success, but the most successful is perhaps Tenants, which, with its tight plot, is reminiscent of those midnineteenth-century French plays which James so admired.Though he had resolved, after The American, never to adapt a play from a literary source, the plot of Tenants is taken from a story by Commandant Henri Rivière, ‘Flavien: Scènes de la vie contemporaine’ which had been published in the Revue des deux Mondes in 1874. In this Anglicized version, the central female figure, Mrs Vibert, is a widow with a complicated set of past relationships, who, at the play’s climax, is compelled to reveal that she is the mother of two young men who are both rivals for the hand of Mildred, the rich ward of Mrs Vibert’s former lover, Sir Frederick Byng. It is a complicated plot, resolved at the end when the two half-brothers are reconciled and the older woman is embraced by the younger. James’s attachment to the plays he had admired at the Théâtre-Français may partly explain why his own works seem dated, but this was, in any case, a rich decade in the history of British theatre. He couldn’t have competed with Oscar Wilde’s meteoric success which began in 1892 with Lady Windermere’s Fan. Having attended its glittering opening night James dismissed it as ‘infantine … both in subject and in form’, but he worried, too, that its plot had superficial similarities to that of his own play Tenants. Wilde’s play went on, nevertheless, to enjoy the kind of runaway box-office success for which James himself had longed. In these years too 252



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playwrights with a range of theatrical experience such as Arthur Wing Pinero and Henry Arthur Jones were establishing their reputations, and, by 1895, George Bernard Shaw had produced Widowers’ Houses, The Philanderer, Mrs. Warren’s Profession and Arms and the Man. Appealing to a narrower public, the ‘early Ibsen invasion’, as Elizabeth Robins called it, had already begun,3 and in the spring of 1891 the premieres of Rosmersholm, Ghosts, Hedda Gabler, and The Lady from the Sea were given in London. James had initially been dismissive, describing Ibsen’s work to Julian Sturgis as ‘ugly, common, hard, prosaic, bottomlessly bourgeois’. But, having seen Ibsen in performance, he came to recognize his originality, and his 1891 essay, ‘On the occasion of Hedda Gabler’, proved influential in countering the general disapproval of Ibsen’s drama in England. Doubtless his friendships with Edmund Gosse and Elizabeth Robins, both important Ibsen proponents in these years, led to this increased appreciation. And though James’s plays owe little to the Norwegian’s stagecraft, he may have drawn on his symbolist techniques in his later novels. Despite no more than moderate success in the theatre, James seems never to have doubted either the quality or commercial potential of his plays, and he was tireless in their promotion. Aside from his extended involvement in the production of The American, he tried to interest the celebrated American actress Geneviève Ward and W.H. Vernon in Tenants and in 1891 negotiations opened with the actor–manager John Hare who began by showing definite interest. Time passed, however, and finally James retrieved his play from Hare. At the end of that year, he tried his luck with Helena Modjeska, the Polish actress who had met with great success in America, but after reading the play’s first act, she rejected his offer. As part of a strategy for staging Disengaged, adapted from the short story, ‘The Solution’, James approached Ada Rehan, a leading figure in Augustin Daly’s company; having been highly successful in New York, Daly was about to establish his own theatre in London. He expressed interest, but asked for revisions, principally to build up the role for Miss Rehan. By autumn 1893 everything was in train for an opening in the new year: costumes and scenery had been ordered in Paris and models for the stage sets had been created. But James felt increasingly cut off from the preparation process and, when he was admitted to a read-through in December, felt it to be a ‘ghastly & disgraceful farce’. He had, in fact, been warned suddenly by Daly that the play ‘was fundamentally unsuited to his purpose, and that I might come to one rehearsal & see’. Ada Rehan appeared, ‘white, haggard, ill & pitifully ashamed of what she was doing’, in what turned out to be a ‘mumbled reading, book in hand, by actors utterly unacquainted with their parts & innocent of any approach to the expression or tentative representation of them’. He felt both angry and betrayed; suspecting that he was a victim of Augustin Daly’s financial problems, he decided to withdraw the play, telling William that Daly is ‘an utter cad & Ada Rehan is the same’. 253



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Such anger is understandable, though it seems surprising, too, that Daly ever considered producing the play, a kind of parody of upper-class life, difficult to imagine on the stage. Doubtless James’s disappointment and frustration related to his financial uncertainties and his sense of diminishing earning power for the years ahead. At this time a convincing theatrical success would have alleviated his anxieties. His fiction simply didn’t pay, as he had confided to Stevenson: ‘the book … doesn’t bring me in a penny…. I don’t sell ten copies! and neither editors nor publishers will have anything whatever to say to me’. James was to translate something of his theatrical experience – the ideal conception of the drama contrasted with the cruder practicalities of theatrical production – in his 1892 tale, ‘Nona Vincent’.The play of the same name at the centre of the story eventually proves successful, but its young author must encounter the mundane conditions offstage, the challenge of performance, and learn something of the means by which an actor inhabits a role. The mysterious alchemy by which a text is transformed into a living theatrical experience is marked by two episodes in the story: the leading lady whose performance is worryingly lacking is visited by the ‘ministering angel’, the woman who had inspired the play’s author, while at the same time, the author has a mysterious experience – a waking dream perhaps – from the spirit of ‘Nona’ herself, ‘ineffably beautiful and consoling’, who assures him that she ‘lives’ (CT 8: 170, 183–184). Such expedients, sadly, are the stuff only of fiction. In ‘Nona Vincent’ success – artistic, theatrical, even commercial – seems shrouded, therefore, in obscurity, indeed in transformative circumstances not generally available to author or performers. And the nature of the play at its centre also remains undisclosed, ‘in three acts and in prose, but rather of the romantic order, though dealing with contemporary English life’ (156). Its climax is reached when the heroine ‘“simply tells her love”’, a corrective, perhaps, to Viola’s words to Duke Orsino from Twelfth Night, ‘She never told her love, / But let concealment, like a worm i’ th’ bud, / Feed on her damask cheek’. Even in this fictional medium, the route to success, or the ‘green garden of the future’ remains uncertain, and James’s own dubious theatrical fortune is uncannily foretold when the play’s author, during the first-night curtain calls, notices the actors’‘strange grimacing painted faces’ backstage, and thinks he hears ‘the laughter of defeat and despair’ as he goes to take his bow (184, 179).The tale ends with a return to the conventional: the young leading lady marries the playwright and retires from the stage; he continues to write plays which ‘sometimes succeed’ (187).

Death of Mrs Kemble At the beginning of 1893, just ten months after his sister’s death, James suffered a further personal blow with the death of Fanny Kemble, aged 83. He had never seen her onstage, but she had been pointed out to him on horseback during his New 254



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York boyhood, and he had attended her celebrated readings of Shakespeare when the family were staying in St John’s Wood. After meeting in Rome in the winter of 1872–1873 the two had become good friends, attending the theatre together in London and meeting up in Switzerland where she regularly holidayed. Simply by her name (having been unhappily married she had reverted to the family name) she represented for James a distinguished line which reached back into a Romantic past. Her aunt had been Sarah Siddons, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Tragic Muse’, her father Charles Kemble, and she had ‘figured in the old London world’ (CWHJD, p. 392). She had sat for her portrait to Sir Thomas Lawrence, breakfasted with Sir Walter Scott, sung with Tom Moore, and watched Mlle. Mars on the stage of the Théâtre-Français. Despite their warm relationship, she had confided to mutual friend Anne Thackeray Ritchie in 1886 that ‘Henry James’ books always appear to me very clever & not very amusing – they are studies of character mental analyses – not stories – & are too close woven & subtle to be light reading – they remind me of Tourgenieff & Balzac but I like them better than the Russian & less than the french novels – He knows exactly what I think of them & I flatter him & myself does not care – as why should he?’.4 Suffering from gout, James attended, with other old friends and ‘a rabble of pushing, staring indelicate populace’, Mrs Kemble’s interment at ‘dreary’ Kensal Green Cemetery. Writing to her daughter, Sarah Wister, resident in Philadelphia, and again acknowledging his age, he moves beyond a sense of personal bereavement to ponder the nature of mortality and the uncertainty of ‘the question of “extinction.” … Yet I confess I used the only word that expresses my own sense of what the great silence means – and of the impenetrable mystery…. I saw your mother go – saw it with the tenderest & most leavetaking eyes: & the reconstruction of the soul is to me the most difficult of all imaginations … I wanted only to express the intensity – to our eyes – of cessation!’.5 Her death had been quick and sudden and she bequeathed to James a small brass clock which he always kept.

Violet Paget, ‘Impudent and Blackguardly’ Another well-established, though less intimate friendship also ended at this time. In 1892 Violet Paget published a collection of three tales treating ‘frivolous women’ titled Vanitas: Polite Stories.6 The event in itself might not have been of particular significance to James: though he admired her intellect, he thought her talent not especially suited to fiction. But he had continued to take a friendly interest in her writing, though this changed when he learnt of the content of ‘Lady Tal’, the first of the stories in the group. Set in Venice, it charts the developing relationship between a young aristocratic widow who aspires to be a writer and an established man of letters who, initially reluctant but charmed by her, offers detailed advice on how 255



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she may improve her novel. She completes the task, though he is privately sure no publisher will take it up. She suggests that they now collaborate on his next fiction, which turns out to be a version of their relationship. Lady Tal thinks the novel would best conclude in marriage, and the story ends as the two are driven indoors to take shelter from a sudden rain shower. The plot of ‘Lady Tal’ (short for ‘Atalanta’) reruns something of Paget’s experience with James, to whom she had dedicated her first novel Miss Brown. His feelings about this work had been mixed at the time and he had offered, as we have seen, a long and typically frank critique. Now some eight years later, in ‘Lady Tal’, Paget evidently decided to put what may have been a chastening experience to further use – as a donnée – in what seems an ill-judged attempt to answer back, if not exercise a form of public revenge. The tale begins by mentioning James by name: Jervase Marion, the man of letters, considers himself ‘a psychological novelist … an inmate of the world of Henry James and a kind of Henry James, of a lesser magnitude’ (p. 11). Having passingly invoked his name, Paget then goes on to develop a kind of parody of James himself in the role of Marion. The piece was perhaps intended as an amusing jeu d’esprit, but what emerges is a poorly judged, even vindictive caricature of James himself. Marion’s speech mannerisms with their hesitations, false starts, and searchings for the right word, are those of James, while his works turn ‘mainly upon the little intrigues and struggles of the highly civilized portion of society, in which only the fittest have survived, by virtue of talon and beak’ (p. 36). The title of Lady Tal’s novel is Christina, the name of the Jamesian heroine who appears in both Roderick Hudson and The Princess Casamassima. Marion is characterized as a snobbish, insecure American expatriate who avoids his countrymen ‘who, he felt sure, would go home and represent him as a poor creature and a snob disavowing his “people”’ (p. 64). His calling as a novelist demands that he remain a ‘dispassioned spectator of the world’s follies and miseries’: ‘he had condemned himself to live in a world of acquaintances, of indifference’, preferring to withdraw to his ‘dear, tidy, solitary flat at Westminster’ (pp. 53, 54, 84). He is emotionally empty, a casualty of life, incapable of natural human interaction: he ‘did not give his heart, perhaps because he had none to give, to anybody’ (p. 56). Even worse, it is hinted that he is effeminate; this ‘dainty but frugal bachelor’ sees his role as literary advisor as ‘a kind of male daily governess’ (pp. 12, 75). And he is irritated by Lady Tal’s cousin: ‘He felt a weak worm for disliking this big blond girl with the atrocious manners, who insisted on pronouncing his name Mary Anne, with unfailing relish of the joke’, a slang term at the time for a homosexual (p. 70). Fortunately, Henry never read the story, though he soon heard of it – ‘I don’t care to care’, he wrote to Morton Fullerton in Paris – and some of his American Venetian friends felt that they too had been mocked. Having originally recommended that William, staying with his family in Florence at this time, should call on ‘the ­irrepressible Vernon Lee’, he now retracted the advice, warning him that ‘She’s a 256



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tiger-cat’. But it was too late. His brother had already appeared at her salon in the Via Garibaldi. Having once read ‘Lady Tal’, William wrote her a measured but dismissive letter, concluding that ‘the book has quite quenched my desire to pay you another visit’.7 William relented a little when Paget expressed her penitence, but Henry cut off all relations with her, replying tersely to a letter she wrote him in 1900, though they did eventually meet and talk together in 1912. It was an episode out of which Violet Paget emerges badly: ‘Lady Tal’ is a quite dull story and her treatment of a man who had only ever been helpful is simply unkind, reflecting, as one of Vernon Lee’s biographers suggests, ‘a blindness to the possibility of personal affront’.8 In personal and social terms, too, Paget was capable of insensitivity; Anne Thackeray’s husband Richmond Ritchie had complained in 1886 – somewhat uncharitably – at her hijacking a conversation he was having: ‘Vernon Lee who is a sort of cross between Howdy Sturgis & Oscar Wilde rushed in & proceeded to discuss the best routes to Clapham Junction. It is a great mistake, with a passionate nature to have a large pasty white face’.9 Though heavily committed to the theatre and playwriting, James brought out in 1893 a group of five of his stories titled The Real Thing and Other Tales, Picture and Text, a collection of earlier essays principally on American artists, some of whom he had met at Broadway, The Private Life, a group of six tales, and Essays in London and Elsewhere, devoted principally to European literary themes and authors. These volumes assemble some of his literary and journalistic work from earlier years. In a note of 7 May 1893, James confesses to a nostalgia, despite his experiments with the drama, a desire ‘to dip my pen into the other ink – the sacred fluid of fiction’, to escape for a little, ‘the horrid theatric trade’: ‘literature sits patient at my door … I have only to lift the latch to let in the exquisite little form that is, after all, nearest to my heart and with which I am so far from having done’ (CN, p. 77). And in the following year he made notes for The Sacred Fount (1901) and ‘A Round of Visits’ (1910), as well as a detailed plan for The Wings of the Dove (1902) (CN, pp. 88, 102–107). Outside his own creative musings, James was pleased, too, to receive advance copies of the two volumes of James Russell Lowell’s letters, sent by their editor Charles Eliot Norton. They reminded him once more of Lowell’s ‘sweet humanity’ and ‘robust manhood’, though, as he suggested to Norton, he would have liked deeper coverage of ‘his English life at large’ which he considered to be ‘the richest period of his existence’. He was enthusiastic, too, about Robert Louis Stevenson’s Catriona, a sequel to Kidnapped. James told him that it ‘reeks and hums with genius’, though he couldn’t resist offering a critical proviso, an observed absence of ‘the note of visibility’, complaining that his own ‘visual sense’, or ‘seeing imagination’, was painfully underfed. Addressing Stevenson, James’s language is often tactile and his sentiments flamboyant, perhaps illustrating Andrew Lang’s comment (the two attended the same Scottish school) on Stevenson’s remarkable ‘power of making other men fall in love with him’.10 257



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During this year came news from mainland Europe of the deaths of two literary men whom James had known. In July, the much admired Guy de Maupassant, ravaged by syphilis, ‘the fruit of fabulous habits’, as James commented, died in a private Paris asylum at the age of 42. And earlier in the year, in April, John Addington Symonds had succumbed to tuberculosis in Rome, aged 52. Just a few months before, Gosse had loaned James a copy of Symonds’s A Problem in Modern Ethics, privately printed in 1891; it is a document, unique for its time and much influenced by Walt Whitman, which discusses the nature of ‘Greek love’, homosexual experience and pederasty (a term with a more general application at this time). Symonds’ life had been divided between a wife and four daughters and a sequence of male lovers, the most significant and enduring, a Venetian gondolier. James confided to Gosse that he wondered at ‘those marvellous outpourings’, admired Symonds’ ‘extraordinary gallantry’, yet regretted his lack of ‘humour – it is really the saving salt’. He recognized Symonds’ reforming spirit while, like Gosse, himself conducting a life in accord with the norms of the British establishment. The weather in the spring and early summer of 1893 was uncharacteristically fine, and in March James left for a two-month stay in Paris, where he caught up again with Morton Fullerton and Henrietta Reubell. He also called on Whistler and his wife at 110 rue du Bac; their garden would serve as the setting for a decisive scene in The Ambassadors (1903). He went on to join William and his family in Lucerne as their sabbatical year in Europe was drawing to a close. William had found his stay in Florence unsatisfactory; distracted by the social demands of the city, he had also been repelled by local conditions, complaining to Henry that, ‘I’m sick of the soup kitchen and urinal air of the streets on warm days; and sick of the unshaven relaxed population’. On his return to England Henry had ‘cut loose from “society”’, spending some six weeks on ‘the sordid sands of Ramsgate’ in Kent, a few days in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, followed by an abbreviated return visit to Whitby which proved, ‘arduous, cold and décousu’, or disorganized. He recalled it for Stevenson as ‘a summer of the British seaside, the bathing machine and the German band’. Those earlier extended stays in the grand estates of the Scottish Highlands were behind him. During his spring visit to Paris, James had offered Edward Compton another play, Guy Domville, for which he had sent the actor–manager the first act along with outlines for the second and third. Compton raised some doubts about the work’s ending, and, by the end of the month, James had amicably withdrawn it, asking ‘aren’t we, after all, really mismated?’. By July, having submitted two further outlines, he was in discussion with George Alexander, the actor–manager who had successfully produced Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. James had attended the play’s first night, praising it as ‘full of substance & full of art, and ­interesting from beginning to end’. Established in the West End, the 35-year-old Alexander, a handsome, if only competent actor, had taken on the St James’s Theatre, .

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renovating it and installing electric lighting with a shrewd eye for future commercial success. And so for the next eighteen months James was increasingly involved in the preparation of Guy Domville for the stage, revising and re-working many scenes.

‘Horror and Pity’: Fenimore’s Death Early in 1894 he received the shocking news of Fenimore’s death in Venice. She had left England in summer 1893, weakened by influenza and suffering from the depression that dogged her, eventually renting two floors of the Casa Semitecolo on the Grand Canal. By Christmas time she contemplated a permanent residence in the city and the plan was for James to visit the following spring. But feverish and unwell, she fell in the early hours of 24 January 1894 from an upper window to the side street below, to be found by two gondoliers, one of them, by chance, the intimate of John Addington Symonds. She died that same night, aged 53. James’s grief was compounded when he read a Venetian newspaper cutting which asserted that the cause of death was suicide. This was probably true, and it was certainly what James came to believe. He had planned to leave for Rome to attend her funeral, the place where she had expressed a wish to be buried, but, as he lamented to John Hay, ‘[b]efore the horror and pity of it I have utterly collapsed’. Having been aware of her solitariness, her social isolation caused by increasing deafness, her melancholia, and her indifferent physical health, James doubtless felt guilty but also betrayed by this sudden, desperate action. From the surviving letters it seems certain that Fenimore loved James, but equally clear, too, that he had established the conditions under which the relationship should be conducted. He represents her life in the days following her death as blighted by both circumstances and a depressive predisposition. To Francis Boott, who shared happy memories of Bellosguardo, he wrote, ‘[t]he event seems to me absolutely to demand the hypothesis of sudden dementia and to admit of none other. Pitiful victim of chronic melancholy as she was … nothing is more possible than that, in illness, this obsession should abruptly have deepened into suicidal mania…. She was not, she was never, wholly sane – I mean her liability to suffering was like the doom of mental disease’. Most striking is the jarring ill-match between James’s rhetoric of brooking no argument (‘absolutely to demand … to admit of none other … she was not, she was never …’) and the central speculation on which these assertions hang, a ‘hypothesis’ in which ‘nothing is more possible than that …’. Despite such absolute terms, his summary of a life, or a condition, remains speculation. It is natural that he felt guilt that such unhappiness had gone unanswered, but, in thus pathologizing Fenimore’s condition, he may also have been excising his own presence from her most pressing needs and desires. Years earlier, sister Alice had, after all, mischievously joked to William that ‘Henry is somewhere on the Continent, flirting with Constance’.11 259



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Though he had been unable to attend Fenimore’s burial in Rome, James agreed to meet her closest relative, Mrs Clara Woolson Benedict, who travelled from New York to clear up her sister’s affairs in Italy.This was a generous and time-consuming gesture, given his theatrical commitments, though his motives may have contained a degree of self-interest. Fenimore’s Venetian rooms had been sealed after her death; she never travelled light and he knew that they would contain papers and letters he had written. Ever intent on preserving his own privacy, he would be present during this sorting-out process with access to any materials he judged confidential and thus best destroyed. Still feeling seedy after a bout of influenza and suffering from lumbago, he met Mrs Benedict and her daughter Clare at the dockside in Genoa at the end of March and saw them through Customs. While they travelled south to Rome to visit Fenimore’s grave, he waited for them in Venice. It proved a harrowing few weeks during which he provided continuous support as the two women dealt with all that remained of his friend’s life. A curious scene was later recalled, an eye-witness account, seemingly, of a gondola trip taken by James in April to the Venetian lagoon, where he spent time attempting to submerge in its deepest waters a collection of dark dresses – presumably part of Fenimore’s remaining wardrobe. It was a difficult task, for they failed to sink, floating up to the surface almost immediately, despite his efforts.The story was told, apparently by James in old age, to a young woman called Mercede Huntington, and recorded by Theodora Bosanquet, his amanuensis. It may be true, though it seems an eccentric way of disposing of a dead person’s clothes. And in its mix of funereal symbolism and human ineffectualness, along with its romantic marine setting, it casts a disturbing valedictory light on James’s relationship with Fenimore.12 By early May the Benedicts had left Italy and James spent time in Florence and Rome as well as a few days in Naples. In Florence, he visited the grave of Lizzie Boott in the Allori Cemetery, south of the city, not far from Bellosguardo, ‘an intensely pious pilgrimage to the spot where Lizzie lies in majestic and perennial bronze’, as he reported to her father. Arriving in Rome, pleasantly cool for June, he met some old friends, a failing William Wetmore Story among them, ‘the ghost, only, of his old clownship – very silent and vague and gentle’, as James later observed. And finally he visited Fenimore’s grave in Rome’s Non-Catholic Cemetery near the Pyramid of Cestius and the old city gate, Porta San Paolo, known at the time as the Protestant Cemetery. It remains a beautiful setting containing the remains of some of Europe’s most distinguished writers and artists, including Keats, Shelley and Symonds. Story would be buried here the following year alongside his wife Emelyn who had died in January 1894, their grave adorned by one of his own sculptures, The Angel of Grief. Fenimore’s grave was planted with violets and surrounded with ivy: there is no record of James’s thoughts, but violets still grow there.

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Alice’s Diary: ‘Absolutely Direct and Original’ While in Italy he became aware of a further threat to his privacy with the arrival of four privately printed copies of his sister Alice’s Diary, sent by Katharine Loring, who as her friend and long-term carer understood that Alice would have wanted it to be published. It covers most of her final three years, with those pages recording her last months dictated to her companion. Neither William nor Henry had known of its existence. It is a remarkable document, even without considering the physical limitations of Alice’s life, and James was sufficiently objective to recognize ‘the life, the power, the temper, the humour & beauty & expressiveness of the Diary in itself ’. It contains touching passages recording Henry’s kindness and patience, but he was nonetheless deeply and characteristically alarmed at the indiscretions it contained, the gossip with which he had attempted to amuse his sister, ‘the sight of so many private names & allusions in print’: he foresaw ‘the danger of accidents, some catastrophe of publicity’. As Alice herself innocently observed, ‘Harry is the most adorable creature for “telling,” and then the things that he sees!’ (Diary, p. 196). Once again, the potential public intrusion into his personal life and observations, the indiscreet revelation of his opinions, ‘the printedness-en-toutes-lettres of so many names, personalities, hearsay, (usually, on Alice’s part, through me!) about people &c, has, through making me intensely nervous & almost sick with terror about possible publicity, possible accidents, reverberations &c, poisoned as yet a good deal my enjoyment of the wonderful character of the thing’. In later years he continued, disingenuously, to argue, as in a letter to his nephew Harry, that those outside the family circle would simply not understand, that ‘[i]ts survival of us, to generations without collateral light about it, strikes me as so sad a profanation’.13 He immediately destroyed his own copy, advising William to do the same, as if that might banish the nightmare. One of the four copies was intended for brother Bob, rootless, often drunk and totally unreliable; to his credit, Henry agreed that he should receive his copy, yet dreaded what he – or members of his family resident in Concord – might do with it. In fact, Katharine Loring never passed it on to Bob. Henry regretted that she had not discreetly suppressed a number of names or reduced them to initials, a device he himself sometimes adopted. He wrote to her requesting that she should not publish the Diary, while William simply acknowledged – without thanks – having received it. Katharine magnanimously complied with Henry’s wishes and the Diary remained unpublished until 1934 when Bob’s daughter, Mrs Mary James Vaux, arranged for the publication of Alice James: her Brothers – Her Journal. She had received it from Katharine herself who remarked of Bob’s children that they had been the only members of the James family to have taken ‘any interest in me’.14

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The Writer’s Life in Short Stories Two of the short stories of these years which feature the anxieties of middle-aged novelists have a clear autobiographical reference. Both protagonists, already weakened by illness, eventually die. The first of these, ‘The Middle Years’ (1893), James considered to be a ‘concise anecdote’, involving many ‘boilings and reboilings’ to achieve ‘the thickest jam’ (LC 2: 1238). Dencombe, an author, falls into conversation with a young man, Doctor Hugh, who, as an ardent admirer, happens to be reading his latest novel, an encounter which takes place by the sea at Bournemouth, a location associated, of course, through Alice James and Robert Louis Stevenson, with chronic illness, and a place he now found to be ‘empty … of almost everything but ghosts’. Dencombe, ‘a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style’, haunted by a ‘sense of ebbing time, of shrinking opportunity’, longs for ‘“another go! … a better chance!”’ (CT 9: 63, 55, 57). Ironically, ‘The Middle Years’ would serve as the title for the third volume of James’s autobiography, a work he failed to complete, as if replicating Dencombe’s unfulfilled desire to enjoy a final rich phase of writing. The two women companions initially seen with Doctor Hugh on the beach are quickly dismissed; always referred to as ‘Doctor Hugh’, he proves to be a modern man of science, ‘an ardent physiologist, saturated with the spirit of the age’, ‘a remarkable, a delightful apparition’, who will care for ‘poor Dencombe’. ‘“You shall live!”’, he is assured, as Doctor Hugh, following what he calls his ‘“infatuation”’, gives up everything to care for the older man (60–61, 68, 74). The author has one remaining wish, to achieve ‘a certain splendid “last manner,” the very citadel, as it would prove, of his reputation, the stronghold into which his real treasure would be gathered’ (70). His grandiose aspiration remains unfulfilled: there is to be no second chance and Dencombe’s deathbed message, much quoted by critics, constitutes a disturbing summation of the artist’s calling: ‘“We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art”’ (75). The dynamics of ‘The Death of the Lion’ (1894) are similar: an esteemed novelist, Neil Paraday, now old and infirm, comes under the protection of an unnamed young man who narrates the tale, initially deputed to come up with a ‘human interest’ story of celebrity for his magazine. Quickly realising the unworthiness of his mission, the young man endorses the sanctity of the text, the irrelevance of the private life, defiantly pronouncing, as he holds up the two volumes of Paraday’s latest book, that ‘“[h]is life’s here … The artist’s life’s his work, and this is the place to observe him”’ (CT 9: 91). The young woman whom the narrator will eventually marry, when offered the chance to see the great novelist in person, turns aside, virtuously preserving that distinction between the man and his work.

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James’s hostility towards the popular press which employs the narrator is evident from his preparatory notes; he rails against the ‘immense reality’ of ‘this age of advertisement and newspaperism’, and the sensation-seeking public it serves, ‘the ravenous autograph-hunters, lion-hunters, exploiters of publicity’ (CN, p. 86). In such hands the author is in mortal danger: ‘a person knowing and loving the thing itself, the work, is simply never to be found…. They must kill him, hein? – kill him with the very fury of their selfish exploitation, and then not really have an idea of what they killed him for’ (pp. 86–87). In this case the deceptions practised by publishers upon a gullible public are given comic-satirical treatment in the revelation of the true identities of two popular authors. Guy Walsingham, author of ‘Obsessions’, is in fact a woman who ‘“goes in for the larger latitude”’ – presumably more risqué subjects, while Dora Forbes, author of ‘The Other Way Round’, turns out to be a man sporting a ‘big red moustache’ (CT 9: 88, 89). The narrator, ‘“lost among the genders and the pronouns”’, confesses his bewilderment (111). But despite such comic ironies, the story ends with the death of Paraday, and a reminder of the author’s role as a commodity, subject to the competitive commercial world of the magazines, having to be available for portraits and biographical profiles, and to give readings to the upper classes. In the final pages, an unfinished manuscript by Paraday, a ‘noble morsel’ passed around among careless country-house guests and read by no-one, is eventually lost, marking the irrelevance, if not the death of the text (110). A further variation on the theme of the conflict between the aspirations of the artist and the commercial demands of the press forms the plot of ‘The Next Time’. Though the tale first appeared in 1895, it directly re-lives some of the pain James had felt nearly two decades earlier when he had been employed by the New-York Tribune in Paris in 1875–1876. Ray Limbert fails as writer and editor of The Blackport Beacon because his talent is too refined for the popular taste – he cannot help writing masterpieces which fail to sell and he is sacked from his editorship for not being sufficiently ‘chatty’. In a further irony a woman novelist, Jane Highmore, who has achieved great commercial success, aspires to write something so fine that it will become, like Limbert’s work, ‘an exquisite failure’ (CT 8: 186). The tale also raises another of James’s contentions, that great art cannot prosper if a wife and family are to be supported. In Limbert’s distracted life, ‘Upstairs’ is the floor on which ‘Mrs. Limbert had her babies and her headaches’ and ‘the bells for ever jangled at the maids’ (204). There is a certain irony in the fact that both ‘The Death of the Lion’ and ‘The Next Time’ appeared first in The Yellow Book, ‘the small, square lemon-coloured quarterly’ associated with the Aesthetic and Decadent movements (LC 2: 1226). Edited by the American novelist, Henry Harland, it placed no word-limit on its authors which pleased the self-confessed ‘too damnably voluminous’ James. Later in

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his life, he recalled with pleasure the Sunday-afternoon visit by Harland and art editor, Aubrey Beardsley, ‘slender, pale, delicate, unmistakeably intelligent’, when he had been invited to contribute to the magazine’s first number. He basked in ‘the golden truth’ that any story might be allowed to find ‘its own organic form’, for once evading ‘the rude prescription of brevity at any cost’ (LC 2: 1226, 1227) and the irritating demands of what he referred to Howells as ‘the catchpenny picture book’. He had never approved of the Victorian practice of illustrating works of fiction and so he was pleased, too, that the illustrations which appeared in The Yellow Book did not relate specifically to its contents. The magazine (its yellow covers perhaps reminding readers of the dubious contents of certain French novels), elegantly produced with pages spaciously laid out with generous margins, enjoyed, however, only a brief life. Some of the greatest writers of the period appeared within its pages, but such high production values proved uncommercial and sadly, founded in 1893, The Yellow Book closed in 1897. It has been suggested that in this association James had joined a clique, ‘the “elite” group of English decadents … the “most dramatic casualties of the crisis in masculinity at the fin de siècle”’.15

Some ‘Terminations’ Walter Pater, one of the most enduringly influential figures in the philosophical evolution of the Aesthetic movement, died suddenly at the end of July 1894, but James, deterred by the thought of ‘the compact Oxfordism of it all’, decided not to attend his funeral. The two had met in the late seventies, when James had judged Pater as ‘far from being as beautiful as his own prose’. He sketches for Gosse (who had been present at the funeral) an uneasy impression of brooding, disturbing, personal mystery: ‘[h]e is the mask without the face…. He reminds me … of one of those lucent matchboxes which you place, on going to bed, near the candle, to show you, in the darkness, where you can strike a light: he shines in the uneasy gloom – vaguely, and has a phosphorescence, not a flame. But I quite agree with you that he is not of the little day – but of the longer time’. By August James had returned to London, frustrated at the increasing numbers of American tourists in Italy, going on to spend two more tranquil weeks in Cornwall. Based in St Ives, he went for ‘long walks on wet moors’ with the notoriously taciturn Leslie Stephen who was staying with his family at Talland House where they spent each summer. Virginia Woolf would return to these idyllic, though not entirely stress-free days in her fiction. In the early autumn James met up with Paul Bourget and his wife in Oxford, staying at 15 Beaumont Street, the lodgings occupied by Fenimore before she had left for Venice.The landlady had become her friend and James had frequently visited in the past.

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It was not coincidental, then, that at this address James sketched out his thoughts for the story that would become ‘The Altar of the Dead’ (1895), a strange, darkly sustained narrative, a ‘more or less vivid fable’ in which the hero, Stransom, is imagined, in James’s preparatory note, as a man ‘whose noble and beautiful religion is the worship of the Dead’ (LC 2: 1249, CN, p. 98). He will transfer his ‘“spiritual”’ altar, ‘lighted in the gloom of his own soul’, to the candles standing on a material altar to commemorate those he has loved, the girl who died before they could marry, and other friends, ‘the silent roll-call of his Dead’ (CN p. 99, CT 9: 239). He was to become, as James observes in his Preface, one of a sequence of ‘poor sensitive gentlemen’ who appear in his later fiction (LC 2: 1250). In the course of time Stransom notices in the chapel a woman similarly devoted; his intentions are undermined when he learns that she is praying for Acton Hague, K.C.B., a man who had once betrayed her and whom she has forgiven. Ironically, many years earlier this man had also betrayed Stransom who is now unable, unlike the woman, to light a candle for him. In this triangular relationship of the living and the dead, it is significant that the narrative offers no name for the magnanimous woman. Stransom, now dying, returns to the altar, wishing to light one final candle and the girl he had loved returns to him in a vision hinting at redemption. He finds ‘the nameless lady’ at his side (269) and resolves to light a last candle; but just as the nature of Hague’s past betrayals is unexplained, the reason for its lighting – whether for himself or for Hague – remains a mystery. In Stransom’s life, friends are increasingly ‘dropping away’, just as death had taken away two women to whom James had been close. Sister Alice had welcomed at last its simplifying certainty after a life of relentless physical suffering, while Fenimore, alone and melancholy, had ended her own pain in an act of irrevocable self-violence, less easy for James to accommodate, though ‘The Altar of the Dead’ powerfully affirms the consolation of reconciliation and forgiveness. The tale never appeared in a magazine but was first published in a collection entitled appropriately Terminations. A further ‘termination’ was soon to follow for, at the end of the year, opening a London newspaper, James was shocked to learn of the death of Robert Louis Stevenson who had died in Samoa on 3 December, aged 44. James’s friendship with Stevenson, though relatively recent, had been warm and affectionate, conducted on an almost domestic level during that Bournemouth summer of 1885 when he had regularly called on husband and wife. He had hoped that the couple might return to England, but this did not happen, and the two men kept in touch, corresponding in an idiosyncratic, playful way. James frequently complained of Stevenson’s absence – he remained too far away for his imagination – though he caught something of the ‘opaline iridescence’ of his ‘legend’ from their mutual friend, Sidney Colvin.

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James’s admiration for Stevenson’s writing was genuine and unreserved, and the man himself seemed detached from mundane life, a bohemian, a rare creature of fancy, as he wrote to Stevenson’s widow, ‘that beautiful, bountiful being’ whose life had been ‘converted into a fable as strange and romantic as one of his own’. James had declined a request to be an executor of Stevenson’s will, pleading in a long letter his unfitness for any such duties. It seems more likely that his work commitments were weighing upon his mind, since he had shown considerable capacity to deal with the complications arising from recent family wills. It was a demanding time, and he complained at the end of December 1894 to Edmund Gosse that ‘[t]he ghost of poor R.L.S. waves its great dusky wings between me and all occupations … the damnable theatre is now given over to nocturnal as well as diurnal rehearsals’.

Guy Domville Preparation for the premiere of Guy Domville, due to open on Saturday 5 January 1895 at the St James’s Theatre, was proving time-consuming; rehearsals began early in December and James was in attendance from the beginning. Suffering from a sore throat and therefore unable to read the play through to the company – a job which George Alexander took on instead – he nevertheless felt optimistic. Much care had been expended on this project and many scenes had been revised, in consultation with Alexander. The sets were designed by Alfred Parsons, a friend from those earlier stays in rural Broadway. Despite previous mixed theatrical success, James remained in good spirits, reporting to William that ‘[t]he play is small & simple – only 3 acts – but pretty, I think, interesting, & distinctly “emotional”; a little romantic story in an old-time (last century,) setting. I have endeavoured to make it both very artful & very human’. This period piece, set in the eighteenth century, begins well enough. Young Guy Domville must decide between his calling to become a Catholic priest and the need to preserve the family name and line by marrying. He is pure and earnest, modestly in love with the widowed Mrs Peverel and beloved tutor of her little boy. He is about to leave for the historic seminary at Douai, but the worldly Lord Devenish (later exposed as a rake) reminds him of his family duty – ‘You hold in your hand, sir, the generations to come!’ (CP, p. 492).The mood has changed by the opening of the second act; it is three months later and Domville, having taken this advice and embraced the world, is about to be married to a young woman, Mary Brasier. Here the action weakens: gratuitous entrances and exits begin to accumulate and a long drinking scene (derived from Augier’s L’Aventurière) had quickly to be cut. Much of the dialogue, too, is unusually subtle and complex for a drama. Domville, realizing that his betrothed loves another, helps the couple escape and, by 266



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Act 3 he has returned to the home of Mrs Peverel. He might have married her, but knowing that she is loved by his friend, a naval officer, Frank Humber, he nobly renounces this opportunity for happiness and leaves to enter the priesthood. Domville’s poignant assertion at the play’s conclusion, ‘I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles!’ and an inappropriately impatient catcall from the gallery, ‘It’s a bloody good thing y’are’, have become celebrated in literary anecdote and indicate the mood of at least part of the first-night audience. Luckily James himself was not present: after several sleepless nights and a restless day, he tried to assuage his nerves by attending a production of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband at the nearby Haymarket Theatre. With the applause of that audience still ringing in his ears, he reluctantly and fearfully made his way to the stage door of the St James’s where his own final act was concluding. His audience included some of the most eminent names in the arts, all of them friends and acquaintances: Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Sir Frederic Leighton, George Frederic Watts, George Du Maurier, Frank Millet, Alfred Parsons, John Singer Sargent, W. Graham Robertson, Elizabeth Robins, Mrs Humphry Ward, Mrs W.K. Clifford, Mrs Hugh Bell, Edmund Gosse, F. Marion Crawford, Kate and Florence Terry, whose sister Marion was in the cast. The critic, William Archer, was again present, as well as George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett. James was especially touched, ‘even to tears’, that his friend, the popular and prolific novelist W.E. Norris, had travelled from Torquay, ‘½ across the wintry England’, recalling his ‘kind, tenderly-embarrassed face’ when he saw him afterwards.16 The play was politely received by the more genteel part of the audience, but some of the rougher elements whistled and booed (possibly a cabal organized against Alexander) and noisy altercations began. As if re-enacting that scene from ‘Nona Vincent’, Alexander, at the calls for ‘Author, author!’, drew James onstage, where he stood white-faced and speechless before confusedly withdrawing. The actor–manager, who enjoyed a popular following, then made a brief but ill-advised speech of apology, expressing his own ‘hurt’ at such ‘discordant notes’ (CP, p. 478). James was devastated and, though the critics later went on to find some redeeming qualities and audiences became more appreciative, the run ended after five weeks and thirty-one performances. In consequence, and doubtless especially galling to James, his own play was replaced by Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest. He later wrote to Edward Compton’s wife that ‘Guy Domville was an unmitigated disaster – hooted at, as I was hooted at myself, by a brutal mob, and fruitless of any of the consequences for which I have striven…. As I walked home, alone, after that first night, I swore to myself an oath never again to have anything to do with a business which lets one into such traps, abysses and heart-break’. However unjustified its brutal reception, Guy Domville, aside from illustrating James’s limitations as a dramatist, indicates his remoteness from the tastes of his potential audience, or as he later bitterly called it, ‘the usual vulgar theatre-going 267



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London public’.To Mrs Sylvia Emerson (married to a cousin of R.W. Emerson) he complained that ‘the English theatre is a barbarous hole’, ‘an abyss of vulgarity’, and wondered at the incomprehension of ‘the stupid ruffians of the Gallery’.17 The experience could hardly have been more humiliating or cruel. He had come to realize that his books enjoyed little commercial success, but on that evening the impatience of many with the undoubted longueurs of his drama was voiced directly and in person. What might have succeeded as a piece of elaborately worked prose narrative involving a crisis of conscience, the conflict between the discipline of religious devotion and the more worldly attractions of a life conducted according to personal preference, probably had little chance of a broad-audience appeal. The play may, though, be interestingly related to James’s own life. A recent critic has suggested that its hero,‘[t]orn between his allegiances to his family and the Church’, may represent an instance of ‘a fraught modern identity’, the play’s events symbolizing the tensions in James’s subjectivity, Domville’s final choice of the monastery ‘a typically Jamesian method of avoiding desire’.18 It is not known whether James discussed aspects of his play with Mrs Humphry Ward. Her father, Tom Arnold, unworldly and deeply spiritual, who led what he called a ‘wandering life’, had twice converted to Catholicism, and in 1898 she published Helbeck of Bannisdale. In this, one of her finest novels, both austere and romantic, she traces the conflict between a traditional Catholic faith and a rebellious secular belief in a love story which ends irreconcilably and inevitably in tragedy. Though he quibbled about certain technical aspects, James, to her great relief, expressed his admiration for ‘the splendid profit of its big subject – secured and gripped by the beauty of the personal drama that presents the case’. Her novel demonstrates, in fact, that such a theme was capable of fictional treatment. As for James and the commercial theatre, this was, essentially, the end: he would, in the future, return occasionally and tentatively to the drama, but Guy Domville marks the disappointing – indeed, devastating – closure to his sustained commitment to the medium.

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Part IV

The Later Years

13 Return to ‘The Sacred Fluid of Fiction’ (1895 –1899)

Though James now turned from what he called ‘the black abyss’ of the theatre,1 he took with him some of drama’s lessons – aside from the enriching possibilities of symbolism, a refreshed, perhaps more disciplined sense of the ‘scene’ as it might be applied to fiction. He now conceded that despite all ‘this wasted passion and squandered time’, he had salvaged – or discovered, perhaps – one redeeming insight: the ‘(I don’t know what adequately to call it) divine principle of the Scenario’ (CN, p. 115). Apart from the physical demands of negotiations and rehearsals in the theatre (a communal experience with actors he seems to have enjoyed), he had also been compelled to listen to the voice of the actor–manager, motivated by the need to consider what would work onstage and, indeed, what the public would pay to see. This must have been an unusual experience for a sedentary writer accustomed to the privacy of a study, and autonomous control over his output. Revision – such a compulsive activity for James as he dealt with the successive republications of his own works – entailed the voluntary exercise of his own choices and preferences, but there is no evidence that any editor either before or after these ‘theatrical years’ ever intervened to suggest stylistic or structural changes. The only discipline (harsh enough as he felt it and sometimes disregarded in any case) was the magazine editor’s control over the length of a narrative, the ‘fixed and beggarly number of words’, a negotiation which usually took place at a preliminary stage of the writing process (CN, p. 77). His notebook for these months suggests – aside from fatigue – a sense of liberation at being allowed to return to a familiar habitat, and, more importantly, a

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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conviction of future possibilities, ventures, technical challenges, of control, and imaginative freedom. Yet though his work was much respected in literary circles, he had an undeniable sense of neglect, a conviction that his moment had passed. He confessed his anxieties to his long-standing friend, W.D. Howells: I have felt, for a long time past, that I have fallen upon evil days – every sign or symbol of one’s being in the least wanted, anywhere or by any one, have so utterly failed. A new generation, that I know not, and mainly prize not, had taken universal possession. The sense of being utterly out of it weighed me down, and I asked myself what the future would be …. periodical publication is practically closed to me – I’m the last hand that the magazines, in this country or in the U.S., seem to want.

He goes on to list the magazines in which his work has appeared, the Atlantic, Scribner’s, the Century, the Cosmopolitan, now ‘with nothing to say to me’, while publishers ‘Houghton and Mifflin’ as well as Macmillan, treat him ‘like dust beneath their feet’ or simply ‘cold-shoulder’ him. In the coming months Howells did his best to ensure that his old friend from Cambridge days received better treatment from the publishing houses.

Visit to Ireland In March James accepted several invitations to Dublin, where he spent seventeen days. Having stayed briefly with Herbert Jekyll, private secretary to Lord Houghton, he transferred to Dublin Castle, Houghton’s residence as the recently appointed British Viceroy to Ireland. James knew the family well, having enjoyed the friendship of the viceroy’s father, Richard Monckton Milnes, when first in London. James refers to ‘poor young Lord Houghton’ – a widower who had lost his infant son in 1890 – but Houghton would go on to have a successful career in diplomacy and Liberal politics. James’s visit coincided with the end of the ‘Season’, but the entertainment at Dublin Castle was lavish and included four balls in the space of six days, ‘a Purgatorio’, he wailed. Local conditions remained uneasy, however, as the Irish aristocracy had little time for the Home Rule tendencies of the government which had appointed Houghton. The harsh juxtaposition of wealth with ‘the beggary & squalor of Ireland at the very gates’ troubled James deeply, though he was, nevertheless, charmed by his host, ‘his unquenched youth, and rosy, blue-eyed freshness and bonhomie’. He was able to relax a little more in the company of Commander-in-Chief of the English Forces, Field-Marshal Viscount Wolseley and his wife, Louisa Erskine, whom he had known since 1877. James knew the ‘pretty’ wife rather better, noting that she had ‘the air, the manners, the toilets & the taste, of an 272



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American’ and judged Wolseley himself, who had had an especially distinguished military career, to be an ‘excellent specimen of the cultivated British soldier’. Affectionately mocked in the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan (most memorably in the patter-song from The Pirates of Penzance, ‘I am the very model of a modern Major-General’), he is now memorialized by an equestrian statue on Horse Guards Parade in London. James’s correspondence with the couple would span nearly forty years. As he confided to Theodora Sedgwick (sister-in-law of Charles Eliot Norton), James continued to admire, as he had throughout his life, the military personnel, their trappings and uniforms: ‘[t]he simplicity of the soldiers! But they made me admire them like a housemaid. I love aide-de-camps: even the Lord Lieutenant’s eight – who all dine in blue coats and brass buttons, with reverses of azure satin’.This mocking of his own feminized self is characteristic, a role he later adopted when thanking Howells for helping to revive his career in the magazine marketplace: ‘I felt myself, somehow perishing in my pride or rotting ungathered, like an old maid against the wall and on her lonely bench. Well, I’m not an old maid (for the blessed trade) quite yet. And you were Don Quixote!’ Not long after his return from Dublin, the trials of Oscar Wilde (which began in April 1895) created a sensation across the country: the accused, after recent years of adulation and theatrical success, fell, Icarus-like, from the heavens, to be condemned to hard labour and eventual incarceration in Reading Gaol. Wilde had initially embarked on a private legal action against the Marquess of Queensberry who, scandalized at the playwright’s continuing relationship with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, had (in)famously accused him of being ‘a somdomite’. Queensbury’s retaliatory initiation of enquiries into the private life of Wilde unearthed a dark underworld of male prostitution, brothels and blackmail which scandalized Victorian society. James had always been repelled by Wilde’s flamboyant style and the publicity it attracted, he thought his plays shallow and popularity-seeking and doubtless, too, he envied their seemingly unstoppable success. He had no direct relationship with Wilde, though Robbie (Robert) Ross, the Irishman’s former lover and most loyal supporter (one of the few to emerge creditably out of the episode), was a friend of Edmund and Nelly Gosse. James was undoubtedly shocked when this network of commercialized, casual sex emerged, so alien to his own celibate, physically repressed life. He admitted to some curiosity but seems most horrified at the extent of Wilde’s precipitous fall from public favour, the charmed, entertaining life of the artist ending in shame and exposure to the prurient, vulgar masses. He found it, he told Gosse, ‘hideously, atrociously dramatic and really interesting’ – though the ‘interest is qualified by such a sickening horribility’. ‘But the fall – from nearly twenty years of a really unique kind of “brilliant” conspicuity (wit, “art,” conversation – “one of our two or three dramatists, etc.”) to that sordid prison-cell and this gulf of obscenity over which the ghoulish public hangs and gloats’. 273



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Summersoft During this spring, the door which had closed so decisively on the commercial theatre opened slightly once more when Ellen Terry, at the height of her fame and doubtless feeling sympathetic, invited James to provide her with a one- or two-act play which she might perform on her forthcoming tour of the United States. The two had a meeting in early February and he learnt that she wished to play an American woman; in fact, James had thought in 1892 he might show onstage ‘the American woman in London society’ and ‘the idea of attachment to the past, of romance, of history, continuity and conservatism’, hoping that such a drama might be taken up by Augustin Daly and his leading lady, Ada Rehan (CN, p. 72). Nothing had come of this plan, but with Miss Terry’s encouragement he now sketched out Summersoft, and a principal role, Mrs Gracedew, for her to play. The play poses a simple question: how to save a historic house of great beauty? The hereditary owner of Summersoft, Clement Yule, prospective radical MP, has mortgaged the entire property to Mr Prodmore who will give it back to him on condition that he marry his daughter, Cora, and become a conservative like his family forbears. However the deus ex machina figure, Mrs Gracedew, a native of Missourah Top (presumably denoting provincial America), much taken by both the beauty and history of the house, proposes buying him out for the unrefusable sum of £70,000. To this new creditor Clement Yule offers himself in marriage, a move entailing the abandonment of his previous radical political commitment (unlike Nick Dormer’s more principled change of career in The Tragic Muse). The play is a slight piece which sometimes stretches credibility, though James will return to the more serious theme of the house beautiful and the need to preserve such historic sites. James accepted Ellen Terry’s cheque for £100 at the end of August 1895, but she never performed Summersoft. He had completed it in the summer at Torquay, on the Devon coast, having escaped from London and its social demands. Alphonse Daudet and his family had paid a three-week visit to the capital when James made himself available almost daily, accompanying them, too, to Oxford and Windsor. At the Reform Club, he hosted a dinner enabling the Frenchman to meet some eminent artists and men of letters. And at Dorking in Surrey, James brought together, as he had promised, Daudet and George Meredith, both men physically infirm, their meeting at the railway station a sight ‘strange & grotesquely pathetic’. James himself was suffering from gout, an affliction which proved chronic. During his stay in Torquay (the first of two this year) he called on W.E. Norris and also took up the increasingly fashionable activity of cycling. As for Summersoft, James re-worked it as a long short story, publishing it as ‘Covering End’, re-naming the historic house, but retaining the play’s protagonists and their dialogue, and expanding what had been stage directions into linking 274



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p­ assages of narrative. The tale was not allowed to rest here, for at the beginning of 1899 George Alexander invited James to re-draft it as a play once more, as did Johnston Forbes-Robertson, eminent actor and theatre-manager. Tempted as he was to make a return to the theatre, James refused both offers but when the persistent Forbes-Robertson renewed his request in 1907 James gave in, producing a new text based on Summersoft and ‘Covering End’ which he called The High Bid. It opened in Edinburgh on 26 March 1908; James was present, there was a good audience, and he reported ‘a great and charming success’, though some of the critics were less enthusiastic (CP, p. 551). In the following February, it was staged in five matinée performances at the small Terry’s Theatre on London’s Strand, where the critical reception was warmer, although James’s hopes for a longer run were dashed when Jerome K. Jerome’s The Passing of the Third Floor Back provided ForbesRobertson and his wife, actress Gertrude Elliott, with a long-running hit. He spent two months in Torquay that autumn while his apartment in De Vere Gardens was renovated and electric light fitted. A younger friend, Jonathan Sturges, joined him in Devon, but the New Yorker, physically disabled from childhood by polio and now in his early thirties, was low in spirits and far from well. A friend of Whistler’s and graduate of Princeton, he had published a book of stories in 1893, The First Supper and Other Episodes. In 1889 James had provided an Introduction for The Odd Number:Thirteen Tales by Guy de Maupassant which Sturges had translated. On his return from Torquay, the novelist entertained Mrs Benedict and her daughter Clare who were passing through London. Though treating them generously, perhaps for the sake of Fenimore, he found them ‘very futile and foolish, poor things’ and became irritated by their preoccupation with the dog which had belonged to his friend.

Some Stories of the 1890s A number of James’s stories of this time take as their theme aspects of the writer’s life, sometimes from a wryly comic perspective, at other times more seriously engaged with the frustrations of the calling. In ‘Greville Fane’, published in 1892 in the widely circulated Illustrated London News, a successful woman author who has assumed the ‘rather smart man’s name’ of the title, has never been troubled by ‘“the torment of form”’ (CT 8: 438). Her works are, however, much enjoyed in such London suburbs as Peckham and Hackney (CN, p. 49) and she continues to labour with increasing difficulty to support her ungrateful children. She has reared her untalented son to become a novelist like herself, an idea James took, seemingly, from the examples of Trollope and Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who had similar plans for their children (see CN, p. 9). She fails in her efforts, but the professional advice she offers her son – an ideal she has been unable to realize herself – has a typically 275



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Jamesian emphasis: ‘the sincere novelist should feel the whole flood of life …. the great thing was to live, because that gave you material’ (CT 8: 447). It is an idea that James would develop in his later novel, The Ambassadors. A tale published in the winter of 1895–1896, ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, develops a more fanciful conceit relating to the literary life. A much admired man of letters, Hugh Vereker, asserts that none of the critics has discovered the secret of his writing, a secret he describes confidentially for the story’s young narrator as ‘a complex figure in a Persian carpet’, a motif ever-present, yet not noticed, part of a beautiful aesthetic effect (CT 9: 289). The rising young critic discusses the matter with his friend Corvick, who wishes to marry Gwendolen, the successful author of a triple-decker novel, Deep Down. But her mother does not approve and, meantime, Corvick leaves for India. There he works out the secret – he has found ‘“our goddess in the temple of Vishnu!”’, a discovery confirmed by Vereker himself (297). A series of deaths follows – Corvick is killed in a driving accident, Gwendolen dies in childbirth and Vereker himself dies – but the secret is passed on. Ironically, the discovery – ‘“the general intention of his books: the string the pearls were hung on, the buried treasure, the figure in the carpet”’ – has not been shared with Gwendolen’s surviving husband, a critic (313). He cannot help when the narrator approaches him, his wife has not trusted him sufficiently, and so the mystery remains. The idea of the artist scarcely understood by either the public or the critic clearly has a biographical relevance to James and his sense of neglect, a conviction that he has been undervalued both as a dramatist and writer, that the point has been missed. Such feelings are hardly surprising: his theatrical experiment had proved an expensive failure, and he has been frustrated by the commercial priorities of the magazine world. The short stories of these years regularly examine the difficulties of the writer’s life – the neglect suffered, the public’s failure to comprehend, the lack of reward, and the occasional mortal danger of being ‘lionized’ and becoming a cultural commodity for the Press. Yet despite such difficulties James himself had attempted to negotiate a pathway through the competitive, commercial world of publishing, trying to attract a broad readership while remaining true to his artistic convictions and to his visiting muse. As for Vereker’s work in ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, not only do the public and critics fail to understand it, they are casually unaware of signs that there is anything beyond what is known – that there may even be a secret, whatever its content. We may regard it as a form of symbolic shorthand for James’s personal conviction, a sense of genuine achievement and frustration at its neglect. When Gwendolen receives the news that Corvick has discovered the truth, she sends him a cryptic telegram message: ‘“Angel, write”’ (298). It is a directive that would have resonated with the James family. ‘Angel’ was the name conferred upon James by his mother and close members of the family, for he had never caused his parents anxiety – and his calling had been from the beginning to ‘write’. The story asks a subsidiary 276



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question, throwing light on James’s private circumstances: ‘[w]as the figure in the carpet traceable or describable only for husbands and wives – for lovers supremely united?’ (306), as if intimacy, officially endorsed as marriage, gives access to confessions, information or knowledge of some kind, not otherwise sanctioned. And evidently, such a framework for intimacy was denied to James himself. Jonathan Sturges was compelled to spend much of that winter of 1895–1896 in hospital, and James escorted him back to London at the beginning of November. The flat at De Vere Gardens was now pleasingly refurbished, though the Smiths, the couple he employed as servants, were causing anxiety by their heavy drinking  – a problem which remained to be resolved. In February 1896 the eminent painter and sculptor, Frederic Leighton died. In his earlier art reviews James had dismissed his work as ‘brilliantly superficial’ and commercial: ‘His texture is too often that of the glaze on the lid of a prune-box; his drawing too often that of the figures that smile at us from the covers of these receptacles’ (CWHJA, p. 351). Nevertheless, he attended the artist’s funeral, an appropriately formal public occasion, ‘the streets all cleared and lined with police, the day magnificent (his characteristic good fortune to the end); and St. Paul’s very fine to the eye and crammed with the whole London world’. Despite his complaints at the trials of magazine publication, by October 1895 James was in negotiation with Horace Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, concerning ‘Glasses’, a short story already 3,000 words too long, despite ‘ferocious compression’. It was the familiar problem: ‘I find, in my old age, that I have too much manner and style, too great and invincible an instinct of completeness and of seeing things in all their relations’, he confessed. Yet despite this, Scudder published the piece in a single instalment in February 1896. ‘Glasses’ probably now makes uncomfortable reading. An unnamed painter tells how the striking beauty of a young woman, Flora Saunt, is marred by her deteriorating eyesight. Refusing to compromise (her beauty is her one asset in the marriage market) she only occasionally resorts to the disfiguring spectacles which she needs to wear. She is courted by a highly eligible aristocrat, Lord Iffield who, on discovering her infirmity, breaks off the engagement: it is ‘a quite distressing sight: this exquisite creature, blushing, glaring, exposed, with a pair of big black-rimmed eye-glasses, defacing her by their position, crookedly astride of her beautiful nose’ (CT 9: 340). Finally, she marries the worthy but ugly Geoffrey Dowling and, having accepted her blindness, is restored to her former beauty. Flora’s acceptance clearly represents the tale’s final resolution, though other passing references to ‘the many little Jews’ forming part of the holiday crowds at Folkestone (317) and the shameful effects of physical infirmity requiring the use of ‘goggles’ or ‘perpetual nippers’ take away from that humane observation. James mentions Maupassant in his Notebook jotting for the tale and, though it lacks any comparable economy of effect, his influence is evident in its sometimes 277



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casual dismissal of women’s experience and its quite cruel plot. Yet there are moments of tenderness, too, as when the narrator catches sight of Flora at the opera house, not yet realizing that she has become blind and is touched by her beauty: ‘She presently moved her eyes over the house, and I felt them brush me again like the wings of a dove’ (364).

The Spoils of Poynton Within a few months of the appearance of ‘Glasses’ a more substantial and important work appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, initially called ‘The Old Things’ and then more memorably renamed The Spoils of Poynton. By James’s standards, it is a relatively short work, and it has a small cast, essentially the widowed Mrs Gereth, her son Owen, and two young women – Fleda Vetch, a girl without home or means, and Mona Brigstock with whom Owen is in love. Fleda has a natural taste for the beautiful and antique while Mona comes from a family irredeemably philistine and vulgar. By the terms of her late husband’s will, Mrs Gereth must now surrender to her son their Jacobean home Poynton and its exquisitely rare possessions, collected in ‘a long, sunny harvest of taste and curiosity’ (p. 12). It is a directive all the more distasteful to his mother when Owen announces that he is to marry ‘the massive maiden’, the unappreciative Mona (p. 213). The true inheritor of Poynton is, in Mrs Gereth’s uncompromising eyes, Fleda; the two have shared their horror at the bad taste of Mona’s home. If Owen were to marry Fleda (from whose perspective most of the action is observed), Mrs Gereth would happily pass it all on, and though the younger woman asserts that he’s ‘“too stupid”’, she loves him, nonetheless: he is ‘handsome and heavy’ and his ‘natural honesty was like the scent of a flower’ (pp. 6, 39, 109). A crisis is reached when Mrs Gereth peremptorily strips Poynton of its beloved contents, transporting them to a much inferior house, Ricks, ‘in the deepest depths of Essex’, to which she is relegated (p. 56). Fleda is shocked and the materialistic Mona also decrees that the marriage must be postponed. Eventually, observing the developing relationship between Fleda and Owen, along with Mona’s alienation, Mrs Gereth just as summarily returns all the antique ‘spoils’ to Poynton, in the hope that Fleda will become the deserving new mistress of the house. But she is disappointed as the virtuous heroine, renouncing any claim, insists that Owen keep his pledge to Mona. The couple marry and travel; months later, pressed by the distant Owen to select a choice object for herself from Poynton, Fleda travels down to the old house once more. She is met at the station by the  ­devastating news that it has burnt down during the night in an ‘atrocious ­conflagration’ (CN, p. 122). 278



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It is significant that in this work which promotes the values of tradition and civilization, of rare objects and possessions, the prevailing ‘consciousness’, Fleda Vetch (who had ‘planted herself centrally’ for James as someone of ‘character’ (LC 2: 1145)), has herself ‘neither a home nor an outlook’ (p. 155). She moves rootlessly between her father’s house in down-at-heel South Kensington, and the home of her sister and curate brother-in-law, in the country, furnished with ‘scant mahogany’ (p. 252). It might be tempting to give in to a selfish passion, but Fleda remains constant, rejecting Mrs Gereth’s wish that Owen should sweep her off to a Registrar and marry her – a ‘stirring speech [which] affected our young lady as if it had been the shake of a tambourine borne towards her from a gipsy dance’ (p. 236). The advice of Mrs Gereth – a woman later described by James as pleasing, if eccentric, floundering ‘in the dusk of disproportionate passion’ (Preface, LC 2: 1148) – was, ‘“Only let yourself go, darling – only let yourself go!”’ (p. 151). It is advice not taken, of course, and Fleda closes her ears to the lure of the gipsy dance, though the injunction carries an echo of James’s own advice to himself in Dublin in 1891. The first reference to the anecdote which inspired The Spoils of Poynton is dated 24 December 1893 (CN, p. 79), recording a conversation at a dinner hosted by Lady Lindsay, wife of Sir Coutts, the couple who founded the Grosvenor Gallery. The story was told on that ‘brown London night’ (LC 2: 1139) by a Mrs AnstrutherThomson. There was a connection here with Violet Paget (currently out of favour with James), since the sister-in-law of his dinner companion was Kit (Clementina) Anstruther-Thomson, a long-time partner of Violet Paget, but it isn’t clear whether James registered the relationship – possibly not. When the anecdote began, he later recalled, it was a moment when his imagination winced ‘as at the prick of some sharp point … its virtue … in its needle-like quality’ (LC 2: 1138). The Notebooks reflect the novel’s meticulous planning; what began as a short story quickly grew, though the ‘question of a concision’ continued to preoccupy him (CN, p. 127). His ongoing attachment to the theatre is reflected in a tendency to refer to the different stages of the narrative as ‘acts’, and the novel itself moves through a series of scenes, interspersed with the occasional, unexpected coup de théâtre. Other matters take place offstage leaving us in uncertainty about family tensions as letters and telegrams seek out and reveal information. James’s original working title was The House Beautiful, the name also of a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson, but it is a phrase more obviously associated with the values of the Aesthetic movement, and the title of one of three lectures (much indebted to the ideas of Ruskin and William Morris) given by Oscar Wilde in America in 1882.2 James had not yet become an intimate friend of Edith Wharton’s, but their paths had crossed in Paris and Venice at the end of the 1880s, and in 1897 (the year of the book publication of The Spoils of Poynton) she brought out, in collaboration with Ogden Codman Jr, The Decoration of Houses, which became a standard manual on interior design for the very rich. 279



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James was still working on the novel in the summer of 1896 and, rather than travelling to mainland Europe, he rented a cottage in the country, Point Hill, in the East Sussex village of Playden. It had been found for him by an eminent architect friend, Edward Warren, and belonged to another architect, Reginald Blomfield, whose uncle, Arthur Blomfield, had employed Thomas Hardy as a young trainee many years earlier. It was not too far from London and James enjoyed its picturesqueness and tranquillity. There were views across Romney Marsh, and just a mile away he could see the historic cinque port of Rye rising above the surrounding countryside. It was a fine summer: he did some cycling and then extended his three-month stay by moving to the Old Vicarage in Rye. Inevitably It was a time of hard work since he was also producing a serial, The Other House, for the Illustrated London News, ‘a much slower and more difficult job than I expected’. He complained at the time of wrist pain, hardly surprising in that he also maintained his voluminous correspondence, often writing late into the night. He was to address the problem by employing an amanuensis along with a typewriter, a large, cumbersome machine made by the American company, Remington. In this way he could dictate freely and there is little doubt that his increasingly complex and at times tortuous style developed as a result. It was a practice he continued until the end of his life. Though not wanting to cut himself off entirely from London, James had pondered for some time the possibility of taking a house in the country and this small, historic town on a hill seemed a place that would suit him well. James returned to London, meantime, and was saddened by the death of George Du Maurier at the age of 62. Theirs had been a long and affectionate friendship and James had always admired the older man’s drawings for Punch which punctured so precisely the pretensions and illusions of middle-class British life. In more recent years, Du Maurier had enjoyed even greater success with Trilby, first as a novel and later in an equally successful stage adaptation with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree playing the sinister role of Svengali. James had originally been offered the plot by Du Maurier and, given his own low sales and the unenthusiastic response to his plays, could not but have felt envious, yet their friendship never wavered and James had continued to enjoy his visits to Hampstead.

The Other House The Spoils of Poynton had finished its serialization in October 1896 and when the book appeared in February 1897, the reviews were far from encouraging. As is evident from a private comment made by Joseph Conrad to Edward Garnett, it was too difficult a read for ‘the man in the street’: ‘my common humanity revolts at the evoked image of his suffering. One could almost see the globular lobes of his brain 280



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painfully revolving, and crushing and mangling the delicate thing’ (CH, p. 268). Almost concurrently with The Spoils of Poynton, The Other House had been serialized in thirteen weekly instalments over summer 1896. In earlier negotiations James had promised its editor that ‘I shall endeavour to be thrilling, and my material is such that I think I shall succeed’. The story’s origins in a three-act play, The Promise, which had failed to appeal to Edward Compton in 1893, are evident, for it is essentially a series of dialogues linked by brief passages of scene-setting and summary action; scenes tend to be determined by the departure or arrival (often unexpected) of another character, as in a French play. The action unfolds between two houses, Eastmead and Bounds, separated by a river. Mrs Beever, widow of the owner of the local bank, lives with her adult son in Eastmead, while Bounds is inhabited by the younger partner in the bank, Tony Bream and his wife. There are two young women visitors: Jean Martle is a guest of the Beevers, while a friend of Bream’s wife, Rose Armiger, is staying at Bounds. Having given birth to a baby girl, Mrs Bream dies, and, with her own experience of a dreadful stepmother, she requests that her husband never remarry while their daughter lives. Several years later the drowned body of the child, Effie, now four, is found by the bridge over the river. After a number of suspects and motives have been presented, Rose Armiger’s guilt is revealed: she has cleared the way for marriage to Tony, with whom she has long been in love. This ‘Bad Heroine’ has even tried to inculpate Jean, the ‘Good Heroine’, as James refers to them in his original note (see CN, pp. 80–82).With the cooperation of the family doctor, the crime is hushed up, and Rose’s punishment is to remain ‘“face to face”’ with her ‘“mistake”’ forever (2: 196). As with the accidental death of a child in the short story,‘My Friend Bingham’ (1867), the question of calling the emergency services never seems to arise. Unique in James’s output in involving a murder, The Other House has a sensational conclusion, though some of its difficult dialogues may have deterred readers of the Illustrated London News. The novel stands, nevertheless, in interesting relation to some of his other works in this final decade of the nineteenth century. The intricate, closely observed series of shifting relationships and competing emotions prefigure the dense and claustrophobic texture of The Sacred Fount. When Rose Armiger admits that ‘“It’s with my back turned that I see most”’ (2: 116), one foresees those darkly mysterious habits of observation and oblique vision which make the later novels and stories so powerful. Little Effie’s uncomprehending witnessing on her birthday of the quarrel between Jean and Rose from ‘the compass of a small child-world’ (2: 79) looks inevitably forward to the narrative perspective of What Maisie Knew. The plays of Ibsen which James had come to admire may well have influenced his choice of protagonists – the subordinate role of Dr Ramage, the professional man, for instance, and the ‘two clever young women’ (2: 79), one of them sinister, complex and unconventional, 281



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‘“insanely in love”’ with Tony Bream (1: 138), a role that might have appealed to James’s friend Elizabeth Robins.Terrible experiences occur within familiar, domestic settings, the kind of juxtaposition favoured by Ibsen, and the novel’s offstage locations, the river and footbridge, acquire an ominous significance. When the child is lost and the tension increases, Mrs Beever watches the bridge from her room, calling out, ‘“Here comes Rose – she’ll tell us”’, and one is reminded of the mill-path, the mill-race, and the foot-bridge, scene of the offstage suicides of Rosmer and Rebecca at the end of Rosmersholm (2: 108). The ‘tail of an idea’ for The Other House, brushing ‘across one’s face with a blur of suggestion, a flutter of impalpable wings’, had come to James on a ‘quiet afternoon of the empty London Christmastide’ back in 1893 (CN, p. 80). He was still smarting from his quarrel with Augustin Daly over Disengaged, but Guy Domville at least was already in the hands of George Alexander. From the beginning, the appropriate genre for The Other House remained unstable; he refers in his notes to ‘the 1st chapter of my story – by which I mean the first act of my play!’ (p. 81), and it became a magazine serial only when hopes for a theatrical production faded. Yet he had not quite finished with The Other House. Encouraged by the degree of success enjoyed by his play The High Bid in spring 1908, James would also return the novel version of The Other House to its original dramatic form later in that year. Though he went on to have discussions about West End performances with actor–manager and critic, Harley Granville Barker, and playwright and poet, Herbert Trench, once again some familiar difficulties prevented the play from reaching the stage. Having now purchased his own Remington, an ‘admirable and expensive machine’ used for the dictating of letters as well as more formal writing, James employed William MacAlpine, a taciturn Scotsman, as the first of his amanuenses. For much of this year, he contributed a series of ‘London’ essays, ten in all, including one on ‘Old Suffolk’, to Harper’s Weekly magazine, a return to journalism after some years. Addressing an American audience, he confined himself principally to current theatrical productions and art exhibitions, along with some literary reviews, though he also covered the great public celebration of the season, the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria.The relationship with Harper’s (as with the New-York Tribune in the seventies) did not end happily and he later complained of their dismissing him ‘as you scarce would an incompetent housemaid’, concluding bitterly that ‘[j]ournalism will have absolutely none of me’.3

Public Tributes On the other side of the Atlantic, in May 1897 the memorial to Civil War hero Robert Gould Shaw and his 54th Massachusetts Regiment was unveiled opposite the State House overlooking Boston Common. Shaw had been killed during the 282



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attack on Fort Wagner in Charleston Bay in 1863, and it was here that Wilky James had been severely injured. As part of the ceremony William James was invited to give the formal oration at the Boston Music Hall; much of it is based on Wilky’s account in ‘The Assault on Fort Wagner’.4 In his own absence, Henry imagined that the spirit of his younger brother would be present: ‘I can’t help figuring it as a sort of beautiful, poetic justice to him’, and, indeed, between thirty and forty of the veteran combatants were present.The bronze relief sculpture was executed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, described by James when he eventually saw it as ‘noble and exquisite’ (AS, p. 267), and he asked William at the time to send him some photographs of this monument of such national significance. James was much less receptive to the elaborate preparations going on in London to mark the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne, which he regarded as ‘a great incommodity’. The capital in its celebration of queen and Empire had been decked out with flags and garlands, and eleven prime ministers from the British dominions attended. Apart from the inconvenience, however, James was especially repelled by the vulgarity and commercial exploitation ­evident – ‘the gross defacement of London, the uproarious traffic in seats, the miles of unsightly scaffolding between the West End and the City, the screaming advertisements, the sordid struggle’. It was all ‘an enormous selfish advertisement’.5 He avoided the designated public holiday on Tuesday, 22 June, by taking himself off once more to Bournemouth where he stayed on through July, though he made a brief railway trip to Oxford to hear his friend Paul Bourget give a lecture at the Taylor Institute. He would not have wanted to miss such a prestigious event since Bourget’s subject was Gustave Flaubert. Having taken MacAlpine and the Remington along with him to the seaside, James was able to continue his work. For relaxation he bicycled, often in company with MacAlpine for whom he had bought a bicycle. His amanuensis at once became ‘a great adept’ on the machine (CN, p. 407), though his employer found him rather dull company.

What Maisie Knew Since the beginning of 1897 James’s new novel had been appearing serially both in America and England. Quite a short work by his own standards, it had originally been conceived as a story for Henry Harland’s Yellow Book. What Maisie Knew is a great tour de force for James – a difficult subject treated with imagination and immense technical resource. In some respects, the novel reads as a kind of Blakelike parable, depicting an innocent little girl who sees much without registering what it means, surrounded by a succession of adults who progress through a series of extra-marital affairs, regularly finding new partners, and the child treated as an awkward appendage in these shifting households. Years after writing the novel, 283



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James remained justly satisfied with what he had achieved, for Maisie, his ‘light vessel of consciousness’, his ‘wondering witness’ (LC 2: 1159, 1160) has a transformative effect on what would otherwise be a sequence of depressingly mean, self-serving events. It is her capacity for innocent wonder, a term with a rich Romantic heritage, her ‘“freshness”’ in observing ‘appearances in themselves vulgar and empty enough’ that proves crucial. Such ‘appearances’ become, ‘as she deals with them, the stuff of poetry and tragedy and art; she has simply to wonder … about them, and they begin to have meanings, aspects, solidities, connexions’ (1162). James acquired the donnée for What Maisie Knew at a dinner party on 10 December 1892, but his detailed preparations began only at the end of 1895. On the failure of the marriage of Beale and Ida Farange, Maisie, ‘“Poor little monkey!”’ (p. 3), must move between households every six months. Beale then marries Maisie’s pretty young governess, Miss Overmore (referred to thereafter as Mrs Beale), while Ida marries the handsome, pleasing but weak Sir Claude – ‘“he do look beautiful”’, observes an under-maid (p. 112). Both re-marriages soon disintegrate: Sir Claude becomes involved with Mrs Beale, while Beale has a number of liaisons, including one with a black, hirsute woman, the rich ‘Countess’ by whom he is paid. Ida has affairs with a succession of men. From the fashionable streets and public gardens of London, the action moves for the final scenes to Folkestone and then across the channel to Boulogne-sur-Mer. One of the more stable figures in Maisie’s life is her governess-companion, Mrs Wix, a shabby person, employed by Ida Beale, who wears spectacles, or ‘straighteners’, and who, despite her appearance ‘of greasy greyness’, seems to her young charge ‘peculiarly and soothingly safe’ (pp. 20, 22). There is a certain mystery about the presence of a husband in her life, but she promises that her daughter, ‘knocked down and crushed by the cruellest of hansoms’, will become for Maisie a ‘“little dead sister”’ (p. 20). The treatment offered the child by adults has a Dickensian pathos: she is compelled or manipulated into making choices inappropriate for her age, while those responsible for her regularly break promises, fail to turn up as arranged and prove evasive in their commitments. They are inclined to ‘dodge’ or to ‘bolt’ (a term which also appears in James’s planning notes). Maisie talks to her French doll, Lisette, replicating her own relationship with her mother, revisiting those silences and vaguenesses with which she herself had become familiar, producing ‘the impression of having mysteries in her life, wondering the while whether she succeeded in the air of shading off, like her mother, into the unknowable’ (p. 28). Knowing may carry danger and, anticipating adult pressures while unsure as to what she has seen might mean, she cultivates ‘the pacific art of stupidity’ (p. 58). For such evasiveness the little girl is impatiently condemned as ‘a dirty little donkey’ and ‘“the perfection of an idiot”’ (pp. 130, 131). As the narrative later points out – and this is perhaps the poignant centre of the novel – it is hard to estimate the compromising, inhibiting consequences of her experience, 284



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‘the small strange pathos … of an innocence so saturated with knowledge and so directed to diplomacy’ (p. 152). Near the end of the novel, Maisie sits with Mrs Wix at the hotel window in Boulogne, and they hear coming up from the street ‘the strum of a guitar and the drawl of a song about “amour”’.The little girl knows what that French word means and surprises the unwary reader by asking – perhaps reasonably, if melodramatically – ‘“Is it a crime?”’ (p. 237). But, in fact, she refers to an earlier point in their conversation – the possibility of throwing in her lot with the co-habiting Sir Claude and Mrs Beale. When Sir Claude delays in returning from England as arranged, the reader is left in no doubt as to the consequences of such a disappointment. Maisie cannot see his familiar luggage in the hotel lobby and we are informed that ‘[s]he was yet to learn what it could be to recognize in some perception of a gap the sign of extinction, and therefore remained unaware that this momentary pang was a foretaste of the experience of death’ (p. 242). Human fickleness of the kind she encounters carries her into unimaginable regions of pain. She is horrified to hear her mother dismiss as ‘“the biggest cad in London!”’ the kindly man, ‘the Captain’, once her mother’s companion, to whom she had once been awkwardly consigned in Kensington Gardens. Maisie has a sudden intimation of the consequences of such disloyalty: ‘There was literally an instant in which Maisie fully saw – saw madness and desolation, saw ruin and darkness and death’ (p. 187). For her daughter, Ida is a fearsome figure, with her ‘huge painted eyes … like Japanese lanterns swung under festive arches’ (p. 119). A look from Ida can be like having a door slammed in the face, and she has already been informed by her father that her mother ‘loathes’ her, and by her mother that her father wishes her dead.The injuries inflicted upon Maisie are, of course, invisible, though the violence of Sir Claude’s language when he tells Mrs Wix of Ida’s behaviour – ‘“She has chucked our friend here … shrieking and pleading, out of that window and down two floors to the paving-stones”’ – is shocking. Maisie serenely comments, ‘“Oh, your friend here, dear Sir Claude, doesn’t plead and shriek!”’ (p. 204). James had early on opted for a little girl rather than boy as his centre of consciousness, though certain details point to an autobiographical dimension for the novel. When Maisie must leave Mrs Wix’s care to return to her father, the pain is severe and the most awful kind that Maisie (and, indeed, James) may imagine is associated with the dentist’s chair. The little girl has recently undergone the extraction of a tooth, and her later uprooting, really ‘a case for chloroform’, took ‘the part of the horrible forceps’ (p. 24). In A Small Boy and Others, James recalls as part of his own New York childhood the ‘torture chamber of Dr. Parkhurst’ (p. 56), his dentist near Wall Street, and throughout his life, extended dental appointments continued to be a trial. On happier occasions, Sir Claude takes Maisie to the pantomime (also enjoyed by the adult James), so that a showy room to which she is taken by her father, strikes her as a spectacular stage effect, ‘some great flashing dazzle’ from a 285



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pantomime. There is something of the Cinderella story in Maisie’s embarrassment when Sir Claude visits her in the nursery with its ‘meagre appointments’: he is compelled to concede that ‘mama kept them rather low on the question of decorations’ (pp. 160, 64). When Maisie clings lovingly to him towards the end, he has become the handsome hero of the pantomime: ‘Princely was what he stood there and looked and sounded; that was what Maisie for the occasion found herself reduced to simple worship of him for being’ (p. 216). In this extended portrait of innocence Maisie is at times affectionately addressed by the much-loved Sir Claude as ‘a man of the world’, an ‘awfully good “chap”’, an ‘“old boy”’, as if James is gently blurring distinctions of gender and re-imagining his own young, all-observing self, the ‘small boy’ gathering impressions amid complex family dynamics. In a biographical parallel to James’s own comic adult transformations into aged women, Sir Claude similarly plays with the idea of gender: ‘“I’m not an angel – I’m an old grandmother … I like babies – I always did. If we go to smash I shall look for a place as responsible nurse”’ (p. 53). The final Pas-deCalais location, with its café scenes, beach walks, trips to the haute ville and its old rampart, and the figure of the gilded Virgin at which Mrs Wix and Maisie gaze, returns to the days of James’s own boyhood in ‘the Boulogne of long ago’ (SBO, p. 315). Henry James Sr had cast an admiring eye at the town’s energetic fisher-girls, exposing more flesh than was customary in England or America, ‘all so shortskirted and free-limbed under stress’ (p. 322), an observation James transfers to Sir Claude whose ‘absent gaze … followed the fine stride and shining limbs of a young fishwife who had just waded out of the sea with her basketful of shrimps’ (p. 196). Once again the familiar possibility of letting oneself go is raised, now in a modified way by Maisie. Having been descended upon in Folkestone by her mother, and having listened to Ida’s explanation of past events, the child opts for preserving decency, for self-containment and restraint: ‘Oh, there would have been things to blink at if one had let one’s self go’ (p. 181). Letting oneself go seems a choice best avoided in both The Spoils of Poynton and What Maisie Knew and Maisie finally opts at the end of the novel for the security of life in England with Mrs Wix. What Maisie Knew appeared in book form in autumn 1897. Like a number of other volumes of James’s fiction, it was published in England by William Heinemann, who had started his business in partnership with Wolcott Balestier, and in America by the Chicago publisher Herbert S. Stone.A slightly abridged serialization appeared in Stone and Kimball’s short-lived magazine, The Chap-Book. It was widely though not that sympathetically reviewed – the Pall Mall Gazette was one of the few to recognize the novel’s ‘astounding cleverness …. we are here dealing with genius’. Other critics (such as the Manchester Guardian’s) found it ‘monotonous’, or commented without much justification (as in Literary World) on James’s quasi-Naturalist detachment:‘all relation between him and his kind has perished except to serve him coldly by way of “material”’ (CR, pp. 284, 283, CH, p. 272). 286



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Americans in Suffolk Having spent part of his summer in Bournemouth, James travelled in August to Dunwich, a more romantic location, an ancient, crumbling former city on the low-lying Suffolk coast, increasingly eroded by the force of what James refers to as ‘the German ocean’. It was for him ‘desolate, exquisite Dunwich’ (CTWGBA, p.  255). The essay he wrote on ‘Old Suffolk’ invokes the county’s literary ­associations – the village of Blundeston, birthplace of Dickens’s David Copperfield, the poetry of George Crabbe, a native of Aldeburgh, and the letters of Edward FitzGerald, a poet most famous for his rendering of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám – but James had been invited to visit by his cousin Ellen (Elly) Temple, Minny Temple’s younger sister who was staying on the coast with her family. In the late 1860s she had married Christopher Temple Emmet, a wealthy railroad magnate, twenty-eight years her senior, and after Emmet’s death, was now (not very happily) married to a Scotsman, George Hunter. In fact, she would separate from her husband the following year. Her sister, Kitty (Henry’s age) had died in 1895. Ellen was accompanied by her three daughters, Rosina, Ellen Gertrude (known as Bay), and Edith Leslie, as well as a small boy, Grenville, a child of Elly’s second marriage. These grown-up girls were lively and talented, and Bay who had been an art student in Paris, went on to become a respected portrait painter. Despite the girls’ charm, James was jarred by their uncompromisingly American accents, listening in vain for the sounds of consonants or pure vowels. He observed to William that ‘[i]f one ever teaches them to speak they will be all right’; they perhaps humoured their mother’s cousin for he allows that ‘they want to improve, and are full of life and humour and sentiment and intelligence’. James was never to abandon this prescriptive attitude which privileged British pronunciation and idioms, and he went on to develop his thoughts in his lecture of 1905, ‘The Question of Our Speech’, delivered to the young women of Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and in the essay, ‘The Speech of American Women’ (AS, pp. 549–594). He concludes that essay comically and fancifully by offering himself as a waiting attendant holding a lantern, offering the prospect of linguistic enlightenment. Look out for the gleam, he advises: ‘I’ll take care of the rest’ (p. 594). Conditions in that unspoilt corner of East Anglia were crude by James’s standards; there were few made-up roads suitable for bicycling – though he appreciated the local inns which served afternoon teas, or lemonade with a ‘dash’ of beer. In quarters he considered ‘primitive’, he nevertheless maintained his routine of working and dictating each morning. The weather remained fine and all was refreshingly ‘quiet and quaint and rustic and uncockneyfied’. There were few shops for provisions or other comforts, but it is clear that his cousin Elly worked tirelessly to keep her guest happy. He stayed for two weeks and, after a trip down to Devon, returned once more, leaving only at the beginning of September. 287



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Lamb House Hardly was James back in London when he received information that was to alter the pattern of his future life, change for which he was more than ready. During his stay the previous summer in Rye he had much admired Lamb House, a substantial Georgian property at the top of West Street; he learnt that it had now become vacant on a long lease and immediately resolved to secure it. He enlisted the help of Edward Warren, and, with his approval, signed the lease by the end of the month at a rent of £70 per annum. James broke the news excitedly to one of his younger literary friends, Arthur Benson, informing him that he had taken ‘a smallish, charming, cheap old house in the country – down at Rye – for twenty-one years! (One would think I was your age!) … [It] has a beautiful room for you (the “King’s Room” – George II’s – who slept there); together with every promise of yielding me an indispensable retreat from May to October’. Other expenses would be involved: he planned to make interior improvements – Lady Wolseley offered advice on furniture and furnishings – and he also agreed to maintain the extensive garden, on which he consulted Alfred Parsons, the illustrator and garden designer whose work he had much admired. Within two years James had bought Lamb House and would own it until his death. It was an undertaking that he regarded as an insurance for the future, ‘such a place as I may, when pressed by the pinch of need, retire to with a certain shrunken decency and wither away – in a fairly cleanly and pleasantly melancholy manner – toward the tomb. It is really good enough to be a kind of little becoming, highdoor’d, brass-knockered façade to one’s life’. Other contingencies were also pressing: he would have to let his apartment in De Vere Gardens and eventually lose the ­regular morning dictation sessions with William MacAlpine since his amanuensis would not be able to find supplementary work in such a small place. James was leaving London after some twenty years’ residence. It seemed an appropriate time, however, and it was as if life were enacting the themes of his own writing; country houses rich in history had been placed centre-stage in The Other House and The Spoils of Poynton.

‘The Turn of the Screw’ But such a move necessarily involved considerable costs, requiring James to remain highly productive.The next major work is set in fact, in another (fictional) country house, deep in the Essex countryside. ‘The Turn of the Screw’ was intended, as he said, to be ‘essentially a pot-boiler and a jeu d’esprit’, but it has become one of the most frequently read of all his fictions, having first appeared in Collier’s Weekly, a Chicago-based magazine with a wide circulation. The idea for the story came 288



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from Arthur Benson’s father, Archbishop of Canterbury and England’s senior churchman. James was immediately taken by it, concluding in his preparatory note that ‘[i]t is all obscure and imperfect, the picture, the story, but there is a suggestion of strangely gruesome effect in it. The story to be told – tolerably obviously – by an outside spectator, observer’ (CN, p. 109).This time two children were to become the central protagonists, though endowed with little of the innocent transparency of Maisie Farange. A young woman, much taken by her handsome prospective employer, accepts a role as governess to his orphaned niece and nephew at Bly, their house in the country. He insists she must never trouble him with any problems that might arise. On arrival she finds two beautiful children, Flora and Miles.The idyllic atmosphere is disturbed only by a letter from Miles’s boarding school: he must never return. No reason is given but she assumes, despite his charm, that it is because he is a corrupting influence. Walking in the grounds, the governess daydreams that she may come upon their admired uncle, but is shocked, instead, to see a man staring down from the rooftop battlements. This is the first of a series of uncanny sightings of a man and a woman. Mrs Grose, the housekeeper identifies them reluctantly as former employees, now dead, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel. The pair had been ‘infamous’, in a liaison of social inequality – in Mrs Grose’s words, she, ‘“a lady”’, he, ‘“so dreadfully below”’ – and had exercised much influence on the children (CT 10: 59). The governess goes on to see Quint standing on the staircase, or glaring through the dining room window – ‘as if I had been looking at him for years’ (42). Miss Jessel is also discovered, head in hands, an image of suffering, seated on the staircase, twice spotted across the lake, or seated in the schoolroom, her head once more in her hands, suggesting ‘an indescribable grand melancholy’ (97). The governess comes to believe the children are in league with these apparitions, tricking her and maintaining a conspiratorial silence. Her relationship with Flora falters when the child defies her, seeming to refuse to see Miss Jessel who appears to the governess ‘“big as a blazing fire”’ standing on the opposite bank (115). The child is taken off to her uncle’s by Mrs Grose. When, later, Quint appears once more at the diningroom window, ‘the hideous author of our woe – the white face of damnation’, she tries to save Miles from being claimed, to find that he lies dead in her arms (137). The narrative has a complex origin, beginning in an old house one Christmas Eve long ago when a man called Douglas is recalled by a narrator as having been given a story by his sister’s governess, ten years his senior. He, after ‘a long reticence’ of forty years, then opens ‘the faded red cover of a thin old-fashioned gilt-edged album’ (22) which contains the document. This might have the authority of a firstperson voice, speaking as a unique witness, but the moment is in turn relegated to the past: the governess has been dead these last twenty years, and Douglas himself is also dead, having entrusted to the narrator the original manuscript. He then provides us with ‘an exact transcript of my own made much later’, thus at one further 289



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remove from the first record (19). This prelude concludes with some generalized, omniscient commentary on the circumstances of the governess before, in Chapter One, making way for her voice which takes over and the story proper begins. There are two internal references to the tale’s title, one of which occurs in the Prelude. The screw of the title invokes the thumb-screw, an instrument of torture for the extraction of information. Its opening paragraph touches upon some ‘strange tale’, a ghostly incident occurring in an old house, an ‘apparition’ involving a child, his presence ‘at so tender an age’ providing an extra horror or ‘turn of the screw’. The small boy wakes his mother ‘not to dissipate his dread and soothe him to sleep again, but to encounter also, herself … the same sight that had shaken him’ (CT 10: 15). He seeks not comfort, therefore, but confirmation. Going a step further, Douglas asks what the effect would be if two children were to be involved. This would constitute two turns of the screw and will, of course, become the disturbing tale we read. The governess (who has no name), like the boy, will crave reassurance of the truth of her experiences. The need to show, to prove, to verify, runs through the tale. Its ghosts are apparent only to the governess and James carefully delineates the nature of her vision, the sense of a powerful presence achieved almost without the confirmation of sight. For instance, engaged in a piece of sewing, she is conscious of a female figure on the other side of the lake, convinced of its presence and of ‘what I should see straight before me and across the lake as a consequence of raising my eyes’. This figure is registered ‘without direct vision’, but, paradoxically, ‘with certitude’ (54). The governess fears that Flora will also see this visitor, but the child is so intent on her playing that her carer suspects that she is in fact aware of Miss Jessel’s presence. Does the governess herself see the apparition? We are left in doubt: ‘I again shifted my eyes – I faced what I had to face’ (56).When, one night the governess wakes to find Flora looking out of the window, she finds, from the vantage point of another room, that it is Miles she is watching on the lawn, not Miss Jessel, as she had presumed. And Miles himself stands in the moonlight not looking at her own face pressed against the pane, but upwards at ‘a person on the tower’ who must, we infer, be Quint (76). Yet when the governess makes seemingly direct contact with the supernatural, it is with a terrible, confirmatory clarity: she sees ‘with a stranger sharpness …. the man who looked at me over the battlements was as definite as a picture in a frame’ (37). James characterized ‘The Turn of the Screw’ simply as a ghost story, believing that it would discourage ‘earnest criticism’, though it has, of course, attracted a wide variety of readings (LC 2: 1182). His own daily life seems at times to have been imbued with the ghostly, especially in familiar places holding enduring memories. Thinking of the recently dead – William Wetmore Story, Fenimore, and his cousin Kitty Emmet – he told Francis Boott, not entirely figuratively, that ‘I see ghosts everywhere’. William James’s sustained interest in psychical research and s­ piritualism 290



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may well have influenced the imagination of his younger brother, though the text itself also invokes literary precedents – the Gothic horror tradition represented by Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, for instance – and, indirectly, that other account of a governess’s life, Jane Eyre. James’s powerful juxtaposing of evil and innocence is comparable to the allegorical mode of Hawthorne; what Melville described as his ‘great power of blackness’ could well be applied to the tale’s repeated indications of unspecified evils.6 The behaviour of Flora and Miles – their seeming knowingness, their charm, and an apparent capacity for concealment and unnerving silences – revises any Romantic conception of childhood innocence with penetrating psychological insight, an acuteness applied too to the motives of the governess. Her reliability as narrator and observer is frequently in question, her assertions reflecting an intense emotional neediness shading into the neurotic. In the 1930s Edmund Wilson introduced an influential Freudian perspective, representing the governess as a hysteric, subject to hallucinations, a pathological case of sexual repression, realized within a specific social environment. A feminist perspective has re-examined James’s representation of the governess and the unreliability he assigns her as a female narrator, while the story’s sociological details – the class divisions, the social disparity between Quint and Miss Jessel, Mrs Grose’s illiteracy, the family’s wealth and sense of entitlement, the colonial links of the children’s dead parents with India – have attracted a range of interpretive emphases. The tale’s characteristic mode is to leave questions regularly unanswered, impressions needing adjustment, and expectations unfulfilled. As Douglas, the initial guardian of the narrative, warns his companions, ‘“The story won’t tell … not in any literal, vulgar way”’ (18). How reasonable is the governess? Does she really envision herself as ‘the expiatory victim’ (50)? How innocent or devious or simply game-playing are the children? Do they really ‘talk horrors’ (81)? James consistently invests the everyday with the possibility of the uncanny or unknown, and most unnervingly, occasions of terror are enacted in silence. After the prolonged moment of encounter with Quint on the staircase, the governess observes that ‘the silence itself … became the element into which I saw the figure disappear’ (71). The sense of the untellable or unspoken reminds us that one of James’s favoured terms, in many contexts, is ‘unspeakable’, and he later emphasized that, rather than providing ‘weak specifications’, he relied upon the reader’s capacity to ‘think the evil’. Thus we are free to scent ‘the hot breath of the Pit’ (LC 2: 1188, 1187). The disturbing illustration for the magazine version of the tale provided by James’s old friend, John La Farge, adds a further layer of horror. There are two abstract side-tablets with sinister, even demonic associations, and the central scene depicts a mature-looking Miles, with curiously pale, vacant eyes, supported by a matronly governess, both viewed from below. In the left-hand top corner, an enlarged disembodied eye seems to watch, while, most unnerving of all, two right 291



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Figure 4  Title illustration by John La Farge for ‘The Turn of the Screw’, Collier’s Weekly, 27 January-16 April 1898 Credit: Historic Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

hands seem to hold on to Miles, one belonging to the governess, the other to some unexplained presence. The illustration captures something of what James, in his Preface, calls ‘the tone of tragic, yet of exquisite mystification’ (1185). The nowexiled Oscar Wilde was impressed by the tale, though he expressed one reservation: ‘I think it is a most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale – like an Elizabethan tragedy – I am greatly impressed by it. James is developing – but he will never arrive at passion, I fear’.7

Country Life and a Literary Agent James moved into Lamb House in June 1898, ‘the biggest job of the sort I have ever tackled’, he reported to William, though it was fortunate, too, that, earlier in the year, his earnings had reassuringly increased: ‘this year, & next, thank heaven, my income will have been much larger than for any year of my existence’. The reception of ‘The Turn of the Screw’ on both sides of the Atlantic, generally very positive, must also have encouraged its author. Despite the necessary upheaval and expense of removal, there was no doubt that James had made the right choice in moving to this historic, tranquil place. In fact, he would soon review his domestic arrangements in London, resolving to give up ‘the complications & expense of De Vere Gardens’. Yet he could not envisage abandoning London entirely and, to this end, had already added his name to a list of applicants for a bedroom at the Reform Club, planning ahead for his ‘declining years’. The summer weather was unusually fine, and, over the following months, James, keen to share his new home, generously entertained a long succession of friends and relatives which included Edmund Gosse and his wife, the Edward Warrens, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, Paul and Minnie Bourget, the Curtises, Howard Sturgis, young Rosina Emmet, and William’s nineteen-year-old son, Harry. He was warned 292



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by his brother that Harry was ‘a taciturn chap …. entirely unlike any of us’ and that he should ‘get rid’ of him as soon as he became bored. In fact, the visit passed off well, and relations between nephew and uncle remained affectionate over the coming years. In September Mrs Annie Fields (having received detailed travel instructions from her host) made the journey out to Rye with her companion Miss Sarah Orne Jewett. James had often enjoyed Mrs Fields’ hospitality in his younger, Cambridge days, and he had admired Miss Jewett’s tales of New England life, Country of the Pointed Firs, published two years earlier.8 It was during this summer, too, that James, cycling with Edmund Gosse, met the young H.G. Wells, living at the time in Folkestone. In these years Wells was producing some of his greatest science fiction, or ‘scientific romances’, as they were called, including The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, though he had also published in 1895 as part of his role as a theatre reviewer a critical but fair account of Guy Domville in the pages of the Pall Mall Gazette. Full of mutual admiration, the two became friends, though there would be a later falling-out over literary matters. In the autumn another friend, Jonathan Sturges, arrived for what became a twomonth stay and, making few demands on his host, provided welcome company. Aside from the pieces he contributed to Harper’s Weekly, James was contributing by 1898 a monthly ‘American Letter’ to a new British journal, Literature, published by the London Times. In this forerunner of the Times Literary Supplement, he reviewed a range of American authors. But he continued to find difficulty in placing his shorter fiction – this despite having engaged the services of a literary agent, James B. Pinker, a former magazine editor who quickly made a success of a role which really came into being only at the end of the century. Aside from James, he represented Conrad,Wells, Kipling, Bennett, and in later years, Joyce. Pinker had probably had on his hands for some time three of James’s tales, ‘The Given Case’, ‘The Great Good Place’ and ‘“Europe”’, and their author now asked for them to be returned: if they were to be rejected by the magazines, he would publish them in book form. His confidence was understandably low and he confessed to Pinker,‘I’m afraid I shouldn’t be able to bear very much more of it. It comes to me late – one can take that in youth’. In fact, all three stories eventually appeared in American magazines.

The Awkward Age On 1 October 1898, Harper’s Weekly began serializing The Awkward Age, a novel strikingly of a piece with James’s other writings of this decade. Like ‘The Other House’, The Awkward Age has its formal origins in his play-writing ventures: the narrative unfolds by means of a long series of dialogues with minimal authorial intervention. There are strong thematic links, too, with What Maisie Knew for, once again, the theme of youthful innocence is played out against a background of adult 293



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corruption and decadence. As James recorded in his Notes for the novel, ‘the little London girl … inevitably hears, overhears, guesses, follows, takes in, becomes acquainted with, horrors’ (CN, pp. 117–118). The ‘horrors’ involving moral lapses, financial ‘sponging’, and sexual indiscretions, remain predominantly offstage, part of the dubious routine of the eighteen-year-old Nanda’s worldly, fashionable family, the Brookenhams, who are (comparatively) short of money. Her fairly compromised innocence contrasts with the strictly chaperoned life of the orphaned Aggie, niece of a relative of the Brookenhams, who has been brought up in the Continental manner reminiscent of Pansy Osmond, ‘privately, carefully, tenderly, and with what she was not to learn – till the proper time’ (p. 41). Nanda’s mother, Mrs Brook (or Brookenham), presides over a congenial salon of friends, ‘“a little sort of a set that hang very much together”’ (p. 93), which includes Van (Gustavus Vanderbank), the very rich but socially unconnected Mitchy (Mitchett), son of a bootmaker to royalty, and his impecunious hanger-on, Lord Petherton. She hints colourfully at their disregard for the conventional proprieties when she explains that she feels like ‘“a circus-woman, in pink tights and no particular skirts, riding half a dozen horses at once. We’re all in the troupe now, I suppose … and we must travel with the show”’ (p. 141). She is speaking to the aged Mr Longdon, recently arrived on this cosmopolitan scene, who, years ago, had been in love with Julia, Mrs Brook’s mother, the great unfulfilled love of his life. Fresh from his historic Suffolk house, like ‘a stranger at an Eastern court, comically helpless without his interpreter’, he finds the manners and language of this younger generation bewilderingly alien (p. 150). He is, however, charmed by Nanda who bears a disarmingly poignant resemblance to her grandmother, and is also much taken by the hard-working Van. Mrs Brook is keen that her daughter should marry Mitchy and is disappointed when, eventually, he marries Aggie, though the marriage, it seems, does not work out well. Nanda is quietly in love with Van – as, indeed, is her mother. Longdon, whose affection for Nanda is reciprocated, wishes, too, that she should marryVan and informs the young man that he will provide her with a substantial settlement if this should happen. Despite his friendship with the girl,Van fails to propose, and the novel ends with Nanda returning to the Suffolk countryside to stay with Mr Longdon. James asserts in his later Preface that editors and publishers had cried out for ‘“Dialogue,” always “dialogue”!’ (LC 2: 1127) and he demonstrates in this novel his capacity for intricate, brilliant conversation – however demanding for the reader – in scenes theatrically arranged once again around the arrival or departure of protagonists. His intention had been, he recalls, comic: he had planned ‘for brevity, for levity, for simplicity, for jocosity’, ‘it would be light and ironical or it would be nothing’ (LC 2: 1120, 1127). He also offers ‘homage’ to two popular French writers, ‘Gyp’, the Countess Martel de Janville, and Henri Lavedan, both writers of witty tales and dialogues who criticized and amused the society of their day, though he 294



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had to confess that his ‘complications’ soon removed him from their sphere. In fact, both ‘Gyp’ and Lavedan were (unlike James himself) ardent anti-Dreyfusards, and in the former’s writing, certainly, antisemitic references are profuse – which may help explain some of the unpleasant Jewish allusions in The Awkward Age. In this 1908 Preface James invokes the ‘scenic thing’, the ‘divine distinction’ conferred by dramatic models, and allowing the storyteller a ‘guarded objectivity’ (LC 2: 1131).Yet in practice, according to James, the paying public of ‘infantine intelligence’ imposes a ‘poor theatrical straight-jacket’ on such dramatists as Dumas fils or Ibsen, mentioned as among those compelled to exchange ‘the finer thing for the coarser’ (1132). In constructing The Awkward Age he adopted ‘the dramatist’s course’, experiencing its imposed aesthetic constraints, its ‘beauty’ and ‘difficulty’, yet it is clear that in his ‘deflexion from simplicity’ he lost his public (1134). The novel appears to have gone virtually unnoticed: as he candidly recalls, he would be told by his publisher that ‘“I’m sorry to say the book has done nothing to speak of; I’ve never in all my experience seen one treated with more general and complete disrespect”’ (1129). The reviewers, as opposed to the public, on the other hand, were generally courteous, at least concerning the brilliance of the writing, while also acknowledging the demands it made of its readers. The Manchester Guardian, for instance, regards The Awkward Age as an ‘intricate and wonderful composition’, as well as an ‘enigma, the very quintessence of riddle’ (CR, p. 317). Similarly, the New York Times Saturday Review of Books and Art concedes that the ‘fineness of the workmanship is not to be disputed’, but ‘we may find ourselves vexed by so much minute analysis of character all but characterless, of so much elaboration in picturing merely sordid minds’ (pp. 327–328). Others, it must be admitted, were less measured: the Pall Mall Gazette protests that James ‘has this time smothered himself with elaboration’ (p. 319), Literature complains at his ‘relentless longueurs’, and the Bookman concludes that ‘[h]e works a delicate thing to death’ (CH, pp. 284, 293). In explaining the novel’s form for his magazine editors, James recalls that he had drawn ‘on a sheet of paper … the neat figure of a circle consisting of a number of small rounds disposed at equal distance about a central object’ (LC 2: 1130), an emblem, perhaps, of the novel’s quite schematic nature. As if to confirm this formalizing preference, it ends with four chapters in which Nanda entertains a string of invited guests, Van, Mitchy, and, last, Mr Longdon – a sequence in which each relationship is evaluated and finally concluded. The reasons for Nanda’s happiness in spending extended periods of time with the 55-year-old Mr Longdon – however precarious her family circumstances – never emerge clearly. James was, in fact, the same age as Longdon, and the novel suggests other biographical parallels as well. The frontispiece for the New York Edition, captioned ‘Mr. Longdon’s’, is a photograph of Lamb House, taken by Alvin Langdon Coburn.9 Longdon’s name, a fusion perhaps of ‘London’ and ‘long-gone’, might 295



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remind us of the novelist’s recent withdrawal from the capital to the country. Longdon’s enduring affection for Van may anticipate James’s own passionate relationships with young men, while his incomprehension of the younger generation and his base in rural Suffolk, must reflect something of James’s own response to the daughters of his American cousin, his cultural and linguistic puzzlement, during that visit to Dunwich in the summer of 1897. The extent to which Nanda’s moral purity has been corrupted is unspecified, but her youthful propensity to send telegrams, considered ‘“dreadful”’ by her mother (p. 342), introduces a device which James will exploit as an emblem often of secret negotiation in his later novels, a medium of its time. This was the decade in which Marconi had revolutionized communication, a telegraphic system rapid in delivery and increasingly independent of distance. Such messages had already figured in the action of The Spoils of Poynton, and in the final pages of The Wings of the Dove Merton Densher must send a ‘persuasive’ telegram to his mistress, Kate Croy (p. 528). A telegram office serves as the principal location for ‘In the Cage’ (1898), a story in which the upper classes are free to arrange their illicit liaisons by means of cryptic messages, all observed by a working-class telegraphist girl confined within her ‘cage’. ‘“Their affairs, their appointments and arrangements, their little games and secrets and vices – those things all pass before me”’, she proclaims (CT 10: 163). Scandal involving the establishment was rife in these late years of the century: the exposure of male brothels in Cleveland Street in 1889, the disgrace of Sir Charles Dilke, the Oscar Wilde trials, had all revealed corruption and hypocrisy in high places. When Lambert Strether in The Ambassadors answers a telegram he has received from Mme de Vionnet, he, too, resorts to the telegraph office where he sees ‘the little prompt Paris women … driving the dreadful needle-pointed public pen at the dreadful sand-strewn public table; implements that symbolized for Strether’s too interpretative innocence something more acute in manner, more sinister in morals, more fierce in the national life’ (p. 360). James would become irritated by the increasingly intrusive sound of the telephone, but the telegram constituted a more complex, sometimes unsettling mode, a technological development raising a new set of possibilities for confidential exchanges.

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14 A Roman Encounter: ‘Letting Yourself Go’ (1899 –1902)

James’s spring trip of 1899 to France and Italy was delayed by what might have turned into a domestic disaster. During a late-night session of letter-writing he detected a fire in the small hours at Lamb House, serious enough to involve the police and fire-brigade. A beam under the floor by the fireplace of the Green Room on the first floor where he wrote in winter-time had caught fire, only to be extinguished by hacking through the ceiling and wall of the dining room below. Reconstruction work had to be carried out, and three new fireplaces fitted; the insurance bill came to a substantial £28.1 In London, the apartment at 34 De Vere Gardens had been let, as James told W.E. Norris, to ‘one Ronald Mor[e]ton Macdonald, of Largie Castle, Argyllshire – who has blessedly taken it for 6 months – perhaps for more’.2 This would provide funds for the European trip, while Jonathan Sturges, recently recovered from influenza, would occupy Lamb House during his absence. Meanwhile Sturges spent much of his time living in Long’s Hotel in London’s Bond Street, a former raffish haunt of Lord Byron, where, James claimed, he held ‘tea-parties for pretty ladies: one at a time’. He was a frequent and welcome guest at Lamb House, ‘altogether a boon’ in fact, and his presence would keep ‘the servants occupied & ventilated’ during their employer’s absence.

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Return to Europe By mid-March James was in Paris – after a gap of some five years – receiving updates on the repairs to Lamb House from his architect friend, Edward Warren, while completing the proofs of The Awkward Age. He caught up with his Emmet cousins, Rosina and Leslie, treating them to museums, theatres, meals, and ‘constant tea & little cakes’. After a fortnight or so he moved south for the warmer climate of the French Riviera and the Plantier de Costebelle estate of Paul and Minnie Bourget in the historic town of Hyères. Robert Louis Stevenson had stayed here in 1883–1884, and Edith Wharton would winter in the town in the years after the Great War. Set on a terraced mountain-side, the Bourgets’ establishment was an idyllic place, surrounded by pine and cedar woods and offering extensive views of the sea and surrounding countryside. James was reminded of the landscapes of Claude and Virgil. He stayed here for a week and though he admired Bourget there may have been some awkward conversations over their opposing views on the Dreyfus affair, the great controversy of the day. Captain Alfred Dreyfus, of Jewish descent and unjustly convicted of treason, had been imprisoned for passing on French military secrets, though the country’s legal establishment had been called into question (with Émile Zola playing an influential role). Not until 1906 was Dreyfus finally exonerated. Bourget, already well known for his anti-Semitic views, was becoming increasingly conservative in these years, while James remained a staunch ‘Dreyfusard’. By early April, he had travelled along the coast via St Raphael to Genoa where he briefly lingered, catching up with old friends. He was happy to feel the ‘sunny warmth of Italian air’ once more, even enjoying the noise of the street and the ‘shuffle of Italian feet’ below his hotel window. In an 1892 essay he had described Venice as ‘the most melancholy of cities … the most beautiful of tombs’ (CTWC, p. 314), and the place still held troubling memories for him, chiefly relating to the death of Fenimore. Nevertheless, he stayed for about a month with the Curtises at the Palazzo Barbaro. His impressions from these weeks doubtless found their way into The Wings of the Dove, on which he was soon to begin work. But his more immediate observations – a night-time arrival by gondola, Venice’s melancholy beauty and ‘decrepitude’, the ubiquitous historical resonances, the invasion of ‘cheap trippers’ – are recorded in his essay, ‘Two Old Houses and Three Young Women’, published in September 1899. His eminent hosts and friends remained wrapt in anonymity, though he could not resist referring to the old scandal, ‘of late immensely in the air’, of George Sand’s liaison with Pietro Pagello, the doctor caring for her lover, Alfred de Musset, ‘a tub of soiled linen’ still being publicly washed (p. 353). Here he also met Jessie Allen, an engaging woman of about his own age, with a distinguished family pedigree, whom he would continue to see at her home in Belgravia’s Eaton Terrace in the years ahead. He took the opportunity to visit 298



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once more – and, as it turned out, for the last time – Mrs Katharine Bronson, who had retreated northwards to her country house La Mura at Asolo. James received a warm welcome, though he had always found the place uncomfortable. His principal goal was Rome for, at the family’s pressing request, he had agreed to write a biography of William Wetmore Story who had died in 1895. He made his way to the Palazzo Barberini where the family had lived and where Story himself had a studio. They had entertained James in the early 1870s and now he had come to examine the archive and its copious contents, a task – undertaken principally on financial grounds – about which he was unenthusiastic. To escape the midsummer Roman heat, he spent what turned out to be a week with Mrs Humphry Ward and her family who had rented apartments for three months in the Villa Barberini at Castel Gandolfo, in the Alban Hills, near Rome, for long a papal summer retreat. She was working on her novel, Eleanor (1900), in outline perhaps the most Jamesian of her works and, indeed, he offered much advice during its writing. The eponymous heroine has accompanied Edward Manisty, a Catholic High Tory historian and politician, to Rome where he is engaged in writing a book, but she must surrender her Egeria-like influence over him when he falls in love with a puritanical Protestant girl from America. Eleanor nobly stands aside and takes the untutored girl in hand, and the novel ends with the older woman’s death. In the Alban Hills an event occurred involving James, a version of which eventually formed a scene in Eleanor. It is recorded both in Mrs Ward’s Writer’s Recollections and in the biography written by her daughter, Janet Trevelyan. An evening expedition was made to the nearby Lake of Nemi and the Temple of Diana. In an 1873 essay James had referred to ‘mouldy little Nemi, perched upon a cliff high above the lake’ (CTWC, p. 456), but its environs were rich in archaeological artefacts – Lord John Savile had located the remains of a temple dedicated to the goddess in 1885 – and in Eleanor Mrs Ward, always alive to the far-reaching ironies of history, exploits this landscape and its rich, sometimes troubled past. Her daughter relates how it was ‘here that Henry James, during the few precious days that he spent with us at the Villa, found the peasant youth with the glorious name, Aristodemo, and set him talking of Lord Savile’s diggings, and of the marble head he himself had found’.3 If Aristodemo were present at that important dig of 1885, he must have been more than a youth by 1899 (though Mrs Ward, too, refers to him as ‘a beautiful youth’ in her Recollections).4 Even if the excavations continued beyond that date, Savile had retired by 1888 and died in 1896.Whatever his putative age, it is clear that James was much taken with the young man. Mrs Ward recalls that ‘Mr. James asked his name. “Aristodemo,” said the boy, looking as he spoke the Greek name, “like to a god in form and stature”. Mr James’s face lit up; and he walked over the historic ground beside the lad, Aristodemo picking up for him fragments of terracotta from the furrows through which the plough had just passed’. She catches up with her friend, in company with this ‘young Hermes’: ‘Mr James 299



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paused – his eyes first on the boy, then on the surrounding scene. “Aristodemo!” he murmured smiling, and more to himself than me, his voice caressing the word – “what a name! what a place!”’ (pp. 328–329). For Mrs Ward the episode spoke of the beauty of Italy, its history and human continuity, and the fictionalized Aristodemo in Eleanor (she retained the name for this ‘young Bacchus’) represents ‘the son of an old race, moulded by long centuries of urbane and civilised living’.5 Yet her observations capture something, too, of the romantic sentiment of the moment, the excitement felt by James in this chance meeting with a godlike figure. Such unexpected encounters seem especially prevalent in his accounts of Italian travels, most frequently involving young men, often of the labouring classes, polite, but engagingly indifferent to such attentions. Like many Victorian visitors (Symonds and Horatio Brown, for instance), James appreciated in Venice ‘the arching body of the gondolier lifted up against the sky’, later admiring the men’s ‘sun-burnt complexions and their childish dialect’: ‘their voices travel far; they enter your windows and mingle with your dreams’. He noted, too, the Venetian fishermen ‘and the gallantry with which they wear their hats, an article that nowhere sits so well as on a mass of dense Venetian curls’ (CTWC, pp. 299, 323, 326, 313). In some ‘picturesque old city upon a mountain-top’ near Genoa, he admires the ancient town walls, the distant mountains, the chestnut and olive trees, and, inevitably, a young man appears on the scene, singing as he goes, ‘his coat slung over his shoulder and his hat upon his ear in the manner of a cavalier in an opera’. They ‘gossip’, but James becomes quickly disillusioned at the other’s revolutionary opinions (p. 396).

A ‘Lovable Youth’: Hendrick Christian Andersen As if exercising some of the freedoms of older age, when James came to revise Roderick Hudson for the New York Edition, he amplified the physical description of the gondolier who ferries the young sculptor and his companion Rowland Mallet to the island of Torcello. And it was during this visit to Rome of 1899 that James met his own young sculptor of grandiose ambition in the studio of the American artist John Elliott whose wife Maude was a daughter of Julia Ward Howe’s. Twentyseven-year-old Hendrik Christian Andersen, Norwegian-born, had been taken to America as a child and grew up in Newport, Rhode Island, where his father found work in the shipyard. The young man immediately caught James’s attention, as if reality were somehow re-enacting his own fiction. Andersen, having studied painting in Paris, had arrived in Rome in 1897, and he would remain there for the next forty years working as a sculptor; he invited the novelist to come and see his work. His relationship with (or patronage by) Lord Ronald Sutherland Gower, sculptor, critic and politician, a man of great wealth and a high-profile member of the Wilde circle, had recently ended. 300



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James must have been shocked to see the studio in the Via Margutta crammed with what he later referred to as a ‘colossal multiplication of divinely naked and intimately associated gentlemen and ladies’. Andersen’s aspirations as a sculptor were incorrigibly and incurably inflated: aside from these startlingly large and ostentatious statues (still to be seen in the Museo Hendrik C. Andersen at the Villa Helene, part of Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna) he went on to develop plans for a ‘World City’, a utopian capital that would bring together the world in a divine unity. James was never able to sympathize with such ambitions, but to encourage the younger man, on this first visit, he purchased a small bust modelled for ‘Berto’, the Conte Alberto Bevilacqua Lazise, a fatherless aristocratic boy. On his return from Italy James placed the bust on the chimney piece in the dining room at Lamb House, where it would be ‘constantly’ before him, ‘as a loved companion and friend’: ‘I foresee it will be a lifelong attachment’, he informed Andersen. A correspondence immediately began between the two men, in which this small artefact acts as an intermediary, a replacement physical presence, for the passion James felt for Andersen; the older man confides that ‘we literally can’t live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night’. The relationship was to continue until James’s death, though they met on only about eight occasions – each lasting just a few days – in Rye, Newport and Rome, though the novelist regularly beseeched Andersen to come to his home, to arrive early or to extend his stay. He even offered to adapt the studio part of his property in nearby Watchbell Street, as ‘a little artistic habitation’ for the sculptor. James’s letters to Andersen are highly charged and passionate, and he frequently casts himself in an abject light, indeed, as the sentimental lover. The young sculptor visited Lamb House later in that summer of 1899, on his way to New York in an attempt to further his career. He was touched by the well-appointed beauty of the place and the hospitality he received, writing to his mother and father, ‘I have one of the most beautiful rooms I ever slept in, with rich old oak walls in pannells polished so that they look like strong iron and in every way I am in a little Paradise here’.6 After his departure James wrote that ‘I have missed you out of all proportion to the three meagre little days (for it seems strange they were only that) that we had together. I have never … passed the little corner where we came up Udimore hill … in the eventide on our bicycles, without thinking ever so tenderly of our charming spin homeward in the twilight and feeling again the strange perversity it made of that sort of thing being so soon over’. In his behaviour James was always physically demonstrative and tactile, appearing to some British eyes suspiciously European in the freedom of his embraces.The terms of his letter-writing are similarly demonstrative, and he frankly admits the strength of his attachment, as well as his own loneliness. There is a poignancy, too, in this sudden passion at a point when James felt, at fifty-six, that he had moved into old age. Yet, however overwhelming his emotions, he never compromised in his 301



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critical judgment, voicing his reservations about Andersen’s sculptures, generally kindly, reasonably questioning on commercial grounds whether there were a market for such works. Andersen himself must have felt flattered at such attention paid to him by an eminent man of letters and may have hoped, too, that James could further his career. He was doubtless a charming young man, fair-haired and strong, Nordic in appearance: William James reported that his wife Alice ‘fell in love’ with him, for instance, when the sculptor paid them a call in Rome in 1901. The language of James’s letters, expressing the desire to touch, hold, caress, and possess, reflects an intimacy and physicality which may have been as much verbal as acted out. This is one of a number of attachments to younger men in James’s later years which reflect something of his loneliness and a desire for physical, if not sexual, intimacy. The extant letters, nevertheless, have an undeniable erotic charge, an emotional vulnerability, not found elsewhere. The premature death of Andersen’s consumptive brother Andreas prompted the novelist, frustrated at the distance between them, to wish him at Rye, ‘so that I might take consoling, soothing, infinitely close and tender and affectionately-healing possession of you … to have you there and do for you, to put my arm round you and make you lean on me as a brother and a lover’. In whatever terms the relationship with Andersen was conducted, there can be no doubt that James’s life became richer emotionally, made more vivid by his infrequent physical presence. The other side of this correspondence, those of Andersen’s haphazardly written letters which survive, seems unexceptionable. There are occasional moments, however, which cast a weird and embarrassingly narcissistic light on the young sculptor’s assumed role in the relationship. He apologizes for not having written for some time, confessing that ‘I am always afraid that you will take your son Hendrik and lay him across your stout knee and spank him on both cheeks of his fat backsides’. And in a following letter he asks ‘by what right has this tall pale, yellow headed Norwegian, Andersen, a poor beggar of a sculptor living in the slums and shadows of Rome, a right to approach the King of writers and impose any obligation upon him? … I have not received any reply to my last letter and I feel like a young lady about to give birth to her first baby’.7 Correspondence between the two men continued until 1915, though their meetings became increasingly infrequent. James never felt able to endorse the younger man’s overblown artistic ideals, while Andersen himself confided as early as June 1907 to his sister-in-law, Olivia Cushing Andersen that ‘I am getting on well with James but James is meens nothing to me’.8 Before leaving Italy for home, James travelled south to Sorrento to visit F. Marion Crawford, the popular novelist whose family James had met during his earliest days in Rome. Crawford (who had been born in Italy) was a nephew of Julia Ward Howe and, having published a string of commercially successful novels, lived with his family in a grand villa in Sant’Agnello di Sorrento, at the southern end of the Bay of 302



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Naples. James had also been invited to visit Dr Axel Munthe, the Swedish doctor, remembered now for his memoirs, The Story of San Michele (1929), who was living on the island of Capri. After a few days he headed northward, stopping in Florence and later Paris, before arriving back in Rye in June after a trip of almost four months. An exciting opportunity arose that summer, for James’s landlord, Arthur Bellingham, had died in South Africa, giving him the opportunity of buying Lamb House for a price of £2,000. It was a stretch financially, but James was charmed at the prospect, if briefly crestfallen when William volunteered older-brother advice on negotiating a deal and indeed on comparative house prices in the local area. Henry replied pointedly, ‘[m]y joy has shrivelled under your very lucid warnings, but it will re-bloom’. Sister-in-law Alice was much more encouraging, even offering an unconditional loan of $2,000, a bequest from her aunt’s estate, a gesture which, though touched, James rejected. At this time William was having treatment for his chronic heart condition at Bad Nauheim, a spa town north of Frankfurt, famous for dealing with cardiac and nervous complaints. He had overstrained his heart while climbing in his beloved Adirondacks Mountains in July 1898, and he would spend the next twelve years with typical perseverance experimenting with treatments for the debilitating pain he suffered.

American Visitors But back in Rye, James was happy to escape from summer heat, welcoming ‘rain and jolly Sussex windy bluster, and beautiful tumbled-up skies and marsh-shadows’. His old friends the Godkins paid a visit in late August, though Edwin, a friend since the 1860s, was now in poor health.William and Alice with daughter Peggy came to England this autumn, initially staying at Lamb House until William’s heart condition worsened once again. They moved to Henry’s Kensington apartment so that he might consult a specialist; somewhat improved, William made a trip to Malvern for hydropathic treatment from which, however, he derived little benefit. He had been invited to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures in the new year at Edinburgh University, but was too unwell to fulfil the engagement at the time and so journeyed to the softer climes of the South of France. Henry, too, was contemplating age and mortality, whilst also appreciating some of the advantages of advancing years, writing to Henrietta Reubell, ‘I like growing (that is I like, for many reasons, being) old: 56! But I don’t like growing older. I quite love my present age & the compensations, simplifications, freedoms, independences, memories, advantages of it. But I don’t keep it long enough – it passes too quickly’. James’s ‘wild and wandering friend’, Isabella Stewart Gardner, also called on her journey from Europe to Boston, taking through British Customs some of the European treasures (including paintings by Rubens and Van Eyck) destined for her palatial home 303



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on the Fenway. Living (briefly) nearby at Brede Place, a historic but dilapidated manor house with few modern conveniences, was another American, Stephen Crane, chiefly remembered now as the author of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets and the Civil War narrative, The Red Badge of Courage. His companion was Cora Taylor, known as Mrs Crane; though she was shunned for this irregular relationship by some of the locals, James became friendly with them both and visits were exchanged. The couple had led colourful and eventful lives, but Crane was to die of tuberculosis in June 1900, aged twenty-eight, at a health spa in the Black Forest. They were short of money and James generously forwarded them a cheque for £50 ($242), but even as he sent it, his ‘stricken young friend’ was already dead. James later confided to his agent Pinker that it was an amount ‘more substantial than I could afford’; he was saddened to learn, too, that the young local doctor who had tended to Crane and who accompanied the couple to the Black Forest had never been paid for his services. James’s appointment of James Pinker as his agent in 1898 which had carried many benefits now led to problems with Heinemann who had published much of his fiction in the previous half-decade. Though the literary agent was by now an accepted professional presence, the conservative William Heinemann regarded such a ‘middle-man’ role with contempt. A ‘lively row’ between author and publisher ensued, leading to James’s opening of alternative negotiations with both Methuen and Constable. His next work, a collection of short stories titled The Soft Side, would be brought out by Methuen. And gratifyingly, Pinker ensured that his author received an advance of £150 (increased from £100) for the twelve tales in the volume, most of which had been published during the past year in British or American magazines.9 Appearing for the first time was ‘The Third Person’, a light, fanciful story in which two elderly female cousins, Susan and Amy Frush, become jealous over their sightings of a ghost in the historic house they have inherited. He is a handsome young man, his head tilted unnaturally to one side; the local vicar helps them decipher a cache of ancient letters found in an old trunk: their ancestor had been hanged for smuggling – a crime quite common to this coastal region. Each woman attempts to lay his soul to rest. The elder reimburses the Chancellor of the Exchequer by sending him the substantial sum of £20 – a solution which, sadly, had not ‘answered’ (CT 11: 164). Miss Amy, on the other hand, goes to Paris, to return and smuggle successfully past customs at Dover a novel ‘“from the forbidden list”’ (169), published by Tauchnitz, the Dresden-based firm, some of whose books were banned by copyright law from entering Britain. By means of this dark crime, she manages to exorcise the ghost as well as enjoying her week in Paris, as Miss Susan ruefully observes. The house the two women have inherited, with its ‘old secrets … old echoes … old aches’, its garden responding to the ‘deepest sweetness of the spring’ and proximity to the church, is clearly modelled on Lamb House, and the old town 304



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with its steep street leading down to the railway station is Rye (160). The tale reflects James’s daily pleasure in his new home, his appreciation of its history and the tranquillity it offered. He observed to Grace Norton, late one night shortly before Christmas 1902 that ‘My little old house … gives out, more and more, strange nocturnal sounds, inexplicable thumps and groans, unaccountable wandering noises, as if it really wished to live up to a proper psychic hauntability’. He would go on to explore such uncanny relations between the everyday and the supernatural in some of his important later fictions.

The Sense of the Past One of these projects, The Sense of the Past, would never be completed – ‘so damnable difficult and so complex’, as he noted – though he returned to it on a number of occasions, and what remains is of great interest (CN, p. 189). The ghostly theme which emerged was to be ‘international’, an experiment in ‘the supernatural and the high fantastic’, a choice which coincided with W.D. Howells’s recommendation at the time. James had been initially approached by Frank Nelson Doubleday on behalf of Harper’s, though this ‘outstretched arm’ was later withdrawn, perhaps as a result of the company’s financial problems. James completed two and a half sections of this novel in 1899–1900, and, in 1914 through to the autumn of 1915, worked on a detailed sketch for its revision, the surviving ‘statements’ outlining the subsequent narrative. The novel’s narrative of a young American who has arrived in England to claim a historic property can be said to have ‘haunted’ James for many decades, for his ‘Passionate Pilgrim’, a novella published in 1871, follows the journey of its ailing hero, who, having rejected America for the tranquillity of English rural life, longs to reclaim his ancestral home. Ralph Pendrel, the hero of The Sense of the Past, occupies a more complex and mysterious sphere, a kind of fantasy of time-travel back into the early nineteenth century, in which he comes to meet himself and to read his own history, in scenes unnerving and threatening. His American romance with a young widow, Mrs Coyne, has failed; she prefers ‘“men of action”’, telling him three times with scant regard for his masculinity, that he is ‘“beautiful”’ (pp. 12–13). Exaggerating that long-established Jamesian contrast between European and American experience, Pendrel taunts her by suggesting that her preference for a man of the kind ‘“we can turn out quite by ourselves”’ would best be served by a cowboy – ‘“isn’t he what you want?”’ (p. 28). Such a hero, a model of untroubled masculinity, was soon, in fact, to figure in the novel written by James’s young friend Owen Wister, The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains (1902), precursor of the new genre of the Western. And so Pendrel moves to Europe: having written a brilliant, aptly named ‘Essay in Aid of the Reading of History’, he is rewarded by an unknown English kinsman 305



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who bequeaths him an eighteenth-century London townhouse. Having arrived in the city, he wanders through the house and, after one nocturnal visit realizes in a gripping scene that the figure he has noticed in reflection carrying a candle is in fact his own alter ego who has materialized from a puzzling portrait of a young man whose face is turned away from the onlooker. Pendrel recounts his experience to a friendly American ambassador (based on James Russell Lowell), and, returning to the house, steps into the 1820s, to inhabit an earlier self and a pre-existing social place. He is betrothed to the eldest daughter of the Midmore family, though finds himself attracted to her younger sister.With his innate twentieth-century sensibility he falls under suspicion from other young men, a Midmore brother and an aristocrat who hopes himself to marry the younger sister. Recognizing his own ‘malaise’, Pendrel longs for his own century. Here, where the ‘reading of history’ entails unexpected and disturbingly ironic insights and the idea of destiny is exposed as banal, the fragment ends. In his August 1900 note on the novel James records a troubling vision (on a night journey from Brighton) of ‘3 or 4 “scared” and slightly modern American figures moving against the background of three or four European milieux … hurried by their fate … in search of, in flight from, something or other’, an insight at the time ‘too faintly glimmering’ (CN, pp. 190–191).This flight and its meaning has only the broadest application to The Sense of the Past, though it anticipates psychologically darker and more threatening experiences explored in a number of his later ghostly stories. The contemporary Pendrel in the opening scenes of The Sense of the Past becomes a furtive observer of his house, feeling both uneasy and happy as he hangs about ‘under cover of night’. He favours a solitary darkness and silence, ‘the force of the stillness in which nothing happened’ (pp. 50, 79). It was intended that the plot of this unfinished novel should turn on its hero’s romantic attachments: Pendrel, once discovered by his fiancée of an earlier era to be an imposter, was to have been helped to return to the present and claim, this time successfully, Mrs Coyne. Yet often it is the connections between men, sometimes mediated by means of their relationships with women, to which James seems most imaginatively committed. In his construction of a Europe of the past – however fantastic – men are characteristically freed from any such simple, stereotypical role as that of the rhetorical cowboy, and boundaries are less defined. In his dealings with his prospective brother-in-law Perry, a countrified figure from the world of Oliver Goldsmith with a ‘very human homely odour’ (p. 153), Pendrel must persuade him not only of the desirability of his marriage, but also of his own authentically nineteenth-century identity. He looks at Perry, and ‘[i]t made him drive his address home, and this was, in the oddest way, as if he had his host by the body in a sort of intimate combat and were trying him and squeezing him for a fall’ (p. 158). The sense of physical contact seems to transcend the formalized aggression of the wrestling match, as if in such tableaux James were examining and re-imagining 306



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conventional masculine behaviours. Even the social order is momentarily transgressed when Pendrel exchanges conspiratorial looks with the young footman who announces Perry: he is ‘struck at once with this young man’s almost wild sidelong stare at him, a positively droll departure from the strict servile propriety the fellow seemed otherwise formed to express’ (p. 147). Pendrel’s relationship with the Ambassador at the beginning of The Sense of the Past similarly revises established modes of behaviour between men and, indeed, between generations.The Ambassador offers much paternal reassurance with the laying on and retention of a ‘reassuring hand’, but the courtly, somewhat coy flattery Pendrel is offered adjusts this traditional set of roles (p. 94). In their playful dialogue with the novel’s title, the Pendrel of the past is cherished as cultivating, not a ‘“sense of the present”’, as the Ambassador suggests, but a ‘“sense of the future”’ (p. 101). ‘“I’m not worse looking, even if I’m not better”’, the young man exclaims: his companion ‘handsomely’ replies, ‘“You couldn’t very well be better!”’ (pp. 97–98). James may (as Leon Edel asserts) have been thinking of his own relations with Hendrik Andersen and the undoubted pleasure the younger man brought him, of the contrasts between youth and age, of his own long past and Andersen’s potentially bright future. Later in the narrative, Pendrel’s earlier American romance is dismissed by his English betrothed; he agrees: ‘“Yes, it’s a thin shade – and melts away hiding its face, even while I look back at it”’, as if realizing the transitory, sometimes faithless nature of experience and memory (p. 207). He goes on to admit (in a characteristically Jamesian way) that, thanks to his prospective sister-in-law, he has ‘“lived into”’ a new ‘“truth”’ (p. 209): the insight might be regarded as an assertion of James’s own sense of self-renewal. Having released himself from earlier evasions or uneasy compromises, and laid to rest remembered personal ghosts, he has reached his own ‘truth’ and embraced the varieties of male experience. Like Pendrel, who asserts that he has cultivated his imagination, James might have proclaimed, ‘“now I’m ready for anything”’ (pp. 247, 209).

The Sacred Fount This turn-of-the-century period was highly productive for James. Aside from a quantity of tales, a substantial amount of The Sense of the Past was begun, an early scenario for The Ambassadors drafted, and, in the spring of 1900 work began on a short story which quickly outgrew its modest beginnings to become The Sacred Fount, submitted to Pinker by that summer. Doubtless the financial outlay involved in buying Lamb House reminded him forcefully of the need to produce, though it is clear that he never had to search for subject matter. The first thoughts for The Sacred Fount are recorded in a note for 17 February 1894 and they are based on an idea suggested by Irish clergyman and writer Stopford Brooke. James pondered 307



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‘[t]he notion of the young man who marries an older woman and who has the effect on her of making her younger and still younger, while he himself becomes her age’, or, alternatively, ‘[a] clever woman marries a deadly dull man, and loses and loses her wit as he shows more and more. Or the idea of a liaison, suspected, but of which there is no proof ….’ (CN, p. 88). The novel begins with a railway journey from London’s Paddington station and the action – such as it is – takes place over a weekend in a luxurious country house called Newmarch, located somewhere beyond Birmingham.The unnamed narrator (whose reliability grows steadily more suspect) travels with Mrs Brissenden and, amazed at her youthful beauty (she is in her early forties), concludes that her younger husband, Guy, ‘thirty at the most’ but who now looks sixty (p. 17), exemplifies James’s original ‘concetto’, the increasingly unequal sharing between them of the life resources of the ‘sacred fount’. The other travelling companion is Gilbert Long, a man known to, but not liked by the narrator, who now turns out to be urbane and friendly. What can have caused this transformation? – he must be deriving sustenance from a relationship with a woman. It becomes the narrator’s quest to solve the mystery of a supposed romantic affair being conducted among the assembled individuals – Grace and Guy Brissenden, Mrs May Server, Lady John, Gilbert Long and the painter Ford Obert – to read what the latter calls ‘the psychologic signs’ without resorting to the more ‘ignoble’ behaviour associated with ‘the detective and the keyhole’ (p. 38).The narrative continues through a series of encounters and observations whose significance remains unvalidated, though sometimes challenged by others. Lacking much opportunity for emotional engagement, the reader is encouraged to follow a hermeneutical parable, to consider the nature of representation, the means by which we see and interpret events. Though a number of potential liaisons is speculated upon, the back views of protagonists frequently observed seem to signify the unknowability of others. Indeed at one point, seeing only the foot of a gentleman, ‘a brown shoe in a white gaiter’, Mrs Brissenden fails to identify her own husband – one of a number of wryly comic moments (p. 48). A further emblematic questioning of identity and concealment occurs in Newmarch’s ‘great pictured saloon’ when a number of guests gather around the portrait of an unknown young man holding a mask, a picture which seems to have been a Jamesian invention. The lookers-on observe each other as well as the painting; conversations take place alongside other cryptic, silent exchanges. The portrait invites a multiplicity of interpretations, an emblem of the novel’s pervading hermeneutic theme, unyielding and sinister, ‘the picture, of all pictures, that most needs an interpreter’: The figure represented is a young man in black – a quaint, tight black dress, fashioned in years long past; with a pale, lean, livid face and a stare, from eyes without eyebrows,

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  1899 –1902  like that of some whitened old-world clown. In his hand he holds an object that strikes the spectator at first simply as some obscure, some ambiguous work of art, but that on a second view becomes a representation of a human face, modelled and coloured, in wax, in enamelled metal, in some substance not human. The object thus appears a complete mask, such as might have been fantastically fitted and worn.

The picture invites multiple, sometimes conflicting readings: it is perhaps ‘the Mask of Death’, or, conversely, ‘“blooming and beautiful”’, ‘the Mask of Life’. By contrast, the living man’s face might itself be Death.To one observer the mask has ‘“an awful grimace”’, though for others it appears ‘“extremely studied”’ and ‘“charmingly pretty”’. The painter in the assembled group adjusts the subject’s gender, seeing ‘a lovely lady’, while the pale figure in the portrait reminds them all tantalizingly of ‘some face in our party’ (who turns out, at least for the narrator, to be Guy Brissenden) (pp. 30–35).Yet it is also, seemingly, a face associated with the Commedia dell’Arte, or Commedia alla maschera, the masked comedy, and the melancholy figure of Pierrot. Continuing the allusion, the narrator later imagines himself as a related character, Pantalone, older and masked, traditionally avaricious and amorous, and ‘the object of Pierrot’s affections’ (p. 199n.). The picture with its onlookers promotes a multiplicity of unresolved perspectives and judgments, illustrating the subjective nature of interpretation. As the entire narrative suggests, impressions can be powerful, silence and indirection may be eloquent, the straightforwardly representational may even operate duplicitously. The narrator himself admits to fostering a ‘complex tangle of hypotheses’, to being ‘meddlesome’, his ‘superior vision’ perhaps simply a ‘frenzied fallacy’ (pp. 99, 102, 101). His conclusion that Mrs Briss (as she is known), in whom he has fully confided and who is, he is forced to concede, unreliable, is having an affair with Gilbert Long offers a form of resolution. He knows, though, that he has at times been misled and the reader’s confidence, too, is similarly and regularly undermined. The Sacred Fount has been regarded as a proto-modernist work and the way in which conventional narrative certainties are eroded, its absence of a sense of sequence or inevitability, its reliance on demanding, convoluted dialogue (the narrator’s nocturnal interview with Mrs Briss, for instance, fills the final three chapters, covering some 40 pages) combine to suggest that the ‘human complication’ is a minor concern, that the real subject is something philosophically broader relating to the way in which we are to read reality. It is perhaps significant – or reassuring – that in a later work, The American Scene, James, returning to an American ­homeland both familiar yet at times shockingly changed, argues in passing that not all experience of the phenomenal world is to be apprehended: sometimes its messages must remain untranslated. We may want to ‘make a sense’ of ‘the cluster of appearances’, but sometimes have to accept ‘incoherence’ and ‘to present and portray it, in all richness, for incoherence’ (AS, p. 290). 309



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James decided to exclude The Sacred Fount from the New York Edition of his fiction, but the novel has proved to be an interesting challenge to many more recent readers who have adopted a range of critical, cultural and historicist approaches relating to art and how it is interpreted, the depiction of privilege and its political context, the contrasts between private and public identities, and the dangers of desire within a vigilant, repressive society. One of the novel’s most fundamental problems relates to the fact that, unlike such novels as What Maisie Knew, or The Awkward Age, whose donnée or material is comparably unsavoury, The Sacred Fount lacks a voice which might constitute a moral perspective, and the reader, in any case, might find it hard to be interested in who is having an affair with whom. The novel was not a success on its appearance in February 1901 and sales were slow both in Britain and America. The reviewer in the paper for which James had once worked, the New-York Tribune, slyly imagined him waking up ‘one fine day’ to slap his forehead and exclaim, ‘“Goodness! I forgot to say anything about the fount!”’ (CR, p. 338). James had rightly judged that it wouldn’t ‘do for serialisation’, yet in optimistic vein, wrote to his agent that he thought it ‘fanciful, fantastic – but very close and sustained, and calculated to minister to curiosity’. In fact, it was met by a degree of incomprehension. Even Mrs Humphry Ward, with her formidable Arnoldian intellect, seems to have misread some of the novel’s events (though she had had similar problems on other occasions, too). James reassured her that the work was ‘the merest of jeux d’esprit’ which had grown from its origins as ‘a single magazine instalment’: it should be read simply as ‘a consistent joke’. But he had had earlier misgivings and might well have ‘“chucked”’ the work if that had not been wasteful. He confided to Morton Fullerton that ‘I shall never do the like again’. The novel had been read aloud in the household of W.D. Howells, nevertheless, a scene difficult to imagine; its author was understandably touched and concerned: ‘I am melted at your reading en famille The Sacred Fount, which you will, I fear, have found chaff in the mouth …’. In a more public context, and in apparent innocence, Howells had asked, ‘why should not a novel be written so like to life, in which most of the events remain the meaningless, that we shall never quite know what the author meant?’.10

Country and Town Life James was by now a firmly established part of the Rye community; visitors accompanying him on walks frequently commented on his cordial relations with locals who greeted him in the street. But in wintertime the place could feel bleak and isolated. On William and Alice James’s departure after Christmas 1899, he complained that ‘[m]ere diluvian sleet & slush rule the day. This day has been the climax – a muddle of snow & rain & biting wind, & a pall of sodden, snow tonight, 310



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over all’. The absence of society and engagements of the kind available in London left him free to work, though he found ‘[t]he lack of human intercourse … rather excessive’. A few weeks later he wrote to his brother, having retreated to the room he had now taken in the Reform Club, that ‘[e]very one has been absurdly kind & welcoming, & London, so stale to me 2 years ago, most renewedly amusing & exciting’. After some months his accommodation had been fitted out satisfactorily: ‘having bed, matting, window-blind & curtains installed, the advantage of possession of it brings tears of appreciation to my eyes. It will really, I think, be a towncradle for my declining years’. In time he came to divide his year between town and country, favouring Lamb House predominantly for spring and summer, though it seems, too, that wherever he was, he often felt nostalgic about his alternative residence. When in Rye, James was characteristically hospitable, developing avuncular friendships with other, relatively local writers. He was much admired by Joseph Conrad who lived with his family near Hythe, Kent. Without becoming intimates, the two men shared a mutual respect as well as similarly high aspirations for the novel as a medium. Conrad was collaborating in writing fiction with Ford Madox Hueffer, who lived in nearby Winchelsea and whom James had met in 1896. James’s amanuensis-secretary, Miss Mary Weld, commented at the time that when out walking with her employer, evasive action had sometimes to be taken to avoid being waylaid by the younger man, his ‘literary flatterer’.11 Not far from Rye, H.G. Wells had settled for the time in Sandgate, on the Kent coast, just outside Folkestone. James had asked him for a copy of his 1895 novel, The Time Machine, duly offering his congratulations on reading it: ‘[y]ou are very magnificent. I am beastly critical – but you are in a still higher degree wonderful’. Sometimes, too, Rudyard Kipling, who was living on the coast at Rottingdean and by now highly successful, would visit in his motor-car. James thought him a genius, though privately harbouring misgivings about his ‘loud, brazen patriotic verse’. Though much respected by this younger generation of writers, James evidently despaired at times of himself and the age in which he lived. Queen Victoria, who had been on the British throne since before he was born, was in failing health and nearing the end of her life, while Britain’s commitment to the Boer War in South Africa divided political opinion in the country. As he confessed to Wells, ‘[t]he weather, the news, the solitary stress of January, Rye and the newspapers combined, have darkened my days and bedevilled my nights’. In a personal act of defiance against the passing years, in May 1900, James shaved off his beard, worn since he was twenty-one, ‘unable to bear longer the increased hoariness of its growth.… Now, I feel forty – & clean & light’. He would remain clean shaven for the rest of his life. A letter from the autumn of that year indicates a profound unhappiness, however. He writes to Morton Fullerton, sympathizing with some unsettling circumstance in the younger man’s life while 311



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sharing, too, his own malaise. It is a rare moment of intimacy in his letters, reflecting a sense of enduring futility at the centre of his life: The grey years gather; the arid spaces lengthen, damn them – or at any rate don’t shorten; what doesn’t come doesn’t, and what goes does.… Hold me then you with any squeeze; grip me with any grip; press me with any pressure; trust me with any trust. I wish I could help you, for instance, by satisfying your desire to know from ‘what port,’ as you say, I set out.… The port from which I set out was, I think, that of the essential loneliness of my life – and it seems to be the port also, in sooth to which my course again finally directs itself! This loneliness, (since I mention it!) – what is it still but the deepest thing about one? Deeper about me, at any rate, than anything else …

The Ambassadors As if in accord with James’s self-examination at the beginning of a new century, his ridding himself of his beard and his current fictional portrayal of a disappointed man with little to show for his life, his younger cousin Bay Emmet came to Lamb House in the hot summer of 1900 to paint his portrait. She had been studying in Paris and was keen to return to America. Henry admired her work, and hoped, he told William, that she wouldn’t marry – returning to an old conviction that art and marriage cannot mix. Though he later joked with Bay about her portrait of the ‘smooth and anxious clerical gentleman in the spotted necktie’, it found nevertheless a permanent place in his dining room, reminding him, as he said, ‘of our so genial, roasting romantic summer-before-last here together, when we took grassy walks at even-tide, and in the sunset, after each afternoon’s repainting’.12 Now, aged 57, James was in this new century to embark on what has been called his ‘major phase’,13 marked by three substantial novels which represent his greatest achievement. He began preparatory work that summer on The Ambassadors. Its aging American hero, Lewis Lambert Strether, an unassuming almost Prufrockian figure, has much in common with his creator, a correspondence pointed out by James to his friend Jocelyn Persse: ‘if you are able successfully to struggle with it try to like the poor old hero, in whom you will perhaps find a vague resemblance (though not facial!) to yours always / Henry James’. Aside from being sidelined and occasionally humiliated as an observer of a richer, busier, and indeed younger world, he emerges, too, as a man of imagination, a mixed blessing, it seems. By 1 September James had completed his outline, or ‘Project of Novel’. A substantial piece of writing of some 20,000 words, it was prepared for Harper & Brothers in New York with typical thoroughness. It is a rare document which he later described as a ‘voluminous effusion … so extremely familiar, confidential & intimate – in the form of an interminable garrulous letter addressed to my own fond fancy’, the kind of material 312



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which was usually destroyed. The novel was to be ‘the picture of a certain momentous and interesting period, of some six months or so, in the history of a man no longer in the prime of life, yet still able to live with sufficient intensity to be a source of what may be called excitement to himself, not less than to the reader of his record’. The ‘excitement’ will be experienced by a man considered ‘exceptionally “clever”’, but jaded, and ‘disenchanted without having known any great enchantments, enchanters, or, above all, enchantresses’ (CN, p. 543). The novel’s inspiration, the ‘dropped grain of suggestion’ (LC 2: 1304), was, as James recorded, a conversation related to him by Jonathan Sturges which had taken place in the Paris garden of the painter Whistler. The young man had been told by William Dean Howells, ‘“Oh, you are young, you are young – be glad of it: be glad of it and live. Live all you can: it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what you do – but live …”’ (CN, p. 141). ‘I saw the scene of my young friend’s anecdote’, James recalls, in this moment when experience addresses youth, and he returns to the conversation again in the prefatory paragraphs of his ‘Project of Novel’ (p. 542). The correspondence with James’s own poignant sense of lost time and seemingly limited achievement, of a life lacking direction, is evident and it is this advice to embrace life before it is too late that is offered by Strether to the struggling young painter, Little Bilham, in The Ambassadors (p. 135). Paris forms the principal setting for the novel, drawing extensively on James’s own experience of the city which stretched back to his infancy. Lambert Strether, whose wife and young son are long dead, has been deputed by the rich Mrs Newsome, whom he wishes to marry, to fetch her son Chad back from Paris where she fears he may be involved in an undesirable liaison. The Newsomes’ wealth, to which Chad is heir, is founded on the manufacture of some ‘“rather ridiculous object of the commonest domestic use”’ (p. 36), which remains, typically and intriguingly, a mystery. Chad must return quickly if he is to be a part of this flourishing enterprise in the fictional Massachusetts town of Woollett, the kind of place that you mention to others, ‘“as if you wanted one immediately to know the worst”’, Strether’s new friend, Maria Gostrey, remarks with Wildean sharpness (p. 8). The novel’s hero feels, quite simply, that he has ‘missed the train’ and ‘the fun’ of life: ‘[i]f the playhouse was not closed, his seat at least had fallen to somebody else’ (p. 54). Unlike his unhappy old lawyer friend, Waymarsh, who remains for the time impervious to the charms of the French capital, Strether is reminded of a previous visit made with his wife, guiltily admiring once again this ‘vast bright Babylon, like some huge iridescent object, a jewel brilliant and hard’ (p. 55). Little Bilham tells Strether that he believes his friend Chad’s romantic relationship to be ‘“a virtuous attachment”’ (p. 112). Strether meets the beautiful Mme. de Vionnet and her innocent daughter, Jeanne, first believing that Chad is in love with the girl, though he learns later that it is his friendship with Mme de Vionnet that keeps him in Paris. Captivated by the city and those he meets, Strether hesitates to act; surreptitiously 313



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tipped off by Waymarsh, the distant Mrs Newsome deputes her daughter Sarah Pocock, her son-in-law, Jim, and his sister Mamie to come and retrieve her errant son. Strether thus finds himself the outgoing ambassador, eliminated also from the loop of transatlantic correspondence of which he has been a part. Chad works hard to entertain them – Sarah is taken about by a revived Waymarsh, Mamie is attracted to Little Bilham, and Strether, generally neglected, is left uncertain as to his fate. Sarah, avoiding any confrontation with Chad himself, finally and privately denounces Strether, blaming him for encouraging her brother’s relationship with Mme. de Vionnet: ‘“[w]hat is your conduct but an outrage to women like us?”’, she demands, meaning the virtuous women of Woollett (p. 312). Strether meets Sarah’s aggression with restraint, even requesting a second interview before the Pocock entourage, accompanied by Waymarsh and Bilham, leave for a stay in Switzerland. Strether has even pitied Waymarsh for the fibs he has been driven to invent. One further humiliation awaits Strether who takes a trip to the country, a scene of ‘French ruralism’, which reminds him of a landscape painting by Émile Lambinet which he had failed to buy long ago in Boston (p. 342). The choice of painter is appropriate: Lambinet and the French Barbizon school of painters which he anticipated proved highly popular in New England in the later decades of the nineteenth century, exemplifying, as James elsewhere observes, ‘the idea of the modern in the masterly’ (SBO, p. 270). On his excursion Strether has the impression of entering the same Lambinet landscape, a composition with silver-turquoise sky, a white village, and a grey church, as if that earlier missed opportunity had been restored. As he stands on the riverbank awaiting his evening meal at an inn, he notices in the distance a couple approaching in a boat and (as if in a painting) the woman’s parasol marking ‘a pink point in the shining scene’ (p. 350). In a moment, a casual observation becomes a realization which changes everything – a transformation brilliantly imagined by James. The two in the boat are Chad and Mme. de Vionnet: Strether has been betrayed: their relationship is less ‘virtuous’ than he had been led to believe. He rescues the encounter by greeting them, knowing that otherwise they would have slipped by, hoping not to be identified. In the gathering that follows Mme. de Vionnet gives a performance, her discomfort marked only by her unaccustomed lapse into idiomatic French. Yet, undeniably, ‘fiction and fable were … in the air’ (p. 354).They all return together to Paris, as if the couple had not planned to spend the night together at the inn. Earlier incidental deceptions anticipating the riverside meeting have already been practised upon Strether. He suffered a minor betrayal at the hands of Mme. de Vionnet on the arrival of Sarah Pocock, being made to appear as if on intimate terms with her. He finds himself drawn ‘into her boat’ and realizes that in representing him as ‘launched’ into Parisian life, she is ‘giving him over to ruin’. Under Sarah’s ‘brilliant eyes’ he is deputed ‘to keep the adventurous skiff afloat’ and 314



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s­urrenders himself: ‘He took up an oar and, since he was to have the credit of ­pulling, he pulled’. When a few days later he visits Mme. de Vionnet, he feels once again ‘the movement of the vessel itself ’ and concludes that they are both consigned to ‘the same boat’ (pp. 241, 243). Such accommodation on Strether’s part (he thinks himself ‘pusillanimous’) accords with his role more generally and his anxiety in dealing with powerful women. Strether’s confidante, Maria Gostrey, likens Sarah Pocock’s effect upon him as ‘“the point of the bayonet”’, while, in response, thinking also of the controlling influence of Mrs Newsome, he imagines ‘some particularly large iceberg in a cool blue northern sea’ (p. 338). Sarah is her mother’s daughter, associated figuratively with violence and torture, and he is thus reduced, as he says, to ‘wriggling’ (p. 254). Mrs Newsome, a distant but threatening presence, is a pillar of local society, ‘“a Woollett swell”’, Miss Gostrey suggests (p. 39), inimical to Paris and all it represents. She has in a sense provided Strether with a calling or identity: aside from being a prospective wife, she finances the journal of which he is editor, ‘“her tribute to the ideal”’, his name appearing on its green cover, partially rescuing him – though it is an obscure publication – from an inconsequential life (p. 40). Even Mrs Newsome’s handwriting on an unopened envelope, with ‘the sharp downstrokes of her pen’, introduces her fearful presence into a quiet room: he accepts that he must ‘take his punishment’ (pp. 275, 276). Maria Gostrey smilingly observes of women that ‘“We’re abysses”’ – both profound and perilous (p. 145). And when he confides to Jim Pocock that he has not (at least initially) found Sarah ‘fierce’, Strether is knowingly assured that the Newsome women ‘“let you come quite close. They wear their fur smooth side out  – warm side in”’ (p. 237), an unexpected image which may, incidentally, be derived from The Ambassadors, by Hans Holbein the Younger, a painting purchased by London’s National Gallery in 1890. The identity of the two young men dressed sumptuously in fur robes was much discussed in the press of the day, a subject which James would not have missed. It is an elusive work containing a range of emblematic objects inviting interpretation, of which the most celebrated is the centrally placed distorted skull, a memento mori, which becomes identifiable only when the viewer stands to the side of the painting – when point of view offers crucial insight. Strether’s ambassadorial role fails through others’ deceptions, though he himself is at times diffident. Arriving in Paris, he turns up at Chad’s address on the boulevard Malesherbes and waits outside, hoping to be noticed. He is indeed watched (significantly from above) by a figure from the third-floor balcony who turns out to be, not Chad, but Little Bilham, and a silent but friendly – even flirtatious – rapport is established between them. He is charmed by the promise of what his own life lacks: ‘There was youth in that, there was youth in the surrender to the balcony, there was youth for Strether at this moment in everything but his own business’ (p. 61). Yet even at the end when he has been betrayed by the lovers, it is Strether 315



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who makes the next conciliatory move, appearing at the Boulevard Malesherbes to find Chad (and not Little Bilham) leaning ‘on the balcony of the mystic troisième’: ‘it was as if his last day were oddly copying his first’ (p. 381). Chad has achieved much that Strether has missed. As James observed many years later, Strether’s relationship with the younger man ‘consists above all in a charmed & yearning & wondering sense, a dimly envious sense, of all Chad’s young living & easily-taken other relations’. When he and Maria Gostrey speculate as to who might be considered the right marriageable age for Chad, Strether asks in a comically camp way, ‘“Do you think anyone would be too old for him? I’m eighty and I’m too young”’ (p. 117).At other times he adopts a subservient comic, feminized role, tucking the unhappy Waymarsh into bed in their Chester hotel, or casting himself as ‘the laundress bringing home the triumphs of the mangle’ when he tells Chad of his interview with Sarah Pocock (p. 319). Even his name, Lewis Lambert Strether, invokes for Maria an unsound literary pedigree, a bad novel, Louis Lambert, by Balzac – a work James regarded as ‘now quite unreadable’ (LC 2: 76).14 When he attends Gloriani’s party (the sculptor who had first appeared in Roderick Hudson) he is neglected by both Chad and Mme. de Vionnet. She fails to introduce him to other guests,‘a note’ he justly observes as ‘false to the Woollett scale and the Woollett humanity’ (p. 133). The new Parisian Chad who is causing such anxiety for his distant mother, becomes for Strether an object to gaze upon. As the two men sit together in a latenight café the elder becomes lost for words, and his impression (in typically lateJamesian manner) ends in bathos: ‘Chad looked unmistakably during these instants – well, as Strether put it to himself, all he was worth’. It is an insight laced with desire: he sees Chad ‘in a flash, as the young man marked out by women’ and he is affected ‘almost with awe’: ‘So that was the way men marked out by women were’ (p. 95). As they later stand together under a streetlamp, Chad’s raised face is illuminated as if he is ‘designedly showing himself ’, asserting ‘his palpable presence and his massive young manhood’ (p. 97). Strether, recalled by James as a man of ‘blest imagination’ (LC 2: 1311), realizes that he is ‘dealing with an irreducible young pagan’, a ‘rousing personage’, who might conceivably benefit the life of Woollett (p. 97). The moment of apotheosis passes and Chad turns from the light; Strether is left with a memory of ‘the happy young pagan, handsome and hard’ (p. 146). Whatever his relationships with women – with the offstage but formidable Mrs Newsome, with Maria Gostrey, occasionally ‘the priestess of the oracle’ (p. 82), and Mme. de Vionnet, whose presence and apartment evoke the spirit of the French Romantic age, as well as the distant scent of blood and revolution – it is his relationship with Chad that shows him at his most engaged. It may well be that James’s own relationships with younger men lie ‘back of this’, as Mr Waymarsh would say. The novel’s final pages hint at an uncertain future. Chad, warned by Strether against ‘“the last infamy”’ – the possibility of his abandoning Mme de 316



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Vionnet – replies that he is ‘“not a bit tired of her”’, terms considered as more appropriate for the discussion of ‘roast mutton for dinner’ (p. 386). Strether himself may have failed his fiancée, Mrs Newsome, in his ambassadorial mission, but there is no doubt that his integrity and generosity of spirit, stand in sharp contrast to Chad’s often self-serving treatment of others. In Strether’s final scene with the sympathetic Maria Gostrey the two face each other across the table, ‘as if things unuttered were in the air’ (p. 390), a silence which might be compared to James’s own response to the affection of Fenimore. It is a farewell scene long planned by the novelist: ‘We see him on the eve of departure, with whatever awaits him là-bas, and their lingering, ripe separation is the last note’ (CN, p. 575). Strether takes back to America only his seventy volumes of Victor Hugo in red and gold binding, ‘a miracle of cheapness’ (p. 186), and he finally comments, with a favourite exclamation of James himself, ‘“then there we are!”’ (p. 395). The textual history of The Ambassadors is complex and still partly unresolved. It was published first as a serial, only in America, in the North American Review (January–December 1903), an honour possibly engineered by W.D. Howells (who also contributed an essay on ‘Mr. Henry James’s Later Work’ in the January number), for the journal had not previously published fiction. The serialization was, in fact, so slow to begin that Pinker and James almost withdrew it from Harper in June 1902, some nine months after the company had received it. The novel appeared in England in book form in September 1903, published by Methuen, and in America two months later. To fit with the twelve serial numbers, James had been compelled to make a number of cuts (in effect, three and a half chapters), an ‘unexpected barbarity’, as he thought, which had to be restored for book publication.15 Since proofs had to cross the Atlantic, some delays occurred: Harper’s were also slow in sending proofs, and a package of material was left waiting at the Reform Club, despite James’s forwarding instructions. Proof-checking proved so onerous that he was even forced to consult his pre-serialization copy of the original typescript. The most significant outcome for the book version involves an entire chapter and the order of the novel’s events: the Harper editor in restoring the omitted serial chapter placed the episode in which Strether tells Maria of his conversation with Chad of the previous night before the conversation itself takes place.The Methuen edition, on the other hand, presented events chronologically. Opinion has remained divided on the intended sequence, but the judgment reached by the novel’s most recent editor, Nicola Bradbury, favours Chapter 28 as containing the Strether-Chad interview (pp. xlix–lv), preceding the scene between Strether and Maria Gostrey, as published by Methuen. It is possible that James himself, always punctilious about his texts, may never have noticed the anomaly, for when he came to revise The Ambassadors for the New York Edition he simply followed the order of the Harper’s edition. The Ambassadors was widely reviewed in both Britain and America and many critics complained about the complexity or obscurity of James’s prose. The Times 317



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Literary Supplement, for instance, thought the ‘cleverness’ to be ‘baffling’ and the novel’s ‘method’ to give ‘an impression of undue dilatoriness in undoing a simple knot’ (CR, p. 394). Arnold Bennett read only the first third of the work, recording in his Journal, ‘I came to the conclusion that the book was not quite worth the great trouble of reading it’ (CH, p. 373). Other critics responded, however, with greater insight and James himself thought the novel to be ‘intrinsically, I daresay, the best I have written’, a judgment with which many would now agree. This was a period of considerable creativity for James. In August 1900, he had published another substantial collection of twelve tales, The Soft Side, all of them written within the past two years. He also produced introductory essays on Balzac and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, requested by Edmund Gosse for his series, A Century of French Romance.The planned biography of William Wetmore Story had still, however, to be written and he wrote a little disingenuously to Story’s daughter-in-law in June 1901 that ‘I make very little at the best & I work very slowly & can only do one thing at a time, & am in every way a very discouraging & disappointing producer even to myself ’.

Life at Lamb House James spent Christmas 1900 at Rye in the company of his young niece, Peggy, now in her early teens. It was a quiet time and he had been suffering for several months from eczema on his face and body, a complaint readily aggravated and slow to clear. Peggy was encouraged to entertain herself in reading some of the novels of Sir Walter Scott and to join her uncle in walking the dog. Her parents, William and Alice, had been in Europe since 1899, principally still seeking suitable treatment for William’s heart condition, though this was proving a difficult, time-consuming task. Peggy was attending a school in Harrow, northwest London, lodging with a local family where she was not especially happy, and James, who enjoyed her company, sometimes took her with some friends to the theatre or an early cinematic show. This became an important relationship for the elderly bachelor, and it seems that he felt he must encourage Peggy’s liberal education. He reminded her parents of what he and his siblings had suffered, warning them against any ‘preoccupation (too strong, at least) of the moral & spiritual in her training & formation! We (father’s children,) were sacrificed to that too-exclusive preoccupation: & you see in Wm & me, & above all in Bob, the funeste consequences!’. On 22 January 1901 Queen Victoria died. She had acceded to the British throne in 1837 and had been a widow since 1861: the nation’s grief was genuine and widespread. James had been repelled by the vulgarity, as well as the inconvenience of her Diamond Jubilee celebrations of 1897, but now with her death, he recognized both the Queen’s courage and the affection in which she was held. He wrote to William 318



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Figure 5  Henry and William James, 1901, photograph by Marie Leon GRANGER - Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

on black-bordered notepaper from the Reform Club,‘[i]t has really been, the Event, most moving, interesting & picturesque. I have felt more moved, much, than I should have expected (such is community of sentiment,) & one has realized all sorts of things about the brave old woman’s beneficent duration & holding-together virtue’. His expectations of her heir, the Prince of Wales, currently ‘“carrying on”’ with Mrs George Keppel, were also depressingly low. Having arranged a place for Peggy to watch the impressive funeral cortege, her uncle watched the procession with the Vanderbilt family at Buckingham Gate. Returning to Rye for a few days in March, though suffering from lumbago, James consulted with his gardener, George Gammon, winner of many prizes at the local horticultural show, over plans for the Lamb House garden. In May 1901, William gave the first of his delayed Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh University; it was an important event, and his text was later published as The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902). He and his family returned to America at the end of August, though the two brothers had some photographic portraits made by Marie Leon before William left. Henry thought they did justice to William who appeared ‘excellent, beautiful, in both’, though he felt he himself had been ‘fearfully sacrificed in each’, wickedly comparing himself to ‘her late Britannic majesty’. Having been in declining health for some years, Mrs Katharine Bronson died in February 1901. Like William James, she had sought treatment for her heart condition in Germany. She had also been attended by Dr Baldwin of Florence who, since Alice James’s consultations in the early 1890s, had become a friend both of Henry and William James. In her later years, Mrs Bronson had converted to Roman Catholicism and, largely abandoning Venice, retreated to her more modest residence at Asolo. She spent her last months in Florence, first at the Villa Mercede on Bellosguardo, before moving down into the city. A number of years later, James 319



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would begin a sketch, ‘The K.B. Case and Mrs. Max’, involving a young New York widow, ‘the “sympathetic American”’, modelled on his dead friend, ‘K.B.’, in preparing for The Ivory Tower, one of his unfinished novels. In a letter of condolence written to Mrs Bronson’s daughter, Edith, the Contessa Rucellai, James sorrowfully confessed that ‘her death makes me feel strangely older and sadder. It is the end of so many things – so many delightful memories, histories, associations – some of the happiest elements of one’s own past’. Over that summer James entertained a succession of friends, American and British, at Lamb House and Peggy also spent much of the holiday with her uncle. Long-awaited, too, was the return of Hendrik Andersen who crossed from France to spend several days at Rye in September, though these visits were never long enough for James. He arranged to meet the young sculptor at the railway station, promising to ‘take very personal possession’ of him. And as for his visit, he promised that ‘I shall make you try to stretch it out further … come the first moment you can; and above all think of me as impatiently and tenderly yours’. This would be Andersen’s longest stay, though, in the event, James’s pleasure was partially marred by a domestic crisis: Charles Smith and his wife, Lydia Fanny, butler and cook, who had worked for him in London as well as Rye, and whose heavy drinking had been for a long time a source of anxiety, had had finally to be dismissed. James invariably treated his servants well and generously and even now he sent the incapable couple off in the care of Mrs Smith’s sister. As he wrote melodramatically to Alice James, ‘Lamb House itself has been a scene of woe … the tragedy of the Doom of the Smiths has in the course of six or seven days been completely acted and is over. The romance of sixteen years is closed, and I sit tonight amid the ruins it has left behind’. For several weeks James lacked domestic support, though through Lucy Clifford’s contacts, a highly satisfactory replacement cook-housekeeper was found: in November Mrs Joan Paddington was engaged at a wage of £3.00 per month. James was overheard meeting her on arrival at Rye railway station, announcing that ‘“I have come to meet my doom”’.16 Jonathan Sturges came to Rye once again to spend Christmas, 1901, though it is clear that James continued to find the often inclement winter months there difficult and lonely. One of his long late-night letters to W.D. Howells conveys the quiet mood and atmosphere of Lamb House while also irreverently sketching the demeanour of his silent companion: ‘my faithful hound (a wire-haired fox-terrier of celestial breed) looks up from his dozing in an armchair hard-by to present to me afresh his extraordinary facial resemblance to the late James T. Fields. It’s one of the funniest likenesses I ever saw (and most startling)’. It was Fields (at the time, Howells’s boss at the Atlantic) who had published some of James’s earliest stories. James left Rye for London at the end of January 1902 where he took up his rooms at the Reform Club, though his stay, planned to end in May, proved much shorter. Suffering a serious inflammation of the bowels, he felt compelled to 320



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return to Lamb House where he could be better looked after. By April William and Alice had returned to England for William to deliver his second set of Gifford Lectures beginning on 13 May. They sailed for Boston once more in June, and Henry, finally ridding himself of the lease of his De Vere Gardens apartment, arranged the packing and transport of a selection of its furniture for their home in Cambridge. To avoid excessive duties, the property was designated as belonging to William. Other items were transferred to Rye. It was a rainy summer and in May James learnt of the death after long illness of E.L. Godkin, one of his earliest editors, whom he had last visited just a few weeks earlier in Torquay. The two had been friends for almost forty years.

Some Short Stories James Pinker continued to find it difficult to place James’s stories in the magazines, and, even after acceptance, a long delay often ensued before they were published. In his 1903 collection, The Better Sort, of the eleven tales included, three – ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, ‘The Birthplace’ and ‘The Papers’ – had never appeared in magazines. The novelist, his reputation long established, was continually frustrated at such neglect, and he was frequently driven to fulminate against what he considered to be the inadequacies and vulgarities of contemporary popular culture, and the Press which indulged the public’s misguided taste. In an essay on the French dramatist Edmond Rostand (who had achieved great success with his play Cyrano de Bergerac in 1897) he characterized the era, in terms which now seem unusually foresighted, as ‘the age of the interview, the automobile and the decennial exhibition, the age of the American campaign and Madame Sarah Bernhardt’ (CWHJD, p. 473). James had mocked journalistic practices both in The Reverberator and The Bostonians, and he returns to the subject in ‘The Papers’ (1903), in which he planned to demonstrate the ‘different shows of human egotism and the newspaper scramble’ (CN, p. 200). This long story develops an especially sharp critique of the press (represented predominantly by the aptly named journalist, Howard Bight) which, while manipulating public opinion, serves a widespread taste for scandal and sensation. In ‘Flickerbridge’ (1902) which was published in Scribner’s Magazine, a young painter fails in his attempt to preserve both the tranquillity of a spinster, a kind of ‘“Sleeping Beauty in the wood”’, and her historic house, an emblem of ‘tradition still noiselessly breathing and visibly flushing’, from the intrusions of his journalist fiancée. He laments helplessly that ‘“We live in an age of prodigious machinery, all organised to a single end. That end is publicity – a publicity as ferocious as the appetite of a cannibal”’ (CT 11: 340, 338, 348). ‘The Birthplace’ (1903) takes a broader view of public preferences, in what James called a ‘jeu d’esprit’:17 in this tale the masses willingly conspire in their own 321



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vulgar exploitation.The newly appointed couple employed as curators of a museum house of a venerated poet near Oxford (Shakespeare is never named) are drawn into the historic life of the great artist. Morris Gedge, committed to finding the spirit and mystery of ‘the Poet’, sits in darkness to find enlightenment, while his wife performs as the conventional guide, giving the public what they want.Their bardolatry, a desire for anecdote and the creation (however inauthentic) of a figure who combines the heroic with the reassuringly everyday, must be satisfied; it is a commercial need recognized, too, by the couple’s employers. Gedge must finally abandon his high-minded ideals and the story ends in comic irony with his engaging performance as a Barnum-like showman which results in a ‘rise’ for the couple. These stories reflect upon aspects of James’s professional calling. ‘The Beast in  the Jungle’ (1903) offers points of connection with his life altogether more intimate – a man’s awaiting ‘“something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible”’ to happen to him (CT 11: 359). John Marcher dimly recognizes a woman he met long ago, as he thinks, in Rome – it was, in fact, in Naples, as she points out (a city of less happy associations for James himself). As May Bartram also suggests, Marcher’s memories belonging to ‘the foreign land’ have played tricks on him: ‘he had got most things rather wrong’ (355, 354). In the years that follow, Marcher, bound by his own egotism, continues to get things wrong. When he had confided to her the conviction that he must suffer something destructive, annihilating, or simply all-altering, she asks simply (and unexpectedly) ‘“Isn’t what you describe perhaps but the expectation … of falling in love?”’ (360). He is a haunted man, not knowing whether ‘the crouching beast were destined to slay him or to be slain’ and allowing no woman to accompany him on this ‘tigerhunt’ (365). His life becomes a ‘long act of dissimulation … he wore a mask painted with the social simper’ (368) and May Bartram conspires to help him ‘“pass for a man like another”’ (375).When finally she dies, Marcher realizes all too late that she might have been the means of his having a meaningful life, that she had loved him and that ‘he had failed, with the last exactitude, of all he was to fail of ’ (402). The conviction of something happening too late had been with James for years, a relationship – ‘It’s love, it’s friendship, it’s mutual comprehension’ – and its wasting, a form of death (CN, p. 112). Social dysfunctionality, self-concealment behind an acceptable mask, a malaise identified but remaining mysterious, a chronic sense of dread, a dependence on a woman to represent a normalcy devoid of sexual desire, a compromised masculinity – these features of Marcher’s melodramatic fate, have been read as an example of homosexual panic, most influentially by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.18 The story’s tensions and insights of what he referred to as ‘a very tiny fantaisie’ (CN, p. 199) can be read as a gloss on James’s own sense of catastrophe, the darkness of a life whose path he had chosen but to which he was also confined.

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15 ‘Dearly Beloved’ Young Men: The Final Novels (1902 –1904)

Friendships with Younger Men Hendrik Andersen was just one of a series of younger men with whom James developed an intimate relationship in the first decade of the new century. The dynamics of these friendships were unique to each, though the surviving letters share an expressiveness and candour of feeling not found elsewhere in his correspondence. Closest to James in age, just twelve years younger, was Howard Overing Sturgis whom the novelist had first met in the 1870s. Sturgis’s wealthy New England father, Russell Sturgis, with his wife Julia entertained a distinguished circle of guests in their Carlton House Terrace home. Howard Sturgis had enjoyed a privileged English education – Eton College followed by Trinity College, Cambridge – and when James came to know him well, he was living with William Haynes Smith (familiarly known as ‘the Babe’) at Queen’s Acre, or Qu’acre, a large house near Windsor Great Park he had bought after his mother’s death. Here the two entertained a wide circle of friends, including James who was a frequent guest, though Sturgis occasionally visited Lamb House; James clearly found the unconventional homosocial atmosphere congenial. Sturgis was accomplished in needlepoint and knitting, occupations he had taken up during a ‘delicate’ childhood. James was a valued, magisterial draw for the group, as one of its members, Percy Lubbock, recalled: ‘How we lived on Henry in those days! The breadth of his humour, the swoop of his curiosity, the loftiness of his criticism, the dignity of his isolation …’.1

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Howard Sturgis had published two relatively successful works of fiction before Belchamber appeared in 1904, a novel which follows the unhappy life of ‘Sainty’ Belchamber, ill-suited to the conventional aristocratic sphere to which he belongs. The novel was not well received and Sturgis wrote little else afterwards, though this may have been a consequence of the ongoing private critique offered by James who, typically, based his thoughts on how he himself would have treated the subject. His comments addressed fundamental aspects of the narrative: he felt, for ­instance, that the novel suffered ‘from Sainty’s having no state of his own as the field & stage of the vision & drama – so that the whole thing doesn’t seem to be happening to him: but happening at the most round him’. Sturgis felt so undermined that  – much to James’s surprise and chagrin – he considered withdrawing the work before it was published. Despite this, their relationship prospered, though James’s feelings seem to have been most intense in the pre-Belchamber years. After Sturgis had stayed at Lamb House James wrote, for instance, that ‘[y]ou were a most conformable (don’t read that by mistake comfortable – for who knows?) & delightful guest. I repeat, almost to indiscretion, that I could live with you. Meanwhile I can only try to live without you. It has been going quite hard till now …’. And, as in the relationship with Andersen, James appears grateful for what was a reciprocated affection, while also acknowledging both his loneliness and his increasing age. Returning some proof sheets of Belchamber, he writes, ‘I also applaud, dearest Howard, your expression of attachment to him who holds this pen (& passes it at this moment over very dirty paper;) for he is extremely accessible to such demonstrations & touched by them – more than ever in his lonely (more than) maturity’. The hospitality offered at Qu’Acre was extended to a wide range of guests, predominantly male, though ‘literary’ women were also welcomed; they included James’s old friend, the popular novelist, Rhoda Broughton, and, in later years, Edith Wharton. Arthur Christopher Benson, still teaching at Eton College, was a regular visitor; in 1904 he was to return to Cambridge where he became a Fellow of Magdalene College. Through Benson, James met in 1900 the twenty-one-year-old Percy Lubbock, who had been a pupil at Eton. Lubbock fell in love with James, was invited to Lamb House, and joined James’s admiring circle of friends. The American historian and academic Gaillard Lapsley was also a guest at Qu’Acre. He had first called on James in 1897, carrying a letter of introduction from Isabella Stewart Gardner. Having specialized in medieval history and taught at Stanford University, he moved to Cambridge in 1904. Lapsley was in his mid-twenties when he met James, and the two soon became friends, regularly having dinner or attending the theatre together. He also visited James at Lamb House, where James could promise him a warm welcome: a highly efficient hot water system had been installed in autumn 1906. James corresponded with these young men until his last years, his tone affectionate, sometimes flirtatious and sentimental, and it may well 324



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reflect the atmosphere of Qu’Acre where he must have felt relaxed and valued. When entertaining, he preferred to see them separately, sometimes having to renegotiate dates for meetings so that, as he said to Sturgis, they could be ‘alone & thereby intimate & free-talking’. James met Jocelyn Persse at the wedding of Frances Sitwell and Sir Sidney Colvin on 7 July 1903. Bride and groom had long been friends, indeed, Frances had been admired both by Colvin and Robert Louis Stevenson and their marriage took place after the deaths of her husband and of Colvin’s mother. Jocelyn Persse, thirty years old, fair-haired and handsome, with a wide social circle, belonged to the landed Irish gentry, and his brother was heir to the family estate in County Galway. Persse, however, lived above the Primrose Club in St James’s, a relatively short-lived gentleman’s club established by his father. His aunt was Lady Isabella Augusta Persse Gregory (a friend of James’s) who, with W.B. Yeats and Edward Martyn, had founded the Irish Literary Theatre and the Abbey Theatre in Dublin: she went on to become an influential figure in Irish literature and drama and James had frequented the Gregorys’ weekly salon in London. Jocelyn Persse was not literary, however, and it is clear that James was attracted simply by his physical charm and engaging manner. He responded warmly to James’s overtures, and though much of the latter’s tone in letters seems romantic, even erotic, Persse was also involved in a number of relationships with women and many years later, in 1938, he married an old friend, Lorna Black. Persse enjoyed both the theatre and the music hall and he and James would often have dinner together before their evening’s entertainment. When Persse visited Scotland he hunted and played golf and James seems to take vicarious pleasure in hearing of the young man’s busy social life. The injunction ‘come to me’ runs through his letters. After one of these stays, James urges him to ‘Come to me … with your cup of experience overflowing, & let me taste in you, as always (for envy without a pang,) this genius for personally, & all so successfully, existing!’. When Persse visited Italy in spring 1906, James ordered him to ‘drink as deep of the cup as you may, & come back to me here & breathe forth something of the scent and the taste’. And the following year when a similar trip was made, James exclaimed, ‘I rejoice at any rate that you are stuffing yourself with impressions & I propose to  pick them out plum by plum. Therefore come back as gorged & replete as ­possible – you will fit tighter into my embrace!’. James relished, it seems, this more sedentary role, exchanging photographs, waiting patiently for his return, and addressing him in the most physically sensuous and affectionate terms. He also acted as one of Persse’s sponsors when he wanted to join the Athenaeum Club (of which James was a member), though having gently to correct his spelling of the institution’s name from ‘Ethaneum’ (p. 85). The relationship was not one-sided (as was perhaps the case with Andersen), for Persse himself held James in great affection, clear from his modest admission to Leon Edel 325



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in 1937 that ‘H.J. was the dearest human being I have ever known. Why he liked me so much I cannot say’. On 10 June 1902 William and Alice James sailed from Liverpool for Boston, though by July no fewer than five Emmet girls had arrived in Rye (two staying with Henry, the others at the local Mermaid inn). William’s Varieties of Religious Experience had recently appeared, a volume read, as his brother said, ‘with such rapturous deliberation as so many Emmets in the air … permit’. The items of Henry’s furniture from his London apartment had arrived safely, and Alice had dealt successfully with the Customs officials who visited their Cambridge house for an inspection.William had already left for Chocorua. During that wet English summer James also read The Virginian, Owen Wister’s recent novel of the American west, which he much admired, singling out for especial praise ‘the exhibition, to the last intimacy’ of the novel’s hero: ‘you have made him live, with a high, but lucid complexity, from head to foot and from beginning to end … you have reached him with an admirable objectivity, and I find the whole thing a rare and remarkable feat’. Inevitably, he voiced certain reservations, regretting especially the Virginian’s marriage at the end ‘to the little Vermont person’: ‘I should have made him perish in his flower and in some splendid noble way’.

The Wings of the Dove Despite dispensing hospitality to friends and relatives during these years when the noise of luggage ascending and descending the staircase regularly resounded through Lamb House, James continued with his work. He had made a start on The Wings of the Dove in early 1900, only to lay it aside to make way for The Ambassadors. According to her diary he began dictating The Wings of the Dove to Miss Weld once more on 9 July 1901.2 He completed the novel in May 1902, and it was published in late August in both Britain and America, though James was disappointed that it ‘had ignominiously failed, in advance, of all power to see itself “serialised”’. It was a subject with which James had lived for many years; in fact, he could hardly remember a time when it was not ‘visibly present’ to him (LC 2, 1293, 1287). The novel’s heroine, Milly Theale, is based on Minny Temple (also M.T.), his much-loved, long-dead cousin. Other details point more broadly to biographical parallels with James family ancestors, rich men mainly, but often dysfunctional and shamed, to whom the novelist would return in his late autobiographical reminiscences. Milly is the ‘final flower’ of a ‘luxuriant tribe’, an ‘immense, extravagant, unregulated cluster, with free-living ancestors, handsome dead cousins, lurid uncles, beautiful vanished aunts, persons all busts and curls, preserved … in the marble of famous French chisels’ (p. 93). Like James himself, she belongs to ‘moneyed New York’, an anomalous group both loved and regretted, consisting in ‘used-up 326



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r­ elatives, parents, clever, eager, fair, slim brothers – these the most loved – all engaged, as well as successive superseded guardians, in a high extravagance of speculation and dissipation’ (p. 145). Privilege, beauty, self-destruction – this is the kind of unhappy sequence that seems to determine the lives of many members of the extended James family. James’s hesitation in beginning arose, not from a reluctance to engage with colourful family history, but, as he later recalled, from the ‘bristling’ difficulty of its sombre subject matter, the story of ‘a young person, conscious of a great capacity for life, but early stricken and doomed, condemned to die under short respite, while also enamoured of the world’ (LC 2, 1287). Though Minny Temple was now a distant memory, James had been more closely and recently involved in the terminal illness of his sister Alice. Nevertheless, in the novel’s planning he made two important decisions: the nature of Milly’s disease is not revealed, and the reader never gains access to the sick-room. Rather, we learn of the gravity of the heroine’s illness in a piecemeal way, marked by unsettling moments when plans are changed or unexpected absences occur. The release of information within the narrative more generally follows a similar course: the reader finds things out seemingly almost by chance and, at times, events are returned to weeks after they happened. Silence and non-disclosure have a powerful influence: as William James bluntly told his brother, ‘[y]ou’ve reversed every traditional canon of story-telling (especially the fundamental one of telling the story, wh. you carefully avoid)’. The novel’s title invokes a tradition of Christian iconography, the dove associated primarily in the New Testament with the Holy Spirit, and its discourse, characterized by figurative terms, exploits the allusiveness of allegory. Venice, the setting for the second half of the novel and a city much associated with death, projects as part of every impression, as James observed elsewhere, a ‘sense of doom and decay’ (CTWC, p. 348). Its familiar features must also have reminded James of his dead friend Fenimore. Ironically (and presumably unknown to James), the dove figures among her diary observations of ‘atmosphere and sky effects’ of the lagoons, made during her last days in the city, with references to ‘[t]he water of a pearl and dove colour. Dove-coloured clouds gathered in the West…. White snow on mountains; vaguely seen against dove or slate-coloured sky and dove-coloured mist’.3 The dove acts, too, as a symbol of love and consolation in a letter written to Hendrik Andersen, soon after the death of the sculptor’s brother. James reaches out a hand which, in a typically daring transition, becomes a consoling dove: ‘I can’t have your beautiful last letter without the necessity of putting my hand out & laying it upon you, touched as I am to the heart, with the tenderest, softest, most healing & soothing benediction. Let it rest on your shoulder, perch there, lightly, like a dove whose wing you may stroke with your cheek; & feel it there as long as possible’ (DBF, p. 40). The letter is dated 19 March [1902] and within two months, James would complete his novel. 327



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Milly Theale’s illness plays its part in a scheme initiated by her new British friend, Kate Croy, who is in love with Merton Densher.When, near the novel’s end, he finally spells out to her the nature of their enterprise – ‘“Since she’s to die I’m to marry her? … So that when her death has taken place I shall in the natural course have money?”’ – Kate agrees, without ‘wincing nor mincing’ (pp. 433–434). Money acts as a determining factor throughout: James juxtaposes unlimited wealth (possessed by Milly and Kate’s Aunt Maud, Mrs Lowder) with impecuniousness (Kate, Densher and Kate’s widowed sister) and, indeed, penury in the form of Lionel Croy, Kate’s father, who has, in the past, committed some unforgivably shameful act. Kate must renounce him if she is to be supported by Aunt Maud, a widow who herself married advantageously, occupant of an opulent Lancaster Gate mansion overlooking Kensington Gardens, a devouring lioness to Kate’s ‘trembling kid’, a Britannia figure with onyx eyes, sometimes an oracle, at other times, ‘a picturesque ear-ringed matron at a market-stall’ (p. 340).The older woman also wishes Kate to give up Densher so that she might marry the aristocratic Lord Mark, but the couple continue their relationship discreetly. Milly’s appearance is strikingly unconventional, ‘constantly pale, delicately haggard’, showing ‘too much forehead, too much nose and too much mouth’. With hair ‘exceptionally red’, she wears clothes ‘remarkably black’, in mourning for family members (pp. 89, 90). Her future is foreshadowed as she gazes on a portrait by the Florentine artist Bronzino; others have remarked on her own likeness to the woman of the painting, ‘her slightly Michaelangelesque squareness, her eyes of other days, her full lips, her long neck, her recorded jewels, her brocaded and wasted reds … a very great personage – only unaccompanied by a joy. And she was dead, dead, dead’ (p. 183). The woman portrayed is Lucia Panciatichi, identified many years ago by Miriam Allott, and it is a work James may well have seen at the Uffizi Gallery on his first trip to Florence in 1869, the year before Minny Temple’s death. Milly weeps as she looks – and her tears may explain why she finds it ‘so strange and fair’: it contains both consolation and despair, expressing art’s capacity to embody life’s rich promise, and its reminder of human mortality. On the green beads of the subject’s necklace is the quoted motto, ‘Amour dure sans fin’ – Love lasts without end. As Miriam Allott so aptly comments, ‘No phrase could be more exact for the love of a Milly, the dove whose wings even from the grave “cover us,” as Merton Densher tells Kate Croy when everything else is at an end’.4 Yet if the portrait offers an image of transcendent love, it speaks to Milly, too, of a life ‘unaccompanied by a joy’ and without consolation, her mortality emphatically confirmed. The great physician, Sir Luke Strett, treats her kindly, his ‘brightness – that even of sharp steel’ of the kind reserved ‘for the other side of the business’, and recommends simply that she should live. But the truth is clear to Milly, for ‘when pity held up its tell-tale face like a head on a pike, in a French revolution, bobbing before a 328



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window, what was the inference but that the patient was bad?’ (pp. 199–200). It is a historical trope to which James returns when hope finally fades: Milly ‘had held with passion to her dream of a future, and she was separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfully silent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold, in the French Revolution, separated, in the prison-cell, from some object clutched for resistance’ (p. 526). She leaves London for Venice accompanied by her companion Susan Stringham and her new-found women friends, Kate and Mrs Lowder.They are later joined by Densher. The Palazzo Leporelli which Milly takes reflects, with its privacy and magnificence, the power of her great wealth. It was modelled on the Palazzo Barbaro, home of the Curtises, and the specially commissioned photograph of the building taken by Alvin Langdon Coburn serves as the frontispiece for the novel’s second volume in the New York Edition. Milly doesn’t, however, ‘go about’ in Venice, remaining within the palace walls. As she explains to Lord Mark (also interested in her wealth), she will not become ‘“a public nuisance”’: with a degree of sophistry, she explains: ‘“I do everything. Everything’s this,” she smiled; “I’m doing it now. One can’t do more than live”’ (p. 377). Against troubling reminders of time passing, hours ‘now narrowly numbered’ (p. 216), the invocation simply ‘to live’ sounds through the entire narrative. The palace, ‘with all its romance and art and history’ is made to represent, as Milly insists to Densher, not ‘confinement’, but ‘the freedom of all the centuries’ (p. 394). She emerges briefly from mourning, and, becoming perhaps more dovelike and liberated, is ‘let loose … in a wonderful white dress’ to appear at the elegant party that has been arranged, imagined as a kind of Veronese painting, with Mrs Stringham casting herself as ‘the inevitable dwarf, the small blackamoor’ (pp. 424, 418). Finally, however, Milly’s door is closed to Densher for Lord Mark has informed her of his discovery of the deception being practised upon her and she has ‘“turned her face to the wall”’ (p. 511). Sir Luke arrives to care for her at the end, and, as Kate had sharply reassured Densher, ‘“She won’t smell, as it were, of drugs. She won’t taste, as it were, of medicine”’ (p. 293). Densher is granted just one last interview with Milly, as he later tells Kate in London – twenty minutes during which the dying girl refrained from asking for the truth. ‘“You’ve fallen in love with her”’, Kate bitterly observes (p. 513). Milly later dies, her final message contained in a letter, dispatched to arrive on Christmas Eve, ‘“[t]he season of gifts”’ (p. 561). It remains unopened by the couple: it is clear that she has bequeathed him a fortune, he offers it to Kate, but she tosses the letter in the fire.Their plan has succeeded, but, as she observes at the novel’s end: ‘“We shall never be again as we were!”’ (p. 576). As Densher recalls his final conversation with Milly for Mrs Lowder (laced even now with deceit since he must conceal his relationship with Kate) it is abbreviated to something ‘too beautiful and too sacred to describe’: he has, he feels, been ‘forgiven, dedicated, blessed’. As the two turn aside in the Lancaster Gate drawing 329



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room, so, too, the reader must defer to their silence: ‘So, as to the wonderful scene, they just stood at the door. They had the sense of the presence within – they felt the charged stillness; after which, with their association deepened, they turned away together’ (p. 527). In place of such a ‘scene’ James allows the fact of Milly’s death to emerge instead through snatches of conversation and vague figurative terms – an indirection that seems intended as a kind of apotheosis of the heroine, reduced to a message of love. On her death, Milly’s aunt picks up once more on her dovelike qualities – her liability to be ‘delicately, so considerately, embraced’ (p. 233) – declaring that she ‘“has folded her wonderful wings”’, unless it be that ‘“she has spread them the wider”’ (p. 538). The Wings of the Dove is now rightly regarded as among James’s greatest achievements, not least perhaps because of its treatment of the most profound human experiences and the sustained power of its prose.Yet he himself had some misgivings, dissatisfied in varying degrees with his treatment of all the female characters except Milly, seeing, indeed, ‘nothing but the faults’, and regretting the work’s unbalanced, or ‘truncated’ proportions, with the middle coming too close to the novel’s end, as he thought. Few readers would have made these criticisms and the Times Literary Supplement review, while acknowledging the demands made by James, appreciates the novel’s almost poetic mode of operation: ‘[t]he scènes à faire take place off the stage; and it is by reverberation, by allusion, by inference, that we are gradually drawn into the circle of what is, first and last, an elaborated work of art’ (CH, p. 320).

A Future Plan In autumn 1902 James welcomed to Lamb House, William and Alice’s son, Billy, now twenty years old. Training in medicine and en route for Geneva, the young man was later to become an artist (reversing his father’s career path) and would return to study in Europe. Billy was handsome and charming, and James enjoyed his company, writing of him affectionately to his parents in Cambridge. But he was much alone, often seeming to be revisited by the ghosts (as he might have said) of the past. A pre-Christmas letter written to Sarah Butler Wister paints an evening scene as he sits in the lamplight by the fire with the sound of a ticking clock, a lonely, quiet time so different from his younger days and the serial dinings-out he had enjoyed on his first arrival in London. The small brass clock had belonged to Mrs Wister’s mother, Mrs Kemble, which she left to him on her death, and now its ticking and chime, ‘very deep and mellow and charming’, reminds him of his evening visits to her, though unlike Mrs Kemble, he expects no nine-o’clock visitor.

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This evocative letter contains another thought, little more than a whim, which hints tentatively at what would become James’s last major adventure. Mrs Wister had suggested he should ‘come home again’ and the advice with its emphasis on ‘home’, clearly hit its mark: ‘My feeling is with you absolutely on the subject … my native land, in my old age, has become, becomes more and more, romantic to me altogether: this one, on the other hand has, hugely and ingeniously ceased to be’. It is a reversal of his conviction, reached as a young man, of the romance of Europe. The prospect of such a visit filled him with trepidation, his principal anxiety the question of his age and diminishing self-confidence: ‘You see I am “too late”; not yet too late for Charleston, etc., but too late for myself…. I don’t, constitutionally, run; I creep and crawl and falter and fumble …’ (259). He would soon be sixty, ‘awful fact’, as he complained to his brother, and his sense of growing old runs through the letters of these months. Despite the complex practicalities involved, he continued to dwell upon the possibility nevertheless, even confessing in November 1903 to having been tempted, when seeing off to America Mrs John La Farge and her daughter at ‘the dreary Tilbury Docks’, to join them on the voyage. With a thicker overcoat and $100 he would have done so, but quickly fled, as he says, through ‘the grimy fog’ in the direction of London. He wished to see his homeland once again, and to write ‘a book of “impressions[”] (for much money)’, he told William, but it would take time to accumulate the material for a book – at least six months. The thought of staying with friends for an extended period was unacceptable, but neither could he entertain the prospect of solitary stays in hotels. In fact,William discouraged such a visit, warning his younger brother that he would find many aspects of American life loathsome. But Henry persevered so that William came to accept his wishes, sending him ‘a decidedly moving book’, by one of his former Harvard students which was to achieve classic status as a sociological study of race, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903). By early 1904 William had himself visited the American South and was quick to offer practical advice to his younger brother. James had maintained many personal links with America over the years and his correspondence with Grace Norton, for instance, continued for most of his adult life. Her brother Charles visited James in the summer of 1903, as did Oliver Wendell Holmes, now recently appointed to the US Supreme Court. But other old friends, on both sides of the Atlantic, were beginning to fail and die. The news he received from William of Francis Boott, who had returned to Cambridge, was not reassuring, and he died in March 1904, remembering both of the older James brothers in his will. A month earlier, Leslie Stephen who had from the beginning been kind to James died in London. As James wrote to Stephen’s sister-in-law, ‘Dearest Anne Ritchie’, his memories took him back to ‘far-away years & ghosts of times & things & people’.5

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William Wetmore Story and His Friends Thoughts of returning to America had to be laid to one side for a time, however, to allow James to begin work on a project to which he had committed in 1895, a biographical study of William Wetmore Story. It was a task reluctantly agreed to, helped on, doubtless, by the lucrative offer made by the Story family. He began work late in 1902 and quickly found his subject to be, ‘on a near view (as he was from afar!) thinner than thin – as a theme for “literature and art”; … I hope to finish in six weeks, or perhaps less’. Quickly completed, he hoped it would enjoy good sales, a work which ‘the intending, and extending, tourist will, in his millions buy’. By early January 1903 he was assuring the sculptor’s daughter-in-law that ‘three quarters of it are practically written’ and by March, it seems, he had submitted the manuscript to the publisher, Blackwood. The work’s title, William Wetmore Story and his Friends, indicates James’s need to broaden his narrative beyond the ‘thin’ subject at its centre. He had first met Story and his wife Emelyn in the early 1870s, though the couple had been living in Rome since 1856. Having initially established himself in New England as a lawyer and author of two standard texts on Contract and Personal Property Law, Story settled in Italy to pursue his calling as a sculptor. He often took as his subjects figures from biblical or classical history, but his interests were also literary and he became a prolific writer of essays, poetry and plays. The Storys’ apartments in the Palazzo Barberini provided a hospitable meeting place for American visitors and the couple counted the British poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning among their most intimate friends. Though James belonged to a later generation, many of those who figure in the biography, the cognoscenti and Brahmins of Boston and Cambridge, for example, were also known to him. Charles Eliot Norton and Francis Boott are often mentioned, but J.R. Lowell’s correspondence with Story is heavily relied upon, following the ‘Life and Letters’ conventions of many Victorian and Edwardian biographies. James frequently, however, departs from this traditional mode by introducing personal memories and lyrical impressions of the kind he would develop in The American Scene (1907). The Storys’ visit to Newport on their 1865 American trip makes way for an ‘innocent anecdote’ belonging to his own youth and a memory of an evening party ‘through which the light of blue seas, yellow sands, pearl-grey lichened rocks, lily-sheeted inland ponds and daily intensities and lustres of sunset seemed breezily to play’. He sketches out in a painterly way a cluster of ‘gossiping groups on vague verandahs, where laughter was clear and the “note” of white dresses, waistcoats, trousers, cool’, as if it were a scene from John Singer Sargent (2: 177–178). Those present might have included James’s Temple cousins, much-loved Minny among them. Simply the mention of Newport, a place ‘romantic out of all proportion’ (NSB, p. 326), seems to have inspired this autobiographical aside.

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There are other comparable moments of connection. James can draw from his own experience the ‘ghosts’ of Story’s life, including, for instance, the formidable Transcendentalist editor of The Dial magazine, Margaret Fuller, who gazes ‘directly and wistfully’ from the past, in her Roman setting reminding him of a tragic female of history, Beatrice Cenci. She knew James’s parents in Boston, and, but for her premature death, she might have become, he speculates, a woman writer of genius as imagined by Mme de Staël, ‘a possibly picturesque New England Corinne’ (1: 99, 128). Story’s friendship with the celebrated mid-century actress, Charlotte Cushman, who spent many years in Rome, returns James to the New York days of his boyhood and the fact that he had been considered too young to attend her evening performance in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. With a degree of envy, too, he remarks on how the Storys had seen the Italian tragedienne Adelaide Ristori, ‘the Ristori of the rich and various early period’, whose performances he had witnessed only in later years (1: 116). When Story make a disparaging comment on the celebrated ballerina Marie Taglioni, James adds that he remembers her as ‘a very ugly and crooked little old woman’ who had dined out in the ‘humane houses’ of London, where he, too, was a guest (1: 198). In more recent times, when the Storys spend an evening with Mrs Procter during a stay in London, James offers a first-hand portrait of this friend for the benefit of the ‘mistimed generation’ who had missed her (1: 224). And he writes affectionately of Mrs Arthur Bronson’s house in Asolo where William Story and his wife Emelyn had last seen their friend Robert Browning (2: 282). If such names represent a few of the friends indicated in the biography’s title – and they are an illustrious group – where does William Wetmore Story himself come? The book’s organization and the extended observations on art and its relation to life indicate his essentially subordinate role.The opening chapter, titled ‘The Precursors’, returns to an old Jamesian theme – a personal meditation on the need for the American (or New-England) artist to engage with Europe, his gratitude to earlier generations, those scouts, as he calls them, pilgrims and victims, too, who ‘made it easy’ for those who followed. Story may well be among these pioneers – ‘I avail myself of an existing instance’ (1: 7), James confides, though the sculptor is named only after ten pages. Further delaying his subject’s appearance, the novelist considers the nature of biography by invoking his tools and materials, the ‘old records, spared by time and mischance, old letters, notes, diaries, faded pages … testifying in their manner to the element of adventure once at play’ (I: 3–4). Though they belong to history, their contents may be dangerous, releasing ‘a swarm of apparitions and reverberations as dense as any set free by the lifted lid of Pandora’ (I: 14). Having quoted one of Story’s letters of 1853, James fears that such ‘ghosts’ as it contains,‘were I to take an unconsidered step to meet them … would fairly advance upon us in a swarm’ (I: 257). But their intentions are friendly on this occasion as they gather to people a convivial milieu within which we may watch a life acted 333



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out. This is how James makes his case for the biography’s inclusive title: as if it were an aesthetic, even quite touching, rather than compensatory choice: Everything in a picture … depends on the composition; if it be the subject that makes the interest, it is the composition that makes, or that at any rate expresses, the subject. By that law, accordingly, our boxful of ghosts ‘compose,’ hang together, consent to a mutual relation, confess, in fact, to a mutual dependence. If it is a question of living again, they can live but by each other’s help, so that they close in, join hands, press together for warmth and contact. (I: 15–16)

The recounting of these archival resources, ‘the scrappiest jottings in ink and pencil, the abbreviated memoranda, the snatches of small heart-breaking arithmetic’ (1: 95), the ‘faded photographs’ (2: 167), the ‘desultory diaries’ (2: 310), recurs and it is they – rather than the progression of an individual life – that often seem to direct the course of the narrative which moves freely, far from chronologically, through the years. Story is characterized chiefly by means of his extensive correspondence with Lowell and Browning; with both men he maintained close relations lasting many years. James confesses that the sculptor’s ‘maturer years’, nevertheless, constitute a common difficulty for the biographer, namely the recording of an untroubled period of success and stability: ‘[m]isfortune may be detailed or analysed, but happiness eludes us more’ (2: 188). Story’s circumstances, and indeed the seductive beauty of Italy itself, also conspired, in James’s judgment, against the highest achievements. Referring to his poetry and prose, his biographer guardedly attributes its lack of intensity to the ‘golden air’ in which he lived (2: 225). It was a privileged life, protected by abundant wealth, so that even the troubled political events of the time, the first and second wars of Italian independence, emerge as occasions for courage and heroism, of humanitarian acts towards the patriots. Having hinted at the blandness of Story’s writing, James relegates his sculptures to an earlier and simpler era with different aesthetic values, a time when ‘an image had, before anything else, to tell a story’ (2: 76). Sculptors had become, as a later critic observes,‘dramatists writing in stone’.6 In earlier years James had railed against the ‘anecdotical’ in British art, its Philistinism reflecting ‘the most vulgar bourgeois taste’, but he is now more measured (CWHJA, p. 238). Story is allowed to characterize for himself such sculptures as Judith (preparing to murder Holofernes) and the Libyan Sibyl by means of his letters, while James adds reserved interpretive comments concerning his ‘frankly and forcibly romantic’ sensibility, his investing ‘the marble with something of the colour of the canvas’, his inspiration derived from ‘history, poetry, legend’, qualities which commended him to the public (2: 77). The piece which helped establish Story (along with the Libyan Sibyl) was Cleopatra, shown at the London International Exhibition of 1862, a ­contemplative 334



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figure reclining on a chair, her head resting on her right hand, with one breast bare. James approaches it obliquely, recording the enthusiasm of Elizabeth Gaskell, another visitor to the Palazzo Barberini. James himself refers to the sculpture as one of Story’s ‘happy children, creatures of inspiration and prosperity’, though he is less enthusiastic about ‘the artist’s fondness for the draped body and his too liberal use of drapery’ (2: 80). In his Preface to The Marble Faun (1860) Nathaniel Hawthorne had characterized Story as ‘an artist whom his country and the world will not long fail to appreciate’.7 Kenyon, the sculptor in Hawthorne’s novel, demonstrates his wondrous ability to render wet clay into seemingly living flesh, his creation, as James points out, ‘none other than a fine prose transcript of Story’s Cleopatra’ (2: 85). The idea of the sculptor was much in James’s mind at this time. He had recently, of course, fallen in love with Hendrik Andersen, but a short story of 1900, ‘The Tree of Knowledge’, raises questions concerning the nature of talent, self-esteem and public status which serve as a commentary on the career of Story, as interpreted by James. The fictional sculptor Morgan Mallow and his wife, having become ‘tremendous Italians’, live on the borders of Hampstead and St John’s Wood in a house pretentiously named ‘Carrara Lodge’ (CT 11: 95). Sustained by his wife’s fortune, Mallow has a studio filled with his creations, ‘a little staring white population’ (100). They remain unsold and he is without genuine talent, as his son Lance realizes, having returned from studying art in Paris. This opinion has long been held by a writer-friend Peter Brench, secretly in love with Mrs Mallow, who persuades Lance to remain silent to spare his mother’s feelings. Only when the young man is harshly challenged to ‘“do” something’ in the manner of his father, does the truth emerge. Mrs Mallow confesses to Lance that she has always been aware of her husband’s mediocrity, has ‘kept the game up’, and her son is left to wonder at her self-effacing restraint (108). William Wetmore Story and his Friends appeared in two volumes in autumn 1903, and it elicited from Henry Adams a typical mixture of admiration and anguish. Both he and James were, with Story, he suggested, of that ‘New England generation’, a ‘Type bourgeois-bostonien!’: ‘You make me curl up, like a trodden-on worm. Improvised Europeans, we were, and – Lord God! – how thin!’8 In its scornful rejection of their shared past, it typifies Adams’s conflicted, unresolved feelings about the privileged social group of which he had been a part and which he believes James to have exposed. In his reply James agrees that he may have made Adams ‘squirm’, though the more general reaction, he suggests, has been more positive: ‘the book, meanwhile, I seem to learn, is much acclaimed in the U.S.’ Though the Illustrated London News reviewer (7 November 1903) comments on having received ‘the pleasantest of surprises’, James was disappointed, however, by the ‘rather vulgar & ill-natured notice in the Nation’, written by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, an early promoter of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The Story family 335



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initially, at least, were pleased with the work, though by March 1911, the mood seems to have changed, for James confided to W.D. Howells that Story’s ‘foolish, or rather reprobate, progeny didn’t like the book – though they could help me with nothing but a few, the very fewest, stray grains of trash toward doing it’.9

Edith Wharton In the spring of 1903 James had met a young American woman, Emilie Busbey Grigsby, mistress of Charles T. Yerkes, an American financier with interests in rail transport in Chicago and London. With her pale skin and red hair, she pointed out her resemblance to Milly Theale in The Wings of the Dove, published, of course, before this first encounter. She went on to meet James several times and he called upon her for tea at the Savoy Hotel. A self-publicist, she enjoyed the attentions of the popular press, and, to James’s horror, rumours began that the two were engaged. However implausible the story (and we are left to speculate on what the two might have talked about), he later explained the nature of the relationship to William in a letter containing much underlining and some capitalization. In fact, the incident served only to confirm his opinion of the press: ‘who – of her set & species – isn’t silly enough for anything, in this nightmare world of insane bavardage?’. In December of that same year James called on another woman in London, this time embarking on a relationship which flourished until the end of his life. They had met previously – though briefly – in Paris and Venice, and in autumn 1900 Edith Wharton had sent him a copy of ‘The Line of Least Resistance’, a recent tale of marital infidelity set among the rich socialites of Newport, Rhode Island. It was a milieu she knew well, but the story scandalized some of her wealthy American friends. James nevertheless appreciated its ‘admirable sharpness & neatness, & infinite wit & point’, though he found it finally ‘a little hard, a little purely derisive’, features which he attributed to her comparative youth – she was thirty-eight at the time. James and Mrs Wharton had friends in common: she had known the Bourgets since 1893, and her brother Fred had been the husband of Mary (Minnie) Cadwalader Jones, whom James had first met in 1883. Like James, Mrs Wharton had spent her early years in New York City and during a privileged childhood travelled extensively in Europe. In 1885 she had married Teddy Wharton, wealthy and twelve years her senior, who had few literary interests. By the 1900s his mental stability was in doubt, and in 1913 the two would finally divorce. Despite her great wealth, her chauffeur-driven motor-cars, the growing popularity of her books, and her magnificent château at Lenox, Massachusetts, she became another disciple of James’s. Generally deferring to his judgment in literary matters (she had reservations about the style of his late novels), when it came to more practical matters – the running of a house, the cultivation of a garden, the 336



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organizing of a journey – Mrs Wharton could offer sound advice. Her memoirs, A Backward Glance (1934), include a vivid portrait of James in older age, his affectionate reciting from memory some of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, for instance, a poet he had rejected in earlier years: ‘it was a joy to me to discover that James thought him, as I did, the greatest of American poets’ (p. 186). James’s domestic routine changed little during these years, with alternate spells in Rye and London according to the season. In the country the pattern of his life was simple, work in the morning, a walk with a dog in the afternoon, reading and revising in the evening, and often letter-writing into the small hours. Mrs Wharton (with her own retinue of staff) recalled what she considered his ‘anxious frugality’, his fear of ‘the spectre of impoverishment’, and the sometimes uninspiring food served in his dining room (p. 244). In fact, the question of diet and digestion came to preoccupy James, and in early 1904 he received from William a self-help book by Horace Fletcher, an American popularly known as ‘The Great Masticator’. Addressing problems of digestion and obesity, Fletcher advocated the practice of prolonged chewing of food until the mouth’s contents were reduced to liquid pulp. Fletcher recruited many eminent followers and James quickly became a convert to the practice, exclaiming to William that ‘I long to approach & embrace him’. He went on to enjoy a ‘first long, & excellent period of benefit’ from this new regimen, dedicating himself to ‘6 years of passionate & intimate Fletcherism’ before finally having to concede in 1910 that the system had ‘bedevilled’ his digestion ‘to within an inch of its life’.

The Golden Bowl In early summer 1903 James began work on what would be his final complete novel, The Golden Bowl, whose theme he had been contemplating for a decade. In 1892 he had read an ‘admirable article’ on ‘Les États-Unis et La Vie Américaine’ by André Chevrillon (nephew of Hippolyte Taine) which appeared in the Revue des deux Mondes and inspired him ‘to do something more with the American character’. This ‘character’ was not to be a version of Lambert Strether, nor a revision of Christopher Newman, ‘but more completely civilized, large, rich, complete, but strongly characterised, but essentially a product…. I have no difficulty in seeing the figure – it comes, as I look at it’ (CN, p. 70).This ‘product’ of American culture would be Adam Verver, and James soon developed the idea of ‘a simultaneous marriage’ for a father and a daughter as the central action for The Golden Bowl (p. 74). The work’s title, invoking the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes – ‘Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken …. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it’

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(12: 6–7) – denotes James’s continued adherence to a form of narrative operating in a symbolic as well as representational mode, a technique reminiscent not only of Ibsen but also Maeterlinck and Chekhov. He had, in fact, recently handled his own golden bowl, having been invited, as occupant of Lamb House, to visit Lloyds Bank in Rye where he was shown King George’s Bowl, as it was known. It had belonged to the Lamb family, former owners of his house, a memento given to them by King George I early in the eighteenth century. The king’s ship had had to take shelter in Rye harbour during a storm and his arrival interrupted the christening of a daughter of the Lamb family. The king had spent the night in Lamb House and the golden bowl, ‘this admirable and venerable object’, as James called it, was the king’s christening gift to the child. A number of the protagonists in The Golden Bowl are American, but the action occurs predominantly in England and, indeed, its London locations, Eaton Square, Portland Place, and ‘Fawns’, a magnificent country house in Kent, bespeak privilege and wealth. The source of this wealth is Adam Verver, an American widower and ‘one of the great collectors of the world’ who plans to endow a museum in America (1: 103). His much-loved daughter Maggie who has been his constant companion, one not ‘“born to know evil”’ (1: 80), is to be married to an impoverished Italian prince, Amerigo, a match brought about by a friend, Fanny Assingham. Contemplating his ‘good fortune’ and the mystery which lies before him, concealed by ‘a thickness of white air … like a dazzling curtain of light’, Amerigo is unexpectedly reminded of a fantastical sea-journey to the South Pole, an example of ‘what imagination Americans could have’ (1: 23). He is thinking of a novel he read in boyhood, Edgar Allan Poe’s strange account of a sea voyage, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. His prospective bride, on the other hand, compares him to a ‘“morceau de musée”’, part of her father’s collection, ‘“a rarity, an object of beauty, an object of price”’, and he concedes that he has indeed ‘“cost a lot of money”’ (1: 12–13). In fact, he is almost priceless, like ‘some old embossed coin, of a purity of gold no longer used’ (1: 23). On the eve of her marriage, Maggie’s schoolfriend, Charlotte Stant arrives, uninvited and, it emerges, she and the Prince have formerly been lovers in Rome, of which Maggie is unaware. Charlotte, who was brought up in Florence, has come to see him once more, ‘“to be as we are now and as we used to be, for one small hour – or say for two”’ (1: 100). Charlotte prevails on the Prince to accompany her, ostensibly to find a wedding gift (she has little money), and they come across a small crystal golden bowl in a small Bloomsbury shop run by a Jewish man. The Prince rejects it, having noticed a crack, and superstitiously – ‘Per Dio’ and ‘Per Bacco’ – declares it an omen (1: 123). At £15 it was, however, cheap, though Charlotte later tells the Prince that the price was £5 – a lie which presages other lies and silences, serving benign as well as selfish motives. The narrative now moves forward: the marriage has taken place and Maggie and the 338



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Prince have a small son, the Principino (we never learn his name). The child and his mother spend much time with Adam Verver, though Maggie who has, as she says, been ‘“married”’ to him (1: 175), now feels her widower father should himself re-marry. She encourages him to propose to Charlotte: to please his daughter he agrees and is accepted. It is a further two years later, and Adam and his daughter continue to be much together while Charlotte is happy to be seen with the Prince – a situation promoted by Maggie who regards the two as the ‘public’ representatives of the family (1: 324). On this basis, Amerigo and Charlotte spend a country-house weekend with friends at Matcham before snatching three or four private hours together in nearby Gloucester. They return to London later than expected, but Maggie is informed and takes an interest in what they have done. At this point her doubts begin: Fanny Assingham, the spectator, and Maggie’s confidante, has already decided that ‘“Her sense will have to open … To what’s called Evil”’ (1: 394). Maggie’s more troubled perspective is contained in an image, both incongruous and highly decorative, of a blooming garden with, at its centre, an ‘outlandish’ pagoda of ‘hard, bright porcelain … with silver bells that tinkled’. It remains ‘impenetrable and inscrutable’ to her, though having tapped it, she hears a sound from within, ‘a sound sufficiently suggesting that her approach had been noted’ (2: 4–5). The action of the second half of The Golden Bowl, ‘The Princess’, is presented predominantly from Maggie’s perspective, while the interior lives of Adam and Charlotte become correspondingly closed to the reader. In an episode which returns to the novel’s central symbol, Maggie, searching for a birthday present for her father, comes upon the very golden bowl earlier rejected as a wedding present. She buys the bowl, later to be visited at home by the nameless Jewish shopkeeper who apologizes for having overcharged her. He recognizes some of the faces in the photographs on display and recalls that earlier visit made by Charlotte and Amerigo, on the eve of Maggie’s wedding, unknowingly confirming for her their ‘intimacy’. Maggie confides in Fanny who continues to mask the extent of her own knowledge, a ploy only partially successful. The young wife has placed the bowl on the mantelpiece to await her husband’s return, but at a climactic moment, Fanny dashes this ‘incriminating piece’, the ‘evidence’, to the polished floor, as if in getting rid of this ‘complicating object’, a deceptive bowl which is not gold but coated crystal glass, and which conceals a flaw, she might banish the treachery to which Maggie has been exposed (2: 173, 183). In a further coup de théâtre, Amerigo appears in the doorway. James may have been rejected by the commercial theatre, but this finely engineered scene surpasses any of his former dramatic efforts. The finding and purchasing of the bowl – such an unlikely coincidence – is, as Amerigo observes, ‘“the sort of thing that happens mainly in novels and plays”’ (2: 202). And when Maggie undertakes the attempt to salvage both marriages, she 339



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feels like ‘some young woman of the theatre who, engaged for a minor part in the play … should find herself suddenly promoted to leading lady and expected to appear in every act of the five’ (2: 213). Despite Amerigo’s initial prevarications, his wife has solved ‘“the whole case”’, the fact that there was ‘“so much between”’ her husband and her old school friend (2: 206).Yet Maggie enters ‘the labyrinth’ with him (2: 194), endorsing the virtue of truth, willing him to avoid treachery, the narrative raising alternative explanations, the speeches and dialogue that might have been uttered or imagined. It is significant therefore that in this work where silence and what fails to be spoken come to exercise such power, the liaison between Charlotte and the Prince should be crucially exposed through their self-protective choice of language. When they had visited the Jewish man’s shop, they had conversed unguardedly, intimately, in Italian, and were shocked to hear him speak ‘the suddenest, sharpest Italian’ (1: 115). He will later serve to confirm Maggie’s unhappy suspicion. The novel’s final part takes place predominantly at a country house, Fawns, during a beautiful Kent autumn. Maggie must preserve both her own and her father’s marriages and, as she stands with Charlotte watching him in the smoking room from the garden, she realizes that it is she who must ‘pay’ (2: 251). In these painful weeks, however, Charlotte too must suffer, for Amerigo is to reveal nothing of the extent of his wife’s knowledge, though it is clear that she has knowledge. Watching Charlotte, Maggie has a sense of ‘gilt wires and bruised wings, the spacious but suspended cage, the home of eternal unrest, of pacings, beatings, shakings, all so vain, into which the baffled consciousness helplessly resolved itself ’ (2: 235–236). Charlotte, ‘the splendid shining supple creature’, may come to escape from this cage to roam at large, though it seems to Maggie as she admires the treasures of Fawns, that Adam Verver could be imagined in some sinister way as ‘holding in one of his pocketed hands the end of a long silken halter looped round her beautiful neck’ (2: 245, 295). Maggie (in Fanny’s eyes ‘“an angel”’ (2: 175)) is herself temperamentally unable to engage with the ‘straight vindictive view’, ‘the rages of jealousy’ associated with the pain of a wronged wife. In contrast with the tranquil historic beauty of Fawns, and perhaps with some memory of an Orientalist painting, James presents such a reaction as being as remote as ‘a wild eastern caravan, looming into view with crude colours in the sun, fierce pipes in the air, high spears against the sky, all a thrill, a natural joy to mingle with, but turning off short before it reached her and plunging into other defiles’ (2: 243). With a further pictorial allusion, Maggie realizes, as she observes from the terrace her husband, father and mother-in-law playing bridge in the smoking-room that she has it in her power to ‘simplify’ the situation, to become herself ‘the scapegoat of old, of whom she had once seen a terrible picture … charged with the sins of the people’. She is perhaps reminded of Holman Hunt’s

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celebrated painting, The Scapegoat (1854–1856). The novel’s predominant symbols gather around her, awaiting her directorial decision: ‘Spacious and splendid, like a stage again awaiting a drama, it was a scene she might people, by the press of her spring, either with serenities and dignities and decencies, or with terrors and shames and ruins, things as ugly as those formless fragments of her golden bowl she was trying so hard to pick up’ (2: 241, 242). Maggie’s goodness, we can infer, will offer restoration. Her closeness to her father prevents her revealing to him the extent of her knowledge, her ‘secret unrest’ when he tells her she must be sacrificed. In fact, neither risks penetrating the thin, transparent wall which a word from either might cause to collapse, and she realizes he is offering himself as sacrifice. He and Charlotte will return to America and found the museum in American City for which Europe has provided many of the exhibits. It has been laughingly proposed as a place in which to be buried by Maggie, and it later becomes the destination to which Adam and Charlotte will, themselves like museum pieces, be ‘shipped back’ (2: 278). Charlotte, cut off by the Prince, is to suffer in her ignorance and Fanny Assingham predicts a fearsome, exiled future: ‘“I see the long miles of ocean and the dreadful great country, State after State – which have never seemed to me so big or so terrible. I see them at last, day by day and step by step, at the far end – and I see them never come back. But never – simply”’ (2: 313). Appropriately in this novel which abounds in beautiful objects, the poignancy of separation between father and daughter is enacted before a picture, ‘an early Florentine sacred subject’, given to Maggie by her father on her marriage. In the novel’s final sad pages, the two stand before it in a scene both of benediction and valediction. It is a treasure which he has ‘sacrificed’ for her, and she seems to see emerging from within the frame ‘his spiritual face’. Continuing in this speculative vein, ‘she might have said to herself, at this moment, that in leaving the thing behind him, held as in her clasping arms, he was doing the most possible toward leaving her a part of his palpable self ’ (2: 367). James had hoped that The Golden Bowl might be serialized in the American Century magazine and, having prepared a version with cuts, was disappointed when this failed to materialize. On the novel’s appearance as a book (November 1904 in America, February 1905 in England), the British reviews were generally kinder than their American counterparts; William, with his customary directness, once more summed up his brother’s style as the ‘interminable elaboration of suggestive reference’. With touching humility James reported to Edmund Gosse that ‘The thing has “done” much less ill here than anything I have ever produced’. Whatever the public reception, James maintained great confidence at this time, not just in himself but, more generally, in the adaptability of the novel as a genre and its capacity to reflect the sensibilities of a changing world. Having been re-reading

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Émile Zola, he explains in an important essay of 1903 how he had been reassured that fiction was ‘a capacious vessel’: ‘It can carry anything – with art and force in the stowage; nothing in this case will sink it. And it is the only form for which such a claim can be made…. The novel has nothing to fear but sailing too light. It will take aboard all we bring in good faith to the dock’ (LC 2: 873–874). And by the time that The Golden Bowl appeared, James had himself sailed, following in the path of Charlotte and Adam Verver to make his own westward voyage and to return to the continent he had not seen for twenty-one years.

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Return to His ‘Native Land’ Initially planned to last six months, James’s stay in America extended to almost a year. Fenimore’s sister and niece, whose company he enjoyed on the voyage, had made many of the arrangements for his ocean crossing on one of the world’s fastest liners, the Kaiser Wilhelm II. On arrival in New York on 30 August 1904, they had been, as he told them, ‘torn apart by bewildering forces’,1 but he was met on the dock, as arranged, by his nephew, Harry, who steered him through customs, his presence ‘a rare benediction’. The experience of arrival was nonetheless recalled as not ‘altogether happy … I arrived in the sultry last part of August and was absolutely overwhelmed with the heat of the city and its other terrors. It was not at all the place I had known as a boy’.2 Indeed the city’s skyline was transformed, and its population had grown with the annexation of neighbouring boroughs to some three and a half million. On arrival, Henry travelled not up to New England and the home of William and Alice James, but down the New Jersey shore to Deal Beach and the cottage of Colonel George Harvey and his wife. Their invitation could hardly be refused for, earlier in the summer, W.D. Howells had been negotiating with Harvey and Elizabeth Jordan, editor of Harvey’s magazine, Harper’s Bazar, for James to deliver some lectures (principally to Ladies’ Clubs), a lucrative means of supporting his trip. Harvey, president of Harper & Brothers, had recently saved from bankruptcy the North American Review, the magazine which serialized The Ambassadors in 1903, and

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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his company would go on to publish what James called his ‘Impressionistic papers’ which later became The American Scene. This proved to be an enjoyable brief stay – the recently widowed Mark Twain was also a guest, and James remarked to William and Alice that ‘the weather, air, light &c, are delicious’ (278). After this brief detour, James travelled northwards, beyond Cambridge, to Chocorua on the southern edge of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where William and his family had their holiday home. In his youth James had spent a memorable week in the company of his Temple cousins and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr not far away at North Conway. Here in the ‘granite state’, at the time increasingly depopulated, he enjoyed the country life, the ‘good old homely, farmy New England things to eat’ and the relaxing company of his closest family. The tranquillity was disturbed just once by a young journalist, Florence Brooks, on whom he ‘took pity’, despite his inveterate hostility to the press and the idea of the celebrity interview. She had travelled all the way from New York, ‘and we ten miles from a station’. The interview, ‘Henry James in the Serene Sixties: A Chat with the American Novelist’, appeared in the New York Herald in October 1904, reminding us that James was a public figure, his arrival and progress recorded by newspapers across the country. He gave, incidentally, one further interview in New York to a young man with whom he later kept in touch, Witter Bynner, though he quickly denied all responsibility for the portrait which resulted, a disclaimer cannily included by the young journalist in his article. He found life at Chocorua in this typically radiant New England autumn ‘pure bucolic and Arcadian’ and, before leaving, made an excursion up to Jackson to visit Katherine Prescott Wormeley, an expert on Balzac and sister of his Venetian friend Ariana Curtis. By mid-September he had returned to William and Alice’s home at 95 Irving Street, Cambridge, which served as a base during the trip. He caught up with brother Bob who was living nearby in Concord in fairly shaky domestic circumstances, his marriage compromised by his heavy drinking and infidelities. Henry was keen for the three surviving siblings to spend some time together. ‘The Dead’ he commented, ‘we cannot have, but I feel as if they would be, will be, a little less dead if we three living can only for a week or two close in together here’. He also saw Howard Sturgis who was visiting his half-sister, Lucy Lyman Paine, in Cotuit down on Cape Cod. Having taken the train from Boston, James completed his journey in a horse and buggy, driven by a small boy, observing the distinctive landscape, ‘the little white houses, the feathery elms, the band of ocean blue, the stripe of sandy yellow, the tufted pines in angular silhouette, the cranberry-swamps stringed across’ (AS, p. 46). Not far away, James also visited his Emmet cousins at Barack-Matiff Farm, their colonial-style home in Salisbury, Connecticut. He stayed longer at The Mount, near Lenox, the country residence of Edith Wharton and her husband in the Berkshires of north-west Massachusetts. It was a popular destination for the very rich of the Gilded Age, and she had designed 344



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the recently built house, ‘an exquisite and marvellous place, a delicate French ­chateau mirrored in a Massachusetts pond (repeat not this formula)’, as James reported to Sturgis. Here he was driven around the hills and woods of upstate New York and Massachusetts, enjoying the landscape of the Hudson Valley while exercising ‘the lasso of observation from the wonder-working motor-car that defied the shrinkage of autumn days’ (AS, p. 57). The sometimes shabby, impoverished villages and farmhouses held, he hints, darker secrets, family dysfunction and incest of the kind Mrs Wharton also treated in her rural short stories and novels. It was at this time, too, that difficulties with his teeth began, introducing James to ‘an appalling experience of American transcendent Dentistry – a deep dark abyss, a trap of anguish and expense’ which would entail many inconvenient follow-up appointments in Boston. Though James had initially resolved to preserve his privacy, certain duties arose which entailed a public appearance, including a testimonial dinner on 8 December organized by George Harvey at New York’s Metropolitan Club. Among the thirty guests were writers and journalists, including Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland. When visiting New York various accommodation options were available and he stayed with Mrs Cadwalader Jones, with the Godkin family, and with Mrs Wharton on Park Avenue. On 9 January 1905 he travelled south to give for the first – though not the last – time his public lecture on ‘The Lesson of Balzac’ in Philadelphia. He was understandably nervous, though he took away the impression that the event had gone well, that he had become, as he informed Edmund Gosse, a ‘conférencier’. He later recorded feeling ‘positively & preposterously caressed’ by audiences.3 Balzac was, of course, a writer he revered and the choice of subject one which allowed him to speak about the novel while avoiding the need to be self-referential. The text was later published and though it reduces the long periods and complex syntax of his written prose, it may have proved difficult listening for an audience, however ‘literary’ their interests. It seems likely that the full houses he attracted came chiefly to see a famous writer in the flesh. Sadly in Philadelphia, at any rate, it is reported that ‘the impeccably groomed author … proved to be a major disappointment to most of the members’.4 Lecturing was, however, a lucrative business: in that ‘City of Brotherly Love’ James received a fee of $250 (£52), and he went on to give repeat performances across the country. His earnings (compared with the income derived from his novels) were impressive, though the contingent social duties could be tiresome, as he reports to William with wry amusement from St Louis: ‘I spouted my stuff last night “successfully” (the cheque slipped into my hand coram publico & almost before I had said my last word) – in the large room of this hotel, crowded to suffocation & with the exhaustion of a long preliminary dinner preceded in its turn by 150 “presentations,” well nigh undoing me’. Further public appearances followed in Washington DC where he was the guest of old friend, historian Henry Adams; nearby lived another friend, John Hay, after a 345



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long and distinguished political career now serving as Secretary of State. Staying in Lafayette Square meant moving among the Washington political elite: James was invited to attend the celebrations marking the imminent, triumphant inauguration of Theodore Roosevelt in his second term as president. Conversation between the novelist and the president, ‘Theodore Rex’, as James called him, must have proved uneasy: in 1894 Roosevelt, voluble proponent of manliness and the American outdoor life, had referred to him as a ‘miserable little snob’, unable to ‘play a man’s part among men’, while James, having dismissed Roosevelt’s American Ideals and Other Essays (1897) as simplistic and juvenile, regarded him as jingoistic.5 James was nevertheless honoured and fêted during his stay, catching up with a friend of his youth, John La Farge, with Jules Jusserand, French Ambassador to the US, and with Augustus Saint-Gaudens, whose sculptures memorializing northern heroes of the Civil War James praises in The American Scene. He was the guest, too, of Charles Follen McKim, one of the foremost architects of the day, at the annual dinner held by the American Institute of Architects.As Henry concisely remarked to William,‘Washington is swell’. On a rainy day, on a more private occasion, in company with Margaret Terry Chanler, a daughter of Luther and Louisa Terry, he visited the grave of his old friend, Clover Adams, who had killed herself in 1885, ‘for a chance de nous soulager, critically, unheard que par les morts’ – a form of private comfort, witnessed only by the dead.The grave was ornamented with a sculpture by Saint-Gaudens. James’s travel plans went awry when he found himself snowed in at Philadelphia where he had returned to stay with Mrs Sarah Wister; in addition, one of his front teeth came out. Having found a local dentist, he continued his journey south and began to see an America with which he was unfamiliar. Richmond, Virginia, had been the capital of the Secessionist South, and, like William who had visited the previous year, he sensed some of the surviving values which had brought about the Civil War, the futility and tragedy of ‘the lost cause’, which had ended forty years earlier. But during his stay at the palatial Jefferson Hotel, he was pleased to receive news that he had been elected to the newly established American Academy of Arts and Letters (a distinction bestowed through the influence of John Hay), though possibly less happy to discover that Theodore Roosevelt received the same honour. The bitterly cold weather continued, and James spent a miserable few days at Biltmore House, the spectacularly appointed Gilded Age mansion of the Vanderbilts located on an enormous estate in the mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. He had been invited by George Washington Vanderbilt, son of the railway tycoon, but suffering from gout, he spent much time in his chilly bachelor room overlooking ‘an ice-bound stable-yard’. After an overnight journey, delayed by a wrecked train further down the line, James arrived at Charleston, the elegant South Carolina coastal city, the ‘Cradle of Secession’ as it had become known for its role in history. Here he met up with Owen Wister, whose grandfather (Mrs Kemble’s former husband, Pierce Mease Butler) had been a wealthy slave-owner from Georgia. 346



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The weather improved and James warmed to the sub-tropical climate, the flowering magnolias, camellias and (with Civil War associations) palmetto trees: ‘I have found here the sweet South – à peu près – of my dream’, he enthused to William and his family. Wister, a friend of Roosevelt and Frederic Remington, the artist who illustrated the American west, offered to introduce James to some ‘old lingering Southern social types’, but James had time only for a two-day stay. Some aspects of the city’s southern society were caught, nevertheless, in Wister’s next (quite Jamesian) novel, Lady Baltimore (1906), and James’s portrayal of the place in The American Scene as beautiful but silent, as if in mourning for its war dead, may have been influenced by conversation with his younger friend. The two had lunch together – hot chocolate, sandwiches and ‘a small delectable compound’, Lady Baltimore cake – at the tea room, The Woman’s Exchange, which became the setting for an early scene in Wister’s novel (AS, p. 427). On 12 February 1905 James boarded the train once more for the 240-mile journey down to Jacksonville, in north Florida, passing through Savannah on the way.Travelling further south to St Augustine he met up with brother Bob’s wife and daughter, the ‘two Marys’, before moving on to Palm Beach. Running out of time, he had to abandon his plan to make an excursion to Cuba, eighteen hours away by steamer, observing instead ‘hotel-civilization’ in Florida, a topic which he hoped would afford him ‘brilliant chapters’. Indeed, he regularly stayed at the best hotels, many in this region established by the great industrialist, Henry Morrison Flagler, who had also developed Florida’s rail network. Though this was a brief visit, James found Florida to have ‘an air as of molten liquid velvet, and the palm and the orange, the pine-apple, the scarlet hibiscus, the vast magnolia and the sapphire sea, make it a vision of very considerable beguilement’. Having retreated once more to the north, James had a few days’ respite before setting out for the mid-west and west coast where he resumed his lecture circuit in what must have been – along with the long-distance travel involved – a punishing schedule. He arrived in St Louis, Missouri, on 6 March, before moving north to Chicago – ‘black, smoky, old-looking’ – then Indianapolis and a return to Chicago. A short trip to the village of Winnetka on the shores of Lake Michigan enabled a meeting with a distant cousin, George Higginson and his wife, and travelling further north to Milwaukee, James visited Wilky’s widow and children. The onward train journey to Los Angeles (a distance of over 2,000 miles), with such onboard facilities as barber’s shops, bathrooms and stenographers, took some three days to complete. Here he had an unguarded conversation with Julian Hawthorne whom he had long known and was later horrified to read a sensationalized version of what was billed an ‘interview’, syndicated throughout the newspapers of the east and west coasts. Maybe he had forgotten that Hawthorne had played a similar trick on J.R. Lowell in 1886. By 29 March James had reached Coronado Beach, California, just outside San Diego, where he rested for a week and completed what would constitute the long 347



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first chapter of The American Scene. The ‘American Journal 1904–1905’ contains his thoughts at this time, returning him to distant New England and to a selection of scenes and events involving friends and family from the past. His moving recollection of a wintry visit to Cambridge Cemetery and the graves of his parents and sister, the consequent ‘divine release of tears’, and his encounter with ‘the cold Medusa-face of life’, proved too autobiographical for The American Scene, where the burial ground is simply reduced to a site of ‘merciless memories’. In James’s text it embodies the impersonality of a quintessential American landscape both beautiful and bleakly elegiac: ‘It was late in the autumn and in the day – almost evening; with a wintry pink light in the west, the special shade, fading into a heartless prettiness of grey, that shows with a polar chill through the grim tracery of November’ (AS, pp. 518–519, 80). Bewitched by the natural beauty of southern California, James wrote to his ­sister-in-law Alice that ‘I live on oranges and olives, fresh from the tree, and I lie awake nights to listen, on purpose, to the languid list of the Pacific, which my ­windows overhang’. After this brief idyll spent at the Hotel del Coronado (a kind of architectural fantasy), James turned north once again, travelling up the west coast and lecturing in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. Here he met up with Bob’s son, Edward Holton James, a lawyer and in later years an eminent socialist. After a long rail journey stopping off at St Paul, Minnesota, and Chicago, James was back in New York by the end of April. Having delivered his ‘Lesson of Balzac’ to the young women of Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, in January 1905, James was invited back to speak at Commencement on 8 June and took as his fresh topic ‘The Question of our Speech’. He had written to Howard Sturgis that he would on this journey devote himself ‘to the study of scenery, manners & linguistics’, and this address, an assessment of the spoken language he heard about him, attacks not only what he considered to be aberrant grammatical usage, but also lexical choices and pronunciation. It is a familiar theme for James – he had been pained at the careless speech of the Emmet girls, for instance – but he goes on to link ‘the colloquial vox Americana’ with an uncivilized absence of good manners (AS, pp. 560–561). It was an unhappy choice of subject, a collection of haphazard observations couched in prescriptive terms, aimed at a female audience and projecting a cultural, Anglophile assumption of superiority. The performance was repeated in Baltimore on 10 June, and, when taken up by the press, the reaction was understandably hostile. James remained on the east coast for the rest of his stay. In June he journeyed north to Maine, where at Kittery Point on the Atlantic coast he met up with his old friend, W.D. Howells, as well as Sarah Orne Jewett who lived not far away at South Berwick. And he returned once more to Newport, staying in the Spanish-style summer ‘cottage’ with two wealthy, unmarried Boston sisters, Ellen and Ida Mason. 348



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To James’s delight, Hendrik Andersen joined him in Newport, and they explored the place, familiar to them both. Andersen wrote to his sister-in-law, Olivia Cushing that ‘Henry James is as good and charming as ever and we have enjoyed some little walks together along Kay Street etc., now and then taking a gost out of the closit of some of those little doll looking houses that peek out of the green foliage at one!’. As a consequence, James had to delay a final stay with Mrs Wharton at Lenox, pleading that ‘the stern reality of things presses upon me … Ich kann nicht anders’. He was quoting Martin Luther, but the German phrase perhaps offers a moment of private pleasure in its echoing of his beloved sculptor’s surname.‘I could no other’ – it was a phrase he must have liked for he uses it also when explaining his decision in 1915 to become a British citizen. With Mrs Wharton, he called on Charles Eliot Norton, now in his late seventies, at his summer home in Ashfield, Massachusetts, for what all knew likely to be a final visit. Just a few months later he recalled for her ‘that leave-taking of ours … and poor dear Charles’s unforgettable fixed smile of farewell (here below) to me’. Norton, who had ‘consecrated’ James’s calling to letters so many years earlier, died in October 1908. Given his former fairly sedentary routine in England and the growing infrequency of his foreign travel, James must have found this year in America both revelatory and exhausting. He complains of homesickness in his letters and, indeed, he spent many hours alone both travelling and in hotels. He was to rail against the country’s materialistic values, but he himself benefited greatly from the lectures he gave, having earned some $4,000 (£825), with the prospect of a further $9,000 (£1,856) in 1905.6 James finally left Boston for England aboard the Ivernia on 5 July 1905, the journey enlivened by the company of Elizabeth Robins and Mrs Wharton’s friend, the lawyer, Walter Berry. Having discussed it with his agent, he already had in mind a large-scale project, the republication of his fiction in a new collected edition, though, more pressingly, he had to write up his American impressions. The Ivernia docked in Liverpool on 13 July.

The ‘Gathered Impressions’ of The American Scene James’s impressions from this ten-month stay, The American Scene, would not be published in England or America till the beginning of 1907, though many of its individual chapters appeared in such magazines as the North American Review and Harper’s Magazine, and, in England, the Fortnightly Review. He was justifiably outraged on seeing that Harpers had omitted in the American edition of his book the 225 thematic page headings he had supplied, ‘with all ingenuity and care’, as well as the final five-page section of the ‘Florida’ chapter which laments ‘the great lonely land’ ‘touched’ by the ugliness of progress (AS, p. 470). When Harpers also delayed 349



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magazine publication of a number of chapters, and failed to publish others altogether, the novelist’s relationship with the company and with Colonel Harvey became decidedly strained. A second companion volume, provisionally titled The Sense of the West, intended to recount James’s travels to the mid-West, to California and the Pacific coast was never written, though the first volume ends – or at least stops – hinting at a sequel, by mentioning ‘the mighty Mississippi’ and the prospect of his ‘very next “big” impression’ (p. 472). As time passed, the American experience grew less immediate, and, as for the westward journey, James complained of ‘the dire thinness of the picture là-bas’. It is possible, too, that he felt that the devastating San Francisco earthquake of April 1906 would have rendered his own impressions obsolete. Some of the cultural observations which he might have included are rehearsed in the lecture, ‘The Question of Our Speech’, and in two essays,‘The Speech of American Women’ and ‘The Manners of American Women’, both published in Harper’s Bazar in 1906– 1907. At this time which witnessed significant change in the status of women, The American Scene had already touched upon the theme of the young American woman and her social behaviour. Though James doubtless had in mind such models as Hippolyte Taine’s Voyages en Italie and Paul Bourget’s Sensations d’Italie, his American Scene moves far beyond the range of the travelogue and occupies a fluid generic mode. It is in part autobiographical and he regretted that Thomas Hardy had already bagged one possible title, ‘The Return of the Native’, while he considered, too, another possibility, ‘The Return of the Novelist’. The idea of return was clearly important to him, and the practice of reminiscence, the contemplation of ghosts passing through landscapes both familiar yet changed, runs through many of its pages. W.H. Auden characterized the work as a ‘prose poem of the first order’ and the passages on New England, Boston and Newport are especially lyrical.7 Confessing himself ‘incapable of information’ in his Preface, James offers other compensations, asserting that ‘I would take my stand on my gathered impressions’. The once ‘forsaken scene’, has become capable of ‘offering a perfect iridescence of fresh aspects’, a means of exercising ‘the faculty of wonder’ (AS, pp. 4, 377).Yet however subjective the writing, James generally avoids personal detail: revelatory moments tend to remain unspecific and anonymous and old friends, important Cambridge figures, W.D. Howells and James Russell Lowell, are referred to simply by initials. Concerned not to go ‘to smash on the rock of autobiography’ (AS, p. 519), James casts himself regularly as the ‘restless analyst’ and, in a further, often ironic distancing strategy, assumes other characterizations including ‘the ancient contemplative person’, ‘the impressible story-seeker’, ‘the story-seeking mind’, ‘the brooding analyst’,‘the starved story-seeker’,‘mooning observer’,‘lone visionary’ and ‘visionary tourist’.With these shifting identities the narrating voice assumes a rhetorical rather than biographical presence. Even allowing for such self-deferring measures, 350



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The American Scene undoubtedly contains moments of autobiographical revelation, at its simplest permitting us to imagine a lone traveller, observing and recording, ­undiverted by the company of others. It is also typical of James that when, for instance, he feels the need to protest at the attack on the English language by the ‘inconceivable alien’ who has occupied the city of New York (AS, p. 99), he humorously casts himself as an unexpectedly heroic St George, a member of the ‘old knighthood astride of its caparisoned charger’, and intent on defending ‘letters’ (AS, p. 153). But impressions of place, of urban and rural life, of social change, race and mass immigration, of the changing relations between young men and women, of prevailing materialistic values, cohere to form a freely ranging narrative which evades any attempt at generic categorization. In New York (to which he devotes almost a third of his book) James finds release only when sailing on the river; walking its streets, he compares the city to a ‘monstrous organism’, ‘some steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws’. He can find no words for such ‘bigness and bravery and insolence’ (AS, p. 88), and the tropes of language, reading and legibility are applied regularly to his cultural confusion. Initial exposure to New York strikes him as ‘like the spelling-out of foreign sentences of which one knows but half the words’ (p. 8). The phenomenal world becomes a text to be read, though its apparent incoherence and obscurity can end in defeat, a state he feels compelled to acknowledge as unavoidable. Faced in New York by ‘numerosity and quantity’, he can offer no explanatory key: his male spectator must simply raise his eyes and gaze upward and above the immediate source of puzzlement: ‘[t]he illegible word … the great inscrutable answer to questions, hangs in the vast American sky, to his imagination, as something fantastic and abracadabrant, belonging to no known language’ (p. 136). The italics denote that this is a French term, ‘absurd’ or ‘preposterous’, though it still carries its English associations of a magical conjuring trick. A sense of the sheer, mysterious immensity of the country rarely deserts James, though he does invoke man-made strategies to help determine ‘meaning’, enough to frame and compose a coherent picture. He approves of the recent ‘formal enclosure’ of Harvard Yard in Cambridge for this reason – so that the scene is contained and the framing, as for a painting, ‘immediately establishes values’ (p. 73). Similarly, on his rail travel, he introduces the framing device of the observation window, ‘the great moving proscenium of the Pullman’, the luxury carriage in which he travelled, which reveals the changing landscapes as if they were a theatrical scene observed as from the stalls (p. 442). James’s inability to read the imagined visual messages hanging in the sky, has an aural equivalent of more sinister application in his incomprehension of the foreign immigrant voices speaking versions of English heard on the streets. As a ‘man of letters’ he foresees the ‘future ravage’ of the language in this ‘Accent of the Future’. 351



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However,‘beautiful’ it may become,‘we shall not know it for English’, he asserts (pp. 153, 155). This was, of course, a period of mass immigration – James includes a powerful account of a visit to Ellis Island in New York Bay, the principal reception centre on the east coast where he observed a ‘drama poignant and unforgettable’ (p.  98) – and he struggles to reconcile his own America with the changed and increasingly peopled continent of the future, as if forgetting the immigrant past of the majority of its inhabitants, including himself. Some of the thematic headnotes to pages – for instance, ‘The Obsession of the Alien’, ‘The Ubiquity of the Alien’, ‘The Scale of the Infusion’, ‘The Effect of the Infusion’ – simply reflect the prevailing terms and attitudes of the time. Similarly, his accounts of Jews in ‘The New York Ghetto’ – ‘the Hebrew conquest of New York’, ‘a Jewry that had burst all bounds’ (pp. 148, 146) – belong to a period when ‘Jewish and Italian immigrants in New York were seen as racially different from – and inferior to – people with origins in northern and western Europe’.8 The city of Richmond, compared to a blighted invalid (p. 387), continues to testify to the tragedy and humiliation of the Civil War, its streets still bearing traces of the conflict which devastated much of its fabric. And it was in this unfamiliar environment and the increased visibility of an African American population that he registered ‘the intimate presence of the negro’, cast invariably in a servile role (p. 385). As he left his Charleston hotel, the porter deposited in the mud the travel bag that he must later place on his knee, leading him to generalize upon ‘the apparently deep-seated inaptitude of the negro race at large for any alertness of personal service’ (p. 434). People of colour rarely break free in James’s observations of those traditional associations established by a white ruling class, and if achieving a more individual presence, they tend to become ‘indistinguishable from plantation romances or minstrel shows’.9 Yet, whatever might be termed James’s ‘racial uncertainties’,10 his broad historical perspective, indeed his constantly shifting, modifying discourse, his disarming confessions of inadequacy, suggest a kind of moral evasiveness on the question of ‘Jim Crow America’.11 And, considering the heritage of the Civil War, he suggests that victims may have white as well as brown skin, the southern white man, a ‘type’ remaining trapped within the unchanged, unreconstructed ideals of the Confederacy. James’s eye is caught in the disappointing Richmond Museum, by another visitor, ‘a gallant and nameless, as well as a very handsome, young Virginian’. The older man is first charmed and then repelled by the Virginian’s recollection of his father’s anecdotes involving the ‘lucky smashing of the skull of a Union soldier’. Such tales may be relegated to history, though other emerging convictions betray a continuing loyalty to the misbegotten Confederate cause: ‘there were things (ah, we had touched on some of these!) that, all fair, engaging, smiling, as he stood there, he would have done to a Southern negro’ (pp. 399–400). 352



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Northern white privilege is subjected to a similarly rigorous examination as James takes in the exclusive houses of the New Jersey shore, the weekend retreats of New Yorkers which demonstrate both great wealth as well as a striking lack of privacy. Without mystery, protection or complexity, such luxury denotes an absence of manners, and therefore, in James’s established terms, an erosion of civilization, with ‘no presumption of constituted relations, possibilities, amenities, in the social, the domestic order’ (p. 17). The ostentatiousness of these properties, ‘their candid look of having cost as much as they know how’ is matched only by their impermanence. They speak to James to remind him that they are simply ‘instalments, symbols, stop-gaps’ (p. 18). The American ‘hotelworld’ with which he became very familiar, constructed on a comparable basis for the display and enactment of wealth, also comes to serve as a powerful emblem of the nation’s restless sensibility, prompting James to ask if ‘the hotelspirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and most finding itself ’. It assumes ‘a social, indeed positively an æsthetic ideal, and making it so, at this supreme pitch, a synonym for civilization, for the capture of conceived manners themselves’ (p. 117). The hotels of which he speaks are, of course, products of the Gilded Age, luxurious gathering places for the self-display of the rich and fashionable. In this ‘supremely gregarious state’, rules are rigorously enforced: transgression, or more euphemistically, ‘adventure’, is to be punished by those peers who also inhabit this gilded cage (p. 119). The darker side of this ‘world’ he would explore more fully in some later stories. New York provided the stage for James’s city wanderings as a boy flâneur and he now reprises this role in the changed city of anonymous crowds and tall buildings in which he finds ‘the character of New York’. He is reminded of Zola’s representations of the Parisian underclass, and, in a strange conflation of images which combine the ‘myriad arteries and pores’ of the human body with the intricate mechanism of a throbbing watch, he imagines mass communities released onto the streets. Caught in ‘the muddy medium’ of a wintry New York street, he is forced to surrender, ‘all one with the look, the tramp, the whole quality and allure, the consummate monotonous commonness, of the pushing male crowd, moving in its dense mass’ (pp. 95, 97). The italicized term ‘allure’ suggests not just the way in which these men are walking (its primary French sense), but hints, too, at their corporate charm: he might, indeed, be carried away. Aboard ‘a shining steamer’ crossing the Hudson River to the Jersey shore, James sees the commuting crowd in a less threatening light, as participants in some Arcadian scene of bounty which ‘could deliciously be left to ripen, like golden apples, on the tree’. He becomes a vicarious part of the ‘rare collection of young men of business … in the pride of their youth’, when, for once, the idea of ‘business’ loses its mundane connotations so scorned by the James family, to be replaced by a temporary – even romantic – sense of rapprochement.The ­commuters 353



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remain oblivious to his gaze, but the ‘charm’ (a term repeated) that attaches to this seductively homoerotic experience, both ‘exciting’ and ‘beguilingly safe’, leaves him lost for words as he asks helplessly, ‘what else shall I call it but a New Jersey condition?’ (pp. 12–13). Such moments of unguarded pleasure never altogether banish James’s more general disillusionment with America, its prevailing materialism in the pursuit of wealth, and its dedication to the values of commerce. He saw a civilization paying little regard either to the personal life or its own history, its absence of values epitomized for him by the evolving versions of English, the product of multifarious racial and ethnic adaptations to be overheard in its streets. The robustness of Rowland Mallet’s convictions in Roderick Hudson, when he had embraced America, the day, the landscape, the atmosphere, while resting on a Massachusetts hillside, has been lost. The term ‘American’ has changed its meaning and, even supposing he wanted to, James would never have found anything approximating to the land of his youth.The extent of that loss he had perhaps not foreseen. In The American Scene he offers a warning to the unwary visitor to Ellis Island: the experience, entailing the loss of innocence, might well apply, more broadly, to his own chilled response to early-twentieth-century America: ‘he comes back from his visit not at all the same person that he went. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge, and the taste will be for ever in his mouth’ (p. 99). On its appearance the volume was praised in Boston’s Evening Transcript for showing ‘ourselves as we are, ourselves as we want to be, and ourselves as we frequently do not want to be revealed’ (CR, p. 446) and James was moved, too, by the appreciative review Edmund Gosse published in the Daily Mail. But poor sales reflected some indifference, and neither British nor American publishers were reimbursed for the advance royalties paid out. Referring to ‘the fat red American book’, James predicted to his friend Lucy Clifford, that ‘it can’t have a sale other than the most modest – it’s not the kind of thing that can. If it could the Public would be a very different sort of big Booby than it is’. On returning to England, he needed to address some domestic concerns: the household servants at Lamb House had not fared well with the temporary tenants and he made some new arrangements for his employees. He also engaged in renovations which enabled the Garden Room to be heated and thus become usable in the winter months. Further work was undertaken on the heating and hot water system for the house in 1907. He would never complete another full-length piece of fiction, though, despite setbacks to his health, he continued to be engaged in a range of projects. Meantime, through the autumn of 1905 he continued to record his American impressions, consulting his notes, ‘with all desirable deliberation, and yet in a kind of panting dread of the matter of it all melting and fading from me before I have worked it off ’.

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The New York Edition At the same time, he approached the major task of gathering, revising and providing prefaces for most of his fiction to date for what he called an ‘Edition Définitive’. Such enterprises where works were collected into a uniform, de luxe edition during the writer’s lifetime were not uncommon, and his contemporaries Kipling, Meredith, Stevenson and Bourget had recently been accorded this treatment. For James, who now regarded himself as old, the matter of his own mortality must have played a part, and the undertaking also illustrates his abiding faith in his own work. But the new edition was not simply to be a reprint of earlier texts, for James could not resist embarking on a large-scale revision of his works which, for the earlier fiction – for example, Roderick Hudson and The American – resulted in significant re-writing and a re-casting of his prose in accord with his late style. As he informed the American publishers Charles Scribner’s Sons, ‘[m]y idea is, further, to revise everything carefully, and to re-touch, as to expression, turn of sentence, and the question of surface generally, wherever this may strike me as really required’. On receiving the second volume of Roderick Hudson (the first of the novels in the series), however, Scribner’s found that James’s ‘interlineations and emendations’ were ‘so numerous’ that they felt compelled to inform Pinker that these sheets could not be passed on to the printer and that revised typewritten ‘copy’ must be provided.12 Not everyone agreed on the need for such revision.The novelist Robert Herrick, whom James had met recently in Chicago, had been bold enough to counsel against it, but James remained adamant: ‘I hold myself really right and you really wrong’. And the publisher Charles Scribner had also confided similar misgivings to James Pinker, fearing that ‘Mr. James should so transform his early books that those who had known and delighted in them should feel disappointed with the new edition, owing to loss of freshness’. The number of volumes planned for this New York Edition, as it was named to honour the city of his birth, grew, though James finally accepted the need to be selective. In the event, twenty-four volumes appeared and in 1918 the two posthumous incomplete novels, were added.13 Omitted is most of the fiction with an American setting which includes Washington Square, The Europeans and The Bostonians and many short stories. James wrote to Robert Herrick, confessing that ‘I have tried to read over Washington Square and I can’t, and I fear it must go!’ With each republication of a work James had rarely resisted the temptation to revise: like the author in ‘The Middle Years’, he was ever ‘a passionate corrector, a fingerer of style’. But this late undertaking, the gathering of a life’s work, a final exercise of authorial control over a text when mortality beckoned, was so reconstructive that subsequent readers must decide which version of a text as

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famous as The Portrait of a Lady they will select. In the light of his late fiction, characterized (most simply) by syntactical complexity and a predilection for abstraction, it might be expected that his revisions of the earlier works would cloud their directness, but this is not always so: they sometimes employ a more colloquial register, freer and more dramatic in impact. Because this was such a thorough revision it was a laborious process, made even heavier by the eighteen individual prefaces James provided. He was still working on them some three years later, and he confessed to Frederick Macmillan that ‘the Edition has smothered me … like an enormous featherbed’. Nevertheless, this was an important step for he had never before discussed his own writing in public, and he planned to provide ‘a freely colloquial and … confidential preface or introduction’ which would for each work include ‘a frank critical talk about its subject, its origin, its place in the whole artistic chain’. As he told Howells, he had a broader aim, too, regarding these essays as ‘a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination, for Appreciation on other than infantile lines … They ought, collected together, … to form a sort of comprehensive manual or vade-mecum for aspirants in our arduous profession’. Indeed, they have come to constitute a significant document in the development of narrative theory, offering, too, a personal – at times idiosyncratic – commentary on the creative process. At a technical level, James offers insights into such matters as point of view, perspective and foreshortening in the presentation of material, characterization, structure and scenic form, whilst conceding in the preface to Roderick Hudson the necessity of limitation or incompletion: ‘[r]eally, universally, relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the artist is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so’ (LC 2: 1041). His attachment to form he conceived of as almost a ‘sacred’ calling, asserting in a letter of 1912 that ‘Form alone takes, and holds and preserves, substance’. In this respect, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, for all their genius, are dismissed as ‘fluid pudding’, owing to ‘their lack of composition, their defiance of economy and architecture’. In that same preface, the first of the series, he hopes, too, for illumination for himself in revisiting some former work and re-examining the means by which it was achieved. It is a rigorous calling for the artist, as he admits, in approaching ‘that veiled face of his Muse which he is condemned for ever and all anxiously to study’ (LC 2: 1039). Aside from the enduring anxiety evident in this disclosure, James moves readily into autobiographical mode in the prefaces, though even this anecdotal mood rarely abandons the complex configurations of his late style. At times he returns to those past locations redolent of a work’s origins, a room, a landscape, a city, the scene, not always of the work’s action, but rather where it was created. His mood is frank, often self-critical and frustrated, as he surveys his substantial œuvre, though he allows himself, too, an occasional moment of self-congratulation.

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James found further diversion in the arrangements for the edition’s illustrations. Each volume of the New York Edition was to have one photographic frontispiece, relevant to the fiction’s location, but entirely detached from its action, appropriate in his eyes, since photographs were ‘in as different a “medium” as possible…. They were to remain at the most small pictures of our “set” stage with the actors left out’ (LC 2: 1327). During his stay in America, the young Bostonian, Alvin Langdon Coburn had photographed the novelist for the Century magazine. James was understandably impressed by this portrait and engaged him to provide all the photographs for the new edition. Scribner’s balked at the fee proposed by Coburn – twelve guineas per plate, of which there were to be twenty-three, and it seems likely that a compromise of £8 per plate was reached.14 James’s meticulously detailed briefing notes for what must have been Coburn’s costly trips to locations in London,Venice and Paris – apart from showing James’s intimate knowledge of these cities – suggest, too, his own emotional attachment. In the event, the highly atmospheric black and white photographs which Coburn produced greatly enhance the collection, and the two men became friends. Since the photographer’s name was not credited in the edition, James, in recompense, paid him fulsome tribute in the Preface to its final volume, The Golden Bowl. Having happily settled into the tranquillity of Lamb House, James was able to Fletcherize once more when consuming his meals, having found ‘the perpetual gregarious and loquacious feeding of the U.S. very detrimental to it’. In the autumn of 1905 he spent a few days with American illustrator and muralist Edwin Austin Abbey and his wife Mary who were searching for a Jacobean house in Gloucestershire. Abbey had been part of the Broadway circle of artists whose company James had enjoyed, and the couple had now acquired a motor-car, ‘a wondrous French machine’, a luxury whose comforts he much appreciated. He was disturbed and touched when Alice, in spring 1906, having attended a séance, passed on to him a message said to have been received from his mother who had died some twenty-five years earlier and who had recently been in his thoughts. He was drawn to the unique and intimate nature of its content, for it contained ‘an allusion to a matter known (so personal is it to myself) to no other individual in the world but me … so pertinent and initiated and tender and helpful, and yet so unhelped by any actual earthly knowledge on any one’s part, that it quite astounds as well as deeply touches me’. Both Alice and William James had for many years been interested in psychic phenomena, his older brother now counselling Henry that ‘the world that our “normal” consciousness makes use of is only a fraction of the whole world in which we have our being’. However sympathetic to this movement, Henry’s own imagination, as reflected in his ghost stories, engages most readily, not with communications from the after-life but rather with the potentially fearsome uncanniness of the phenomenal world. After this re-connection with affections of the past, Henry was suddenly shocked by the news of the earthquake 357



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which decimated San Francisco in April 1906. His brother and sister-in-law were staying at the time at nearby Palo Alto where William was doing some teaching at Stanford University and Henry spent some anxious days until he received a reassuring cable from nephew, Harry.

The European Scene James’s relationship with Edith Wharton grew increasingly close during these years, and she had quickly become ‘My dear Edith’ in correspondence. He joined her on a motor-car tour of southern England and the west country in May 1906 for which he had planned the itinerary, but bad weather intervened and the trip had to be cut short. A more ambitious tour was undertaken with the Whartons in spring 1907. James stayed with them for two weeks in the Paris apartment they had rented from George Vanderbilt at 58 rue de Varenne, in ‘a beautiful old house in the heart of the Rive Gauche, amid old private hotels and hidden gardens’. The small chauffeurdriven party then travelled down through the Loire Valley, with a stop at Nohant to honour the memory of George Sand, before moving on to south-west France and the Pyrenees, to return by way of Provence. It was a three-week trip of some two thousand miles and James was charmed at such ease of travel in ‘the magical monster the touring Panhard’, ‘the old travelling-carriage way glorified and raised to the 100th power’.Yet he found his finances stretched in keeping pace with the Whartons who, he reported to Jessie Allen, were ‘full of kindness, sympathy, curiosity and all the right elements of amenity and convenience – to say nothing of travelling arrangements (with servants sent on ahead by train everywhere to have our rooms ready and our “things out”), which makes the whole thing an expensive fairy-tale’. This was an extended visit for, returning from the motor tour on 2 April, James stayed in Paris until leaving for Italy on 10 May where he remained for six weeks: it was his twelfth and final visit. In Rome he had the added pleasure of once more seeing Hendrik Andersen who sculpted his bust, now exhibited at the museum which carries the sculptor’s name. James concludes a late essay on Rome in elegiac mood by recollecting an evening meal the two had shared, ‘in the warm still darkness that made no candle flicker’, in which he is conscious of bidding farewell to ‘the mild confused romance of the Rome one had loved … a reconciling … an altogether penetrating, last hour’ – a final memory of the city and, perhaps the person, too (CTWC, p. 496). In similarly valedictory mood he visited Fenimore’s grave in the Non-Catholic Cemetery near Porta San Paolo, set ‘below the great grey wall, the cypresses and the time-silvered Pyramid. It is tremendously, inexhaustibly touching – its effect never fails to overwhelm’, he observed to her niece, Clare Benedict. Clare (who died in 1961) would become an important benefactor for the Cemetery and is commemorated there. Nearby is to be found, too, the 358



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family tomb where Hendrik Andersen is buried, along with the remains of his brother Andreas and Andreas’s wife, Olivia Cushing Andersen. James’s homeward journey took in once again Florence and Venice, and he spent four days with the painter Edward Boit and his family at their villa in Vallombrosa, near Florence, where Howard Sturgis was among the guests. Italy had changed much since James’s first arrival nearly forty years earlier, not least in its political and religious institutions. In the 1870s it had catered for the richest of tourists; now, he asserted that ‘I don’t care, frankly, if I never see the vulgarized Rome or Florence again’. Venice, on the other hand, could not be so easily cast off, and he confessed that it ‘never seemed to me more loveable – though the vaporetto rages’. He stayed once more with the Curtises at the Palazzo Barbaro where he relished the peace, the rich furnishings, the retinue of servants, and the marbled coolness that offered relief from the ‘full-blown summer’. James had often represented himself as a pilgrim in his accounts of travel and, in this first decade of the twentieth century, he published two volumes of ‘Hours’ on this theme. The title suggests the passage of time and the changes it brings as well as invoking the illuminated sacred books of prayer and meditation from medieval times. English Hours was published in October 1905, soon after his return from America, many of its essays having first appeared in the 1870s. They range principally across the landscapes and historic sites of rural England, the volume much enhanced by the ninety-five monochrome illustrations of Joseph Pennell. Once more, James took his revisionary pencil to each article, nowhere hesitating ‘to rewrite a sentence or a passage on judging it susceptible of a better turn’ (CTWGBA, p. 3). It was as if he were applying ‘the varnish-bottle’ to an ‘old sunk canvas’, as he comments in the Preface to Roderick Hudson (LC 2: 1046). Italian Hours, published in 1909, also contains earlier essays in revised form, though he also added three more recent pieces, ‘A Few other Roman Neighbourhoods’, ‘Other Tuscan Cities’, on Livorno, Pisa, Lucca, Pistoia, Volterra and Montepulciano, and ‘The Saint’s Afternoon and Others’ which includes impressions of Naples and its bay, and the islands of Capri and Ischia. Unlike many travellers, he had learnt to appreciate the area’s still-undeveloped southern ways. Now conveyed in a twentieth-century ‘chariot of fire’, the motor-car belonging to doctor and explorer Filippo de Filippi and his American wife, Elizabeth, though occasionally disturbed by ‘unchidden infants’, he records how he and his companions ‘lay at our ease in the bosom of the past’ (CTWC, pp. 617, 618–619). James never returned again to Italy. One further topographically themed project failed to be completed by James: ‘London Town’, a ‘romantical-psychological-pictorial “social”’ work, was to form part of a series published by Macmillan. Having signed a contract in 1903, he began gathering reference books on the subject and it was hoped that this urban study might appear in autumn 1906. All that survive, however, are thirty-seven pages of 359



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evocative manuscript notes, dated August 1907 through October 1909. Unexpected items of architectural detail observed in historic public buildings and churches are juxtaposed with busy barge-laden river scenes and impressions of light effects in the streets he walked, brought to life by the odd cat observed sleeping in the sun. It would have made a typically idiosyncratic volume, a tribute to the city in which he had chosen to lead much of his adult life.

Edith Wharton and Morton Fullerton Though he had vowed that he would not again cross the Channel, James visited Edith Wharton once more in Paris in 1908 for another, shorter motor-car trip and also sat for a portrait by Jacques-Émile Blanche, arranged by his hostess. Blanche, fashionable in the upper reaches of society, was a committed Anglophile who had recently completed a sketch as well as a formal portrait of Thomas Hardy in London, and the James portrait (the pose re-organized after the sittings were over) came to be much admired.15 While in Paris James also arranged to meet two of his oldest American friends,W.D. Howells and T.S. Perry.The latter was travelling to Russia and James tucks away in a letter postscript a request full of question marks and professed uncertainties for Perry to inquire at St Petersburg after Paul Zhukovsky, the man whom he had loved thirty years earlier.There is no evidence that he learnt any more. Morton Fullerton continued to live and work in Paris, and he remained one of James’s most intimate friends. However, the younger man’s free-wheeling social and sexual life had recently caught him out – he had conducted a string of short-term affairs with both obscure and eminent men and women, including Lord Ronald Gower, Margaret Brooke, Ranee of Sarawak, and stage designer Percy Anderson (who had designed the costumes for Guy Domville). By the end of 1907 he was being blackmailed by a former mistress, Henrietta Mirecourt, who had possessed herself of a cache of letters kept in his apartment. Shocked at this outcome, James confessed to him his own ‘unenlightened ache’ (a term repeated), the sense of ‘complications’ hinted at but unexplained; though he had been kept in the dark, he assured Fullerton of his own unwavering tenderness. However painful his own feelings, James remains unjudgmental in the advice offered, reassuringly plays down the impact any revelation might have within Fullerton’s cosmopolitan circle, and seems to believe that his mistress, ‘ridiculous, impossible and odious’, might be bought off. Fullerton had little money, but it seems that in addressing himself to James, he sought emotional rather than financial support. The threat of blackmail hung over Fullerton for two more years, and it seems that in summer 1909 James and Mrs Wharton conspired finally to solve the problem by paying off the blackmailer. She suggested to her British publisher, Frederick Macmillan, that he commission Fullerton to write a book on Paris. Macmillan 360



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c­ omplied and James forwarded to him a cheque for £100 which might constitute part of an advance to its author who would not be informed of its source. In fact, James – ‘poor impecunious and helpless me’ – would be reimbursed by Mrs Wharton. As James had frankly confided to her earlier in 1909, ‘Glad am I that we “care” for him, you and I, for verily I think I do as much as you, and that you do as much as I’. Morton Fullerton had met Edith Wharton early in 1907 in the famous Parisian salon of the widow Countess Rosa de Fitzjames, and a year later, in spring 1908, the two embarked on an affair; by the end of the year Mrs Wharton, who sought to keep it secret, had confided in James.16 The relationship did not end happily, for Fullerton proved evasive and silent when separated by distance. If Mrs Wharton lamented his lack of commitment, James, too, felt similarly abandoned, writing to her on 24 November 1907 that ‘Fullerton was with me on his way home for just one night – from 6.30 one P.M. to 9.30 the next A.M. and the only visit he has paid me in all these years’. James had asserted that he and Mrs Wharton ‘cared’ equally for Fullerton, as if each shared the younger man and could offer mutual sympathy, and thus, too, it seems that James regarded himself, in a sense, as Fullerton’s lover rather than simply friend. Certainly he played a vicarious role within the couple’s relationship, meeting them, for instance, for dinner before they spent the night together at the Charing Cross Hotel. In her poem, ‘Terminus’, Edith Wharton, accustomed to the finest luxury, recalls the details of ‘the long secret night’ in their hotel room,‘The bed with its soot-sodden chintz, the grime of its brasses, / That has borne the weight of fagged bodies’.17 James’s response was much less liberal when another of his friends, Violet Hunt, embarked on an affair with Ford Madox Hueffer. She was a daughter of the painter Alfred Hunt and James had known her since childhood. A writer and feminist, she conducted a salon attended by many (including James) of the leading authors of the day. But Hueffer and his wife lived locally, and the matter was reported in the newspapers, so that James had to consider his own reputation. Feeling unable to condone the liaison, he refused to receive Violet at Lamb House – doubtless an affront, though not terminal for their relationship. In 1907 a New York editor had approached James, claiming that Mrs Wharton had suggested that he might review her recent novel, The Fruit of the Tree. When asked, she denied this and, having read it, James in any case decided against complying with the request. He was inspired, however, to write a short story, ‘The Velvet Glove’ (1909), which contains a number of semi-autobiographical, lightly comic, if slightly barbed messages, for his friend. It was initially called ‘The Top of the Tree’, echoing Mrs Wharton’s title, and its central character is John Berridge, a muchadmired novelist and playwright with a European reputation, living out perhaps James’s own aspirations. The Parisian studio where a party takes place is given by Gloriani, the sculptor brought into play once again after earlier fictional appearances. Berridge is introduced by a handsome young English lord, over whom he 361



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had once ‘yearned’, to a beautiful woman, a wealthy Princess, who has written a novel, The Velvet Glove, under the pen-name of Amy Evans (Mrs Wharton’s unmarried name, Edith Jones, had similarly Welsh associations) (CT 12: 236). To ‘poor’ John Berridge, both seem to inhabit, with their beauty and wealth, some enchanted Olympian or Arcadian landscape. A recital of operatic tenor highlights of the kind Edith Wharton would have enjoyed (James much less) entertains the assembled company. Supper is about to be served, but the lord smiles benignly as Berridge is spirited away by the Princess from the party in her motor car, ‘the chariot of fire’ (256). They tour the landmarks of Paris, but this proves to be no romantic assignation for what she wants from Berridge is a Preface for her new work. He cannot oblige and exhorts her to live as Romance; ‘“You are Romance”’, he assures her as he kisses her farewell (264). The story has involved much laying on of hands and, at the end, as Berridge comforts the Princess, stroking her hands ‘for tender conveyance of his meaning’ (264), it is clear that James is gently mocking Mrs Wharton who frequently employs this gesture in her fiction.18 His affectionate if unsparing portrait of this best-selling Princess who lives in such luxury, joins, in fact, a small gallery of similarly rich women in the later fiction – Mrs Worthingham in ‘Crapy Cornelia’ (1909), Mrs Bradham in The Ivory Tower (1917), and Aurora Coyne in The Sense of the Past (1917). All of them owe something to Edith Wharton. With his advancing years, a condition often on his mind, James was regularly reminded of the need to stand aside, to appreciate the inevitable claims of a younger generation. Visiting his old friend Leslie Stephen’s daughter, Vanessa, on the eve of her marriage to Clive Bell in 1907, he thinks of those family members he has known who have died – Leslie Stephen himself, his son Thoby (who succumbed to typhoid, aged twenty-six), Stella, his half-sister, and Julia, Leslie’s second wife, ‘on all of whom these young backs were, and quite naturally, so gaily turned’. When Vanessa and sister Virginia stayed in Rye the same year, James observed these brilliant, founding members of the Bloomsbury Group, the ‘handsome’ Vanessa sitting on his lawn, Virginia ‘on a near hill-top’, ‘facially most fair’, preparing her Times reviews, and, adjusting a line from Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, lamented that ‘“the hungry generations tread me down!”’.

Three Days in Cambridge, ‘A Very Precious Little Treasure of Memory’ The Stephens were a family he had known virtually since his first residence in London, and James’s affectionate friendship with Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Leslie’s sister-in-law, ensured that he remained in touch with their changing lives.When he was contacted out of the blue by some young men of Cambridge University, inviting him to come and stay for a weekend in 1909, he accepted, pointing out, 362



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however, that he was ‘a more tattered & battered old person than you perhaps suppose & subject to interlunar swoons’.19 The weekend, organized by Charles Sayle and A. Theodore Bartholomew, both librarians, and Geoffrey Keynes, an undergraduate of Pembroke College and later distinguished surgeon and man of letters, passed off successfully, despite some awkward moments – a rather dull musical concert, and one of the young men unwisely interceding whenever James hesitated over the choice of a word. Once again, though, he was struck by the irrevocable passage of time, writing to Arthur Benson that he felt ‘the ghosts, somehow, of a promiscuous past brushing me as with troubled wings, and the echoes of the ancient years seeming to murmur to me: “Don’t you wish you were still young – or young again – even as they so wonderfully are?”’. At lunch on the Saturday James was introduced to Keynes’s friend, Rupert Brooke (‘the handsomest young man in England’, according to W.B. Yeats) and, by Keynes’s account, immediately fell under his spell. On the Monday morning a punting expedition was organized: it turned out to be a great success, only slightly marred when Sayle dropped a pole on James’s uncovered head. The great novelist then settled back on some cushions to remain ‘gazing up through prominent halfclosed eyes at Brooke’s handsome figure clad in white shirt and white flannel trousers’.20 Brooke was to die in the Great War and the last piece James wrote when already ill was a Preface for the poet’s posthumous Letters from America; there he recalls how, ‘unforgettingly’, he met the young man in summer 1909 (LC 1: 753). The essay on Brooke had to undergo some revision, a task to which the dying James was unequal, and so the necessary alterations were made by Theodora Bosanquet, his last secretary and amanuensis. An educated and sympathetic young woman with a BSc degree and training as a secretary, she began working for James in October 1907 when she was twenty-seven, proving herself an ideal amanuensis. She was also very observant, her diaries offering detailed insights into James’s working methods and personal life. Much involved in the production of the New York Edition, Miss Bosanquet remained with him to the end. Her Henry James at Work, first published by the Hogarth Press in 1924, has proved a reliable source of biographical information. A feminist, she went on to follow a successful career as editor and writer as well as undertaking important civic duties. During these years James had been invited by Elizabeth Jordan and W.D. Howells to contribute, as one of a dozen of Harpers’ authors, to a novel called The Whole Family (1908). Designed to illustrate the effect of an engagement or marriage on a family, it is a mixed bag and his chapter is characteristically dense and complex.The volume was, nevertheless, quite well reviewed and achieved respectable sales. James wrote some of his finest short stories in these years – there is no indication of a falling-off in creativeness – and some, transforming into a kind of private Gothic vision his recent impressions of America, seem to lead him to consider alternative possibilities in his own life and, for dramatic purposes at least, to imagine darkness, 363



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guilt and secrecy associated with the experience of Europe. He suffered a kind of trauma when one of the houses from his youth in the mid-1860s, Ashburton Place, Boston, was demolished in a swift ‘act of obliteration’ during his stay. It had contained for him ‘a short page of history’ leaving in the ‘gaping void’ his identity temporarily compromised: ‘[i]t was as if the bottom had fallen out of one’s own biography, and one plunged backward into space without meeting anything’ (AS, pp. 245–246).

Some New York Stories After staying with Mary Cadwalader Jones in Greenwich Village he had written to tell her how the hours spent in this ‘mystic locality’ came to ‘haunt and revisit my own departed identity’.21 And it is a New York family house which stands at the centre of one of his finest late stories, ‘The Jolly Corner’ (1908), in which Spencer Brydon, its fifty-six-year-old expatriate hero, on his ‘so strangely belated return to America’, successfully reclaims his property on ‘the jolly corner’ (CT 12: 193, 195). It is a place ‘consecrated’, even its doorknobs suggesting ‘the pressure of the palms of the dead’ (201). Successful in business, Brydon might be an aging version of those young men James had admired on the New York ferry. Long ago, however, he had opted for Europe, associated with pleasure, infidelity, and ‘passages of life that were strange and dim’ in the eyes of his old friend Miss Alice Staverton (197). Compelled continually to return to the house, he favours the dark hours when he may move from room to room and floor to floor in an entirely plausible quest for his alter ego, the man he might have become, involving choices not merely of career or continent but identity, some repressed ‘other’, a product of another alternative psychosexual formation. Assured that he is alone, ‘he let himself go’, hopeful that he will not be disturbed by some passing policeman. Fearful of pursuit, he imagines how ridiculous he must appear: ‘Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from behind by ubiquitous Harlequin’ – the same Commedia dell’Arte character invoked by the indefatigably curious Jamesian narrator in The Sacred Fount (207, 213). Brydon’s quest for this other self entails strategies both of pursuit and flight. Both longing and fearful, he roams the house with doors significantly open and closed, scanning dizzying depths and heights, moving up and down front and back staircases, in search of ‘what he would never have imagined’. Moving ‘on the points of his evening-shoes’, a kind of Edwardian socialite, he cuts an almost comic balletic figure (194, 209).Yet the phenomena of this grand house, blurring distinctions between the living and the inanimate, seem to illustrate Freud’s conception of the uncanny, the pedestrian unexpectedly and disturbingly defamiliarized.The catalogue of objects and sequences invites comparison, too, with Freudian dream features, as 364



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if James offers a symbolic account of long-established sexual anxieties. The ghostly ‘other’, both desired and dreaded, emerges as a paradoxical figment mixing threat, seductiveness and vulnerability, capable of triumphing even in abjection. When the climax finally arrives with a quasi-deathly encounter between the two selves, Brydon finally sees the figure, ‘spectral yet human’, in elegant eveningdress, but masking his face with his hands, one of them mutilated. Brydon had relished the possibility of an encounter between males, of being ‘met by some strange figure, some unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house’ (198). But he has been ‘“sold”’: in the final horror he glimpses only the face of a stranger and collapses ‘under the hot breath and the roused passion of a life larger than his own’. ‘“I was to have known myself ”’, he cries (226, 230). He recovers to find his head ‘pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly refreshing fragrance’ in the lap of Miss Staverton, ‘as exquisite for him as some pale pressed flower’ (226, 197). The terms discourage any romantic or sexual possibility, but she is not without power – a ‘discriminating possessive was always on her lips’ – and one is reminded of the line of women in James’s own life who offered a range of alternative consolations for the single state. Miss Staverton has rescued him from a kind of death; she has foreseen this ‘“black stranger”’ in a dream. She kisses him, ‘“And now I keep you”’, she tells him (197, 231, 228), with a chilling echo of some horror, or even fairy story. ‘The Jolly Corner’ is undoubtedly the most revealing of the tales which postdate James’s American visit, the most intense and mysterious examination of unresolved anxiety at a psychosexual level, an arresting ghost story which, in its imagery and allusiveness, invites multiple interpretations. Other late stories, less directly autobiographical, provide a further gloss on his recent American impressions. In ‘Julia Bride’ (1908), a work which has been compared with Wharton’s The House of Mirth, the eponymous heroine attempts to escape from her socially dubious background through an advantageous marriage. Her six former engagements along with her mother’s compromised past (twice divorced and with a foundering third marriage), ‘nine nice distinct little horrors in all’ (CT 12: 161), bar her from the higher reaches of society to which she aspires. For all its apparently democratic freedoms, American society, predicated upon wealth, is revealed as quite as restrictive as its European equivalent. When the rich Basil French inquires of her past, with ‘indirect but so worrying questions’, Julia enlists the help of her mother’s second husband and a former fiancé to re-write her history – to lie on her behalf, in fact (156). She finds, however, that they have their own interests and prospects to further. She is compelled to concede that the gifts of prettiness and charm can get you into ‘tight places’: young men may have showered her with chocolates and flowers, but the gates to ‘the grand square forecourt of the palace of wedlock’ move on stiff hinges (158, 160). Society has changed: many do not sympathize with ‘the old American freedom’, and the ‘freeborn American girl’ must (like Daisy Miller) bow to 365



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convention (183, 184). With her former fiancé, ‘as crashingly consistent as a motorcar without a brake’, embodying twentieth-century American values, Julia’s future seems bleak (189). ‘Crapy Cornelia’ (1909) offers a further critique of New York society, juxtaposing its relentless materialism, ‘the angular facts of current finance … as harsh and metallic and bewildering as some stacked “exhibit” of ugly patented inventions’, with ‘“those days, those spacious, sociable, Arcadian days”’ which the story’s hero, White-Mason, has shared and recollects with Cornelia (CT 12: 354, 357). Both embrace old age (he is forty-eight, ‘a bachelor markedly nervous’, she a year and ten months younger), and they have become ‘conscious, ironic, pathetic survivors together of a dead and buried society’ (337, 353). White-Mason has considered marriage to a rich widow, Mrs Worthingham, but she proves to be too modern, too vulgar: her ‘“things are awful … the newest of the new …. swaggering reproductions”’ (361). Instead, he opts for a permanent position in Cornelia’s fireside armchair: though she twice asks him, they will not marry. The two do share, however, affectionate memories of the old NewYork, stamping ground of James’s childhood, the area ‘south of Thirtieth Street and north of Washington Square’ (357): the Jameses lived at 58 West Fourteenth Street. In a nostalgic and surely autobiographical interlude, White-Mason recollects a candy store on Seventh Avenue selling ‘“suspectedly stale popcorn”’, and a tobacconist’s fronted by the figure of ‘“a wonderful huge Indian who thrust out wooden cigars at an indifferent world”’ (355).The story is a fictional reworking of James’s shocked reaction to America’s changing culture, characterized in the Virgilian quotation he includes, ‘rari nantes in gurgito vasto’ (‘a few men swimming in the vast abyss’), those diminishing survivors of ‘a society once good’ (349), an allusion he had also used in his essay on ‘The Manners of American Women’ (1907). The inescapable present, modernity, cannot be denied, however, and the imagery of the cinematograph and the sky-scraper reiterates the need to accept. James remained in twentieth-century New York for his last completed short story, ‘A Round of Visits’, published in May 1910. It begins in a ‘great gaudy hotel’, its name, with mythical and historic resonance, the Pocahontas, and the lives it contains – the private enacted under the public gaze – have already been observed in the cameo hotel-portraits of The American Scene. A young man, Mark Monteith, is recovering from influenza in his luxurious room, but his doctor fails to diagnose a deeper malaise: despite Monteith’s hopes, he omits to notice a small photograph of a man held in a little leather show-case. He is called Phil Bloodgood, an old friend, ‘beautifully good-looking’, and as assertively masculine as his name hints (CT 12: 429). He has proved, however, to be a swindler who absconded with Monteith’s (and others’) investments. Monteith longs to release his ‘heart’s heaviness’, to vomit up the pain, ‘extracting to the last acid strain of it, the full strength of his sorrow’ (429). His woeful admission that ‘“he’s what’s the matter with me”’ seems to expand 366



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beyond Bloodgood’s swindling ways. In his abjection Monteith cannot condemn his former friend. Receiving limited sympathy from two women friends, he is directed to visit, as a favour, another male acquaintance, Newton Winch, who is similarly ailing. The snowy streets of New York through which the young man passes project their own horrors heard in the shrieks of public vehicles and the trolley-car howling under its human load. He finds that Winch, with his ‘convalescent smile’ and ‘fine fingers’, has been transformed and refined by illness, and the scene which follows dismantles conventional emblems of masculinity, demonstrating how men may ‘minister’ to each other (444). Winch, ‘happily transfigured’ by the shaving off of his moustache, offers the sympathy Monteith has craved, reducing him to tears. There is much laying of hands on shoulders and Monteith feels his ‘personal case’ to have been ‘touched by some tender hand’ (448). It is a scene of intimate, even seductive anticipation, with Monteith struck by Winch’s ‘becoming’ grin. The potential ‘horror’ of Bloodgood’s fate returns to him, however, ‘as if a far-borne sound of the hue and cry, a vision of his old friend hunted and at bay, had suddenly broken in’ and he longs to go to him (450). There is no need, Winch assures him, for he himself is as guilty as Bloodgood: ‘“You see I’m such another”’ (457). As if relating the story’s ostensible theme of financial corruption to its more shadowy drama of illicit sexuality, Monteith, ‘in the very act of blinking’, notices a pistol, ‘small and queer, neat and bright’, which Winch attempts to conceal with his foot, ‘surreptitiously applied to giving it the right lift’, an object which assumes a phallic significance (455, 456). Hardly heard offstage noises resolve into the sudden ringing of the doorbell; Monteith, thinking of the pistol, invokes Winch’s ‘honour’ and ‘another long, mute exchange’ passes between them. As Monteith admits the police, the suicidal shot is heard, and the ‘emissaries of the law’ enter to greet the final horror with ‘a gruff imprecation’ (458, 459). The idea for the tale (to which he regularly returned) had been with James since 1894, from the beginning involving male subjectivity, guilt and fear of exposure, ‘the notion of a young man … who has something – some secret sorrow, trouble, fault – to tell and can’t find the recipient’ (CN, p. 88).The Criminal Law Amendment Act, or Labouchère Amendment, as it became known, enabling homosexual men to be prosecuted for acts of gross indecency was introduced in 1885, the raiding by police of a male brothel in Cleveland Street in 1889 which exposed many men of the nobility and Establishment, and, finally, the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895, could not have escaped James’s notice at this time. These are the events of legal and social history, covered extensively by the press, but ‘A Round of Visits’ constitutes a more private and sympathetic vindication of male shame and abjection. The story, with its romanticizing of male friendship, the diminishing of female roles, a long intimate scene between two men interrupted by the arrival of policemen, a final detonation signifying death and ensuing public 367



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d­ isgrace, the sometimes coy ambiguities of James’s language, can be read as an earlytwentieth-century parable of the fate of same-sex desire. In biographical terms, it seems reflective of James’s accommodation of his own nature within society and his awareness of the potential harshness of heterodox public judgment. Monteith feels that the secret he harbours, ‘some violent, scared unhappy creature’, must be watched lest it release some dark underside of civilization, ‘a young jibbering ape’, ‘an ominous infant panther’, creatures iconographically associated with unbridled sexuality (CT 12: 427–428). As James confided to Arthur Benson in 1896, ‘I have the imagination of disaster and see life as ferocious and sinister’.22 This final short story published originally in the English Review was collected with others including ‘The Velvet Glove’ and ‘Crapy Cornelia’ in The Finer Grain volume of 1910. ‘The Jolly Corner’, on the other hand, had appeared early enough to be included in the seventeenth volume of the New York Edition. Initial sales for the edition’s earlier volumes had been disappointing and the final outcome, given the time and effort invested in the enterprise, proved disastrous. Returns were even poorer than anticipated since James had failed to allow for payments due to his works’ previous publishers. Scribner’s, in any case, had ‘never expected a rapid sale; indeed’, they wrote to Pinker, ‘we were never too sanguine of a paying sale’.23 Between 1909 and 1911 the edition seems to have earned James only some $2,000 (£412), with annually decreasing sales. He later complained that it had become ‘a monument (like Ozymandias) which has never had the least intelligent critical justice done it’. It was an especially bitter experience on a personal level for, as David McWhirter has suggested, it represented a physical embodiment of a life’s work, indeed, of ‘his life as an artist’.24 Despite what amounted to a private income, James continued to be disturbed by his meagre earnings, illustrated in a well-known, ruefully comic anecdote. During one of her motor-trips with James, Mrs Wharton commented that her last novel had paid for her new car. He replied that ‘With the proceeds of my last novel I purchased a small go-cart, or hand-barrow, on which my guest’s luggage is wheeled from the station to my house. It needs a coat of paint.With the proceeds of my next novel, I shall have it painted’.25 The apparent public indifference nevertheless caused him great pain, seeming to repeat the theatrical humiliations he suffered in the mid-1890s. He was now less resilient, however, and this setback undoubtedly contributed to the dark, often despairing days that lay ahead.

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17 Loss of William, ‘So Shining a Presence’: Autobiographical Writing: The Great War and Death (1909 –1916)

‘A Sick God on a Damp Olympus’: James’s Ailing Health James was especially concerned about his health from the beginning of 1909, as Miss Bosanquet noted in her Diary, and in the early spring he consulted eminent cardiac specialists, Sir William Osler and Sir James Mackenzie. He was reassured by the latter, however, who concluded that his heart was sound for a man in his midsixties and advised that he should watch his diet and take regular exercise. At about this time he received a letter from a young journalist and aspiring man of letters who by way of introduction mentioned a mutual friend, Arthur Benson. The charming, handsome young man by whom James was much taken was Hugh Walpole, and he was invited to Lamb House later in the spring. James was pleased to be revered and Walpole, keen to further his career and be noticed by such a distinguished figure, was excited by their friendship. A letter of 27 April indicates how quickly their relationship developed, and James’s romantic assertions strike a familiar note: ‘believe in the comfort I take in you. It goes very deep – deep, deep, deep; so infinitely do you touch and move me, dear Hugh…. Hold me in your heart, even as I hold you in my arms – though verily I think no gallant youth less of a Baby. Say “Très-cher-Maître,” or “my very dear Master” (for the present)’. Thus James established his masterly role as mentor, cherishing this late-flowering passion, while also acknowledging his own loneliness. In his later years, Walpole told Stephen Spender that he had offered himself to James, but that he had replied, ‘I can’t, I can’t’, for reasons – emotional, moral or physical – which remain mysterious.1

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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James’s last flirtation with the theatre was to end in much the same way as his other dramatic experiences, but he found it difficult to resist offers when they came. The High Bid, well received in Edinburgh in 1908, had failed to find audiences in London. He had also adapted his story, ‘Owen Wingrave’, as a one-act play, The Saloon, and Bernard Shaw, on behalf of the Incorporated Stage Society, a group which put on new or experimental plays, trenchantly pointed out its shortcomings. The piece was eventually produced (with mixed critical reception) by Gertrude Kingston in January 1911 at her Little Theatre in London. James had been persuaded, too, most strongly by J.M. Barrie, to provide a play for American manager and producer Charles Frohman for production at the Duke of York’s theatre. Other eminent dramatists – Shaw, Granville Barker, Maugham, Masefield and Galsworthy – were also contributors to this repertory season. By early 1910 James had completed The Outcry, a comedy with a topical relevance involving the buying up of British art treasures by rich American collectors. His progress had been impeded by illness, and the play itself finally foundered when the West End theatres were closed on the death of Edward VII on 6 May 1910. It was finally recast as a novella and published in 1911. Christmas 1909 was spent once again quietly at Lamb House where he entertained a local journalist friend, T. Bailey Saunders, as well as his amanuensis, Theodora Bosanquet and Nelly Bradley, her ‘lady-pal’, as James refers to her. In her diary she noted that they all donned masks found in their crackers, though James, looking ‘real lovely’, stole the show. He was transformed into ‘a fat old lady with side curls, which made us so hilarious that he had to send for a shaving-glass to see himself in. “Why,” he propounded “don’t we all wear masks and change them as we do our clothes?”’.2 The remark is typically Jamesian, neatly touching upon questions of identity, gender and self-representation. Indeed, Miss Bosanquet with her sharp eye offers many such insights.Though James, she reports, had been likened to a sea-captain, invoking conventional models of masculinity, she decided that ‘no successful naval officer could have afforded to keep that sensitive mobile mouth’.3 An article which appeared after James’s death in the weekly paper The Sketch also refers to his entertaining ways – his ‘expertise in pulling crackers’ as well as his enthusiastic participation in the simple after-dinner amusement of sitting on the floor and blowing a feather across a stretched linen sheet.4 In nearby Eastbourne James visited Jonathan Sturges who, beset by chronic disease, had sunk into alcoholism and would die in 1911, in his mid-forties. In this ‘dimlydawning New Year’ of 1910 he also began to plan his next short serial in response to a request from Harpers, embracing the challenge and the clearing of his way when aided by ‘mon bon’, his affectionate name for the presiding genius of his inspiration: ‘the more doubts and torments fall away from me, the more I know where I am, the more everything spreads and shines and draws me on and I’m justified of my logic and my passion’ (CN, p. 261). Such confidence was sadly crushed, however, when he 370



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succumbed to what William called ‘melancholia’, a serious collapse of both physical and mental health. Henry described his condition as a ‘digestive crisis making food loathsome and nutrition impossible – and sick inanition and weakness and depression permanent’. He suffered some palpitations and shortness of breath, though the main trouble seems to have been psychological. He even abandoned for the time his allegiance to Fletcherism. All through the spring of 1910 and into the summer, his pocket diary entries are filled with simple observations of ‘bad days’ following ‘bad nights’ (CN, pp. 313– 316). His attentive local doctor, Ernest Skinner, installed a nurse at Lamb House, sometimes taking James with him on his country rounds to wait in his car while he attended his patients. Mrs Wharton sent grapes, ‘a bloom of purple and a burst of sweetness’, as well as offering financial help which was refused.When Hugh Walpole suggested he might visit, James declared himself unfit for company, blaming ‘the black devils of Nervousness, direst, damnedest demons, that ride me so cruelly’.

William’s Final Months: Henry’s Return to America Henry longed for the comfort and company of his closest family,William and Alice, and his letters complain to them of his ‘fairly dismal “lonesomeness”…. it has all been a queer & indescribable history’. William, still suffering from his own debilitating heart condition, sent Harry across the Atlantic to attend to his uncle towards the end of February and James was deeply grateful for the company of this ‘priceless youth’, invariably stolid and intelligent. His trials continued, however, depression dragging him down unpredictably into a helplessly sad and abject state. By April Harry had returned to America, but William and Alice then took over. In fact William, now increasingly ill, was heading once more for the curative salt springs of Bad Nauheim, while Alice (of whom Henry was very fond) stayed at Lamb House and attempted to divert her brother-in-law. She observed disconsolately in her date book at this time that ‘William cannot walk and Henry cannot smile’.5 Alice and her brother-in-law also spent two weeks as the guest of Mrs Mary Hunter at Hill Hall, an Elizabethan mansion at Theydon Bois, Epping. A socialite sister of composer Ethel Smyth, she entertained a variety of artists and musicians on a grand scale, but even here the novelist’s spirits could not be lifted. Henry and Alice joined William in Nauheim, but the elder brother’s health showed no improvement. Despite this, the three made a detour through Switzerland, though this must have proved stressful for the one healthy member of the group. To add to their prevailing anxieties, they learnt of brother Bob’s sudden death in Massachusetts, as Henry commented, ‘a painless, peaceful, enviable end to a stormy and unhappy career’.To spare them, Alice had kept the bad news from both brothers for a few days. She and William left for home, via Quebec, on 12 August and Henry sailed with 371



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them.To his nephew Harry he had written, ‘I feel I shall not be able for some time to come, to face solitude’.6 It was a fine-weathered, fast crossing, though William was becoming increasingly weak. Having left a rainy Quebec, they travelled down from Canada to the much-loved country house at Chocorua in New Hampshire where on 26 August William died. Henry was bereft, ‘heavily stricken and in darkness’, writing to T.S. Perry that ‘from far back in dimmest childhood he had been my ideal Elder Brother’.William was 68 years old and that final return to America had been difficult and pain-filled. His death was a grievous blow for Henry, but it was also an event of public moment: a prolific writer and teacher,William had established an international reputation in the fields of pragmatic philosophy and functional psychology. The remaining family members clung to each other (a term which recurs in the letters written during this time of bereavement), Henry pointing out to Anne Thackeray Ritchie that they were ‘the only near relatives I have left in the world’.7 He would remain with them until the end of July 1911, though he found ‘the whole face of life’ in America to be ‘repulsive & appalling’. After a service in Harvard’s Appleton Chapel, William’s ashes were placed in the James family grave in Cambridge Cemetery overlooking the Charles River. In his 1910 essay, ‘Is there a life after death?’, James considers the nature and quality of existence as much as the afterlife, recognizing simply the ‘unmistakable absoluteness of death’ and the sense of the universe which ‘takes upon itself to emphasize and multiply the disconnectedness of those who vanish from our sight’.Yet in this meditation on mortality he is drawn to the idea of the soul, its independence, and he ends by confirming his wish to ‘reach beyond the laboratory-brain’ (HJC, pp. 119, 127). Unsurprisingly, Henry’s mental state remained fragile, though he made trips to New York to meet, for instance, the Whartons and Morton Fullerton, most often staying with Mary Cadwalader Jones. At this time, too, back in Cambridge, he attended sessions with the eminent neurologist James Jackson Putnam at his practice on Marlborough Street, Boston. James seems to have benefited from the Freudian therapy he underwent, examining his grief at the loss of his brother, and pondering his own increasing age and loneliness: ‘[y]ou tided me over three or four bad places during those worst months’, James later assured Putnam. And as on his previous American visit, he also sought treatment from his Boston dentist. Having been awarded an honorary degree from Harvard in June 1911 (he received the same honour from Oxford, attending the ceremony in 1912), James took refuge from the excessive summer heat by staying with his old friend, George Abbott James. Unlike Henry, George James did graduate from Harvard, and now, recently widowed, he lived on his estate at East Point, Nahant, a small town on a peninsula reaching out into Massachusetts Bay. James appreciated the refreshing sea breezes, commenting to Mrs Wharton that it is ‘always profusely florid & floral & wonderfully sea-girt & gardened & groved here’, and he stayed for almost a month. Still depressed, he wrote to George James of the seemingly ‘accursèd necessity of falling back into deep dark 372



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holes’, and on his return to England thanked him as ‘the best of all good Samaritans at the worst of all melancholy seasons … the sweet savour of the whole fond episode will cling always to my spiritual palate’.8 His friend is affectionately recalled in James’s reminiscences of Harvard in Notes of a Son and Brother.

England once More Similarly hot weather awaited James when he arrived in Liverpool on 8 August and, staying only briefly in Lamb House, shocked at the sight of starving sheep and lambs expiring on the marshes nearby, he left home once again. Reluctant to endure solitude, he accepted Mrs Hunter’s invitation to return to Hill Hall, in Essex, where he stayed for a fortnight, transferred to the Norfolk country house of Sir Frederick Macmillan and then visited John Cadwalader and his cousin Minnie Jones in Forfarshire. But Mrs Wharton’s invitation to join her on a motor-trip through northern Italy with Walter Berry (her frequent companion and possibly lover) was declined: he wished, he said, to remain in his ‘long-abandoned home’ and to find ‘some sort of recovered peace & stability’. Yet, once back in Rye, ‘a black collapse’ returned and he complained to nephew Harry of ‘the being thrown there wholly on myself, with nothing outside to do & nowhere to go, in the darkening & muddying, the entirely talkless & walkless season, but to the end of the High St., or that of the little further stretch of pavement & back’.9 What he did need, he said, was ‘the remedy of London – of the blessed miles of pavement, lamplight, shopfront, apothecary’s beautiful and blue jars and numerous friends’ teacups and tales!’. He returned to the capital, though Miss Bosanquet, ‘the Remington priestess’, could not be admitted to the Reform Club to carry out her usual duties; instead, she secured a couple of rooms in Chelsea to which he sped by taxi at 10 o’clock every morning where she took dictation until they broke for lunch at 1.30. Though he continued this routine of work, James’s health during 1912 continued to cause concern. In July, while staying at Cliveden, the spectacular Italianate home of Waldorf and Nancy Astor in Buckinghamshire, where he saw Violet Paget once again, he twice suffered what he regularly referred to as a ‘pectoral attack’ and was transported back to Rye in Mrs Wharton’s motor-car, ‘a sovereign benevolence’. As Percy Lubbock points out in his edition of James’s letters (LHJ 2: 158), the novelist had begun to think of himself by this time as an invalid, and in the autumn he was struck down by a debilitating and lengthy attack of shingles which left him ‘absolutely lost in the wilderness of pain’. At the end of the year he signalled his commitment to a life based in London, however, by taking a flat at 21 Carlyle Mansions, Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, an arrangement which allowed him access to the large circle of friends to whom he was attached. 373



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The new apartment overlooked the Thames, ‘the black-barged yellow river’, and its five bedrooms could accommodate, as well as himself, a cook, a maid, and Burgess Noakes (his valet and manservant). Life in London was more congenial, especially during the winter months, for, despite physical frailty, James could be his sociable self once again. He wrote resignedly to his sister-in-law, ‘I sit here with my big south window open to the River, open wide, and a sort of healing balm of sunshine flooding the place…. My beginnings of going out again have consisted, up to today, in four successive excursions in a Bath-chair…. the B.C. has a sweet appeal of its own, for contemplative ventilation’. At this time, too, in the hope of improving his general health, most of James’s teeth were extracted and his mouth fitted with replacement ‘machinery’. He was finally delivered from the visits to the ‘torture chamber’ he had endured since childhood (SBO, p. 56). Wishing to fête his achievements, Edith Wharton commissioned a charcoal drawing of James from his old friend, John Singer Sargent.The first version was not a success, but the second fared better, though the novelist affirmed that the artist found him ‘difficult, perverse, obscure – quite as if I were a mere facial Awkward Age or Sacred Fount’. Mrs Wharton was instrumental, too, in organizing the collection for a gift of ‘not less than $5,000’ from fellow Americans for his imminent seventieth birthday – a project which, on learning of it, James immediately vetoed (p. 209). Mrs Wharton, always conscious of his comparatively slender finances, nevertheless privately arranged with Scribner’s to divert funds from her own royalties so that the company could offer him an advance of $8,000 for a proposed new work, ‘an important American novel’. The publisher complied, writing to James

Figure 6  Henry James, 1913, portrait, oil on canvas, by John Singer Sargent

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directly concerning this ‘somewhat unusual proposal’.10 The novelist was initially suspicious of such a generous offer, but nevertheless accepted the commission. He was never to complete The Ivory Tower, nor did he ever discover his friend’s involvement in the negotiation. His British friends and admirers, Percy Lubbock, Edmund Gosse and Hugh Walpole were also successful in assembling a long list of eminent subscribers to contribute to the purchase of a silver gilt porringer – a ‘golden bowl’ as a birthday gift – as well as commissioning a portrait by Sargent. The celebration proved to be, as he reported to his sister-in-law, ‘an extraordinary, prodigious, portentous, quite public Birthday’. James sat for Sargent in May and June 1913, inviting friends to come and chat with him – a practice favoured by the artist to relax his sitters. With the painting (which pleased him) completed, James sat for three days next to it in Sargent’s studio in Tite Street so that the subscribers could visit and enjoy both the portrait and his company. The artist himself then generously used his fee to commission a bust of James by the young sculptor Derwent Wood, and James offered his portrait to the National Portrait Gallery. The painting was much admired, but within the year it had been attacked, slashed three times with a meat cleaver by Mary Wood, a suffragette wishing to promote the cause of women’s rights. It wasn’t personal for she didn’t know who Henry James was, but he admitted that he felt ‘very scalped and disfigured’. The picture was quickly repaired.

‘I … Watch the Small Boy Dawdle and Gape Again’: Late Reminiscences James’s thoughts in these years were much involved with the past, for he had embarked on what turned out to be a personal and typically idiosyncratic account of his early years, two and a half volumes which transcend the conventional terms of autobiography. The original plan which was to incorporate a selection of William’s letters within a ‘Family Book’ must have developed during the long months of mourning following his brother’s death in 1910. He was aware, after all, that he was the last survivor of a brilliant family. The American Scene contemplated the national condition as he saw it, and now he was enabled to become more personal, to bring to life individual history, and, in a sense, to name names. Edith Wharton, whose recorded memories of James tend towards the romantic and lyrical, nevertheless provides a vivid first-hand account of her friend in reminiscing mood, his capacity to create, people, and unravel a distant scene, the kind of picture he would transfer to the page in his autobiographies. She recounts his reaction to a mention of his Emmet relatives:

375



  Loss of William, ‘So Shining a Presence’: Autobiographical Writing  ‘Ah, my dear, the Emmets–ah, the Emmets!’ Then he began … forgetting everything but the vision of his lost youth … the long train of ghosts flung with his enchanter’s wand across the wide stage of the summer night. Ghostlike indeed at first, wavering and indistinct, they glimmered at us through a series of disconnected ejaculations, epithets, allusions, parenthetical rectifications and restatements, till not only our brains but the clear night itself seemed filled with a palpable fog; and then, suddenly, by some miracle of shifted lights and accumulated strokes, there they stood before us as they lived, drawn with a million filament-like lines, yet sharp as an Ingres, dense as a Rembrandt …(A Backward Glance, pp. 193–194).

Henry initially began negotiations with Scribner’s for a volume of ‘Early Letters of William James, with Notes by Henry James’, though the project soon took on a quite different character. Sister-in-law Alice had passed over to him the large extant cache of letters and documents: dropped into ‘the limbo of old letters’ and overwhelmed by the profusion of materials and the imagined presence of supplicating ‘ghosts’, James was to confess himself sunk ‘into depths of concession’ and his emphasis quickly changed (NSB, p. 36). By August 1912 he had realized that he would need two volumes.The first, A Small Boy and Others, is composed entirely of recollections, reaching conclusion with a form of cliff-hanger when the fourteenyear-old Henry contracts typhus from which he sinks into unconsciousness: none of the family letters had so far been included. It soon becomes clear that the small boy of the title is, in fact, Henry rather than William: as John Singer Sargent is reported to have written, ‘[t]he opening sentence announces with engaging candour “some particulars of the early life of William James”. Then William glides into the wings and Henry takes his place’.11 The narrative is highly personal and idiosyncratic, tracing from an evocatively detailed past located in mid-century America and Europe, the developing sensibility of an artist. The retrospection serves, therefore, to illustrate and dramatize what he calls the ‘subjective passion’ (SBO, p. 25), the process by which the ‘gaping’, observing child, prefigures the artist who is narrating his story. Autobiographical narrative, displaying clear generic links with fiction, is notoriously prone to manipulation, of course, though in constructing, in Jungian terms, a ‘personal myth’, James is establishing a form of truth, the individual whom he recognizes in that distant past – an act of witness for which he is the sole means of validation. It is a model – in terms of narrative theory – of ‘unreliability’, but in what is omitted as much as what is included, James achieves a finely shaded, seemingly objective self-portrait. The temperamental characteristics associated with the embryonic artist, typified, as James represents them, by passivity, subjectivity and a susceptibility to diverse impressions, run counter to conventional masculine modes of behaviour, as his text acknowledges. Like that other fine young craftsman, Hyacinth Robinson, hero of The Princess Casamassima, James casts himself as one upon whom ‘nothing is lost’. Such observational powers come at a price, however: he is rarely at ease in his social circle, finds it difficult 376



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to play with other boys (as they with him), and like Hyacinth, though much better shod and dressed, becomes a lone flâneur walking the ‘beguiling streets’ (p. 24) of ‘our old original NewYork’.12 The corporate family disdain for ‘business’, or for ‘doing’ generally, is translated easily into a feminized sensibility, a habit of engaging with vicarious experience, recorded patterns of behaviour offering ‘clues to James’s creative neurosis’.13 James moved swiftly on to a second volume. Miss Bosanquet wondered at the creative process: in their Chelsea room, he dictated and she typed; ‘no preliminary work was needed’, she recalled.14 In Notes of a Son and Brother, which covers his adolescent years in Switzerland and Germany and the family’s return to America in the early sixties, James eventually reaches the family letters. Once back in England in 1911 he had requested from Alice more of William’s early letters as well as the slender collection of their father’s correspondence, aware, ironically, that he himself habitually destroyed such materials. William’s letters describe Harvard student life in the 1860s as well as his stay in Germany in 1867–1868. The older brother, aside from wishing to improve his German, was seeking help for some of his physical and psychological ailments and to develop his academic interests. Some of his art work which happened to be preserved from those years enhances the volume. Included is a reproduction of a portrait in oils of a cousin, Kitty Temple, as well as a pencil drawing of Wilky, injured in the Civil War, and a slyly comic sketch of young women at a French health spa, ‘The cold water cure at Divonne – excellent for melancholia’. William’s small self-portrait of about 1866, drawn in pencil on lined paper, but ‘exceedingly good, characteristic & valuable’, forms a frontispiece; it had fallen out of an old book belonging to sister Alice, which Katharine Loring had recently sent Henry. A selection of Henry James Sr’s letters (those less ‘intensely domestic, private and personal’) extends his son’s narrative more broadly into the mid-nineteenth-century intellectual history of New England as James Sr exchanges ideas with James Elliot Cabot and develops a somewhat one-sided relationship with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Henry Sr’s communications with those women who belonged to the literary elite of Boston and Cambridge such as Annie Fields, Jane Norton (Charles’s elder sister), and Caroline Sturgis Tappan (part of the Transcendentalist circle which included Margaret Fuller), often seem mannered, even flirtatious. For some of the letters addressed to himself Henry gives his sister Alice as the recipient. Henry Sr’s affectionate language might have embarrassed his son, or perhaps he wished not to have his own masculinity compromised. The episode of American history which Henry experienced only vicariously, the Civil War, is recounted at first hand from the southern states in the letters of Wilky who, having been severely injured, returned to the 54th Massachusetts regiment at the end of 1864. When Henry read of ‘Sherman’s whole army’ moving through the cities of the South, ‘it affected me’, he recalls, ‘from afar off as a vast epic vision. The old vibration lives again …’ (NSB, p. 310). 377



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In thus presenting these family letters, James refers modestly to his ‘own weaving hand’ but the choice of material and the manner of its editing, reflect, in fact, a quite firm grip (p. 235). His mother’s letters have no place in the volume and, he was disappointed, too, that little remained of the correspondence of his sister Alice. The letters which do appear, however, have become part of a Jamesian text; he asks his sister-in-law to remind her son Harry who had expressed some misgivings, ‘how I am entirely at one with him about the kind of use to be made by me of all these early things, the kind of setting they must have, the kind of encompassment that the book, as my book, my play of reminiscence & almost of brotherly autobiography & filial autobiography not less, must enshrine them in. The book I see & feel will be difficult & unprecedented & perillous – but if I bring it off it will be exquisite & unique; bring it off as I inwardly project it & oh so devoutly desire it’.15 It is a typical expression of family loyalty and affection, of faithfulness to a dead brother, and unyielding adherence to his own artistic integrity. Before she had finished reading A Small Boy and Others, Alice quickly thanked James for the volume, enthusing about ‘the grace, – and the tenderness – and the charm! … How William would have rejoiced over you, and the book and the genius of it!’16 In responding to Harry’s obvious misgivings about his editing of William’s letters, James, in his own long responses composed in the quiet small hours, remains sympathetic, even penitent, though he never wavers from representing himself as the final wise arbiter, protecting his dead brother’s reputation and refining his prose for public consumption. He could hear, he said, William’s pleading voice: ‘“Oh but you’re not going to give me away, to hand me over, in my raggedness and my poor accidents, quite unhelped, unfriended, you’re going to do the very best for me you can, aren’t you …”’? It reflects well on both uncle and nephew that their relationship successfully weathered this difference of opinions; by 1920 Harry had published his own two-volume edition of his father’s letters. In May 1913,Alice James received a visitor at her home in Irving Street, Cambridge: it was John Chipman Gray, a Civil War veteran and lawyer, part of the Jameses’ circle of friends, who was now mortally ill. He drew from his pocket a cache of twentythree letters, all addressed to him by Minny Temple, Henry’s much-loved and long dead cousin. Reluctant to destroy these letters written in her last year of life, Gray did not wish them returned to members of the Temple family, yet wondered what was to be done with them. A few years earlier he had shown William James one of the letters in which he was admiringly mentioned, a gesture for which William was touched and grateful: he had felt Minny ‘live again in all her lightness and freedom’.17 Assuming responsibility, Alice James, as on other occasions, made a wise decision. She asked that she might give them to her brother-in-law to use as he would, saw Gray again, and went on to let him see Henry’s two letters written on Minny’s death forty-three years earlier. Gray, having also read and admired A Small Boy and Others, agreed to her suggestion. She wrote to Henry, 378



  1909 –1916  It is a gallant and haunting record - almost too perfect to be broken up - but you will know how to use it for some memorial of her…. He thought your letters most beautiful and just, and he added slowly, “I too was never in love with her.” I liked better to write to her than to see her.” She was the only just woman I have ever known. Her friendship is one of the things in my life which I best like to remember.” If only he could have given the letters to William! How he would have prized them! (NSB, p. 476 – punctuation unchanged).

On receiving these manuscript letters which chart a young woman’s resilient response to the consumption which was destroying her, James was much moved, deciding, as his ‘memorial’ to Minny, to incorporate nineteen of them in the final chapter of Notes of a Son and Brother, at the time three quarters finished. He wrote of them to Minny’s youngest sister, Henrietta Pell-Clarke, ‘They came, & when I had read them (with such irresistible tears!) I recognized my chance to do what I had always longed in some way to do without seeing quite how – reserve & preserve in some way from oblivion, commemorate & a little enshrine, the image of our admirable & exquisite, our noble and unique little Minnie’.18 The chapter was much admired by critics when the work was published in March 1914 and James himself was proud of the result, writing to Alice, ‘I hope you will think that the use I have made of M.T.’s letters is as interesting as it could have been, & that J.G. will think so, poor dear man – if, ill & detached as he is, he still thinks or cares about anything.The whole working-in of Minnie was difficult & delicate – highly so; but I seem already to gather here that my evocation of her appears by her touchingness & beauty, the “stroke,” or success, of the book’.19 Letters and the power they can wield over time play an important role in James’s fiction and, indeed, his inclusion of Minny’s letters, long after her death, caused some family offence. Her surviving sister Ellen complained that neither she nor Henrietta had been consulted about their publication, but what seems much more reprehensible is James’s subsequent action in destroying these original documents. We do not know how Gray (who died in February 1915) or Alice felt, but James had ensured that Minny’s voice, duly edited and corrected, would speak only through his memoir. Possibly Alice had anticipated such an action for she had taken precautions, allowing for her brother-in-law’s habits and the dangers of such a journey. She had parcelled up the letters for their crossing of the Atlantic when war in Europe seemed likely and when memories of the loss of the Titanic in 1912 remained fresh. But before mailing them, with the aid of her daughter Peggy, she had diligently transcribed them all. Alice’s relationship with Henry remained affectionate, but on the brown manila envelope in which these transcripts are kept at Harvard’s Houghton Library, a pencilled comment remains: ‘The originals of these letters were given by J.C.G. to A.H.J. – She sent them to H.J. who used them & afterwards destroyed them without 379



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saying a word to her’. Alice’s handwriting appears on the envelope, but these accusatory words, not in her hand, are most likely to have been written by Harry, who had had his own problems when dealing with his uncle and the matter of letters. A third volume of autobiography, The Middle Years, was also begun, though never completed. Notes of a Son and Brother had ended with the death of Minny in 1870 and The Middle Years backtracks to the spring of 1869 and James’s arrival in London at the start of a fifteen-month stay in Europe. His opening chapter acknowledges the consolatory power of the past located in ‘the paradise of the first larger initiations’, the ‘images’ of memory a means of salvation capable of saving us from the ‘welter of death and darkness and ruin’ (p. 414). It was autumn 1914, war had already begun and he would soon lay the work to one side, never to complete it. The style remains Jamesian, though the recollections have much more in common with conventional memoirs by men (usually) of letters. His impressions of meetings with the great figures of the Victorian age, George Eliot, George Henry Lewes and Tennyson, are recounted in detail, but it seems likely that the unfolding conflict in Europe relegated for him those encounters to distant history. James has moved out of the sphere of his immediate family and though they cover the beginning of his independent, professional life, the reminiscences of The Middle Years lack the intensity of experience which characterizes the earlier volumes. The outbreak of war, ‘this colossal convulsion’, had rendered the past ‘of the least consequence or relevance’; he felt that Notes of a Son and Brother, for instance, belonged to ‘another life and planet’. His Notes on Novelists, a collection of relatively recent essays, many on French writers, was published as the first battle of Ypres was about to begin in western Flanders in autumn 1914. James offered Edmund Gosse some simple advice: ‘[p]ut my volume … away on a high shelf – to be taken down again only in the better and straighter light that I invincibly believe in the dawning of ’. He was aware, of course, that the world of his autobiographies was remote from twentieth-century concerns. Asking T.S. Perry to check some of the details (mostly relating to the American Civil War) contained in Notes of a Son and Brother, he confessed that ‘It’s among ghosts, isn’t it, that I invite you to walk … the vividness of all that antiquity is so compelling and beguiling to me that every item of its texture is a trap of memories and an abyss of divagation!’ James employs a similar trope in a letter to another contemporary, Henry Adams, who had written that the volume ‘reduced me to a pulp’: ‘[o]f course we are lone survivors, of course the past that was our lives is at the bottom of an abyss – if the abyss has any bottom’. Reflecting perhaps his own disappointment in life, Adams had scoffed to another friend that ‘Poor Henry James thinks it all real and actually still lives in that dreary, stuffy Newport and Cambridge with papa James and Charles Eliot Norton’. The difference between the two men, James had explained in his letter (unaware, of course, of this comment), lay in his own interest in consciousness, a responsiveness to changing experience and the need to persevere, ‘in presence of life’: ‘[i]t’s, I suppose, 380



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because I am that queer monster the artist, an obstinate finality, an inexhaustible sensibility’. The contrast between the two men’s perspectives accentuates James’s resilience, his capacity for renewal and for engaging with the values of a remote past.

Notes on Novelists James included in Notes on Novelists, the volume he had suggested should be placed, for the time, on a high shelf, an essay on ‘The Novel in The Ring and the Book’, the amended text of a lecture he had been persuaded to give by Gosse as part of the Centenary Celebration for Robert Browning’s birth, held by the Royal Society of Literature at Caxton Hall, London, on 7 May 1912. He was supported by both Percy Lubbock and Howard Sturgis. A long-time admirer of Browning’s poetry, though less enthusiastic about the man’s social presence, James daringly suggested that The Ring and the Book, a substantial collection of monologues dramatizing the circumstances of a murder trial set in late-seventeenth-century Rome, a work traditionally much admired, might be better re-written as a novel by James himself. He contended that this ‘great loose and uncontrolled composition, the great heavyhanging cluster of related but unreconciled parts’ would lend itself to an extended prose narrative (LC 1: 792). His lecture, at least on the page, with its colourful account of Browning’s finding of his materials in a Florentine market stall, for instance, must have proved much more accessible to an audience than the two lectures he delivered in America in 1905, though James was disconcerted to find that his listeners were principally women rather than ‘men of letters’.20 Not everyone, it seems, could hear him, but many were touched by his presence. Anne Thackeray Ritchie considered it ‘a most beautiful sympathetic & original speech full of reality & generous appreciation’, and the lecture was well received by the reporting press.21 Three of the substantial essays in Notes on Novelists take George Sand as their subject; they are the most recent of eight written across a long professional career, the earliest dating from 1868. James is most fascinated by her life and personal conduct, her resilience and capacity to translate experience into a fictional medium. Her novels had become old-fashioned even within her own lifetime, though she had remained on intimate terms with Flaubert, Turgenev and Mérimée. In James’s representation, the typical Sandian plot entails the fulfilment of passion, an outcome that contrives to promote the idealistic, egalitarian vision of its author, so that love and virtue, bathed in glory, may paper over any incidental moral lapses. James moves deftly between the life and works: a ‘single coat of rose-colour’ replaces any ‘tender appreciation of actuality’ in the fiction, whilst, in parallel, her ability to ‘outlive’ experience allows her to reminisce as if ‘dealing with the history of another person’ (LC 2: 734, 733).

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He returns regularly to the notorious Venetian episode in which Sand conducted an affair with Dr Pagello and wonders at her enduring capacity to arrange matters to her own advantage and to improvise in such prose that the reader may willingly conspire in any deception. Thus her novel, Elle et Lui (1859), had been designed to adjust the history of her relationship with Musset two years after his death and to counter his representation of events in Une confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836). He had asked her in his poem, ‘Souvenir’, the painful question, ‘Qu’as-tu fait, infidèle, / Qu’as-tu fait du passé?’ [What have you done, faithless one, What have you done with the past?]. The James essays, progressively less concerned with the contents of the large number of Sand’s novels, never tire of wondering at the practices of this ‘Parisian Pythoness’, as Thackeray called her, a female artist outlasting her male counterparts, and who, in effect, never gave up.

Outbreak of War, ‘Black and Hideous’ In the spring of 1914 Peggy James had arrived in England with a girlfriend, Margaret Payson, who struck James with some dismay as a kind of Daisy Miller figure. His youngest nephew, Aleck, then twenty-three and destined to be an artist, also visited. Though especially fond of his niece, he was concerned that he was not well enough to entertain the two girls; he did take them, however, to the Royal Academy, the British Museum, and to a sitting of the House of Commons. This was a restless time in British social and political life, and relations with Ireland remained strained. Such internal, national problems were eclipsed, however, by the events which brought about the outbreak of the Great War. Britain, committed to supporting French interests, declared war on Tuesday 4 August 1914 when Germany marched on neutral Belgium. England was enjoying an extended Bank Holiday and many – especially the young – were excited at the prospect of war, but James, who had left London for Rye in mid-July, was distraught, disillusioned at the betrayal of his belief in the continuity of European culture and history. On that day he wrote to Howard Sturgis of the ‘plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness’: ‘[h]ow can what is going on not be to one as a huge horror of blackness?’ Britain had, however, honoured her promises, as James also appreciated: at least, he admitted, ‘I haven’t had to face the shame of our not having drawn the sword for the massacred and tortured Flemings, and not having left our inestimable France, after vows exchanged, to shift for herself ’. Meantime, Rye seemed untroubled and tranquil – ‘the countryside not caring’, as Philip Larkin was to observe in his poem ‘MCMXIV’ – and the fine summer weather continued.A few days later, James wrote to his old friend Rhoda Broughton that ‘[t]he country and the season here are of a beauty of peace, and loveliness of 382



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light, and summer grace, that make it inconceivable that just across the Channel, blue as paint today, the fields of France and Belgium are being, or about to be, given up to unthinkable massacre and misery’. He regretted, indeed, that he had lived to witness such events, writing to Mrs Alfred Sutro, wife of the dramatist & novelist, that ‘I find it such a mistake on my own part to have lived on – when, like other saner and safer persons, I might perfectly have not – into this unspeakable giveaway of the whole fool’s paradise of our past…. My aged nerves can scarcely stand it, and I bear up but as I can’. A hopeful rumour that Russian troops were to be shipped into France that autumn was short-lived. Once again, James found it difficult to eat and to Edith Wharton, now resident in Paris, he railed at ‘the utter extinction of everything … a nightmare from which there is no waking save by sleep. I go to sleep, as if I were dog-tired with action – yet feel like the chilled vieillards in the old epics, infirm & helpless at home with the women while the plains are ringing with battle…. we look inconceivably off across the blue channel, the lovely rim, toward the nearness of the horrors that are in perpetration just beyond’. By the end of September some Belgian refugees fleeing from invasion were being accommodated in Rye. James offered up his studio in Watchbell Street where they could meet, write letters and read the papers during the day. He heard, against ‘the shuffle of mounting feet and the thick-drawn breath of emotion’, the sobbing of a young mother carrying her child and recognized that this was ‘the voice of history itself ’ (HJC, p. 168). In the same month James’s manservant, the ‘invaluable and irreplaceable little Burgess’, enlisted with the 5th Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment; James kept in touch, sending him reassuring, paternally affectionate letters, along with food and chocolate. Hugh Walpole, being short-sighted, had been rejected by the army, but was soon to leave for Russia as a war correspondent for the Daily Mail, while Jocelyn Persse had joined the Royal Fusiliers.

The Ivory Tower James continued to work, but finally had to give up on The Ivory Tower, the ‘fiction supposed to represent contemporary or recent life’,22 the ‘important American novel’ for which he was contracted. It was his first extended ‘American’ fiction since The Bostonians, which had been published nearly thirty years earlier. The first third was completed and detailed notes for the remainder survive, and it would doubtless have occupied a place among his last great novels. The usual direction of James’s narratives is reversed, for its hero, Graham (or Gray) Fielder, has been summoned to return from Europe to the opulence of Gilded Age Newport (no longer the innocent place of James’s youth) by his rich, dying uncle; Rosanna Gaw, a childhood friend whose father is also ill and who has long loved him, waits for him there. His 383



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businessman uncle, the aptly named Mr Betterman, wishes to leave him a vast fortune, but the slight young man, untainted by experience of what Rosanna calls ‘“the awful game of grab”’ (p. 33), is first to be appraised by his uncle; ‘“what I’m going to like, I see, is to listen to the way you talk. That … I guess, is about what I most wanted you to come for. Unless it be to look at you too. I like to look right at you”’. Gray apologizes that ‘“there isn’t more of me”’ (pp. 99–100). But he is ‘“different”’, his uncle assures him, triumphantly asserting, ‘“I’ve got you – without a flaw. So!”’ The young man senses himself to be ‘as in the exposed state of an important “piece”’, a precious acquisition for the dying man, a role he willingly accepts (pp. 105–106). Such frank, tender exchanges, dismantling conventional modes of male discourse, a feature of James’s late fiction, echo the language of his letters to other men and, perhaps, his conversations with intimates. Assured by his uncle’s doctor of his good influence, Gray finds himself free ‘to step straight into the chariot of the sun’, as if transformed into Phoebus Apollo. And, wondering at his uncle’s admiration, he realizes that never before had he ‘known his brow brushed or so much as tickled by the laurel or the bay’ (pp. 82, 100). The young hero’s physical features are further dwelt upon in conversation between his old friend Horton Vint and Vint’s lover Cissy Foy, her gender freeing her to expand on Gray’s charms. Like those Civil War soldiers never forgotten by James, Gray is olive-skinned, ‘“pale, very pale, clean brown”’ (p. 170), though his masculinity is comically compromised when neither can remember whether he has a moustache. Horton himself sports ‘a beautiful mitigating moustache’ which pleases Cissy who suspects any clean-shaven man to be ‘a sneak-thief ’ (pp. 154, 171). By contrast, the novel’s women tend to be marginalized – Rosanna Gaw is diminished from the beginning as a ‘massive’ figure carrying ‘a vast pale-green parasol’, while Cissy Foy ‘earns her keep’ in this society ‘by multiplying herself for everyone’ as a precarious observer (pp. 1, 43). After his uncle’s death, in a scene of homoerotic intensity, Gray trustingly reveals to the more worldly wise Horton that he has inherited ‘a most monstrous fortune’. Each ‘gapes’ at the other as Gray revels in ‘“the luxury, the pure luxury of you!”’ (p. 189). Horton has already confessed to Cissy that ‘“the dream of my life has been to be admired, really admired, … by some awfully rich man. Being admired by a rich woman even isn’t so good”’ (pp. 158–159). He later relishes his own prospective future as adviser, with ‘Gray’s face, Gray’s voice, Gray’s contact of hands laid all appealingly and affirmingly on his shoulders’. Horton looks forward to immense wealth ahead, for he and Cissy have been too poor to marry, but James’s language, ‘the great wave set in motion … washing him warmly down’, gives to Gray’s proposal the physical release of consummation (p. 192). In this exclusively male chapter of the novel’s third ‘Act’ (ten were planned in the manner of The Awkward Age), Gray rejects Horton’s suggestion that it would be a ‘blessing’ if he were to marry. He has locked away in an ornamental ivory tower 384



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the unopened letter received from Rosanna Gaw’s father, now dead. Horton can hardly believe that Gray has not guessed that Mr Gaw entrusted to him his beloved daughter. Like Densher and Kate Croy in The Wings of the Dove, Horton and Cissy conspire to deceive Gray though he, knowing of the swindle, will take no action against his friend, just as Monteith in ‘A Round of Visits’ cannot bring himself to pursue Bloodgood. It was important for James, as indicated in the extended ‘Notes’ for the novel drafted in the summer of 1914, that this should be no ‘vulgar theft’, but that Horton should have been ‘led on and encouraged’ by Gray (p. 287). The latter’s acquisition of great wealth, a reward for innocence, belongs to fairy-tale, though James’s plan, darker but unrealized, was to demonstrate Horton’s ‘queerness’, a drama of the kind of moral treachery which undermines human relations. And Gray was to be exposed to ‘the black and merciless things that are behind the great possessions’ (p. 287). The Ivory Tower undoubtedly reflects James’s disillusionment with his former homeland, his despair at its vulgarity and materialism, its dedication to business; in this twentieth-century Newport, he observes that one can almost hear the chink of money in the fresh sea breezes. In the chapters never written, the action was to have moved on, first to New York, its institutionalized wealth imagined by Gray as ‘familiar mountain masses’ (p. 232), and then to an autumnal Lenox, the increasingly exclusive small town in the Berkshires, associated for James with Edith Wharton. The values of honesty and loyalty can be enacted, it seems, only in the private sphere.The novel’s ivory tower, the ‘“distinguished retreat”’ (p. 213) with its rows of drawers, may represent the only refuge from what James saw as the nightmare of life for him in America. As the horrors of the war in Europe continued relentlessly, such ruminations must have seemed increasingly irrelevant, however, and James found himself unable to pick up once more his preparatory notes. Instead, he went back to the third volume of his autobiography, The MiddleYears, though, by the beginning of October 1914, once back in his Chelsea flat, he returned to the fantastical Sense of the Past, a fiction sufficiently remote from the disintegrating world around him. He found, it seems, some respite from the present and the jarring chatter about war in the literature of a less troubled past, writing to Edith Wharton that ‘It’s impossible to “locate anything in our time”…. It all makes Walter Scott, him only, readable again’.

War Essays and Charitable Work Yet James was far from wishing to escape from the realities of the present. His essay ‘France’ appeared in The Book of France in Aid of the French Parliamentary Committee’s Fund for the Relief of the Invaded Departments (1915), a collection of 385



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pieces by French and British writers, edited by Winifred Stephens. This also included his translation of ‘Les Saints de la France’, an essay by Maurice Barrès. In the short piece on ‘France’, ‘our great Ally’, which was later included in his volume of war essays, Within the Rim (1918), eschewing the popular jingoistic terms of the time, James appealed to the idea of a shared ideal of culture and civilization, whilst acknowledging ‘a native genius so different from our own’ across the Channel (HJC, pp. 149, 147). He was fascinated, too, by the vivid first-hand accounts provided by Mrs Wharton (resident in France and with influential connections) of her visits by motor-car to the frontline. She was much involved in charitable work, opening a workroom for French women whose husbands or sons had enlisted in the army, as well as helping establish American Hostels for Refugees. When the volume she had edited, The Book of the Homeless, containing the work of many of the most prominent writers, artists and composers of the day, appeared in 1916, it included James’s essay on ‘The Long Wards’, reflecting his own experience of visiting wounded soldiers in London. The historic St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City had opened its East Wing for the military sick and wounded at the beginning of the war and began admitting Belgian refugees in October 1914. James was, in fact, just one in a line of distinguished visitors which included King George V and Queen Mary, Princess Clementine of Belgium and her husband, Prince Victor Napoléon, and Princess Henriette of Belgium, Duchess of Vendôme and her husband Prince Emmanuel, Duke of Vendôme. To his nephew Harry he commented on the British Grenadier Guards, ‘bright and instinctive’, invalided out of the first Battle of Ypres, whom he met at St Bartholomew’s, expressing in ‘The Long Wards’ his admiration for the enduring patience and humanity of the soldier, qualities at such odds with his original mission to ‘advance and explode and destroy’ (HJC, p. 172). James also visited Belgian refugees at Crosby Hall, not far from his Chelsea flat, recording his impressions in an essay, ‘Refugees in England’, which appeared in America in 1915 and later in the Times Literary Supplement (23 March 1916). The historic fifteenth-century building in Cheyne Walk had recently been transplanted from Bishopsgate, and now housed ‘the exiled, the broken and bewildered’. Invoking history, James observed how the hall’s ‘almost incomparable roof has arched all this Winter and Spring over a scene probably more interesting and certainly more pathetic than any that have ever drawn down its ancient far-off blessing’ (HJC, p. 163). For Elizabeth Asquith, daughter of the British premier, still in her teens, who was fundraising for artists in distress during the war, James wrote ‘Within the Rim’, an essay which she finally had published posthumously in the pages of the Fortnightly Review (1 August 1917). Its terminology is more directly of its time – he refers to the ‘Germanic pounce’ upon France in 1870–1871, to ‘crucified Belgium’ and the 386



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world now ‘squeezed together in the huge Prussian fist’ – but the essay has an autobiographical strand as the author ponders the incongruously beautiful summer of 1914 ‘from the old rampart of a little high-perched Sussex town … staring at the bright mystery beyond the rim of the furthest opaline reach’ and, in the unseen distance, the ‘Belgian horror’ in progress (HJC, pp. 183, 178, 179). James is reminded of his feelings at the outbreak of the American Civil War, though the ‘general sense of the land’ he now cherishes is quintessentially British. The ‘blades of grass, the outlines of leaves, the drift of clouds, the streaks of mortar between old bricks … the call of child-voices muffled in the comforting air’ celebrate the England nostalgically itemized in Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ (p. 184). James’s anguish is expressed more volubly in his correspondence than in the published work and, despite his continuing ill-health, his cardiac problems and recurring ‘food-loathing’, he continued to engage with charitable causes.When the late Charles Eliot Norton’s son Richard (formerly resident in Rome) set up the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps, a group of young Americans who acted as drivers and paramedics, he enlisted James as its honorary chairman. Having met him for lunch, James reported to Grace Norton that he had found Richard ‘unmitigatedly magnificent’. He was later delighted to receive a cheque from T.S. Perry and his wife Lilla Cabot in support of the team’s efforts in ‘working both for the French and the English Army’. James also offered his own help to individuals – a bed for the night for a volunteer from Rye, for instance, or a lunch invitation and dental treatment for T.J.Williams, a sapper in the Royal Engineers.The weather was unusually fine in spring 1915, and the author’s dairies are scattered with brief comments on his own ailments and the many occasions on which he enjoyed ‘tea with the wounded’. James’s eye had always been caught by the sight of a soldier in uniform. Long ago, in 1878, in his essay on ‘The British Soldier’, confessing to knowing ‘nothing about soldiers’, he had admired the Life Guards on summer afternoons, in undress uniform, ‘with their tight red jackets and tight blue trousers following the swelling lines of their manly shapes’ – a case of what was popularly known as ‘scarlet fever’. He admired, too, the uniform of the Rifle Brigade, when worn by ‘a tall, slim, neatwaisted young Englishman with a fresh complexion, a candid eye and a yellow moustache … of quite irresistible effect’ (HJC, pp. 13, 8, 10). And in autumn 1914, when London was filling with military men, he related to Harry James his excitement at seeing from his window ‘a great swinging body of the London Scottish, as one supposes, marching past at the briskest possible step with its long line of freshly enlisted men behind it…. there is always a particular big thrill in the collective passage of the stridingly and just a bit flappingly kilted and bonneted, when it isn’t a question of mere parade or exercise’. At the beginning of 1915 James was saddened to learn that the mulberry tree growing in the centre of the garden at Lamb House had been blown down in a storm. 387



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In a letter to Mrs Dacre Vincent, a friend living in Rye, he mentions a tempest, and talks of mortality and regret, as if, perhaps, he is recollecting The Tempest, the subject of his one extended essay on Shakespeare, published in 1907, in which he muses on the nature of genius, the jarring contrast between the everyday life of the artist and his creative self, Shakespeare as ‘monster and magician of a thousand masks’ (CWHJD, p. 497). According to tradition, the dramatist had planted a mulberry tree at his grand house, New Place, in Stratford-upon-Avon. The Tempest, of course, reflects upon the medium of dramatic illusion, and the ‘magic’ invested in Prospero, who controls its events. It is as if James is contemplating his own mortal gift as an artist and the disturbingly dark times in which he now finds himself living. The mulberry tree, might have gone on for some time, I think, in the absence of an inordinate gale – but once the fury of the tempest really descended he was bound to give way, because his poor old heart was dead, his immense old trunk hollow. He had no power to resist left when the south-wester caught him by his vast crinière and simply twisted his head round and round. It’s very sad, for he was the making of the garden – he was it in person; and now I feel for the time as if I didn’t care what becomes of it – my interest wholly collapses. But what a folly to talk of that prostration.

In this same year H.G.Wells published Boon, a typically original treatment of authorship and literature composed by the fictional Reginald Bliss. Its fourth chapter, ‘Of Art, of Literature, of Mr. Henry James’, which lampoons the novelist, parodies (not especially convincingly) his late style and ridicules his subject matter, James had found hurtful since the two had been to this point on friendly terms. In fact, Wells mocks himself, as well as a number of other contemporary writers. In his letters James had been encouraging towards the younger man, though his long two-part essay on ‘The Younger Generation’, first published in the Times Literary Supplement (19 March and 2 April 1914), which groups Wells with his friend Arnold Bennett, is more circumspect about the achievement of both.Wells’s admiration for the older man was already waning and this is perhaps why he felt free to mock him in this way.23 The two fell out, and, indeed, their literary values were quite distinct: Wells regarded himself largely as a journalist, while James felt that he had betrayed a higher calling. The consequent robust exchange of letters indicates the distance between them, and James was moved to spell out his aesthetic credo, now celebrated: ‘It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, for our consideration and application of these things, and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process’.Wells doesn’t emerge with much credit from the episode, though it has to be admitted, too, that James’s ‘Younger Generation’ essay contains a number of dubious judgments and choices that Hugh Walpole was quick to mention to James Pinker: ‘Quite between you and me, I thought HJ’s Times things all wrong. Anyone 388



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who prefers Edith Wharton to Chance, and Sinister Street to Sons and Lovers! Also no mention of E.M. Forster, who can put the rest of us in his pocket!’.24 In early summer 1915 James received the devastating news of the death of Rupert Brooke who, a member of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, had died on 23 April 1915 not in combat but of blood poisoning on a French hospital ship while en route for Gallipoli. He was twenty-seven years old and James had first met him (memorably) at Cambridge in 1909. He received from Brooke’s friend Edward Marsh 1914 and Other Poems, published posthumously, and in his response drew together the beauty of Brooke’s writing with the beauty of the man, having spent ‘heart-breaking’ hours ‘under the sense of the stupid extinction of so exquisite an instrument and so exquisite a being. Immense the generosity of his response to life and the beauty and variety of the forms in which it broke out, and of which these further things are such an enriching exhibition’. James’s last essay, an unconditionally affectionate introduction to Brooke’s Letters from America, was finished that autumn: the young poet, referred to simply as Rupert, assumes a mythical, ­idealized beauty, appearing like ‘a stripped young swimmer … splashing through blue water’: he ‘expressed us all’ and ‘one liked absolutely everything about him, without the smallest exception’ (LC 1: 750, 752–753). News of the tragedies and horrors of war continued relentlessly. From May 1915 the Kaiser had authorized Zeppelin bombing raids on the capital; observing the airship’s ‘unerring instinct for poor old women and young children’, James wondered at such ‘dastardly barbarities’. His pocket diaries for this period mix remarks on his own worrying ill-health with the social engagements, also coloured by anxieties about the war, which he continued to fulfil. On 31 August 1915, for instance, he lunched at the Ritz ‘with Mrs. Hall Walker to say good-bye to her brother,Wilfred Sheridan back to front after week’s leave; he splendid and beautiful and occasion somehow such a pang – all unspeakable…. Afterwards at tea at Lady C’s – very interesting (splendid) young manchot officer, Sutton. They kill me!’ (CN, p. 430). James could only admire the resilience and courage he regularly witnessed. Sheridan was married to the daughter of a Sussex friend and James had been invited to be godfather to the couple’s eldest child in 1912. He had refused, telling them darkly that the little girl ‘mustn’t be taken, for her first happy holiday, to visit her late godfather’s tomb’. On 25 September 1915, Sheridan, whose third child had just been born, would be killed at the Battle of Loos, aged thirty-six. Deeply interested in the progress of the war, though leading a ‘sequestered’ life, James occasionally mixed with those political and military leaders ‘high in authority’. He was an old friend of Margot Asquith’s and had met her husband Herbert Asquith, now Prime Minister, in the 1890s. He was invited to the occasional lunch in Downing Street and in mid-January 1915 spent a weekend at Walmer Castle on the Kent coast, overlooking the English Channel. The castle, dating back to the reign of Henry VIII, was administered by the Ministry of Works and, as well as 389



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offering a useful weekend retreat for members of the government, provided through its location effective links with the frontline in France. On this occasion, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, was present (though it is not certain that he knew who James was). The novelist was taken for a motor drive round the Isle of Thanet, Kent’s most easterly point, in company with the Prime Minister and Viola, daughter of Herbert Beerbohm Tree: it was bitter winter weather, but James was reassured by ‘the friendly sight of all the swarming khaki on the roads’, as he reported to Edith Wharton.

British Citizenship From the beginning James had hoped that America would intervene in the European war; he was so far disappointed and, indeed, railed to fellow-American Sargent against his homeland’s apparent ‘amiabilities’ towards Germany. America now seemed a place from which he was himself detached, as he had confessed to his sister-in-law several years earlier, somewhere he could never think of returning to permanently. It held a past somehow sinister which he looked on with dread, a history, personal but quite incidental to him, which he preferred not to confront: Dearest Alice, I could come back to America (could be carried back on a stretcher) to die – but never, never to live…. when I think of how little Boston and Cambridge were of old ever my affair, or anything but an accident, for me, of the parental life there to which I occasionally and painfully and losingly sacrificed, I have a superstitious terror of seeing them at the end of time again stretch out strange inevitable tentacles to draw me back and destroy me.

England had been James’s home for almost the past forty years and his affection and loyalty had only increased with the outbreak of war. It was ironic, therefore, that, as part of the security arrangements, when he travelled to Lamb House from London, he was regarded as ‘an Alien’ requiring ‘Police supervision’. He therefore decided to act on a conviction that had become clearer in the recent difficult years, applying to become a naturalized British citizen: he took the Oath of Allegiance at 4.30 p.m. on 26 July 1915. His four sponsors included some of the most eminent men of the Establishment – Herbert Asquith, Edmund Gosse, recently retired from his job as Librarian of the House of Lords Library, literary agent James Pinker, and G.W. Prothero, academic historian and writer who lived with his wife Fanny in Rye. It was an important act on James’s part, a final commitment made all the more significant with the outbreak of war, and a confirmation of his having chosen ‘the old world’ so many years earlier (CN, p. 214). Dismayed that America, led by President Woodrow Wilson, continued with a policy of neutrality, he considered his 390



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homeland to be ‘fraternising with the common foe’. He consulted no-one in advance and some of his American friends, Edith Wharton, for instance, and his Cambridge family, did not approve.When America finally entered the war in April 1917, he had been dead for over a year. The delay had been hard for him: as Ezra Pound later pointed out, referring to relations between Britain, France and America, James had spent a ‘life-time … in trying to make two continents understand each other, in trying … to make three nations intelligible one to another’.25 James felt too ill to make his usual return to Rye in summer 1915, confined much of his time to bed, ‘dismally unwell and helpless’, enduring ‘stomachic and digestive crisis; with, suddenly, gout as climax’, as he noted (CN, p. 430). Nevertheless he arrived at Lamb House in mid-October where during a short – and what proved to be final – stay he made a last bonfire of documents and photographs before returning to London. He had asked his nephew Harry, as his executor, ‘to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter – which, I know, is but so imperfectly possible’. Edith Wharton came to England, but he was not well enough to join her on a trip to Qu’acre. She did have a meeting with Miss Bosanquet, however, who agreed to keep her informed of his condition.

Final Illness Troubled by his heart, James could now eat little and on the morning of 2 December he suffered a first stroke which paralysed his left side.The previous day he had written his last letter, to Peggy James; it was dictated, but he finished by remarking that ‘the pen drops from my hand!’That same evening he spent time looking over his notes for The Sense of the Past. He had to call for help the next morning in his bedroom and years later Edith Wharton recorded having been told that, in falling, ‘he heard in the room a voice which was distinctly, it seemed, not his own, saying: “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!”’ – it has a wonderfully Jamesian poignancy.26 A second stroke followed the next night, of which he was less aware; his mental clarity became compromised, and from this time his physical condition progressively declined. Often in a confused state, he continued at times (with the Remington moved into his bedroom) to dictate to Miss Bosanquet; surviving documents indicate that he believed he was writing an autobiography of Napoleon Bonaparte, a figure who had interested him from earliest days. She records with wonder how he could compose sentences in his characteristic style, fragments which managed to hang together: ‘[h]e leaves huge gaps undictated, but everything somehow fits into the scheme. It’s the most extraordinary thing to watch the bits falling together’. At other times, his hand moved across the bed clothes, as if he were still writing and he was sometimes uncertain whether he was in Edinburgh, Dublin or New York, becoming angry and frustrated with those around him. 391



  Loss of William, ‘So Shining a Presence’: Autobiographical Writing 

His sister-in-law Alice made the dangerous wartime crossing of the Atlantic in early December to care for James ‘when his time came’, as she had promised her dying husband and in the New Year her daughter Peggy and son Harry also arrived. He sent a brief message via Peggy to Anne Thackeray Ritchie, ‘My love – always, always’.27 It was a harrowing, exhausting time for those who looked after him both night and day. John Singer Sargent’s sisters, Emily and Violet, offered much support. Burgess Noakes had rejoined the household staff in autumn 1915, released on indefinite leave, having been injured by a bursting shell as well as suffering hearing loss; he was especially attentive to James’s needs. The notes sent by Miss Bosanquet to Edith Wharton up to the Christmas period provide almost daily details of James’s prolonged suffering, but Alice, when she learnt of these communications, increasingly excluded the younger woman. She believed that Miss Bosanquet had taken too much upon herself and also disapproved of Edith Wharton, her style of life and the novels she wrote.Theodora Bosanquet, who had been such a kind and i­ ntelligent support in the past months, was understandably hurt at this treatment, now appearing at Carlyle Mansions only when James needed her services. On New Year’s Day 1916, it was announced that Henry James had been awarded the Order of Merit, an honour granted by the Crown to those who have distinguished themselves in the services, science, art or literature. The following notice appeared in the London Times: The King has been graciously pleased to make the following appointment to the Order of Merit:– HENRY JAMES, ESQ. Mr. Henry James recently became naturalised in this country to mark his sympathy with the cause of the Allies. The high honour now conferred on him will give the keenest satisfaction to lovers of literature all over the world, and not least in France, with whose national spirit and national culture he is deeply imbued. For Mr. James, though American by birth and British by adoption, is a citizen of the world. The variety and subtlety as well as the fertility of his genius have placed him with Mr. Thomas Hardy unquestionably at the head of living masters of English. Now he joins Mr. Hardy in the Order, membership of which is the highest distinction attainable by a writer, and in which they are the only two representatives of pure literature.

If he read the announcement, James would doubtless have disapproved of some of the journalistic hyperbole, and it is unlikely that he would have welcomed the association with Thomas Hardy for whose writing he showed a marked lack of sympathy, but he was sufficiently clear-headed to appreciate such an honour, receiving piles of letters and telegrams of congratulation. It had been a close thing, however, as the influential Lord Morley (now an O.M. himself) had sought to dissuade the Prime Minister from forwarding James’s name to the King. John Morley had often failed to appreciate James’s writing, indeed, had advised 392



  1909 –1916 

Macmillan’s, for whom he was a reader, against publishing his French Poets and Novelists back in the late 1870s. It was Eddie Marsh, now an assistant private secretary to Asquith, who eloquently defended James’s work, as well as recalling his newly attested loyalty to England. Owing to his illness, the King gave permission for the Cross of the Order of Merit to be brought to James on 19 January by his old friend, Lord Bryce, formerly lawyer, Member of Parliament, and British Ambassador to America.28 James had, it seems, first been told of the honour by Edmund Gosse, accepting the news quietly, before instructing his nurse, ‘to turn off the light so as to spare my blushes’.29 In these final two months of his life James’s suffering continued, relieved only by brief, occasional returns of strength and lucidity. Having lapsed into unconsciousness, he died on 28 February, at six in the evening, with Alice at his side. Edith Wharton was relieved to learn from Miss Bosanquet that ‘the end was quiet & unconscious’. He was seventy-two years old. Edmund Gosse provided an obituary for the Times which appeared on the following day.The funeral service on 3 March took place on a cold wet day in Chelsea Old Church in which gathered many of the most celebrated figures of literature and art, ‘a crowd exclusive as his books’. Anne Thackeray Ritchie wondered whether any of ‘his soldiers’ were present and wrote to Theodora Bosanquet from the Isle of Wight that ‘I have been picturing to myself the long procession of the people who loved him & whom he had cheered & helped for so long’.30 The black coffin was adorned with ‘a crown of delicate fresh violets’.31 A commemorative plaque designed by John J. Borie (a friend of James’s and of Bay Emmet) placed on the wall records him as ‘Lover & interpreter of the fine amenities of brave decisions & generous loyalties … who renounced a cherished citizenship to give his allegiance to England in the 1st year of the Great War’. Cremation took place at Golders Green, North London, and Alice James carried his ashes back to America where they were laid in the James family grave in Cambridge Cemetery. Many years later, in June 1976, a memorial stone in black marble was unveiled in his honour in Westminster Abbey by the novelist’s great grand-nephew, Alexander James, Jr. His fiction had never been as popular as he wished – the obituary which appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette (one of many) refers to ‘the author’s deliberate, intricate and microscopic method’32 – and little changed after his death. Highly respected by the few, he had never been sufficiently popular to suffer serious reversal in the years that followed. In 1916 Rebecca West (H.G. Wells’s mistress at this time) published a biography, written in her characteristically crisp style, and in 1917, Percy Lubbock edited for publication his unfinished works, two novels, The Sense of the Past and The Ivory Tower, as well as the memoir, The Middle Years. Lubbock worked assiduously in these years, not only selecting and editing two volumes of James’s letters, mostly taken from his later years, and much influenced by the f­ amily’s

393



  Loss of William, ‘So Shining a Presence’: Autobiographical Writing 

preferences, but also re-issuing in thirty-five volumes what was claimed to be ‘all the fiction … published in book-form during his life’.33 These volumes appeared in 1921–1923, but, in addition, in 1921 Lubbock published his own Craft of Fiction, an essay on the form of the novel, imbued with the spirit of ‘the Master’ which proved both influential and controversial with a younger generation which included E.M. Forster,Virginia Woolf and Graham Greene. Ezra Pound’s praise for James’s efforts as cultural intermediary were made in a special number of The Little (August 1918), a journal devoted to the experimental and avant-garde, whilst T.S. Eliot also provided two pieces, ‘In Memoriam’ and ‘The Hawthorne Aspect’. Both writers, like James, reflected, of course, sensibilities American and European. James had known Virginia Woolf, a part of this new literary generation, since childhood, had visited the Stephen family in Cornwall, and seen the house in St Ives which was to be re-created in To the Lighthouse many years afterwards. For her, James was – quite naturally – of ‘The Old Order’, but her brilliant review of The MiddleYears, alive to his distinctive style, his enduring creative capacity, and to his restless need to revise, poignantly captures something of the man’s spirit: although we are aware that we shall hear his voice no more, there is no hint of exhaustion or of leave-taking; the tone is as rich and deliberate as if time were unending and matter infinite; what we have seems to me but the prelude to what we are to have, but a crumb, as he says, of a banquet now forever withheld. Someone speaking once incautiously in his presence of his ‘completed’ works drew from him the emphatic assertion that never, never so long as he lived could there be any talk of completion; his work would end only with his life; and it seems in accord with this spirit that we should feel ourselves pausing, at the end of a paragraph, while in imagination the next great wave of the wonderful voice curves into fullness.34

Death has inevitably claimed the man, but, as Virginia Woolf so movingly imagines, the artist’s voice continues to speak to us, freed from time and mortality.

394

Letter Details

Chapter 1 p. 11: ‘No one took any interest whatever in his development’, 8 November 1906, LHJ 2: 55 p. 16: ‘Dear Eddy / As I heard you were going to try to turn the club’, n.d., CL5572, 1: 3 p. 19: ‘very good-looking’, ‘of an almost épouvantable badness’, to Howard Sturgis, ‘May 12th or 13th!’ 1913, HJL, 4: 669 pp. 20-21: ‘Uncle Edward never married’, to Sturgis, 670

Chapter 2 p. 32: ‘There are six gilt legged armchairs’, to Edgar Beach Van Winkle, 1 July 1856, CWJ 4: 2 pp. 38-39: ‘[h]e is quite as sound in body and mind as any of us’, CWJ 4: 9 p. 42: ‘his sentences when they do come forth’, 27, 28 March [1860], CL55-72, 1: 34 p. 43: ‘this is our day for sailing’, 8 October [1859], CL55-72, 1: 15 p. 43: ‘dilapidated old stone house’, to T.S. Perry, 26, 29 January 1860, 27–28 p. 43: ‘[d]rinking, smoking big German pipes and singing’, to T.S. Perry, 13 May 1860, 39

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

395



  Letter Details 

p. 43: ‘one of the loveliest spots upon earth,’ 40 p. 44: ‘to no style am I a stranger’, 18 July 1860, 52 p. 44: ‘I cannot again stand the pressure of avowed authorship’, 25, [28] March 1864, 96–97 p. 44: ‘sooner than we expected when we came’, 27, 28 March [1860], 34–35 p. 45: ‘I think I must fire off my biggest gun first’, 18 July 1860, 47 p. 45: ‘I am more than ever “penetrated” with Paris’, 3, 6 September [1860], 69 p. 46: ‘the place in America we all most care to live in’, 18 July 1860, 47 p. 46: ‘I have not the remotest idea’, 62

Chapter 3 p. 55: ‘a dead generation’, 20 September 1867, CL55-72, 1: 179 p. 55: ‘Ah, thou who hast trod the pavement of Moorish shrines’, 1 December 1866, 149 p. 60:‘the bright intensity of her example’, to WJ, 29, 30 March [1870], CL55-72, 2: 343 p. 60: ‘a good deal of injustice for some years past’, to HJ, 5 December 1869, CWJ 1: 129 p. 65: ‘well-nigh half a century’, 19 February 1912, LHJ 2: 230 pp. 65-66: ‘the face of nature & civilization in this our country’, 16 January 1871, CL55-72 2: 390 p. 67: ‘I shall have a very long row to hoe’, 22 November 1867, CL55-72, 1: 189 p. 67: ‘Social relaxation’, ‘I haven’t a creature to talk to’, 22 November [1867], 189, 190 p. 68: ‘the most agreeable and graceful and civilized house’, to Grace Norton, 7 April 1914, HJL 4: 710 p. 69: ‘unhappy bowels’, to WJ, 7 October [1869], CWJ 1: 104 p. 70: ‘“Oh. I don’t sleep. I’ve given it up”’, to WJ, 29, 30 March [1870], CL55-72, 2: 344 p. 70: ‘sick & disordered a creature’, to WJ, 343

Chapter 4 p. 75: ‘[i]t all strikes me as amusingly thin & watery’ 31 August [1869], CL55-72 2: 87 p. 75: ‘[a]ll the French utterances I read’, to Grace Norton, 26 September 1870, 374 p. 75: ‘the odorous gloom of the cabins’, ‘Old England’, to James family, 27 February 1869, CL55-72 1: 220, 221 p. 75: ‘gloom-smitten’, to MWJ, 2, 5 March [1869], CL55-72, 1: 226

396



  Letter Details 

p. 76: ‘I pay a guinea & ½ a week for sitting room’, to MWJ, 2, 5 March [1869], 227 p. 76: ‘short, burly & corpulent, very careless & unfinished’, 10 March [1869], 237–238 p. 77: ‘an old doge – a work of beauty & elegance’, to MWJ, 20 March [1869], 256–257 pp. 77-78: ‘a marvellous phenomenon – ploughing along’, to AJ, 10, 12 March [1869], 234 p. 78: ‘continues decidedly bad’, to MWJ, 26 March [1869], 258 p. 78: ‘baths are ingeniously delicious’, 6 April [1869], 270–271 p. 78: ‘famous for her Platonic friendships’, to Elizabeth Boott, 15 August 1873, CL72-76, 2: 38 p. 79: ‘literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking’, 10 May [1869], CL55-72, 1: 311 p. 79: ‘He paints nothing but Mrs. Morris’, to WJ, 13 May [1869], 318 p. 79: ‘have you think that I am extravagant’, to HJ Sr, 10, 12 May [1869], 309 p. 80: ‘I find I like it even better’, to MWJ, [19] May [1869], CL55-72, 2: 7 p. 80: ‘monumental splendour’, ‘extremely pretty, but rather vacuous’, to MWJ, [19] May, to Charles Eliot Norton, 31 May [1869], 5, 22 p. 80: ‘the glaciers had spared to it “the soul of their white snows”’, 19 June 1869, 29 pp. 80-81: ‘The sadness of the place flattens you out into nothing’, to MWJ, 21, 23 December [1869], 231 p. 81: ‘I have lost my best friend’, 13, 16 [17] October [1869], 146 p. 81: ‘lounging away the days in the shade of “Sonchaud’s piny flanks”’, to MWJ, 13 July [1872], CL72-76 1: 43 p. 81: ‘the sense of going down into Italy’, 31 August [1869], CL55-72, 2: 83 p. 82: ‘horribly decayed – but sublime’, to MWJ, 10, 12 September 1969, 96 p. 82: ‘only a delightful impression … a man of about 38’, 13, 16 [17] October [1869], 144, 145 p. 83: ‘strangely the Venice of dreams’, to John La Farge, 21 September [1869], 109 p. 83: ‘pushing & paddling & screaming’, to HJ Sr, 17 September, to WJ, 25, 26 [27] September [1869], 119 p. 83: ‘I always breakfast on a beefsteak’, 7, [8] October [1869], 136 pp. 83-84: ‘It makes Venice – Florence – Oxford’, to WJ, 30 October [1869], 166 p. 84: ‘thick with the presence of invisible ghosts’, ‘great transfigured statue of M. Aurelius’, to Grace Norton, 18 November, to MWJ, 21, [22] November [1869], 202, 210 p. 84: ‘great violet Campagna’, ‘delightful princely shabby old Palaces’, to MWJ, 21, [22] November [1869], 208, 210–211 p. 84: ‘onerous society’, to HJ Sr, 7 December [1869], 225 397



  Letter Details 

p. 84: ‘a vast swarming ugly place’, to MWJ, 21, 23 December [1869], 230 pp. 84-85: ‘immortal soul’, ‘the last sweet remnant of the beautiful Italian race’, to HJ Sr, 14, 17, 18, 19 January 1870, 257, 260 p. 85:‘an immense revelation of the power of good acting’, to HJ Sr, 19 March 1870, 324 p. 85: ‘I may be considered therefore to have cost you’, 5 February [1870], 280 p. 85: ‘how I do find myself longing for a great succulent swash’, ‘this Italian ghost’, to WJ, [7], 8, 9, March 1870; to HJ Sr, 19 March 1870, 312, 324 p. 85: ‘It is a wondrous thing to think’, ‘[f]rom this moment she sank’, to HJ Sr, 19 March 1870, 1 April 1870, to Grace Norton, 1 April, 323, 351 p. 85: ‘with all that wonderful ethereal brightness of presence’, ‘& yet I had the great satisfaction’, to MWJ, 26 March; to WJ, 29, 30 March [1870], 336, 342 p. 85: ‘air vocal with her accents’, ‘how much – how long – we have got to live’, to MWJ, 26 March [1870], 338, 339 p. 86: ‘[h]ow it comes back to one’, to WJ, 29, 30 March [1870], 346 p. 86: ‘I have time only for a single word’, 28 April [1870], 354 p. 86: ‘I feel my European gains sinking’, ‘[i]t’s a good deal like dying’, to Grace Norton, 26 September, 28 April [1870], 376, 355 p. 86: ‘eyes closed, listening to the sweet Italian names’, 20, 22 May 1870, 358 p. 86: ‘thro’ the thin trees’, ‘our dear detestable common Cambridge’, 20, 22 May, 26 September [1870], 357, 372 p. 88: ‘I lounge in a darkened room’, 16 July 1871, 408 p. 88: ‘full of sylvan seclusion and sweet shady breezy coverts’, to Grace Norton, 16 July 1871, 408 p. 90: ‘a long & urgent & momentous piece of Autumn work’, to George Abbott James, 16 September [1870], 369 p. 90: ‘one of the greatest works of “this or any age”’, 15 November [1870], 382 p. 90: ‘pretty enough’, ‘very thin, & as “cold” as an icicle’, to HJ Sr, 19 April [1878], CL76-78 2: 104 p. 91: ‘intellectual grace’, ‘moral spontaneity’, to WJ, [7], 8, 9 March 1870, CL55-72 2: 314 p. 91: ‘various vague moonshiny dreams’, 4, 5 February 1872, 438 p. 91: ‘[t]he day was extremely sombre’, 6 May [1872], 449

Chapter 5 p. 93: ‘just as I left it – still, to American eyes’, to MWJ, 23 May [1872], CL72-76, 1: 5 p. 93: ‘we have slept in Christian beds’, 24 May [1872], 8 p. 94: ‘more lordly & lovely even than when I saw it before’, to parents, 4 June [1872], 17 398



  Letter Details 

p. 94: ‘[w]e fancied Ilfracombe about the best thing visible’, ‘the very lap of Paradise itself ’, to parents, 11 [12, 13] June; 19 [20] June [1872] 21, 24 p. 94: ‘Alice & I have spent … in the month, from £65 to 70’, to parents, 19, [20] June [1872], 28 p. 95: ‘still the perfection of brightness & neatness & form & taste’, to parents, 28, 29 June [1872], 34 p. 95 : ‘the same easy=fitting Bootts as before’, ‘Lizzie’s unshared society’, 21 July; 28 July [1872], 50, 61 p. 95: ‘[c]hange as we have sought it’, ‘old Swiss legs’, to parents, 21 July; to WJ, 24, 28 July [1872], 51, 55 p. 95: ‘singularly lovely place’, ‘a case of climatic antipathy’, ‘glutted with mountain grandeur & gloom’, to Grace Norton, 8 August; to HJ Sr, 11 August [1872], 70, 73, 74 p. 95: ‘Alice is everywhere, invariably & obstinately taken for my wife’, to HJ Sr, 11 August [1872], 73 p. 95: ‘four delightful days’, ‘ices every night at Florian’s’, ‘[w]e had two mighty gondoliers’, to parents, 31 August, [3 September 1872]; 9 September [1872], 96, 99 p. 96: ‘mother-city of Venice’, to parents, 9 September [1872], 98 p. 96: ‘a nightmare of pretentious vacuity’, ‘gloomy, battered & painful’, to parents, 15, 16 September [1872], 105, 106 p. 96: ‘[m]y own desire to remain abroad’, to parents, 9 September [1872], 100–101 p. 96: ‘too exquisite not to suffer by acting’, to WJ, 22 September [1872], 114 p. 96: ‘a diamond on a dunghill’, 10 October [1872], 122 p. 97: ‘strangely filled with dormant memories’, to AJ, 28 October [1872], 126 p. 97: ‘furious intimacy’, to HJ Sr, [early November 1872], 130 p. 97: ‘in a better way for production’, ‘the heartiest & most heroic of humorists’, to Elizabeth Boott, 16 November [1872]; to WJ, 1, [2] December 1872, 138, 143 p. 97: ‘throwing me overboard at the last minute’, to MWJ, 17 February [1873], 217 p. 98: ‘it makes it a bad look out ahead’, to HJ Sr, 1 February [1873], 202 p. 100: ‘seems to have thought, so to speak, in color’, to WJ, 22, 28 September [1872], 114 p. 101: ‘stale, flat & unprofitable’, to AJ, 16 December [1872], 158 p. 101: ‘a blessed change from drenched & draggled Paris’, to WJ, 8 January [1873], 176 p. 101: ‘little crimson drawing room’, to HJ Sr, [25 December 1872], 162 p. 101: ‘passably erratic & uncomfortable’, to HJ Sr, 4 March [1873], 227 p. 101: ‘a strange jumble now of its old inalterable self ’, to WJ, 8 January [1873], 179 p. 101: ‘rubbishy – magnificently, sublimely so’, to Grace Norton, 11 November [1869], CL55-72, 2: 194

399



  Letter Details 

p. 102: ‘He is not as handsome as his photographs’, to Charles Eliot Norton, 31 March [1873], CL72-76, 1: 251 p. 102: ‘He is not delicately beautiful’, 25 April [1873], 265 p. 102: ‘I had first & last a little small talk’, to Sarah Butler Wister, 9, 11 May [1873], 288 p. 102: ‘the terrific Kemble herself ’, 29 December [1872], 166 p. 103: ‘the decay of her accomplishments’, to HJ Sr, 19 January 1873, 191 p.103: ‘The Storys, if you take them easily’, 10 February 1873, 211 p. 103: ‘he got through 3 acts in 3 hours’, to Charles Eliot Norton, 13 March 1873, 237 p. 103: ‘through a narrow black alley lighted by a single lamp’, to AJ, 10 February 1873, 209 p. 104: ‘the slippery saddle’, ‘only serious expense – 11 frs.’, to HJ Sr, 1 February; to MWJ, 17 February [1873], 204, 218 p. 105: ‘a most affable coachman’, 8 January [1873], 176 p. 106: ‘much better & maturer than their predecessors’, ‘thin spots in the writing’, to MWJ, 24 March 1873, 243, 244 p. 107: ‘thick=headed and a little head=achy’, to WJ, 9 April 1873, 256 p. 107: ‘haunted with throbbing nightingales’, ‘perfect Paradise of picturesqueness’, to AJ, 25, 26 April; to Sarah Butler Wister, 9, 11 May [1873], 264, 288 p.108: ‘an incipient headache’, ‘care an inordinate number of straws’, to WJ, 19 May [1873], 292, 293 p. 109: ‘a hundred times more wondrous in retrospect’, to WJ, 31 May [1873], 309 p. 109: ‘Drawn by me since Dec. 18th’, 280

Chapter 6 p. 111: ‘a very good young Englishman staying at this hotel also for his health’, to MWJ, 15 July [1873], CL72-76, 2: 4 p. 111: ‘I’ve not had a very productive summer’, 9 September [1873], 47 p. 111: ‘the best thing I’ve done’, to parents, 14 August [1873], 33–34 p. 111: ‘a winter of European idleness and the European climate’, ‘a supply of Harrison’s lozenges’, to MWJ, 22 September; to WJ, 26 September [1873], 53, 26 p.111: ‘[i]t will be a blessing to have a “superior mind”’, ‘full instructions’, to MWJ, 22 September [1873]; to WJ, 26 September 1873, 55, 58 p. 111: ‘degenerating in health’, ‘very much charmed’, to HJ Sr, 26 October, 2 November [1873], 64, 67 p. 112: ‘violent cold’, to Samuel Gray Ward, 4 January 1874, 99

400



  Letter Details 

p. 112: ‘a disagreeable combination of indigestion & rheumatism’, to AJ, 13 January 1874, 106 p. 112: ‘our great unendowed, unfurnished, unentertained & unentertaining continent’, ‘washerwomen & waiters’, 14 January 1874, 115, 114 p. 112: ‘the divine tongue’, ‘more American than America’, to parents, 9 March 1874, to Elizabeth Boott, 7, 8 April [1874], 133, 145 p. 112: ‘raw, rainy Sunday’, to WJ, 3 May [1874], 159 p. 113: ‘[t]he writing and publishing a novel’, ‘pure money question’, to parents, 9 March 1874; to W.D. Howells, 10 March [1874], 134, 137 p. 113: ‘& what would do me more good’, 17 May 1874, 169 p. 113: ‘[b]oth your letter & Alice’s are a mine of advice’, to MWJ, 3 June 1874, 175 p. 114: ‘a goodly store of tomatoes’, 28 July 1874, 189 p. 117: ‘the glory of an American autumn’, to Robertson James, 13 October [1874],197 p. 118: ‘a rattling big luxurious place’, to Elizabeth Boott, December 1874; January or February 1875, 200 p. 120: ‘“social” matters, so called, manners, habits, people &c’, to John Milton Hay, 21 July [1875], 226 p. 125-126: ‘I take possession of the old world – I inhale it’, ‘the same old big black London’, ‘[a]s you sit in your room you seem to taste the very coal’, to James family, 1 November; to parents, 9 November [1875], CL72-76 3: 3, 4, 7 p. 126: ‘the advantage of being both central & noiseless’, to HJ Sr, 18 November [1875], 9 p. 126: ‘a life of insupportable loneliness & sterility’, to MWJ, 11 January [1876], 40 p. 126: ‘27 or 28 years old & extremely ugly’, 25 April [1876], 106 p. 127: ‘a magnificent creature, & much handsomer than his portraits’, to Catharine Walsh, 3 December [1875], 16 p. 127: ‘vision of some person’, to W.D. Howells, 24 October [1876], 210 p. 127: ‘a most fascinating & interesting woman’, to HJ Sr, 11 April [1876], 97 p. 127:‘unlyrical, unmusical, unrhythmical, unmanageable’, 22 January 1895, LHJ 1: 236 p. 127: ‘the slave of Mme Viardot’, 20 December [1875], CL72-76 3: 25 p. 128: ‘I took a mighty fancy to F. as well’, to HJ Sr, 20 December [1875], 24 p. 128: ‘[t]hey are a queer lot, & intellectually very remote’, to MWJ, 24, 25 January [1876], 52 p. 128: ‘the most beautiful things in the world’, to HJ Sr, 11 April [1876], 98 p. 128: ‘[h]is conversation … has a perfume of the highest intelligence’, 14 March [1876], 80 p. 129: ‘something very sweet & distingué about him’, ‘will never be any thing but a rather curious & delicate dilettante’, to WJ, 25 April; to MWJ, 8 May [1876], 107, 115

401



  Letter Details 

p. 129: ‘– from 9 to 2 a.m! – at Paul Joukowsky’s’, to Elizabeth Boott, 11 November [1876], 213 p. 132: ‘bottomless superficiality’, to WJ, 4 July [1876], 149 p. 132: ‘I desire only to feed on English life’, 29 July [1876], 161 p. 132: ‘agreeable & kindly people, tho’ a trifle superfine & poseurs’, to WJ, 8 February [1876], 67 p. 132: ‘little moated 15th century chateau’, to Elizabeth Boott, 19 August [1876], 169 pp. 132-133: ‘I am afraid I can’t assent to your proposal!’, 30 August [1876], 177 p. 133: ‘gouty couch’, to AJ, 13 December [1876], CL76-78 1: 4

Chapter 7 p. 137: ‘an impossible couple’, 30 March [1877], CL76-78 1: 87–88 p. 138: ‘glittering, charming, civilized Paris … [i]n this matter … we are without an elementary sense’, to W.D. Howells, 18 December [1876]; to Katharine Hillard, 6 January [1877], 10, 26 p. 138: ‘the heavens being perpetually enstained’, to AJ, 13 December; to Elizabeth Boott, 26 December [1876], 4, 19 p. 138: ‘an excellent lodging’, to AJ, 13 December [1876], 3 pp. 138-139: ‘very swarthy & scraggy’, to WJ, 29 March [1877], 83 p. 139; ‘a little heaven here below’, to WJ, 28 February [1877], 70 p. 139: ‘very much like Dan’l. Deronda’, to MWJ, [24 December 1876], 14 p. 139: ‘an impossible companion’, to WJ, 28 February [1877], 69 p. 139: ‘a great chatterer’, to W.D. Howells, 30 March [1877]; to AJ, 8 April [1877], 90, 94 p. 139: ‘dancing all the evening’, to MWJ, 26 August [1877], 196 p. 141: ‘very moderate regret’, 6 August [1877], 181 p. 141: ‘a couple of shabby little rooms’, to HJ Sr, 19 September [1877]; to Elizabeth Boott, 7 September [1877], 208, 206 p. 141: ‘simple minded – & Bonapartists into the bargain’, to MWJ, 2 October [1877], 214 p. 141: ‘with its charmless absence’, to AJ, 2 November 1822, 222 p. 142: ‘I never wrote a line of verse’, 25 October [1877], 219 p. 142: ‘picturesque old house’, to AJ, 29 December [1877], CL76-78 2: 10 p. 142: ‘infantile husband’, to HJ Sr, 25 March [1878], 70–71 p. 143: ‘an ugly little wizened old woman’, to HJ Sr, 25 March [1878], 71–72 p. 143: ‘[h]e is a queer little Londonized Southerner’, to HJ Sr, 19 April [1878], 105 p. 143: ‘the native finesse & animation’, to WJ, 1 May [1878], 111, 113 402



  Letter Details 

p. 143: ‘London smells of gunpowder’, to Caroline Tilton, 3 April [1878], 87 p. 144: ‘[m]y father doesn’t pretend to write’, 22 May [1878], 133 p. 144: ‘I believe almost as much in matrimony’, 29 May [1878], 138 p. 144: ‘I am in superb health’, 25 June [1878], 158 p. 144: ‘thoroughly mastered Dumas, Augier & Sardou’, to WJ, 1 May [1878], 112 p. 146: ‘in future I shall publish all my things’, to WJ, 23 July [1878], 177–178 p. 146: ‘a pendant or counterpart’, to W.E. Henley, 28 August [1878], 193 p. 147: ‘more money than I have ever got’, 29 September [1878], 219 p. 147: ‘[p]urple moors, misty mountains’, to Elizabeth Boott, 13 September [1878], 202 p. 147: ‘in sooth divinely handsome’, to AJ, 15 September [1878], 208 p. 147: ‘[i]n all a bevy of young girls’, to MWJ, 29 September [1878], 217 p. 148: ‘a genial, charming youth’, 30 March [1877], CL76-78 1: 89 p. 149: ‘for the sake of the picturesque’, 30 March [1877], 89 p. 150: ‘a very joyous little romance’, 30 March [1877], 89 p. 151: ‘crazy, stage-struck, scatter-brained’, to Grace Norton, 8 June [1879], CL7880 1: 203–204 p. 151: ‘port-wine & tobacco’, to WJ, 29 March [1877], CWJ 1: 283 p. 152: ‘Yorkshire smoke=country is very ugly’, to Grace Norton, 4, [5] January [1879], CL78-80 1: 83 p. 153: ‘the Yorkshire climate’, to AJ, [31 December 1878] – [1 January] 1879, 74 p. 153: ‘[v]iolent cold, torrents of driving sleet’, to MWJ, 18 January [1879], 90 p. 153: ‘the golden youth of every description’, to Jane Dalzell Finlay Hill, 21 March [1879] 135 p. 153: ‘[i]t is part of the British code’, to AJ, [23], 26 March [1879], 141, 142 p. 153: ‘I am sick for the bosom of nature’, 19 August [1879], 257 p. 153: ‘I could think (in all modesty)’, 15 January 1879, 88–9 p. 154: ‘by no means cultivated’, to WJ, 4 March [1879], 125 p. 155: ‘it was all extremely pleasant’, to MWJ, 6 July [1879], 229 p. 155: ‘comfortable, leisurely work’, to MWJ, 28 July [1879], 250

Chapter 8 p. 156: ‘the need of swallowing inscrutable entrées’, to AJ, 19, 20 May [1879], CL7880 1: 178 p. 156: ‘diabolical attacks of pain in my head’, to MWJ, 8 April [1879], 150 p. 156: ‘a very tidy little lodging’, to MWJ, 14 September [1879], CL78-80 2: 4 p. 156: ‘for ventilatory reasons’, to T.S. Perry, 14 September; to HJ Sr, 11 October [1879], 8, 19 p. 156: ‘[t]he snow was piled up’, to HJ Sr, 16 December 1879, 56 403



  Letter Details 

p. 157: ‘It will be very good indeed’, [4] May [1879], CL78-80 1: 167 p. 159: ‘wrong-headed & crude’, to HJ Sr, 11 January 1880, CL78-80 2: 90 p. 159: ‘for the better!’, to Josiah Holland, 18 September [1879], 12 p. 161: ‘do battle for most of the convictions expressed’, 31 January [1880], 108 p. 161: ‘a very big tempest in a very small tea-pot’, 22 February [1880]; 31 March [1880], 130, 150 p. 162: ‘the British maiden’, to Elizabeth Boott, 31 December 1879, 74 p. 162: ‘a beautiful set of Hawthorne’s complete works’, to HJ Sr, 16 December 1879, 15 February 1880, 56, 124 p. 162: ‘looking at the sea’, to HJ Sr, 30 March [1880], 144 p. 162: ‘natural & logical thing’, to WJ, 10 November [1879], 39 p. 162: ‘the most highly-developed phenomenon’ … ‘uncouth but vigorous … terribly earthy & unlicked, having barely the “form” of a civilized white’, to Charles Eliot Norton, 31 March [1880], to Catharine Walsh, 3 May [1880], 149, 178 p. 162: ‘the yellow Arno’, to HJ Sr, 30 March [1880], 144, 146 p. 162: ‘a delicious nest’, to Sarah Butler Wister, 16 April [1880], 161 p. 162: ‘living in great intimacy’, to AJ, 25 April [1880], 173 p. 163: ‘the same impracticable, & indeed ridiculous, mixture’, to AJ, 173 p. 163: ‘[t]his day … derived an extra merit’, to AJ, 174 p. 164: ‘the manners & customs of a little group of Russians’, 9 April 1880, 153 p. 164: ‘delicious … radiant … delicately and divinely beautiful’, to Charles Eliot Norton, 31 March [1880], 149 p. 164: ‘the convulsing intelligence’, to HJ Sr, 14 May [1880], 188 p. 165: ‘their combined ages’, 19 August [1880], CL80-83 1: 42 p. 165: ‘amiable bachelor’, 7 November [1880], 85 p. 166 :‘through Europe with a letter of introduction’, to AJ, 25 April [1880], CL7880 2: 174 p. 167: ‘really an angel of quiet virtue’, 11 December [1883], CL83-84 1: 277 p. 167: ‘a poorish story in three numbers’, 31 January [1880], CL78-80 2: 110 p. 170: ‘this rather cocknefied watering-place’, to Francis Parkman, 8 August [1880], CL80-83 1: 37 p. 170: ‘there remains more of nervousness’, 4 July [1880], 11 p. 170: ‘good deal of money’, to MWJ, 20 July [1880], 20 p. 170: ‘who used to be American’, [?4 January 1888], HJL 3: 214 p.171: ‘much kindness, much talk’, to Grace Norton, 28 December 1880, CL80-83 1: 134 p. 172: ‘[p]oor Minny was essentially incomplete’, 28 December 1880, 135 p. 176: ‘the modified martyrdom’, to Sir John Forbes Clark, 16 March [1881], 187 p. 176: ‘a rather poor lot’, to HJ Sr, 24 February 1881, 177, 175

404



  Letter Details 

p. 176: ‘the messes, sauces, greases’, ‘crowded & loathsome’, to HJ Sr, 24 February 1881, to Frederick Macmillan, 27 February [1881], 177, 182 p. 176: ‘bad odours’, to Sir John Forbes Clark, 16 March [1881], 187 p. 176: ‘done à l’Italienne’, to Frances Anne Kemble, 24 March 1881, 202 p. 177: ‘infamous little vaporino’, to Grace Norton, 12 June 1881, 226 p. 177: ‘[h]e is romantic, sentimental & naif ’, 5 June 1881, 222–223 p. 178: ‘disagreeable as a likeness’, to HJ Sr, 11 May [1881], 217 p. 178: ‘birth-place of the divine Leopardi’, to HJ Sr, 11 May [1881], 218 p. 178: ‘[m]y mind reverts, with a delicious pain’, to Katharine de Kay Bronson, 19 July [1881], 236 p. 178: ‘certainly worth her weight in gold’, to HJ Sr, 31 July [1881], 241 p. 179: ‘so extraordinarily fond of Miss L.’ to MWJ, 25 August [1881], 254 p. 179: ‘if it were only in her power’, to HJ Sr, 31 July [1881], 242 p. 179: ‘lovely & most beautifully worked’, 13 October [1880], 76 p. 179: ‘a trial both to him self & to others’, to WJ and AGJ, 22 March [1881], 199 p. 179: ‘famous & ghostly’, to Katharine Peabody Loring, 17 September [1881], 265 p. 179: ‘little London-dusky back bedroom’, to W.D. Howells, 4 October [1881], 276 p. 179: ‘I am going home to “see America”’, 25 August [1881], 255 p. 179:‘You will find me fat & scant o’breath’, to W.D. Howells, 4 October [1881], 276

Chapter 9 p. 183:‘singularly lovely’, to Frederick Macmillan, 17 November 1881, CL80-83 2: 19 p. 184: ‘in a gorgeous “up-town” mansion’, to Frederick Macmillan, 30 December [1881], 55 p. 185: ‘the suicidal death-bed of Johnny James’, to MWJ, 22 January [1882], 84 p. 185: ‘an unclean beast’, ‘silly success’, to Edwin Lawrence Godkin, 22 January [1882], to Jane Dalzell Finlay Hill, 15 January [1882], 80 p. 185: ‘a rather bad time with my head’, 22 January [1882], 83 pp. 185-186: ‘I thank heaven that one can lose’, [3 February 1882], 104 p. 186: ‘with extraordinary tenderness’, 5 June [1882], CL80-83 2: 163 p. 186: ‘blighted by cold theatrical breath’, to Isabella Stewart Gardner, 3 September [1882], 197 p. 187: ‘a trying companion’, to Mary Lucinda Holton James, 25 May [1882], 159 p. 187: ‘three stout volumes’, to Grace Norton, 2 August [1882], 185 p. 187: ‘some papers’, to Elizabeth Boott, 7 October [1882], 207 p. 188: ‘holding a lighted bombshell’: to Elizabeth Boott, 7 October [1882], 206 p. 189: ‘wintry Atlantic’, to Edmund Gosse, 10 December [1882], 258 p. 189: ‘very rapid & prosperous, but painful’, to WJ, 26, 27 December [1882], 262 p. 189: ‘which I am sure he heard somewhere’, 1 January 1883, 285 405



  Letter Details 

p. 190: ‘Boston is a city of serious winters’, 20 March [1883], 12 February 1883, CL83-84 1: 72, 54 p. 191: ‘[y]ou really take too melancholy a view of human life’, 26 April [1883], 105 p. 191: ‘remember that every life is a special problem’, 28 July [1883], 196 p. 191: ‘I have a house all to myself ’, 11 June 1883, 149 p. 191: ‘the dead past lives again’, to T.S. Perry, 10 August [1883], 202 p. 191: ‘hammered by domestic cares’, to T.S. Perry, 10 August [1883], 202 pp. 191-192: ‘My desire to get away’, 8 August [1883], 199 p. 192: ‘a great disintegration’, to WJ, 17 August [1883], 208 p. 192: ‘a wonderful passage’, to Emma Lazarus, 2 September [1883], 215 p. 192: ‘very tidy, with smart new wooden pavements’, to Sir John Forbes Clarke, 10 October [1883], 234 p. 192: ‘in all these last years seeing him’, to AJ, 5 February [1884], CL83-84 2: 10 p. 192: ‘a melancholy wet lumbagoish week’, to WJ, 10 October [1883], CL83-84 1: 237 p. 192: ‘simply a genial, gentle, sociable memory’, 2 December [1883], 271–272 p. 192: ‘most beautiful winter’, to Grace Norton, 19 January [1884], 299 p. 192: ‘a perfect little residence’, to Elizabeth Boott, 11 December [1883], 277 p. 193: ‘in better form than might be expected’, 19 January [1884], 300 p. 193: ‘a soirée of Gurney & Myers’s Psychical Society’, 25 January [1884], 305 p. 193: ‘I expected the said results would be small’, to Frederick Macmillan, 29 January [1884], 306 p. 194: ‘these books be as pretty as possible’, to Frederick Macmillan, 19 April 1883, 93 p. 194: ‘was not a deliberate & mature proceeding’, to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 19 March 1884, CL83-84 2: 66 p. 194: ‘[t]hat journal has bribed me with gold’, 6 March [1884], 55 p. 195: ‘there is something tragical’, to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 13 February [1884], 23 p. 195: ‘hideously political … there don’t seem to me to be three people’, 8 March [1884], 58 p. 195: ‘The Costanza … upon whom I have not a single reflection to make’, [2 June] 1884, 137–138 p. 196:‘I went with him to the exhibition of Sir Joshua Reynolds’, to Grace Norton, 29, 31 March [1884], 83 p. 196: ‘a certain incompleteness’, to Grace Norton, 2 August 1884, 193 p. 196: ‘worldly prosperity & success’, to Grace Norton, 29, 31 March [1884], 83 p. 196: ‘the greatest of the great’, 8 March [1884], 58 pp. 196-197: ‘I have seen plays & performers’, 21 February [1884], 32–33 p. 198: ‘one of the most charming & ingenious talkers’, to T.S. Perry, 26 September [1884], 218–219 406



  Letter Details 

p. 198: ‘a kind of intellectualized rowdyism of style’, 10 May [1885], CL84-86 1: 182–183 p. 198: ‘an interesting failure, if an unsavoury one’, 24 January [1885], 85 p. 198: ‘a word of warning about Vernon Lee’, 20 January [1893], HJL 3: 402 p. 199: ‘literary, clever, a gentleman’, to Grace Norton, 2 August 1884, CL83-84 2: 193 p. 199: ‘extremely intelligent but full of mistakes’, 31 October 1884, 246 p. 199: ‘I am greatly compromised here’, 13 May [1885], CL84-86 1: 194 p. 199: ‘if marriage is perfectly successful’, 3 November [1884], CL83-84 2: 255 p. 201: ‘it seemed to me that the victims of a common passion’, 22 [February] 1884, 39–40 p. 201: ‘Perhaps I have divined the innermost cause’, 9 June [1884], 145–146 p. 202: ‘[h]ow strange it seems to be doing these things’, 31 October 1884, 245 pp. 202-203: ‘There is no question of her living with me’, 3 November [1884], 252–253 p. 203: ‘in a very knocked-up condition’, to Catharine Walsh, 11 November 1884, CL84-86 1: 3 p. 207: ‘little innocent jeu d’esprit’, to Sarah Butler Wister, 17 November [1884], 20

Chapter 10 p. 209:‘how beautiful it is that William should have done it’, to WJ, 8 January [1885], 2 January 1885, CL84-86 1: 74, 63 p. 209: ‘degraded, worthless & shameless’, to WJ, 2 January [1885], 65 p. 209: ‘attempting to poison a man’, to Catharine Walsh, 24 November [1884], 24 p. 211: ‘youthful Southron’, to John Milton Hay, 13 May [1885], 196 p. 212: ‘a pretty bad business’, to WJ, 14 February [1885], 112 p. 213: ‘the prettiest thing in the book’, to WJ, 15 February [1885], 116 p. 213: ‘Miss Chancellor must have lived in Charles St’, to Frances Carruth Prindle, 1 August 1901, HJL 4: 195 p. 213: ‘become as solid as he ought to be’, to John Milton Hay, 13 May [1885], to WJ, 13 June 1886, CL84-86 1: 196; 2: 117 p. 213: ‘loomed peculiarly formidable’, 25 August 1915, HJL 4: 777 pp. 213-214: ‘as soon as they get together’, 29 January [1885], CL84-86 1: 99 p. 214: ‘[t]he next couple of months will probably determine’, to Elizabeth Boott, 24 April [1885], 161 p. 214: ‘hearty sympathy’, 5 December [1884], 36 p. 215: ‘very queer & charming’, ‘his face, his talk’, to Henrietta Reubell, 18 November [1885], to Grace Norton, 9 May [1885], 330, 178 p. 215: ‘scribbled off at the moment’, to WJ, 1 October 1887, HJL 3: 204 407



  Letter Details 

p. 215: ‘little Humster’, to HJ, 11 July 1885, CWJ 2: 21 p. 215: ‘sweet flower of information’, to Frederick Macmillan, 5 May, to Francis Boott, 9 May [1885], CL84-86 1: 168, 175 p. 216: ‘Irish Dynamiters’, ‘an incurable shirker & dodger’, to Grace Norton, 24 January, 9 May [1885], 86, 178 p. 216: ‘yearning to see London aestheticism’, to Henrietta Reubell, [5 July 1885], 244 p. 216: ‘mystic apartment’, to Florence Boughton, [3 July 1885], 242, 241 p. 216: ‘very pretty, with its silver=white cliffs’, to Elizabeth Boott, 3 August [1885], 257 p. 217: ‘more than ever like a big modern bazaar’, to Frances van de Grift Stevenson, 18 September [1885], 304 p. 217: ‘heat & heaviness’, to Lady Louisa Erskine Wolseley, 13 September [1885], 298 p. 217: ‘the land of the eternal chop’, ‘muddy November’, to Francis Boott, 13 November, to Henrietta Reubell, 18 November [1885], 324, 329 p. 218: ‘young Arthur Pakenham’, to Sarah Butler Wister, 3 December [1885], 337 p. 218: ‘chaste & secluded’, to WJ, 9 March [1886], CL84-86 2: 47 p. 218: ‘perfect Voltaire in petticoats’, ‘the solution of the knottiness of existence’, to Grace Norton, 20 September 1880, CL80-83 1: 60, to Edwin Lawrence Godkin, 6 February [1886], CL84-86 2: 31 p. 218: ‘the Queen of the Franks’, to Francis Boott, 25 May [1886], 104 p. 219: ‘the subject of a peculiarly atrocious & vulgar form of modern torture’, 26 October [1886], CL84-86 2: 203 p. 219: ‘horrible place’, 12 December [1884], CL84-86 1: 43 p. 223: ‘a deaf & méticuleuse old maid’, to Francis Boott, 25 May [1886], CL84-86 2: 103 p. 223: ‘the space, the views, & the big wood fires’, ‘every day or two’, to WJ and AGJ, 23 December, John Milton Hay, 24 December [1886], 270, 274 p. 223: ‘trying to make temporary homes’, 30 August [1882], HJL 3: 540 p. 223: ‘[y]our letters are better than you are’, ‘send their love to you’, 7 May [1883], 24 May [1883], 557, 561 p. 224: ‘Tell Fenimore I forgive her’, 15 March [1887], 176 p. 225: ‘what a superfluous product’, [15 January? 1887], 155 p. 226:‘infamous trick’‘the basest cad unflogged’, to WJ, 13 November 1886, CL8486 2: 231 p. 226: ‘social embroilments’, ‘shoals of people’, to Katharine de Kay Bronson, 5 February [1887], to Sarah Butler Wister, 27 February [1887], HJL 3: 163, 168 p. 226: ‘glutinous malodorous damp’, to Sarah Butler Wister, 27 February [1887], 169 p. 226: ‘quattro-cento dress’, 20 May [1887], 184 408



  Letter Details 

Chapter 11 p. 229: ‘the simplest person in London’, 23 July 1887, HJL 3: 197 p. 229: ‘American & fraternizing’, ‘a most offensive and impertinent letter’ to WJ, 1, 5 October 1887, CWJ 2: 71, 74–75 p. 229: ‘[t]he box was full of rosy candid English children’, [?4 January 1888], HJL 3: 212 p. 230: ‘the vast dimness of character’, 3 July 1888, 235. p. 230: ‘a kind of window in the past’, to Lady Constance Leslie, 10 March [1888], 224 p. 231: ‘those two poor uncongenial men’, to Henrietta Reubell, 1 April 1888, 230 p. 231: ‘the dear old Florentine earth’, 15 May [1888], 233 p. 231: ‘vain specifications’, HJL 3: 226, n. 2 p. 231: ‘notorious stinginess’, to Theodore E. Child, 27 March [1888], 229 p. 232: ‘[y]ou have become a beautiful myth’, 31 July [1888], 239 p. 232: ‘rare, delightful genius’, 29 October 1888, CWJ 2: 95 p. 235: ‘like a big black inferno of fog’, to Charles Eliot Norton, 25 March [1889], HJL 3: 252 p. 235: ‘seemed a sort of slap in the face’, 25 May [1889], CWJ 2: 110 p. 237: ‘Hawthornian’, to HJ, 26 June [1890], 143 p. 239: ‘profoundly pecuniary’, to WJ, 9 March 1890, 131–132 p. 240: ‘to become intimate again’, 30 August 1889, 122 p. 240: ‘all red brick & cockney prose’, to Grace Norton, 30 September 1888, LL, p. 208 p. 240: ‘dear old eternally juvenile Lowell’, to Grace Norton, 22 September [1889], HJL 3: 261 p. 241: ‘the red legs of the little soldiers’, to Edwin Lawrence Godkin, 20 September [1889], 259 p. 241: ‘hordes of furious Franks & fiery Huns’, 28 November [1889], CWJ 2: 126 p. 241: ‘for pure and copious lucre’, to Grace Norton, 22 September [1889], HJL 3: 263 p. 241: ‘the congruous, romantic, poetic place’, to Katharine de Kay Bronson, 12 January 1890, 268–269 p. 242: ‘the poor success’, to Frederick Macmillan, 28 March 1890, 275 p. 242: ‘don’t, oh don’t, my dear boy’, 11 March [1890], 269 p. 242: ‘My dear, dear boy’, 22 March 1900, HJL 4: 136 p. 243: ‘the admirably acute and intelligent young Balestier’, 17 May [1890], HJL 3: 284 p. 243: ‘the perfection of an “agent”’, 6 June [1890], 286 p. 243: ‘poor dear big-spirited, only-by-death-quenchable Wolcott’, to Edmund Gosse, [10 December 1891], 364 409



  Letter Details 

p. 243: ‘a queer office for me to perform’, 18 January 1892, 371 p. 243: ‘sawdust & orange-peel phase’, to WJ, 6 February [1891], CWJ 2: 169 p. 244: ‘a dozen more infinitely better’, 6 June [1890], HJL 3: 286 p. 244: ‘curious, tedious, touching’, 24 June 1890, 293 p. 244: ‘dear little American physician of genius’, to Grace Norton, 30 June [1890], 295 p. 245: ‘the summer of one’s childhood’, to WJ, 23 July 1890, CWJ 2: 145 p. 245: ‘a little masterpiece of compression’, to Horace E. Scudder, 10 November [1890], HJL 3: 307 p. 246: ‘[t]he conditions (of the Ang[l]oSaxon stage’, 7 November 1890, CWJ 2: 155 p. 247: ‘[m]y play suffers from being a novel dramatized’, to Mrs Mahlon Sands, [?10 October 1891], HJL 3: 357 p. 247: ‘I am launched & committed’, 13 December 1891, CWJ 2: 197

Chapter 12 p. 248: ‘her intense horror of life & contempt for it’, to WJ, 31 July [1891], CWJ 2: 181 p. 250: ‘I seemed to see that you were tied down by pain and weakness’, 20 July [1891], HJL 3: 346 p. 250: ‘was a sort of boy to the end’, 20 August 1891, CWJ 2: 185 p. 250: ‘I esteem my presence during those three days’, 13 October 1891, 190 p. 250: ‘other ailing organism’, to WJ, 21 October 1891, 191 p. 250: ‘has undergone no particular change’, 10 October [1891], 189 p. 250: ‘with catarrh and rheumatism and lumbago’, to Robert Louis Stevenson, 30 October 1891, HJL 3: 361 p. 250: ‘little garland on the cold new slab’, 26 January 1892, 371 p. 250: ‘when she is slightly better the power to live & talk’, 6 February 1892, CWJ 2: 200 p. 251: ‘a tragic vessel, or receptacle’, to WJ, 2 March 1892, 203 p. 251: ‘Tenderest love to all farewell Am going soon Alice’, 204, n. 1 p. 252: ‘infantine … both in subject and in form’, to Mrs Hugh Bell, [23 February 1892], HJL 3: 372 p. 253: ‘ugly, common, hard, prosaic, bottomlessly bourgeois’, Sunday [1893], LHJ, 1: 217 p. 253: ‘an utter cad & Ada Rehan is the same’, 24 January [1894], CWJ 2: 299 p. 254: ‘the book … doesn’t bring me in a penny’, 5 August 1893, HJL 3: 428 p. 255: ‘a rabble of pushing, staring indelicate populace’, to WJ, 20 January [1893], CWJ 2: 252

410



  Letter Details 

p. 256: ‘I don’t care to care’, ‘the irrepressible Vernon Lee’, to William Morton Fullerton, 16 January [1893], HJL 3: 399 pp. 256-257: ‘She’s a tiger-cat’, 20 January [1893], CWJ 2: 252 p. 257: ‘sweet humanity’, ‘robust manhood’, 15 November 1893, HJL 3: 440, 441 p. 257: ‘reeks and hums with genius’, 21 October [1893], 438 p. 258: ‘the fruit of fabulous habits’, to Robert Louis Stevenson, 30 October 1891, 362 p. 258: ‘those marvellous outpourings’, 7 January [1893], 398 p. 258: ‘I’m sick of the soup kitchen’, 19 February 1893, CWJ 2: 257 p. 258: ‘cut loose from “society”’, to Grace Norton, 20 August [1893], HJL 3: 430 p. 258: ‘the sordid sands of Ramsgate’, ‘arduous, cold and décousu’, to Robert Louis Stevenson, 5 August 1893, 428, to Jonathan Sturges, 19 October 1893, 435 p. 258: ‘a summer of the British seaside’, 21 October [1893], 439 p. 258: ‘aren’t we, after all, really mismated?’, 29 April [1893], LL, p. 261 p. 258: ‘full of substance & full of art’, to Arthur Wing Pinero, 28 May 1893, p. 262 p. 259: ‘Before the horror and pity of it’, 28 January 1894, HJL 3: 459 p. 259: ‘[t]he event seems to me absolutely to demand the hypothesis of sudden dementia’, 31 January [1894], 463 p. 260: ‘an intensely pious pilgrimage to the spot’, 15 December 1894, 493 p. 260: ‘the ghost, only, of his old clownship’, to Francis Boott, 11 October [1895], HJL 4: 24 p. 261: ‘the life, the power, the temper, the humour’, to WJ and AGJ, 28 May 1894, CWJ 2: 311 p. 261: ‘the sight of so many private names & allusions in print’, to WJ, 25 May [1894], 307–308 p. 261: ‘the printedness-en-toutes-lettres of so many names’, to WJ and AGJ, 28 May 1894, 310 p. 262: ‘empty … of almost everything but ghosts’, to WJ, 7 August 1897, CWJ 3: 14 p. 263: ‘too damnably voluminous’, to Thomas Bailey Aldrich, 29 April [1886], LL, p. 183 p. 264: ‘the catchpenny picture book’, 22 January 1895, HJL 3: 512 p. 264: ‘the compact Oxfordism of it all’, to Edmund Gosse, [10 August 1894], 483 p. 264: ‘far from being as beautiful as his own prose’, to MWJ, 18 January [1879], CL78-80 1: 92 p. 264: ‘[h]e is the mask without the face’, [13 December 1894], HJL 3: 492 p. 264: ‘long walks on wet moors’, to Edmund Gosse, 22 August [1894], 485 p. 265: ‘opaline iridescence’, to Robert Louis Stevenson, 19 March 1892, LL, 248 p. 266: ‘that beautiful, bountiful being’, to Frances Van de Grift Stevenson, 26 December [1894], HJL 3: 498 p. 266: ‘[t]he ghost of poor R.L.S.’, 27 December 1894, HJL 3: 502

411



  Letter Details 

p. 266 ‘[t]he play is small & simple’, 8 December [1894], CWJ 2: 329–330 p. 267: ‘Guy Domville was an unmitigated disaster’, to Virginia Bateman Compton, 15 March [1895], HJL 3: 521 pp. 267-268: ‘the usual vulgar theatre-going London public’, to WJ, 9 January 1895, CWJ 2: 338 p. 268: ‘the splendid profit of its big subject’, 24 May 1898, LL, p. 303

Chapter 13 p. 272: ‘I have felt, for a long time past’, 22 January 1895, HJL 3: 511–12 p. 272: ‘the beggary & squalor of Ireland’, ‘his unquenched youth’, to WJ, 28 March 1895, CWJ 2: 354, to Theodora Sedgwick, 30 March 1895, HJL 4: 8 pp. 272-273: ‘the air, the manners, the toilets & the taste’, to WJ, 28 January [1878], CWJ 1: 296 p. 273: ‘[t]he simplicity of the soldiers!’, 30 March 1895, HJL 4: 9 p. 273: ‘I felt myself, somehow perishing’, 27 November 1897, 60 p. 273: ‘hideously, atrociously dramatic and really interesting’, [8 April] 1895, 9–10 p. 274: ‘strange & grotesquely pathetic’, to WJ, 1 June 1895, CWJ 2: 362 p. 275: ‘very futile and foolish, poor things’, to Francis Boott, 11 October [1895], HJL 4: 24 p. 277: ‘the streets all cleared and lined with police’, to W.E. Norris, 4 February [1896], 27 p. 277: ‘I find, in my old age, that I have too much manner’, 4 October 1895, 22 p. 280:‘a much slower and more difficult job’, to Edmund Gosse, 28 August [1896], 33 p. 281: ‘I shall endeavour to be thrilling’, to Clement K. Shorter, 26 February 1896, 31 p. 282: ‘admirable and expensive machine’, to William Morton Fullerton, 25 February 1897, 41 p. 283: ‘I can’t help figuring it as a sort of beautiful, poetic justice’, to WJ, 25 February 1897, CWJ, 3: 5 p. 287: ‘[i]f one ever teaches them to speak they will be all right’, 7 August, 1 September 1897, CWJ 3: 14, 19 p. 287: ‘quiet and quaint and rustic and uncockneyfied’, to WJ, 7 August 1897, 14 p. 288: ‘a smallish, charming, cheap old house in the country’, 25 September 1897, HJL 4: 57 p. 288: ‘such a place as I may, when pressed by the pinch of need’, to Arthur Christopher Benson, 1 October 1897, 58–59 p. 288: ‘essentially a pot-boiler and a jeu d’esprit’, to H.G. Wells, 9 December 1898, 86

412



  Letter Details 

p. 290: ‘I see ghosts everywhere’, 11 October [1895], 24 p. 292: ‘the biggest job of the sort I have ever tackled’, 1 June, 20 April 1898, CWJ 3: 34, 30 p. 292: ‘the complications & expense of De Vere Gardens’, ‘declining years’, to WJ, 11 October, 20 April 1898, 46, 30 p. 292: ‘a taciturn chap…. entirely unlike any of us’, 12 June 1898, 36 p. 293: ‘I’m afraid I shouldn’t be able to bear very much more of it’, 23 October 1898, LL, pp. 310–311

Chapter 14 p. 297:‘tea-parties for pretty ladies’, to Henrietta Reubell, [11 November 1899], LL, p. 330 p. 297: ‘altogether a boon’, to AGJ, 19 December 1898, LHJ, 1: 312 p. 297: ‘the servants occupied & ventilated’, to WJ, 26 January 1899, CWJ 3: 48 p. 298: ‘constant tea & little cakes’, to WJ, 2 April 1899, 58 p. 298: ‘sunny warmth of Italian air’, to Minnie David Bourget, [8 April 1899], HJL 4: 105 p. 301: ‘colossal multiplication of divinely naked and intimately associated gentlemen and ladies’, to Hendrik C. Andersen, 31 May 1906, 405 p. 301: ‘as a loved companion and friend’, ‘I foresee it will be a lifelong attachment’, 19 July 1899, 108, 109 p. 301: ‘we literally can’t live without each other’, 27 July 1899, 113 p. 301: ‘a little artistic habitation’, 7 September 1899, 119 p. 301: ‘I have missed you out of all proportion’, 118–119 p. 302: ‘fell in love’, 1 January 1901, CWJ 3: 154 p. 302: ‘so that I might take consoling, soothing, infinitely close and tender and affectionately-healing possession of you’, 9 February 1902, HJL 4: 226 p. 303: ‘[m]y joy has shrivelled under your very lucid warnings’, 4 August 1899, CWJ 3: 75 p. 303: ‘rain and jolly Sussex windy bluster’, to WJ, 30 August 1899, 84 p. 303: ‘I like growing (that is I like, for many reasons, being) old’, [12 November 1899], LL, p. 330 p. 303: ‘wild and wandering friend’, to Isabella Stewart Gardner, 27 November 1899, HJL 4: 127 p. 304: ‘stricken young friend’, ‘more substantial than I could afford’, to Cora Crane, 5 June 1900, to James B. Pinker, 29 August 1900, 144, 163 p. 304: ‘lively row’, to Lucy Clifford, 24 January 1900, 130 p. 305: ‘My little old house … gives out’, 18 December 1902, 258

413



  Letter Details 

p. 305: ‘the supernatural and the high fantastic’, to W.D. Howells, 9 August 1900, LHJ 1: 364 p. 305: ‘outstretched arm’, to W. D. Howells, 29 June 1900, HJL 4: 151 p. 310: ‘fanciful, fantastic – but very close and sustained’, to James B. Pinker, 25 July 1900, 154–155 p. 310: ‘the merest of jeux d’esprit’, 15 March 1901, 186 p. 310: ‘I shall never do the like again’, 9 August 1901, 198 p. 310: ‘I am melted at your reading en famille’, 11 December 1902, 250–251 p. 310: ‘[m]ere diluvian sleet & slush rule the day’, to WJ, 2 February 1900, CWJ 3: 100 p. 311: ‘[t]he lack of human intercourse’, to WJ, 10 February 1900, 101 p. 311: ‘[e]very one has been absurdly kind & welcoming’, 25 March [1900], 111 p. 311:‘having bed, matting, window-blind & curtains installed’, to WJ, 17 November 1900, 145 p. 311: ‘[y]ou are very magnificent’, 29 January 1900, HJL 4: 133 p. 311: ‘loud, brazen patriotic verse’, to Charles Eliot Norton, 24 November 1899, 124 p. 311: ‘[t]he weather, the news, the solitary stress of January’, 29 January 1900, 133 p. 311: ‘unable to bear longer the increased hoariness of its growth’, to WJ, 12 May 1900, CWJ 3: 119 p. 312: ‘The grey years gather’, 2 October 1900, HJL 4: 169–170 p. 312: ‘smooth and anxious clerical gentleman’, 20 October 1901, 164 p. 312: ‘if you are able successfully to struggle with it’, [Monday p.m. (1903?)], DBF, p. 87 p. 312: ‘voluminous effusion … so extremely familiar’, to H.G. Wells, 15 November 1902, LL, p. 376 p. 316: ‘consists above all in a charmed & yearning & wondering sense’, to Hugh Walpole, 14 August 1912, p. 515 p. 317: ‘unexpected barbarity’, to James B. Pinker, 19 April 1901, p. 352 p. 318: ‘intrinsically, I daresay, the best I have written’, to Mary Ward, 16 December 1903, p. 391. p. 318: ‘I make very little at the best & I work very slowly’, to Maud Broadwood Story, 13 June 1901, p. 354 p. 318: ‘preoccupation (too strong, at least) of the moral & spiritual’, to WJ and AGJ, 26 April 1900, CWJ 3: 116 p. 319: ‘[i]t has really been, the Event, most moving, interesting & picturesque’, 24 January 1901, 159 p. 319: ‘carrying on’, to Clara and Clare Benedict, 22 January 1901, HJL 4: 181 p. 319: ‘excellent, beautiful, in both’, to WJ and AGJ, 1 November 1901, CWJ 3: 185 p. 319: ‘her late Britannic majesty’, to William Morton Fullerton, 17 November 1901, HJL 4: 215 414



  Letter Details 

p. 320: ‘her death makes me feel strangely older and sadder’, 15 February 1901, 183 p. 320: ‘take very personal possession’, to Hendrik C. Andersen, 13 September 1901, 201 p. 320: ‘Lamb House itself has been a scene of woe’, 26 September 1901, 205 p. 320: ‘my faithful hound (a wire-haired fox-terrier of celestial breed)’, 25 January 1902, 224

Chapter 15 p. 324: ‘from Sainty’s having no state of his own’, [28 November 1903], DBF, p. 135 p. 324: ‘[y]ou were a most conformable’, 25 February 1900, p. 124 p. 324: ‘I also applaud, dearest Howard’, 8 November 1903, p. 132 p. 325: ‘alone & thereby intimate & free-talking’, 3 October 1903, DBF, p. 129 p. 325: ‘Come to me … with your cup of experience overflowing’, 21 September 1905, DBF, p. 93 p. 325: ‘drink as deep of the cup as you may’ ‘I rejoice at any rate that you are stuffing yourself ’, 4 April 1906, [22 January 1907], pp. 95, 97 p. 326: ‘H.J. was the dearest human being I have ever known’, 31 August 1937, p. 83 p. 326: ‘with such rapturous deliberation’, 4 July 1902, CWJ 3: 210 p. 326: ‘the exhibition, to the last intimacy’, to Owen Wister, 7 August 1902, HJL 4: 233 p. 327: ‘[y]ou’ve reversed every traditional canon of story-telling’, 25 October 1902, CWJ 3: 220 p. 330: ‘nothing but the faults’, ‘truncated’, to Mary Ward, 23 September 1902, to Mary Cadwalader Rawle Jones, 23 October 1902, HJL 4: 242, 247 p. 331: ‘My feeling is with you absolutely on the subject’, 21 December 1902, 259 p. 331: ‘the grimy fog’, to Clara and Clare Benedict, 21 November 1903, 292 p. 331: ‘a book of “impressions[”] (for much money)’, 10 April 1903, CWJ 3: 231 p. 331: ‘a decidedly moving book’, WJ to HJ, 6 June 1903, 242 p. 332: ‘on a near view (as he was from afar!) thinner than thin’, ‘the intending, and extending, tourist will, in his millions buy’, to Sarah Butler Wister, 21 December 1902, to W. D. Howells, 25 January 1902, HJL 4: 260, 225 p. 332: ‘three quarters of it are practically written’, to Maud Broadwood Story, 6 January 1903, LL, p. 380 p. 335: ‘the book, meanwhile, I seem to learn, is much acclaimed’, 19 November 1903, HJL 4: 289 p. 335: ‘rather vulgar & ill-natured notice in the Nation’, to WJ, 2 December 1903, CWJ 3: 250 p. 336: ‘who – of her set & species – isn’t silly enough for anything’, 6 May 1904, 270

415



  Letter Details 

p. 336: ‘admirable sharpness & neatness’, to Edith Wharton, 26 October 1900, HJL 4: 171 p. 337: ‘I long to approach & embrace him’, 21 March 1904, CWJ 3: 266 p. 337: ‘first long, & excellent period of benefit’, to WJ, 15 March [1910], 416 p. 338: ‘this admirable and venerable object’, to Mrs Francis Bellingham, New Year’s Eve 1902, HJL 4: 264 p. 341: ‘interminable elaboration of suggestive reference’, 22 October 1905, CWJ 3: 301 p. 341: ‘The thing has “done” much less ill’, 16 February 1905, HJL 4: 353

Chapter 16 p. 343: ‘a rare benediction’, to WJ and AGJ, 31 August 1904, CWJ 3: 278 p. 344: ‘and we ten miles from a station’, to Lucy Clifford, 16 September 1904, LHJ 2: 19 p. 344: ‘pure bucolic and Arcadian’, 18 p. 344: ‘[t]he Dead we cannot have’, to Robertson James, 4 September 1904, HJL 4: 320 p. 345: ‘an exquisite and marvellous place’, 17 October 1904, 325 p. 345: ‘an appalling experience of American transcendent Dentistry’, to Edmund Gosse, 16 February 1905, LHJ 2: 25 p. 345: ‘conférencier’, 16 February 1905, 28 p. 345: ‘I spouted my stuff last night “successfully”’, 8 March [1905], CWJ 3: 289 p. 346: ‘Theodore Rex’, to Mary Cadwalader Jones, 13 January 1905, HJL 4: 337 p. 346: ‘Washington is swell’, 14 January 1905, CWJ 3: 279 p. 346: ‘for a chance de nous soulager’, to Edith Wharton, 16 January 1905, HJL 4: 342 p. 346: ‘an ice-bound stable-yard’, to Edith Wharton, 18 December 1905, 386 p. 347: ‘I have found here the sweet South’, [10 February 1905], CWJ 3: 288 p. 347: ‘old lingering Southern social types’, to WJ, [5 February 1905], 286 p. 347: ‘hotel-civilization’, to Edmund Gosse, 16 February 1905, HJL 4: 351 p. 347: ‘an air as of molten liquid velvet’, to Lucy Clifford, 21 February 1905, LHJ 2: 31 p. 347: ‘black, smoky, old-looking’, to Edward Warren, 19 March 1905, HJL 4: 355 p. 348: ‘I live on oranges and olives’, 5 April 1905, LHJ 2: 34 p. 348: ‘to the study of scenery, manners & linguistics’, [15 September 1904?], DBF, p. 139 p. 349: ‘Henry James is as good and charming as ever’, 22 June 1905, p. 52, n. 64 p. 349: ‘the stern reality of things presses upon me’, to Edith Wharton, 13 June 1905, HJL 4: 358

416



  Letter Details 

p. 349: ‘I could no other’, to Henry James III, 20 July 1915, 771 p. 349: ‘that leave-taking of ours’, 8 November 1905, 376 p. 349: ‘with all ingenuity and care’, to James B. Pinker, 5 May 1907, 448 p. 350: ‘the dire thinness of the picture là-bas’, to William Morton Fullerton, 8 August 1907, 454 p. 354: ‘it can’t have a sale other than the most modest’, 17 February 1907, 438 p. 354: ‘with all desirable deliberation’, to Margaret Mary James, 3 November 1905, LHJ 2: 37 p. 355: ‘[m]y idea is, further, to revise everything carefully’, [30 July 1905], HJL 4: 366 p. 355: ‘I hold myself really right and you really wrong’, 7 August 1905, 371 p. 355: ‘Mr James should so transform his early books’, 409, n. 4 p. 355: ‘I have tried to read over Washington Square’, 7 August 1905, 371 p. 356: ‘the Edition has smothered me … like an enormous featherbed’, 5 April 1908, LL, pp. 460–461 p. 356: ‘a freely colloquial and … confidential preface’, to Charles Scribner’s Sons, [30 July 1905], HJL 4: 367 p. 356: ‘a sort of plea for Criticism, for Discrimination’, 17 August 1908, LHJ 2: 102 p. 356: ‘Form alone takes, and holds and preserves, substance’, to Hugh Walpole, 19 May 1912, HJL 4: 619 p. 357: ‘the perpetual gregarious and loquacious feeding’, to Mary Ward, 25 September 1906, 415 p. 357: ‘a wondrous French machine’, to Edith Wharton, 8 November 1905, 376 p. 357: ‘an allusion to a matter known (so personal is it to myself)’, to Paul Harvey, 11 March 1906, 396–397 p. 357: ‘the world that our “normal” consciousness makes use of ’, 6 April 1906, CWJ 3: 310 p. 358: ‘a beautiful old house’, to W.E. Norris, 23 December 1907, LHJ 2: 88 p. 358: ‘the magical monster the touring Panhard’, ‘the old travelling-carriage way’, to George and Fanny Prothero, 13 April 1907, to Howard Sturgis, 13 April 1907, HJL 4: 445, 444 p. 358: ‘full of kindness, sympathy, curiosity’, 28 March 1907, 441 p. 358: ‘below the great grey wall’, 13 September 1907, 460 p. 359: ‘I don’t care, frankly, if I never see the vulgarized Rome’, to Edith and Edward Wharton, 11 August 1907, 459 p. 359: ‘full-blown summer’, to Jessie Allen, 24 June 1907, 451 p. 359: ‘romantical-psychological-pictorial “social”’ work’, to Margaret Mary James, 3 November 1905, LHJ 2: 38 p. 360: ‘unenlightened ache’, 14 November 1907, HJL 4: 473

417



  Letter Details 

p. 360: ‘ridiculous, impossible and odious’, to William Morton Fullerton, 29 November 1907, 480 p. 361: ‘poor impecunious and helpless me’, to Edith Wharton, 3 August 1909, 530 p. 361: ‘Glad am I that we “care” for him’, 11 January 1909, 509 p. 361: ‘Fullerton was with me on his way home’, 24 November 1907, 477 p. 362: ‘on all of whom these young backs were, and quite naturally, so gaily turned’, to Lucy Clifford, 17 February 1907, 437 p. 362:‘handsome’,‘on a near hill-top’, to Sara Norton Darwin, 11 September 1907, 504, n. 1 p. 363: ‘the ghosts, somehow, of a promiscuous past’, 5 June 1909, 523 p. 368: ‘a monument (like Ozymandias)’, to Edmund Gosse, 25 August 1915, LHJ 2: 515

Chapter 17 p. 369: ‘believe in the comfort I take in you’, HJL 4: 520 p. 370: ‘lady-pal’, to Edith Wharton, 13 December 1909, 539 p. 371: ‘digestive crisis making food loathsome’, to T. Bailey Saunders, 27 January [1910], LHJ 2: 161 p. 371: ‘a bloom of purple and a burst of sweetness’, to Edith Wharton, 8 February 1910, 162 p. 371: ‘the black devils of Nervousness’, 13 May 1910, HJL 4: 551 p. 371: ‘fairly dismal “lonesomeness”’, to WJ and family, 18 February 1910, CWJ 3: 410 p. 371: ‘priceless youth’, to Jessie Allen, 20 February 1910, LHJ 2: 165 p. 371: ‘a painless, peaceful, enviable end’, to Edith Wharton, 29 July 1910, HJL 4: 557 p. 372: ‘heavily stricken and in darkness’, 2 September 1910, 561 p. 372: ‘the whole face of life’, to Fanny Prothero, 30 December 1910, LL, p. 497 p. 372: ‘You tided me over three or four bad places’, 4 January 1912, HJL 4: 597 p. 372: ‘always profusely florid & floral’, 27 June 1911, HJ&EW, p. 180 p. 373: ‘long-abandoned home’, 27 September 1911, pp. 192–193 p. 373: ‘the remedy of London’, to James Jackson Putnam, 4 January 1912, HJL 4: 597 p. 373: ‘the Remington priestess’, to Theodora Bosanquet, 27 October 1911, 589 p. 373: ‘pectoral attack’, to Edith Wharton, [3 August 1912], HJ&EW, p. 228 p. 373: ‘absolutely lost in the wilderness of pain’, to Edith Wharton, 18 November 1912, p. 235

418



  Letter Details 

p. 374: ‘the black-barged yellow river’, to Hugh Walpole, 21 August 1913, HJL 4: 680 p. 374: ‘I sit here with my big south window open’, 5 March 1913, LHJ 2: 311 p. 374: ‘difficult, perverse, obscure’, to Edith Wharton, 1 February 1912, HJ&EW, p. 212 p. 375: ‘an extraordinary, prodigious, portentous, quite public Birthday’, 1 [and 16] April 1913, HJL 4: 659 p. 375: ‘very scalped and disfigured’, to Jessie Allen, 6 May 1914, 712 p. 377: ‘exceedingly good, characteristic & valuable’, to Henry James III, 10 December 1913, LL, p. 527 p. 377: ‘intensely domestic, private and personal’, to AGJ, 13 November 1911, LHJ 2: 214 p. 378: ‘Oh but you’re not going to give me away’, 15–18 November 1913, HJL 4: 802 p. 380: ‘this colossal convulsion’, to Helena de Kay Gilder, 2 September 1914, LHJ 2: 416–417 p. 380: ‘[p]ut my volume … away on a high shelf ’, 15 October 1914, HJL 4: 721 p. 380: ‘It’s among ghosts, isn’t it, that I invite you to walk’, 17 September 1913, 685 p. 380: ‘in presence of life’, 21 March 1914, 705–706 p. 382:‘plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness’, [4 August 1914], LHJ 2: 398 p. 382: ‘I haven’t had to face the shame’, to Lilla Cabot Perry, 22 September 1914, 422 pp. 382-383: ‘[t]he country and the season here are of a beauty of peace’, 10 August 1914, HJL 4: 713–714 p. 383: ‘I find it such a mistake on my own part’, to Esther Isaacs Sutro, 8 August 1914, LHJ 2: 402 p. 383: ‘the utter extinction of everything’, 19 August 1914, HJ&EW, p. 293 p. 383: ‘invaluable and irreplaceable little Burgess’, to Edith Wharton, 1 September 1914, 297 p. 385: ‘It’s impossible to “locate anything in our time”’, 9 November 1914, p. 316 p. 386: ‘bright and instinctive’, to Henry James III, 30 October 1914, LHJ 2: 438 p. 387: ‘unmitigatedly magnificent’, 1 January 1915, 447 p. 387: ‘working both for the French and the English Army’, to Lilla Cabot Perry, 17 June 1915, HJL 4: 758 p. 387: ‘a great swinging body of the London Scottish’, 30 October 1914, LHJ 2: 437 p. 388: ‘might have gone on for some time, I think’, 6 January 1915, 450–451 p. 388: ‘It is art that makes life’, 10 July 1915, HJL 4: 770

419



  Letter Details 

p. 389: ‘under the sense of the stupid extinction’, to Edward Marsh, 6 June 1915, LHJ 2: 489 p. 389: ‘unerring instinct for poor old women’, to Lilla Cabot Perry, 17 June 1915, HJL 4: 758 p. 389:‘mustn’t be taken, for her first happy holiday’, to Wilfred Sheridan, 12 January 1912, LHJ 2: 223 p. 389: ‘high in authority’, to Walter Berry, 11 December 1914, HJL 4: 732 p. 389: ‘the friendly sight of all the swarming khaki’, 16, [17] January [1915], HJ&EW, p. 322 p. 390: ‘amiabilities’, 30 July 1915, HJL 4: 774 p. 390: ‘Dearest Alice, I could come back to America’, 1 [and 16] April 1913, 657–658 p. 390: ‘an Alien’, to Henry James III, 24 June 1915, 760 p. 391: ‘fraternising with the common foe’, to Lilla Cabot Perry, 17 June 1915, 758 p. 391: ‘to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter’, 7 April 1914, 806 p. 391: ‘the pen drops from my hand!’, 1 December 1915, 784 p. 391: ‘[h]e leaves huge gaps undictated’, Theodora Bosanquet to Edith Wharton, 12 December [1915], HJ&EW, p. 377 p. 393: ‘the end was quiet & unconscious’, Edith Wharton to Theodora Bosanquet, 1 March [1916], p. 391

420

Notes

Prelude 1 Letter to W.D. Howells, 25 January 1902, HJL 4: 224–225. 2 Letter to Mrs J.T. Fields, 2 January 1910, 541. 3 Henry James at Work, ed. Lyall H. Powers (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 38. 4 Witter Bynner,‘A Word or Two with Henry James’, The Critic, 46, no. 2 (February 1905), 148.

Chapter 1 1 MS letter, 11 June 1912, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 2 See, for instance, Alfred Habegger, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), p. 41, and Sheldon Novick, Henry James: The Young Master (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 453, n. 5. 3 The Father, p. 33. 4 The James Family (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), p. 12. 5 The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, ed. William James (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), pp. 15, 16. 6 Quoted in Habegger, The Father, p. 173. 7 Society the Redeemed Form of Man (Boston, MA: Houghton, Osgood, 1879), pp. 160–161. 8 Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, ed. William James (Boston, MA: Osgood, 1885), p. 55. 9 Quoted in Matthiessen, James Family, p. 69.

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

421

  Notes to pages 9 to 29 



Rode’s New York City Directory, for 1850–1851 (New York: Rode, 1850). Jack: Moeurs Contemporaines (1876, tr. Laura Ensor, London: Routledge, 1890), pp. 37, 35. The Nature of Evil (New York: Appleton, 1855), p. 99. AJ to WJ, 4 November 1888, Ruth Bernard Yeazell, The Death and Letters of Alice James (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981), p. 148. 14 ‘Honoré Daumier’, Picture and Text (New York: Harper & Bros., 1893), p. 120. This phrase occurs only in the 1893 revised version, not the 1890 original. 15 MS letter, 16 July 1912, to Henry James III (nephew Harry), Houghton Library, Harvard University. 16 See www.findagrave.com/memorial/46189589/eugene-norcom and www.ancestry. co.uk/genealogy/records/frederick-norcom-24-7w7fbs, accessed 28 April 2018. 17 Leon Edel, Henry James:The Master, 1901–16 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972), p. 468. 18 MS letter [London, 1856], Houghton Library, Harvard University. 19 Emerson was, incidentally, uneasy with this term, disavowing doctrinaire ideas and representing his associates as ‘only two or three men and women, who read alone, with some vivacity’ (quoted in Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, ed. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske (New York: Appleton, 1888)). 20 (New York: De Witt and Davenport, 1854), p. 5. 21 MS letter, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 22 See Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 99. 23 Habegger, The Father, pp. 319–320. 24 See Katharine Hastings, ‘William James (1771–1832) of Albany, N.Y., and His Descendants’, New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, 55 (April 1924), 2: 111. 25 Laurence Senelick, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 268–269. 26 Tr. Dorothy Bussy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), p. 145. 27 Robert C. Le Clair, Young Henry James 1843–1870 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1955), p. 146, n. 18.

10 11 12 13

Chapter 2 1 Quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: The Untried Years, 1843–70 (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1953), p. 141. 2 ‘Banish mosquitoes from Staten Island’, 5 June 1910. 3 Hachette’s French Reader, Vol. 3: Rodolphe Töpffer, ed. P.H. Ernest Brette and Gustave Masson (Paris: Hachette, 1873), p. 8. 4 Quoted in Le Clair, Young Henry James, p. 171; see also Habegger, The Father, p. 368. 5 Edward Walford, Old and New London: A Narrative of Its History, Its People, and Its Places, 6 Vols. (London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin [1877?]), 5: 248. 6 Peter H. Hansen, ‘Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 34 (July 1995), 300; quotations from Illustrated London News and Punch.

422



  Notes to pages 30 to 44 

7 See letter to Elizabeth Jordan, 3 May 1907, HJL 4: 446–447. 8 Richard W. Schoch, ed. Victorian Theatrical Burlesques (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), pp. xxxi–xxxii. 9 The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (London: Hart-Davis, 1965), p. 46. 10 Richard W. Schoch, Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 43. 11 See Habegger, The Father, p. 384 and Le Clair, Young Henry James, p 217. 12 See Pierre A. Walker and Alfred Habegger who question the school’s Fourierist values, describing it as ‘essentially a French language school for foreigners’ (‘Young Henry James and the Institution Fezandié’, Henry James Review, 15, no. 2 (Spring 1994), 117). 13 Scott Derrick, ‘A Small Boy and the Ease of Others: The Structure of Masculinity and the Autobiography of Henry James’, Arizona Quarterly, 45, no. 4 (Winter 1989), 45. 14 Quoted in Albert Boime, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 107. 15 A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 8. 16 ‘A French Watering Place’, Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune, 1875–1876, ed. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind (New York: New York University Press, 1957), p. 205. 17 The Grove Dictionary of Art: From David to Ingres: Early 19th-Century French Artists, ed. Jane Turner (London: Macmillan Reference, 2000), p. 127. 18 Merridew’s Visitor’s Guide to Boulogne-sur-Mer and Its Environs (London: Simpkin, Marshall, n.d. [?1864]), pp. 25–26. 19 The Newcomes, 2 Vols. (London: Bradbury and Evans), 2: 308. 20 Merridew’s Guide, p. 45. 21 Alice James: Her Brothers: Her Journal, ed. Anna Robeson Burr (London: Macmillan, 1934), p. 166. 22 Letter, 24 December 1857, Le Clair,Young Henry James, pp. 264–265. 23 ‘Napoléon Ansieaux, Henry James’s Boulogne Tutor’, Henry James Studies [Henry James Society of Korea], 6 (2001), 169–201; for further discussion, see John Carlos Rowe, The Other Henry James (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 139. 24 Quoted in Le Clair, Young Henry James, p. 260. 25 Virginia Harlow, Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950), p. 8, Perry quoted by Le Clair, Young Henry James, p. 281. 26 Quoted in Matthiessen, James Family, p. 88. 27 Harlow, Perry: A Biography, p. 345. 28 Royal Cortissoz, An Exhibition of the Work of John La Farge (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1936), p. 6. 29 31 May 1906, quoted in Adeline Tintner, The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987), p. 144. 30 Le Clair, Young Henry James, pp. 291, 292. 31 Ibid., p. 249. 32 NSB, pp. 34–35; my thanks to Peter C. Caldwell for much of this information. 33 5 August 1860, Harlow, Perry: A Biography, p. 259. 34 David Thomson, Europe since Napoleon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), p. 270.

423



  Notes to pages 44 to 56 

35 Other printed versions of this letter have a ‘group’ rather than a ‘grasp of warriors’, but Edmund White speculates in ‘Sons and Brothers’ (New York Review of Books, 11 October 2007) that the phrase ‘surely began life as une poignée de guerriers’. 36 Quoted in Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992), p. 44. 37 See Sally Webster, William Morris Hunt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 58. 38 See James L. Yarnall, John La Farge, A Biographical and Critical Study (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 49. 39 Quoted in CWJ 1: 402. 40 Henry James, Sr, ‘Civilization’, Moralism and Christianity; or Man’s Experience and Destiny (New York: Redfield, 1850), p. 63. 41 Royal Cortissoz, John La Farge: A Memoir and a Study (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), p. 117. 42 Katie Kresser, The Art and Thought of John La Farge: Picturing Authenticity in Gilded Age America (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), p. 93; see also Henry Adams, ‘The Mind of John La Farge’, John La Farge: Essays, ed. Henry Adams, Kathleen A. Foster, Henry A. La Farge, H. Barbara Weinberg, Linnea H. Wren, and James L. Yarnall (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987), p. 17. 43 See Habegger, Henry James and the “Woman Business” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 11–12.

Chapter 3 1 Paper read before ‘The Loyal Legion’, rpt. in Milwaukee Sentinel, 2 December 1888, quoted in Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973, 2003), p. 110 n. 2 HJ Sr to Elizabeth Peabody, 22 July 1863, Horace Mann Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, quoted in Aaron, ibid., p. 110. 3 Undated letter fragment, given in Habegger, The Father, p. 430. 4 To Edmund Tweedy, 18 July [1860], Ralph Barton Perry, Thought and Character of William James, 2 Vols. (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1935), 1: 191. 5 Charles and Tessa Hoffmann, ‘Henry James and the Civil War’, New England Quarterly, 62, no. 4 (December 1989), 534. 6 See R.W.B. Lewis, The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), p. 117. 7 See Edel, Untried Years, pp. 179–180. 8 Aaron, The Unwritten War, p. 107. 9 Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967), p. 77. 10 C. and T. Hoffmann, ‘Henry James and the Civil War’, 543, 552. 11 A Backward Glance (New York: Appleton-Century, 1934), p. 186. 12 Quoted in Adeline Tintner, The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), p. 15.

424



  Notes to pages 58 to 92 

13 Becoming William James (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 233. 14 The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 385. 15 Ibid., p. vii. 16 ‘A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim’, Drum-Taps, in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), p. 441. 17 To Manton Marble, 3 October 1903, Henry James: Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 348. 18 Quoted in Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), p. 459. 19 Quoted, ibid., p. 288. 20 Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells, 2 Vols. (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, n.d.), 2: 397, 399. 21 See Kenneth S. Lynn, William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), p. 214. 22 Ellery Sedgwick, The Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909:Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), p. 3. 23 See Victorian Boston Today:Twelve Walking Tours, ed. Mary Melvin Petronella (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2004), p. 121. 24 Diary of Alice James, p. 149. 25 Quoted in Michael Anesko, Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 13. 26 Van Wyck Brooks, From the Shadow of the Mountain: My Post-Meridian Years (London: Dent, 1962), p. 45. 27 Quoted in Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women and His Art (New York: Norton, 1999), pp. 100–101. 28 Ibid., p. 48.

Chapter 4 1 18 June 1869. 2 Preface to Ruskin’s The Nature of Gothic: A Chapter of The Stones of Venice (Hammersmith: Kelmscott Press, 1892), p. i. 3 The Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, ed. John Aplin, 5 Vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), 3: 142. 4 ‘Stanzas in Memory of the Author of “Obermann”’, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott, 2nd ed. Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1979), p. 139. 5 Ibid., pp. 135, 137. 6 See CP, p. 87. 7 See Novick, The Young Master, p. 238. 8 Jean Strouse, Alice James: A Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), p. 117.

425



  Notes to pages 98 to 132 

Chapter 5 1 Quoted in The Tales of Henry James, Vol. 2: 1870–1874, ed. Maqbool Aziz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. xxxix. 2 La Comédie Humaine, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1966), p. 586. 3 It occurs also in ‘The Madonna of the Future’ and The Bostonians (p. 126). 4 Elizabeth Prettejohn, Interpreting Sargent (London: Tate Gallery, 1998), p. 25. 5 Amours de Voyage, ed. Patrick Scott (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland, 1974), p. 39. 6 For detail, see also Philip Horne, ‘Clough, James, and Amours de Voyage: A Juxtaposition’, Literary Imagination, 15, no.1 (March 2013), 89–104. 7 Italian Hours, ed. John Auchard (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 179. 8 Roba di Roma, 2 Vols., 2nd ed. (London: Chapman & Hall 1863), 2: 337. 9 Ibid., 1: 314–315. 10 Galaxy 16 (November 1873), 686.

Chapter 6 1 Probably written in 1873: see NSB, pp. 220–221, n. 453. 2 James later applied this comic ‘fancy’ to the intrepid American journalist Henrietta Stackpole in the revised New York Edition of The Portrait of a Lady: ‘she went into cages, she flourished lashes, like a spangled lion-tamer’, 24 Vols. (London: Macmillan, 1907–9), 3: 127. 3 New York Edition, 6: 150. 4 See Leon Edel, Henry James: The Conquest of London, 1870–83 (London: Rupert HartDavis, 1962), p. 191. 5 Quoted in Parisian Sketches, p. 12. 6 See Roderick Hudson, ed. Geoffrey Moore, with notes by Patricia Crick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 390–391. 7 13 September 1879. 8 26 June 1879. 9 Taine quoted in Tourguéneff and his French Circle, ed. E. Halperine-Kaminsky, tr. Ethel M. Arnold (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), p. 192. 10 Quoted in Francis Steegmuller, Maupassant: A Lion in the Path (London: Macmillan, 1949, 1972), p. 63. 11 Leon Edel, Henry James: The Middle Years, 1884–94 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963), p. 456. 12 11 December 1875. 13 Lettres de Paris – Notes Parisiennes: ‘Le Sémaphore de Marseille’ 1871–1877, ed. Margherita Elia Leozappa (Lecce: Milella, 1981), pp. 85, 87. 14 Ibid., pp. 217–218 and xxv.

426



  Notes to pages 142 to 174 

Chapter 7 1 See John Aplin, Memory and Legacy:A Thackeray Family Biography, 1876–1919 (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2011), pp. 78–81. 2 Works of William Makepeace Thackeray, with introductions by Anne Ritchie, 13 Vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1900), 9: xlvi. 3 See Strouse, Alice James: A Biography, p. 182. 4 Introduction to Daisy Miller and An International Episode (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. vii. 5 ‘“An International Episode”: A Centennial Review of a Centennial Story’, Henry James Review, 1, no.1 (November 1979), 24–56. 6 Quoted in Edel, The Conquest of London, p. 315. 7 128 (January 1879), 101–106. 8 ‘The Old Order’, rpt. in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), 89–90. 9 Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, 5: 319. 10 For discussion of the dates of these visits, see TMY, p. 462, n. 85. 11 Gordon Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968, 1978), pp. 513–514. 12 Ibid., p. 514. 13 Journal, quoted in David W. Pancost, ‘Henry James and Julian Hawthorne’, American Literature, 50, no. 3 (November 1978), 461.

Chapter 8 1 See Laurence Dreyfus, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), p. 182. 2 Ibid., pp. 175–184. 3 See letter to T.S. Perry, 20 May 1908, HJL 4: 492. 4 Henry James’, rpt. in Aspects and Impressions (London: Cassell, 1922), p. 43. 5 43 (January 1879), 106–108. 6 In the New York Edition James replaces Beethoven with Schubert, a composer whose music is typically more serene and lyrical. 7 New York Edition, 3: 402. 8 Ibid., 131. 9 Ibid., New York Edition, 4: 436. 10 As my anonymous but well-informed reader at Wiley Blackwell reported to me, James is here misquoting: Eliot’s phrase in the novel is ‘delicate vessels’ – a significant change. 11 John Aplin pointed this out to me; see his The Inheritance of Genius: A Thackeray Family Biography, 1798–1875 (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2010), p. 237.

427



  Notes to pages 177 to 215 

12 See More than Friend: The Letters of Robert Browning to Katharine de Kay Bronson, ed. Michael Meredith, with assistance of Rita S. Humphrey (Waco,TX:Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University and Wedgestone Press, 1985), p. xxiii.

Chapter 9 1 Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988), p. 170. 2 Matthiessen, James Family, pp. 129–30. 3 Ibid., p. 130. 4 Diary of Alice James, p. 79. 5 Michael Anesko, ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 176. 6 See Michael Anesko, ‘Collected Editions and the Consolidation of Cultural Authority: The Case of Henry James’, Book History, 12 (2009), 191. 7 See Anesko, ‘Friction with the Market’, p. 37. 8 See CL83-84 2: 5 n. 9 53 (May 1884): 724. 10 Gertrude Ward, MS Diary entry, 30 January 1884, quoted in my ‘Mrs Humphry Ward, Vernon Lee, and Henry James’, Review of English Studies, 31, no. 123 (1980), 319. 11 Miss Bretherton (London: Macmillan, 1884), p. 16. 12 Introduction to the Westmoreland Edition of Miss Bretherton (London: Smith, Elder, 1911), p. 225. 13 Pall Mall Gazette, 6 December 1884; Athenaeum (27 December 1884). 14 3 volumes (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1884). 15 Macmillan’s Magazine 52 (June 1885), 135. 16 10 January 1885. 17 Ruth Bernard Yeazell, The Death and Letters of Alice James, p. 100.

Chapter 10 1 See Daniel Karlin, Introduction to The Bostonians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. xlii. 2 Ibid., p. 459. 3 See Anesko, ‘Friction with the Market’, p. 153. 4 ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism, ed. Janet Adam Smith (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948), p. 99. 5 Ibid., pp. 92, 96. 6 See Claire Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson:A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2005), p. 281. 7 Quotations from Richard Ormond, Elaine Kilmurray, with contributions by Trevor Fairbrother, Barbara Dayer Gallati, Erica E. Hirshler, Marc Simpson and H. Barbara Weinberg, Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends (London: National Gallery, 2015), p. 108.

428



  Notes to pages 215 to 246 

8 Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 282. 9 Ormond, Kilmurray, Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends, p. 55. 10 Quoted in Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, p. 54. 11 Tr. Havelock Ellis, 1885 (London: Nonesuch Press, 1942), p. 374. 12 Many years later, James learnt that an impoverished cousin, Mary (daughter of ill-fated Howard James), had been earning a similar living, ‘standing as a model in wholesale “Cloak stores” to show styles to “buyers” – a deplorable pursuit’ (WJ to HJ, 18 May 1907, CWJ 3: 341). 13 The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York:Viking Press, 1950), pp. 58–92. 14 Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (New York: Norton, 2016), p. 221. 15 Women Artists, Women Exiles: ‘Miss Grief’ and Other Stories, ed. Joan Myers Weimer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), pp. 264–265. 16 Henry James, Letters from the Palazzo Barbaro, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (London: Pushkin Press, 1998), p. 156. 17 Quoted in Edel, Middle Years, p. 169.

Chapter 11 1 Advertisement, Era, 7 January 1877. 2 See CN, pp. 247–252, 439–465, and CP, pp. 607–637. 3 Harman, Robert Louis Stevenson, p. 325. 4 (London: Penguin, 2010), pp. 161–162. 5 Nation, 1943, quoted in Diary of Alice James, p. 325. 6 See CWHJD, p. 390. 7 4 August 1889, Diary of Alice James, p. 51. 8 Translator’s Preface, Port Tarascon: The Last Adventures of the Illustrious Tartarin (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1891), p. 1. 9 See The Correspondence of Henry James and the House of Macmillan, 1877–1914, ed. Rayburn S. Moore (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p. xxi. 10 Quoted in Edel, Middle Years, p. 250. 11 Henry James: Selected Letters, p. 325. 12 Quoted in Andrew Lycett, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999), p. 222. 13 Theatre and Friendship: Some Henry James Letters, with commentary by Elizabeth Robins (London: Cape, 1932), p. 55. 14 Diary of Alice James, p. 223. 15 More than Friend:The Letters of Robert Browning to Katharine de Kay Bronson, p. lxx. 16 Diary of Alice James, p. 130. 17 Leamington Spa Courier, 24 January 1891. 18 See CP, pp. 196 n. 1 and 185.

429

  Notes to pages 250 to 292 



Chapter 12 Diary of Alice James, p. 222. Ibid., p. 4. Theatre and Friendship, p. 12. Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, 4: 195. Quoted in Kaplan, Imagination of Genius, p. 358. (London: Heinemann, 1892), [p. v]. Quoted in Vineta Colby, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003), p. 196. 8 Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856–1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 136. 9 Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, 4: 182. 10 ‘Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson’, North American Review, 160, no. 459 (February 1895), 191–192. 11 Quoted in Strouse, Alice James: A Biography, p. 259. 12 See Alide Cagidemetrio, ‘Scelta di Città: Venezia, Black Balloons and White Doves’, Henry James e Venezia, ed. Sergio Perosa (Florence: Olschki, 1987), pp. 54–55. 13 MS letter, 5 April 1908, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 14 Quoted in Diary of Alice James, p. vi. 15 John R. Bradley, Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence (London: Palgrave, 2000), p. 126; quotation from Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, p. 170. 16 MS letter to W.E. Norris, 19 January 1895, Beinecke Library,Yale University. 17 MS letter, 13 February 1895, Morgan Library and Museum, New York. 18 Michèle Mendelssohn, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 174, 179. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Chapter 13 1 MS letter to W.E. Norris, 19 January 1895, Beinecke Library,Yale University. 2 See Kevin H.F. O’Brien, ‘“The House Beautiful”: A Reconstruction of Oscar Wilde’s American Lecture’, Victorian Studies, 17, no. 4 (June 1974), 402. 3 Quoted in Parisian Sketches, p. xxxv, n. 2. 4 War Papers Read before the Commandery of the State of Wisconsin, Military Order of the United States,Vol. 1 [1891], see CWJ 3: 3 n. 5. 5 ‘London Notes’, rpt. Notes on Novelists (London: Dent, 1914), p. 340. 6 ‘Hawthorne and his Mosses’ (1850), Melville: Pierre, Israel Potter, The Piazza Tales, The Confidence Man, Uncollected Prose, Billy Budd, ed. Harrison Hayford (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 1159. 7 Robert Ross: Friend of Friends: Letters to Robert Ross, Art Critic and Writer, Together with Extracts from His Published Articles, ed. Margery Ross (London: Cape, 1952), p. 351.

430



  Notes to pages 292 to 322  8 See M.A. DeWolfe Howe, Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs. James T. Fields (Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922), pp. 297–301. 9 Alvin Langdon Coburn: Photographer: An Autobiography, ed. Helmut and Alison Gernsheim (London: Faber & Faber, 1966), p. 52.

Chapter 14 1 See H. Montgomery Hyde, Henry James at Home (Methuen, 1969), p. 81 and LL, p. 323 n. 1. 2 MS letter, 26 February 1899, Beinecke Library,Yale University. 3 Janet Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs. Humphry Ward (London: Constable, 1923), p. 161. 4 (Collins, 1918), p. 328. 5 (Smith, Elder, 1900), pp. 141, 146. 6 Quoted in Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men, ed. Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 25 n. 26. 7 Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrick C. Andersen 1899–1915, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004), pp. 128, 131. 8 Quoted in Dearly Beloved Friends, p. 23. 9 See Kerry Lee Sutherland, ‘The Prince of Agents: James Brand Pinker and Henry James’, PhD dissertation, Kent State University, 2012, p. 35. 10 ‘Mr. Henry James’s Later Work’ (1903), W.D. Howells as Critic, ed. Edwin H. Cady (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 415. 11 Mary Weld, quoted in Hyde, Henry James at Home, p. 154. 12 Quoted in Edel, The Master, p. 69. The painting is now in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, a gift of Marjorie Edel in memory of Leon Edel. A second portrait, unfinished or a sketch, and perhaps more psychologically revealing, has recently been discovered, concealed under the first when it was removed for cleaning. See Elizabeth Lee,‘Among Women, between Men: Launching a Career, 1896–1900’, Ellen Emmet Rand: Gender,Art, and Business, ed. Alexis L. Boylan (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020), pp. 39–40. 13 F.O. Matthiessen, Henry James:The Major Phase (London: Oxford University Press, 1944). 14 See also Hazel Hutchison, ‘The Other Lambert Strether: Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Balzac’s Louis Lambert and J.H. Lambert’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 58 (September 2003), 230–258. 15 See also Michael Anesko, Generous Mistakes: Incidents of Error in Henry James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 70–72. 16 Quoted in Edel, The Master, p. 109. 17 Quoted in The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 307. 18 See her essay, ‘The Beast in the Closet’, Sex, Politics, and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 148–186.

431



  Notes to pages 323 to 360 

Chapter 15 1 Portrait of Edith Wharton (London: Cape, 1947), p. 17. 2 See Hyde, Henry James at Home, p. 150 n. 3 Constance Fenimore Woolson, arr. and ed. Clare Benedict (London: Ellis, 1932), pp. 399–400. 4 ‘The Bronzino Portrait in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove’, Modern Language Notes, 68, no. 1 (January 1953), 25. 5 Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, 5: 178. 6 Albert T. Gardner, ‘William Story and Cleopatra’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 2, no. 4 (December 1943), 147. 7 ‘Transformation’ and ‘The Blithedale Romance’ (London: George Bell, 1900), p. viii. 8 The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, 1877–1914, ed. George Monteiro (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), p. 60. 9 Anesko, Letters, Fictions, Lives, p. 446.

Chapter 16 1 Jörg Hasler, Switzerland in the Life and Work of Henry James.The Clare Benedict Collection of Letters from Henry James (Berne: A. Francke, 1966), p. 156. 2 Witter Bynner, ‘A Word or Two with Henry James’, 146. 3 Quoted in Michael Anesko, ‘James in America: in Quest of (the) Material’, Cambridge Quarterly, 37, no. 1 (2008), 8. 4 Thom Nickels, Literary Philadelphia: A History of Poetry and Prose in the City of Brotherly Love (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2015), p. 66. 5 Kaplan, Imagination of Genius, p. 488. 6 Ibid., p. 501. 7 The American Scene,Together with Three Essays from ‘Portraits of Places’, with an introduction by W.H. Auden (New York: Scribner’s, 1946), p. x. 8 Nancy Foner, In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 13. 9 Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 120. 10 See Sara Blair, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 160–163. 11 Eric Haralson, ‘Henry James and the Limits of Historicism’, Henry James Review, 16, no. 3 (Fall 1995), 275. 12 MS letter, 27 March 1906, Beinecke Library,Yale University. 13 See Michael Anesko, ‘Friction with the Market’, pp. 141–162. 14 MS letters from Scribner’s to Pinker, 23 November 1906, 17 December 1907, Beinecke Library,Yale University. 15 See also Jacques-Émile Blanche, Mes Modèles: Souvenirs littéraires (Paris: Librairie Stock, 1929), pp. 163, 171.

432



  Notes to pages 361 to 377 

16 Hermione Lee, Edith Wharton (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007), p. 307, Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters: 1900–1915, ed. Lyall H. Powers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990), pp. 15–16. 17 Selected Poems of Edith Wharton, ed. Irene Goldman Price (New York: Scribner, 2019), pp. 127–128. 18 See Jean Frantz Blackall, ‘Henry and Edith: “The Velvet Glove” as an “In” Joke’, Henry James Review, 7, no. 1 (Fall 1985), 21–25. 19 Geoffrey Keynes, Henry James in Cambridge (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1967), p. 12. 20 Ibid., p. 19. 21 See Cushing Strout, ‘Henry James’s Dream of the Louvre, “The Jolly Corner”, and Psychological Interpretation’, Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 217–231. 22 Henry James: Letters to A.C. Benson and Auguste Monod, ed. E.F. Benson (London: Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 1930), p. 45. 23 MS letter, 6 October 1908, Beinecke Library,Yale University. 24 Introduction to David McWhirter (ed.), Henry James’s New York Edition:The Construction of Authorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 6. 25 Percy Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947), pp. 69–70.

Chapter 17 1 Edel, The Master, p. 415. 2 25 December 1908, MS Diary 22 August 1907–8 May 1909, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 3 Henry James at Work, p. 4. In his reminiscence, James’s portraitist, Jacques-Émile Blanche, also commented on the novelist’s ‘bouche fine, ironique, peu sensuelle’ (Mes Modèles: Souvenirs littéraires, p. 146). 4 Signed by Ella Hepworth Dixon, 15 March 1916. 5 Quoted in Edel, The Master, p. 446. 6 MS letter, 21 June 1910, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 7 Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, 5: 244. 8 MS letters, 10 May 1911, 12–13 August 1912, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 9 MS letter, 18 October 1911, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 10 MS letter, 27 September 1912, Beinecke Library,Yale University. 11 Robert Ross: Friend of Friends, p. 260. 12 SBO, p. 24; MS letter, 16 July 1912, to his nephew, Henry James III, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 13 Carol Holly, ‘The British Reception of Henry James’s Autobiographies’ American Literature, 57, no. 4 (December 1985), 575. 14 Henry James at Work, p. 37. 15 13, 19 November 1911, Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women, ed. Susan E. Gunter (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 83.

433



  Notes to pages 378 to 394 

16 MS letter, 1 April 1913, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 17 NSB, p. 475. 18 S.P. Rosenbaum,‘Letters to the Pell-Clarkes from Their “Old Cousin and Friend” Henry James’, American Literature, 31, no. 1 (March 1959), 53. 19 MS letter, 18 March 1914, Houghton Library, Harvard University. 20 Letters to Benson and Monod, p. 82. 21 Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, 5: 262. 22 Percy Lubbock, Preface to The Ivory Tower, p. v. 23 See Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie, H.G. Wells: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), pp. 291–294. 24 Rupert Hart-Davis, Hugh Walpole: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952), p. 113. 25 ‘Brief Note’, The Little Review, 5, no. 4 (August 1918), 7. 26 A Backward Glance, pp. 366–367. 27 Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, 5: 304. 28 The Mail, 28 January 1916. 29 Henry James: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Norman Page (London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 154. 30 Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, 5: 305. 31 Manchester Guardian, 4 March 1916. 32 29 February 1916. 33 Quoted in Leon Edel and Dan H. Lawrence, A Bibliography of Henry James, 3rd ed. (Winchester: St. Paul’s Bibliographies; New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1982), p. 167. 34 ‘The Old Order’, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, p. 82.

434

Bibliography

Where possible I have used the ongoing Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James; for titles not yet available I have generally consulted a first book edition.Towards the end of his life, James revised much of his fiction for what has become known as the New York Edition (1907–1909). I have referred to this edition for the Prefaces he provided for each of the twenty-four volumes and occasionally (duly noted) for the quotation of an especially choice phrase which did not appear in earlier editions. For the sake of convenience when discussing the short stories I have used the twelve-volume Complete Tales, edited by Leon Edel.

Fiction The Ambassadors, ed. Nicola Bradbury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) The American (London: Macmillan, 1879) [1st [English] edition authorized by HJ] The Awkward Age (London: Heinemann, 1899) The Bostonians, ed. Daniel Karlin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) Complete Tales of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel, 12 Vols. (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962–64) Confidence, 2 Vols. (London: Chatto and Windus, 1880) Daisy Miller and An International Episode, ed. Adrian Poole (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) The Europeans, ed. Susan M. Griffin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) The Golden Bowl, 2 Vols. (New York: Scribner’s, 1904) The Ivory Tower, ed. Percy Lubbock (London: Collins 1917) The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

435



  Bibliography 

The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910, ed. N.H. Reeve (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) The Novels and Tales of Henry James, the ‘New York Edition’, 24 Vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1907–1909) The Other House, 2 Vols. (London: Heinemann, 1896) The Outcry, ed. Jean Chothia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) The Portrait of a Lady, ed. Michael Anesko (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) The Princess Casamassima, ed. Adrian Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) The Reverberator, ed. Richard Salmon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Roderick Hudson, 3 Vols. (London: Macmillan, 1879), ‘revised edition’, ‘originally published in Boston, in 1875’ The Sacred Fount, ed. T.J. Lustig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) The Sense of the Past, ed. Percy Lubbock (London: Collins, 1917) The Spoils of Poynton (London: Heinemann, 1897) The Tragic Muse, 3 Vols. (London: Macmillan, 1890) Washington Square (New York: Harper, 1881) Watch and Ward (Boston, MA: Houghton, Osgood, 1878) What Maisie Knew (London: Heinemann, 1898) The Wings of the Dove (London: Constable, 1902)

Other Writings The American Scene, ed. Peter Collister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019) The American Scene, Together with Three Essays from ‘Portraits of Places’, with an introduction by W.H. Auden (New York: Scribner’s, 1946) Anesko, Michael, Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997) Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrick C. Andersen, 1899–1915, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press, 2004) ‘Bravest of Women and Finest of Friends’ : Henry James’s Letters to Lucy Clifford, ed. Marysa Demoor and Monty Chisholm (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 1999) Complete Letters of Henry James (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006-ongoing): ed. Pierre A. Walker, Greg W. Zacharias: 1855–1872, 2 Vols. (2006); 1872–1876, 3 Vols. (2008); 1876–1878, 2 Vols. (2012–13); 1878–1880, 2 Vols. (2014–15); ed. Michael Anesko, Greg W. Zacharias: 1880–1883, 2 Vols. (2016–17); 1883–1884, 2 Vols. (2018–19); 1884– 1886, 2 Vols. (2020–21) Complete Notebooks of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) Complete Plays of Henry James, ed. Leon Edel (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949) The Complete Writings of Henry James on Art and Drama, ed. Peter Collister, 2 Vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016) The Correspondence of Henry James and Henry Adams, 1877–1914, ed. George Monteiro (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992)

436



  Bibliography 

The Correspondence of Henry James and the House of Macmillan, 1877–1914. ‘All the Links in the Chain’, ed. Rayburn S. Moore (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993) Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women, ed. Susan E. Gunter (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999) Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men, ed. Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2001) English Hours (London: Heinemann, 1905) Hawthorne (London: Macmillan, 1879) Henry James: A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 1999) Henry James and Edith Wharton: Letters: 1900–1915, ed. Lyall H. Powers (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990) Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: Great Britain and America, ed. Richard Howard (New York: Library of America, 1993) Henry James: Collected Travel Writings: The Continent, ed. Richard Howard (New York: Library of America, 1993) Henry James: Interviews and Recollections, ed. Norman Page (London: Macmillan, 1984) Henry James: Letters, ed. Leon Edel, 4 Vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974–84) Henry James: Letters to A.C. Benson and Auguste Monod, ed. E.F. Benson (London: Elkin Mathews and Marrot, 1930) Henry James: Literary Criticism: Essays on Literature: American Writers: English Writers, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984) Henry James: Literary Criticism: French Writers: Other European Writers: The Prefaces to the New York Edition, ed. Leon Edel and Mark Wilson (New York: Library of America, 1984) Henry James on Culture: Collected Essays on Politics and the American Social Scene, ed. Pierre A. Walker (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1999) Henry James: Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987) Henry James: Selected Literary Criticism, ed. Morris Shapira (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1963]1968) Italian Hours, ed. John Auchard (London: Penguin, 1992) Letters of Henry James, ed. Percy Lubbock, 2 Vols. (London: Macmillan, 1920) Letters of Henry James to Walter Berry (Paris: Black Sun Press, Éditions Narcisse, 1928) The Master, the Modern Major General, and His Clever Wife: Henry James’s Letters to Field Marshal Lord Wolseley and Lady Wolseley. 1878–1913, ed. Alan G. James (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2012) The Notebooks of Henry James, ed. F.O. Matthiessen and Kenneth B. Murdock (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 372 Notes of a Son and Brother and The Middle Years, ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011) Notes on Novelists (London: Dent, 1914) Parisian Sketches: Letters to the New York Tribune, 1875–1876, ed. Leon Edel and Ilse Dusoir Lind (New York: New York University Press, 1957) Picture and Text (New York: Harper & Bros., 1893) Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 1882–1915: A Literary Friendship, ed. Rayburn S. Moore (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1988)

437



  Bibliography 

A Small Boy and Others ed. Peter Collister (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011) The Tales of Henry James, Volume 2: 1870–1874, ed. Maqbool Aziz (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) Theatre and Friendship: Some Henry James Letters, with commentary by Elizabeth Robins (London: Cape, 1932) William Wetmore Story and His Friends, from Letters, Diaries and Recollections, 2 Vols. (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1903)

Works on Henry James Allott, Miriam, ‘The Bronzino Portrait in Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove’, Modern Language Notes, 68, no. 1 (January 1953), 23–25 Anesko, Michael, ‘James in America: In Quest of (the) Material’, Cambridge Quarterly, 37, no. 1 (2008), 3–15 ———, ‘Collected Editions and the Consolidation of Cultural Authority: The Case of Henry James’, Book History, 12 (2009), 186–208 ———, ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) ———, Generous Mistakes: Incidents of Error in Henry James (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) ———, Henry James and Queer Filiation: Hardened Bachelors of the Edwardian Era (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) Blackall, Jean Frantz, ‘Henry and Edith: “The Velvet Glove” as an “In” Joke’, Henry James Review, 7, no. 1 (Fall 1985), 21–25 Blair, Sara, Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Bosanquet,Theodora, Henry James at Work, ed. Lyall H. Powers (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2006) Bradley, John R., Henry James’s Permanent Adolescence (London: Palgrave, 2000) Bynner, Witter, ‘A Word or Two with Henry James’, The Critic, 46, no. 2 (February 1905), 146–148 Cagidemetrio, Alide, ‘Scelta di Città:Venezia, Black Balloons and White Doves’, Henry James e Venezia, ed. Sergio Perosa (Florence: Olschki, 1987), pp. 53–64 Collister, Peter, ‘Mrs Humphry Ward,Vernon Lee, and Henry James’, Review of English Studies, 31, no. 123 (1980), 315–321 ———, ‘“Taking Care of Yourself ”: Henry James and the Life of George Sand’, Modern Language Review, 83 (1988), 556–570 ———, ‘James’s “Madonna of the Future” and the Problem of Artistic Failure: Some French Models’, Journal of European Studies, 32 (2002), 339–350 ———, ‘Levels of Disclosure:Voices and People in Henry James’s Italian Hours’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 34 (2004), 194–213 ———, Writing the Self: Henry James and America (London: Routledge, 2007)

438



  Bibliography 

———, ‘“As an Artist and as a Bachelor”: The Sexual Dynamics of “The Liar”’, Henry James Review, 34, no. 1 (Winter 2013), 64–82 ———, ‘Henry James, the “Scenic Idea”, and “Nona Vincent”’, Philological Quarterly, 94, no. 3 (Summer, 2015), 267–290 ———, ‘Shakespeare for Tourists: Henry James’s “The Birthplace”’, Modern Philology, 116, no. 4 (May 2019), 377–400 Critical Companion to Henry James: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work, ed. Eric Haralson and Kendall Johnson (New York: Facts on File, 2009) Derrick, Scott, ‘A Small Boy and the Ease of Others: The Structure of Masculinity and the Autobiography of Henry James’, Arizona Quarterly, 45, no. 4 (Winter 1989), 25–56 Edel, Leon, and Dan H. Lawrence, A Bibliography of Henry James, 3rd ed. (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies; New Castle DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1982) Edel, Leon, Henry James:The Untried Years, 1843–70 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953) ———, Henry James:The Conquest of London, 1870–83 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1962) ———, Henry James:The Middle Years, 1884–94 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1963) ———, Henry James:The Treacherous Years, 1895–1901 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1969) ———, Henry James:The Master, 1901–16 (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1972) Gard, Roger (ed.), Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968) Gordon, Lyndall, A Private Life of Henry James:Two Women and His Art (New York: Norton, 1999) Gorra, Michael, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (New York: Liveright Norton, 2012) Gosse, Edmund, ‘Henry James’, Aspects and Impressions (London: Cassell, 1922), pp. 17–54 Graphic,The, 13 September 1879, review of Roderick Hudson Habegger, Alfred, Henry James and the ‘Woman Business’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) Haralson, Eric, ‘Henry James and the Limits of Historicism’, Henry James Review, 16, no. 3 (Fall 1995), 273–277 Hasler, Jörg, Switzerland in the Life and Work of Henry James. The Clare Benedict Collection of Letters from Henry James (Cooper Monograph No. 10) (Berne: A. Francke, 1966) Hayes, Kevin J. (ed.), Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Henry James’s New York Edition:The Construction of Authorship, ed. David McWhirter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995) Hoffmann, Charles, and Tessa Hoffmann, ‘Henry James and the Civil War’, New England Quarterly, 62, no. 4 (December 1989), 529–552 ———, ‘The Failed American Dream: Cousin Robert Temple and James’s “Jolly Corner”’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 1, no. 2 (Summer 1990), 39–49 Holly, Carol, ‘The British Reception of Henry James’s Autobiographies’, American Literature, 57, no. 4 (December 1985), 570–587 ———, Intensely Family:The Inheritance of Family Shame and the Autobiographies of Henry James (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995) Hoople, Robin P., Inexorable Yankeehood: Henry James Rediscovers America, 1904–1905 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2009)

439



  Bibliography 

Horne, Philip, ‘“Reinstated”: James in Roosevelt’s Washington’, Cambridge Quarterly, 37, no. 1 (2008), 47–63 ———, ‘Sense of the West:When Henry James Visited California’, Times Literary Supplement (21 September 2018) Hughes, Clair, Henry James and the Art of Dress (Houndmills, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001) Hutchison, Hazel,‘The Other Lambert Strether: Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Balzac’s Louis Lambert and J.H. Lambert’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 58 (September 2003), 230–258 Hyde, H. Montgomery, Henry James at Home (London: Methuen, 1969) Kaplan, Fred, Henry James:The Imagination of Genius (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1992) Keynes, Geoffrey, Henry James in Cambridge (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1967) Le Clair, Robert C., Young Henry James 1843–1870 (New York: Bookman Associates, 1955) Leamington Spa Courier, 24 January 1891, review of dramatization of The American Maher, Jane, Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilkie and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry, and Alice James (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1986) Manchester Guardian, 4 March 1916, report of Henry James’s funeral Matthiessen, F.O., Henry James:The Major Phase (London: Oxford University Press, 1944) Mendelssohn, Michèle, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) Moon, Michael, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) New-York Tribune, 18 June 1869, review of ‘Gabrielle de Bergerac’ Novick, Sheldon M., Henry James:The Young Master (New York: Random House, 1996) ———, Henry James,The Mature Master (New York: Random House, 2007) Pall Mall Gazette, 26 July 1879, review of Roderick Hudson ———, 29 February 1916, Henry James Obituary Pancost, David W., ‘Henry James and Julian Hawthorne’, American Literature, 50, no. 3 (November 1978), 461–465 Rosenbaum, S.P., ‘Letters to the Pell-Clarkes from Their “Old Cousin and Friend” Henry James’, American Literature, 31, no. 1 (March 1959), 46–58 Rowe, John Carlos, The Other Henry James (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) Strout, Cushing,‘Henry James’s Dream of the Louvre,“The Jolly Corner”, and Psychological Interpretation’, Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Edith Kurzweil and William Phillips (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 217–231 Sutherland, Kerry Lee, ‘The Prince of Agents: James Brand Pinker and Henry James’, PhD dissertation, Kent State University, Ohio, 2012 Times (London), 1 January 1916, Order of Merit for Henry James announcement Tintner, Adeline, ‘“An International Episode”: A Centennial Review of a Centennial Story’, Henry James Review, 1, no. 1 (November 1979), 24–56 ———, The Museum World of Henry James (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986) ———, The Book World of Henry James: Appropriating the Classics (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987) Vincec, Sister Stephanie, ‘“Poor Flopping Wings”: The Making of Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove’, Harvard Library Bulletin, 24 (1976), 60–93

440



  Bibliography 

Walker, Pierre A., ‘Napoléon Ansieaux, Henry James’s Boulogne Tutor’, Henry James Studies [Henry James Society of Korea], 6 (2001), 169–201 Walker, Pierre A., and Alfred Habegger, ‘Young Henry James and the Institution Fezandié’, Henry James Review, 15, no. 2 (Spring 1994), 107–120 Winner, Viola Hopkins, Henry James and the Visual Arts (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1970) Woolf, Virginia, ‘The Old Order’, rpt. in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), pp. 86–92

Works relating to the James Family Alice James: Her Brothers: Her Journal, ed. Anna Robeson Burr (London: Macmillan, 1934) Allen, Gay Wilson, William James: A Biography (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1967) Correspondence of William James, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley, 12 Vols. (Charlottesville,VA: University Press of Virginia, 1992–1999) The Diary of Alice James, ed. Leon Edel (London: Hart-Davis, 1965) Feinstein, Howard, ‘The Use and Abuse of Illness in the James Family Circle: A View of Neurasthenia as a Social Phenomenon’, Our Selves / Our Past: Psychological Approaches to American History, ed. Robert Brugger (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 228–243 ———, Becoming William James (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984) Gunter, Susan E., Alice in Jamesland: The Story of Alice Howe Gibbens James (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2009) Habegger, Alfred, The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994) Hastings, Katharine, ‘William James (1771–1832) of Albany, N.Y., and His Descendants’, New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, 55, no. 2 (April 1924), 101–119; 3 (July 1924), 222–236 James, Henry, Sr, The Nature of Evil (New York: Appleton, 1855) ———, Society the Redeemed Form of Man (Boston, MA: Houghton, Osgood, 1879) ———, The Literary Remains of Henry James, ed. William James (Boston, MA: Osgood, 1885) Lewis, R.W.B., The Jameses: A Family Narrative (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991) Lee, Elizabeth, ‘Among Women, between Men: Launching a Career, 1896–1900’, Ellen Emmet Rand: Gender, Art, and Business, ed. Alexis L. Boylan (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020) Matthiessen, F.O., The James Family (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947) Perry, Ralph Barton, Thought and Character of William James, 2 Vols. (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, & Co., 1935) Strouse, Jean, Alice James: A Biography (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1980) Walsh, Rev. William, A Record and Sketch of Hugh Walsh’s Family (Newburgh, NY: Newburgh Journal Print, 1903)

441



  Bibliography 

Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, The Death and Letters of Alice James (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1981)

Other Works Aaron, Daniel, The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (Madison,WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973, 2003) Adams, Henry,‘The Mind of John La Farge’, John La Farge: Essays, ed. Henry Adams, Kathleen A. Foster, Henry A. La Farge, H. Barbara Weinberg, Linnea H. Wren, James L. Yarnall (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987) Adelson, Warren, William H. Gerdts, Elaine Kilmurray, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, Richard Ormond, Elizabeth Oustinoff, Sargent’s Venice (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2006) Alvin Langdon Coburn: Photographer: An Autobiography, ed. Helmut and Alison Gernsheim (London: Faber & Faber, 1966) Aplin, John, The Inheritance of Genius: A Thackeray Family Biography, 1798–1875 (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2010) Appletons’ Cyclopædia of American Biography, ed. James Grant Wilson and John Fiske (New York: Appleton, 1888) Balzac, Honoré de, La Comédie Humaine, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1966) Beckert, Sven, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) Blanche, Jacques-Émile, Mes Modèles: Souvenirs littéraires (Paris: Librairie Stock, 1929) Boime, Albert, Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1980) Bourget, Paul, Cruelle énigme, 9th ed. (Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1885) Clough, Arthur Hugh, Amours de Voyage, ed. Patrick Scott (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland, 1974) Colby, Vineta, Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2003) Constance Fenimore Woolson, arr. and ed. Clare Benedict (London: Ellis, 1932) Correspondance: Guy de Maupassant, Émile Zola (Rennes: La Part Commune, 2013) The Correspondence and Journals of the Thackeray Family, ed. John Aplin, 5 Vols. (London: Routledge, 2011) Cortissoz, Royal, John La Farge: a Memoir and a Study (Boston, MA and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1911) Cummins, Maria Susanna, The Lamplighter [1854] (London: Nisbet, 1887) Daudet, Alphonse, Jack: Moeurs Contemporaines, 3rd ed. (Paris: Dentu, 1876, tr. 1890 Laura Ensor, London: Routledge) Delaisement, Gérard, Maupassant, journaliste et chroniqueur: suivi d’une bibliographie générale de l’œuvre de Guy de Maupassant (Paris: A. Michel, 1956) Dreyfus, Laurence, Wagner and the Erotic Impulse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010)

442



  Bibliography 

Ellmann, Richard, Oscar Wilde (London: Penguin, 1988) Foner, Nancy, In a New Land: A Comparative View of Immigration (New York: New York University Press, 2005) Gardner, Albert T., ‘William Story and Cleopatra’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 2, no. 4 (December 1943), 147–152 Gide, André, L’Immoraliste (1902), tr. Dorothy Bussy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970) Grove Dictionary of Art: From David to Ingres: Early 19th-Century French Artists, ed. Jane Turner (London: Macmillan Reference, 2000) Gunn, Peter, Vernon Lee:Violet Paget, 1856–1935 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964) Haight, Gordon, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968, 1978) Hansen, Peter H., ‘Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 34, no. 3 (July 1995), 300–324 Harlow,Virginia, Thomas Sergeant Perry: A Biography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1950) Harman, Claire, Robert Louis Stevenson: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 2005) Hart-Davis, Rupert, Hugh Walpole: A Biography (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1952) Horne, Philip, ‘Clough, James, and Amours de Voyage: A Juxtaposition’, Literary Imagination, 15, no. 1 (March 2013), 89–104 Kresser, Katie, The Art and Thought of John La Farge: Picturing Authenticity in Gilded Age America (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) Lang, Andrew, ‘Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson’, North American Review, 160, no. 459 (February 1895), 185–194 Lee, Hermione, Edith Wharton (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007) Lee,Vernon, Miss Brown, 3 Vols. (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1884) ———, ‘Lady Tal’, Vanitas: Polite Stories (London: Heinemann, 1892), pp. 7–122 The Letters of Edith Wharton, ed. R.W.B. Lewis and Nancy Lewis (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1988) The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J.C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee, Viola Hopkins Winner, 6 Vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982–8) The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Gordon Ray, 4 Vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1945–6) Liddell, Robert, ‘Percy Lubbock’, Kenyon Review, 29, no. 4 (September 1967), 493–511 Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells, 2 Vols. (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, n.d.) Long, Clarence D., Wages and Earnings in the United States 1860–1890 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960) Loving, Jerome, Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000) Lubbock, Percy, Portrait of Edith Wharton (London: Jonathan Cape, 1947) Lycett, Andrew, Rudyard Kipling (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999) Lynn, Kenneth S., William Dean Howells: An American Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971) MacKenzie, Norman and Jeanne, H.G. Wells:A Biography (NewYork: Simon and Schuster, 1973) Majo, Elena di, Il Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen (Turin: Edizioni Sacs, 2001) Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships Drawn Chiefly from the Diaries of Mrs.

443



  Bibliography 

James T. Fields, ed. M.A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1922) Merridew’s Visitor’s Guide to Boulogne-sur-Mer and Its Environs (London: Simpkin, Marshall, n.d. [?1864]) Miller, Neil, Banned in Boston:The Watch and Ward Society’s Crusade against Books, Burlesque, and the Social Evil (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2010) More than Friend: The Letters of Robert Browning to Katharine de Kay Bronson, ed. Michael Meredith, editorial assistance by Rita S. Humphrey (Waco, TX: Armstrong Browning Library of Baylor University and Wedgestone Press, 1985) O’Brien, Kevin H.F., ‘“The House Beautiful”: A Reconstruction of Oscar Wilde’s American Lecture’, Victorian Studies, 17, no. 4 (June 1974), 395–418 Ormond, Richard, Elaine Kilmurray, with contributions by Trevor Fairbrother, Barbara Dayer Gallati, Erica E. Hirshler, Marc Simpson and H. Barbara Weinberg, Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends (London: National Gallery, 2015) The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott, 2nd ed. by Miriam Allott (London: Longman, 1979) Prettejohn, Elizabeth, Interpreting Sargent (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1998) Rioux, Anne Boyd, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist (New York: Norton, 2016) Robert Ross: Friend of Friends: Letters to Robert Ross, Art Critic and Writer, Together with Extracts from His Published Articles, ed. Margery Ross (London: Cape, 1952) Robinson, Solon, Hot Corn: Life Scenes in New York Illustrated (New York: De Witt and Davenport, 1854) Rode’s New York City Directory, for 1850–1851 (New York: Rode, 1850) Schapiro, Leonard, Turgenev: His Life and Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978) Schoch, Richard W., Shakespeare’s Victorian Stage: Performing History in the Theatre of Charles Kean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) Sedgwick, Ellery, The Atlantic Monthly, 1857–1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994) Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990) Senelick, Laurence, The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and Theatre (London: Routledge, 2000) Spann, Edward K., The New Metropolis Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) Stanley-Price, Nicholas, The Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome: its History, its People and its Survival for 300 Years (Rome: The Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome, 2014) Steegmuller, Francis, Maupassant: A Lion in the Path [1949] (London: Macmillan, 1972) Stevenson, Robert Louis, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson: A Record of Friendship and Criticism, ed. Janet Adam Smith (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1948), pp. 86–100 Story, William Wetmore, Roba di Roma, 2 Vols., 2nd ed. (London: Chapman & Hall, 1863) Thackeray, William Makepeace, The Newcomes, 2 Vols. (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854–55) Thomson, David, Europe since Napoleon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966) Töpffer, Rodolphe, Nouvelles genevoises (Paris: Charpentier, 1841)

444



  Bibliography 

———, Voyages en Zigzag and Nouveaux Voyages en Zigzag (Hachette’s French Reader, vol. 3), ed. P.H. Ernest Brette and Gustave Masson (Paris: Hachette, 1873) Tourguéneff and His French Circle, ed. E. Halperine-Kaminsky, tr. Ethel M. Arnold (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898) Trevelyan, Janet, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward (London: Constable, 1923) Trilling, Lionel, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Viking Press, 1950) Turner, James, The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) Victorian Boston Today: Twelve Walking Tours, ed. Mary Melvin Petronella (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 2004) Victorian Theatrical Burlesques, ed. Richard Schoch (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003) Walford, Edward, Old and New London: A Narrative of its History, Its People, and Its Places, 6 Vols. (London: Cassell, Petter and Galpin [1877?]) Vol. 5 Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982) Ward, Mrs Humphry, Miss Bretherton (London: Macmillan, 1884) ———, The Writings of Mrs Humphry Ward, 16 Vols., Westmoreland Edition (London: Smith, Elder, 1911) ———, A Writer’s Recollections (London: Collins, 1918) W.D. Howells as Critic, ed. Edwin H. Cady (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973) Webster, Sally, William Morris Hunt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) Wharton, Edith, A Backward Glance (New York: Appleton-Century, 1934) ———, Selected Poems of Edith Wharton, ed. Irene Goldman Price (New York: Scribner, 2019) Woolson, Constance Fenimore, Women Artists,Women Exiles: ‘Miss Grief’ and Other Stories, ed. Joan Myers Weimer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988) Yarnall, James L., John La Farge, A Biographical and Critical Study (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012) Zhukovsky, Irina, Vasily Zhukovsky (Boston, MA: Twayne, 1976) Zola, Émile, Lettres de Paris – Notes Parisiennes: ‘Le Sémaphore de Marseille’ 1871–1877, ed. Margherita Elia Leozappa (Lecce: Milella, 1981)

MSS Houghton Library, Harvard University Letters from Henry James to: George Abbott James, 10 May 1912, 12–13 August 1912; bMS Am 1094.1 nephew, Harry, 3 April 1908, 5 April 1908, 21 June 1910, 18 October 1911, 11 June 1912, 16 July 1912, bMS Am 1094 sister-in-law, Alice Howe Gibbens James, 18 March 1914, bMS Am 1094 Letters to Henry James from: John Singer Sargent, 25 June 1885, bMS Am 1094 Mary James, 8 August 1869, bMS Am 1093.1 Alice Howe Gibbens James, 1 April 1913, 17 May 1913, 14 March 1914, bMS Am 1092.11

445



  Bibliography 

Theodora Bosanquet, Diary 22 August 1907–8 May 1909, bMS Eng 1213 Theodora Bosanquet Diary Notes, 1912–1916, ‘Transcribed diaries of Theodora Bosanquet’, bMS Eng 1213.2 William James to John Chipman Gray, 17 March [no year], bMS Am 1092.1 MS letter HJ Sr to R.W. Emerson [London, 1856], bMS Am 1092.9

Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University Henry James to: W.E. Norris, 28 December 1893, 19 January 1895, 26 February 1899, Henry James Collection YCAL MSS 830 Charles Scribner’s Sons to J.B. Pinker, 27 March 1906, 23 November 1906, 17 December 1907, 6 October 1908, 27 September 1912, Henry James Collection YCAL MSS 830

Morgan Library and Museum, New York Henry James to Sylvia Emerson, 13 February 1895

St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archive, London Minutes of the Board of Governors, 1912–1921, SBHB/HA/1/29

Digital/Electronic Resources Eugene Norcom: www.findagrave.com/memorial/46189589/eugene-norcom, www.ancestry. co.uk/genealogy/records/frederick-norcom-24-7w7fbs, accessed 28 April 2018 Augustus James Barker: www.findagrave.com/memorial/11650998/augustus-james-barker, accessed 4 March 2018 Project Gutenberg: a library of over 60,000 free eBooks: www.gutenberg.org, regularly accessed HathiTrust Digital Library: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis&c=1930843488, regularly accessed MacCormack, Dee, ‘…“between absolute silence and absolute sound”: Orchestrating the Action in Henry James’s The Saloon’, www.openstarts.units.it/bitstream/10077/32300/ 1/4_HenryJamesSociety_online.pdf, accessed 5 June 2021 Lawrence H. Officer, ‘Dollar-Pound Exchange Rate from 1791’, MeasuringWorth, 2022. URL: http://www.measuringworth.com/exchangepound, accessed 18 August 2022

446

Index

Abbey, Edwin Austin, 193, 217, 357 Abbey, Mary, 357 About, Edmond, 45 Adams, Clover (Marian) Hooper, 91, 154, 156, 184, 218, 346 Adams, Henry, 91, 139, 154, 156, 184, 335, 345, 380 Aeschylus, Oresteia, 23 Alcott, Bronson, 18 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 192 Alexander, George, 258, 266, 267, 275, 282 Allen, Jessie, 298, 358 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence, 193 American Civil War, 15, 34, 47, 49, 122, 135, 161, 177, 211, 346, 352, 387 Andersen, Andreas, 302, 359 Andersen, Hendrik Christian, 122, 300–2, 307, 320, 327, 349, 358 Andersen, Olivia Cushing, 302, 359 Anderson, Mary, 196 Anderson, Percy, 360 ‘An’silvy’ (enslaved woman), 15 Ansiot, Monsieur (Napoléon Ansieaux), 39 Anstruther-Thomson, Agnes, 279 Anstruther-Thomson, Kit (Clementina), 279 Archer, William, 246, 247, 267 Arnold, Matthew, 11, 15, 60, 62, 81, 102, 188, 197, 200 ‘Obermann’ poems, 80, 85 Arnold, Thomas (the Younger), 197, 268 Arthur, Chester A., 184 Asquith, Elizabeth, 386 Asquith, Herbert, 389, 390

Asquith, Margot, 389 Astor, Nancy, 373 Astor, Waldorf, 373 Athenaeum, 198, 222, 239 Atlantic Monthly, 57, 60, 62, 65, 66, 75, 78, 89, 90, 96, 98, 102, 103, 105, 107, 113, 116, 120, 135, 137, 148, 154, 166, 170, 174, 176, 187, 192, 194, 195, 202, 210, 235, 245, 250, 272, 277, 278 Auden, W.H., 350 Augier, Émile, 85 L’Aventurière, 204, 238, 266 Austin, Alfred, 217 Baldwin, William, 244, 245, 248, 319 Balestier, Wolcott, 242–43, 246, 286 Balzac, Honoré de, 42, 88, 141, 188, 221, 318, 344 Eugénie Grandet, 167 La Comédie Humaine, 121 ‘Le chef d’œuvre inconnu’, 99 Le Curé de Tours, 188 Le père Goriot, 54 Louis Lambert, 316 Bancroft, John, 54 Bancroft, Marie, 186 Bancroft, Squire, 186 Barbizon school of painters, 131, 314 Barker, Gus (Augustus, cousin), 47, 56, 211 Barker, Harley Granville, 282, 370 Barker, Lois, 17 Barnard, Frederick, 217 Barnum, Phineas T., 14, 30

The Life of Henry James: A Critical Biography, First Edition. Peter Collister. © 2023 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2023 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

447



  Index 

Barrie, J.M., 370 Bartet, Julia, 232 Bartholomew, A. Theodore, 363 Bartlett, Alice, 144 Barye, Antoine Louis, 130 Bastien-Lepage, Jules, 131 Baudelaire, Charles, Les Fleurs du Mal, 141 Beardsley, Aubrey, 264 Beaumont, Somerset, 163 Bell, Clive, 362 Bell, Florence Olliffe (Mrs Hugh), 267 L’Indécis, 246 Bell,Vanessa, 77, 362 Bellingham, Arthur, 303 Bellini, Giovanni, 83 Benedict, Clara Woolson, 166, 260, 275, 343 Benedict, Clare Rathbone, 166, 260, 275, 343, 358 Bennett, Arnold, 267, 293, 318, 388 Benson, Arthur C., 42, 288, 324, 368, 369 Benson, Edward White, 289 Berlioz, Hector, 105 Bernard, Charles de, Le Gendre, 31 Bernhardt, Sarah, 38, 130, 141, 195, 204 Berry, Walter, 349, 373 Besant, Annie, 222 Besant, Walter, 207, 214 Black, Lorna, 325 Blackwood, William, 332 Blanche, Jacques-Émile, 360 Bloede, Gertrude, 142 Blomfield, Reginald, 280 Boit, Edward Darley, 132, 359 Boit, Mary Louisa Cushing, 132, 195 Boldini, Giovanni, 216 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon (Napoléon III), 32, 33, 45 Bonaparte, Napoléon, 24, 391 Bonaparte, Napoléon-Eugène-Louis-Jean-Joseph, 33 Bonaparte,Victor Napoléon, Prince, 386 Boningue, Félicie, 38 Bonnat, Léon, 131 Bonnefons, Monsieur (Georges Bonnefond), 33 Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People, 222 Boott, Francis, 68, 96, 126, 141, 162, 178, 222, 224, 230, 232, 251, 259, 331, 332 Boott, Lizzie (Elizabeth), 68–69, 91, 95, 96, 107, 118, 126, 137, 141, 144, 161, 167, 193, 195, 214, 218, 222, 230–31, 232, 242, 260 Borie, John J., 393

Bosanquet, Theodora, 260, 363, 370, 373, 377, 391–92, 393 Boucicault, Dion, 14 Boughton, George Henry, 193, 217 Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, 131 Bourget, Minnie, 251, 264, 292, 298 Bourget, Paul, 199, 240, 251, 264, 283, 292, 298, 355 Cruelle énigme, 199 Sensations d’Italie, 350 Bowes-Lyon, Claude, 179 Bowes-Lyon, Frances, 179 Bradley, Nelly, 370 Brady, Mathew, 17 Broadway group of artists, 217, 229 Bronson, Katharine de Kay, 177, 178, 218, 226, 228, 244, 299, 319, 333 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 291 Bronzino (Agnolo di Cosimo), 328 Brooke, Margaret, 360 Brooke, Rupert, 363, 389 Brooke, Stopford, 307 Brookfield, Charles, 186 Brooks, Florence, 344 Broughton, Rhoda, 324, 382 Brown, Horatio, 300 Brown, John, 50 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 332 Browning, Robert, 42, 60, 70, 139, 177, 230, 241, 332, 334, 381 Bryce, James, 393 Buffet, Louis, 130 Burne-Jones, Edward, 193, 196, 216, 217, 267 Burnett, Frances Hodgson  Esmeralda, 184 Young Folks’Ways, 184 Bynner, Witter, 344 Byron, George Gordon, 82, 105, 227 Cabot, James Elliot, 377 Cadwalader, John, 373 Caillebotte, Gustave, 131 Cannon, Anne C., and her establishment, 19–20 Carlyle, Thomas, 8, 202 Carolus-Duran, Émile-Auguste, 131 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste, La danse, 130 Carter, Alexander, 139 Century Magazine, 38, 201, 205, 209, 215, 231, 272, 341, 357

448



  Index 

Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 46 Chanler, Margaret Terry, 346 Chap-Book,The, 286 Charpentier, Georges, 128 Chatto and Windus, 154 Chavannes, Puvis de, 42 Chekhov, Anton, 338 Chesnut, Mary, 49 Chevrillon, André, ‘Les États-Unis et La Vie Américaine’, 337 Child, Francis J., 54, 102, 184 Child, Theodore, 139, 195, 196, 199, 233 Childe, Blanche de Triqueti, 132, 156, 176, 217 Childe, Edward Lee, 132, 156, 176 Churchill, Winston, 390 Clark, Charlotte Coltman, 147, 171, 179 Clark, John Forbes, 147, 171, 179 Clementine of Belgium, Princess, 386 Clifford, Lucy (Mrs W.K.), 267, 320, 354 Clough, Arthur Hugh, 101–2 ‘The American’s Tale; or Juxtaposition’, 102 Amours de Voyages, 102 Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 295, 329, 357 Codman, Ogden, Jr,The Decoration of Houses, 279 Coe, Benjamin H., 9 Cogniet, Léon, 46 Cole, Thomas, 149 View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, 121 View of Florence from San Miniato, 12 Collier’s Weekly, 288 Collins, John Churton, 219 Colvin, Sidney, 265, 325 Commedia dell’Arte, 309, 364 Compton, Edward, 240, 243, 246, 247, 258, 281 Compton,Virginia Bateman, 240, 267 Compton’s Comedy Company, 246 Conrad, Joseph, 280, 311 Continental Monthly, 60 Cooper, James Fenimore, 166 Coppet, Louis De, 16 Coquelin, Benoît-Constant, 38, 85, 246 Cornhill Magazine, 146, 169 Correggio, Antonio da, 82, 98 Cosmopolitan,The, 272 Coulson, Henry John Wastell, 111, 126 Couture, Thomas, 42, 46, 126, 141 Page with a Falcon, 35, 46 Romains de la Décadence, 35

Crabbe, George, 287 Craig, Sam D., 54 Crane, Stephen, 304 Crawford, F. Marion, 267, 302 Crawford, Thomas Gibson, 103 Crewe-Milnes, Robert (first Marquess of Crewe), 272 Criminal Law Amendment Act, 367 Croizette, Sophie Alexandrine, 141 Cruikshank, George, 29, 170 Cummins, Maria Susanna,The Lamplighter, 18 Curtis, Ariana Randolph Wormeley, 218, 228, 244, 292, 344, 359 Curtis, Daniel S., 218, 228, 244, 292, 298 Cushman, Charlotte, 333 Daly, Augustin, 253, 274, 282 Dana, Charles Anderson, 17 Danse, Augustine, 33 Dante Alighieri, 61 The Divine Comedy, 160 Paradiso, 251 Darwin, Charles, 77 Daudet, Alphonse, 33, 45, 128, 167, 188, 195, 207, 233, 274 Jack, 10 L’Évangéliste, 209 Port Tarascon - dernières aventures de l’illustre Tartarin, 241 ‘Davy’ (enslaved boy), 15 Degas, Edgar, 131 Delacroix, Eugène  Apollo slays Python, 36 Dante and Virgil on the Styx, 132 La barque du Dante, 35 Delaroche, Hippolyte-Paul  Charles I insulted by the Soldiers of Cromwell on the Eve of his Execution, 35 The Execution of Lady Jane Gray, 35 Les Enfants d’Édouard IV, 34 Delaunay, Louis Arsène, 141 Delavigne, Casimir, Don Juan d’Autriche, 217 Delmonico’s Restaurant, 118 Desclée, Aimée, 85 Dicey, Albert, 97 Dickens, Charles, 9, 22, 29, 54, 61, 63, 66, 90, 140, 162, 170, 207, 233 David Copperfield, 23, 287 Dombey and Son, 14

449



  Index 

Hard Times, 90 Nicholas Nickleby, 14 Oliver Twist, 14, 152 public readings, 67–68 Didelot, Charles-Louis, Flore et Zéphire, 143 Dilke, Charles, 78, 231, 296 Disraeli, Benjamin, 143 Dixwell, Fanny Bowditch, 91 Dolmidge, Mr, 9 Doré, Gustave, 31, 74, 131 Dorr, Charles Hazen, 101 Doubleday, Frank Nelson, 305 Douglas, Alfred, 273 Dreyfus, Alfred, 298 Du Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk, 331 Du Maurier, George, 170, 229, 237, 267 Trilby, 280 Dubreuil, Madame, 23 Dubreuil, Monsieur, 23 Duckworth, Stella, 362 Dumas, fils, Alexandre, 295 L’Étrangère, 130, 136, 204 Le Demi-monde, 141, 204 Dumas, père, Alexandre, Kean, 130 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 131 Duveneck, Frank, 162, 178, 218, 230 Eliot, George, 61, 79, 110, 140, 143, 152, 164, 173, 380 Daniel Deronda, 173 Middlemarch, 78 Eliot, T.S.  ‘The Hawthorne Aspect’, 394 ‘In Memoriam’, 394 Elliott, John, 300 Elliott, Maud Howe, 300 Emerson, Edith, 56 Emerson, Ellen, 56 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 8, 17, 50, 66, 88, 97, 187, 211, 377 Emerson, Sylvia, 268 Emmanuel, Prince, Duke of Vendôme, 386 Emmet, Bay (Ellen Gertrude), 287, 312 Emmet, Christopher Temple, 287 Emmet, Edith Leslie, 287, 298 Emmet, Elly Temple (Ellen, cousin), 48, 91, 287, 379 Emmet, Kitty Temple (Katharine, cousin), 48, 68, 91, 287, 290, 377

Emmet, Richard Stockton, 68 Emmet, Rosina, 287, 292, 298 English Illustrated Magazine, 199 Favart, Marie, 85 Fechter, Charles, 66 Ferrero, Edward, 23 Fezandié, Félix Eugène, 33 Fields, Annie Adams, 66, 210, 250, 293 Fields, James T., 60, 65, 66, 90, 210, 320 FitzGerald, Edward,The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, 287 Flagler, Henry Morrison, 347 Flaubert, Gustave, 128, 131, 141, 207, 283, 381 La Tentation de Saint Antoine, 128 Madame Bovary, 318 Flaxman, John, 160 Fletcher, Horace, 337 Forbes-Robertson, Johnston, 275 Forrest, William, 9 Forster, E.M., 389, 394 Fortnightly Review, 218, 231, 349, 386 Fourier, Charles, 33, 40, 41 Franco-Prussian War, 75, 96, 129, 135 French Revolution, 74, 189, 328 Freud, Sigmund, 364 Frohman, Charles, 370 Frohman, Daniel, 186 Fuller, Margaret, 211, 333, 377 Fullerton, Morton, 242, 256, 258, 360–61, 372 Galaxy, 64, 69, 97, 104, 107, 111, 114, 140, 148 Galsworthy, John, 370 Gambetta, Léon, 129 Gammon, George, 319 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 155, 183, 185, 218, 244, 251, 303, 324 Garland, Hamlin, 345 Garnett, Edward, 280 Garnier, Charles, 130 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 335 Gautier, Théophile, 35, 42, 128, 137, 141 Émaux et Camées, 106 George I, King, 338 George V, King, 386, 393 Gerebsow, Count Alexander de, 27 Géricault, Jean Louis André Théodore, Raft of the Medusa, 36

450



  Index 

Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 130, 238 Giacometti, Paolo, La morte civile, 196 Gide, André, L’Immoraliste, 24 Gilbert, W.S., 247, 273 Comedy and Tragedy, 196 Pygmalion and Galatea, 196 Gissing, George, 222 Gladstone, William Ewart, 138, 216, 230 Godkin, Edwin Laurence, 67, 92, 184, 303, 321 Godkin, Katherine Sands, 345 Godkin, Lawrence, 345 Goldoni, Carlo, I Quattro Rusteghi, 107 Goldsmith, Oliver, 306 She Stoops to Conquer, 217 Goncourt, Edmond de, 128, 195, 207 Chérie, 208 Gordon, Charles George, 215 Gosse, Edmund, 164, 200, 201, 213, 219, 230, 253, 258, 264, 266, 267, 273, 292, 293, 318, 345, 354, 375, 380, 390, 393 Gosse, Henry, 217 Gosse, Nellie (Ellen) Epps, 292 Got, Edmond, 85 Gower, Ronald Sutherland, 300, 360 Grant, Ulysses S., 216 Graphic,The, 198 Gray, John Chipman, 48, 52, 60, 70, 378, 379 Greeley, Horace, 17 Greene, Graham, 394 Gregory, Isabella Augusta Persse, 325 Greville, Sabine Thellusson, 151 Grigsby, Emilie Busbey, 336 Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, 111 Gurney, Edward, 198 Halévy, Ludovic, Froufrou, 85 Hamilton-Lee, Eugene, 227 Hardy, Thomas, 280, 350, 392 Hare, John, 246, 253 Harlamoff, Alexei, Portrait of Ivan Turgenev, 131 Harland, Henry, 263–64 Harper, Henry, & Co, 187, 217, 312, 317, 349, 370 Harper’s Bazar, 343, 350 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 170, 231 Harper’s Magazine, 349 Harper’s Weekly, 223, 282, 293

Harvey, George B., 343, 345, 350 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 32, 80 Hawthorne, Julian, 153, 226, 347 Hawthorne, Minnie (Mary Albertina), 184 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 50, 66, 119, 125, 142, 212, 237, 291 The Marble Faun, 335 Twice-Told Tales, 65 Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls, 65 Hay, John, 120, 251, 259, 345 Haydon, Benjamin Robert  Autobiography, 31 The Banishment of Aristides, 30 Heinemann, William, 243, 286, 304 Henriette of Belgium, Princess, Duchess of Vendôme, 386 Henschel, George, 127, 190 Herrick, Robert, 355 Hervé, Florimond Ronger, 130 Higginson, George, 347 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 148, 335 Hoar, Ebenezer J., 50 Hoffmann, Lily von, 102 Holbein, Hans, The Ambassadors, 315 Holland, Josiah Gilbert, 113 Holman, Harriet, 13 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 66 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr, 52, 60, 69, 91, 292, 331, 344 Houghton and Co., 120 Houghton and Mifflin, 272 Houssaye, Arsène, 33, 120 Houssaye, Henry, 33 Howe, Julia Ward, 103, 300, 302 Howells, William Dean, 64, 65–66, 67, 88, 98, 111, 113, 127, 137, 138, 148, 150, 161, 167, 179, 190, 243, 272, 273, 305, 310, 313, 317, 343, 348, 350, 356, 360, 363 Indian Summer, 218 Hudson River school of painters, 87 Hueffer, Ford Madox, 311, 361 Humpert, Dr (Philippus?), 44 Hunt, Alfred, 361 Hunt,Violet, 361 Hunt, William Holman, The Scapegoat, 340–41 Hunt, William Morris, 46, 68 Hunter, George, 287 Hunter, Grenville, 287

451



  Index 

Hunter, Mary, 371, 373 Huntington, Mercede, 260 Huntington, William Henry, 217 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 216 À rebours, 123 Ibsen, Henrik, 246, 253, 281, 295 A Doll’s House, 247 Rosmersholm, 282 Illustrated London News, 275, 280 Irving, Henry, 126, 139 James Edward (uncle), 20 James, Aleck (Alexander, nephew), 382 James, Alexander, Jr (great grand-nephew), 393 James, Alice, 7, 11, 38, 50, 56, 67, 80, 92, 93, 144, 163, 178–79, 186, 189, 190, 202–3, 209, 217, 218, 222, 235, 240, 243, 244, 245, 252, 259, 265, 319, 327, 377 contentious will, 251 Diary, 31, 261 illness, 67, 191, 213–14, 248, 250–51 relationship with William, 144 James, Alice Gibbens, 144, 154, 185, 252, 302, 303, 310, 318, 321, 326, 344, 357, 371, 376, 378, 379, 392, 393 James, Billy (William, nephew), 330 James, Bob (Robertson), 7, 41, 50, 56, 67, 153, 179, 187, 190, 191, 202, 251, 261, 344, 371 James, Carrie (Caroline) Eames (­sister-in-law), 190, 347 James, Catharine Barber (grandmother), 7 James, Edward (uncle), 19 James, Edward Holton (nephew), 348 James, Elizabeth Bay (aunt), 21 James, George Abbott, 54, 191, 372–73 James, Gus (Augustus, uncle), 21, 34 James, Henry  fiction  ‘Adina’, 101, 102 ‘The Altar of the Dead’, 250, 265 The Ambassadors, 93, 126, 174, 249, 296, 312–17, 343 The American, 114, 126, 134–37, 142, 148, 154, 158, 174, 206, 225, 240, 355 ‘The Aspern Papers’, xv, 227–28, 235 ‘At Isella’, 82, 98 ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’, 139, 199–200, 214, 234 The Awkward Age, 293–96, 298, 384

452

‘The Beast in the Jungle’, 322 ‘Benvolio’, 119–20 The Better Sort, 321 ‘The Birthplace’, 321–22 The Bostonians, 66, 143, 149, 202, 207, 209–13, 216, 355 ‘The Chaperon’, 231 Confidence, 117, 132, 154, 157–59 contribution to novel, The Whole Family, 363 ‘Covering End’, 274 ‘Crapy Cornelia’, 362, 366 ‘Crawford’s Consistency’, 113 ‘Daisy Miller’, 43, 80, 115, 145–46, 154, 230 ‘The Diary of a Man of Fifty’, 165–66 ‘Europe’, 293 The Europeans, 148–50, 152, 154, 158, 166, 213, 355 ‘The Figure in the Carpet’, 276–77 The Finer Grain, 368 ‘Flickerbridge’, 321 ‘Four Meetings’, 25, 154 ‘Gabrielle de Bergerac’, 73–75 ‘Georgina’s Reasons’, 4, 163, 194 ‘The Given Case’, 293 ‘Glasses’, 277–78 The Golden Bowl, 130, 337–41, 357 ‘The Great Good Place’, 293 ‘Greville Fane’, 275–76 ‘Guest’s Confession’, 89 ‘An International Episode’, 27, 146–47, 154 ‘In the Cage’, 296 The Ivory Tower, 41, 69, 121, 320, 362, 375, 383–85, 393 ‘The Jolly Corner’, xvii, 37, 364–65 ‘Julia Bride’, 365–66 ‘Lady Barberina’, 205–6 ‘A Landscape Painter’, 48 ‘The Last of the Valerii’, 104–5, 123 ‘The Lesson of the Master’, 233–34 ‘The Liar’, 29, 100, 234–35 ‘A Light Man’, 69–70 ‘A London Life’, 100, 233–34 ‘Lord Beaupré’, 233 ‘Louisa Pallant’, 231, 235 ‘Madame de Mauves’, 111, 114–15, 151 ‘The Madonna of the Future’, 65, 98–99, 121 The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales, 154 ‘Master Eustace’, 89 ‘The Middle Years’, 119, 262, 355



  Index  ‘The Modern Warning’, 235 ‘A Most Extraordinary Case’, 59 ‘Nona Vincent’, 254, 267 The Other House, 280, 281–82, 288 The Outcry, 130, 370 ‘Owen Wingrave’, 200 ‘Pandora’, 185, 194 ‘The Papers’, 321 ‘A Passionate Pilgrim’, 78, 305 A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales, 107, 118 ‘The Patagonia’, 235 ‘The Path of Duty’, 201–2 ‘The Pension Beaurepas’, 190 ‘The Point of View’, 190 ‘Poor Richard’, 58, 65 The Portrait of a Lady, 48, 69, 97, 127, 144, 146, 163, 170, 171–75, 176, 230, 356 The Princess Casamassima, 118, 174, 194, 202, 212, 214, 216, 219–22, 376 The Private Life, 257 ‘The Private Life’, 241–42 ‘The Pupil’, 200, 245–46 Roderick Hudson, 107, 113, 118, 120–25, 127, 154, 223, 300, 316, 354, 355, 356, 359 ‘A Round of Visits’, 366–68, 385 ‘The Real Right Thing’, xiv  The Real Thing and Other Tales, 257 The Reverberator, 133, 225–26, 230, 321 The Sacred Fount, 257, 281, 307–10, 364 The Sense of the Past, 305–7, 362, 385, 391, 393 ‘The Siege of London’, 190, 203–4, 206, 238 ‘Sir Dominick Ferrand’, 241 The Soft Side, 304, 318 The Spoils of Poynton, 278–79, 286, 288, 296 ‘The Story of a Masterpiece’, 234 ‘The Story of a Year’, 57–58, 64, 225 Tales of Three Cities, 205 ‘The Third Person’, 304–5 ‘A Tragedy of Error’, 60 The Tragic Muse, 28, 88, 107, 134, 178, 197, 230, 232, 235–39, 241 ‘Travelling Companions’, 82 ‘The Tree of Knowledge’, 28–29, 335 ‘The Turn of the Screw’, 37, 89, 200, 231, 234, 288–92 ‘The Velvet Glove’, 361–62 Washington Square, 167–69, 213, 355

453

Watch and Ward, 87, 90–91, 154, 194 What Maisie Knew, 20, 40, 234, 281, 283–86, 293, 310 The Wings of the Dove, 48, 163, 228, 242, 257, 296, 298, 326–30, 336, 385 lectures  ‘The Lesson of Balzac’, 345 ‘The Question of Our Speech’, 287, 348, 350 life  acquires Lamb House, Rye, 288 admiration for  British men, 82 the soldier, 55–56 Théâtre-Français, 134 adopts British citizenship, 390–91 ancestry, 4–5 attachment to Europe, 86 autobiography, xv–xvii  awarded Order of Merit, 392 being an American, 55 boyhood writing and privacy, 44 calling to art, 34 childhood  débardeur, 23–24 education in New York City, 10, 25 entertainment in London, 32 envy of orphans, 22 flâneur in New York City, 11 plays, 16 theatre in New York City, 13–15 contempt for intrusive journalism, 226 dismisses  French Impressionism, 131 idea of marriage, 164–65, 199 drawing classes, 46 encounters Pre-Raphaelitism, 76–77 encouragement to marry, 113 enjoyment of pantomime, 229–30 falls out with  H.G. Wells, 388–89 Violet Paget, 256 final illness and death, 391–93 finances, 65, 79, 85, 94, 109, 111, 154, 170, 194–95, 235, 242, 254, 292, 345, 368 ‘Fletcherism’, 337 food and diet, 85 gives up writing for New-York Tribune, 132–33



  Index  homoerotic desire, 46–47, 299–300, 353–54, 387 illness, 27, 38, 51–52, 67, 69, 83, 112, 226, 369, 370–71, 373 impressions of rural England, 78, 93–94 initiation into ‘Style’, 36 loneliness, 111, 312 negotiation to write for New-York Tribune, 120 nightmare set in Galerie d’Apollon, 36–37 notebooks and muse, 249 ‘obscure hurt’, 51, 52 opinion of  advancing age, 303, 331 the British upper classes, 153 his education, 10–11 ‘positive consecration to letters’, 61 preference for Britain, 80 psychic phenomena, 357 reaction to the Great War, 382–83 re-apportions father’s will, 190 resolves to ‘let himself go’, 248–49 sense of neglect, 271–72 starts dictating his work, 280 study at  Académie de Genève, 43 Berkeley Institute (Newport, RI), 41 Collège Impériale (Boulogne-sur Mer), 37 Institution Fezandié (Paris), 33 the Institution Rochette (Geneva), 43 School of Law, Harvard, 52 takes apartment at  21 Carlyle Mansions, Chelsea, 373 34 De Vere Gardens, Kensington, 218 takes lodgings at  Bolton Street, Piccadilly, 138 Half Moon Street, Piccadilly, 76 takes up residence in  Boston, MA, 60 Cambridge, MA, 55 London, 138 Newport, RI, 40, 46 Paris, 126 Rye, 293 travel with family  England and France, 8 England, Switzerland, France, 26 Switzerland and Germany, 44–45

454

visit to health spa, 78, 85, 109, 110 visits and extended stays  America, 189, 343, 371 Bournemouth, 213, 287 Broadway, 217 Dover, 202 Dresden, 243 Dunwich, 287 England, France, Switzerland, Italy, 69 England, France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Germany, 93 Florence and Venice, 222 Florence, Rome, Naples, 162 France, 187 Geneva, Monte Carlo, Paris, 232 London, Paris, Switzerland, Italy, 75 Nauheim, 371 Paris, 156, 195, 217, 241, 360 Paris, Florence, Rome, 141 Paris, Florence,Venice, Rome, 358 Paris, Italian Riviera,Venice, 176 Paris, Lucerne, 258 Paris,Venice, Rome, 298 Playden, 280 Ramsgate, 258 Scotland, 147, 179, 192 Siena,Venice, Lausanne, 251 Venice and Florence, 44 Venice, Florence, Rome, 260 volunteers for Boston Educational Commission, 52 other writings  The American Scene, 3, 40, 149, 309, 332, 346, 348, 349–54, 365, 366, 375 ‘The Art of Fiction’, 207–8 ‘The British Soldier’, 387 ‘A Chain of Cities’, 109 ‘Daniel Deronda, a Conversation’, 174 ‘Edmond Rostand’, 321 English Hours, 187, 359 ‘An English New Year’, 152 Essays in London and Elsewhere, 257 essays on British life, 139–40 essays on Rome (1873), 107 ‘A European Summer’, 94 ‘Florentine Notes’, 98 ‘France’, 385



  Index  French Poets and Novelists, 141, 142 ‘Guy de Maupassant’ (1888), 218–19, 231 Hawthorne, xv, 153, 157, 159–62, 167 Introduction to The Tempest, 388 ‘Is there a life after death?’, 372 Italian Hours, 77, 108, 109, 187, 359 ‘John S. Sargent’, 217 A Little Tour in France, 187–89, 190 ‘London’, 231 ‘London’ essays, 282 ‘London Town’, 359–60 ‘The Long Wards’, 386 ‘The Manners of American Women’, 350, 366 The Middle Years, xvi, 4, 79, 151, 380, 385, 393 ‘Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson’, 223–24 Notes of a Son and Brother, xvi, 4, 70, 86, 116, 192, 373, 377–78, 379, 380 Notes on Novelists, 380, 381–82 ‘The Novel in The Ring and the Book’, 381 ‘Old Suffolk’, 287 ‘On the occasion of Hedda Gabler’, 253 ‘Other Roman Neighbourhoods’, 109 ‘Our Artists in Europe’, 217 Partial Portraits, 231 Picture and Text, 257 Portraits of Places, 190, 194, 201 Preface for Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America, 363, 389 ‘Refugees in England’, 386 ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, 215 ‘Roman Rides’, 105 A Small Boy and Others, xvi, 4, 20, 168, 285, 376–77, 378 ‘The Speech of American Women’, 287, 350 Transatlantic Sketches, 118 translation of  Alphonse Daudet, Port Tarascon: dernières aventures de l’illustre Tartarin, 241 Maurice Barrès,‘Les Saints de la France’, 386 travel writing on America and Canada, 87 ‘Two Old Houses and Three Young Women’, 228, 298 William Wetmore Story and his Friends, xv, 332–35 ‘Within the Rim’, 386–87 ‘The Younger Generation’, 388 plays  The Album, 246, 252 The American, 243, 246, 250

455

Daisy Miller, 186, 240 Disengaged, 252, 253, 282 Guy Domville, 258, 266–68, 282, 293, 360 The High Bid, 275, 282, 370 The Outcry, 370 The Promise, 281 Pyramus and Thisbe, 89 The Reprobate, 252 The Saloon, 370 Summersoft, 274 Tenants (Mrs Vibert), 246, 252, 253 Theatricals Second Series (The Album and The Reprobate), 252 Theatricals (Tenants and Disengaged), 252 reception of his fiction  The Ambassadors, 317–18 The Awkward Age, 295 The Bostonians, 212–13 The Europeans, 150 ‘Gabrielle de Bergerac’, 75 The Golden Bowl, 341 The Portrait of a Lady, 176 The Princess Casamassima, 222 The Reverberator, 226 Roderick Hudson, 125 The Sacred Fount, 310 The Spoils of Poynton, 280–81 The Tragic Muse, 239 The Wings of the Dove, 330 Washington Square, 169 What Maisie Knew, 286 reviews  Algernon Charles Swinburne, Chastelard. A Tragedy, 63 Anthony Trollope, Miss Mackenzie, 63 ‘The Bethnal Green Museum’, 96 Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Portraits of Celebrated Women, 62 Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, 63 Charles Kingsley, Hereward, the Last of the English, 63 Edmond Schérer, Nouvelles Études sur la Littérature Contemporaine, 62 Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, 63 Exhibition of Montpensier Collection, Boston, 118 George Eliot  Felix Holt, 63 Middlemarch, 97



  Index 

Henri Regnault, Correspondance, 96, 100 Hippolyte Taine, Italy - Rome and Naples, 62 Ivan Turgenev, Frühlingsfluthen, Ein König des Dorfes, 119 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship and Travels, trans. Carlyle, 62 John Cross, George Eliot’s Life, 208 Matthew Arnold, Essays in Criticism, 62 Nassau Williams, Sr, Essays on Fiction, 61 Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, 118 Victor Hugo  Quatrevingt-treize, 118 Travailleurs de la mer, 63 Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps, 63 William Morris, The Life and Death of Jason, The Earthly Paradise, 63 James, Henry III (Harry, nephew), 292, 343, 358, 371, 378, 380, 391, 392 James, Henry, Sr, 6–7, 8, 10, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 33, 37, 39, 40, 42, 46, 50, 51, 62, 67, 86, 98, 126, 144, 170, 186, 187, 189, 232, 286, 377 The Church of Christ, 17 Immortal Life illustrated in a brief Autobiographic Sketch of the late Stephen Dewhurst, 6 Lectures and Miscellanies, 17 The Literary Remains of Henry James, 6 Moralism and Christianity, 17 The Nature of Evil, 17 James, Herman (nephew), 202, 215 James, Howard (uncle), 19 James, John Barber (uncle), 19, 21, 25, 184–85 James, Johnny (John Vanderburgh, cousin), 19, 21, 25 James, Marie Bay (cousin), 21 James, Mary (niece), 347 James, Mary Holton, 187, 348 James, Mary Robertson Walsh, 7, 26, 32, 34, 37, 67, 86, 154, 185–86, 232 James, Peggy (Margaret Mary, niece), 11, 303, 318, 319, 320, 379, 382, 391 James, Robert (half-uncle), 19, 34 James, Wilky (Garth Wilkinson), 7, 41, 44, 50, 55, 56, 57, 66, 153, 184, 190, 191–92, 283, 347, 377 James, William, 6, 7, 8, 9, 17, 19, 32, 35, 38, 43, 44, 47, 50, 54, 60, 62, 65, 67, 69, 70, 79, 85, 111, 113, 126, 132, 144, 146, 172, 184, 187, 189, 192, 193, 198, 199, 203, 213, 232, 237, 240, 250, 251, 256, 258, 259, 261, 283, 290–91, 302, 303–4,

310, 318, 321, 327, 331, 344, 358, 371, 375, 377, 378 as artist, 16 illness and death, 372 The Literary Remains of the Late Henry James, 202, 209 marriage to Alice Gibbens, 144 relationship with HJ, 9, 16, 17, 25, 29, 35, 37, 46, 67, 89, 170 student at Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard, 50 The Varieties of Religious Experience - A Study in Human Nature, 319, 326 volunteers for Boston Educational Commission, 52 James, William (grandfather), 19, 51 Janville, Martel de, 294 Javelli, Leon, 14 Jekyll, Herbert, 272 Jenks, Richard Puling, 9 Jerome, Jerome K., The Passing of the Third Floor Back, 275 Jewett, Sarah Orne, 210, 348 The Country of the Pointed Firs, 293 Johnson, Samuel, 94 Jones, Henry Arthur, 253 Jones, Minnie (Mary) Cadwalader, 336, 345, 364, 372 Jordan, Elizabeth, 343, 363 Jusserand, Jules, 240, 346 Kean, Charles, 31 Keats, John, 84, 260 Lamia, 165 ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, 362 Kemble, Charles, 255 Kemble, Fanny (Frances Anne), 32, 68, 102–3, 139, 142, 164, 169, 187, 195, 229, 238, 254–55, 330 Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 103 Records of Later Life, 187 Keynes, Geoffrey, 363 King, Charlotte, 34 King,Vernon, 34, 150 Kingsley, Charles, 93 Kingston, Gertrude, 370 Kipling, Rudyard, 243, 311, 355 Knowles, James Sheridan, Love, 14 La Farge, John, 41–42, 46, 47, 122, 291, 346 La Farge, Margaret Perry, 331 Lamar II, Lucius, 211

456



  Index 

Lamb, Charles and Mary, Tales founded on the Plays of Shakespeare, 29 Lambinet, Émile, 314 Landseer, Edwin, 30 Lang, Andrew, 38 Langtry, Lillie, 147 Lapsley, Gaillard, 324 Lathrop, George Parsons, 160 Lavedan, Henri, 294 Lawrence, Louisa, 190 Lawrence, Thomas, 255 Lazarus, Emma, ‘The New Colossus’, 190 Lecocq, Alexandre Charles, 130 Leigh, Frances Kemble, 142 Leigh, James, 142 Leighton, Frederic, 193, 196, 229, 267, 277 Leon, Marie, 319 Leopardi, Giacomo, 178 Lerambert, C.F., 33 Leutz, Emanuel, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 12 Leverett, William C., 41, 46 Lewes, George Henry, 8, 79, 143, 151, 152, 380 Lewes, Thornton, 79 Leyland, Frederick R., 216 Lincoln, Abraham, 52, 64, 120 Lindsay, Caroline Fitzroy, 143, 279 Lindsay, Coutts, 143 Lippincott’s Magazine, 139, 146 Literature, 293 Little Review,The, 394 Locker-Lampson, Frederick, 142 Lombard, Fanny, 176 Lombard, Mrs, 176 London Mercury, 164 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 66, 67, 88, 160 ‘Excelsior’, 168 Longman’s Magazine, 207, 214, 245 Loring, Katharine Peabody, 178, 189, 202, 203, 210, 213, 218, 235, 245, 251, 261, 377 Lovell, Maria Ingomar the Barbarian, 196 Lowell, James Russell, xv, 52, 61, 66, 67, 84, 97, 141, 149, 197, 218, 226, 229, 240, 249, 250, 257, 332, 334, 347, 350 Lubbock, Percy, 323, 324, 373, 375, 381, 393 The Craft of Fiction, 394 Luther, Martin, 349 MacAlpine, William, 282, 283, 288 Mackay, Donald James (11th Lord Reay), 179

Mackaye, Jim, 42 Mackenzie, James, 369 Maclise, Daniel, Play-scene from Hamlet, 30 Macmahon, Patrice de, 129 Macmillan & Co, 142, 147, 154, 156, 159, 193, 231, 272, 359, 360 Macmillan, Frederick, 162, 190, 191, 193, 215, 242, 356, 368, 373 Macmillan’s ‘Collective Edition’ of James’s fiction, 190, 194 Macmillan’s Magazine, 170, 176, 230 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 338 Mallory, George, 186 Mallory, Marshall, 186 Marconi, Guglielmo, 296 Mars, Mademoiselle (Anne Françoise Hippolyte Boutet), 255 Marsh, Edward, 389, 393 Mary, Queen, 386 Masefield, John, 370 Mason, Ellen, 348 Mason, Ida, 348 Mason, Lydia, 34 Maugham, W. Somerset, 370 Maupassant, Guy de, 128, 167, 207, 218, 231, 258, 275, 277 May, John, 54 McCarthy, Justin, 198 McClellan, May, 225 McKim, Charles Follen, 346 Meissonier, Jean-Louis-Ernest, 130 The Battle of Friedland, 130 Melville, Herman, 291 Mendès, Catulle, 128, 207 Mengin, Urbain, 240 Meredith, George, 274, 355 Merimée, Prosper, ‘La Vénus d’Ille’, 104 Mestayer, Emily, 14 Methuen & Co, 304, 317 Meyerbeer, Giacomo, Les Huguenots, 234 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 35, 98 Dawn and Dusk, 99 Moses, 84 Night and Day, 99 The Dying Slave, 46 Mill, John Stuart, 8 Millais, John Everett, 196 The Order of Release, 1746 , 28 Millet, Frank D., 217, 267

457



  Index 

Millet, Jean François, 46 Millet, Lily Merrill, 217 Milnes Gaskell, Catherine, 139, 147, 161 Milnes Gaskell, Charles, 139, 147, 161 Milnes Gaskell, James, 152 Milnes, Richard Monckton (first Baron Houghton), 138, 216, 272 Mirecourt, Henrietta, 360 Modjeska, Helena, 253 Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin), 85 Le Malade Imaginaire, 97 Les Précieuses Ridicules, 97 Moncrieff, W.T., The Cataract of the Ganges, 13 Monet, Claude, 41, 131 Montaigne, Michel de, 68 Montesquiou, Robert de, 216 Moore, Tom, 255 Moreau, Gustave, 131 Morisot, Berthe, 131 Morley, John, 142, 162, 392 Morris, Jane Burden, 76, 79 Morris, William, 76, 77, 189, 198, 217, 222, 279 Mozart,Wolfgang Amadeus, Don Giovanni, 137, 174 Munthe, Axel, 303 Musset, Alfred de, 14, 115, 137, 141, 225, 298 Lorenzaccio, 99 On ne badine pas avec l’amour, 96 Proverbes dramatiques, 88 ‘Souvenir’, 382 Nadali, Jean, 36 Napier (Robert William?), 38 Nation, 67, 87, 88, 92, 93, 94, 97, 118, 120, 126, 143 New England Society for the Suppression of V   ice, 90 New York Edition of James's fiction, 138, 208, 213, 295, 300, 310, 357, 363, 368 New York Herald, 344 New York Sun, 194 New York Times, 27 Newport Mercury, 52 New-York Tribune, 17, 18, 28, 42, 75, 120, 126, 128, 129, 132, 136, 212, 217, 263 Nilsson, Christine, 66 Noakes, Burgess, 374, 383, 392 Norcom family, 15 Norcom, Eugene, 15, 211 Norris, William Edward, 267, 274

North American Review, 61, 62, 63, 67, 91, 111, 119, 125, 317, 343, 349 Norton, Charles Eliot, 61-62, 65, 68, 69, 73, 76, 80, 88, 91, 95, 102, 132, 161, 184, 191, 248, 257, 331, 332, 349 Norton, Grace, 68, 78, 79, 85, 86, 88, 93, 96, 124, 164, 165, 172, 191, 193, 196, 198, 199, 202, 229, 240, 305, 331, 387 Norton, Jane, 77, 377 Norton, Richard, 91, 387 Norton, Susan Sedgwick, 76, 80, 88, 91, 95 Offenbach, Jacques, 130 Ogilvy, David (Earl of Airlie), 179 Ogilvy, Mabell (Countess of Airlie), 179 Osgood, J.R., & Co, 187, 190, 215 O’Shaughnessy, Arthur, 198 Osler, William, 369 Ovid, 36, 228 Paddington, Joan, 320 Pagello, Pietro, 298, 382 Paget, James, 79 Paget,Violet (pseud Vernon Lee), 198, 227, 255, 279, 373 Euphorion, 198 ‘Lady Tal’, 255–57 Miss Brown, 198 Pakenham, Arthur, 218 Pakenham, Elizabeth, 170, 218 Pakenham, Thomas, 170 Pall Mall Gazette, 184, 196, 197, 293, 393 Parker, Joel, 52 Parsons, Alfred, 193, 217, 266, 288 Parsons, Theophilus, 52 Pater, Walter, 42, 198, 200, 264 Marius the Epicurean, 198 The Renaissance, 198 Pattison, Emily, 78 Pattison, Mark, 78 Payson, Margaret, 382 Peabody, Mary Codman, 143 Peirce, Charles, 126 Pell-Clarke, Henrietta Temple (cousin), 48, 166, 379 Pell-Clarke, Leslie, 41 Pendleton, Gertrude, 34 Pennell, Joseph, 187, 231, 359 Pepino, 163 Perkins, Helen Wyckoff, 22, 84

458



  Index 

Perrault, Charles, 57, 74, 174 ‘La belle au bois dormant’, 206 Les Contes de ma Mère L’Oye, 31 ‘Les Fées’, 57 Perry, Lilla Cabot, 41, 67, 387 Perry, Margaret Mason, 41 Perry, Matthew Calbraith, 41 Perry, Oliver Hazard, 41 Perry, T   homas Sergeant, 41, 42, 44, 51, 55, 69, 119, 164, 194, 219, 229, 360, 380, 387 Persse, Jocelyn, 312, 325, 383 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca), 188 Phiz (H.K. Browne), 170'  ‘Pierre Newski’, Les Danicheff, 130 Pinero, Arthur Wing, 253 The Second Mrs Tanqueray, 258 Pinker, James B., 293, 304, 307, 317, 321, 355, 368, 388, 390 Pissarro, Camille, 131 Planché, James Robertson  The Discreet Princess, 30 The Yellow Dwarf, 31 Poe, Edgar Allan, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 338 Polignac, Edmond de, 216 Pound, Ezra, 391, 394 Pozzi, Samuel Jean, 216, 217 Pratt, Herbert, 177–78 Procter, Anne Benson, 165, 230, 234, 333 Prothero, G.W., 390 Proust, Marcel, 216 Punch, 11, 170, 237, 280 Putnam, James Jackson, 372 Quackenbos, George Payn, 9 Quarterly Review, 219 Rachel (Elizabeth Félix), 43, 134, 238 Racine, Jean  Andromaque, 141 Phèdre, 43 Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 291 Raphael, 98 Madonna della sedia, 98 Marriage of the Virgin, 82 Ravel family, 14 Regnault, Henri 

Exécution sans jugement sous les rois maures de Grenade, 96 Portrait of General Juan Prim, 96 Salomé, 100 Regnier, François, 85 Rehan, Ada, 253, 274 Reichardt-Stromberg, Mathilde, 116 Aspasia, 44 Reid, Whitelaw, 120, 132 Remington, Frederic, 347 Renan, Ernest, 128 Dialogues et fragments philosophiques, 128 Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, 128 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 131 Reubell, Henrietta, 100, 126, 195, 217, 244, 258 Revue des Deux Mondes, 41, 53, 337 Reynolds, Joshua, 196, 255 Richards, Annie Ashburner, 251 Ripley, George, 18 Ripley, Helen (second cousin), 84 Ristori, Adelaide, 44, 333 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, 142, 143, 151, 205, 255, 275, 362, 372, 381, 392, 393 Ritchie, Richmond, 142, 257 Robertson, Tom, 158 Robertson, W. Graham, 267 Robins, Elizabeth, 247, 252, 253, 267, 282, 349 Robinson, Solon, Hot Corn, Life Scenes in New York illustrated, 18 Robson, Frederick, 31 Roediger, Achilles Heinrich, 27 Rogerson, James Alexander, 147 Roosevelt, Theodore, 346, 347 Rosebery, Archibald (Fifth Earl of), 179 Ross, Robbie (Robert), 273 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 76, 79, 198, 216 Rossi, Ernesto, 107, 130 Rostand, Edmond, Cyrano de Bergerac, 74, 321 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 95 Confessions, 188 Ruskin, John, 41, 61, 77, 82, 83, 108, 131, 143, 200, 279 The Stones of Venice, 82, 108 Rutson, Albert, 76 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin, xv, 53, 62, 66, 142, 215 Causeries du lundi, 33, 53 Chateaubriand et son groupe littéraire, 81

459



  Index 

Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 283, 346 Salter, Charles Christie, 54 Salvini, Tommaso, 191, 196 Sanborn, Franklin B., 50, 153 Sand, George, 117, 132, 174, 188, 298, 358, 381 Elle et Lui, 382 Sardou,Victorien, 144, 158 Fédora, 195 Odette, 186 Sargent, Emily, 392 Sargent, John Singer, 39, 100, 127, 132, 177, 195–96, 198, 214, 216, 267, 332, 374, 375, 376, 392 Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, 217 Dr Pozzi at Home, 216 Interior in Venice, 228 Madame X, 100 portrait of Henry James, 375 Venetian Bead Stringers, 221 Sargent,Violet, 392 Saunders, T. Bailey, 370 Savile, John, 299 Sayle, Charles, 363 Schliemann, Heinrich, 139 Scott, Walter, 179, 184, 255, 318, 385 Waverley, 61 Scribner’s Magazine, 272, 321 Scribner’s Monthly, 113, 154, 157 Scribner’s, Charles and Sons, 213, 355, 357, 368, 374, 376 Scudder, Horace, 245, 277 Sedgwick, Arthur, 88, 120 Sedgwick, Sara, 79 Sedgwick, Theodora, 273 Senancour, Étienne Pivert de, 80 Sévigné, Madame de, 205 Shakespeare, William, 14, 102, 130, 140, 173, 255 The Comedy of Errors, 13 Hamlet, 101, 179 Henry V, 68 Henry VIII, 31, 333 King Lear, 32 Macbeth, 126, 179 The Merchant of Venice, 103 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 13, 32, 89 Much Ado about Nothing, 13 Othello, 50, 52, 107, 137, 196 Romeo and Juliet, 239 The Tempest, xv, 388 Twelfth Night, 254

Shaw, George Bernard, 222, 253, 267, 370 Shaw, Robert Gould, 282 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 84, 227, 260 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 14 The School for Scandal, 118 Sheridan, Wilfred, 389 Siddons, Sarah, 238, 255 Sisley, Alfred, 131 Sitwell, Frances, 325 Skinner, Ernest, 371 Smith, Albert  The Story of Mont Blanc, 30 Tour of Mont Blanc, 30 Smith, Charles, 320 Smith, Lydia Fanny, 320 Smith, William Haynes, 323 Smyth, Ethel, 371 Société des Zofingues, 43 Society for Psychical Research, 193 Soumet, Alexandre, The Gladiator, 196 Speaker,The, 241 Spender, Stephen, 369 Spenser, Edmund, 54 Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 82, 108 Mémoires d’un touriste, 188 Stephen, Julia Prinsep, 362 Stephen, Leslie, 77, 126, 139, 142, 146, 147, 264, 331, 362 Stephen, Minny Thackeray, 77 Stephen, Thoby, 362 Stevenson, Fanny (Mrs Robert Louis), 215 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 29, 214–15, 217, 232, 265–66, 279, 298, 325, 355 Catriona, 257 ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, 214 ‘The Mirror Speaks’, 215 Treasure Island, 208, 214, 215 Stewart, Alexander T., 130 Stewart, Harriet Gore, 165 Stone, Herbert S., 286 Story, Emelyn, 332 Story, William Wetmore, 84, 102, 105, 106, 260, 290, 299 The Angel of Grief, 260 Graffiti d’Italia, 174 Nero, 103 Roba di Roma, 105, 106 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 66 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 14

460



  Index 

Stratton, Charles (General Tom Thumb), 30 Sturges, Jonathan, 275, 277, 293, 297, 313, 320, 370 The First Supper and Other Episodes, 275 trans, The Odd Number - Thirteen Tales by Guy de Maupassant, 275 Sturgis, Howard, 20, 161, 292, 323, 324, 344, 348, 359 Belchamber, 324 Sturgis, Julia Boit, 323 Sturgis, Russell, 161, 323 Sullivan, Arthur, 247, 273 Sutro, Esther Isaacs, 383 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 8, 51 Sylvestre, Joseph-Noël, Locusta trying the effects of poisons before Nero, 131 Symonds, John Addington, 139, 200–1, 258, 259 A Problem in Greek Ethics, 201 A Problem in Modern Ethics, 258 Taglioni, Marie, 142, 333 Taine, Hippolyte, 108, 131, 240 Voyages en Italie, 350 Tappan, Caroline Sturgis, 377 Taylor, Cora, 304 Taylor, Tom, Still Waters Run Deep, 31, 89 Temple, Bob (Robert, cousin), 19, 48, 209 Temple, Catharine Margaret (aunt), 19, 22, 40 Temple, Minny (Mary, cousin), xvi, 48, 56, 60, 68, 69, 70, 75, 77, 79, 85–86, 87, 91, 143, 160, 172, 209, 287, 326, 327, 328, 378–79 Temple, Robert Emmet (uncle), 22, 40 Temple, William (cousin), 48, 56, 211 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 8, 138, 151, 380 ‘Audley Court’, 220 ‘Locksley Hall’, 151 The Princess, 122 Tennyson, Hallam, 151 Tennyson, Lionel, 142 Terry, Ellen, 139, 274 Terry, Florence, 267 Terry, Kate, 267 Terry, Louisa Crawford, 103 Terry, Luther, 103 Terry, Marion, 267 Thackeray,William Makepeace, 11, 17, 23, 29, 32, 37, 61, 66, 142, 204, 207, 218, 221, 382 The Newcomes, 37 Vanity Fair, 33, 230 Théâtre-Français, 38, 43, 85, 96, 130, 134, 137, 141, 156, 204, 232, 236, 237, 252, 255

Thiers, Louis-Adolphe, 97 Thomson, Robert, 29 Thoreau, Henry, 66, 211 A Thousand and One Nights, 82, 205 Ticknor and Fields, 66 Times Literary Supplement, 386, 388 Times, The, 215, 242, 393 Tintoretto, Jacopo, 77, 83 Töpffer, Charles, 43 Töpffer, Rodolphe  ‘La bibliothèque de mon oncle’ (Nouvelles genevoises), 43 Nouveaux Voyages en Zigzag, 28 Voyages en Zigzag, 28 Tree,Viola, 390 Trench, Herbert, 282 Trollope, Anthony, 94, 207, 221, 275 Turgenev, Ivan, 111, 114, 127, 133, 141, 154, 156, 174, 176, 187, 192, 207, 381 Turgenev, Klara, 128 Turgenev, Nikolai, 128 Twain, Mark (pseud Samuel Clemens), 66, 344 Tweedy, Edmund, 25, 40, 48, 65, 96, 101, 145 Tweedy, Mary, 40, 48, 96, 101, 145 her coachman, 105 Upham, Catharine, 54 Vanderbilt, George Washington, 346 Vanderpool, Beach, Jr, 54 Vaux, Mary James, Alice James – her Brothers – Her Journal, 261 Verdi, Giuseppe, 31, 174 Requiem, 130 Vernon, W.H., 253 Veronese, Paolo Caliari, 83 Viardot, Pauline, 127, 176 Victoria, Queen, 282, 283, 311, 318 Vincent, Margaret Dacre, 388 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène, 188 Virgil, 105, 298 Wagner, Cosima, 162 Wagner, Richard, 162–63 Parsifal, 129, 162 Walker, Sophie Sheridan, 389 Wallace, Richard, 96 Walpole, Hugh, 369, 371, 375, 383, 388

461



  Index 

Walsh, Catharine (Aunt Kate), 7, 26, 67, 84, 86, 92, 93, 96, 189, 190, 192, 232, 235 Walsh, Hugh, 7 Ward, Bessie, 111 Ward, Geneviève, 253 Ward, Gertrude, 197 Ward, Mary Arnold (Mrs Humphry), 197, 267, 299, 310 Eleanor, 299 Helbeck of Bannisdale, 268 Miss Bretherton, 197, 239 Robert Elsmere, 230 Warren, Edward, 280, 288, 292, 298 Washburn, Emory, 52 Watt, Alexander Pollack, 230 Watts, George Frederic, 267 Webb, Philip, 189 Weber, Carl Maria von, Der Freischütz, 176 Weld, Mary, 311, 326 Wells, H.G., 267 Boon, 388 The Time Machine, 293 The War of the Worlds, 293 West, Rebecca, 393 Wharton, Edith, 56, 242, 279, 298, 324, 336–37, 344–45, 349, 358, 360–62, 368, 372, 373, 374, 375, 383, 385, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393 A Backward Glance, 337, 376 The Book of the Homeless, 386 The Decoration of Houses, 279 ‘Terminus’, 361 Wharton, Teddy (Edward), 336 Whistler, James McNeill, 143, 177, 237, 258, 313 ‘Peacock Room - Harmony in Blue and Gold’, 216 Whitman, Walt, 63, 200, 258 Leaves of Grass, 56, 337 ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, 64 Wilde, Oscar, 185, 279, 292 An Ideal Husband, 267

The Importance of Being Earnest, 267 Lady Windermere’s Fan, 252 The Picture of Dorian Gray, 234, 237 trials, 273, 367 Wilkinson, Florence, 143 Wilkinson, James John Garth, 8, 28, 40 Winkle, Edgar Van, 16, 38 Wister, Owen, 187, 347 Lady Baltimore, 347 The Virginian - A Horseman of the Plains, 305, 326 Wister, Sarah Butler, 102, 187, 255, 330, 346 Wolseley, Garnet Joseph (first Viscount Wolseley), 272 Wolseley, Louisa Erskine, 272, 288 Wood, Mary, 375 Woolf,Virginia, 77, 151, 264, 362, 394 ‘The Old Order’, 394 Woolson, Constance Fenimore, 166, 195, 222–24, 230, 232, 259–60, 264, 275, 290, 298, 327, 358 Anne, 166 ‘Dorothy’, 251 ‘A Florentine Experiment’, 166 short stories, 244 World,The, 225, 247 Wormeley, Katherine Prescott, 344 Wyckoff, Albert (cousin), 22 Wyckoff, Alexander, 22 Wyckoff, Henry, 22, 84 Wyckoff, Mary (‘Great Aunt Wyckoff ’), 22 Yeats, W.B., 325, 363 Yellow Book,The, 263, 283 Zhukovsky, Paul, 128–29, 141, 158, 162–64, 177, 360 Zola, Émile, 128, 131, 167, 195, 207, 221, 298, 342, 353 Germinal, 219 Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, 34

462

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