Readers of The Atlantic Monthly, browsing the edition of November, 1880, and already looking forward to articles on “The Silk Industry in America” and “The Future of Weather Foretelling,” were greeted, on the opening page, by the first installment of a new story. It began, “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.” This is hardly the most American of starts, and certainly not the most American of sentiments; those readers, if canvassed, could have nominated a host of more agreeable experiences. The whole setup sounds suspiciously English; was it for this that Emerson, Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and others had founded the magazine, twenty-three years before? Suspicions are confirmed, as the tale unfurls; the setting is indeed an English lawn, rug-soft, on a waning summer’s day, and one of the tea-takers, to make matters worse, is an English lord.
He and two other men are soon joined by a female character. As a newcomer, she is entranced by the spectacle, and we are invited to join the trance:
And I have never read anything as beautiful as that. Decades after I first encountered the passage, it has lost none of its thrill and lustre. The beauty of the telling should not be confused with the loveliness of the scene, whatever the enticement of the greensward; hundreds of writers have tried their hand at Old World pastoral and got stuck in a sentimental mud. The beauty, rather, is in the excitement—in the motions of the “flexible figure,” and in all that is presaged by the quickness of her response. “It’s just like a novel!” she exclaims, unaware that she is trapped inside one. Already, however, we find ourselves wanting to ask, of those turnings of hers: are they feline and purposeful, or more akin to the flutters of a flag in a breeze? Will this impressionable young woman, apparently so open to experience, end up in its pitiless thrall?
So begins “The Portrait of a Lady,” and its opening chords, quiet as they are, have almost no match in English-speaking literature. You have to go to “Great Expectations”—to the raw, shivering sea light and the talk of slit throats, all so vastly distant in tone, though not on the map, from this teatime in the warm sun—to find the same trembling sense of a plot in waiting and a book in bud. What Pip sees, hears, and does in a few paragraphs will determine the entire span of Dickens’s novel, though Pip will take almost as long to understand why, and no less an impact is made upon Isabel Archer, the woman on the grass; from here, she will be launched on an adventure, both by the men she meets at tea—two of whom will fall in love with her, and one of whom will bequeath her a fortune—and by the delectable deluge of her senses.
The serialization that started in late 1880 bore no author’s name at the head. Instead, his identity was revealed at the end of each excerpt, in minuscule type: “Henry James, Jr.” The appellation was a telling one; James still resided, to a degree, in the shadow of his father, and would remain there until Henry James, Sr., a theologian with a pronounced weakness for Swedenborg, joined the shades himself, at the end of 1882. Not that his son was a stranger to the magazine. Countless items of nonfiction, with titles such as “A Roman Holiday” and “Recent Florence,” had appeared there, as had the novels “Roderick Hudson” (1875) and “The American” (1877), whose title, so promisingly patriotic, had proved deceptive; the story opened in the Louvre and seemed all but incapable of tearing itself away from France. Where, one was forced to ask, did this young James fellow belong? To what, or to whom, did his loyalties cling? He had caused a small storm, in 1878, with the appearance of “Daisy Miller,” whose sales were of a breeziness that would hardly be repeated; he had also published “The Europeans” (1878) and “Washington Square” (1880). Now, at last, he was girding himself for a more substantial project (“settling down to the daily evolution of my ‘big’ novel,” he wrote in a letter of March, 1880), although subscribers to The Atlantic Monthly had, as yet, no inkling of what they were in for—no clue that James was passing from apprenticeship to mastery, or that the scene by the silvery Thames would flow into an enterprise of great pith and moment, shifting the deep tides of what we seek, and listen out for, when we read.
That flow is charted by Michael Gorra in “Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece” (Liveright), which takes the rare but wise decision to approach James through the channel of a single work. This is, in short, a book about a book, joining a select band of the equally fixated. We have “James Joyce’s Ulysses,” an early explication by Stuart Gilbert, and Francis Steegmuller’s “Flaubert and Madame Bovary,” although more questing Flaubertians may prefer “The Perpetual Orgy,” a plunge into the same novel by Mario Vargas Llosa. Samuel Beckett’s “Proust” was written after he spent a summer reading “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” twice, a valorous act, although any discussion of Proust must, by definition, pay homage to the one engulfing work. Note that all the authors honored in this list are themselves obsessives: men prepared to devote any amount of time and intellectual industry, and to renounce almost everything, in the exhausting bid to wrestle the world into words, leaving us to revere the result and to inquire how much was entailed in the sacrifice. In each case, the equilibrium of their readers was shaken, and it remains so today; part of Gorra’s task, in admitting James to that distinguished company, is to measure the aftershocks touched off by “The Portrait of a Lady.” A book that begins in tranquil decorum will become, like “Ulysses” and “Madame Bovary,” a disturbance of the peace.
What happens in “The Portrait of a Lady”? A plain chronology seems manageable. Isabel Archer, of Albany, aged twenty-one, and conveniently parentless, is brought by her aunt, Mrs. Touchett, to England. There she meets her uncle, the aging Mr. Touchett, who is sufficiently charmed to alter his will in her favor, although it is her cousin Ralph, weak of lung but strong in his affection for her, who suggests the change; to observe how Isabel fares, and what she may fashion from her independence, has swiftly become his “finest entertainment.” She receives but rejects offers of marriage from Lord Warburton, a manly neighbor, and Caspar Goodwood, who has pursued her from Boston to pitch his woo. She spends time in London, largely with her friend Henrietta Stackpole, an American reporter, who nourishes fewer illusions about European allure. Mr. Touchett dies. Isabel makes the acquaintance of Madame Merle, a handsome, baffling friend of Mrs. Touchett’s, who, in turn, once Isabel has crossed to the Continent, and descended from France to Italy, introduces her to Gilbert Osmond, a widowed gentleman with perfect manners. To his imperfections, which are grave and irredeemable, Isabel alone seems blind, and she consents to marry him. She becomes stepmother to the teen-age Pansy, who is later courted by a young American named Rosier and, for good measure, by Warburton, who will lose no opportunity to draw near to Isabel once more. Pansy, we learn, is in fact the product of an adulterous liaison between Osmond and Madame Merle. On hearing that Ralph is close to death, Isabel, against the orders of her disobliging husband, returns to the English house where we first observed her, and where she stays until Ralph passes away. Goodwood, undaunted, arrives and pledges to rescue her from the quicksand of Osmond—“you must save what you can of your life.” Isabel, nonetheless, leaves for Rome. What happens next we do not know.
Put like that, the novel sounds not uneventful, and it is surprising to read the reviews that “The Portrait of a Lady” attracted when it first appeared as a book, in both England and America, in 1881. “Nothing but a laborious riddle,” The Spectator said, while The Nation remarked on its “elaborate placidity”; even William Dean Howells—not just James’s friend and adviser but the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, who had received it, chunk by chunk, for serial publication—was moved to ask, in an essay on James the following year, “Will the reader be content to accept a novel which is an analytic study rather than a story?” A furious but anonymous critic, in The Quarterly Review, cited Howells’s words and added, “The answer to this question, from nine readers out of ten, will be emphatically No.” To an extent, the battle over James has never really shifted from that ground; Jamesians continue to swoon over his fine discernment, while detractors still smirk at his willingness to grind near-nothings into powder. Yet “The Portrait of a Lady”—and the same holds true for masterpieces early and late, like “The Europeans” and “The Ambassadors” (1903)—is enough to stop the fight, and to prove both parties wrong. Plenty occurs to Isabel, in body and mind, with a frequency that suggests both comic and tragic modes; her pursuers pop up with the unexpected flourish of farceurs (Warburton is suddenly there, before her, in the Roman Forum), while a stalking mortality is never far behind. Her final exchange with Ralph would surely gratify the most demanding connoisseur of the Victorian deathbed, as Jamesian prolixity is halted and hushed by the patient’s last gasps: “Love remains. I don’t know why we should suffer so much. Perhaps I shall find out. There are many things in life; you are very young.”
Yet the reviewers, in their bewilderment, were onto something. However carefully you lay out the structure of the plot, you will always be left with a rustling sense of truths unapprehended—smaller, darker sagas unfolding backstage or in the wings. Some of these, naturally, are prompted by the sexual reticence of the author and the period alike. When Henrietta heads off to see the Paris sights with a jovial bachelor named Bantling, and we hear that “they had breakfasted together, dined together, gone to the theatre together, supped together, really in a manner quite lived together,” it is precisely in not knowing what they did together by night—whether they proceeded to feast in foodless ways upon each other—that one finds, as so often with James, a pleasurable ache of dissatisfaction. Far creepier is his description of Osmond’s rapport with his daughter: “If he wished to make himself felt, there was soft and supple little Pansy, who would evidently respond to the slightest pressure.” James omitted the line, and its surrounding passage, when he thoroughly revised the novel, in 1906, for the New York edition of his works (and thereby hangs another tale), yet the jolt of that earlier, unrefined image feels dreadfully suited to Osmond, for whom Humbertism, actual or threatened, would make a pleasing addition to his secret stash of sins.
This hint of links either missing or deliberately dropped, however, reaches beyond the carnal. James was the nonpareil of the hiatus: “the whole of anything is never told,” he confided to his Notebooks, when sketching out the novel. Only he would pause, after his heroine has been favored with yet another declaration of love, and then spring forward a year, obliging us to hang around, like fidgety suitors, for her reply. The year, we learn, has been “an interval sufficiently replete with incident,” though not replete enough to warrant more than a short chapter; the author tells us that Isabel gazed at the Pyramids, but makes it clear that her mind was elsewhere. And only James, too, would then vault over the wedding itself, and the first years of marriage, before landing squarely once more in the presence of “Mrs. Osmond”—for a second, we have to stop and remind ourselves who on earth this is. What change has been wrought by her new status, and her new name? “She had lost something of that quick eagerness to which her husband had privately taken exception—she had more the air of being able to wait. Now, at all events, framed in the gilded doorway, she struck our young man as the picture of a gracious lady.” Tucked inside that last sentence is not simply the near-title of the novel but a perplexing memory of her first appearance, hundreds of pages ago—“a tall girl in a black dress,” who “lingered in the doorway, slim and charming,” observed by Ralph as he wandered on the lawn. Over the years, she has traded one doorway for another—stepped from frame to frame, as if sitting for two different artists, first as a girl, and then as a lady. In between, the picture has become a prison.
How does one hope to pay homage to such complications: to all those hops and holes in the text, those worrisome velleities? What Michael Gorra has done—and I can’t decide whether it’s modest or brazen—is to make his book almost as tricky to negotiate, let alone to summarize, as James’s. You shouldn’t tackle “Portrait of a Novel” without getting “The Portrait of a Lady” under your belt, and into your head, either afresh or for the first time; submit yourself to the dazzling vertigo of James’s third and fourth chapters, when he drops away from the tea ceremony and slips backward into Isabel’s meeting with her aunt, in a rainy Albany, and thence, with frictionless grace, into incidents from her childhood, and you will be nicely primed for Gorra’s own exercise in time travel. He thinks nothing of leaping from a scene in Osmond’s villa to the Italian journeys of Goethe, in 1786, or from a chapter that ends with James getting down to his novel, in Italy, to a chapter that opens, “With nine months of work on the ‘Portrait’ behind him, James left London.” Some people will find this confounding; a more charitable verdict would be that, in deference to James’s brilliance, Gorra has assumed the role of a professional prismatist. He peers at the book from multiple angles—those of biography, geography, publishing, textual variation, and mild erotic sleuthing, among others—as if hoping to catch it at an unfamiliar slant. No facet must go uninspected.
That may be inevitable. How can a critic embrace James and stay uninfected by his chronic restlessness? This had been initiated by a trip to Europe in 1843: a first chance to take the temperature of an older civilization, although even Henry was not quite up to the job, being only six months old. By the time Gorra catches up with him, in 1869, the wayfaring is well under way. “He hiked through Switzerland and traveled down into Italy, to Venice and Florence and then Rome,” Gorra writes, and anyone schooled in the later, fastidious James will be bewitched by this youthful vision of him with groaning rucksack and outstretched thumb. But Gorra is right to map such movement, because vagabondage was as crucial to the formation of the novel as it is to people’s actions within it; it is scarcely a coincidence that a heroine who lands in Europe with a dangerously boundless curiosity, as Isabel does, and who marries an expatriate so torn from his roots that he now secretes himself in Florence like a neglected prince, or a spider, should have been conjured into being in that same place. It was in yet another city, on the Venetian waterfront, that the threads of the book were eventually pulled together; James’s incomparable preface to “The Portrait of a Lady,” composed to accompany the New York edition, recalls a vain struggle to create fiction while the “ceaseless human chatter” outside, teeming with unfictitious life, poured in through his high window.
If chatter is your preference—if you would readily swap James the international voyager for the more contained prowlings of James the social animal—then Gorra will meet your needs, with a roll call of the supporting players from whom “The Portrait of a Lady” drew its dramatic strength. Most of them are female, as befits a novel about “a certain young woman affronting her destiny,” in James’s phrase—not merely “confronting” but squaring up to what was expected of her and, if the mood stirred her, doing the opposite. Gorra gives us a chapter on George Eliot, for instance, whose account of a frustrated, half-frozen marriage, in “Middlemarch,” can be felt behind Isabel’s no less calamitous match with Osmond, and to whom James’s anxious debt was such that—for The Atlantic Monthly, again, in 1876—he couched his response to “Daniel Deronda” not as a straight review but as a three-voiced “Conversation.” We get a similar excursus into the short but zestful existence of Minny Temple, James’s adored cousin, who is commonly identified with the ailing Milly Theale, in “The Wings of the Dove” (1902). But that connection is a sickly one; in Minny’s “taste for life as life,” as lauded by James in his autobiography, in “the play of her own light spontaneity and curiosity,” she is no less surely reborn in the shape of Isabel Archer. (“Poor Minny was essentially incomplete and I have attempted to make my young woman more rounded, more finished,” Isabel’s creator wrote in a letter of 1880.) A third presence whom Gorra summons to the stage is Constance Fenimore Woolson, with whom James once shared a villa, and who threw herself from a window in Venice, after—we should not say because—he failed to make a promised pilgrimage to see her. Mind you, their intimacy belongs to the late eighteen-eighties and the early nineties, some years after “The Portrait of a Lady,” and that gap forces Gorra to read backward, rather than forward, into the novel and tempts him into a flight of wayward fancy: “Let us walk with Fenimore onto her terrace and look down at Henry James as he sits with his morning coffee.”
That is untypical of Gorra’s book. For the most part, it is wary of elastic speculation while being every bit as nimble, alert, and far-ranging as it ought to be if justice is to be done to Henry James. I could have used more vivisection—the laying bare of individual sentences, and the probing of syntactical tissue—but no one could deny how densely the author is steeped in his theme. When, on the first page, he writes of James, “He had lived in Europe for thirty years—he had taken possession of it, inhaled it, appropriated it,” he is himself appropriating a line from a letter that James wrote to his family from London, in November, 1875, the day after docking in Liverpool: “I take possession of the old world—I inhale it—I appropriate it!” Gorra does not own up to that borrowing in the endnotes, which is a little remiss, and, as a rule, it seems risky to replay as reported fact, long after the event, what a young man once announced and prophesied on his own behalf. Nonetheless, the accent of devotion is unmistakable, and, if anything, one is driven to ask: Is this book mad enough? Does it have a touch of “that tonic wildness” which Isabel finds wanting in the oversophisticated Madame Merle? If you love a book so much that the sole outlet for your infatuation is to write your own book about it, should you leave rough traces of that love, or should scholarship smooth them over?
In the acknowledgments, at the back of “Portrait of a Novel,” Gorra writes, “I first read ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ during the fall of 1977, in a class at Amherst College.” If I find myself wishing that he had broken cover, perhaps in an afterword, and sought to track his changing apprehension of the novel, over thirty-five years, that is not out of prurience but because such transformation is an abiding theme in James. His books are drenched in time: the times at which they were written, and the times and ways in which they were rewritten or left alone; the times in which they are set; the times that elapse in the careers of the characters, as they thrive or sour; the time it takes for a man to split into two, like the hero of “The Jolly Corner,” and to see what he might have become; and, last, the times at which we read them, and, if we happen to be incurable Jamesians, at which they leave us other than we were. I know of no more enviable diary entry than the one made by Evelyn Waugh on Sunday, November 17, 1946: “Patrick left on Saturday afternoon. What an enormous, uncovenanted blessing to have kept Henry James for middle age and to turn, as the door shuts behind the departing guest, to a first reading of ‘Portrait of a Lady.’ ”
On the other hand, what does middle age bring to the inhabitants of the book? Disappointments, refusals, and shutdowns; chances for the enactment of low cunning, if you are Osmond or Madame Merle; and, for Ralph, what Philip Larkin called “the only end of age.” “The Portrait of a Lady” that I read in my late teens bears the scantest relation to “The Portrait of a Lady” that I read today. That may be because, taking things the wrong way around, I began with the New York edition, whose style bears the more velvety nap, whereas these days, if possible, I pick the earlier version, which is marked by abrasive edges; but textual difference alone does not account for the chasm between the two. What I browsed, back then, seemed a serene, rather aristocratic affair, strewn with bright, overtalkative folk who could switch countries at will; one bad marriage didn’t make it any the less romantic. What I discover now feels funnier, still sharp with the Jane Austen-like tartness of its predecessor, “Washington Square,” but it’s more than that. It’s a horror story.
The first critic to notice this, and to lend it adequate stress, was, of all people, Ezra Pound. In a brief essay from 1918, he wrote, “What I have not heard is any word of the major James, of the hater of tyranny; book after early book against oppression, against all the sordid petty personal crushing oppression, the domination of modern life.” In a footnote, he added, of James, “What he fights is ‘influence,’ the impinging of family pressure, the impinging of one personality upon another.” We think of Osmond, the supreme impinger, all the more cruel in his confinement of Isabel’s spirit because she gave herself to him, rather than to his rivals, in a defining flourish of her liberation. That, it turns out, is precisely what rouses his contempt. “One ought to make one’s life a work of art,” he tells Isabel, sounding like a warmup act for Oscar Wilde; any hint of aesthetic levity, however, vanishes after the marriage, once she realizes that he is an anti-Pygmalion, quenching her vital fire and nailing her into place like a statue. Osmond did not fall in love with our heroine; what he loved was “the idea of taking to himself a young lady who had qualified herself to figure in his collection of choice objects.” That is what monsters do, especially the polite and patient ones: they harvest souls. Hand them a human in full bloom, and what they give back to you, after a few seasons, is a pressed flower.
Is there a blush of self-accusation here? When James calls Osmond “a student of the exquisite,” whose “ideal was a conception of high prosperity and propriety,” was he glancing in the mirror at his own ambitions, fearful of what harm they might, if brandished too freely, inflict on other selves? It goes without saying that James, who chose never to marry, was infinitely kinder than his villain; but I agree with Gorra when, having recounted the closeness of James and Minny Temple, he frowns over “the speed with which he reconciled himself to Minny’s loss.” In short, the elbow of the creator—someone, as Gorra says, “whose job is to turn life into narrative”—is forever nudged by opportunism. If Osmond is uniquely menacing, it is because he resembles a writer who writes nothing, preferring to take a woman as his text.
Yet he is not alone. Listen to all the other schemers in the book. “I don’t pretend to know what people are meant for,” Madame Merle says, adding, “I only know what I can do with them.” She would say that, of course, being Osmond’s co-conspirator, but consider Henrietta, the journalist in search of a topic, who admits to Isabel that “I should have delighted to do your uncle,” or Ralph, musing on the newly arrived Miss Archer with his mother:
Ralph, hands in pockets, with not much time to live, is the most benevolent character in the book; yet if even he displays “the crooked timber of self-interest in the most altruistic of intentions,” as Gorra proposes, what hope is there for the rest of us? Are we all so mercenary, cutting and trimming people, whether unwittingly or by design, to fit the pattern of our own desires? Such are the politics of personhood. There is always the option to remain alone: “A woman ought to be able to make up her life in singleness,” Isabel reflects, and that assurance stares ahead to what we, though not James, would hail as the feminist cause, requiring no male prop. At the same time, any retreat into the solo self, for either sex, must be shaded with a special dread: “the isolation and loneliness of pride had for her mind the horror of a desert place,” we learn of Isabel, in words that seem to herald the parched cries of “The Waste Land,” and the truest hell is to wind up like Osmond, immured in the plush safety of his own home and the fortress of his own brain. And so the book traffics back and forth, with sublime indecision, between the need to stand firm, in Emersonian majesty, and the yearning to break one’s pose and join the more crowded landscape of mankind. “That account of the limits of self-sufficiency is what, above all, makes ‘The Portrait of a Lady’ stand as a great American novel,” Michael Gorra declares, and the case that he mounts for the defense is unlikely to be put with more conviction. “It is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself,” Pound wrote in his tribute to James, adding, in triumph, “Here the thing was done.” We are left, in Ralph-like idleness, to wonder what Henry James would make of our current state. To him, one imagines, it would rise up like a bad dream; he would see an archipelago of solitudes, feverishly interlinked, with bridges collapsing as fast as we can build them. He is our foremost explorer of the private life, and of what it costs to preserve. We need him more than ever. ♦
