Out of the Frame
August 27, 2012
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:
She had been looking all round her again,—at the lawn, the great trees, the reedy, silvery Thames, the beautiful old house; and, while engaged in this survey, she had also narrowly scrutinized her companions; a comprehensiveness of observation easily conceivable on the part of a young woman who was evidently both intelligent and excited. She had seated herself, and had put away the little dog; her white hands, in her lap, were folded upon her black dress; her head was erect, her eye brilliant, her flexible figure turned itself lightly this way and that, in sympathy with the alertness with which she evidently caught impressions. Her impressions were numerous, and they were all reflected in a clear, still smile. “I have never seen anything so beautiful as this,” she declared.
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.
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| Henry James |
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.
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